by Paul Zindel
3) Next, we thought we could at least make a beautiful terrarium in the backyard. All we did was dig a hole two feet wide, four feet long, and one foot deep, and plant in it some of the most healthy and appealing clumps of grass, Johnny- jump-up flowers, and other succulent flora. We then decided to add insects to it such as black beetles, ants, grass- hoppers, centipedes, daddy longlegs, wood bugs, and cocoons. We designed everything perfectly. The terrarium became our lovingly controlled little universe where nothing could go wrong. We watered it. Replenished it. We did everything except sufficiently wonder one day why Moose and the Bronski boys were watching us so long from across Victory Boulevard. We would see them passing by from time to time as we were digging and planting, but we didn’t think they’d do what they did. What happened was, one morning Jennifer came over to play a board game with me called Rich Uncle, and afterward we strolled out to visit our perfect plant-and-insect world. We gasped at what we saw. Somebody, and we knew who, had smashed it with rocks and thrown dirt in it. Jennifer trembled, her voice cracking. “They’ve killed our little world,” she said, stunned. I put my arm around her. We felt awful, but there was nothing we could legally do about it. We couldn’t call the police and press charges against Moose and the Bronskis for annihilating a hole-in- the-ground terrarium.
And Miss Haines had done her share to depress us. She embarrassed me and everybody else one day by announcing her homeroom students’ Intelligence Quotient Test results.
Miss Haines prefaced her remarks with “You’ll never guess who got the highest score. Someone none of us thought was really smart!”
That someone turned out to be me, which didn’t make me any extra friends. Miss Haines announced Jennifer’s score, which was a normal I.Q. Moose turned out to have the intelligence quotient of a turtle. It was all just mortifying to everyone, but Miss Haines licked her chops as she announced each score. Jennifer’s eyes filled up with tears at just having to witness the ordeal. Actually, her eyes filled with tears whenever we spoke about anything that might negatively influence her future, because she truly believed she had no future. She acted as though her spirit still felt condemned to her becoming a zombie, though I always tried my best to let her know she could be anything she wanted. I wasn’t much comfort, though, because she knew I was completely mixed up myself. I had no idea how I would ever grow up to earn money to support myself, even though I liked science and math.
However, my favorite teacher in Travis turned out to be my English teacher, Miss Konlan. She was the only one besides Jennifer and Nonno Frankie who, I was positive, didn’t think I was a misfit. She was the first high school teacher I had ever heard of who had a doctorate in Shakespearean studies. She was so brilliant, I was one of the few kids in her classes who wasn’t bored and didn’t throw pennies or shoot spitballs at her. She loved to hear about my ghost shows and encouraged me to write all sorts of weird tales and build 3-D cycloramas. But in April she had a severe nervous breakdown and they took her away. I was there in her class the day she broke down. I saw it! She was reading a beautiful speech from Romeo and Juliet when Moose, Conehead, and the Bronskis began launching paper airplanes and shooting kidney beans at her. The missiles would bounce off her head, Boi-n-n-g! Boi-n-n-g!, until she couldn’t stand it any longer. Suddenly, she opened the classroom window wide and leaped up on the windowsill. It was three stories high above a cement handball court! And she pleaded desperately with the class: “If you don’t stop it, I’m going to jump!” And that was the first time I learned how much most kids like action and suspense, because half the class yelled, “JUMP!”
I didn’t just sit there.
I stood up and yelled at the worst hoods, telling them what a pack of barbarians they were. I knew my little speech wasn’t going to make me any more popular, but it gave enough time for Mr. Nash, the Dean of Boys, to run into the room and pull Miss Konlan off the windowsill. I began to think it was something about me that made people want to commit suicide. The month before, my mother had gotten feeling so down about the puppies’ not selling, she threatened to kill herself by swallowing a pound of salt. Of course, my mother’s threats weren’t very real, but to have my sensitive, lovely English teacher driven to climb onto a window ledge was very upsetting. Naturally, we were told she wasn’t coming back, so they gave us a substitute, Mr. Wender, who had all the sensitivity of a tsetse fly and killed off any spirit of creativity anyone had.
I really missed Miss Konlan. I wrote the best stories I ever did for her. One was about a man who ran a grocery store and would mix up a ton of wheat, corn, and beans every night and then tell his stepson that if he didn’t have them separated by the morning, he would cut off his ears. But I had a sorcerer appear and bring an army of magical Japanese beetles to help him sort out the grains. And in another story I had a witch threaten to make a handicapped girl marry someone she didn’t love if she didn’t collect an armful of wool from a flesh-eating llama, but an old man appeared and taught her how to gather the wool from the thorned branches of a thicket where the monster llama had grazed. Miss Konlan would let me tell her all my stories. She’d sit there smiling at me, encouraging me. I even read to her an essay I wrote in which I invented the perfect sleeping room: a room that’s painted all black with just a mattress, where a boy could have fantastic dreams of Heaven and Earth! She let me tell her my worst fears about being a freak, and a social failure, and a teenager who didn’t know what on earth would happen to him. But she said she was certain I had nothing to worry about, that I was filled with life! Filled! That I had magic! There was magic in me to protect me from demons! That I’d always find a way out! I’d escape! I’d be a winner!
