“A commune?” Miami played at being scandalized. “Are you turning into some kind of hippie in an apron? We better get the social worker in here, pronto. I’ve never been so shocked in all my born days.” She pretended to be shocked over the tops of imaginary eyeglasses, like an old prude.
“A commune is a perfectly good English word, and it applies to families, too,” said Mrs. Shaw. She sat down on the hassock with an unopened bag of frozen peas in her hands, and as she talked she worked her hands over the solid mass, separating them. It looked like calming work, and Miami wouldn’t have minded trying. But Garth meandered over and put his big old head in his mother’s lap.
“I hope,” said Miami, with as much dignity as she could muster, “I most sincerely hope I’m not in for lecture number one hundred and fourteen: How Being a Negro Is Just As Good As Being Anyone Else. I already agree. Garth’s problem isn’t that he’s black. It’s that he’s a boy.”
“Hee hee hee,” squealed Garth into the peas. Mrs. Shaw was tickling him.
“I was revving up,” admitted Mrs. Shaw. “Now I’m all warmed up and have no place to go. How about number seventy-five?”
“What’s that?”
“How you’re the oldest and have to set a good example.”
“Bor-ing.”
“Well, honey, it’s true. Now that you’re twelve—”
“She’s still eleven-going-on-twelve!” said Garth. “Until Saturday when there’s a party. I get to go to it, too!”
“You want my opinion?” said Miami conversationally. “This family is crazy. Two crazy parents, one perfectly sane preteen, one crazy brother, and two crazy baby sisters whose names sound like diaper rash!”
“Miami!”
“Well they do! Nobody has a baby named Fanny! Fanny and Rachelle! Fanny rash!”
As if they had heard their names, the girls woke up from their afternoon nap and began to wail. “Now, Miami, that’s just enough of that,” said Mrs. Shaw. “Fun is fun, but I won’t have you picking on your brother and sisters. Frances was my grandmother’s name, and Fanny was a common nickname years ago. Fanny can choose to be Franny or Fran when she grows up. If she wants.”
Miami murmured something rude under her breath.
“What is eating you?” said Mrs. Shaw. “Are you worried no boys will come to your party?”
“Of course not!” shouted Miami. “I can’t stand here and talk nonsense all day!” She shot out of the living room and up the stairs to the tower.
But of course that was it. What if no boys came? What if they thought she was just a stupid girl? If she had to have one more party with just girlfriends she’d scream.
It was a relief to have the tower. Mrs. Shaw called it the Alone Room. Mr. Shaw called it Shaw’s Folly. Garth wasn’t allowed up in it. Fanny and Rachelle were too young to know about it. So Miami swam through the dusty shadows of the main attic, past skis and cardboard cartons of Christmas decorations and a couple of strap-bound steamer trunks, to the ladder that led to the tower. Each time, she put her foot on the bottom rung and tested. There was a screech of rusty nail against a stubborn old board somewhere. She imagined the ladder coming loose, as if a knight on a castle battlement above were pushing the ladder away from the castle walls. But each time it held. She emerged into the cool octagonal area as if climbing out of a pool—or a moat.
Eight small windows. One of them could be jostled open. Miami hadn’t yet had the nerve to climb out onto the roof. It was so high. She would bounce, how many times, if she slipped and fell? On the sloping roof, tiled in chipped slate; on the front porch roof; on the small, level front yard where Garth had his baby wading pool all summer; on the long overgrown slope down to South Allen Street. Four times. She’d be dead as JFK by the time she came to a rest.
She leaned on the windowsill. The trees were still bare, and the square top of Saint Peter’s Hospital could still be seen all those blocks away. From here you could see the street was streaked with the runoff of last week’s snowfall. She imagined the fuss if she fell. Mrs. Shaw running out on the porch. Is that—it can’t be! Oh my God…Her hand put tremblingly up to a quivering mouth. Garth trailing along like the leech he was. Don’t look, it’s too, too horrible, darling! Maybe she wouldn’t be dead yet. Mr. Shaw could be walking over the hill from where the bus dropped him off on Western Avenue. Oh, sweet Jesus—it’s my baby—He would run, long, slow-motion strides, his London Fog belted raincoat flapping open. His briefcase would be flung aside. With any luck it would smack old crabby next-door neighbor Mrs. Jenkins on the noggin and good-bye Jenkins. He would get to his daughter’s neat, oddly bloodless near-corpse just as Mrs. Shaw arrived, scrambling down the wooden steps to the street level. They’d be sorry they hadn’t had those steps painted last fall when they showed up on the news on channels six, ten, and thirteen. News crews would just happen to be coming along South Allen Street. Here’d be a great story! An innocent little adopted girl, fallen to her pretty death from a height of—she fell from way up there? The cameras would pan to emphasize the horror of it. That ledge on the tower at the top of that tall house? And then down that steep slope through the brambles and the litter that collected there no matter how often the little angel had been assigned to clear it away?
