Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) by Edna Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

make? The point is, it’s going to be awful.”
    It made all the difference to me. My father and Fred would again be the odd, conspicuous old among the usual young.
    â€œDon’t come. Please don’t,” I begged. “You and Fred already heard Ben do his part, and you’ve heard me.”
    â€œYou’ll make Lucresse nervous,” Ben added.
    The prospect of the performance had not made me nervous, until now. Now, instantly, I translated the strange, strained behavior I’d noticed in many of my friends in their parents’ presence. They were nervous. Mothers were overly interested in their daughters being ladylike; I was glad I didn’t have that situation. Fathers with young, unsure faces were so anxious to be proud of their sons. Regardless of whether my father hoped for me to be ladylike, regardless of whether he wanted me to make him proud, I wanted to be like the others. I would be nervous if he came.
    â€œYes, it would make me nervous,” I said.
    â€œTomorrow at two thirty will never happen again,” my father said. “And you both know that. You’re going to do something you’ll never do again. Of course you’ll both be nervous—but you’ll do the best you can. And I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
    â€œSuppose something goes wrong and I’m out there all by myself?” Ben said.
    â€œNothing ever goes completely right.”
    Ben woke up in the morning sniffling and speaking in a new, echoey voice. “I’ve got a cold. I’ve got the worst cold adybody ever had!”
    He attributed it to a new breakthrough in the ceiling above his bed which silently dripped cold water onto his pillow all night.
    â€œWhat ki’d of crazy house is this adyhow?” he said.
    My father looked hurt.
    I came to my father’s defense. “Aw, Ben, we’ve lived in worser ones.”
    â€œWorse,” my father corrected.
    â€œNo, we haven’t,” Fred interjected.
    â€œA’d I have to si’g!” Ben wailed.
    Fred had seen us through chicken pox, measles, and mumps. Immediately, he gave Ben his own adjunct to any medicine a doctor ever prescribed, a cup of boiling hot coffee with a tablespoonful of whiskey stirred in. He was convinced that heat and alcohol could cure any disease. This time they relieved the congestion in Ben’s nose and left his eyes glazed, his muscles relaxed, and his voice more resonant. Fred was pleased. “I’ll bring you some more in a thermos before the performance,” he assured Ben.
    An adult seeing Miss Bunce lurching around in the schoolyard as she frenziedly herded us all into the buses hired to take us to San Bruno might have suspected that she too had swallowed a few bracers in preparation for the occasion. No doubt she hadn’t; it was her unfamiliar high-heels causing the imbalance.
    At San Bruno, I went with her and the blue bells to a classroomwhere they were to change into their costumes. It took a half hour to snap and hook fast all their leotards, another half hour to adjust all our creations over them, and twenty minutes more to attach headpieces. The whole process could have taken twenty minutes had not Miss Bunce been scolding one child after another, and had not one of the interested mothers been flitting about resnapping snaps that she was sure hadn’t been securely snapped in the first place and telling every girl she looked “adorable.”
    Fifteen minutes before curtain time, we met the leaves and Ben, who had been ensconced in a different classroom, on the stage. Miss Bunce bounced across it screeching between clenched teeth, “Everybody ready?” The children took turns teasing and tugging each other away from the curtains’ center where they could peek out. Hysteria built as waves of hostility floated up to us from our audience, composed mostly of our San Bruno fourth- and fifth-grade counterparts, glad that they