Better Than All Right

by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Overview

The darker the truth, the deeper you hide it—but  what happens when you can’t hide anymore?

Innocence, I guess, is not my image. 

Sixteen-year-old Iris knows that between her bohemian playwright father who lives off the grid in the New Mexican desert and her mother, to whom getting married (but not staying married) is a full-time job, she’s led an unorthodox life, which hasn’t left with her with a lot of childhood illusions. So it’s no surprise when her mom sends her to spend the summer with her aunt, uncle, and cousin.

Iris’s younger cousin Caryn is different. She’s only fourteen, and much more sheltered. Aunt Elaine hopes that Iris will be good company for Caryn, and when the girls meet an appealing young man at the pool and all three become friends, it seems her plan just might be working. But for Iris, making things work means keeping secrets from Caryn. If Iris can’t pretend to be someone she isn’t all summer long, will she still be all right?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781497682771
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	01/06/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	102
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	12 - 16 Years

About the Author

Susan Beth Pfeffer wrote her first novel, Just Morgan, during her last semester at New York University. Since then, she has written over seventy novels for children and young adults, including Kid Power, Fantasy Summer, Starring Peter and Leigh, and The Friendship Pact, as well as the series Sebastian Sisters and Make Me a Star. Pfeffer’s books have won ten statewide young reader awards and the Buxtehude Bulle Award.

Read an Excerpt

Better Than All Right

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By Susan Beth Pfeffer

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1972 Susan Beth Pfeffer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8277-1

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CHAPTER 1

SECOND-RATE SCANDALS

All my life I've read books with talking trains in them. You know the kind I mean: they go, "Seneca Falls, Seneca Falls" or "He loves me, he loves me" to the heroine as she races to her destiny. So naturally I expected the train I was on to make sounds other than rasps and growls. I wasn't sure what I expected it to say and would have been pleasantly surprised by almost anything. It chose not to speak. The conductor was a disappointment too. I thought he'd be paternal and concerned; I was, after all, a fairly young girl making a fairly long trip by herself. Innocence, I guess, is not my image, and the conductor I got was thirty-five and somewhat lecherous. He told me about his ex-wife for a few minutes. They'd gotten divorced the year before. She got custody of their two kids and the cocker spaniel, but he had visitation rights. The alimony was going to kill him, he said. Union or no union, conductors were grossly underpaid. And job security was non- existent, since the railroad was still running only because the government was making it. The board of directors wanted to declare bankruptcy, or maybe they already had. He wasn't too sure of the details, but he did know there was no future in it. He'd had ambitions too, he was telling me, when we pulled into one of the many stops we made, and he had to check other people's tickets. I beat a hasty retreat to the washroom, and hid there for a few minutes, smoking the remains of a joint. After that, I felt better, and returned to my seat. The train still wasn't singing, but I was, inside my head. Then I tried to read the book I'd bought at the station for reading on the train—Jane Eyre I think it was. I know I took Jane Eyre with me that summer, and two or three volumes of Dickens. I was feeling very nineteenth century when I packed and took only those books that went with my mood.

