by Lisa Howorth
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. She teetered on.
Max and I started in busting the tar-pops welling up on the hot street, exploding the liquid inside. Ivan seemed more quiet than usual and didn’t join in.
“Brickie says he used to chew tar when he was a kid,” I mused. “He said it was kind of like bubblegum, but not sweet.”
“That’s a big lie,” Max said. “Why would you chew it, then?”
“I don’t know.” I wished I hadn’t brought it up.
“Well, if it’s true, why don’t you try it?” Max said, swatting at me. With his big head and wide lips, he looked like Howdy Doody, and I said so, hoping to derail his challenge.
Ivan looked pensive. “In Mexico people chewed pieces of cactus.”
Max grinned fiendishly. “Okay, so John can try some tar, and you can eat a piece of that cactus in your backyard?”
“Not that kind of cactus, I don’t think,” said Ivan.
“You’re both chicken.” Max flicked us with tar-pop juice. I pulled up a soft, warm blob of tar, rolled it into a ball, and popped it into my mouth. “It’s like Turkish Taffy,” I lied, trying to hold it in my cheek without actually chewing.
“Oh, sure,” Max said. Then, alarmed, he yelled, “You’ll probably get lockjaw now. Or yaws. Spit it out!” We were horrified by yaws, a disease that caused big, open sores that we’d seen on people in Brickie’s National Geographic. Almost as horrified as we were by the photos of floppy native bosoms and incomprehensible penis sheaths.
I spit out my tar cud, simultaneously throwing up some of the morning’s Frosted Flakes.
Ivan shook his head. “The stuff they chewed in Mexico made everybody happy.” He looked both wise and sad as he spoke.
The Goncharoffs’ screen door slammed. There was Elena, resplendent in her kimono, holding up her hands with her Cuba libre and a sheaf of paper. “Darlings!” she called. “Here I am. Sorry to be late.”
Checking the porch swing for bird shit and spiders, she reclined on her side as usual, but seemed a little stiff. We ran up the walk to her. “I have the paper for your posters right here. Ivan, I couldn’t find your box of crayons. So you can use my fingernail polish, I guess.” From her kimono sleeve she pulled some bottles of Revlon polish in brilliant colors and passed around the sheets of paper.
We accepted the paper and polish silently, not wanting to admit that when I’d gotten my new box of sixty-four Crayolas, we’d melted down Ivan’s old box of forty-eight on his backyard grill, hoping to make one giant rainbow crayon, a waxen disaster that mercifully had not yet been discovered.
Elena took a sip from her drink, popped a Miltown, and settled the cocktail on the floor. She shrieked a little when a daddy longlegs ran up her hand, and I noticed a dark bruise on her wrist.
Max said, “Don’t worry—they don’t bite,” and reached for her glass.
She slapped his arm. “No Cuba libre for you boys today. You have a serious job to do.”
“Aww, rats,” said Max.
“Well, what do we want to say on these posters? What was the name you came up with for your party?” I thought Elena was being unusually businesslike, not her typical cheerful self, and she wasn’t bestowing her usual radiant smiles on us.
She handed each of us a couple sheets of paper and we spread ourselves out on the porch. We each picked out a fingernail polish color—I picked Sports Car, of course, and Max snatched a vivid orange called Tropical Punch. Ivan, our creative one, started right away making big pink letters in Cotton Candy: FABULOUS FAMILY FIESTA. “Fingernail polish is good because if it rains, the writing won’t run,” he opined. Max and I looked at his poster and copied him, although more sloppily.
“Okay, what’s the rest of the information?” said Elena. “Like what day and what time will it be?”
We didn’t know. “How about early evening? With a beautiful sunset, and it will be cooler?” Elena suggested.
Naturally we agreed. Everything became so simple with Elena in the picture.
“We have to have it before school starts,” Ivan said. “And that’s soon.”
I added, “And I have to go to the beach with my dad before then.”
