Dear
Diary

One thing I've learned is that strange things do happen. They
happen all the time. Today, for instance, my best friend Jill's cat
spoke. We were making brownies in the kitchen when we heard it say,
Let me out. Well, we rushed to the back door and did exactly that.
We experienced a miracle and now we're looking for more, although
Franconia, the town we live in, is not known for such things. Jill
and I have known each other our whole lives. One house separates
our houses but we act as if it doesn't exist. We met before we were
born and we'll probably still know each other after we die. At
least, that's the way we're planning it.

My mother and I left for Atlantic City so quickly I didn't have
time to call Jill. We told people we were on our way to visit an
old aunt, but really our departure had something to do with love,
or the lack of it, and the aunt doesn't even exist. I know other
people whose mothers suddenly pack up when their fathers drink or
scream, but for us this is more serious. My mother doesn't do
things like go to Atlantic City. She doesn't order room service and
cry. She once told me that anyone who gets married had better like
herself, because there's nobody else in this world that she'll ever
really know, not truly.

We stayed in our room in Atlantic City for three days, and didn't
go outside once, thanks to room service. We ate like pigs and
didn't even bother to brush our teeth until my mother's cousin
Margot, who got a divorce last summer and changed the color of her
hair to give herself an emotional lift, came to get us. She drove
to New Jersey in the Ford Mustang convertible that she refused to
let her ex have, since he'd taken her very soul and raked it over
red-hot coals.

"Get dressed right now," she told us.

We were wearing our bathrobes and watching an old cowboy movie,
which, for some reason, made my mother cry. Maybe it was all those
men on horseback who were so steadfast and loyal. Their own men had
disappointed them, but somehow Margot and my mother both had hope
for improvement. Frankly, I had more faith in the horses.

"I mean now, Frances," Margot said, and because she meant business,
my mother actually dressed and put on some lipstick and we went to
a Chinese restaurant where the drinks came with little paper
umbrellas, which I kept as a souvenir.

Listen to me, Gretel, Margot told me when we'd gone back to the
room to pack and my mother was finally out of earshot. When a
marriage breaks up, it's the children who suffer, so baby, hold on
tight. That's why Margot was relieved that she and Tony had never
had children, although she became teary whenever she saw a baby.
"Margot is my best friend, but she's completely full of baloney,"
my mother whispered as we were throwing our suitcases into the
trunk. "Take it all with a grain of salt. Maybe even a whole
shaker."

Say what you want about the Mustang, it may be gorgeous, but it has
very little trunk space. I had to sit in the back seat with the
hair dryer and the makeup case on my lap all the way to Franconia,
but that didn't stop me from keeping my fingers crossed and wishing
we'd wind up someplace other than home.

We're in Florida for one week, the week when the turtles die on the
beach and there are jellyfish in the ocean. As soon as we checked
into the hotel, my brother, Jason, who likes to pretend he's not
part of our family, went out to study tide pools and no one has
seen him since. My parents are here to try to revitalize their
marriage, which seems a pretty impossible feat to all outside
observers. Gretel honey, don't get high hopes, Margot had already
warned me when she took me shopping for a bathing suit, a mission
which can give anyone with a less than perfect body a complete
nervous breakdown. When it's over, it's over, Margot told me, and I
had the distinct feeling that she was right.

Long before the plane touched down in Miami we could hear our
parents arguing, and at the hotel they locked themselves in their
room. If you ask me, working so hard at being married can backfire.
It certainly is making my father nastier than usual. Not that his
bad temper affects me. I keep my own counsel. I go my own way. I
order room service and eat Linzer tortes and shrimp scampi alone in
the room I was supposed to be sharing with Jason, not that he was
ever planning to show up. Even though I was across the hall from my
parents, I could still hear them fighting.

I went out to the beach late, later than I'd be allowed to if
anyone knew I was alive. That's where I met Jonathan Rabbit, who is
now in love with me. He is known as Jack Rabbit, which makes me
laugh out loud. Doesn't it figure that the boy who fell for me
would be a rodent? He lives in Atlanta and is in the ninth grade,
and frankly he's terribly boring. I let him kiss me once, but
believe me, I did not hear bells. I only heard the jellyfish
sloshing around in the water and the noisy beat of Jack Rabbit's
heart. Florida didn't do anything for my family, but at least it's
starting to be spring. Jill and I are keeping our eyes open for
miracles. Jack Rabbit calls me constantly and that is something of
a miracle. He writes so often you'd think his fingers would start
to cramp up. I bring his letters to school, so everyone is well
aware that I have a boyfriend in Atlanta. They'll never meet him.
They'll never know it's actually possible for a boy to be so boring
you'd agree to kiss him just to get him to shut up. I should get
paid to listen to him when he calls on the phone. I should get a
dollar fifty an hour. Minimum.