Not that my situation was, in the strictest sense, nineteenth century. True, I was spending the summer as a poor relation, but with the economy being what it was, there was every chance that my uncle ("Moneybags Mike" as my mother was fond of calling him) would lose his job. At least so my aunt had hinted when she told Ma that it would be all right for me to come up and spend the summer as a companion for Caryn. That's their daughter, Caryn, age fourteen, which made her two years younger than me. Caryn I had met, but we'd never said much of anything to each other. Her mother and mine are sisters, but they're not very close. Still, I had to spend the summer somewhere, and I absolutely refused to go to New Mexico and stay with my father. Not that I have anything against him, or Evie, his wife, or even their three kids, aged eight and younger, but it gets fiercely hot in New Mexico in the summer, as I had discovered when I spent the year there, a couple of years earlier. It had all of a sudden been decided I was going to spend the year there, and so Ma called Pa up, and plans were made. Actually Ma called Evie, since Pa refuses to have a telephone, which is another reason I didn't want to spend the summer there. I don't use the phone much, but it's good to know there is one, in case of an emergency. That was the reason my parents got divorced, after years of shouting. Because Pa decided he wanted the artistic life, complete with the deserts, the mesas. My mother said no thank you, she favored civilization, and telephones, and running water. My mother doubts that any place west of Chicago has running water. Evie works as a nurse, so she has more access to telephones. Pa doesn't work, in the strict sense of the word. He's a playwright, of very little renown. His work is very popular in New Mexico, and Arizona, and Colorado, but that's about it. He had a play of his produced off Broadway once, after it broke all records in some theatrically discerning city in New Mexico, but the critics panned it unmercifully, and it closed its third night. I saw it the second night, and thought it was pretty good. Anyway, that was why I was in no mood to go to New Mexico. And I couldn't spend the summer with Ma, since she was going to be in Bermuda, trying to convince Marshall to become her fourth husband. Well, third and a half. Ma's marital record isn't the best in the world, but it does have certain disarming features. Her first marriage was annulled by the boy's irate mother. Ma was just a kid (each time she tells it, she gets younger), and the guy wasn't much older, and he'd just been drafted into the Korean war, so they got drunk at a party, and ran off and got married. His mother, as I just said, was not pleased by this development in her son's life and, as soon as it could be done, had the marriage annulled. The lady offered to buy Ma off, but she said it wasn't necessary, thereby setting a pattern she hasn't been able to break. Three marriages and not a cent of alimony. Then Ma went to college, and then she dropped out and joined the early fifties artsy crowd. She claims she was an original beat, which may very well be. Somewhere along the way, she met my father, and they began their long, complicated relationship, which ended in me. Pa was not too thrilled when he learned he was going to be a father, and he postponed marrying Ma for a few months, but eventually one of his friends persuaded him I was entitled to his last name, which is Levin. I could live without the last name, but they didn't know that, so Pa married her at a very jolly wedding ceremony, with Ma in her seventh month, and me kicking throughout the service.

Ma developed a taste for domesticity that marriage, and so did Pa, but not with each other. They fought a lot. I don't remember very much about it, except the screaming. I was astounded when I realized that my friends' parents didn't scream at each other over everything. I thought that was the way adults talked. Anyway, one day Pa screamed about how he was going to New Mexico, and Ma screamed back that he should feel free to go, just as long as he stopped in Nevada on the way over. Which is why Pa sued Ma for divorce, instead of vice versa. Pa found Evie within a matter of months, and he married her the straight way, and they proceeded to have three children and a few plays. Ma, who was stuck with me, and a past that she used to refer to as colorful, stuck around in New York for a while, and then took me to California for two years that I don't remember at all. Maybe it was a refusal to be any place near Pa, or maybe it was just my mother's faulty sense of direction, but we moved up to the topmost part of California, right by the Oregon border. I don't know what she did there. I was halfway through third grade when she decided she'd had enough of the West Coast and moved us back to New York, where she got a job as Lloyd's assistant.

Lloyd was a photographer. He took pictures for confessions and detective magazines. Ma modeled for some of the pictures, whenever they needed someone thirtyish and good-looking, but for the most part she kept Lloyd's books and helped with the lighting and the make-up and talked to the models. There was one model Lloyd used a lot, a guy named Eddie, and Ma started dating him, which got Lloyd really upset, since I guess he felt he had rights on Ma. He would have too, except he also had a wife he was separated from when Ma first got the job. Lloyd was dawdling over the divorce, though, because of the cost of getting it. He said he couldn't afford to get rid of his wife and marry Ma, which was what she was favoring. So Ma threatened to marry Eddie if Lloyd didn't start divorce proceedings. Lloyd decided Ma was bluffing, and procrastinated some more. Ma wasn't. She and Eddie ran off to Maryland, and got married on Friday. Monday, she returned to work complete with wedding ring. Lloyd almost fired her, he was so mad, but then he decided Ma was too good an assistant to fire for personal reasons. He just stopped using Eddie. Ordinarily that would have upset Ma, since she is a very loyal person, but she wasn't so thrilled by Eddie that she wanted to see him at work as well as at home. She'd only married him, after all, because she'd said she would, and she doesn't like to go back on her word. It worked out pretty well for a while, though. Eddie, it turned out, was no mere male model, but a man with some ambition. He wanted to be a poet. Ma was pretty upset when she found that out, on account of Pa and his playwrighting. When she and Pa had been married he worked on Madison Avenue, writing commercials for laundry detergents. His friends called him Low Suds Solly, unaware that he was going to retire prematurely to become one of New Mexico's leading literary lights. Still Ma, a forgiving soul, forgave Eddie his ambitions, and even encouraged him, until it was impossible for her to ignore the fact that Eddie was a lousy poet. He really was. He sold some stuff to Hallmark for birthday cards, and one of his Condolences became a classic in its field, but that was before humor became really big in the greeting card business. Eddie wasn't much for humor in his poetry, which specialized in overweight symbolism, full of dying turtles and the like. It never sold anywhere. Lloyd, meanwhile, took great delight in pointing out Eddie's liabilities to Ma, who was perfectly aware of them without Lloyd's help, so she told him if he didn't stop tormenting her, she'd quit. Lloyd still hadn't learned about Ma, and kept at it, so Ma gave him twenty minutes' notice (it was 4:40), and left.

