Read Online Hilda and Pearl by Alice Mattison - Free Book Online Page A

the hospital, then, Frances thought, just after she was born.
    Now Hilda was all dressed. “I don’t know why I talked about this today,” she said. “We have enough trouble to think about. Don’t worry about that baby. It was a long time ago.”
    Frances thought that if she could only ask the right question, she could find out what she needed to know, but she didn’t have time to think. She didn’t know what it was she needed to know. She could imagine a tiny baby, dressed in white—she’d seen that in a book or someplace. Maybe they had buried her in white. “Simon once told me you had a miscarriage,” she said. She was embarrassed, because it was a private thing about her mother, because she wasn’t sure how a miscarriage happened, but also because it was the only time she and Simon had ever talked that way.
    â€œNo,” said her mother. “Did Aunt Pearl tell him that?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œHe picks up all sorts of things. You never know what’s coming next,” her mother said affectionately, as if Simon had not done what he had done that weekend, as if the things he did weren’t important.
    â€œMaybe I forgot what he said,” Frances said.
    Her mother turned and looked at her, her hand resting on her dresser. “Do you and Simon talk a lot?” she said.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI mean, he never said anything about running away, or where he’d go?”
    â€œNo,” said Frances, and at once she thought, for the second time, that it was bad for all of them that Simon had run away. She had been a little proud of him, a little excited. She had been wondering whether her classmates would know on Monday what had happened, whether the teachers would ask her questions, or whether she might have to stay home, as if it were a Jewish holiday. But her mother turned and looked at her as she left the room, and suddenly Frances almost was her mother and knew how it would be to be looking at herself, a girl, to be wearing nylon stockings, facing the window, not the door, and feeling gray and terrible about Simon, tattered and frightened.
    Soon her mother left. Frances promised to stay indoors and not to open the door to anybody. “What will you do?” her mother asked.
    â€œI have homework.”
    Frances was alone for many hours. She had never been alone for so long before. When her parents had left her previously, they’d always returned before she finished whatever it was she was doing when they left. Now she had time to think. The apartment felt different, empty of her parents. When her mother left, she walked through all the rooms and looked in the closets. She looked behind the shower curtain into the bathtub. For a second she thought she might find Simon lying in the tub, laughing at her for taking so long to find him—or drowned.
    She turned on the radio and then the television, but was unable to find a program she liked. Finally she took out her homework and began to work at the kitchen table. It didn’t take long, even though she did it slowly.
    For lunch she made herself a sandwich. She found some tuna fish salad in the refrigerator and toasted the bread, but she burned it and had to scrape off the black parts. She was confused. She thought she’d done it just the way her mother did, on Medium Dark, but it was burned. She found herself crying as she scraped the bread with a knife, getting black crumbs all over the tablecloth. It was bad that she could cry over burning the bread but not about Simon. She didn’t like toast that had been burned. The sandwich didn’t taste good, even though she scraped for a long time.
    After lunch, time went even more slowly. She cleaned up the kitchen to give herself something to do and to keep her parents from knowing that she’d burned the toast. She had a glass of milk and some cookies. After a while she sat in the living room, but she had