Under the Watsons' Porch

by Susan Shreve

  But there is something I do want. I just don't bring the subject up to my parents because it would make them unhappy, and besides, they probably know it already, the way parents seem to know everything whether you tell them or not.

  The truth is I would like to have been asked to Rosie O'Leary's birthday party and then I could have said, “Thank you very much but I'm afraid that I'm unable to come, even in time for birthday cake, because it would bore me to death.”

  In my class of twenty-seven girls and fifteen boys, almost the same class I've been with since I started kindergarten, sixteen of the girls are popular and the rest of us are hopeless. “Hopeless” is P.J.'s word.

  “It's not a bad thing,” P.J. said to me. “It's just the way it is when you're a girl and doomed.”

  The popular girls in the sixth grade dress alike in tight jeans and little T-shirts with flowers in full bloom painted on the back and clunky shoes. They come to school with a stash of makeup hidden in their bookbags, and in the girls' room before school begins, they spread peach blush on their cheekbones, paint their nails magenta, and put lavender eye shadow on their eyelids.

  And they whisper. It's the whispering I especially don't like.

  I would rather be doomed than popular, but I'd like to make the choice myself.

  So I've become very good at lying. “Safe lies” is how I think of them. I'll say things casually, like, “We'll be going to Vail, Colorado, to ski for Christmas as usual.” Or “I have a cousin who is an actress in New York City (which is true) and she has given me a walk-on part in her television show (which is not true).” Or that I have a boyfriend in South Africa whom I met on my summer vacation.

  And if I'm asked about my grades—a subject the popular sixteen girls are interested in discussing—I say, “mostly A's and an F.” I like that balance. It makes me seem smart and a little dangerous. Hardly anyone gets an F.

  Tommy goes through the screen door and into the hall, standing in the middle of the room, which is small but with enough space for my grandmother's old gold brocade loveseat with springs that stick in your bottom if you happen to sit down on it, which we don't.

  “So is this all you have downstairs?” Tommy asks. “Just three rooms?”

  “We have a bathroom downstairs. A half bathroom.” As if that information will hold any interest for Tommy.

  “Powder room,” he says. “That's what the mother I had before this one called the downstairs bathroom. We had two powder rooms in the mansion where we lived, one for guests.”

  He heads for the kitchen and I follow him.

  What I know of Tommy's history is complicated and I don't know if it's true. My father, who wouldn't dream of making up stories, told me that Tommy was a “doorstep baby” when doorstep babies were more common.

  “He was left by someone, maybe his real mother, maybe not, on the doorstep of an older woman's house who hadn't the wherewithal to deal with a baby and so she called the authorities.” That's how my father talks. As old-fashioned as if he were actually my grandfather and he's only thirty-nine.

  The authorities, according to my father, are the people in charge of protecting children from bad or incompetent parents. The authorities arranged for Tommy to live with Betty something or other and her husband, but Betty turned out to be incompetent, leaving Tommy in his baby carriage in front of the S&F department store so she could go inside to look for leather pants, which took her several hours. I know Tommy had a second mother before he went to live with Clarissa Bowers, but my father didn't know the details of those stories. Besides, he said, it's hard to know what's true and what isn't. No one I've ever met has had so many mothers.

  “So what kind of mansion did you live in?” I ask.

  I've never been inside a mansion and we don't have any in our neighborhood. But there is the Slough Mansion downtown, where you can pay five dollars to the Slough family to take a look around on Saturdays and Sundays when it's open, and the Birdsall Mansion near the high school, which is a private art gallery, but I've never been to either one.

  “A huge mansion and I didn't like it,” Tommy says. “It was in Florida and I lived there with Belinda and Jack and their ‘natural’ son, Jack junior. They had big cats.” He opened the fridge.

  “Big cats?” I ask.

  “Tigers, jaguars, that kind of thing. They were big-game hunters in Zimbabwe.” He took a bottle of white wine, Pinot Grigio, from the inside shelf of the fridge where my parents keep it. “May I have some?” he asks, perfectly normal, as if it is the most ordinary thing in the world to come into my house and open my fridge and take out a bottle of white wine.

  And I say yes. I'm sitting on the kitchen table with my legs crossed yoga-style and my arms folded across my chest and thinking to myself that I've just said yes to a thirteen-year-old boy's drinking my parents' wine. I must have a worried expression on my face because Tommy looks over at me with a sweet smile.

  “Don't worry,” he says. “I'm allowed to drink wine whenever I want at home.”

  “Me too,” I say, though of course this isn't true.

  Milo and I are allowed to have a sip of wine, usually champagne, at Christmas dinner and Thanksgiving and sometimes at my parents' birthdays, but it's only a sip poured in the bottom of our glass and it has never occurred to me, never even crossed my mind, to try it myself from the open bottle my parents keep in the refrigerator.

  Something about Tommy Bowers makes me want to say yes to everything he asks. He could ask me to run away from home with him or skip school or take a nap in my parents' bed, which even I'm not allowed to do. And I'd probably say yes. I'm thinking that this could be the rule of our friendship from now on. Sitting here in the old kitchen of our dumpy house watching him pour Pinot Grigio in my mother's very best wineglass, I am thinking that I may always say yes to Tommy.

