Izzy, Willy-Nilly

by Cynthia Voigt

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “My mother made it for me, when I was small. When she thought batik was her medium, but it isn’t. I kind of like it, though, don’t you?”

  It was a long piece of cloth. All up it, hidden underwater and behind flowers and on trees and in the sky, were animals—zoo animals, elephants and monkeys, brightly colored fish and brown turtles, parrots, tigers, giraffes. “It’s neat,” I said. It was perfect for a little kid, to look at and look at and find all the animals.

  “I always thought so. I thought it would cheer up your room some. Then I brought you this—”

  She held up a ceramic vase, made of rough clay glazed to earthy tones.

  “But you don’t have any flowers to put in it. Has the enthusiasm dwindled?” She moved the chrysanthemums aside and put the tall vase in its place. “My mother made that too. She’s a potter, as it turns out.”

  “Oh,” I said. It wasn’t my kind of pottery, because my style is the smooth curved kind, with designs painted on it, like the Chinese vases or the Danish ones.

  “If you don’t like it, I could take it back. She was nervous about letting me bring it down anyway, so that would be okay. She wants to give it to the Treasure Trove for Christmas sales.”

  “Does she sell things at the Treasure Trove?”

  “Mugs and vases mostly, sometimes a platter. They like her stuff.”

  “My mother shops there,” I said, looking at the vase with a more interested eye.

  “All the best people do. A lot of them buy my mom’s stuff.”

  “Aren’t you proud of her?”

  Rosamunde crouched back by the box before she answered me. “Sometimes I am. But sometimes I’m jealous too, because I don’t have any talents like that; and sometimes, when I can see she’d like to have a creative daughter, I just feel guilty. You know? I brought these, too. I didn’t know which you liked.”

  These were games in boxes, Clue and Othello, Parcheesi, Yahtzee. “No Monopoly?” I asked, as she piled them up on top of my table.

  “No, you’d just get depressed; I’m really good at Monopoly. I wish we had Trivial Pursuit, but we’re waiting to see if Santa can afford it. It sounds like our kind of game.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Six. I’m the oldest, and I’ve got three younger sisters and two little brothers.”

  “Twins?”

  “No. Why should they be twins? Oh, I get it, because of yours. Do you have anyone younger?”

  “Francie. She’s ten.”

  “It’s a drag being oldest. All the responsibilities and no pay. Then—“ She lifted out a small cooler, the kind that will keep just a six-pack of beer cold, and two shoe boxes. “Can you get those games out of the way?” I moved them onto the bed. “The eats.” Rosamunde passed all three up to me and a roll of paper towels. “Don’t open them yet. I’ve just got these left.”

  One after another, she pulled out library books. Two of them were big collections of cartoons. “didn’t know what you liked, so I tried one of everything. If you don’t like horror, you ought to skip this one.”

  “I will,” I promised her, looking at the black cover, with a pair of evil green eyes on it and drops of blood. She stacked half a dozen books up on my night table.

  “Funny, it always seems like so much more when you’re putting things together, you know? It never seems like as much when you’re finished—sort of like Christmas.”

  I looked around my room, which no longer looked neat and clean. It looked almost messy, and certainly lived in. It didn’t really look like me, anymore; but I liked the way it looked, just because it was different from the dull way it had been looking.

  “This is great,” I said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Rosamunde said. “Can I sit on the bed, is that okay?”

  “Sure.”

  She sat down awkwardly, half-sideways.

  “I can’t move the cast much,” I apologized.

  “No problem. Do you feel like you still have the other leg? I read, somewhere, that amputees can still feel—they think they can feel stuff. Do you?”

  She was just curious, I reminded myself. I shook my head. Rosamunde was busy opening the cooler and taking the tops off the boxes. She lifted fat little pastry squares out of the cooler.

  “They’re hot. Fresh from the oven. Piroshkis, I love them.”

  “Did you make them?”

  “I’m a pretty good cook, especially baking. I wasn’t sure how this thing would work, for keeping things hot, but it does okay, doesn’t it?”

  Then she opened the shoe boxes. “And for dessert, apple turnovers with individually wrapped chunks of cheese. Do you like cheddar?”

  “I don’t know. What color is it?”

  “Orange, Izzy, cheddar is orange and good cheddar is aged, and it’s clear you don’t know anything about food.”

  I finished chewing and swallowed the first little pastry, the pillow-shaped piroshki. “I know that these are good.”

  “That’s just the beginning.” She bit into one and chewed happily. “I almost never make them, so I always forget—How is your appetite, anyway?”

  “For these it seems to be okay. Or maybe I’m finally hungry.”

  “I should have brought some fresh fruit.”

  “You should have brought something to drink.” I heard what I’d said. I sounded ungrateful. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? I thought it was a joke. I’ll think about it for next time.”

  “Can you do this again?”

  “Only on weekends. I’ve got a regular babysitting job. But—you haven’t begun to know the breadth of my repertoire.”

  “I’ll get fat.”

  “You could use a little fat.”

  “The trouble is,” I told her, “that that’s all it is, fat. I’m losing my muscle tone.”