Little darling! Speak into the microphone.
Please…my last wish…Her voice would carry with such a vibrato even hard-boiled newsmen would tear up. Invite my friends to what would’ve been my twelfth birthday party anyway. No yucky boys. But if Billy O’Hara insists on coming…And please…Mama? Papa? Bury me…
Bury me…
(Everyone strains forward to catch this last bit.)
…with rhinestone earrings…
Her head would loll, her eyelids flutter down. Garth would pitch himself on her body and beg forgiveness for being such a pain in the neck.
And then, thought Miami with a gentle, pale smile, I’ll come back and haunt the whole lot of them from here to kingdom come.
The night was rippling in, on faint breezes like an airy tide. Miami loved being in the tower when evening arrived. The air was purple with a hint of green, as if the trees were thinking of flowering. She could see Mrs. Jenkins down below, scraping the ground with a bristly rake. That woman would come out and iron the snow in her yard, just about. She was just so obsessed with neatness. If Garth or Miami so much as accidentally breathed in the smell of her lilacs, or worse yet, let a ball bounce into her yard, she was out on the porch in moccasins and a housecoat having a heart attack in public. She straightened the grass blade by blade, and resurrected it with Dippity-Do hair styling gel. Just about. Miami couldn’t understand nuts like Mrs. Jenkins.
There was Garth. It was April, and he was still wearing snow pants, those fat, squeaky things. He wandered around the yard looking for something to play with. He was bored because dinner was even later than usual; Mr. Shaw hadn’t come home yet. It was too dark to find ants to kill, which was Garth’s hobby last summer. He was going to be an exterminator when he grew up, Mr. Shaw said. He should practice on old Hag Nag Jenkins.
He didn’t know she was there. His voice spiraled up to Miami. She leaned a bit farther out to try to hear what he was saying.
“Hi, Mrs. Jenkins,” said Garth in his fluting, small-boy’s voice.
What an Eddie Haskell. Garth didn’t like Jenkins any more than she did. Or maybe he was too young to keep his dislikes constant in his mind.
Mrs. Jenkins was walking to the fence. She was leaning over. Miami watched carefully. Garth annoyed her, but she didn’t want to see him kidnapped or anything. Mrs. Jenkins had a cooey-dovey voice that was hard to pick up from this far away.
“What king?” said Garth loudly.
A fluttery explanation. Who did she think she was talking to? Garth had the brains of a bowl of soggy Cheerios.
“Oooh!” said Garth. “I better tell my mom! Bye, Mrs. Jenkins!” He waddled away. Mrs. Jenkins stood with her rake in her hand, still. She came back to her senses in a mi
nute, though, and began flinging a wheelbarrow around her yard, pelting the soil with handfuls of lime.
Another notch of dark. Lights came on across the street. Other families were finishing their dinners, and kids were starting on their homework. The Shaws ate late, waiting for Mr. Shaw. High as she was, Miami couldn’t quite see down into West Lawrence Street, where the O’Haras lived. Billy the Kid among them.
The party, day after tomorrow, had to have a number of dumb things like games and hamburgers and cakes and candles. Well, actually there wasn’t anything wrong with candles on a cake; it was just the embarrassing singing. Mr. and Mrs. Shaw loved the singing. They’d be there beaming like Fred and Wilma Flintstone admiring their little Pebbles. The fifth-grade girls would chime in, screeching on purpose, singing the silly verses like “How old are you?/You live in a zoo./You look like a monkey./And you smell like one too.”
