“Why’s she got her undies in a bundle?” Mary Lane, who left the front of the line and came back to keep me company, says over my shoulder. “Molinari?”
I’m pretending that I am so interested in watching the game that I don’t hear her.
“Hey. Helen Keller.” She stabs me in the back with a bony finger. “I know ya know that Greasy Al broke out of reform school. Troo just told me.”
If only that juvenile delinquent would’ve stayed put like he was supposed to. I already started writing a letter to that school with some reform ideas of my own:Dear Mr. Warden,
Have you ever heard of gun towers? Guard dogs? The gas chamber?
Mary Lane says, “I bet you’re havin’ a conniption.”
I am. And not just about Greasy Al escaping.
The day we got back from camp, even though I have lost almost all of my faith, I right away went up to church and lit candles. I prayed for the kind of summer days where you can stick your nose into a peony bush and breathe so deep that everything goes pink. Or spend a whole morning reading under a shady tree or making lanyard after lanyard at the playground. But here we are only three weeks into summer and there’s a convict on the loose and a cat burglar and Troo is acting like a wilder animal and Sampson is gone and Mother is sulky and we’ve got a runaway kid.
What is God thinking? Hasn’t He ever heard of good news?
Before Mary Lane can start in on how Molinari is going to make mincemeat out of Troo when he catches her, I’m gonna ask her if she heard any details about Charlie Fitch’s disappearance. She has to know more than me. She’s a peeper who lives two houses down from the Honeywells. I’d like to help out. It bothers me to see Artie looking like the Lone Ranger without his Tonto.
“You got any idea why Charlie Fitch ran off?” I ask her.
“Uh-uh.”
“Do you think Mr. and Mrs. Honeywell coulda changed their minds about takin’ him in and that was more than he could stand?” That’s still the only reason I can think of why he’d run away right before he was going to get adopted. Our Brownie troop went up to the orphanage at Christmas and brought those poor kids bars of soap and holy cards wrapped with red curly ribbon. Their eyes lit up over those crummy presents, that’s how desperate they are for someone to take them home.
Mary Lane says, “The last time I peeped on ’em the Honeywells seemed all set. They fixed up their spare room and it looked really good with pennants on the wall and two new yo-yos were sitting on the madras bedspread.” She shrugs. “I guess it’s possible they coulda found out between then and now that Fitch was bad news. Ya never know what you’re gettin’ with an orphan.” She hitches up her shorts because they’re always falling down. “There was that kid who was livin’ up there for a while before he got adopted. Teddy Jaeger? He picked his boogers and ate ’em. I know mosta them kids are nice at St. Jude’s and all that, but there could be a few bad apples just like everywhere else in the neighborhood.”
I would have to agree with her. Teddy Jaeger was a booger-eating orphan and there are a few people around here that are rotten to the core. The entire Molinari family, for instance.
Mary Lane says, “Maybe right before the Honeywells were headin’ over to St. Jude’s to bring Charlie home somebody knocked on their door and told ’em something terrible about him.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Like . . . like he was the long-lost son of Ed Gein or something.”
“Ed who?” I ask, not recognizing the name. “What block does he live on?”
“Gein,” Mary Lane says. “He’s not from around here. He killed a buncha women around the state capitol and took ’em home and hung ’em upside down in his living room like they were deer until all the blood drained outta them. Then he peeled off their skin and made lampshades out of it and a little suit he wore around the house and he was a grave robber, too. The cops found shriveled heads at his house and skulls on his bedpost and . . .”
This is one of her no-tripper stories. Next she’ll go on about how Charlie didn’t run away from the orphanage. That he was kidnapped by gypsies. Somehow she’ll work wienies into the story. I don’t know why, but a lot of Mary Lane’s stories are about gypsy kidnappings and wienies and my tummy already is not feeling so great.
I turn back to the game, put two fingers in my mouth and whistle good and loud. Dave taught me how. “You got him where you want him, Troo.” She is punching the tetherball two-fisted and springing for it when it comes whipping back. Even with all her sweat and wild hair she is a beautiful kid.
Mary Lane must be thinking the same thing that I am because she props her chin on my shoulder and says, “Too bad Molinari’s gonna rearrange her face when he shows up.”
