by Betsy Byars
He had forgotten his promise to be intelligent, and Johnny had had to tell him to shut up twice and to get out of the way a dozen times. Still, the afternoon had been a great success.
Johnny moved through the kitchen, still walking in an important way. He opened the refrigerator door. Retta watched him with wary eyes. “Don’t eat the hard-boiled eggs,” she snapped. “That’s supper.”
Johnny did not bother to look closely. He was not really hungry. He just wanted to come in and let Retta hear Roy babbling about the afternoon. He wanted her to know the afternoon had been a bigger success than any she had planned.
He slammed the refrigerator door in disgust. The bottles and jars rattled.
“We never have anything to eat around here,” he complained. “Come on, Roy.”
“Yeah, we never have anything to eat around here.”
The two of them went out the door, leaving Retta alone at the table. Roy’s voice saying, “I really, honestly, and truly didn’t believe it was true!” floated back to her through the window.
Retta put her chin in her hands and slowly exhaled. She thought about the afternoon. It had the long, unreal beat of a fever dream.
She had followed her brothers all the way to the park, keeping a good distance away. And at the park she had sat alone under a tree and looked down the hill at the field where her brothers waited.
Staring down at them with slitted eyes, she had hoped, first, that their friend would not appear, hoped even that there was no friend. But then he came, a tall, skinny boy laden down with a yellow airplane. Her bad feelings swelled. She began to will misfortune upon them. She hoped the plane would not start, then that it would crash into the ground. She had felt like an evil witch made suddenly powerless to cause the trouble she wanted.
When it was obvious that the flight was successful, Retta had gotten up and started for home. Halfway there she began running, stumbling over the sidewalk even though she knew every crack and buckle. She had come into the house, flushed, out of breath, to find her father with his guitar. Her harsh look had continued, piercing Shorty Anderson in his red cowboy shirt. It seemed that all her life, at every vital moment, Shorty Anderson had been composing a song.
She had stood there, heart pounding so hard she couldn’t hear the words he was singing. And she had suddenly felt as if she were seeing her father so clearly that her image of him might be damaged forever, the way one’s eyes are damaged by looking directly at the sun.
She remembered the night after her mother died. Retta had come into the living room to be with her father. It was late, but Retta had not been asleep; indeed, she was so troubled she thought she would never sleep again. She had drawn close to her father.
“You can stay in here,” Shorty had told her, “but you have to be quiet.”
“I will.”
It was three o’clock in the morning, and Shorty was playing his guitar. Retta lay on the sofa, nightgown wrapped around her thin body, eyes on her father.
Shorty Anderson was bent over his guitar, intent. His voice rose, then fell. The phrase, “Yes, my angelllll went to heavennnnn in a D … C … three!” filtered through her unhappiness.
“Are you writing a song about Mama?”
He nodded without looking up. She turned her head away. That was her last memory of that night. But the unswallowed, unspoken pain of her mother’s death stayed in her throat so long that sometimes she thought she would die of it.
Retta sat at the kitchen table without moving. She stared down at her hands. Everything was clear to her now. Her father’s goal—becoming a star, achieving a place where his voice made people laugh and cry, his clothes made people stare, where his life itself became the daydreams of ordinary people—that goal was so powerful that everything else, even his family, became a mere interruption.
If I died, she thought, Shorty Anderson would just write a song about that too. She put her face in her hands and sighed. In the silent kitchen her sigh had the slow, dangerous sound of a snake’s hiss.
THE ANDERSON KIDS CAME out of the bushes slowly, shy even though they were in their new bathing suits. They glanced, not at the pool shimmering in the moonlight, but at the bushes and trees, the shadows where somebody might be hiding, spying on them.
“Do you see anybody, Retta?” Roy called quietly. He was standing close to the bushes. Out of habit he held up his bathing suit with one hand.
“No, I do not see anybody,” Retta said firmly, “and that is because nobody is here.”
She had had a hard time getting her brothers to come tonight. Roy was afraid to come and admitted it, but Johnny had pretended he had better things to do.
“What?”
“Things!”
“Oh, both of you are scared. You make me sick.”
“I’ll show you who’s scared!” Johnny had said then, throwing open the front door and going outside.
“Well, don’t forget your bathing suit!”
And now here they were, moving so slowly across the lawn that they still had not left the shelter of the shrubbery. Retta felt as uneasy as her brothers. All the pleasure of swimming in the colonel’s pool was gone, but she was determined not to let that stop her.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw that Roy had not moved. “Are you just going to stand there all night like the Pillsbury dough boy?”
He shook his head. His eyes rolled fearfully to the garage. His plump toes curled down as if to clutch the grass and hold him in place.
“Come on,” Retta said through her teeth. Her eyes shifted to Johnny. “And for someone who isn’t scared, you certainly are sticking close to the bushes. You remind me of a weasel.”
She looked at her brothers critically. For the first time she was struck by their physical shortcomings. The new bathing suits, she decided, made them look even worse. Johnny’s was too big and Roy’s too little, so that in their matching striped suits they accented each other’s faults.