Elena said, “So maybe Labor Day weekend would be good? That gives us a week or so to plan.” She thought for a minute. “Let’s do it Monday, September seventh. And that’s extra nice because Labor Day is to celebrate all the working people.”
We bent back to our posters and painted that in. “What time?” Ivan asked.
Elena said, “Oh, how about five o’clock? Cocktail hour.” We added that. “And whose house will it be at?”
“My house!” I exclaimed.
“And that’s okay with your grandparents?” asked Elena, raising an eyebrow.
“Sure it is. They love parties,” I lied, remembering Dimma’s peeved face. We wrote my address, 3512 CONNORS LANE, on the posters.
“And it’s going to be potluck, right?”
“Yep,” said Max. “We’re bringing some kosher stuff from Hofberg’s, and I hope some watermatoes.”
I piped up. “Estelle and my grandmother will make some stuff, and I bet Maria will make those tiny tacos, right, Ivan?”
Ivan just said, “I guess so.”
I added, “And then Beatriz is making stuff, and Mrs. Shreve…”
“And Tim did say he’d help us. There should be plenty to eat,” Elena said.
We wrote POTLUCK across the posters.
“Beatriz wants to have entertainment,” Max said scornfully.
“Very nice! What kind of entertainment?” Elena appreciated Beatriz’s more sophisticated touches.
We looked at one another. “We don’t know yet. But we’ll think of something.” I knew Beatriz would come up with an idea.
“Nothing dumb, like singing,” Max added. “Just put ENTERTAINMENT.”
Ivan left out the first t in entertainment and, since we were copying him, we did, too.
“What if it rains?” Max said. Everyone looked at me.
I knew my grandparents would not be okay with having the party inside our house, and I mumbled, “Umm…”
Elena said, “Well, just put RAIN CANCELS. And we’ll cross our fingers.”
We each made two posters and lounged around until they dried. Elena wanted us to be sure that we invited Gellert, even though he didn’t live in our neighborhood. She thought it would cheer up him and his family, struggling with their immigration problems.
“Gellert always seems pretty cheerful to me,” I said.
“Well, you boys haven’t seen him since school let out,” Elena said reprovingly, “so how would you know? You’ve never had him over to play this summer.”
This was true. I tried to defend myself by saying “He’s great at kickball, but he eats paste at school.” This was a bizarre thing that some kids did, worse, in a way, than picking and eating buggers. “And he’s kind of…dumb.”
Elena said, “John, you know better than to say that! Gellert is actually very smart. He’s just different, and he can’t even speak English yet. I’m disappointed in you.” Elena rarely got mad at us, and she was the last person in the world I wanted mad at me. Her frown was a punch to my gut.
“I’m sorry, Elena!” I said. “We like Gellert, don’t we, Ivan?”
Ivan nodded slightly, looking away to make it clear that he didn’t want to be associated with my ignorant faux pas.
Max shook his head and said, “Boy, you really put your dirty moron feet in your mouth.”
Elena’s mouth twitched, resisting a smile. “So we’ll invite Gellert and his family and make sure he has a good time, right?”
“We will!” I vowed. Elena finally smiled, flooding me with relief.
The posters dried and did look wonderful.
We were ready to distribut
e them. Elena rose crookedly, as if something hurt, giving us each a light hug, not one of her robust ones, saying, “Good job, my darlings. I’m going to take a little nap.” We gave her a poster for Gellert and rolled the rest up, stuffing the paper tubes into our back pockets.
We didn’t want to post them too close to the Shepherd Street park, where the Bridge Hoods—teenaged boys a little older than Liz who lurked on the bridge with their transistor radios, smoking cigarettes and sniffing model-airplane glue—might notice a poster and think they could come to the Fiesta. We started down past the Friedmanns’ and worked back up the lane, putting the last poster on the streetlight at the corner of Brookville Road, where the Montebiancos’ house was. They looked grand, and we were proud of our work.