Jill told me that when you're really in love, you know right away.
I'm not exactly sure how this happens. Is it like a flash of
lightning? Like an angel tapping you on the shoulder? Or is it
similar to choosing a puppy? You think you're picking the cutest
one, but really you wind up going home with the one who keeps
insisting on climbing into your lap. That's how we got our dog,
Revolver. We thought he was so crazy about us, but it turned out
that Labrador retrievers adore everyone. Well, maybe that's what
love is, a state of mind ready to grace anyone willing to accept
it. Anyone who cares.

School's out. Hurray. Life, however, is still so boring that I'm
writing to Jack Rabbit every day. I go to the pool with Jill and
take along my notebook and write until I think I'm going blind,
then jump into the deep end. We are not going on vacation because
no one in my house is talking to each other, so going anywhere
together is definitely out. My brother's on the summer science team
at the high school, so he's never home. My father is on an exercise
kick and has joined a gym, so he's never around either.

My mother and Margot and I spend a lot of time going to movies.
It's dark and it's cool and no one knows if you're crying, except
for the person sitting directly beside you. Margot buys me anything
I want, even Jordan almonds, which are so terrible for your teeth.
She's the kind of person who knows about love. She has men calling
her in the middle of the night, but they're all no good, or so she
says. Just like Jill, she insists she'll know when she meets the
right man. But unlike Jill, she tells me exactly what love's
evidence is. I'll just want to kiss him till I die. To me, this
doesn't sound like something to hope for, but people seem to hope
for it all the same.

Jill is camping with her parents, and has sent me a postcard that
it has happened. The miracle we've been searching for, the great
event, the angel's secret. It's love, it really is. It's the boy in
the tent next to hers who she sneaks out to meet after her parents
are asleep. I sit on my front stoop while Jill is away and think
things over. I've smartened up and am no longer waiting for the
mailman. Jack Rabbit isn't writing anymore. He went to camp to be a
junior counselor and I guess he broke his arm or fell in love with
somebody new. Doesn't it figure that I would miss his letters like
crazy? Sometimes I read the old ones late at night, and I wonder
what was I thinking when I got them. How could I have thought he
was boring? Well, I'm the boring one now. When Jill comes back I
may have to lie to her. I may tell her Jack Rabbit died in a
canoeing accident. My name was the last word he said, or so they
tell me. My name brought him comfort with his last dying
breath.

Jill and I are not in the same class at school. We never are. The
administration doesn't want people who like each other to be
together. They think it builds character when they stick people who
hate one another in the same room, day after day, and nobody winds
up getting killed or maimed. I'm not supposed to know that Jill's
mother is seeing a psychiatrist, just as Jill is not supposed to
know my parents are no longer sleeping in the same room. My mother
spends her nights on a quilt on my floor, and she doesn't cry until
she thinks I'm asleep.

Recently, Margot and I went out for ice cream. We had butterscotch
sundaes with vanilla ice cream. Margot asked for my advice. She had
spotted my father at an expensive restaurant, the kind he'd never
take us to, with some woman she'd never seen before and she didn't
know whether or not to tell my mother. I have never been much of a
tattletale myself, although I understand that there are times when
the truth serves its purpose. This didn't seem to be one of those
times. For all we knew, this woman could be some business
associate, although Margot and I probably would have both been
willing to bet our lives that she wasn't.

Don't tell. That was the advice I came up with. My mother was
already crying and sleeping on the floor, what good would the truth
do her now? Margot didn't eat any of her sundae, and when she
offered it to me I realized I was sick to my stomach. I think I've
pretty much figured out that in this world, it's better to stick to
hot fudge.

On Halloween Jill wore all black and made ears out of felt which
she glued to a plastic headband. She was a black cat. She had a
tail that was braided out of three silk scarves. I borrowed thirty
silver bangle bracelets from my grandmother. I was a
fortune-teller. We should have suspected something when we saw the
moon. It was orange and so big we couldn't believe it. It was like
we could take one big step, and there we'd be: moon girls who had
fallen off the rim of the world. My brother laughed at us. Weren't
we a little too old for trick-or-treating? Well of course we were,
but we didn't care. We went up and down the block, collecting
candy; then we walked beyond the high school through the field so
we could smoke cigarettes beside the creek. Jill had stolen the
cigarettes from her mother's purse, and I had gotten the matches
from my grandmother.

