Under the Watsons' Porch

by Susan Shreve

  Tommy's in a cozy mood, walking along beside me so close he keeps bumping into my shoulder.

  “So I have an Aunt Eva who's Clarissa's sister and then her husband who's in a wheelchair and they have two children, very stuck-up, especially the girl who's our age. And then there's an uncle who sounds as if he's swallowed a bag of marbles. Yoble, yoble, yoble.” He imitates the sound. “And his wife who divorced him but liked my grandfather even though she didn't like his son.”

  His slips his arm through mine in that funny way grown-ups have of walking along together. I like it, of course, but it feels a little awkward and embarrassing.

  “A bunch of my new cousins were interested to meet me since I'm new to the family and adopted and have this reputation for trouble.”

  I'm thinking it's weird to suddenly, out of nowhere, have this huge family you've never met. Our family is tiny, only me and Milo and three cousins, one of whom I like okay and the other two are creeps.

  “So are you listening?”

  “I'm listening,” I say.

  “The boy cousin—his name is Sean—asked me if I'd ever been in a home for juveniles. I suppose he meant criminals.”

  “Where did he get that idea?”

  “Because his parents were probably talking about how Clarissa had adopted a teenage juvenile delinquent.” This seems to please him as he saunters along beside me, shaking his head so his floppy hair is out of his eyes. “And maybe she has,” he adds.

  “My mother heard good things from the kids in the neighborhood about the Lollipop Garden,” I say, changing the subject.

  “Good,” Tommy said. “I expected that.”

  “Ms. O'Shaunessey was very excited and so was Hannah's mother and someone else who saw my mother at the grocery store.”

  When the light turns green, Tommy heads across the street taking hold of my hand.

  “By tomorrow afternoon, people will be talking about us in every house on Lincoln Road.” He jumps and hits a tree branch, grabbing a handful of leaves.

  At the corner, we stop at Wake Up Little Suzie and I show Tommy the sparkly necklace which is still in the window.

  “The one you got me is more beautiful,” I say.

  “Because this one is fake.” Tommy's nose is pressed against the storefront window.

  We head on down the street past the grocery store and the hamburger restaurant and through the glass doors of the five-and-ten.

  G.C. Murphy's is my favorite store in the world. It has everything anyone needs and lots of stuff we don't need, too. And it's cheap enough for me to afford to buy things on my five-dollar weekly allowance. There's makeup and clothes and school supplies and candy and junk food and costumes and masks and wigs and shoes and paintings and rugs and towels and books and toys. I could go on and on.

  I know we won't go straight for the candy aisle. It's too much fun to wander the aisles back and forth imagining what you'd buy even though you won't.

  In the cosmetics department, Tommy checks the powders and blush and nail polish. He picks up a tube of Raspberry lipstick, takes off the top, and winds out the lipstick.

  “Do you like this color?” he asks.

  “I don't know. I can't tell without trying it.”

  “Try it,” he says.

  I laugh. “Then I'll have to buy it.”

  “Just try it,” Tommy says. “You don't have to buy it if you don't like the color.”

  “I do, Tommy,” I say. “If I try it on, I'll get my germs on it and then I have to buy it so no one else will get my germs.”

  He looks at me with an odd expression.

  “Who will know?” he asks.

  I consider this question. I've never thought this way before, and although I know it's wrong to use something without buying it, I wonder how a person knows something is wrong if he doesn't know the rules. Or whether someone like Tommy knows what Puss refers to as “the difference between right and wrong.”

  “I'll know,” I say in answer to his question. “I'll know I have germs and have left them on the lipstick and someone will buy it and take it home and put it on with my germs spread all over her lips.”

  “That's how many germs you've got?” he asks. “Thanks for telling me. I'll be more careful after this.”

  We go down the costume aisle and Tommy picks up a skeleton mask. He puts on the mask and looks at himself in the mirror, making a strangling gesture with his hands at his neck. I'm trying on a black mask with silver sequins and pressing my face into the skeleton on Tommy's face when a clerk appears out of nowhere and tells us to return the masks and not to try them on unless we plan to buy them.