During May, Jennifer and I continued to spend a lot of time talking about death. Even on weekends we’d sit in our apple tree lamenting the existence of the Grim Reaper. The tree was in full blossom. Its perfume filled the air. The weather was pleasant, so the zombies began to sit out on their porches again. And Nonno Frankie began to plant his new garden. One day, he came over to us in the apple tree and did his best to cheer us up.
“What kind of apple has a short temper?” he asked.
“A crab apple,” Jennifer sighed.
“Right! Ho! Ho! Ho! But do you know what game can be dangerous to your mental health?”
“Marbles, if you lose them,” I answered, trying to force a smile.
“Here’s one I’ll bet you don’t know,” Nonno Frankie said, desperate to entertain us. “What do you get if you cross a pet dog and a werewolf?”
“What?” we asked to humor him.
“A new owner every full moon! Ho! Ho! Ho!”
We could hardly hear him because Queenie had had another litter of puppies, so now there were twenty-six collies in the outside pen. They were just barking and barking for no special reason. Mother had gone out to answer an ad to be a practical nurse, and Connie was out joyriding with Chops in his Buick Skylark. The twins were off to play at Schmul Park.
Nonno Frankie’s worn blue work shirt and brown corduroy pants billowed in the wind, and his eyes shone like those of an earnest clown. At one point he made believe he needed our help putting in tomato plants, which he really didn’t. Finally, he could stand it no longer and just flatout asked, “What’s the matter with you two?”
“We don’t want to die,” I summarized.
“What do you mean, you don’t want to die?”
“We don’t ever want to die,” Jennifer clarified, as we climbed down from our favorite branch. Of course, Nonno Frankie noticed Jennifer already had tears in her eyes. He watched us sink into a sitting position with our backs against the trunk right beneath where “ESCAPE! PAUL & JENNIFER! & NICKY & JOEY!” was carved. Nonno Frankie sat down, too, so now there were three of us sitting under the apple tree. He let us pour out our terrible feelings to him about the demise of Lady and the dead water-head baby and Miss Konlan trying to jump out the window. And our poor fish. There was death all around us, including the remnants of the destroyed terrarium
, which looked like a little freshly dug grave.
“Death is the Great Mystery of life,” Nonno Frankie said. This time, there was no Ho! Ho! Ho! in his eyes or voice at all. “But you’re both too young to worry about it. You should only wonder about it, wonder about all the great questions such as ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’”
“Which did?” Jennifer wanted to know.
“Personally, I think the chicken,” Nonno Frankie said.
“Why?” we asked.
“Because I can’t see God wanting to sit around on an egg for over twenty days to hatch it,” Nonno Frankie explained over the din of the collies yapping from their pen. “And you’ve got to remember most people only croak when they’re very sick or very old, and you two kids aren’t either of those. You shouldn’t waste your days thinking a meteor’s going to strike you and turn you into pancakes.”
“We try to think about other things,” I said. “But we always come back to death.”
“Yesterday, we tried thinking about the universe,” Jennifer added.
“The universe!” Nonno Frankie erupted. “How can you know the secrets of the universe when you can’t even make a good tomato sauce yet! First things first. Besides, I think Death is nothing more than Nature’s way of helping us say we’ve had enough baked ziti.”
“We heard human beings’ hair and fingernails continue to grow for three days after they die,” I said.
“Sure,” Nonno Frankie admitted, “but homework stops immediately. See, you’ve got to always think of the big pluses! And one of the best ways to have people say nice things about you is to kick the bucket.”
Jennifer started to weep. “Life is so painful,” she said.
I could see Nonno Frankie wanted to give her a grandfatherly hug. For a long while the three of us just sat in silence, as the collies barked louder and louder.
“Do you think a dead person feels it when they’re cremated?” I asked.
“No,” Nonno Frankie said. “It’s only the living things you have to worry about. Like lobsters. They feel pain when they’re boiled alive, which is why you should always give them a good soak in a pot of salt water first. It numbs them.”
Jennifer sobbed audibly. “God is so cruel.”
“No,” Nonno Frankie contradicted. “God is very kind. He’s pulled strings so most of us can live a very long time. Even if we’re starving, he’s arranged it so we can live by eating our shoes.”
“Eating our shoes?” I asked.
“Yes. He’s made us so talented, we can live from eating shoe leather! A lot of people don’t know that about God. And I’m not saying I’m personally thrilled about death. When I was your age, I sat around for a week and thought about it, but that was all.”
“Only a week?” Jennifer inquired.