But how to get Billy O’Hara there without inviting his stupid friends Brian and Gino? You couldn’t just ask one boy. It would be too obvious. But Miami didn’t exactly trust Brian and Gino. Or like them, for that matter. Brian had a filthy mouth, and Gino boasted of stealing money. The Shaws weren’t the Rockefellers. Was there a way to tell Mrs. Shaw to lock up her valuables without raising too much suspicion?
Billy was a sweetheart. He combined all the best things in a boy, Miami thought. He was funny. Smart. And cute. Like real cute. Next to him, Brian looked like a reject from a funny farm. And Gino might be sexy in a pasta-commercial kind of way. But the verdict among the fifth-grade girls was unanimous: Good looks disguising a bad attitude was bad news. Why Billy hung around Gino and Brian was a mystery. But boys were mysteries, anyway. The real mystery was that one could be as nice as Billy.
Miami’s best friend, Patty Geoghagen, had sidled up to him on the way back from First Friday Stations of the Cross a few weeks earlier. She’d said, in a suitably noncommittal way, “If someone really liked you, would you want to know about it? I’m just asking as a point of interest. Supposing.”
“Theoretically,” mused Billy, looking off into the muddy hedges. “I’d have to think about it. You mean a lot?”
“A lot,” said Patty. “In fact: tons.”
“Oh,” said Billy suddenly. “You mean Miami? She’s okay, I guess.”
The girls puzzled over Billy’s remark later: Did it mean he’d accept an invitation to Miami’s birthday party? For everyone knew she was having a party. She’d been dangling the prospects of an invitation in front of her classmates for a month. A big party. It had come up in religion class, even: What were the laws about having birthday parties during Lent? Was it really right?
“You can’t choose your birthday,” began Miss Zebrewski, their teacher. “Miami can because she doesn’t know when her birthday is!” the class screamed. “If April sixth has been agreed as the day to celebrate the presence of God’s grace in Miami’s life, that’s her birthday,” replied Miss Zebrewski. “It wouldn’t be right not to join with her in her happiness.”
“But what about eating birthday cake if you’ve given up dessert for Lent?” they wanted to know. Miss Zebrewski opined that a small piece, most of it left on the paper plate, would be polite. From that they deduced that a larger piece with ice cream would be more polite, and gobbling down everything and asking for seconds would be exemplary.
But then the other problem. How could Miami set about impressing Billy O’Hara if Garth was hanging around? Garth idolized big boys. He’d never let them alone. Miami couldn’t quite imagine what Garth might actually interrupt, but she knew it would be romantic. Garth would be grinning that face he always made when an Instamatic camera got aimed at him, the face with the high-arched eyebrows and the gleeful smile. He’d swing on Billy’s arms and crowd him with cake and jokes. Oh, she loved Garth and everything, but enough was enough. There was going to be no Garth at this party. She was putting her foot down about it.
“Miami!” It was Mrs. Shaw’s voice, spiraling up to the tower room, in the come-and-set-the-table tone. Mrs. Shaw had some weird idea that everyone doing chores all the time made people feel wanted and needed. I don’t need to feel that needed, Miami thought. But with the hopes for wearing rhinestone earrings on Saturday still alive, she swung shut the window. Obedient Miami. Good Miami.
“Miami!”
“All right!” shrieked Miami from three floors away. Or maybe that was the do-your-homework-before-supper tone. And thinking of homework, Miami was suddenly visited by a stroke of brilliance.
She had the answer.
There was a project, a stupid geography project everyone had been assigned a month ago. It was due on Monday. Naturally she hadn’t begun it yet. She could claim to forget her geography book this weekend. She could bully Patty Geoghagen into forgetting hers too. Then there was no reason why she shouldn’t call Billy O’Hara on the phone! A business call, no sweat! Could I borrow your geography book? Billy was a brain, but the nice kind, not snotty. Sure, Miami, when should I drop it by? How about six on Saturday evening? The party would be in full swing. It would only be courteous to invite him in. And Gino and Brian would be off somewhere else, breaking into the church poor boxes or doing whatever bad kids did on a Saturday evening.
It was brilliant. It was flawless. All that was left to figure out was how to get rid of Garth. In her excitement she forgot to be scared of the shaky ladder and dropped into the gloom and murk of the attic with an energetic thud. She barreled along the halls and pounded down the worn front stairs, almost running into Garth.