  I quickly take off the mask and put it back in the bin of black-and-sequin masks, but Tommy is in no hurry. While the clerk watches with one hand on her hip, her lips tight, her eyes so narrow they've almost disappeared into her head, Tommy makes a drama of taking off his skeleton mask, reaching behind him, pulling the rubber band, lifting the skeleton face very slowly off his own face, waving it in the air to shake off the germs, putting it back in the bin.

  “Don't let me see that again,” the clerk says.

  “Don't look,” Tommy says.

  But I'm worried.

  “Let's leave and come back through another door,” I whisper.

  “We have no reason to leave. We did nothing wrong.” I can tell he has a plan as we head to the candy department.

  “How much money do you have?” he asks.

  “I forgot about money.” I reach into the pocket of my shorts and find four quarters, a dime, and a penny, which I hold out in my palm for him to see.

  “That's it,” I say. “What about you?”

  “Nothing,” he says, pulling the pockets of his trousers inside out.

  “Then we should go back home and get some money,” I say, knowing that I've got at least twenty-seven dollars in my top bureau drawer, ready to go into my savings account at the bank.

  But Tommy has something else in mind.

  We reach the candy aisle, rows and rows of large bags of chocolates and jellybeans and jellies and licorice and nut candy and bars and gummy bears and lollipops. I don't like candy except peanut M&M's. So aisles of candy actually make me feel a little sick and I hang behind Tommy while he walks up and down the aisle, looking around from time to time, picking up a candy bar and looking at the contents, the calories and ingredients, that sort of thing, as if he has an interest in such details.

  I'm getting impatient since it's taking so long to look at candy that we won't be able to buy because of our money problem. And I'm worried that at any moment the clerk will see us loitering and take us to the manager, who will call the police, who will come to the five-and-ten and pick us up in the paddy wagon and take us to the police station and call our parents.

  All of this is going through my mind when Tommy tells me he's ready to leave.

  “Home?”

  He nods and leads the way in a kind of hurry out of the store.

  “Are we going to get money?” I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  “The clerk was a creep,” he says.

  “I know,” I say.

  We are headed down Lincoln and Tommy's walking so fast that I have to jog to keep up.

  “We should check on our club,” he says as we reach the Watsons' corner. “I haven't been here all week. Have you?”

  “I didn't want to come without you.”

  We walk up the driveway, looking in the window for the Miss Watsons but no one is visible. Tommy pushes the lattice gate very gently since it's almost off its hinges. He shuts the door behind us, opens the beach chairs, and we sit down.

  “What time do you have to be home?”

  “Soon,” I say. “My parents have been away all day and they'll expect me to go swimming at the neighborhood pool with them and then get pizza.”

  “Do we have time to plant the lollipops?” he asks, leaning back in his chair, his arm behind his neck.

  “Before I have to be home?”
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  “That's the question,” he says.

  I'm confused. As far as I know, we don't have any lollipops to plant unless Tommy plans for us to get some money and go back to G.C. Murphy's and it's too late for me to do that.

  “I can't be home any later than five.”

  “Good,” he says.

  And he reaches into the deep pockets of his trousers and pulls out two bags of lollipops, one from each pocket.

  14. Reflection

  I've been awake all night. The moon is a circle of light filling my room with a kind of silvery whiteness. I can even see the numbers on my alarm clock. Three in the morning and I'm not even sleepy, so I get up and wander around my bedroom in the white darkness, going finally to the sunporch, where there's a soft breeze. I bring my pillow, drop it onto the cot that faces the Bowerses' house, and lie down.

  When Tommy took out the bags of lollipops he had stolen from G.C. Murphy's, I didn't even let him know that I was upset. I acted as if the lollipops had magically materialized in his pockets, like the ones we planted in careful rows for the neighborhood kids to find tomorrow morning.

