“I can, too, think. I can think that you are far from perfect, Malcolm Soo ...”
“So what?” he said, looking down his nose and tightening his mouth. “No one is perfect. But my being imperfect has nothing at all to do with Tallulah.”
“Oh, yes it does.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. But I know it does.”
Now he mimicked me. “ ‘I don’t know, but I know.’ That’s just like you, Jeanmarie. You know everything you don’t know. How can you know without reasons?”
“I know a lot. I know you should have been nicer to Tallulah and lighted her cigarettes.”
“I know she shouldn’t smoke.”
I said that he had no feelings, and he said that I had no sense.
I said he was constipated, and he said that I was a slob.
I said that he had the soul of a transistor, but he did not hear that because by then he had stormed out of Jericho Tel and left me hollering to the circle of pines.
THE NEXT MORNING I wanted to miss Malcolm, so I waited until the last possible minute to leave for the bus. Malcolm must have had the same idea, for he was where he always was when I opened the door to our trailer. He looked the other way when he saw me, and I slowed up so that he could get well in front of me. He took a seat in the back of the bus, and I took my usual place behind the driver.
We pretty much repeated the process in reverse when we were let off after school. At home, I kept poking my head out the door of our trailer so that I would be able to spot Malcolm leaving his. When I didn’t see him leave for twenty minutes, I decided to head out, and I did. He again had the same idea, for he was coming down the step from his trailer just as I reached it. This time, he slowed down, and I walked ahead to Jericho Tel, walked around the circle of trees to the opening and walked all the way in to the center to make certain that I had not missed Spot in the dying light of the late afternoon.
There was no Spot, and I passed Malcolm walking into the Tel as I walked out. I thought of telling him that it was not logical for a person who cared nothing about returning to Rahab Station to make a trip to the Tel. But I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t either, even though our shoulders almost brushed at the entrance.
THAT EVENING, I got a phone call from Lynette Hrivnak, the queen of clones. She told me that she was calling to find out if I was going to Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas show. Every year, Mrs. Spurling, the music teacher, bought fifty tickets and took a group of students to see it. The group would be going on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and Mrs. Hrivnak, her mother, would be a chaperone, and that was why she was helping with the phone calls. They wanted to know if I would come. The total cost for transportation, box lunch and show was twelve-fifty.
I wanted to go. I had been wanting to get to Manhattan; and since I had met Tallulah, I had been wanting to get there passionately. But I was worried that my stomach would let me down during such a long bus ride. When I did not say yes immediately, Lynette said that there was a fund to help anyone who couldn’t afford it.
Who did she think she was to offer me charity?
Who did she think I was that I would accept it?
I got furious. I told her that I would be happy to buy a ticket. Then in a voice as sweet as the wind off a field of thyme, I said, “Maybe you have a little brother or some relative who is as tone deaf as you are, Lynette. I would like you to give him my ticket, darling. I really have never considered what they play at Radio City Music Hall to be music, and I have never thought what the Rockettes do can be called dancing. I thank you very much for asking me, darling, but please tell Mrs. Spurling and your dear Mama that I couldn’t possibly attend.” I said miMAH for Mama.
I hung up, and I was miserable. I knew that Lynette would waste no time in telling her miMAH as well as Mrs. Spurling what I had said. And Mrs. Spurling was the last person that I wanted to antagonize. Because of my visits to Rahab Station, I had decided to try out for a part in the spring production of Rumpelstiltskin.
If only Tallulah would send me Topside to Singer Grove Middle School, I could haunt Mrs. Spurling, and she would give me a part in Rutnpelstiltskin. If only she would let me haunt Lynette Hrivnak so that she would throw up on the bus all the way to Radio City Music Hall and splash all over her chaperonish mother, which would be disgusting and make three other kids throw up, which would make them stop the bus in the tunnel leading to Manhattan, which would make the smell of vomit and car fumes so awful that all the girls would throw up. All the girls plus Malcolm. Which would make such a terrific traffic jam in the tunnel that they would miss the show at Radio City Music Hall, which would make the police arrest them for holding up traffic, which would make them spend the night in jail with whores and pimps and drunks who threw up.