* * *
—
We collapsed on the ground to relax. We often loitered at this corner because it was great for spotting cars and license plates. A ’58 Ford Country Squire passed on Brookville, and an Edsel. Eventually we spotted a new Chevy Impala with its cat-eye rear, and a two-tone Pontiac wagon about twenty feet long, and a beautiful Thunderbird with little portal windows. Ivan called an Alaska license plate—a first for us, since it was a new state. We chewed some long stems of grass that grew around the stop sign, then we made grass whistles—Max excelled at this. Holding his blade of grass loosely between his thumbs, he could create a low, rumbling, and gigantic fart sound, and this usually made us laugh as if we hadn’t heard it ten thousand times. But Ivan didn’t laugh this time, and I wondered why he seemed so subdued, and then I thought how Elena had been out of sorts, too, and remembered the bruise on her wrist.
“Hey, Ivan, is anything wrong?” I asked.
“I’m just tired.” Then he said, “I couldn’t sleep last night because of Josef and Elena fighting.”
Max said, “But it’s like with the Andersens; they always argue, right? So it’s not a big deal?”
“I guess,” he said, listlessly pulling at grass.
“What were they fighting about?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. She came home really late, and it was about that, and having so many dates. But then I heard him say something about taking her passport away, and something about a ring that was their grandmother’s.”
We were quiet for a minute. Then, not knowing what else to say, I told him, “The best thing to do is don’t think about it. That’s what I used to do when my mom and dad had fights.”
“Grown-ups are always saying secret, scary things that kids have to listen to,” Max reasoned. “Do what I do: Pretend that it’s some stupid TV show, and in your mind change the channel and think about something else, like bosoms, or just turn it off. Sometimes I stick chewed Bazooka in my ears.” He put an arm around Ivan and shook him gently.
“We should be hunting right now,” I said to Ivan. “Finding some bad spiders would cheer you up.”
“Yeah. I wish I had a tarantula for Josef.” He smiled wanly. “I could put it in his cigar!”
“We need to look harder,” Max said. He pointed across the lane at the Pond Lady’s house. “That’s where we need to look.”
Just then two older ladies in a brown Frazer sedan rolled up the lane, the driver with her hand out signaling. They slowly pulled up at the stop sign and looked both ways about five times.
“Guys,” Max said, determined to get a laugh out of Ivan, “watch this!” Ivan and I rose to our knees, knowing we’d better be prepared to run. Max took a few steps to the open car window and said, very meaningfully, into the face of the lady riding shotgun, “Bosom.”
As we beat it down the lane we heard the driver lady shriek, “Did that boy say bosom to you?” We howled like wolves, even Ivan.
5
My mother and sister were scheduled to visit that weekend; my sister would stay until it was time for her to go to Holton-Arms for the new school year. As usual, on the rare occasions when my mother visited, I always hoped she would refuse to go back to the sanatorium, even though I’d been warned not to expect that; according to Brickie and Dimma, she was still sick.
Liz arrived first from Camp Furman, very tan, with dirt under her fingernails, which bore remnants of orange nail polish. I could see golden stubble on her legs, and her long red hair had been chopped off at the ears and stuck up in shocks and knots all over the top of her head. Kiss curls hooked on her cheeks stiffly, as if they’d been pasted there. Dimma was horrified.
“What on earth have you done to yourself?” she demanded.
“What?” Liz said with bogus innocence. “I learned how to tease it.” She grinned. “Don’t you like it, Dimma?”
“It’s not appropriate for a girl your age, and we are going straight to Garfinckel’s to have it repaired before your mother gets here. If it can be repaired.” Dimma ran her fingers over Liz’s head, smoothing the hanks that spiked up randomly. “What did you do—use an entire can of Aqua Net?”
“Mama won’t care—she teases hers.” My mother wore a short pompadour, clipped on the sides and high on top like the Everly Brothers’, except that she dyed it platinum. At least it had still been that color when I last saw her.