Eddie got a job selling encyclopedias, but he wasn't very good at it, since he never could convince himself that encyclopedias were worthwhile. He never used one himself. While he was out making his honest bucks, Ma stayed home and took care of me. Neither one of us liked the arrangement very much. Ma soon bored of the routine, and she could never remember to be home when I got back from school, which was, of course, the whole point to her being a stay-at-home mother. She went to the movies instead, and hard as she would try to remember to be back in time, she never managed. Instead, she'd stay to see the movie again. When she got home, she'd tell me the plots while we made supper together. Ma's a pretty good cook, and a very good plot teller, so those were good times. But the rest of it was a nuisance. When she was working she never thought to pressure me about getting my homework done, or going to bed on time, because she was too tired, or too busy. But as soon as she traded her paycheck for an apron, she started with the "Why don't you do your homework" speeches that I used to hear my friends' mothers deliver to them. Finally I told her she was driving me crazy, which she was, and that if she didn't go back to work, I would run away to New Mexico and live with Pa and keep a coyote for a pet. It was the only threat I had and I didn't think it would work, but I was pleasantly surprised. I guess Ma just wanted the excuse, and I provided her with it. So she told Eddie, who was spending more and more time selling encyclopedias, although you never could have told it from the money he brought home, that she had to get a job to keep the family together. Eddie offered a few succinct remarks about the sanctity of the family, and Ma kicked him out of the house. She went out the next day, and got a job selling a rival brand of encyclopedias. Years later, I pointed out to her that she was competing with Ed, but she denied it. It was the first job she could get, she said, and she would have taken it if she'd had to sell septic tanks. Ma was much better at encyclopedia selling than poor Eddie, and we lived quite comfortably for a while, until Eddie started pestering her to let him come back. After a bit Ma relented, and Eddie returned to our fold. He gave up on selling though, and stuck to his room, where he worked on his poetry. Ma made the money for the family, which worked out fine until Ma decided encyclopedia selling wasn't emotionally rewarding enough. So she quit, and took a job as secretary to an artist she'd known in her old "beat" days. The artist had since made it very big, but he was kind of messed up and needed someone around to keep things straight. It was a great job. Ma juggled wives and mistresses and patrons and critics and would-be purchasers, and made reservations under assumed names and sent money to Swiss banks and helped write speeches for various occasions and sent out press releases and kept very busy, while Eddie stayed at home and plugged away at his dying turtles.

Poor Eddie got very jealous and started insisting that Ma use her newly made connections to help him get started in the poetry world. Ma, who had no illusions about Eddie's talents, laughed right in his face, which he didn't particularly care for. So they had a big fight, and he called her everything his poetic soul could come up with, and then he left. For about two weeks, Ma pretended to be deliriously happy to be rid of him. She threw away his typewriter, and told her artist, who was starting to get interested in her once again (she said they'd had a very brief thing together years before, but it hadn't meant very much to either one of them), that she would be happy to go to Palm Springs with him. Only then she changed her mind and called Eddie and told him to come back. She bought him a new typewriter, and he returned, but his heart just wasn't in it. His cards weren't selling, and his poetry was rejected by everybody, and Ma continued to enjoy herself with the artistic life. So very sadly, one day Eddie announced, without any fight at all, that he was leaving. And he packed his stuff and left. Ma cried for days, but she never called him, and he never called her, and eventually they both hired lawyers and got a divorce. No alimony though. We don't hear much from Eddie any more; he moved to Idaho, where he got a job selling sporting goods.

