“Hey, c’mon, don’t do that,” I said. “You can’t tell nothin’ by somebody’s house. She’s eccentric.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s how a lot of rich people get. The more money they make the poorer they look. They don’t want people to know they got a lot of money.”
“Why not?”
“So they don’t get robbed, hemorrhoid head.”
“Okay.” He poked me in the forehead. He knows I hate that. “If she don’t want people to know she’s rich, how come she’s wearing a diamond?”
I poked him back, a poke a word. “Be. Cause. It. Ain’t. Real.”
That surprised him. “Huh?” he goes.
I told him, “They don’t wear their real jewels outside. They wear fakes that just look like the real ones.”
“So where’s the real one?”
“In the house someplace. In a safe.”
“Okay,” he said, “so what about the mink?”
Just then I noticed the old lady was gone, and the door to the house was wide open. We went up the steps. “Bet it’s crummy,” I said. “Rich eccentrics always live in crummy houses.”
Sure enough, it was crummy. Not crummy-dirty. Crummy-old. And dark. You could hardly see. I almost bumped into the mink hanging on a coatrack. The furniture was all these old antiques, and there were egg-shaped pictures of old-fashioned ladies with black dresses up to their necks, and the walls had wallpaper.
“Toldjuh,” I said.
We put the bags on the kitchen table. Then we saw the cat—this humongous shaggy thing that was the craziest color—orange!—and was so fat it waddled like a duck. It just waddled over to the foot of the table and plumped down and looked up at the bags. Then before I knew what happened, the old lady whips out the lamb chops, drops one of them onto the floor—no plate—and the cat goes at it like it’s ten rats.
“Man!” said Richie.
I just stared. I wanted that lamb chop.
“Man!” Richie kept saying.
When the old lady got her bags unloaded she took two glasses from the cupboard and put ice in them. Ah, soda, I’m thinking, but she just filled them with water and handed them to us. That smile on her face was getting a little stupid by now.
“Let’s go to the bathroom,” I said.
Richie’s mouth got little and round and laid an ice cube. It plopped into his glass. “I don’t have to go,” he said.
I nudged him. “Get a look upstairs.”
I turned to the stupid smile and I knew we had a problem. How do you tell a deaf and dumb old lady you have to go to the bathroom? Well, I’m standing there for about an hour moving my lips and trying to make all kinds of signs without getting too gross, and then I look over and there’s Richie going plop! plop! plop! with his ice cubes into the water. I cracked up and we just took off upstairs. I almost broke the banister laughing.
Upstairs was scary. Old deaf lady or not, we tiptoed around. Sun was coming in here and there, but even the sun seemed dark, it was all so quiet. It was like nobody lived there for centuries.
The only thing that moved in the whole place was a drop of water coming out of a bubble on the end of a faucet (there were two of them, one Hot and one Cold). Almost every ten seconds a drop dropped, and where it hit there was this orange and green stain in the sink. It made me think about erosion. No matter how hard something is, if a little bit of water or wind hits it for long enough, like a couple million years, it will wear away. If I waited there long enough that water would drip right through the sink. That’s time for you. The bathtub had squatting legs on it and there wasn’t any shower.
“Where’s the safe?” Richie whispered.
“How do I know?” I said. “You think she’s gonna leave it in the middle of the floor?”
We looked in a couple rooms. Nothing but beds and closets and wallpaper. The wallpaper was these French poodles and fancy ladies with black pointed feet, and swans. It was all brownish-yellow. Where the edges of the paper met, little pieces about the size of cornflakes were coming off.
There was one room left, at the end of the hallway. The door was shut.
“Go ahead,” I said.
Richie pushed the door open. It smelled—I don’t know—old. It was dark. Three windows had long green shades pulled all the way down, even below the windowsills. But the shades had these little pinholes in them, like the sky at night, only it was sun coming through instead of stars, and where these rays of sunlight were crossing the room you could see millions of specks of dust just moving, moving; they never stopped.