  I don't know what's the matter with me. Certainly I was afraid the clerk at G.C. Murphy's had seen him, seen us leave the store with stolen goods. But I said nothing, as if I approved of what he'd done, as if stealing were the most normal thing in my world.

  I helped him plant the lollipops in perfect rows, folded the beach chairs, told him it was time for me to leave, and we left with Tommy talking about our plans for tomorrow morning.

  “You're so quiet,” Tommy said to me on the walk down the Watsons' driveway and home.

  “I guess I am,” I said.

  But I didn't tell him why and I don't think he worried about my silence or wondered why I was quiet or even if I thought shoplifting was wrong. He needed lollipops and so he took them. Maybe he would have paid for them if we'd had money. Or maybe not.

  But I didn't say anything, so now I'm so furious at myself for keeping silent, and at Tommy because he might have ruined everything, that I can't sleep.

  I don't know what he's thinking. Probably nothing except about tomorrow when the kids arrive under the Watsons' porch, and we turn into magicians.

  I got home last night just as my parents were packing up the swimsuits and towels, and we all headed to the swim club and messed around even though it was still raining a light misty rain, and then we went to the pizza parlor for dinner.

  We sat at the table and talked about what we'd done all day, and I actually told the truth that I'd gone to the shopping center with Tommy. Just in case the clerk at the five-and-ten had seen him take the lollipops, I wanted to tell the truth that I'd been there, too. I wanted to protect him in spite of what he did and later, sitting with my family at the pizza parlor, I had a sense of doom—a kind of cloud over my head covering the sun so the air around me was cool. And I knew something unpleasant could happen to Tommy and me.

  Tommy is sleeping. The lights are off in his room although in another upstairs room they are on and I imagine that Clarissa is still awake. I'm lying on the cot going over and over the day from the moment the taxicab pulled up in front of the Bowerses' house to late afternoon when Tommy stood up from the beach chair under the Watsons' porch and dumped the lollipops he'd stolen on the ground.

  I can't decide whether I'm afraid because what Tommy did was wrong or I'm afraid of being caught and of my parents' disappointment in me, which is worse than anger. I don't remember ever having this jumble of feelings in my brain, as if my skin no longer fits me and I need to squiggle out of it and get a larger size.

  Yesterday I was certain of things. I knew what was right to do and what was wrong and never thought about it. Sometimes I did wrong things but I knew they were wrong and that I might be caught and punished. But I made a choice. That's gone now, just dissolved in the air and my brain is in a jumble.

  Tonight is not the first time I've thought about right and wrong—really thought about it in a serious way. My father and mother are always arguing about black and white and gray. Mom tends to see the world as good and bad and right and wrong and black and white.

  “Things are never black or white, Meg,” my father will say. “There're extenuating circumstances or ambiguities or complications. Almost always.”

  “A person can't live that way,” my mother will say.

  “Don't be such a teacher!”

  And sometimes, my quiet father will slam down the paper or bang the door and leave the room.

  I always tend to think like Mom because it's safe to think that way, I guess. Safe and simple. But I'm more interested in what my father has to say.

  “Look at the whole picture,” he'll say to my mother about such and such a kid at school. “He may have done a bad thing, but it doesn't make him a bad boy. You know that.”

  And my mother does know that but she's too stubborn to change her mind in front of him.

  I don't think Tommy's bad. Not a criminal or a juvenile delinquent or even a bad boy. I know that if I were blamed as an accomplice to his stealing, he would say I hadn't seen him do it, so it wasn't my fault.

  My guess is that Tommy's had such an empty life, if he finds something he needs, like lollipops, he takes them.

  At least that's what I'm telling myself tonight as I drift off to sleep in the cot on the sunporch with the weight of all this thinking.

  Sometime later, still in absolute darkness except for the moon, the light in Tommy's room goes on and that wakes me up. I sit up on the cot and see him across the divide. He's opening the window in his bedroom, leaning out, calling my name.

