by Jack Gantos
“Believe it or not!” she snapped. “Sometimes I’m just thinking about how to help you grow up and keep you from becoming a pathetic-boy display in the Ripley’s Odditorium!” Then she turned, walked down to the kitchen, and made herself a cup of coffee.
Beauty and Order
Summer was almost here. It was already hot in the early morning and I was sitting out back staring beyond our yard toward the dandelions and train tracks. All day, every day, the long freight trains rumbled back and forth. They brought in lumber, cement, steel beams, roof tiles, nails, tools, bulldozers, earthmovers, fishing boats, cars, and people. South Florida was being built up with things made in places that had already been built up. We wanted what they had, and they wanted what we had. On the return trip the trains carried huge royal palm trees, pallets of coral block and limestone cut right from the earth, and crates of oranges, limes, and grapefruit. It was as if all of South Florida was being replaced. The trees, swamps, alligators, flamingos, Seminole Indians, and fish were being taken away. Before long we’d be filled up with pieces of Ohio, New Jersey, Indiana, and Michigan. Soon, those states would look like ours. But I wondered if such enormous changes really would work. I didn’t think you could just mix everything up. Some things would change for the worse if moved. When icebergs broke away from the Arctic, I reminded myself, they melted down to nothing on their way south.
Just as Florida was building on the outside, I was building on the inside, where no one could see the changes taking place. Even I couldn’t see them. Still, I knew trainloads of ideas made up in my brain and feelings leaping out of my heart were shifting around within me. It was confusing to try and figure out what was going on. Sometimes it felt as if my brain was growing faster than my skull and my head would explode. All I knew was that I woke with some pressure building up inside me where I didn’t yet have the words to express it. Whatever change was going to take place was still a mystery to me. Caterpillars must have felt the same way before they dozed off to burst awake later as butterflies.
The thought of all this oncoming change made me nervous, so I rolled my sleeve up and checked on my hookworm. Now, that was something I could see. I didn’t know how I got it. Three days before, it just appeared. The first day the worm had made a little mark, the size of a comma, on my forearm. Once I knew he was busy I kept monitoring his progress. He was a hardworking worm. He never slept. Even in the middle of the night he was still at it.
At the end of the second day the spiral had circled around twice and he was picking up speed. By the third day I looked as if I had pressed my forearm down over an electric-stove burner. But I still wasn’t ready to get rid of him. He was a secret pet and, unlike me, he would never change. On and on forever, like every other hookworm on the planet, he would spiral around. He didn’t make straight lines or zigzags or figure eights. Only spirals. I wished my life was as simple as his. But I knew better. Life had more in store for me than just going in circles.
My only fear was that he’d finish his job on my arm when I wasn’t watching and move to a fresh place like the inside of my eye, where he’d spiral around and around, and drill it through before moving on to do the same with my brain. Sooner or later I’d have to get some medicine, but not yet. I rolled my sleeve back down and went inside.
“Is my ride here yet?” I asked Mom. We were almost finished with the school year. Mrs. Pierre was sick of us and we were sick of her. It was only a matter of moments before the entire class went insane and everyone was at each other’s throats. All year long there wasn’t money for anything special, then suddenly we were taken on a field trip almost every week. We had been to the Planetarium, the Seaquarium, the Parrot Jungle, and the Monkey Jungle. Now we were going to Vizcaya, a huge old mansion filled with French art and furniture. It was now a museum.
“No,” Mom said. She was gluing on a new set of red fingernails and waiting for her ride to work. The glue smelled like burning plastic and made the inside of my nose sting.
Suddenly there was a knock on the door. We both stood up and stepped forward. I turned the doorknob because Mom’s nails weren’t dry yet.
It was Tack, and he was holding up a fluffy white cat. It looked as if it had been groomed for a cat show, with its fur combed and puffed out like cotton candy around a tiny pink face. “I told my grandmother what happened,” he said. “She was very sorry and wants you to have this special cat.”