What a crazy room! There was a giant bed, and lying down right on the bed was one of those big old-fashioned radios shaped like a tombstone. There was lots of other stuff too. A big stack of records. A wooden rack with these heavy black men’s suits hanging on it. A row of old shoes—crazy—they went from real tiny baby shoes to big men’s ones, right up the line. And next to the shoes a row of dolls, all sitting up against the wall. An old sword. An army helmet. A rocking horse. On the wall over the bed was a real long picture. It showed a bunch of dogs, big ones, and they were all looking down at this little white kitten playing with a pink ball of yarn. The funny thing was, the dogs sort of had expressions on their faces, like people.
We were looking at all this from the doorway. I pointed to the long picture. “The safe’s probably behind there.” I could see what Richie was thinking. “Oh no,” I said, “I ain’t lookin’.”
Richie leaned in for a look at the side of the room behind the door. “Look,” he said. “Doughnuts!”
There they were. A stack of powdered doughnuts on a silver tray. Next to lamb chops I love doughnuts. I could actually feel a hole in my stomach open up to the size of about three of them.
“C’mon,” I said, but Richie was a mule in the doorway. So I grabbed hold of his shirt sleeve with one hand and stretched myself out till I could reach the silver tray with the other. I grabbed a doughnut and pulled it in.
Something was wrong. It wasn’t powdered sugar.
“Dust!” Richie said.
He was right. My fingers were sunk into it. I dropped the doughnut, clapped my hands, slammed the door, and beat it downstairs all at once.
“Shit,” I said in the hallway. I was even madder because I had promised myself I was going to slide down the banister on the way down and that damn doughnut corpse made me forget.
Richie said, “Look.”
The old lady was sitting in a rocking chair in a corner of the living room. Her eyes were closed. She wasn’t moving.
“She’s dead,” I said.
Then she snored.
Richie looked at me and I looked at Richie, and it was like our eyes said to each other: We ain’t getting paid.
Richie said, “Wanna steal the diamond?” He was all excited. Then he remembered. “Oh yeah, it’s just a fake.”
So we just sort of left in a daze. When we passed the stupid wide-eyed animal on the coatrack, I gave it a smack in the face. We were a couple blocks away before I could finally admit it to Richie. “You were right,” I told him, “it’s a fox.”
Next day me and Cootyhead went to my father’s for our monthly weekend. One thing for sure: when we go there I don’t have to worry about stepfathers or deaf old ladies trying to starve me. My father loves to eat, and he lets us make pigs of ourselves.
It starts right at the train station, where he meets us. We spot him right away by his white shoes; he started wearing them when he moved away. We go over. Cootyhead runs. I walk. (Timmy’s not there. He’s Ham’s.) Then all this hugging with Mary and handshaking—well, now it’s hand-slapping—with me. Then he puts Cootyhead down and spreads out his arms and says so loud you get embarrassed: “It’s all yours, kids! What’ll it be?”
He means we can have anything we want to eat in the whole station. And we aren’t limited to one thing either. We go a little crazy. We head off in different directions to the places we want to start at. Like me to the pizza and Cootyhe
ad to the water ice. We get there and start yelling across the station for my father to come pay for what we got.
I walk out of there feeling like there’s a hump in my stomach. Ice cream, hot dogs, candy, sodas, soft pretzels—anything I want. And every time—it never fails—by the time we get to my father’s place one of us has to vomit.
My sister was the vomiter this time. After an hour or so I was ready for food again. In my father’s refrigerator there’s always a couple good things and a couple weird things. I love looking into it. It’s not like at home. (“What are you looking for? You just looked in there two minutes ago. Did you think something appeared in there in the last two minutes? Shut the door.”)
“What’s that?” I asked. I always ask now. One time I chomped into something I thought was a cherry turnover and it turned out to be full of mashed chicken livers.
My father took it out and held it in front of me. He pulled it away when I went to touch it. “Ten dollars and ninety-five cents a pound,” he goes. My father does that a lot, tells you the price of a thing instead of the thing. He was looking at it like grandparents look at babies.
