Daily Book Excerpt: YA books:
Next book on the shelf is Glory in the Flower 
It is now 1901! Tish is 14, going on 15! Still sensitive and annoying!!
40 year old Mama has a new baby girl on the night of a raging blizzard! Tish gets cast as Juliet in the school play of Romeo and Juliet! And her friend Ken, the boy she has a huuuuuge crush on, gets cast as Romeo! Much drama ensues. Celinda, Tish’s best friend, has problems at home. Her mother is a wacko fundamentalist nutjob (kinda like Carrie’s mother “cover your dirty pillows”) and basically stands on street corners haranguing townspeople about how they’re all going to hell, etc. It gets so bad at home that Celinda comes and stays with Tish for a while. Uhm, let’s see what else – oh yeah. Tish writes a poem, gives it to her father – and then later, she hears him chuckling with his wife about it, as though she’s cute for even trying to be a good poet. Tish, being Tish, is literally sent into a tailspin of betrayal and sadness. (Actually, I’m making fun of Tish – but it really is a very moving section of the book … the description of that kind of pain). And of course – she hears her father chuckling on Opening Night of Romeo and Juliet so then she has to go off and do the play. The title of the book refers to the Wordsworth verse:
There’s nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.
Ouch. So this book is basically the story of Tish’s leaving the world of “splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower” – it’s the story of her losing some of her illusions about life … and yet finding “strength in what remains behind”.
Oh yeah, and here’s another thing: Mary Lou Hodge is a big character in these books. She’s the wild girl in Tish’s class. She wears rouge! She curls her hair! She is only 14, but she is just one of “those” girls. She has a bad reputation – not really for any REASON, but just because she likes to hang out with crowds of boys, etc. She starts to date Ken’s older brother Doug – who is 16? It’s a huge scandal. Mary Lou Hodge is too young to date anyone! Ken and Tish, who obviously like each other, and he carries her books when they walk, etc., sometimes have awkward shy conversations about the Doug/Mary Lou situation – and how his parents are NOT happy about the situation. Mary Lou and Tish used to be friends when they were little girls – but it’s one of those things where adolescence just rips people apart. I had a couple of friends like that. It was weird. Junior high came, and BOOM, they were gone. For good!!
So Tish has very little sympathy for Mary Lou’s various scandals – Mary Lou is kind of a lost little girl (and it’s interesting – in the later books in the series – the 5th and 6th books – which leap forward in time to the early 1920s – we learn that Mary Lou Hodge has become a silent film actress – which makes total sense.) Even though Mary Lou Hodge seems like a classic “mean girl”, she’s actually NOT – and one of the strengths of these books is how nobody is pigeon-holed like that. Everyone has more to them than just the surface, and Norma Johnston has a really nice way of showing that.
So but here’s an excerpt from near the end of the book – where we get to see beneath Mary Lou Hodge’s wild and kind of bitchy arrogant exterior. She and Tish had a big blow-up. Here’s the aftermath.
From Glory in the Flower (Keeping Days)
I turned towards the cloakroom door and there, effectively cutting off my exit, was Mary Lou Hodge.
“I’ve been waiting for you. I want to talk to you.”
“What about?”
I realized with a sinking sensation that I shouldn’t have given her an opening, for she closed in firmly, “About the things you said about me that day – the stories you’ve been spreading around the school.” With no audience around, Mary Lou wasn’t bothering about what impression she was making. Her cheeks were an unhealthy red and her eyes looked driven. She must have been hanging around waiting to waylay me ever since school got out. “There’s only one person you could have gotten that stuff from, and that’s Doug. He won’t tell me what he’s been saying, so you’ve got to.”
“My mother’s waiting for me.” I tried to duck past her out the door, wishing fervently that Mrs. Owens hadn’t left. Mary Lou grabbed my arm so hard that her fingernails bit my wrist.
“Oh no, you don’t. I’ve been trying to talk to you for over a week, but your sweet little pals wouldn’t let me near you. You’re not getting away from me this time. Not till you tell me exactly how you knew. Did Doug tell your brother? Is that it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Oh, yes, you do. Those things you shouted at me in the hall. That’s what this all started from, or are you too dumb to know. And I’ve got to find out exactly what you heard.”