But I knew Tallulah never would, and not because she was selfish. Deep in my heart, I knew that deep in her heart, Tallulah had other reasons for making Malcolm and me invisible. Being invisible had started something inside us. I decided that Malcolm was not comfortable with his invisible self, and I was. Maybe it was not Tallulah that Malcolm was mad at. Maybe Malcolm did not like what he saw when he was invisible.
But we made such a terrific team. Just as Tallulah had missed the us of the buskers, I missed the us of Malcolm and me. Missing the us of Malcolm and me was like a tragic disease. I developed symptoms of the common cold.
Tallulah says, “I have never understood why people who have knocked themselves out to become stars, afterwards knock themselves out to prove they’re just folks.”
ten
MOTHER AND I had to eat Thanksgiving dinner at eleven o clock in the morning because she was scheduled to report to the airport at three. We didn’t bake a whole turkey, just the breast; we stuffed it with Pepperidge Farm corn bread stuffing mix and opened cans of sweet potatoes and Ocean Spray cranberry sauce; Mother and I prefer the jellied kind. We decided that we needed something green so we had some Niblets peas; the boiled-in-the-bag ones taste as good as fresh. I had intended to invite Malcolm and Mr. Soo so that they could have a true American Thanksgiving dinner, but I would have had to talk to Malcolm to invite them, so I didn’t. “Let them eat tofu,” I said.
Mother got dressed in her uniform immediately after eating and left for the airport because she worried that traffic would be awful. I felt restless and annoyed and wandered outside. I was walking aimlessly around Empire Estates when I found a dead duckling. Wild ducks sometimes swept down from the skies and mated with the ducks that the farmers raised. Unless someone took pity on the half-breeds, they were destroyed. You couldn’t sell a duckling as Long Island duck if only half of it was. This one must have been raised as a pet, for it looked full grown to me. It probably got killed on its first solo flight. The poor thing was mangled and bloody. Half-wild is a dangerous thing to be.
I stood over the dead duck with my hands in my vest pockets, not wanting to touch and not willing not to. I wished Malcolm would walk by as he had when I had found the blue jay. I would be willing to bury the hatchet if he would be willing to bury the bird. I waited around, my hands clenched inside the pockets of my vest, waiting for Malcolm to appear by magic, but he was nowhere in sight. I would have to do it myself. With the edge of my boot, I gently shoved the carcass off the path and went home for the funeral equipment. Once inside, I wiped my boots with pine oil and washed my hands with Fels Naphtha soap before opening the drawer that held the aluminum foil. I found the calligraphy pen and ink and tore a strip of paper from a brown paper bag. I would do it; I would do it all and all by myself and hope I didn’t end up in the hospital with salmonella from undercooked duck.
I picked up the shovel that was leaning against the back of our trailer, and I carried the duck at arm’s length on the blade of the shovel to Jericho Tel.
I chose a spot near the ring of evergreens that bordered the Tel and struck the ground with the shovel, hoping against hope that the ground would yield and that I would find myself floating in the lavend
er light of the Epigene. I had to push hard against the edge of the shovel blade, for the nights had been cold, and the ground was frozen. The earth did not open up for me, and I had to scoop out the small grave, one shallow layer at a time. After I put the duck into the earth, I backed away, the way that Malcolm and I always had, and I sat under the tree where I would hang the weathergram.
I wrote: Wild duck + sitting duck = dead duck. Direct and to the point. My writing was not as beautiful as Malcolm’s, but the vertical and horizontal strokes of my + were the same thickness. I hung the weathergram on the pine tree, and when I did, I found a small shred of one of our other weathergrams. I didn’t know which one it was; the only letter I could make out was a small s, and one small letter s isn’t much of a message.
