Switcharound

  "What do you mean, team up? You're not going to try to get me to play baseball, Caroline—"

  "No, no," Caroline reassured him. "I just meant we should stick together. Because there will be other enemies in Des Moines."

  "Dad, for one," said J.P. gloomily. "If he calls me 'fella' just once—just once—"

  "And his wife. I can't remember her name. She wasn't so bad, but she's always on his side," Caroline said.

  "His wife's name is Lillian. Don't forget that I have a photographic memory, Caroline. Anything you want remembered, just ask me."

  "Their kid. That obnoxious little kid. He had some weird name—what was it?" Caroline asked. "Was it Butchie?"

  J.P. choked on the last piece of ice. He sputtered, laughing. "You can't remember the kid's name?"

  "No. Dutchy?"

  J.P. doubled over. "I'm not going to tell you. Wait till you find out, though. They'll be at the airport, and the kid will be there, and Dad will say something like, 'You remember our son—' and you wait, Caroline, you see if you can keep a straight face. I dare you to keep a straight face."

  Caroline sighed. "I'm pretty good at straight faces," she said. "Anyway, you see what I mean, J.P.? It's you and me against them. So I think we ought to call off our own war, just for the summer."

  "Détente," announced J.P.

  "What?"

  "You ought to pay more attention in school, Caroline," he said. "Or read the newspapers. When two countries that have been enemies decide to try being friends, it's called détente."

  "Like the United States and Russia?" Caroline asked.

  J.P. nodded. "We might as well try it," he said.

  "The Tate Détente," Caroline pronounced. "It sounds pretty impressive."

  "You want to shake hands?" her brother asked.

  She looked at him suspiciously. "You don't have your hands hot-wired, do you, so I'll get a shock?"

  J.P. exhibited his hands, palms up. "They took all my electronic equipment away, remember?"

  Caroline shook his hand solemnly. Then she giggled suddenly when she thought of something.

  "I have a toast," she said, and held up her empty ginger ale glass. J.P. tapped his glass against hers.

  "To us," Caroline announced. "To the United Tates of America!"

  3

  "You won't be able to miss our car," Herbert Tate announced as he carried the two suitcases across the parking lot. The gleaming parked cars all shimmered in the bright sunlight. It was so hot that the asphalt was steaming, and the air seemed blurred in front of Caroline's eyes.

  Of course, she had a particular problem that might be affecting her eyes. She was still trying to keep a straight face. She had told J.P. that she was pretty good at straight faces. And she was, ordinarily. But this was an unusual situation. When her father had said, as Caroline and J.P. got off the plane, "You remember our son—" and then gone on to say it—out loud—that name—well, she had been having a very tough time, ever since, with her face. She was having to bite the inside of her lips very hard.

  "Why?" asked J.P. He was walking beside Caroline, clutching his clanking suitcase. "Why won't we be able to miss your car? I don't even know what kind of car you have." Then he stopped walking and stood still. "Oh," he said. "I see what you mean."

  Caroline stopped, too, and looked. The car was a gray station wagon—nothing extraordinary about that. But it was covered with writing. On the driver's door, it said, in dark red letters: MAKE A DATE WITH HERBIE TATE.

  On the door behind that: MEET YOUR FATE AT HERBIE TATE.

  Silently, Caroline and J.P. walked around to the other side of the station wagon and looked. On one door: DON'T BE LATE FOR HERBIE TATE.

  And on the other: WE'RE CUT-RATE AT HERBIE TATE.

  Across the back of the car, in larger letters, it said simply: HERBIE TATE'S SPORTING GOODS.

  Caroline's face failed. She couldn't bite the inside of her lips anymore. She started to giggle. She glanced at her brother. J.P. wasn't a giggler; he didn't even laugh very often. But he glanced back at Caroline and lost control of himself. He set his suitcase down in the parking lot and doubled over, clutching his stomach. Together Caroline and J.P. laughed until tears appeared on their cheeks. When, breathless, they finally managed to stop, they saw that Herbie and Lillian Tate were grinning proudly at them.