“I’m sorry too,” I whispered, and lowered my chin. I was still upset about Miss Kitty III.
“She said the refrigerator disaster had happened to her before,” he said. “She wanted me to make sure and tell you that.”
“Thanks,” I replied.
“It’s just like the cat on the car engine, or on the tracks,” he said. “It happens to other people too.”
“I’m sure it does,” I said, “but it doesn’t make it any better. I’m the kiss of death for these cats.” I reached out and took it from his arms.
“Well, don’t kiss them anymore,” he said, then laughed through his nose with such force a long strand of thick yellow snot unrolled from his nostril like a party whistle, then snapped back.
“Don’t you think she’s beautiful?” Tack asked.
It was a beautiful cat but I didn’t care if it looked like Miss America. I was staring at Tack’s nostril. The way the snot had unrolled into a long strand then rolled back up into his nose was pretty incredible to me. Lately I was beginning to wonder why I was much more interested in gross things than beautiful things. This was starting to bother me about myself. I found it puzzling and I was worried it would become a problem.
“What are you going to name it?” Tack asked.
“Miss Kitty IV,” Mom replied.
“Don’t you think we should break the cycle?” I suggested. “Give it a name, like Supercat, or Mightycat, or something tough like Spike?”
“Yes,” she said. “How about Wonder Woman?”
Just then a van pulled up and a kid inside waved to me.
“See you later,” I said to Mom, and handed her Wonder Woman. She frowned as its fur stuck to her nails.
“Have fun,” Tack groaned. He was at a different school and they were doing nothing but math drills.
I took a seat in the back of the van next to a girl I hadn’t talked with all year long because she was on the other side of Mrs. Pierre’s gender wall. There was a big burn mark on the lap of her dress. It was the first thing I spotted because it smelled like burnt toast. She caught me staring and tried to cover it with her hands. I didn’t know what to say to her so I pointed at the blackened circle and asked, “Did you set yourself on fire?”
She turned toward me. She had outrageously thick glasses. Behind them, her eyeballs looked like huge blue guppies trapped inside very tiny fish tanks.
“It was an accident,” she said. “As I waited for the van I was sitting and reading a book on the sidewalk. The sun was behind me and felt good on my back. And I was so involved in the story that I didn’t notice the sun shining through a corner of my glasses like a magnifying glass and focusing a hot spot of light on my dress and so it caught fire.”
“Wow,” I remarked, thinking to myself that she was so honest. If I had stupidly set myself on fire I never would have told anyone.
“Have you ever done anything stupid?” she asked.
I had done a million stupid things but I was too embarrassed to say so. “No,” I replied. I tried to look her in the eyes but because I was lying I stared down at my shoes.
“Have you ever been to Vizcaya before?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Never even heard of it.”
“It’s my favorite place in Miami,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
Hope you don’t stare at it for too long then, I thought, or you’ll burn it down.
——
When we arrived at Vizcaya, Mrs. Pierre lined us up in two rows, one for girls and one for boys.
“The girls will appreciate the mansion,” she
announced. “But house décor won’t be of much interest to you boys. If you wish, you can run off and play in the gardens.” She pointed toward the distant acres of hedges and canals. “There are plenty of snakes and snails out there.”
A boy named Wilson, who had never shown interest in his schoolwork, said, “You mean we can just run around?”
“Like wild Indians,” Mrs. Pierre suggested, and threw one hand up over her head as if she held a tomahawk, while her other hand patted her lips. “Woo, woo, woo,” she whooped.
I hated how Mrs. Pierre, and other people too, thought they understood what I liked or disliked just because I was a boy. Some people were as well trained as hookworms and never grew beyond the custom that blue is for boys and pink is for girls. I guessed it was a lot easier to be lazy and stupid and just lump all the boys together, rather than have to sort through them and find out what each one liked and disliked. I decided to stay with the girls while the boys took off.