I was beginning to feel thoroughly frightened. “I didn’t hear anything. I don’t even know what I said – things I’d read in books. I was so mad. I was just yelling. Nobody’d believe me.”
“Oh yes, they would. They do. They think,” she mimicked savagely, ” ‘The Sterlings are such nice people. That sweet little Sterling girl couldn’t say a thing like that if it wasn’t true.’ You and your saintly goody-good pillar-of-church-and-community family! You make me sick!”
I remembered some things I hadn’t thought about for years – Mr. Hodge carrying home a pail of beer from the saloon on Saturday nights, Mrs. Hodge trailing blowzily around in a wrapper at mid-day, the fact that Mary Lou and Viney always seemed to hang around other kids’ houses instead of vice versa. I felt kind of sick myself.
“Mary Lou – honest – I don’t remember what I said.”
“You called me a whore,” Mary Lou said bluntly. She released my wrist and pushed her hair back from her face. “Tish, can’t you try to understand why I’ve got to know? I — love Doug,” she said painfully. “I’ve trusted him. If he’s saying — things like that about me, can’t you see I’ve got to know? You couldn’t have gotten it out of thin air, not you with your pure little mind. What did he say? Was it to Ben? Or Ken?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. And then I stopped, staring at her, sick. Because all at once I did know. The pieces added up. One of the arrows I had flung blindly into the air had landed dead on target. A whore, I’d said. Well, maybe not a whore, in the technical financial definition of the term, but close enough. And everybody’d believed me, not because I’d known, not because it was true, but what was far worse – because it was what they wanted to believe. Mary Lou was right, we did have dirty minds. And for far too long I’d had my own head buried in the sand.
“You have to have heard something. You couldn’t have made it up. And it couldn’t have come from anyone but Doug.” Mary Lou broke off, staring at me oddly. “You really didn’t know, did you?” she whispered. “Not till I just told you. Here I’ve been imagining – worrying – and you didn’t even … Ha ha! It’s funny, really. Oh, God, I’m going to be sick.” She stumbled into the girls’ lavatory, and I followed.
The last thing in the world I ever expected to be doing, on that or any other day, was kneeling on the dingy tiles of a lavatory cubicle holding Mary Lou’s heaving shoulders while she was very sick indeed. I held her till it was over and she was leaning, limp and trembling, against the wall; then I went and got her a glass of cold water and bathed her face. I sat down on the floor across from her and neither of us knew where to look.
“Tish,” Mary Lou’s voice was low. “I’m not used to begging, least of all from you. Please don’t tell anybody. It’s bad enough now.”
I forced a glance on her. Both her masks were gone now, the tough one and the too-cute flirt. For the first time, I thought, I’m really seeing Mary Lou. She looked bedraggled and unlovely and very human. And afraid.
I had precipitated this mess – through ignorance, through hurt feelings, through not putting myself in someone else’s place. Strangely enough, I could believe her when she said she loved Doug Latham. And remembering a lot of things I didn’t want to face, I could understand exactly what she was feeling. Couldn’t I? And in that moment I knew exactly what I had to do.
I told her the story of Herbie Willis and the pantry closet. All of it. “It may not sound like much,” I finished. “All I can tell you is if the story got out, I’d feel exactly the way you do right now. I’ve trusted you with it, so you know you can trust me. Because if I tattle, you can too.”
I went and got her gaudy coat and got her into it. That coat was like the Sterling chin-thrust, I thought: a bright banner of pride against unfriendly winds. We went outside into the misty rain and walked in silence towards Vyse Avenue and home.
Mary Lou thrust her hands deep into her pockets, and she didn’t look at me. She didn’t look at anything, but her head was high. I walked her to her house, and when we reached it she went inside without a word. I knew what she was feeling. I knew because it was happening inside me, too, as if she were an extension of myself.
I never knew I could ache so much with someone that I couldn’t even like.