  "You like it, huh?" said their father. He opened the back—HERBIE TATE'S SPORTING GOODS—and put their suitcases inside. "Lillian just had it done, as a surprise for my birthday. Her uncle's a sign painter."

  "He would have painted footballs and baseballs and basketballs all over, but I thought that would be too much," Lillian explained.

  "We'll have to have it all redone in a few years," Herbie Tate said as he lifted his little boy, who was sucking his thumb, into the back seat. "When my boy gets old enough to come into the business, then we'll have new signs. Right, fella?" He tickled his son under the chin, and the little boy nodded, still sucking noisily on his glistening thumb.

  "And the new signs will say—" Herbie Tate went on. Then he stopped and gestured to Caroline and J.P., so that they could guess the ending.

  "HERBIE AND POOCHIE TATE'S SPORTING GOODS," they said together and bit their lips so that they wouldn't break up again.

  "Come on," called Lillian from the front seat. "Let's go home!"

  Caroline and J.P. climbed into the back of the station wagon beside the little boy, whose curly hair was damp with sweat. He glanced over at them shyly. Finally he removed his thumb from his mouth and revealed missing front teeth. "Hi," he said nervously, the way you might say "hi" to someone who had just appeared in a dark alley, pointing a gun in your direction.

  "Hi, Poochie," Caroline replied. She felt a little sorry for someone who was so terrified and who had to be named Poochie, as well. She also felt a little sorry for herself.

  The car moved along through the streets, which were very, very different from the familiar streets of New York. Caroline pushed her hair back under her headband with a moist hand and watched through the windows. Shopping centers. Schools. Churches. Apartment complexes. And more shopping centers, shopping centers, shopping centers. Apparently people in Des Moines did nothing but go shopping.

  "There's a Radio Shack, J.P.," she whispered, pointing. He nodded. But he looked as if he felt just as depressed as Caroline did.

  "I'd take you by the store," their father said, turning to glance at them from the front seat as he drove, "but it's a little out of the way. And everything's a mess there this week, anyway. I know you saw it when you were here last—when was that? Two years ago?"

  "Three," Caroline said. "It was three years ago."

  "Well, we've expanded a lot since then. We used to be strictly sports equipment. But now we've branched out into clothes, too—sports clothes, you know? Tennis outfits, jogging wear, even shoes. We have a whole line of shoes. Maybe you kids could do with some jogging shoes while you're here. What do you think?"

  Caroline smiled politely, even though her father's head was turned back to watch the road, so he couldn't see her smile. One of the sayings on the door of the car came to her mind. MEET YOUR FATE WITH HERBIE TATE. That's what I've done, thought Caroline; I've met my fate. My fate is to spend the summer with people who want me to wear jogging shoes.

  She felt hideously depressed. Through the windows of the car, more shopping centers and shopping plazas and shopping malls whizzed past. Where were the museums? In New York, Caroline spent all her time at the Museum of Natural History. It was her favorite place in the entire world. And this July they were going to be having an entire special week devoted to primates: lectures, movies, famous people in primate research visiting and showing slides. Since it wasn't during the school year, Caroline would have been able to go. She would have been able to spend a whole week learning more about primates.

  If she weren't in Des Moines, that is. Trying on jogging shoes.

  "Almost there," announced Herbie Tate.

  "J.P.," Lillia
n said, turning around to look toward the back seat. "We've put you in Poochie's room—there are bunk beds. I hope you won't mind having the top; Pooch is afraid of the height."

  Poochie slumped farther down into the seat, looking humiliated, his mouth working around his thumb. J.P. just stared morosely at Lillian Tate. Caroline knew exactly what he was thinking and feeling. All of his electronics gear. J.P. had been planning to survive the summer in Des Moines by shutting himself in his room and working with his tools and wires and batteries. How could he do that if he didn't even have a room of his own?

  At least, thought Caroline with some grim satisfaction, I don't have to share a room with them. I'll have a room of my own, and I can read all summer.