“But . . . how would he get back here?” I ask. I’ve given this a lot of thought in the middle of the night. “Ya know, his polio leg.”
Mary Lane pulls out one of the bananas she’s always got in her shorts pocket and says, “Well, he for sure couldn’t walk all the way here. Green Bay is really far away. My father took me to a Packers game up there once and we had to stop three times on the way so I could go to the bathroom.”
That’s such a relief to hear. That makes me breathe a lot easier.
“But you know what could happen?” Mary Lane says, after taking a big banana bite. “A Good Samaritan could see that greaseball hunch limpin’ along the highway and offer him a ride.”
“But—”
“Go, O’Malley,” and “Ya sissy, O’Hara. Ya can’t beat a girl?” the kids watching shout.
The tetherball rope is wound around the pole close to the top and Troo’s got her victory smile on.
Needing to get Mary Lane off the subject of Greasy Al before she tells me something else I don’t want to hear, I make a whew sound and brag to her, “Looks like she’s got it in the bag. Thank God.” Her and just about everybody in the neighborhood knows what a sore loser my sister is. She hates ties, too.
Mary Lane chuckles. “’Member how my dad had to break up her and Artie at the Fourth picnic last year?”
Of course I do. Troo tied with Artie Latour for best costume. He grabbed the genuine Davy Crockett cap off the prize table before she could so the two of them got into one of those roll-around-on-the-ground wrestling matches. After he pried them apart, Mr. Lane, who was one of the judges, awarded Troo the cap. Artie has tried plenty of times to get it back, but she tells him she lost it, which is not the truth. It’s under our mattress. See, it’s not about the cap for my sister or even winning. It’s about having something somebody else wants with all their heart that is the real prize for Troo.
Mary Lane licks her fingers clean and shoves the banana peel back into her pocket. “What’re ya doin’ for the parade this year?” she asks. “Are ya just gonna watch or are ya gonna find something to decorate?”
Before I can answer, the new counselor, perky Debbie Weatherly, juts her head in between us and says, “Were you girls just talking about the Fourth?” She knows darn well we were. She’s been buzzing around us like we’re daisies and she’s a bee. Like we’re Mouseketeers and she’s Roy. “Did you hear that we’re having a party the day before the parade and there’s going to be plenty of decorating and it’s all free!”
“Free?” Mary Lane says with a lot of suspicion, but because I’m her best friend, I can also hear the hope in her voice. I don’t know why, but her family seems poorer than the rest of ours. “Ya givin’ away bikes, too?”
The counselor slaps the top of her legs and yips, “Free bikes? Ha . . . ha . . . ha. You slay me.”
Peppy Debbie doesn’t know how close to the truth that is. You don’t ever want to be the one crossing Mary Lane. While I like her for her patience with my flights of imagination and her love of animals and we both watch the same television shows, the part of her that makes her Troo’s best friend is what they have in common—a love of revenge.
Mary Lane shoots back at Debbie, “For your information, I don’t need a bike. I was just
makin’ sure ya weren’t givin’ any away. I’d have to tell my butler to build another room onto the mansion to keep it in if you were.” (By butler, she means her father, whose middle name really is Butler so she uses that one a lot. And by mansion, she means the drafty old Lane house, which is on the largish side, but needs a ton of repairs.)
Debbie’s face goes blank. I’ve seen this happen before. Mary Lane’s no-tripper stories can hypnotize you if you’re not used to them. People’s eyes go glassy, and if they have a slack jaw like Debbie does, it will go as unhinged as the Latours’ back gate.
“You New York turd,” my sister yells from behind me. “Quit hittin’ so high over my head!”
The tide has turned at the tetherball pole. Willie’s got my sister right where he wants her and it’s making her foot-stomping mad. It’s never a good idea for Troo to get so worked up. I’ll have to rub her back for over an hour tonight and she’ll make me sneak into the kitchen to get cookies out of the jar and will eat them on my side of the bed if I don’t do something. I step up to her side and start helping her out against big-boned Willie.
Between hits, O’Hara shouts, “Two against one! Do something, Debbie!”
