“We’ve made up a big shopping list so we won’t have to go back for a while,” added Dad.
“And,” said Mom, “what do you think—we’re going to take the subway!”
“But a cab—”
“No cabs, Pearl. Too expensive,” said Dad.
I imagined my family struggling onto a crowded subway car, trying to hold on to the poles and our bags of groceries at the same time. Of the four of us, I was the most likely to lose my balance, drop the groceries, and fall down.
“Do I have to go?” asked Lexie suddenly from the doorway of her bedroom. I thought maybe her eyes looked a little red. And watery.
Mom must have thought so, too, because she only hesitated for a second before she said, “No, honey. You can stay at home. Everything all right?”
“Yup,” replied Lexie. And then she closed her door quietly.
“Has anyone noticed that Dallas hasn’t come over lately?” I asked.
Mom and Dad both gave me a Look so I didn’t make any more comments about the missing boyfriend.
The subway trip to Brooklyn was fun. One time the brakes slammed on when we weren’t expecting it and a man toppled over and landed on his bottom and said a word I’m not allowed to say, and then also a lost pigeon hopped into our car and wandered around cooing. These kinds of things almost never happen in a cab.
We bought six overflowing bags of groceries and supplies at BuyMore-PayLess, and then we struggled back to the subway station with them. The ride home was not fun at all. Nothing interesting happened, and it was hard to keep track of our bags, which were really heavy, and there were no empty seats, but at least I didn’t fall down.
When we finally made it home I said, “The next time we go to BuyMore-PayLess why don’t we take our car?”
We had a green Subaru that we parked in the garage in the basement of our apartment building.
Dad set the last bag of groceries on the kitchen counter and let out a sigh. He glanced at Mom. “I’m afraid we’ve decided to sell the car,” he said.
“What! Why?” (I liked our car.)
“Partly because it’s in good condition and we can get a couple of thousand dollars for it, but mostly because keeping it in the garage is expensive. Our garage bill is huge. Without the car we can save hundreds of dollars every month.”
“But—but—” There was a gumball machine in the garage that I really liked, in addition to our Subaru.
“I’m sorry, Pearl,” said Mom, “but we have to make some difficult choices.”
“I’m earning a little money writing articles for journals,” added Dad, “but not nearly as much as I was earning when I was teaching. And I can tell that the job hunt is going to take a long time. A lot of other people are out of work, too, and we’re all competing for the same jobs.”
I figured that the least I could do was not have a fit in front of my parents. Dad already felt bad, plus he was working awfully hard in his new office in our family room. So I went into my room before I began to cry. Then I threw my hairbrush on the floor and it broke, and I had to hide it in the back of my closet.
It was during supper that night that Dad said, “Family meeting in ten minutes.”
“Oh, no!” I cried. “Now what happened?”
But it turned out that the meeting was for a nice reason. When Lexie and I were seated on the couch, Mom and Dad came into the family room with their hands behind their backs. With a flourish Mom handed me a large blue album and Dad handed Lexie a large purple album.
“They’re scrapbooks,” said Mom. “Maybe we aren’t taking our trip out west, but you girls are still going to Camp Merrimac, and I have a feeling that other fun things will happen this summer.”
“So we thought you might like to keep a record of them by making scrapbooks,” said Dad.
I flipped through the blank album, imagining the possibilities.
“You can glue postcards and photos to the pages,” said Mom.
“Or make drawings,” added Dad, looking at me. “Or write diary entries.”
“And we can decorate the pages!” I exclaimed, thinking of my supply of papers and markers and stickers and sequins.
I glanced at Lexie. She isn’t very arty, but even she looked intrigued.
I jumped to my feet. “Thank you,” I said, and kissed Mom and Dad. Then I hurried to my room, closed my door, and sat at my desk, the scrapbook opened to the first page. In my very best handwriting I wrote:
Today we took subway to Brooklyn for a grocery shopping experience. A man fell down and swore, and a pigeon rode with us for two stops, exciting!