Ma decided that it was all the artist's fault that her marriage broke up, and quit her job. For a really long time she couldn't find anything else, and we both got scared that she had no future. It's very important to Ma that she have a future, just as it is very important to me that I have a past. She finally got something in a clothes store, but she hated that and quit almost as soon as she was hired. Then she got a job as a nurse-companion to an elderly lady. Ma didn't pretend she was a nurse when she went for her interview, but Mrs. Smith was so delighted by Ma that she decided she didn't really need a professional nurse. So Ma took the job, but it was live in, and Mrs. Smith didn't want a thirteen-year-old girl making noise in the house, so I shipped myself out to New Mexico. By the end of the year though, I knew I could never stay there on a permanent basis, and I wrote Ma accordingly. Ma had assumed when she took the job that Mrs. Smith's days were numbered; she looked awfully old and fragile. But Mrs. Smith's doctor told her that she was the best medicine Mrs. Smith could have; her very presence rejuvenated the old lady. So Ma explained the situation to Mrs. Smith, and said that when her daughter's happiness was at stake, she would sacrifice anything, including her job, which she was enjoying very much. Mrs. Smith was horrified, but she still refused to have me stay, since she didn't care for fourteen-year-old girls any more than for thirteen-year-old ones. She'd had four children of her own, and that was quite enough. However, her late husband had been on the board of directors of a little-known boarding school, and maybe something could be arranged ... Ma consulted with me, and I agreed it was worth a try, so I returned east to attend Martha Prescott School for Girls, a rather raunchy institution much given to second-rate scandals. Martha Prescott S for G and I got along immediately. The girls there had comparable backgrounds, except they generally wound up with more money. One of my friends there can name every one of her mother's seven husbands and their wedding anniversaries. Only her mother ended up with huge settlements more often than not. I spent my first summer at a camp that had to be a training ground for a bordello. The second summer I spent with a friend's family at their summer home in Maine. That was very pleasant, and I wouldn't have minded going back, except my friend's father lost all his money in the stock market, and they sold the house and took their daughter out of Prescott. And then, right in the middle of my junior year, Mrs. Smith died. Ma was heartbroken. She was especially upset because Mrs. Smith hadn't mentioned her in her will. Not that Ma had stayed there with that in mind, but it would have come in handy with the recession and all. And she had given up four good years of her life to take care of an elderly lady, when she could have been finding somebody new to marry. What Mrs. Smith did leave Ma (besides a guarantee that my scholarship would be continued for my senior year, should I decide to go back) was her third son, Marshall. Not literally, of course, but when Marshall came up for the funeral, he and Ma found themselves mutually very attracted. Of course Marshall was quite upset by his mother's death, but Ma proved to be a great comfort. She also proved her competence by making all the arrangements for the funeral, which was a great help to the various Smiths. Marshall, it turned out, was very wealthy, with a house here and a yacht there and a yearning for an intelligent woman to help him share these pleasures. He'd only planned to stay for the funeral, but then he met Ma and stayed for three months instead, living at the Plaza. That impressed Ma; she always wanted a man who could afford the Plaza. But business called, and Marshall reluctantly returned to Bermuda, begging Ma to join him there. It didn't take much begging. The only problem was me, and that was solved with a couple of phone calls to my aunt, who agreed to take me in while Ma was starting this business in Bermuda. Ma had seen no point in telling Elaine the truth about the nature of her business. Elaine wasn't too happy about the summer anyway, since she and Mike were supposed to go to Europe, but now Mike's job was in jeopardy, and there was no point spending the money, when they might need it to send Caryn and Marc to college. So instead, they shipped Marc off to summer camp, and she and Caryn went to a small resort town in upstate New York, where Mike would join them weekends. I'd serve more than adequately as a companion for Caryn, maybe help her with her French while I was up there. So poor relation that I was, I packed my bags, and left for the hinterlands.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Better Than All Right by Susan Beth Pfeffer. Copyright © 1972 Susan Beth Pfeffer. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Second-rate Scandals,
A Pockmarked Environment,
Good-by Was Always One of Phil's Best Words,
A Small Personal Smile,
Part of Being an Adult,
Clean Living and Wholesome Thoughts,
Four of Us and a Cheeseboard,
The Ultimate Copout,
About the Author,