Just then a very old man rounded the corner and stood in front of us. He was dressed in a suit jacket that probably fit him when he was young and not stooped over. His tie was frayed, and immediately I noticed that he must have had a hair transplant because his scalp was lined with rows of evenly spaced plugs of hair like a miniature cornfield.
“Hello,” he wheezed, and smiled so broadly that his wrinkled cheeks unfolded like an accordion. “My name is Mr. Adolino and I am your guide at Vizcaya. Please follow me.”
We all poked forward behind him. As we entered the front door someone stepped on the back of my shoe and my foot popped out. I turned around to see who did it but no one confessed. I stepped and scuffed, stepped and scuffed forward like a man with one bum leg. To one side of the foyer was a door marked with a telephone sign. I slipped inside. It was a plain, sea-green room with a comfortable old leather chair next to a telephone. I sat down and untied my shoe, and refit my foot. When I looked up I was surprised to see a bouquet of enormous roses painted on the ceiling. They were the most milky wet, red, and creamy gold roses I had ever seen. As I stared up at them my heart began to race and I felt nervous. At first I thought my nervousness was because the beauty was as strong and blinding as looking into the sun. Then, just as I felt I would faint, I jerked my head away and closed my eyes. I took a deep breath, then looked back at the roses, and once again, just when I thought I would reach into the painting and hold them in my hands and be swallowed up by the velvet petals, I jerked my eyes away and looked down at the floor, where somebody had spit out a piece of gum. It was black with dirt and in some sick spasm of a thought I imagined having to scrape up the gum and chew it, and I was revolted with the thought of it.
Why am I turning away from beauty, I asked myself, only to stare at gross, filthy, disgusting things? I didn’t have the answer. And by the time I fled the telephone room everyone had gone. I thought I heard Mr. Adolino’s voice explaining something about the “classical Adams wall treatments,” so I went the other way. I wanted to test a theory I was developing about myself. With Tack, I had looked at his nasty snot before looking at the beautiful cat. And with the girl I had been more interested in her burned dress and weird eyes than her honesty. Since I was in such a beautiful mansion I wanted to see if I could just enjoy beauty and not be so totally captivated with gross stuff.
I passed down a long hallway and entered a fancy music room. A sign mounted in a small brass frame described the room as “Austrian Baroque.” From a small overhead speaker classical violin music was playing. I closed my eyes and the music formed the image of large fern buds curling open in slow motion. I opened my eyes before someone sneaked up on me. In one corner of the room was a harpsichord and a beautiful, hand-painted harp of polished blond wood. I looked at the top of the harp and began to follow the bend of the wood with my eye. The watery swirl of the music, the image of curling ferns, and the curve of the harp all braided together into something so beautiful to me I suddenly jerked my head away and stared down at the baseboard where there was a narrow heating vent clogged with dust, bits of dirty paper, and insects. I felt as if I could have stared at the vent for hours. It was such a relief after the shock of so much beauty. Suddenly the music overhead sounded less like flowing violins and more like someone weeping. I closed my eyes again and tried to change what I was feeling, but the room had already given me the creeps and I marched out as if I knew where I was going.
But I didn’t. I ended up in a room with a bronze statue of a Greek boy sitting on a tree stump pulling a thorn out of his foot. His face was set in an expression of absolute concentration. The bow-shaped wrinkles across his forehead were perfectly formed. His eyes squinted. And his lips were so tightly pressed together that I felt my lips pinch back against my teeth. I felt exactly what he felt. But instead of feeling the thorn in my foot, I pulled my eyes away and found myself rolling up my sleeve to check on my hookworm. My eyes went around the spiral again and again until I reached the outward tip. I pulled my pen out of my pocket and began to pick and scratch at the spot where the hookworm was digging. Finally I broke through my skin and gouged out a hunk of flesh, or worm. I didn’t know which. I dropped it on the black marble floor and stepped on it. When I lifted my shoe there was a pasty pink spot of crushed something. I looked back at my forearm. A little line of blood had rolled down the side. I wiped it off on my pants, then dashed out the door.