"As long as you're not smoking cigarettes," my grandmother had said
to me, which pretty much ruined the whole thing. I couldn't enjoy a
single puff. Grandma Frieda was visiting for the weekend and she
had the ability to put a hex on any form of high jinks. She was
sleeping on my floor too, and it was getting pretty crowded there
in my room. I could never find my sneakers. I couldn't find my
underwear. Every night, as I fell asleep, I'd hear bits of
whispered conversation, and every single one seemed to include the
word sorrow.

Jill had been practicing and knew how to blow smoke rings. She was
blowing a misty ring when some guys from the high school intent on
trouble approached. Jill looked older than she was, and even in
costume, you could tell she was beautiful. The high school guys
tried to kiss her, and when she refused, they grabbed her. The
whole thing happened so fast I just sat there, as though I were the
audience and the whole thing was a play. And then it wasn't. I hit
one of the guys, and all of my silver bracelets were so heavy he
fell backwards. The shock of me smashing one of them gave us time
to run. We ran and ran, like we really could get to the moon if we
had to. We ran until we turned into smoke; we could float across
lawns and drift under windows and doors.

"I can't believe you did that," Jill said when we finally made it
home. She had lost her tail and her ears, but her face was shining.
"You hit him."

I felt great for days.

We don't do holidays. We go to my grandma Frieda's for Passover,
but we skip Chanukah, which my father insists is trivial, and
Thanksgiving, which he considers a meaningless ritual. We do,
however, spend every Christmas at Margot's house. It's a holiday
she feels entitled to celebrate since she was married to Tony
Molinaro for all those years. My father never goes to Margot's, and
this year Jason wasn't there either. It was just us, and we
decorated the tree with all of Tony's mother's beautiful old
ornaments. There's an angel that's always been my favorite,
fashioned out of silvery glass. When Tony's mother was alive she
assured me it would bring good luck to whoever hung it on the tree.
Tony's mother always preferred Margot to her own son, and when they
broke up she took to her bed and was dead by the following
spring.

Even after Margot and Tony divorced, Margot always included her
ex-mother-in-law in the festivities. Tony's mother must have been
at least ninety. Her hands shook as she held out the angel. "Here's
the thing about luck," she told me on her last Christmas. "You
don't know if it's good or bad until you have some
perspective."

This year we made a toast to the old lady and Margot actually
cried. Right as we finished the tree, snow started to fall. We all
rushed to the front window to look. It was the kind of snow that
you hardly ever see, so heavy and beautiful you fall in love with
winter, even though you know you'll have to shovel in the
morning.

Margot had made a turkey with stuffing, a noodle kugel, and a white
cake topped with coconut that looked like the snow outside. After
dinner, she and my mother put on aprons and did the dishes and
laughed. I let them listen to Elvis's Blue Christmas; I hardly ever
saw my mother having a good time, so how could I complain?

In Jill's family Christmas was a big deal, and I knew when I went
over to her house in the morning she'd have a dozen great presents
to show me and I'd have to try not to be jealous. Jill and I had
given each other bottles of White Musk, our favorite scent. I
envied Jill just about everything, but I didn't feel jealous right
then, listening to Elvis in Margot's house. Truthfully, there was
nowhere else I'd rather be. Lucky for us, Margot lived right around
the corner from us. Her house was our house, and vice versa, unless
my father was at home. Margot and my mother intended to be
neighbors forever; they had dozens of plans, but not all of their
plans were working out.

That night, when we walked home, my mother put her arm around me
and told me to wish on a star. She still believed in things like
that. We stood there in the snow, and try as I might, I didn't see
a single star. But I lied. I said that I did, and I wished anyway.
We stood there while my mother tried in vain to see that same star.
My fingers were freezing, so I put my hands in my pockets. The
angel was there. I knew that if I tried to thank Margot, she'd tell
me to cut it out, she'd say it was nothing, but it was definitely
something to me.

It was late, but we could hear traffic on the Southern State
Parkway, even though it was Christmas, and snowing so hard. You had
to wonder who all these people in their cars were leaving behind
and who they were driving toward, and if they knew that in the
distance, the echo of their tires on the asphalt sounded like a
river, and that to someone like me, it could seem like the miracle
I'd been looking for.

Reprinted from LOCAL GIRLS by Alice Hoffman by permission of G.
P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c)
1999 by Alice Hoffman.