A gasp goes through the line of kids. What I’m doing is against playground rules, but what Willie just said is worse. He knows better than to ask an outsider for help.
Snapping out of the trance that Mary Lane’s story put her in, Debbie is about step in and referee. But when she comes marching toward Troo and me, Mary Lane takes the banana peel out of her pocket, tosses it on the ground and up, up Debbie goes. She doesn’t fall down, but her arms are flapping like mad when she stumbles back to Mary Lane and asks, “Why . . . what did you do that for?” like she can’t imagine, and really, she can’t. I don’t think she understands us Westsiders. We aren’t like the rich people who live on the opposite side of the city like she does. We can get especially hard to deal with during the summer when we get even hotter under our collars. We don’t have Lake Michigan to cool us off the way Eastsiders do.
“I’m tellin’ ya for the last time,” Mary Lane warns Debbie. “Keep your stuck-up nose outta our business. We don’t need your help. We fight our own battles around here.”
Willie O’Hara hollers again, “But . . . they’re cheatin’!” and smashes the tetherball with all he’s got.
No matter how hard we’re hitting, the O’Malley sisters are just not strong enough to keep the ball from winding up to the top of the pole with a mean sounding snap!
So fast, the crowd of kids goes quiet. They know the same way I do that something bad is about to happen. Like in a gunfight in an OK Corral movie, they’re watching and waiting the way the townspeople do to see whose side they should jump over to, except for Mary Lane who is rubbing her hands together, getting fired up to pound the daylights out of whoever she thinks needs it the most. She’s eyeballing Debbie.
Troo breaks the silence by saying, “Just so you know, O’Hara, I let you win . . . ya fat cow.” She spins toward the rest of the gang. “And you . . . all of ya . . . you’re not fit to lick my boots. You’re nothin’ but . . . cookie factory riffraff.”
Now, if we really were in the Old West, these kids would already be throwing bottles at my sister from a saloon window or from the alley next to the blacksmith’s barn and, honestly, as much as I adore her, I might pick up a rusty horseshoe and toss it at her, too—when she wasn’t looking, of course.
My sister gets a kick out of my imitations every so often and it’s all I can think to do before a rumble starts. These factory kids know how to fight.
I lower my voice as far as I can, and say just like John Wayne does to his sidekick when they’re in trouble, “I got your backside, Troo.”
Mary Lane and a couple of the other kids in the crowd chuckle, but my sister doesn’t. She shoves her beret to the back of her head and tells me very ornery, “What did ya say?”
She’s got excellent hearing, so I don’t get what she means at first, but then I do. I waddle around the pole the way Mr. Wayne would, like he’s wearing a diaper that needs changing. “I mean . . . I got your derriere, Leeze.”
For the longest time, all I can hear is my fast breathing and my heart knocking against my ribs, but then my sister starts hunh . . . hunh . . . hunhing and yells, “Fuck all a ya and . . .” She elbows me.
“And . . . and the horses you rode in on,” I say the way she taught me, and then I loop my arm through hers and we mosey toward the playground gates, and ya know, just for that second, that precious moment in time, everything is coming up roses.
Chapter Eight
Mother called to me from the backyard this morning and told me to run up to the Five and Dime and get her a Snirkle bar. She has a gigantic sweet tooth. It seems like a lot of us in the neighborhood do. I think it’s because those chocolate chip cookies bake night and day over at the Feelin’ Good factory so that smell is part of our every breath and we want more, more, more! That’s why the O’Malley sisters are skipping down the street where we used to live before we moved in with Dave. Vliet Street is the way we always go to North Avenue because a lot of stuff that happened on this block was bad, but some of it was good, so it’s sorta like walking down Memory Lane if it had a bunch of potholes.
Right after we moved here, Mother would play the name game with me and Troo so we could learn about all the different kinds of people who live in the city. “You can know just about all there is about a person when you hear their last name, so be sure to ask it” is what she told us. Wops, who have mostly vowels in their names, are loud but great cooks. And the Polacks have names that end in ski and brains that run on the small side, but noses that run larger than normal. I’m not sure where bohunks come from but they are thick-ankled and wear babushkas. And if someone has man in their last name they are probably a German who loves kielbasa and polka music. (I could never tell Mother that the name game is right some of the times, but not always. I am friends with a Kraut who loves music by a man named Mozart much more than she likes Lawrence Welk.)