  “Ellie,” he calls.

  I don't answer.

  “Ellie? Can you hear me?”

  I lie very still on the cot and hope he can see me in the dark and know that I'm not answering him on purpose.

  “I'm so excited, I can't sleep,” he says.

  And though I want more than anything to run over to the screen on his side of the sunporch, I close my eyes and don't move.

  15. Opening Ceremony

  Milo is standing beside the cot, fully dressed for the day in his bathing suit and T-shirt, looking down at me and calling my name.

  “I'm sleeping,” I say. “It's too early to get up.”

  “It's already six and it's Saturday and it's raining.”

  I sit up, rubbing my eyes. It's gray and drizzling and warm.

  “What about the lollipops? Will they still be growing?”

  “They're probably full-grown lollipops by now and the rain won't hurt them. They're under the Watsons' porch.”

  “I know,” Milo says, sitting down on the bed beside me. “How come you slept on the sunporch?”

  “I wanted to,” I say, stretching, climbing out of bed, checking Tommy's room for the shadow of him getting up but seeing nothing.

  “I can hear you talk to Tommy at night,” Milo says.

  Milo's bedroom is next to mine. He keeps the window open on the side of the house next to the sunporch, so it must be Tommy's side of the conversation that he's heard.

  It worries me that Milo is part of the Lollipop Garden. In a funny way, it doesn't bother me to pretend to the neighborhood kids that we can actually grow lollipops. But it does bother me with my very own brother. I suppose it feels like a betrayal because Milo trusts me absolutely. And he should. I'm his sister.

  I grab my clothes out of the bottom drawer of my dresser, the same clothes I wore yesterday, including my yellow cargo shorts, and go into the bathroom to change. I can tell Milo is standing on the other side of the door. I can see his feet.

  Everything is ready under the Watsons' porch, so Tommy and I have nothing to do. I'm bringing the games, board games that we keep in the television room, and I'm picking up another packet of Mom's new seeds from the potting shed to pass out for next week's lollipops. Tommy's making lemonade and I made chocolate chip cookies after we got home last night from the pizza parlor. We're doing a story game that Tommy made up, pretendi
ng we're orphans. I've never wanted to be an orphan at all, but Tommy tells me that most ordinary kids do.

  “Orphans-on-the-Go.” That's Tommy's name for us.

  Milo is standing right beside the door to the bathroom when I open it.

  “Can I come with you and Tommy to the Lollipop Garden?” he asks.

  “We have to go first and get everything ready for camp and then you come at ten with the other kids.”

  “But I'm your brother.” He follows me downstairs.

  “It doesn't make any difference, Milo,” I say. “You're the camper and I'm the counselor.”

  He follows me into the kitchen, sitting down at the table, his chin on his fists.

  “I don't like that.”

  “That's the way it is if you want to be part of the Lollipop Garden.”

  He reaches for a chocolate chip cookie.

  “No cookies for breakfast,” I say, but he eats one anyway and takes another.

  I pour cereal for us both, slice two bananas, get the orange juice out of the fridge, and sit down for breakfast.

  “I hope my lollipops grew in purple,” Milo says. “It's my favorite color.”

  “I hope so, too,” I say. “Do you remember which seeds are yours?”

  “Mine are on the bottom of the first row,” he says.

  “Maybe we should have put a sign with the kids' names next to the seeds,” I say. “What do you think?” I ask Milo. “Everyone may not have as good a memory as you do.”

  “They will remember exactly. They were paying attention,” he says, and then his eyes light up. “Do you hear Tommy on the front porch.”

  “Already? It isn't even seven.”

  Milo nods.

  And he's right.

  My mom and dad are up and Milo runs upstairs to talk to them. I call goodbye, tell them I'm headed to camp, and Tommy and I hurry out the back door. We stop at the potting shed where I grab some carrot seeds, and then head out the gate, down the driveway, and up the street to the Watsons'.