I knew the truth about Liz’s hair—that she had been brushing only the top of her long mane at camp, not underneath, and a tangled mass like an orange Brillo pad had developed, at which point she’d had to cut it all off. This had happened before, and I’d been the one to chop out the matted mess and smooth the remaining hair over the damage. Somehow this had gone undetected. “You look like Clarabell,” I said.
“At least I don’t have scabs on my head,” she said, eyeing my ringworm. “I heard that enemas cure scabby heads.”
This alarmed me because my grandmother believed enemas were good for everything. She often threatened me with them to scare me into better hygiene or behavior, but enemas had been administered a couple times. Dimma said, “That’s enough, you two. His head is clearing up.” It wasn’t; it still itched viciously.
Dimma called Garfinckel’s salon and told Liz to go take a shower, not a bath, and to wash her hair thoroughly with the Breck. Liz stomped upstairs to her room with her suitcase and slammed the door. In a minute, “A Big Hunk o’ Love” was blaring. I followed Dimma into the kitchen. “She shaved her legs, too,” I mentioned casually.
“Damn it.” Dimma lit a Chesterfield. “She’s headed straight for Florence Crittenton.” Florence Crittenton was a place where girls had to go to have babies if they didn’t have a husband, which I was a little confused about. Dimma went to ladies’ lunches to help them. She said, “She’ll end up like…God in heaven.” She shook her head but didn’t finish the sentence and began rinsing out ashtrays at the sink. Dimma used a lot of expressions with religious words in them, but we didn’t go to church. I supposed that was why she said them—to make up for it. I wondered if she was saying that Liz would end up like God in heaven, but that made no sense, and in my opinion Liz was not destined for heaven.
* * *
—
Dimma and Liz returned later, Liz sporting a sleek pixie cut à la Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, another of Elena’s favorite films, and a red nose from crying.
“Now you look like Bozo,” I said, running out of striking range. I was a little bit glad to have Liz home but didn’t have any idea of how to show it. I felt like Max, who secretly liked Beatriz but tried to act as if he didn’t. And I wished I could have my mother all to myself.
Liz yelled after me, “Why don’t you go drink some Clorox with your dopey friends?” I’d once accidentally drunk some bleach that had been in a 7 Up bottle, and had to have my stomach pumped.
“Dear Lord, deliver us,” Dimma said, shaking her head. “Can you two, for the sake of your mother, please try to get along?”
Brickie had already driven down to St. Elizabeths, my mother’s hospital, which was just off Alabama Avenue in Southeast Washington. I badly wanted to g
o, especially since Brickie was taking Dimma’s gleaming cream-colored Cadillac, but he said it wasn’t a good idea. I thought he was worried, maybe, that I’d get TB or something, but couldn’t I also get it from my mother? Another thing that made no sense to me, but I didn’t press it.
* * *
—
They returned late that afternoon. For a second I didn’t recognize my mother—I just saw a pretty, well-dressed lady being helped out of the car by Brickie. She was so thin and pale, practically the color of Brickie’s tawny roses blooming in a bed next to the driveway, and normally in summer she was gorgeously tan. An inch or two of black roots showed bizarrely in her ice-colored hair. Then I noticed she was wearing a navy-blue shirtwaist that I liked, and her lipstick was her usual color, Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow, so I felt better. Brickie, carrying her suitcase, announced happily, “Here’s our girl!” Dimma rushed out the screen door to hug her, then held her at arm’s length, telling her how wonderful she looked. At a loss for words, I ran to her, too, squeezing between my mother and Dimma, and wrapped myself around her.
“My baby!” she said, letting loose of Dimma and folding herself over me. “Oh, I missed you so much!” When we separated I saw tears in her gray eyes. “You look wonderful! Did you miss me?”
“No,” I said, suddenly a little angry.
Dimma said, “John.”
Mama just smiled. She hugged me again, planting little smooches all over my face, which I hoped would leave Cherries in the Snow smudges. I felt my anger melt away, and tears coming on, but I wasn’t going to cry. “I’m much better now,” she told me. “I’ll be coming home for good soon, I promise.”