“All the trouble I went to getting those bathing suits and then you act like this!” Retta had spent that whole morning walking to the shopping center, picking out the suits, walking home.
“I wanted blue,” Roy had whined as she pulled his out of the bag, and Retta had thrown the suit at him so hard he had put up his fat arms in defense.
“I don’t know why I even bother with you!”
She frowned at them. She wanted to make them presentable, the way mothers change a child by tugging a collar, yanking a belt into place, smoothing hairs. It would, she decided, take a lot more than that to make these two presentable.
The intensity of her dislike for her brothers surprised her because she had never really hated anyone before. She thought she had. She thought she had hated her third grade music teacher who criticized her singing, and two girls in her homeroom who whispered about her clothes, and the neighbors who disapproved of her family. That, she saw now, was only mild dislike. This was hate.
“All right, stay there and rot, chickens!” she taunted. “I’m going swimming!”
She strode toward the swimming pool, taking big steps, swinging her arms boldly. She did not glance behind her because she was certain Johnny would follow.
“I’ll show you who’s chicken!” Johnny yelled suddenly.
Retta turned.
Johnny came running toward her. He passed her so quickly that she felt the breeze. His skinny arms pumped. His legs, long pale sticks in the moonlight, scissored over the ground.
“Johnneeee!” she warned. He did not even glance in her direction.
Retta stepped back. Her hands rose to her chest, covering the flowers on her new bathing suit. Her mouth was slightly open.
Johnny reached the edge of the patio. He didn’t pause. He headed for the forbidden diving board. “Even I can’t go off the board,” Retta had told them. “Even I would splash.”
“Johnneeeee!” Retta’s voice rose with her concern.
Johnny was on the diving board now. He ran to the end, bounced once, and then
threw himself into the air, making a ball of his body. As he hit the water, the splash seemed to cause sound waves in the air. It was like an explosion, loud enough to mark the end of something. In the after-silence, water sprayed lightly onto the patio tiles.
“Oh, Johnny,” Retta said in a flat voice. She stood like a lawn statue with her arms over her chest. With the moonlight upon her, she was as pale as marble.
There was a moment of calm. Moonlit shadows flickered over the lawn. A bird called.
Then everything happened at once. A light went on upstairs in the house. A solid square of light shone on the pool. In this square of light Johnny’s head bobbed to the surface. He struggled to the side of the pool.
The colonel was at the window now. He peered down through his Venetian blinds at the pool. He turned abruptly and disappeared from view.
Retta ran forward a few steps. “Johnny!” His head appeared over the side. He pulled himself out and flopped onto his stomach. He got to his feet and began to run.
The downstairs lights went on in the house. The patio lights went on. The pool lights. Johnny was spotlighted as he scrambled to his feet in his new red-striped bathing suit.
He slipped on the wet tile, went down on one knee, and got to his feet. He was running again, heading for the bushes.
The door to the house was flung open. The colonel stood in the doorway in his shorty pajamas, glaring out into the brightly lit yard. He put one hand up to shield his eyes.
“Who’s out there?” he yelled. His voice boomed through the silent night. “What’s going on?”
Johnny was on the grass now, zigzagging across the lawn like a soldier trying to avoid gunfire. He passed Retta, spraying her with water.
With a start, Retta joined him. She scooped up her clothes and Roy’s and grabbed Roy’s arm as she came out of the bushes. The three of them ran for the fence.
“Stop! This is trespassing!” the colonel shouted.
He was striding across the patio now. Outrage made him look like a military man even in his shorty pajamas.
“Stop or I’ll call the police!”
Roy, Johnny, and Retta were at the fence now, crawling over. Even Roy with his short legs was moving like an athlete. They dropped into the ditch and ran for the road. The only sound was Roy’s hard breathing.
“Keep running,” Retta gasped.
She was dividing up the clothes as they ran, handing Roy his T-shirt, pulling on her own blouse. She broke stride to put one leg into her jeans, then the other.
Beside her, Roy refused to pause even to put on his pants. As a concession to modesty, he held his pants in front of his bathing suit so that anyone who saw him from the front would think he was fully clothed.
At last they reached the house, entered, and slammed the door behind them. Retta threw the lock into place, something she had never done before. She leaned against the door, weak with the narrowness of their escape.
She looked at Johnny, who had sunk onto the sofa. His clothes were in a bundle on his lap. His skinny chest rose and fell as he tried to get his breath.
“Why did you do that?” Retta asked.
“Yeah, Johnny,” Roy gasped, “we could have been arrested.”
Johnny looked up at them. Water ran down his forehead from his dripping hair. He wrapped his clothes tighter and put them under his arm like a football.
“Now who’s chicken?” he said.
ROY WAS CONNECTING DOTS in a puzzle book he had given Johnny for his birthday.
“You’re going to ruin Johnny’s book,” Retta said. She was sitting on the sofa watching him critically.
“I am not.”
He connected the next two dots with special care and drew back to view his work. He nodded his approval.
“You don’t know your numbers,” Retta went on. “How can you connect numbered dots when you don’t know your numbers?”