  “It’s only been two weeks,” she protested. “And we’re young; it can’t go that fast. Besides, aren’t you doing some kind of physical therapy? That should do something. As long as you’re eating.”

  “The food’s pretty dull.”

  “So I guess you’re not too hungry?”

  “Not most of the time. I am now,” I said. I took a second little pillow, ate it, and took a third. I looked at the vase sitting on the windowsill, with the sky behind it. It didn’t suit the curtains, but “It looks good with the sky, your mother’s vase.”

  “I’ll tell her. Would you like to play a game of something? I looked at TV Guide and there’s nothing on this afternoon.”

  We cleared off the table and I pulled myself up straighter in the bed, to give Rosamunde more room. We played Othello and talked. She told me what she knew about what was going on at school. “But I don’t know much about your crowd, just what I overhear. And by observation. Like Lauren seems depressed about something—”

  “Probably because she can’t go to her mother’s for Christmas.”

  “And she wanted to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why doesn’t she? I guess they’re divorced?”

  “For years. Because her mother’s too busy. She and her second husband run a resort hotel on one of the Sea Islands, and Christmas is their busy season.”

  “So what? They must have room enough, and Lauren could help out, couldn’t she? It sounds suspicious, doesn’t it? I don’t blame Lauren—nobody likes being rejected.”

  “It isn’t that, it’s because there’s a boy she met last year.”

  “That’s what she says,” Rosamunde said. “Do you believe her?”

  I had never thought not to believe her. Now I wondered. “I can’t imagine how it would feel, having divorced parents,” I admitted.

  “Me either. Whatever else, my parents seem determined to stay married.”

  She told me who had broken up with who, and who had started going together. “They say that Deborah has finally decided to like Tony Marcel. Anyway, he’s the only one she’s going out with, and they always eat tog
ether, but that could be because of newspaper.”

  “I can’t imagine what she wants if Tony doesn’t have it.”

  “I guess. He’s okay. But Deborah—she’s got success written all over her and she’s probably smart enough to know that—she’ll never be really serious about him. Not the way he is about her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, you know. He’s king of the roost here, in high school, but he’s not original or tough enough. He’ll be a nice, ordinary man. Which isn’t bad, but Deborah—”

  “She’s not that good-looking.”

  “There’s a lot more to it than looks, Izzy.”

  I asked about Latin Club and she told me they were going ahead, now that everybody had settled down again. “Settled down?” I asked.

  “That first meeting after Marco slammed you into a tree—well, they were pretty shook up.”

  I knew who she meant by they.

  “They kind of—came in like tragic queens—or like close relations of the corpse? All pale and subdued and tragic whisperings, little dabbings at the eyes. Besides, everybody was—shocked. Anyway. So Mr. DePonte cancelled the meeting. I think”—and she looked up from the Othello disks she was turning over on the board—“they were disappointed. I think they expected some personal attention, sympathy and all that. But Mr. DePonte keeps things impersonal.”

  So that was what Suzy had been lying about, when I asked her. It didn’t seem to be worth telling a lie about.

  After we got tired of Othello, we started on Yahtzee. My afternoon snack came, and we shared the fruit drink. By then, we were getting sort of slap-happy, so we started betting on the games. Two turnovers against one piroshki. Plantations and daughters. A weekend with Michael Jackson against a date with Prince Andrew. When Rosamunde started rolling Yahtzees, one after the other, about every third time it was her turn, we both got the giggles. It was almost as if she was playing with loaded dice—she’d roll out the five dice and three or four would be the same. Then, she’d take those that didn’t match and roll again. About a third of the time, by the time she’d taken her third roll she had all five the same. “Let’s play for money,” she said, about halfway through the game.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I’ve never had such luck in anything in my whole life. It’s wasted on me here. Why couldn’t it happen sometime important?”

  “Like when?” I grumped.

  “On the SATs, that would be a good time.”

  I rolled for a full house and had to scratch, since I didn’t get it, didn’t even get close to it. Rosamunde rolled for fours, the only number she had left. After her first roll, four fours showed.

  I started to laugh.

  “It’s making me nervous,” she said. “Things going right. You know what it means, don’t you?”

  I shook my head.

  “It means the gods are setting you up for something really bad.”

  She rolled and the die came up a four. “Oh no,” she groaned, laughing away.

  “It’s impossible. I’ve gone for weeks never getting a single Yahtzee. I think I’ll quit. I give you this game.”

  “Oh no, you don’t,” Rosamunde said. “If the gods are going to get me later, I want full pleasure now. Every last drop. Squeeze it out, Izzy.”

  By this time we were both doubled over with laughing and general silliness. It wasn’t actually that funny, not really; but it felt really funny at the time.

  I swiped at the table with my hand, like a good tennis backstroke. The dice flew all over the room, even into the bathroom, landing with little clattering sounds. That struck us as really really funny.

