Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

cracking hideously, and he suddenly stood up from the table, looking very tall and skinny in his jeans and sweatshirt. “I was a fool to think I could get you guys to behave like human beings,” he said in a quieter voice. “You insult me, and you insult Martha, and I’m not going to take it anymore. Don’t worry, you’ll see me again. But this Sunday dinner is definitely over.”

He walked around to where Martha was sitting, her face pale and her lips parted. In a minute they had walked out of the dining room, out the front door, and we heard the sputtering sound of the ancient white Volvo that Matthew had bought from his roommate.

“Young jackass,” said Cousin Polly. “Why can’t he find a nice colored girl?”

My mother, who had tears on her cheeks, let her forehead drop until it touched the tablecloth. Then she raised her head and suddenly turned to me. “Don’t sit there staring—go to your room!”

The order was so violent that it was clearly not meant to be obeyed. I went outside and sat down on the front steps. From inside I could hear the monotonous sound of my parents’ voices in argument.

Around me the neighborhood yards were bright green in the late afternoon sunlight, and everything was in bloom: the tough old azalea bushes my father fertilized with oak leaves every fall, the hyacinths my mother, kneeling on a stack of magazines and wearing a ragged jacket of Daddy’s, had planted the previous September. Under the azalea bushes to either side of the front steps were the dark passageways that Matthew and I had used in childhood games that never saw the light of day. Whole empires of Martians—represented by pine needles and the minute round seeds of the arborvitae—had risen and been destroyed in that leafy shadow; it was there that we brought the few cigarettes we stole from Daddy’s bureau, and there that Matthew, after swearing me to secrecy on pain of instant and horrible death, had built a fire and roasted a dead mouse.

Peering into the darkness under the tall blossoming bushes, I could clearly picture Matthew at nine, knobby-limbed in a baggy pair of shorts and a Davy Crockett t-shirt, his head nearly shaven for summer, his eyes narrowed with diabolical excitement as he impatiently outlined a scheme to me. Sometimes he would bury a tennis ball in the leaves by the front steps and then grab me to explain hastily, “We’re saboteurs, and I just planted a deadly explosive that’s gonna blow the fort sky-high! That means it’s a bomb, dumbbell! It’s going to explode, and we have to run for it!” Then he’d be off down the tree-lined street, his face a blurred speeding star, yelling, “Come on, Sarah! Run for your life!” Often in his impatience at playing with a little sister, he would round the corner in the direction of his friend Eddie Ratcliff’s house, and I would see him no more that day. But I would keep running after him until my short legs gave out. That was the way it always went: Matthew set the explosions and ran, and I, pulled by some invisible cord, followed after because there seemed to be nothing else to do.

The voices in the dining room had quieted, and through the screen door I heard the slight clatter that meant the table was being cleared. Daddy came outside with the roto-comic section of the Philadelphia Inquirer under his arm. “Better go help your mother,” he said in a neutral voice, and I dusted off the seat of my blue jeans and went inside. In the dining room I picked up all six of Grandma Phillips’s water glasses—the one Martha Greenfield had used, the one at Matthew’s place, and the other four—and carried them dangling loosely by the stems, three to a hand, into the kitchen. It was a gesture, I thought; if I’d had the courage, I’d have thrown them all against the wall.

“What in the name of common sense are you doing?” said Mama, who was helping Cousin Polly to wrap up the uneaten peach cobbler. “Put those down, and do it carefully. You kids are going to kill me!”

I looked at her and put the glasses down slowly.

“She’s crazy like her brother!” said Cousin Polly.

The Days of the Thunderbirds

When the Thunderbirds arrived at Camp Grayfeather, Ellen, Chen-cheu, and I were waiting for them, lounging on the splintery steps of the recreation hall. Behind us a big fly with a weary August note to its buzz banged against the screen door. In front of us, under a level evening sun, the straw-colored Delaware countryside—pointedly referred to as “Wyeth Territory” in the camp catalogue—rolled off from our own wooded hillside toward the bluish haze that was Maryland. It was a Tuesday and just after dinner, the tranquil period in a camp day when the woods are filled with the soft clanging of bells announcing evening activities and the air still holds a whiff of tuna casserole. After dinner was supposed to be journal-writing time for the three dozen or so fourteen-year-olds who made up the rank and file at Grayfeather, but Chen-cheu, Ellen, and I had slipped out of our tent in order to witness the coming of the Thunderbirds. It was an event we were awaiting with the same kind of horrified delight as that with which biblical adolescents—as deep in glandular boredom as we ourselves were—must have greeted a plague of serpents. The Thunderbirds were a black teenage gang, one of many that battled in the close brick streets of Wilmington, and through some obscure adult arrangement they were coming to spend a week with us at camp.

“Do you think they’ll have knives, Sarah?” Chen-cheu asked me, rubbing an array of chigger bites on her ankle.

Chen-cheu was the camp beauty, a Chinese-American girl from Oberlin, Ohio, whose solid-cheeked, suntanned face had an almost frightening exotic loveliness above her muscular swimmer’s shoulders. She