I illustrated the page with a drawing of a bag of groceries, a drawing of a man crashing to the floor and saying !#%!* in a cartoon bubble, and a drawing of a pigeon holding a swipe card for the subway under his wing.
5
I. My dad got fired.
A. My family was shocked.
B. We tried to pretend that saving $$ was fun!!!
C. We had a tiny celebration when I hit the big one-oh.
Since I am the youngest person in my family, everyone else has already hit the big one-oh and progressed from lame nine, which only has one number in it, to ten, double digits. Even Bitey has turned ten, although when he turned ten it was in cat years, so he actually turned from sixty-three to seventy. He skipped the big one-oh entirely. Although come to think of it, he was the first one of us to hit the big seven-oh. Anyway, since there was no one else left in our entire family who would turn ten after I did, I thought Mom and Dad and Lexie would make a big deal out of my one-oh. Plus, I kind of felt I deserved it, what with all the cutting back we’d been doing, and the fact that my trip to the Wild West had been cancelled and I might never get to see a ghost town or a redwood or a pack mule. I decided not to say much about my birthday, though. I figured that was how a mature 10-year-old would handle the situation.
A week before my birthday came one of the best days of the entire year—the last day of school. Bitey woke me up early that morning by staring at me. I opened my eyes and saw his round yellow cat eyes just inches away. I pulled my head back.
“Hi, Bitey,” I said. He was probably hungry. I sat up, yawned, and pulled off my nightgown. There was a rip in the side so big, I could fit my whole head through it.
“Why don’t you learn to sew?” Lexie had asked when she’d seen the rip.
There were about ten zillion mean things I could have said to Lexie right then, but I had settled on a non-mean reply, which was, “I like the rip.”
I put on my last-day-of-school clothes, which I had chosen the night before and laid out on a chair. It took me about six seconds to get dressed. This was one of the few things that I did far, far better than Lexie, who practically had a stroke every morning trying to choose an appropriate outfit for a day of eighth grade.
Bitey stared at me from the doorway while I got dressed, then from the hallway while I was in the bathroom, and then from the kitchen while I walked through our apartment. In the cupboard I found a can of his new food, which I don’t think he likes it very much. He doesn’t appreciate change.
“Why can’t he have his old food?” I’d asked Mom the first time I’d found the dull-looking green cans on Bitey’s shelf. They said simply ORGANIC CAT FOOD on them. No pictures of kitties wearing crowns or eating with silverware that someone had glued onto fake white cat paws.
“Because this is the same as his old food,” Mom had replied, “but it only costs half as much.”
“Are you sure it’s the same?” I’d said as I’d watched Bitey sniff it and jump away from his dish as if the food had shouted at him.
“Positive. I compared the ingredients. Exactly the same.”
Huh.
When I spooned the food into Bitey’s dish on the last day of school he ate it all, which was my clue that it was going to be a very, very good day.
And it was.
In school, Mr. Potter let us sit wherever we wanted, so JBIII and I waited until Jill-Rachel-Kat
ie had chosen seats (they sat in their own seats, the ones they had already sat in all year, which only goes to show you how unimaginative they are), and then my best friend and I sat together by the windows, where we could look into the apartment building across the street, and also where we were about as far from Jill-Rachel-Katie as we could get.
All day long we only did things like clean out our desks and have a spelling bee and take turns talking about what we were going to do over vacation. When it was my turn I walked to the front of the classroom and said, “After I get day camp out of the way at the beginning of the summer, my family and I are going to travel to the Wild West. We’re going to ride mules down into the Grand Canyon and see a redwood forest and spend the night in a ghost town.” (As long as I was lying, I might as well be creative.) “Oh, and we’re going to pan for gold and sleep under the stars on a dude ranch and look for stallions with some cowboys.” I noticed a funny look on Mr. Potter’s face then and figured he knew I was lying, so I decided to stop talking. “Thank you,” I finished up. “I’ll be sure to send po—” I was about to say “postcards” when I realized that of course I couldn’t send anyone postcards from the west if I wasn’t actually going there. “Um, have a happy summer,” I said, and hurried to my seat.