  She had brought with her, in her suitcase, almost more books than clothes. She began trying to recall their titles: The Clan of the Cave Bear (one of her favorites; she was going to read it for the second time), An Anthropologist's Life, Primitive Man, and—

  Caroline's thoughts were interrupted when Herbie Tate swung the big car around a corner of the residential street. He pulled into a driveway leading to a garage. Next to the garage was an ordinary looking brick house. Caroline stared. Herbie and his wife had moved since she had visited before, and this house was one she had never seen. But it had an odd, familiar look to it.

  She poked her brother. "'Leave It to Beaver'?" she murmured.

  J.P. stared at the house. "'My Three Sons'?" he responded.

  '"Father Knows Best'? 'The Donna Reed Show'?" Caroline suggested.

  "All of the above," J.P. announced as he picked up his small suitcase from the floor of the car.

  Caroline was staring at something she couldn't quite believe on the front lawn of the TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver house. How interesting, she thought: a mirage. The heat has created a mirage right here in Des Moines, the way it creates mirages on the desert. I wonder if J.P. is also seeing it, or if it is a single-person mirage. Suddenly she became aware that Lillian, still looking over the back seat, was talking to her.

  "And we've put you in with the girls, Caroline," Lillian was saying.

  Caroline blinked. "The girls?" she asked politely. "Who are the girls?"

  Lillian Tate looked startled. "The babies," she said as if that were an explanation. "Didn't your mother tell you about the babies?"

  "I don't think I ever mentioned to Joanna that we'd had the twins," Herbie said to his wife. "She and I don't really stay in touch, you know."

  Caroline looked again at the mirage. It was a huge double baby carriage parked on the lawn. "No," Caroline said with a sinking feeling, a realization that Des Moines didn't have mirages after all. "I didn't know about the twins. And you, ah, said I'd be sharing their room?"

  Lillian Tate smiled pleasantly. "We put a nice bed in there for you," she said. "It fits right between the cribs."

  4

  "Dear Mom," wrote Caroline that night, and then hesitated. How honest should she be? She didn't like to lie to her mother. And she knew that her mother was hoping that she and J.P. would have a good summer in Des Moines. And there was nothing that her mother could do about things, since the court said that they should spend the summers with their father.

  She sighed, looked at the piece of paper and sipped at the glass of lemonade Lillian had given her. It was still horribly hot, even though it was eight P.M.

  "We arrived safely," she wrote.

  "Did the plane arrive on time?" she asked, looking up from the table where she was writing. Lillian, Herbie, and J.P. were all watching television. Poochie and the babies were in bed.

  "Right on time," Herbie told her. "Even a couple of minutes early."

  "The plane was right on time," Caroline wrote, "and Dad and Lillian were there to meet us, with their little boy named Poochie.

  "J.P. and I did not fight at all on the plane, not even about who got the window. In fact, we have not fought since we got here, either. We have decided to have an agreement to be friends, all summer.

  "Mom, maybe you didn't know it, but Dad and Lillian had twin babies last December. Both girls. They look exactly alike, which means partially bald, with brown eyes. These babies were something of a surprise to me and J.P. since we didn't know about them in advance, and it was even a worse surprise to me than it was to J.P. because I have to sleep in the same room with them.

  "Worse than that, Mom, I also am going to have to take care of them a lot, because it turns out that Lillian is going to spend the summer taking a real estate course so that she can become a person who sells houses. She's going to be gone almost all of every day. And I think that's just fine if Lillian wants to become a real estate person because I have nothing against real estate people, but Mom, I have to tell you that I think it's pretty crummy that I have to become a person who takes care of babies.

  "Remember when you and I had a long conversation once about marriage after I decided to become a paleontologist? Because paleontologists have to travel a lot, to places like Asia Minor, and so it would be hard to have a husband and harder still to have children? And remember I told you that I had decided that I probably would not ever want to get married and definitely did not want to have children, ever?

  "Well, it doesn't seem fair that someone who has already definitely decided that she doesn't want to have children should get stuck taking care of someone else's for the summer. I don't mean to be a bad sport, but I really wanted to go to the primate seminar at the Museum of Natural History in July. And instead I have to take care of these babies.