The people who live in them might look different, but most of the houses on the block are the same shape and size and made out of wood or brick and always two stories high, maybe three. They’re enough alike anyway that you might head into the wrong front door if you have too much to drink late at night. That happened to Mr. Fred Latour. He accidentally got into bed with Mrs. O’Hara, who lives next door to him. That was a laugh riot. Mrs. O’Hara started calling him Fred Lamour until his wife made her stop. (Lamour is French for love bucket.)
Something like that would never happen to me. Even if I gouged my eyes out of my head the way St. Lucy did, if somebody led me past any of these houses at suppertime, I could tell you who lives there without second-guessing.
The Fazios’ smells like this spice called garlic they use on just about everything and the Latours’ like cheesy casseroles made with condensed milk. The O’Haras’ reeks of cabbage and sometimes liver and onions if they’re celebrating something. If you walk past the Goldmans’ at six o’clock, the aroma of sauerkraut and schnitzel will be drifting out of their kitchen window along with their Germanese and violin music.
Troo’s a little in front of me bouncing a red rubber ball that she “borrowed” from the playground shed. She’s warming up to play that a my name is Annie and I come from Alabama with a carload of Apples game. When she gets to the letter f, her name will be Fifi and she comes from where else but France. I refuse to repeat what she will have a carload of.
When we pass the Osgoods’ house, the flag flying off the front porch reminds me to ask Troo, “What are you gonna do for the Fourth? Are you gettin’ ready to decorate? Is that why you’re comin’ with me? To get some Kleenex to make your flowers?”
If my sister does not end up being a ventriloquist or a drummer in a band like Sal Mineo or the fat lady in a traveling freak show, all ideas that she has from time to time, she could become a Kleenex flower maker. That’s how good she is at folding the t
issues, sliding a bobby pin down the middle and separating the layers until they spring alive and look like real carnations, which was Daddy’s favorite that covered his casket.
When Troo keeps bouncing, I keep asking, “Are you gonna wear a costume again?” Last summer, besides covering her bike in flowers, she dressed herself up like the Statue of Liberty because that was a gift to America from France. “Or are ya just gonna do up your bike?” I don’t have a Schwinn. Even if I did, I don’t think I would fancy it up for the Fourth. What if I accidentally won the decorating contest? Having the feeling of that silky blue ribbon sliding across my neck is just not worth Troo tricking me with some of that gum that turns your teeth black or licking my Jell-O when my back’s turned. “What’s your plan?”
“You writin’ a book?” Troo asks snotty.
“No, I’m just tryin’ to—”
“What I’m doin’ is for me to know and for you to find out,” she says with a flip of her ponytail. “But I’ll tell ya one thing, I’m gonna win that decoratin’ prize this year hands down. No ties. And I’m gonna be Queen of the Playground again, the same way I was the first year we moved here.” She starts up the game for real very loudly. “A my name is Annie and I come from . . .”
“Whatever you’re doin’, you better get busy. Time’s runnin’ out,” I tell her when we come to the front of the Kenfields’ house.
When we first moved into the city, it was into the house next door to them. Late at night horrible sounds would come out of a bedroom that was across from mine and Troo’s. I thought the place was haunted and I guess in a way it was. Mr. Kenfield would moan into his daughter’s pillow that probably still had the smell of his precious girl’s perfume hidden in the seams the same way that Daddy’s blue shirt still has Aqua Velva. After he was cried dry, he would go sit on the front porch of this house and smoke his Pall Malls, rocking until the church bells rang twelve midnight. After Mother went into the hospital, some nights after Troo would fall asleep and I was sure that Hall had passed out, I’d slip outta our bed and go sit with our neighbor. We didn’t talk so much. We held hands and listened to the creaky sound the porch swing made. I’d like to do that again, but I’m not sure Mr. Kenfield would. Sometime between last summer and this one, he got a reputation for being the neighborhood crank.