I climbed a set of stairs that led to a guest bedroom. The walls were covered with elaborate Chinese scenes of birds and cherry blossoms buzzing with glossy insects. The bed was draped with pink silk with gold fringe. I stepped back so I could take it all in when suddenly my eyes drifted toward the bottom edge of the bed covering, where there was a splash of a crimson stain. And once I saw the stain my eyes fixed on it and wouldn’t let go until I blinked and quickly looked down at the floor. I stood there for a few minutes until the words gathered in my mind like a jury. And I knew what I suspected about myself was true. That I was more attracted to totally gross things than to beautiful things.
I returned down the stairwell and found the closest exit. I left the house as quickly as possible and began to walk aimlessly through the maze of low hedges. Suddenly I saw, lying in the middle of the path, a mauled squirrel. I stared into the open wound of his belly. The flesh was surrounded with a crowd of buzzing, shiny blue flies. I found myself staring at the flies, at the glistening flesh, and the stiff fur standing out on the rigid body. Why, I wondered, can I not concentrate on a work of art but can stare like an eagle at the slightest object of filth, death, and decay? This horrified me because it meant that Mrs. Pierre was right—that boys could only like snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails and all things disgusting, gross, and weird. But I didn’t want that to be true. I loved beautiful objects. It couldn’t be true, because it was a man who built and furnished this house. Something had to be wrong with me.
I was thinking about all of this when I passed through a stone arch and entered a walled, secret garden. The girl with the burned dress was sitting on a bench reading a book. She had been so honest in the car about her burn mark that I thought I might try being totally honest too. I really didn’t have anyone else to confide in. Tack wouldn’t understand and I hadn’t made close friends with any of the other boys in my class. “Hi,” I said. She looked up from her book.
“I’m sitting in the shade,” she said, as her huge eyes dipped down toward her dress. “No more fire accidents.”
“You asked if I ever did something stupid,” I said. “Well, I lied. I’ve been doing something really stupid all day long. Every time I look at something beautiful I get so nervous I have to look away at something disgusting to settle down.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, I’ll look at a beautiful painting and it’s as if I’ve just stuck my finger over a flame. I can only keep my eyes on the painting for about three seconds before I jerk them away. And then, the worst part is I immediately find something gross and filthy to look at which I find a kind
of relief from all that beauty. Now, don’t you think something is wrong with that?”
She looked at me very carefully, and her large eyes passed over me as if she were looking for cracks in a glass. After a minute she said, “That’s awful. My sister had a problem kind of like that,” she said. “She couldn’t find anything nice to say about people. She could only find nasty things to say. And you know what they say, ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.’ Well, she didn’t follow that rule, and it only got worse. Her mouth was going a mile a minute just saying mean things all day long.”
“What happened next?” I asked. I was really interested because I was a lot like the sister too. I never had a nice thing to say to Betsy, I bullied Pete, and I seemed to spend a lot of time thinking about everyone’s worst qualities.
“We put her in a hospital for a while. She’s home now. And she’s better, but she has to take medication to stay nice. Otherwise she gets mean again.”
“Do you think my problem is like her problem?” I asked.
“It’s not exactly the same,” she said. “But I’d be really upset if looking at beautiful things made me feel so nervous that I had to look at ugly things in order to feel better.”
“What do you think I should do?” I asked.
“My mom says that the only way to chart a course in life is to use all your strengths to defeat all your weaknesses.”
I knew she was telling me something important. The more I realized this the less I listened to her. In fact, listening to her was the same as if I was looking at something beautiful or listening to wonderful music. After a few seconds of listening my eyes drifted from hers to the lily pond just to her side. In a windblown corner the dirty water had been whipped up into a bubbly brown foam of decaying leaves and twigs and insects. It looked like a hunk of rotting fat and seemed as if at any minute some horrible monster would spontaneously rise from out of the scum.