I didn’t even know if it was meat or fruit or what. It was sort of shiny and wet and in thin slices and orange-pink. Somewhere in color between a basketball and Cootyhead’s face when she gets mad.
I said, “What is it?”
“Lox,” he said.
“What’s that?” I said. Crazy name.
“Fish.”
“Fish? I never heard of it.”
“It’s smoked.”
That sounded strange. “Smoked? What do you mean?”
“They build a fire under it and let the smoke flavor it.”
“Who would want to do that?” I asked him.
This thin little grin came over his face. His eyelids lowered. He put his hand over the fish like he was healing it. “Jews,” he said.
Ah, well, that explained it. Sort of, anyway. See, my father, since he moved out, wants to become a Jew. “Bet he has a Jewish girlfriend,” was the first thing my sister said. I don’t think so. I think it started with the delicatessens. Delicatessens are sort of Jewish grocery store-restaurants. They’re famous for sandwiches. Well, when my father went to live in the city, he found it was crawling with delicatessens. And there’s one way my father is just like a kid: he can eat all day. “Found a new deli,” he’s always saying happily.
So I guess my father figured if the Jews could come up with delicatessens, they must have a lot of other good stuff going for them too. So he decided he wants to be one.
But I guess it’s not so easy. As far as the Jews are concerned, my father says, everybody who’s not a Jew is a Gentile. Everybody. Whether you want to be or not. Me and an African pygmy and an Eskimo—we’re all the same to a Jew: we’re Gentiles. If there are any Martians out there, they might not know it, but as far as the Jews are concerned, they’re Gentiles too.
So you see, it’s almost impossible to become a Jew. If you weren’t born one, you can practically forget it. You can’t sneak in either, because the Jews can spot a Gentile a mile off. Funny thing, though, if you’re a Gentile and a Jew happens to be standing right next to you, you probably wouldn’t even know it. To look at them, they seem just like us. But I don’t know… when you hear about some of the weird stuff they do.… Like, they eat fishballs. In a soup! And they wear these little beanies in church—which they go to on Saturday. I also heard they’re scared to death of pigs; they think pig meat’s poison to them. (Well, personally, I don’t know about that. Maybe it’s true about the adults, but there’s a Jewish kid in my math class, Marty Renberg, and he eats in the dining hall with the rest of us, and once I saw him eating a BLT and he didn’t keel over.)
Anyway, the main thing about Jews is “life,” according to my father. He says they used to throw fire and apples into the air. And they dance in a circle and smash glasses with their feet when they get married. There’s something he says almost every time he’s sitting in front of a mile-high corn beef sandwich with Russian dressing. He says it real slow and serious: “The—Jew—knows—how—to—live.” And then he sinks his teeth into the sandwich, and the Russian dressing oozes out and runs a little down his chin.
When I think about what would happen if my father ever manages to become a Jew, I wonder mainly about two things:
1. Would that make me Jewish too?
2. What about Christmas?
At first I used to think the Jews had it really bad because they don’t have Christmas. But then I heard they came up with their own holiday about the same time. It’s called Hanukkah. There’s no tree or trains, but they do get the best part: presents. One present a day for eight days. Now, that may not sound so hot, but I talked to Marty Renberg and he says maybe you only get eight, and maybe they come at you slow, but every one of them is a winner.
Later that night we all walked to a deli. My father had to get a bagel to make a sandwich with his lox. Mary asked him if he was a Jew yet.
“ ’Fraid not, Peanut,” he said. “They won’t let me in.” He was sad.
We went into the delicatessen and got the bagel, but as usual my father wanted to hang around the meat and salad counter awhile. He was pointing out the different stuff to us, pronouncing their names in Jewish. You could tell that made him feel a little better. I started thinking about my father’s teeth chomping into those corn beef sandwiches, and how bad he wanted to dance and smash glasses. Then I remembered that the Jews go to church on Saturday, and this was a Saturday, and we were in a delicatessen, and my father was almost even kneeling down in front of the counter like it was an altar, and he was saying Jewish words and I thought to myself all happy: Hey, Dad—you made it! You are one! You’re in!