I went home and took an entire bath with Fels Naphtha soap to wash off the salmonella, any possible psitticossis or botulism, which I intended to look up in Dr. Maceo E. Patterson’s Encyclopedia as soon as I had finished my bath.
MOTHER had Friday off. She had brought home a New York Times that someone had left in one of the waiting lounges at the airport, and I found that the Bleecker St. Cinema was having a revival of the movie Vixen!, starring Tallulah. I insisted that Mother take me. Beg as she would that she was tired and that she didn’t want to drive all that distance just to see a thirty-year-old movie, plead as she would that I would get carsick on the long ride into Manhattan, I insisted. I thought of telling her that it was a school assignment, but I didn’t. I thought of playing on her guilt at leaving me alone for all of those latchkey hours, but I didn’t. I was polite but firm, and she realized that I meant business and gave in.
We set out for Greenwich Village in the early afternoon. Mother parked the car at Shea Stadium, and we rode the subway. We got out at Fifty-third and Fifth Avenue and then had to come above ground from a station that was at least three levels deeper than Rahab and take a bus down Fifth Avenue. The day after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year, and everything about the sidewalks of New York seemed to bear that out, but the more complicated and crowded the going became, the more determined I became to see Vixen!
I thought that Mother and I would be two of about six, possibly eight, people who were interested in seeing Tallulah. Actually, since Mother wasn’t interested, I thought that I would be one of about six, possibly eight people, but I was wrong. The movie was full.
On the screen Tallulah looked just as she did in Rahab Station. She had the same painted mouth. You could tell that it was lipstick even though the movie was in black and white, and when the camera came in close up, you could see the false eyelashes, and her fingernails were the same ten wonders of the modern world.
She played a young girl who works in a department store and who marries the son of the owner, even though his mother hates her because she thinks Tallulah is not good enough for her son. The son turns out to be a drunken bum who fools around with other girls behind her back and causes all kinds of trouble in the store because he neglects business as well as his loving wife. Tallulah saves the family business and lets the mother think it was her son who did. The son appears at his mother s deathbed and realizes that his wife has never told his mother how disgusting he was; he doesn’t tell her either. Instead, he gives up drink and other women and returns to Tallulah, and they end with a kiss. Her lipstick didn’t smear.
It was a good story. Mother cried. I cried, too, but not as much. I didn’t ask her if she was glad she came because I knew that she was. We came out of the movie crying but smiling, and I asked her if she would like to see Washington Square Park since we were in the neighborhood. She suggested that we get some take-out pizza and eat it in the park. And we did that.
We found a bench with a clear view of a juggler who was tossing grapefruits, oranges and Brazil nuts in the air so fast that they looked like fruit salad. He finished his act, and the crowd thinned out just before he passed his hat. After the juggler left, a sidewalk stand-up comic appeared, clapped his hands for attention and then began insulting the hecklers who had answers for questions he had not asked. Some people left, but others came.
One of the problems of living with my mother was that we lived so close together in our trailer, and so much of our time together put me into the role of daughter and her into the role of mother, that I almost never saw her from the audience. Once in a while, when we were removed from the home ground, she would give me some hint about her other life, and she did that now. “I love a city,” she said. When I mentioned that the crowd seemed to change as the acts did, she sighed contentedly and said, “I guess that is what is meant by panorama—the whole scene changing time after time.” She took a large bite of pizza and chewed it, watching the panorama. “Nice place to visit,” she said, looking at me and laughing. “People always say that about a city. ‘Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.’ I would. I would want to live here. But I would also want to be very, very rich.” She crunched up all the wrappings from our pizza but made no effort to deposit them in the trash container. She leaned back against the bench and put her hands in her coat pockets and let the crumpled ball of paper sit on her stomach. “Just look at them,” she said. “If the animals you love best in this world are human beings, then the city is the place to be. It will show you every variety. Look at that woman waiting over there She looks like someone left over from another century.”