  “Did the tigers and jaguars live in cages?” I change the subject.

  “They were dead,” he says opening the back door and looking out at our garden, which is my mother's pride and joy, with roses and camellias and lilac bushes and a cutting garden.

  “They kept them mounted on the wall. Just their heads. The jaguar's tongue was hanging out when they killed him.” He turns to me and smiles, a toothy smile with a dimple on one side of his mouth, which makes him look innocent although it's perfectly clear that he's not.

  I check the clock. One o'clock. My parents could be home at any time, and they'll be upset to find me in our house with a boy they don't know. In fact, my mother might be crazy mad.

  “Where're your parents?” Tommy says as if he's got X-ray vision and can read my thoughts.

  “They're buying me a birthday present,” I say.

  “Do you know what they're going to buy you?” He's sitting at the kitchen table.

  “I said I wanted a jean skirt and a new wallet.”

  “Is that what you really want or just what you said?” he asks.

  I'm surprised at his question. It's as if he already knows me better than anyone, even my parents. What I really want is a necklace that I saw at a funky shop called Wake Up Little Suzie. It has three rows of tiny little sparkly diamonds, not real of course but very beautiful. But I didn't ask my parents for it because my mother would say it was a frivolous gift when there are things I really need, like new shoes and a bathing suit.

  “What I really want,” I tell Tommy, who's on his way out of the kitchen, “is this necklace I saw yesterday in a shop in town.”

  “What kind?”

  “Diamonds,” I say.

  I'm following Tommy upstairs. He wants to see the bedrooms and I'm thinking, Oh no, I didn't make my bed and I've got underclothes all over the floor, even this new underwire bra that just killed when I wore it to the last day of school yesterday.

  “Real?”

  I don't answer. All I'm thinking about is what's on the floor of my bedroom.

  “How come you don't have any posters?” he asks, going in the door to my bedroom while I run around gatherin
g up the Little Lady blue panties I've left half under the bed and the bra that is on my desk chair and toss them and a couple of T-shirts in my closet.

  “I like a lot of posters all over my walls.”

  I finish collecting the laundry, toss it in the corner of my closet, and collapse at the end of my bed.

  “My mom made this girly room when I was about nine, even the curtains and the bedspread, and I don't complain about it because it'd hurt her feelings,” I say.

  He has opened the door to the sunporch.

  “This is cool,” he says.

  “I have sleepovers here in the summer.”

  “We could have a walkie-talkie going from my bedroom to your bedroom.” He points to the back of the Bowerses' house. “That's my bedroom.”

  Tommy's house is modernized, and what used to be a sunporch like mine is now Tommy's bedroom, a glassed-in, heated room so close to my sunporch that I could almost reach over from here to the Bowerses' house and touch it.

  “Then we could talk all the time, even when I'm in bed. I'd just call you up and you'd be in bed and we'd talk all night.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But my mom's a monster about the phone after nine at night.”

  “That's why we'd have a walkie-talkie. Our mothers would never know.”

  I'm sitting on the end of my bed and Tommy's looking out the window that faces the house next door, and he turns to me with a quizzical expression on his face.

  “What do you think of your mom?”

  “I love her,” I say, taken aback. “Why do you ask that?”

  He shrugs. “You called her a monster as if you don't like her.”

  “I didn't mean to,” I say. “I love her but she also drives me crazy because she's—I don't know—such a mother.”

  He sits down on the bed beside me.

  “I guess I just never had a mother for long enough to know.”

  “I guess,” I say, sounding stupid in my own ears.

  But it's hard for me to imagine trying out new mothers since I have always had my funny, flashy-tempered mother, who is a constant in my life, always there whether I want her to be or not.

  Tommy has hopped up now and wants to see the rest of the house: Milo's room and the study, my parents' bedroom, and the attic where we keep all of my mom's parents' old furniture since they moved to an apartment, and boxes of my parents' scrapbooks. But I hear my parents' car out front.

  “We can't,” I say. “My parents will be back soon.”

  My parents have never said I'm not allowed to have a boy upstairs when no one is in the house. But I know that's what they'll say if they come in the house now and discover that Tommy and I have been in my bedroom together.

  That's one of the problems with parents who teach school. Other parents may think their kids are perfect, but my parents know better. They spend all day and night with kids, and according to my mom, none of them is perfect.

  Now Tommy has taken a picture of me out of the bookcase. It's my favorite: I was three with curly brown hair, riding on a merry-go-round, my head thrown back, my hands high on the horse's mane as if he's real and I'm in control.

  “You?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “Can I have it?”

  “I don't think I can give it to you,” I say, wondering what in the world does Tommy Bowers want with a picture of me when I was little.

  “I hear my parents' car,” I say.

  “So we better go downstairs.”

  “In a hurry,” I say.

  My parents haven't met Tommy Bowers, only by reputation, but already I have a sense that they're not going to like him.