I sat down heavily, then turned to look at JBIII, who was staring at me with his mouth open. I sent him a signal with my eyes that said, “SHH,” and he didn’t say anything, so I knew my signal was a good one.
Even though we didn’t have to do any work, the day seemed endless, like the time my father took me to the Museum of Modern Art and dragged me around from one painting to another until finally we got to the gift shop, where I bought a twisty straw for slurping up the milk from my Count Chocula.
I squirmed in my seat. I watched the hands on the clock, which I finally decided the clock might be broken. I was staring at Jill and remembering the time she had barfed on her desk when at last the buzzer sounded and Mr. Potter said, “Make sure you have all your belongings, people. Enjoy your vacations!”
I shot up out of my seat, took one last look at the corner of the blackboard where my name had been written every time I hadn’t turned in my homework, called, “Bye, Mr. Potter!” and ran into the hall. For one second I felt bad for Mr. Potter and all teachers, since what their students really want is to get away from them. Then, clutching an armful of old paintings and tests and reports (I had forgotten my backpack), I charged through the hallway with JBIII at my heels.
We burst onto the street and found my father waiting for us, my backpack in his hands. I stuffed the papers into it, and Dad said, “Last day of school. I think this deserves a celebration.” He took us to the Daily Grind, where JBIII said, “I have my own money, sir,” and reached into his pocket.
I had zero money but Dad must have been thinking about the hundreds of $$$ we were saving every month by not having our green Subaru anymore, because he bought me a tall lemonade, plus one for himself. After that I saw Lexie and three of her friends peer through the window and catch sight of us with our drinks and then hurry away, probably to Cuppa Joe, where it would be easier for Lexie to pretend she was a grown-up if Dad and JBIII and I weren’t nearby.
After school I lay on the couch in the family room and was allowed to watch cartoons until dinnertime. It was a little hard to hear them over Dad’s computer and fax machine and the ringing of his cell phone, but I managed. It was the perfect way to start summer vacation.
A week later came my big one-oh.
* * *
Now, it is true that I had already had a birthday party for my big one-oh. I’d had a party with my friends in the spring when everyone was still around. It’s pointless to have a birthday party over summer vacation because no one can ever come to it. I didn’t know what kind of family party to expect now that I had a fired person for a father, but I was hoping we could splurge since I was the last Littlefield to turn ten.
When Lexie turned thirteen we’d gone to the Hard Rock Café for her family party. Mom and Dad had had to make a reservation, and they’d ordered a cake ahead of time, and when the waiters had brought it to our table they’d sung to Lexie, which she only pretended to be embarrassed, because you could tell she hoped everyone in the restaurant was looking at her and feeling amazed that there was another teenager in the world.
“Happy birthday!” Mom and Dad said to me at breakfast on my actual one-oh. Lexie didn’t join in because she was still snoring away in her bedroom. When I am a teenager I plan to be awake as much as possible so as not to miss anything.
“Thank you,” I replied. I looked at Bitey then and he hissed at me, so after breakfast I made a sign for him that I taped to the bottom of the refrigerator where he could see it. It said:
All day I wondered about my special birthday dinner. I knew Daddy Bo would come with us, and I thought maybe we would go back to the Hard Rock Café, even though the Hard Rock Café isn’t exactly my grandfather’s kind of place, since it’s crowded and noisy and Mom is always afraid that someone will knock into Daddy Bo and he’ll fall over. Plus, in crowds Daddy Bo can’t hear anything even with his hearing aids in, so then he takes the hearing aids out and one time he dropped one in some guacamole and my father cried, “Those cost eight hundred dollars each!”
Here are the nice things that happened on my big one-oh:
1. I got four birthday cards in the mail.
2. Bitey didn’t hiss at me again.
3. Lexie took me to the Daily Grind and bought a lemonade for me and a Mocha Moxie for herself and we sat at a tiny round table just the two of us and suddenly I could see the point of being in public with no adults to tell you what to do.