The woman who had caught Mother’s eye was wearing a long calico skirt. On her head was a black felt bonnet with three strange looking feathers tucked into its band. The hat tied under her chin, and a fringe of golden-brown ringlets poked out from under it. One of her hands was holding an old wicker basket, and the other was pulling on a long cape, in order to clutch it tighter around her neck. She looked like an old-fashioned illustration of Little Red Riding Hood done before color printing was invented. She caught my eye and smiled at me in the hesitant way a person smiles at someone known in one place but seen in another—like meeting the girl from the supermarket checkout counter at the dentist’s—showing dimples that added a sweetness to the old-fashioned prettiness of her looks. She lifted the basket she was carrying in a kind of salute. Her gloves were a rough gray wool, and the tips of two fingers were worn through. I studied the feathers in her bonnet; like a friend’s handwriting, they looked familiar but they took a minute to identify. They were the feathers of a half-wild duck.
Mother said we better leave and got up, deposited our trash in a container and looked around, expecting to find me still at her side, but I had remained on the bench. She came over and began tugging on the lapel of my coat. “C’mon, Jeanmarie,” she said, “it’s a long way home.” I didn’t budge. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
I didn’t tell Mother that I had.
I had just seen Emmagene Krebs.
Tallulah says, “The telephone and the light bulb were invented by men who knew how to make them work but didn’t know why. That’s the way people should raise children.”
eleven
MOTHER AND I both slept late the next morning. It was the Saturday that everyone, including Malcolm Soo, was going to Radio City Music Hall. I first wakened about eight and thought about going to Malcolm’s to tell him about having seen Emmagene Krebs. That would lead to his asking me how I knew that it was Emmagene, and that would lead to my telling him that I didn’t have her fingerprints, but I knew it was Emmagene as surely as I knew that I was Jeanmarie, and that would lead to his telling me that if I were as smart as I was certain, I would be Einstein. There was an even stronger possibility that I would talk and he wouldn’t answer, that he would just walk away, so I turned over and went back to sleep. It was ten o’clock when I woke again. Mother was already dressed, ready to go grocery shopping. I told her that I wanted to skip doing groceries and laundry, that I was too tired from yesterday.
Which was not exactly the best thing I could have said. Mother was also tired. She had had to do all the dri
ving and all the asking for directions. She had to get the groceries today, and she would have to go to work tomorrow. I was glad I had not laid a guilt trip on her yesterday when I had been tempted to. I was sorry that I would not be helping her with the groceries and the laundry, but I knew it was time for me to return to Jericho Tel. I had to make another withdrawal from my good-daughter account.
I WAITED only long enough to know that Mother’s car would have cleared the trailer park before I headed out to Jericho Tel. As soon as my feet hit the opening to the clearing, I peered into the center to see Spot. He was not there. I decided to walk toward center anyway and saw a glowing white outline in the shape of a dog appear. Next the dog’s eyes became three dimensional, and the dog looked at me. Within only a second, the entire dog came into focus, spots and all.
It was Spot.
Except it wasn’t. He was the same and different. Could Spot have changed his spots?
Suddenly I knew. This was Tallulah’s Then Spot, the dog that Malcolm and I had met at Smarty Plants. I called him to me. He cocked his head slightly to one side. I called again, and he came bounding over to me and began licking my face. Yes, this was Then Spot, for he was much friendlier than Now Spot. I walked to the center of the Tel, and he followed me. I wiped his licks from my face with a piece of Kleenex. It occurred to me to test something, so I rolled the tissue up into a ball and threw it toward the weathergram tree. Spot went for it. His sight had been returned.
I was so glad for him and so happy to know that in a few seconds I would be back in Rahab Station that I laughed out loud. Then Spot returned to me, carrying the wad of Kleenex in his mouth. I patted him and hugged him and would have kissed him had I known that it was medically safer to kiss a dog than to kiss a human. I tapped the ground three times, and the two of us were whooshed down off the face of the earth and into the Epigene.