  3. Shadows

  I love my bedroom, especially at night, when shadows from the trees bending with the wind and cars taking a shortcut down our street slide across the wall in animal shapes. My bed is wide and high, with a canopy and curtains that pull on either side so I can, as I did when I was little, sleep here totally concealed from anyone who happens to come into my bedroom unannounced. A burglar is the sort of person I imagined coming into my room when I was younger. Milo lies in bed waiting for pit bulls with plans to eat him.

  I love that my room is old-fashioned, that it doesn't look like the rooms of my friends who do have posters on the walls, mainly rock stars or movie stars, but P.J. has a huge poster of a Labrador retriever, and Linsay, another friend of mine, has James Dean straddling his motorcycle with a cigarette hanging between his lips.

  What I have instead of posters is pictures of women in advertisements for Ivory Snow and Lysol and Castile soap and Betty Crocker cake mix. My mother used to have these same pictures in her bedroom when she was growing up, and before that my grandmother had them as well. It makes me feel safe to sleep in a room with pictures that have lasted for so long surrounding my bed.

  Maybe I'll explain this to Tommy the next time he mentions posters.

  It's after midnight now, going on the day after my birthday, and I'm in bed with a flashlight and a notebook writing a letter to Tommy under my covers, my door shut, my radio tuned to the all-music station on low.

  I'm too excited to sleep.

  “I haven't seen you so thrilled about your birthday since you were little, Ellie,” my mother said at my birthday dinner, which was roast chicken and gravy and mashed potatoes and apple spice cake with maple sugar icing.

  “That's because she loves her blue jean skirt,” Milo said, since he's the one who gave me the blue jean skirt although my mother picked it out and paid for it.

  “I do love it. It makes me look thin again,” I said.

  “Are you fat?” Milo asked, looking up from his plate.

  “Ellie is not fat,” my father said. “She's gorgeous.”

  The truth is I'm regular and used to be skinny, but all of the girls in sixth grade, especially the popular girls, talk about weight and boys, one subject or the other all of the time unless it's the end of the grading period and then they talk about grades. So I can't help talking about fat sometimes.

  “Maybe Ellie's just happy to be twelve,” my mother said. “That would be my guess.”

  “I'm very happy to be twelve,” I said after blowing out the candles on the spice cake, but I'm really neither happy nor unhappy to be twelve. Twelve is fine. It's what I happen to be.

  After dinner, we sat around and played Cranium on the dining room table and we always figure out a way to let Milo win because he loses his temper and throws all the game pieces on the floor if he doesn't. When it got to be about ten o'clock, P.J. called from Rosie O'Leary's birthday slumber party to say she was having the most boring time. I could tell as soon as I picked up the phone and heard her whispery voice.

  “Is the party terrible?” I ask, hoping that it is since I'm not there.

  “The worst,” P.J. says. “We had hot dogs and hamburgers and carrot cake, and Josie Tree threw up her cake on Mrs. O'Leary's carpet, so the carpet has to be professionally cleaned and Mrs. O'Leary had a temper tantrum.”

  “Because of Josie?”

  “Because Josie ruined the carpet,” P.J. says. “You're lucky you missed it.”

  “I didn't exactly miss it,” I say. “I wasn't invited.”

  P.J. laughs. “That was lucky, too.”

  I was really feeling great as I got ready for bed, swinging around a little to the music on the radio, checking to see if Tommy was visible in the bedroom next door. But because my light was on, I couldn't tell.

  After I got into bed and turned out my light, pretending I was going to sleep, my mother and father came in together to tell me good night. This didn't surprise me. They often come in together, and on my birthday, every single birthday since I can remember, they sit down on the end of my bed and my mother tells me about the dinner my grandmother brought to the hospital to celebrate the night I was born. The dinner was roast chicken and gravy and mashed potatoes and apple spice cake and even though I didn't get to eat it that night when I was zero, we have had it every June 13 since then.

  But
tonight my parents had something else in mind.

  Even before my father started to speak, I could tell they were going to talk about Tommy.

  “Did you meet our new neighbor today?” was the first question.

  My parents are hopeless at lying. Of course they knew I had met Tommy Bowers. They probably even saw him as he dashed out our back door and over the fence.

  As soon as I heard the car door slam, I headed downstairs first so I'd be in the kitchen pretending to check out the fridge when they walked in the front door. Tommy ran down the stairs after me, through the dining room, passing the big window that overlooks the driveway where the car was parked, into the kitchen, out the back door, and over the fence, which goes from our beautiful garden to the Bowerses' ugly one.

  I watched through the side window in the kitchen as my parents unpacked the car, came up the front steps, and opened the door, and I could hear Milo stomp up the stairs to my parents' room carrying my presents. My parents could possibly have seen Tommy but they didn't mention it.

  Sometime after dinner, Clarissa Bowers called my mother to say how nice it was that Tommy had met me and that I lived next door and how much she hoped that we would be friends, especially since Tommy was new in the neighborhood.

  “Mrs. Bowers didn't mention a thing about the trouble Tommy has been in,” my father said. “But we learned quite a lot today when we were having coffee at Moxie's sitting at the table next to the Brittles.”

  “I don't like the Brittles.” I slid down in my bed.

  “This is about Tommy and not the Brittles,” my mother said.

  “I just wanted to be clear that I hate them and tonight is still my birthday.”