  "I didn't even tell you their names. This, honestly, is gross. When Lillian brought them out, after we arrived from the airport (a baby sitter had been with them), and J.P. and I said very politely how cute they were (we really were polite, Mom, I promise. And they AREN'T cute, not at all), I asked very politely what their names are. And Lillian said: 'GUESS.' Talk about stupid: I mean how are you supposed to guess not one, but two names? J.P. and I just stood there looking stupid and Lillian laughed and said: 'I'll give you a hint. They were born Christmas Day.'

  "Right away J.P. guessed Mary and Joseph, which was really dumb because they are both girls. So then he guessed Frankincense and Myrrh, and everybody laughed, ha ha, and then he said he didn't want to guess anymore.

  "Well, I didn't want to guess either, but I wanted to get the conversation over with, because she had plunked one of the babies into my lap, and it was gnawing on my finger, and it hurt. (They each have two teeth, absolutely identical.) So I guessed Beth for Bethlehem, and Noel, and everybody agreed that that was clever, but it was wrong, too.

  "And then Lillian explained that they are named Holly and Ivy, because there is a Christmas carol called 'The Holly and the Ivy,' which I never heard of, and she started to sing it, but fortunately one of the babies started to cry, and so she took them away to change their diapers.

  "Anyway, that is all that has happened so far. J.P. has to sleep in Poochie's upper bunk, and I have to sleep between two cribs, surrounded by Holly and Ivy. So far Des Moines is not very much fun. But they have a huge color TV, and a big yard, and we don't have either of those in New York. And we had steak for dinner, which we don't have at home. So there are some okay parts.

  "Love,

  "Caroline"

  She folded the pages, addressed the envelope, and sealed the letter. Across the room, the TV flickered, a few gunshots came from the set, followed by music, and then a commercial began. Herbie Tate yawned and turned it off.

  "Getting late," he announced. "Bedtime at the O.K. Corral. Lots of work to do on the old ranch tomorrow, right, Diamond Lil?" He poked Lillian in the side with his elbow. She nodded.

  Caroline winced. Her father had a habit of making very stupid remarks, and if there was anything she couldn't stand, it was someone who poked other people in the side with an elbow.

  "It's only nine o'clock," J.P. pointed out after he had looked at his watch. "I don't have to go to bed this early at home if it's not a school night. And what do you mean, lots to do?
What do I have to do?"

  His father grinned proudly. "I've lined up a big job for you this summer," he said.

  Caroline could see J.P.'s shoulders stiffen. And even though they had agreed on the Tate Détente, that they wouldn't be enemies in Des Moines, she felt a little bit of satisfaction. When that repulsive baby had been set down on her lap, earlier, and Lillian had told her that she would be taking care of the "twinnies" this summer, she could see that J.P. was smirking.

  At least they had planned something horrible for him, too.

  "What is it?" J.P. asked, in the polite but suspicious voice that people usually reserve for unidentifiable vegetables on their plates.

  Herbie Tate went to the closet and took out a package. "I had this made," he explained, "and now that I can see you in person, I can tell that I estimated your size wrong. Frankly, J.P., I thought that at thirteen you'd be bigger than you are. When I was thirteen, I had really well-developed biceps and pectorals. Of course, I was a true athlete."

  Caroline watched J.P. and felt truly sorry for him. Poor scrawny J.P., who spent his entire life with computers and motors and chess sets and who never ever, if he could help it, engaged in any sport. Even at school, in gym, the coach let him be scorekeeper, stopwatch holder, towel distributor.

  Now J.P. was simply staring at his father, who was demonstrating his biceps by squeezing one arm against his waist so that the muscle thickened and rippled, like a guy in a beer commercial.

  "Take your shirt off, son," Herbie Tate commanded; and J.P., speechless for a change, obeyed. He pulled his T-shirt over his head, leaving his hair standing upright and his skinny chest, with its visible ribs, exposed.

  "Here," said his father, "put this on." He tossed him the contents of the package, a bright blue shirt. J.P. pulled it down over his messed-up hair and pushed his arms through the sleeves.