  When I raised my head, my parents were standing in the doorway, in formal dress. As soon as I caught my breath I greeted them. “You look terrific,” I said. My father was tall and solemn in his black tuxedo with a black cummerbund and plain shirt front; my father would never wear anything but the most conservative dress shirts. My mother wore a long, frothy blue gown and her lamb’s-wool jacket. But my mother had tears running out of her eyes. But she was smiling.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  Rosamunde had gotten off the bed and was standing by the window.

  “She’s fine,” my father said. He put his arm around her shoulder. I opened the drawer and passed her a box of tissues. “We just heard all the noise in here—”

  “It sounded like a first grade classroom party,” my mother said. She wiped at her eyes. “It looks like a first grade classroom party too.”

  “Rosamunde Webber, this is my mother, Mrs. Lingard.” I introduced them. My mother put out her gloved hand to say hello, it’s a pleasure to meet you, whatever has been going on in here. The room was pretty messy, with the shoe boxes dropped onto the floor and the wastebasket overflowing with Yahtzee score sheets and paper towels.

  “And my father.”

  Rosamunde stepped around the carton of crumpled newspaper to shake my father’s hand.

  “You’ve come to have supper with Izzy,” she said, taking in their formal wear. My father, whose sense of humor isn’t as quick as my mother’s, sort of stared at her without anything to say.

  My mother didn’t say anything either, though.

  “Bad joke,” Rosamunde said to me.

  “They’re going to a formal dinner,” I explained. “But Mom, your eyes are a mess. Are you all right?”

  I didn’t really have to ask, even though I never thought I’d ever see her crying in front of a stranger, in a strange public place, not home. Her eyes were shining.

  “I’m fine, really, Angel. I am. Where’s that makeup I brought you—I’d better do a repair job.”

  “We just came to say hello, I didn’t have to play this afternoon so we got dressed a little early,” my father explained. “We’ll try to come back later, but we wanted to—say hello.”

  “That means you didn’t make the finals, doesn’t it?”

  Rosamunde was standing lumpishly quiet.

  “He was playing in the member-guest tournament,” I told her.

  “Ah,” she said.

  “There’s a dinner dance, the last night of the tournament.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t make the final round,” I said to my father.

  “It doesn’t matter,” my father said. “I think I got a couple of new contracts out of it, which is what it’s all about, after all Isn’t it?” He smiled at Rosamunde.

  “I guess, if you don’t win, that better be what it’s all about,” she answered. Then she grimaced and half looked at me and looked quickly away. My father just looked as if he didn’t know what to say.

  My mother came out, dropped two dice on the tabletop. “In the sink,” she said.

  “Izzy was losing,” Rosamunde explained. My mother raised her eyebrows at me. “Badly,” Rosamunde said. “You should bring her some fresh fruit.”

  “That’s a good idea.” My mother accepted the suggestion. “Would you like that?”

  “I think so. I’m getting tired of stewed prunes.”

  That made her smile and having something definite to do always pleased her. “That’s a handsome vase,” she said.

  “Rosamunde’s mother made it.”

  “It looks like some work I’ve seen in the Treasure Trove.”

  “That’s my mom’s stuff. I keep telling her she should find someplace else to sell her work, because—everything else in there is so cute, you know? I guess she thinks she looks good by contrast. Or,” Rosamunde told my mother, “something.” Rosamunde didn’t know how to talk to people, I thought. My parents, who were ready to like anybody we brought around, were getting uncomfortable. I was relieved when my mother kissed me and told Rosamunde it was a pleasure to meet her, and she hoped to see more of her. When she turned around to wave from the doorway I could see in her expression that she had put two and two together and gotten four. She had remembered seeing Rosamunde by the elevators.

  “I have to go pretty soo
n myself. My father’s picking me up at seven. I guess I’d better neaten things up here a little too, or they’ll evict you. But Izzy—that was like being visited by Charles and Di.”

  “Who, my parents?”

  “You know what I mean. Does your mother cry a lot?”

  “No, never.”

  “Mine does.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s artistic. They look okay, your parents. Very well bred. Like you.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I shouldn’t have said that, about coming to eat with you. Or bringing fruit, as if I was criticizing her. Or the Treasure Trove either. Should I have?” She had loaded the empty carton on the carrier and she put on her PAL jacket. She looked sort of deflated.

  “What’s the matter with you, Rosamunde?”

  She shook her head. She smiled a big, fake smile. “I told you, nothing. I was just wondering again. Really wondering, because I hadn’t put it into the big picture, with your parents and your whole life and all.”

  “Wondering what?”

  “Oh—what a nice girl like you is doing in a place like this.”

  And she left.

  It wasn’t ten minutes later that the phone rang. I had been tidying up the pile of books and anything else I could reach. I had been sort of looking at the zoo hanging on the wall, seeing how many animals I could find. “Hello?” I said into the receiver.

  “Izzy, it’s me. I’m downstairs. But I didn’t mean to be—I mean, did you know that nice has more than the one meaning, more than the way we use it now?”

  “Rosamunde.”

  “Yeah. It used to mean, like, fine, delicate, precise, like a nice distinction, or a nice point. My dad’s here. I’ll see you. Next weekend? I’ve got to work all week.”

  “I might be home by then,” I said.