At five thirty that afternoon I came out of my bedroom wearing a dress. I’d had to search a little while to find a dress in my closet, since I almost never wear them, and when I did find one it was on the tight side, but I wanted to look fancy for my special evening.
“Oh, my!” said Mom when I walked into the family room wearing my third-grade Christmas dress, which was velvet.
Lexie was sitting on the couch in her black jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. I said to her, “Why aren’t you dressed up?” and at the very same moment she said, “Pearl, you’re going to swelter in that.”
(Note: Look up “swelter” in the dictionary.)
“We don’t have to get dressed up to go to Ollie’s,” Lexie replied.
Since Ollie’s is just the diner on the corner this was my clue that my family had actually planned a surprise one-oh dinner for me at someplace very fancy, and Ollie’s was a joke to throw me off the track. My parents must have decided that we could splurge. We were probably even going to take a cab.
I was a little surprised when we walked out of the apartment later and Lexie was still wearing her jeans and T-shirt and my parents were wearing jeans, too. Daddy Bo had arrived by then and he was wearing a suit, but then he almost always wears suits. We walked to the end of the block. I looked at Ollie’s, then looked at my family, grinned, and hailed a cab.
“Pearl!” cried my father as the cab swerved over to the sidewalk. He stuck his head through the front window of the taxi and said to the driver, “Sorry, it was a mistake.”
The cabdriver said the second bad word I’d heard recently, punched a button that swooped the window up so fast that it nearly hit my father on the chin, and then screeched back into the traffic on Sixth Avenue and I think he ran a red light.
“What are you doing?” cried Lexie, whose face had turned bright pink with embarrassment even though she didn’t know the cabdriver or any of the people on the street.
“I—” I started to say, but then I saw my mother open the door to Ollie’s. “Nothing,” I muttered.
Well, by now you’ve probably figured out that my birthday dinner really was going to be at Ollie’s and not at the Hard Rock Café or any other restaurant where I wouldn’t look too out of place in a red velvet Christmas dress. We ate hamburgers and fries and drank Coke and no one came to our
table with a cake, and even worse, the waitress said to me, “Don’t you look pretty,” which I know very well was really her way of saying, “What a strange clothing choice for a diner on a ninety-degree day, little girl.”
At the end of the meal, the waitress brought the check and Daddy Bo reached for it, and my father let him pay for our food.
Back at the apartment Mom said, “Pearl, we have a surprise for you,” but it was just that JBIII and his parents were coming over for the cake Mom had secretly baked while Lexie and I had been at the Daily Grind. And since I don’t like cake anyway, I didn’t even have a slice after everyone had finished singing “Happy Birthday.” I liked JBIII’s present, which was a book about scrapbooking, and it was especially generous of him to give it to me since he had already given me a book about pirates at my other party. But I was starting to feel … well, I couldn’t help comparing my dinner at Ollie’s to Lexie’s dinner at the Hard Rock Café.
After the cake, JBIII and his parents went home, and Mom set a little pile of presents on the couch in the family room. None of the packages looked like it was the right size for an iPod or a hamster environment, and since they were all wrapped, I knew none of them contained a living hamster either.
I was right. Lexie had gotten me a bottle of glittery nail polish, and Mom and Dad had gotten me a hair clip with fake rubies on it and a pair of sunglasses for camp and a pair of jeans, which had probably come from our trip to BuyMore-PayLess. Then Daddy Bo gave me five dollars, which was good since I realized I would have to start saving for the hamster and the iPod myself.
I tucked the money into my pocket and I was just starting to feel tears in my eyes, when I glanced up and saw Mom and Dad looking at me hopefully. I remembered my father’s face the day he had come home and told us he’d been fired from his economics job. And I thought about the fact that Mom and Dad hadn’t wanted to give up our Subaru or start taking the subway to Brooklyn to shop at BuyMore-PayLess. But they had done both things anyway.