“The king’s dead,” said Garth excitedly.
“We don’t have a king, Einstein, we have a president,” she said, diving for the phone in the hall to call Patty and tell her of the plan to get Billy to the party without his hoody friends. The little girls had been set on a blanket in front of the TV. They had their thumbs in their mouths and were looking stupidly around. Garth jollied them up by doing a little dance that consisted of lifting his feet up lightly and dropping them quickly, as if stepping on coals. “The black people have a king, and he’s dead,” he sang.
“Will you keep it down?” said Miami in an aggrieved voice. Her finger went wheeling around the rotary dial and then froze halfway through the number. She had turned away to give her voice some privacy and looked down the hall past the bulge of coats hanging on hooks, into the kitchen. There was a smell of macaroni and cheese and Meister’s excellent all-beef homemade franks boiling on the stove. In the steam, sweeping up from the open pot, stood Mrs. Shaw. The heels of her hands were pressed deep into her eye sockets. Her shoulders were shaking. A little wail, not unlike the kind Fanny and Rachelle made when they were annoyed, came out of her mouth. “Holy Mother of God,” said Miami. “Will you look at that. Yikes.”
She set the receiver on the cradle and leaned back to be out of sight. She’d never seen Mrs. Shaw cry. Mrs. Shaw was cheery. She believed in the power of positive thinking. A smile was her umbrella. She kept her sunny side up, up. Not only that, she blathered on about it. She was proud of being upbeat. She liked herself that way. She thought it might catch on with Miami, who was naturally a little sour, a handful of burrs in a family bouquet of wildflowers.
But Miami had been with the Shaws what, five, six years now? And Mrs. Shaw had never so much as had her eyes mist over. So what was this private display of blubbering? It was embarrassing. When Mrs. Shaw reached for a paper towel to blow her nose, Miami slipped into the living room. She cuddled the little girls, who were unused to her attentions and stopped being annoying and began to coo and bubble over her. Garth was saying, “Maybe I’ll be the black king when I grow up.”
“That’s awfully confident, to assume you’re going to grow up,” said Miami. “You won’t make it to six the way you’re keeping on. I’ll see to that. A great big rock rolled off the roof into your wading pool this summer. Good-bye, Garth.”
“Oh,” said Garth, used to Miami’s sarcastic tone of voice, knowing she hardly meant it, “that’s what you think. You just
don’t want me to come to your party. But I am.”
“But sweetheart honey-bunny sugarlips doll, you don’t want to come to my boring old party.”
“Oh, yes I do,” said Garth firmly. “And you can’t stop me. Just because you think you’re so hot.”
“I am,” said Miami. “Hot as hell. I love myself.”
“I’m telling,” said Garth. “Mommy!” he screeched. “Miami sweared!”
“No, don’t go in there—” Miami raised herself to her knees, tumbling the toddlers off her lap. But Garth had barreled toward the kitchen. He slowed down at the sight of Mrs. Shaw. Then, stupider or braver than Miami, he catapulted himself into Mrs. Shaw’s arms and gave her kisses one two three.
By the time Mr. Shaw got home from work at last, Miami had worked out what was going on. Some Negro guy had been shot and killed. Martin Luther King, Jr. “He’s not a king, his name is King,” she’d finally snapped at Garth, whose normal placid way had been stirred up by the fuss.
“But he’s like a king, that’s why it’s on the news,” said Garth. “A black king. Like me.”
Mrs. Shaw finished crying and began talking. Miami preferred the crying. This was a mammoth lecture: numbers forty-seven and twenty-five and eighty-eight all rolled up in one. Martin Luther King, Jr.: A brave campaigner for the rights of American blacks. A man of God. All people are created equal. “I have a dream,” said Mr. Shaw, looking soberly at Garth as if the little twerp had a clue to what was going on. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skins but by the content of their characters.”
Garth looked at his skin color. Miami preferred hers: pale, although Garth could wear deep purples and reds that made her face look washed out.
Mrs. Shaw was wiping sauerkraut off Rachelle and Mr. Shaw was doing the same for Fanny. “We may have to postpone your party, dear,” said Mrs. Shaw.
“What?”