“This happens to be a picture of a pony and I do know ponies. I rode on one one time.”
He bent over the book again. He loved to connect dots. He considered becoming a dot connector when he grew up. He liked the thought of himself at a desk, connecting dots while his secretary sharpened pencils.
“That’s no pony,” Retta said in a disgusted voice.
Roy jerked the book up and hid the half-finished picture against his chest. “It is too.”
“It’s a zebra. You’re supposed to be going up and down making stripes instead of plodding on around!”
Retta got up and went to the kitchen. When she was gone, Roy lowered his book and looked critically at his picture.
“I was going to make the stripes,” he explained to the empty doorway, “only I was doing the outside dots first, so there!”
Retta did not answer.
“You think you know everything.”
He connected two dots, one at the top of the zebra, one at the bottom. He regarded his work with pleasure.
“Well, you don’t!”
He heard the sound of water in the kitchen. He began nodding his head for emphasis. “You don’t even know who was spying on us night before last.”
The water stopped running. There was a silence in the kitchen and in the living room.
Roy realized what he had said. His fingers, fat as sausages, flattened his mouth. His eyes rolled to Retta as she appeared in the doorway.
“What did you say?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“Nothing.”
Retta crossed the room as quickly as the mothers in the supermarket rushed to keep their children from toppling toilet paper pyramids.
“I want to know what you said.”
“Nothing!”
Her fingers closed around his arm. She was the grocery store mother he had admired and feared and loved to see grabbing other children. He found himself doing exactly what those other children did—twisting to get free. “You’re hurting me,” he whined.
“Do you know who was spying on us?”
“Ow!”
“Roy!”
“I can’t think when you squeeze my arm like that.”
“All right!” She released him. “Your fat arm is free. Now think.”
He rubbed his arm. He couldn’t even remember the question. Tears of self-pity welled in his eyes.
“Do you know who was spying on us?” Retta asked in an unnaturally calm voice.
“Yes.”
“Who?”
Roy’s arm still bore her fingerprint marks. He regarded his arm closely. “Look,” he accused, “you squeezed.”
“And I’m squeezing again if you don’t tell me right this minute.” She reached toward him.
“All right!” He drew back. He hesitated. He had promised Johnny he would not tell Retta, and he now weighed Retta’s anger against Johnny’s. The deciding factor was that Retta was here, threatening pain now.
“It was Arthur,” he confessed quickly.
“What? Who’s Arthur?”
“Johnny’s friend—you know, with the airplane?”
“He was spying on us?”
“Yes, but he wasn’t doing it to be mean. Johnny said so. Arthur happened to see us walking down the street one night with our inner tubes and he wondered where we were going. He just moved here, see, like us, and he didn’t know where people swam. That was all. He and Johnny laughed about it later. Johnny said not to tell you because he wanted you to be worried.”
“Did he?”
Retta was cold now. She seemed suddenly taller, an adult. Roy looked up at her. He hesitated for a moment. Then he surprised himself by saying, “Anyway, you spied on us.”
The tone of his voice made it an accusation, and Retta looked down at him in surprise. “What?”
“You did too spy on us. At the park.”
“I did not spy.”
“Johnny said you did. He saw you. He said you were sitting under a tree and as soon as we finished flying the plane you got up and ran home and sat down at the table so we’d think you’d been there the whole time.”<
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Retta straightened. She tried to regain the powerful, adult feeling she had had only a moment before, but the room seemed to have tilted and left her off-balance. “That was different,” she said.
“No.” Roy shook his head back and forth. “It was the same.”
“It was different,” she explained, “because I was looking after you guys, making sure you were all right.”
“You were spying,” Roy said.
“If you are so stupid that you can’t tell the difference between looking after someone and spying on someone—well, you’re just hopeless, that’s all.”
She turned abruptly and strode into the kitchen. There was an explosion of sounds. Water rushed into the sink. Pots rattled. Dishes spun on the table. The refrigerator door slammed.
“Spying is spying,” Roy said wisely.
He went back to his book. With great care he connected the dots on the zebra’s tail. He had been saving that till last, like dessert. As an added personal touch he drew seven hairs on the end of the zebra’s tail. He was so pleased with this original touch that he wanted to rush out the door and show it to the world.
Head shaking with admiration, he paid the picture his highest compliment.
“You,” he said, “should be put in a frame.”
RETTA SAT ON THE back steps with her arms over her knees. She lifted her head idly and looked at the house behind theirs. A face at one window moved out of sight. Retta closed her eyes.
She had felt isolated ever since her family moved to this neighborhood. It was a neighborhood of old people, and Retta knew that none of them approved of the Anderson family. When Shorty Anderson went out at night, rhinestones gleaming, high-gloss boots clicking on the pavement, yelling, “Be good!” to his children on the porch, Retta saw the older women on their porches look at each other and shake their heads. They also disapproved, Retta knew, of the Anderson children who “ran loose at night like dogs.”
If we still lived in our old neighborhood, Retta thought, where we had friends …
“Well, what are you doing out here all by yourself?” a voice asked behind her.