Susan Pfeffer: This World We Live In

“Do you think it’ll rain again?” Jon asked after we’d dried ourselves off and hung the towels on the sunroom wash line.

“It rained a couple of nights ago,” I said.

Everyone stared at me. I couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or not.

“The sound woke me,” I said.

“You should have told us,” Mom said. “We could have put pots out.”

“I didn’t think of it,” I said. “I had a bad dream and I woke up and heard the rain falling. Or maybe I heard the rain falling and then I woke up. I don’t know.”

Mom sighed. It was her “Miranda is never going to grow up and be responsible and understand that when it’s raining she needs to let me know so I can put pots and pans outside and catch the water and make all our lives easier” sigh.

“What?” I said. “It was raining. I didn’t wake you up. It stopped raining. Now it’s raining again, and for all we know it’s going to rain every day for the rest of our lives and we’ll float away to sea.”

“What if the rain washes away the snow and then it stops raining?” Jon asked. “What would we do for water?”

“If the snow melts, the well will fill up,” Mom said. “As long as the pipes don’t freeze, we’ll be fine.”

“Running water,” I said. “Now that we have electricity sometimes, it’ll be a lot easier to do laundries.”

“It’s funny,” Mom said. “The things we used to take for granted. Water. Power. Sunlight.”

“We still don’t have sunlight,” Matt pointed out. “And we can’t count on power. Or water, for that matter.”

Mom looked at the pot with all the accumulated rainwater. “It’s a good sign, though,” she said. “A sign better things are coming.”

It started raining again yesterday afternoon, and it hasn’t stopped since. A heavy, steady rain.

Mom decided to celebrate by giving Jon and me pop quizzes.

Jon flunked his. Mom got all scowly.

“What difference does it make?” Jon asked. “So what if I don’t learn algebra?”

“Someday schools will be open again,” Mom said. “Things will be more normal. You need to do your work now for when that happens.”

“That’s never going to happen,” Jon said. “And even if schools do open up somewhere, they’re not going to open up here. There aren’t enough people left.”

“We don’t know that,” Mom said. “We don’t know how many people are like us, holed up, making do until times get better.”

“I bet whoever they are, they aren’t studying algebra,” Jon said.

I went upstairs to Mom’s room to find something to read. I’ve read every book in my room so many times, I can open them to any page and recite it from memory.

At least it feels that way.

Mom likes biographies, which don’t usually interest me, and given everything that’s happened in the past year, interest me even less. Sure, Mary Queen of Scots spent most of her life in prison and then got her head chopped off, but compared to me she had it easy.

How much volcanic ash did she have to breathe every day?

One good thing about those biographies, though, is I haven’t read them. Not all of them, not all the way through. And since I can’t go to a bookstore or the library to get anything new to read, I went up to Mom’s room to find something.

Mom expects us to keep our bedrooms as clean as possible, even though we’re rarely in them. I noticed right away that there was no dust on the furniture or even on the books. I pulled one off the shelf, looked to see if I’d find it even remotely interesting, decided I wouldn’t, and took another one instead.

I noticed something sticking out of the third book I looked at, a piece of paper about halfway in, and pulled it out. It was a shopping list. Mom had probably used it as a bookmark.

Milk

Romaine

OJ

WWB

Butter

Eggs

Raspberry Preserves

That was it. That was the whole list, just seven items. It took me a moment to figure out that WWB is whole-wheat bread. It’s been so long since I’ve had any bread, let alone whole-wheat.

It’s been so long since I’ve eaten any of those foods. So long since I’d even thought about raspberry preserves or butter.

I can’t say staring at that list (and I couldn’t take my eyes off it) made me hungry, because I’m always hungry. The food we get every week is enough to keep us going, not enough to keep us full. And it sure didn’t make me nostalgic. Oh, for the good old days when you could actually breathe the air and put a little raspberry preserves on your whole-wheat French toast! Mary Queen of Scots probably missed French toast, assuming it was invented by then, but not me. I’m past all that.

No, it was the romaine that got me. Seeing “romaine” in Mom’s handwriting, written who knows when, made me think about who we were, who we used to be. We were a family that ate romaine. Other families ate iceberg, or Bibb, or Boston lettuce. We ate romaine. The Evans family of Howell, PA, favored romaine.

What about other people who ate romaine and raspberry preserves? Are we the only people left on Earth who did?

Somewhere there must be a place where people are eating eggs and drinking milk. I don’t know where, or how they get the food, but I bet somewhere in what’s left of America, there are places with food and electricity and lots of books to read.

The president had kids. The vice president had grandkids. Millionaires and senators and movie stars had families. Those kinds of people don’t subsist on two cans of vegetables a day.

I wonder if they make shopping lists. I wonder if they prefer romaine.

I hate Sundays. And this one feels even worse because it’s the last Sunday in April.

Mr. Danworth brings us our bags of food on Mondays, along with a little bit of news and the sense that there are people still living in Howell. But every Sunday, even though none of us says anything, we worry that he won’t show up, that the food delivery will have stopped, that things will go back to where they were in the winter, with us all alone and slowly starving.

Only it would be worse now, because for a little while we’ve had food, so we’ve had reason to hope.

If I hadn’t started writing in my diary again, I wouldn’t realize it’s the last Sunday in April. There’s no reason to think things are going to change just because the calendar does, but it’s one more thing to worry about. Maybe the food deliveries were going to last only through April.

I hate Sundays.

There was no food delivery.

We spent the whole day waiting for it. Every sound we heard made one of us jump. After a while Mom gave up pretending that Jon and I were studying.

It’s never light, but with it being spring, it’s getting less dark later. Finally, though, we knew it was nighttime and Mr. Danworth wasn’t coming.

“We’re okay for a few days,” Mom said. “We still have food in the pantry. A week’s worth if we’re careful.”

I know what “careful” means. It means we eat one meal a day and Mom stops eating altogether.

“Just because we didn’t get a delivery doesn’t mean there isn’t any food,” Matt said. “Maybe Mr. Danworth can’t use the snowmobile anymore. Maybe they ran out of gas. I’ll go to town tomorrow and see.”

“You’re not going alone,” Mom said. “Miranda can go with you.”

“Why can’t I go?” Jon whined.

“Because you flunked your algebra quiz,” Mom said.

It’s funny. I’ve felt holed up here for so long, you’d think I’d be excited at the thought of going someplace, anyplace, even if it’s just to town. But it scares me.