THE END
I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. SUMMER’S ALMOST OVER.
Summer has a funnel shape. It seems real wide at first, and deep. Slow. Like it will last forever. You just float on top of it.
But all the time it’s getting smaller and smaller. And before you know it the summer days are getting sucked down faster and faster. You’re helpless. You can’t stop it. You’re like a bug in a toilet that was just flushed.
One sure sign that summer is coming to an end is that I start liking the kids on the corner again. There’s these little kids that always play on the corner in the warm weather, and I’m sort of their hero. Like, they always stop me when I’m going by on my bike and give me paper and ask me to make them paper airplanes, which I’m an expert at. I also have to settle their little arguments and all.
Early in the summer I don’t mind it much. Then it gets to be a drag. But then, I kind of start liking them all over again. I guess because I know that as long as they’re out there playing on the corner, summer isn’t over yet.
Baseball: you can feel it dying. Every morning we meet at the field in the park: me, Richie, Calvin Lemaine, Peter Kim, and Dugan. All day we play. We can feel September closing in. We hit a little harder, run a little faster, stay a little longer. We try to squeeze out of the summer every base hit left in it. So far I have two hundred and forty-seven homeruns this year. (I keep track.) I’m shooting for last year’s record of two hundred and ninety-five.
I get home and I kind of don’t want to wash. Because I know the day is coming when I’ll have to wait nine months to get this dirty again. When I oil my glove and put it away in the shoe box—that’s when baseball will be officially over.
I ride my bike more now, when I’m not playing. I go farther and farther from home.
I guess my biggest regret is that another summer is gone and I still didn’t learn to spit between my teeth like Dugan.
SCHOOL
THE FIRST WEEK OF SCHOOL IS OVER. I HATED IT. I’M NOT GOING back.
I wish I was back in the sixth grade. I was important there. I’m nothing here. I’m a turd.
They had us fooled for a little while, the teachers. “Welcome to all our new seventh-graders,” the principal said over the intercom.
/> The woodshop teacher, Mister Slatter, gave us a little speech. He told us to relax and sit on the edge of the bench if we wanted. He smelled like sawdust. His eyebrows were golden from it. “You are not boys anymore,” he told us. “From now on you are on the road to adulthood. You left your childhood back in grade school. You can kiss it goodbye.” He saluted out the window. “You are in junior high school now. You are… young men.”
Hah! I was a young man for about half an hour in woodshop on Wednesday. Then I had to go to the bathroom. The door didn’t say Young Men. It said Boys. As soon as I opened it a ninth-grader took a cigarette out of his mouth and said, “Watta you lookin’ at, faggot-face?” I walked out. For the rest of woodshop I was sawing wood and having to pee. The more I had to pee the faster I sawed. Young man, monkey dung.
The teachers don’t run this place, neither does the principal. It’s the ninth-graders. You can tell a ninth-grader a lot of ways, like size and deep voice and all, but the main way you can tell them is their eyes. They don’t see you. It’s like they’re blind to the sight of seventh-graders. They’re always talking loud and laughing to each other and shoving each other, and their eyes are always off in the distance; always down the hallway somewhere like they’re looking for more ninth-graders, or girls or something. If you’re a seventh-grader, even standing right in front of them, you’re invisible. I saw a seventh-grader, a puny little kid even for seventh-grade, and he was standing in the hallway when a mob of ninth-graders came running up. They just went right over him. Never turned back. Like he was grass.
I didn’t get run over yet. Mostly it’s just eyes, zooming up and down the hallways over your head, like you’re in a shooting gallery of eyes. Pray one of those eyes don’t hit you. It happened to Richie. He was going along being invisible with the rest of us when all of a sudden he got hit by a ninth-grader’s eye. We were in the bathroom. I was in one of the stalls, sitting down, but I could see out because there was a little round hole where the latch used to be.