“Yes. I thought everything I could about death. I had read in one of my uncles’ books about a Mongolian ruler who used to build pyramids out of human and camel skulls. And I worried about the body of Voltaire, who my teachers told me was a very famous person but whose body was stolen from its tomb and never found. I thought about a lot of things that one week. Things that bothered me even more than death. I didn’t like finding out that Julius Caesar was an epileptic. I didn’t like reading in an Italian history book that Christopher Columbus had blond hair. I hated learning anything that wasn’t the way I wanted it to be. Old men in my hometown thought they could learn answers from God by placing a rooster down in a circle and watching which way it turned. My mama in Sicily believed God sent omens to her in the first words she would hear after waking up. Once, the first thing she heard was my papa ask for a coffee and proscuitto ham sandwich. She sat around all morning wondering what God was trying to tell her. And I had an aunt in Padua who thought divine revelation came through ‘reading’ the location of moles on her children’s bodies. But more than anything, what really terrified me the one week I spent thinking about death was when I read what the last words of Michelangelo were!”
“What were they?” Jennifer and I both wanted to know.
“They were ‘I don’t feel so good,’” Nonno Frankie said. “That really scared me.”
The collies now yapped at the top of their lungs, though it wasn’t anywhere near feeding time. Mom had given everyone strict rules that when she wasn’t home, all the dogs had to be kept only in the side room or in their pen, so I figured it was better for them to be outside in the fresh air.
I caught Nonno Frankie looking to the dogs, and then glancing up toward the window from which my mother had yelled at him about keeping off her half of the backyard. He seemed to be making some connection between the dogs, my mother, and me. The way he had been talking, the way he was looking at me, this was the moment I realized he was much more than Ho! Ho! Ho!
“You only think about death when you are not alive. When you are not alive inside,” Nonno Frankie said, pointing toward his heart. “It’s hard to think of life when you are not allowed to be free and alive.”
“How can we feel free and alive?” we asked.
“Don’t let other people make you feel dead.”
“But how?”
“Don’t let the zombies and witches drag you down. Believe in yourself and in your own heart and mind, and don’t go around thinking the veal cutlets are always tastier in another frying pan. You need to know you are your own frying pan. Shut out wacko mothers and rocking-chair mummies and anyone else who doesn’t see how delicious you are inside! You are two wonderful kids! But you are trapped! The zombies and wackos have made you forget how buttery and sweet you are! You are a wonderful boy and girl! If one of your legs is shorter than the other, that is something you maybe can’t change. But that has nothing to do with being good, bad, or worthless, or nice. You stop thinking about death when you start knowing who you really are. Each of you is one of a kind. You are like homemade salad dressings. No two come out the same. A little less vinegar there, a little more olive oil here. You are like fingerprints on a knife! Each is different! Each of you is the only one of you who will ever dance your own tarantella. And when you remember that, and remember to listen to yourself, then you don’t think of Death anymore! You think of Life! Listen! Can’t you hear all the Life?”
Jennifer and I listened.
What we heard was the collies barking their heads off.
Nonno Frankie stood up. He was alert, filled with energy, knowing what he was about to do. He started walking swiftly toward the dog pen. Jennifer and I leaped up and hurried to catch up with him.
“Do you know what ‘Io sono differente!’ means in Italian?” he asked.
“No,” we said.
“It means ‘I am different!’”
The dogs barked louder, jumping higher up against the fence the closer we got to them. In a moment, Nonno Frankie was at their gate. He released the latch and threw open the gate. Twenty-six collies came rushing out into the backyard. Big Lassies! Small Lassies! All sizes of Lassies jumping on us, kissing us, licking our faces. Nonno Frankie began to run toward the back fence. Jennifer and I and the dogs took off after him. In a moment we were all racing across the great fields above the airport. Young skunk cabbages and stalks of lady’s slipper flowers and bullrushes and wild wheat were all reaching upward toward the dazzling new spring sun!
“IO SONO DIFFERENTE!” Nonno shouted at the sky.
“IO SONO DIFFERENTE!” Jennifer and I cried out. “IO SONO DIFFERENTE!”
We ran yelling proudly, victoriously, all of us leaving Death, we thought, far, far behind.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Slaying of the
Apple Tree
The fascinating thing to Jennifer and me was that, after the romp, all the dogs followed Nonno Frankie back to their pen like contented, well-adjusted canines. None of us want to run crazy all the time, but once in a while it does a living spirit good. From that day forward, Jennifer and I swore we would never forget the importance of freedom and being a little daring about life. We even s
tarted going up in airplanes. Of course, we didn’t tell our mothers about it, but a lot of Saturday and Sunday afternoons we’d stroll over to the main airport shed and sit on a bench. We got to know most of the weekend pilots, and if one would head alone for his plane, we’d ask if we could take a ride with him. It wasn’t long before we had clocked thirty-seven flights in Cessnas, Piper Cubs, a double-winged open-cockpit Waco, Aerocoups, Taylorcrafts, and Beechcrafts. We never thought about crashing, which we should have because some of the pilots took us through stunts and let us take the controls during level flying. We loved the stunts—loops, stalls, spins, and wingovers—even if they all made us feel our stomachs were going to come up out of our throats. It was a lot of fun. One time, we flew ten feet above the ocean buzzing fishing boats off Sandy Hook, but the Civil Air Patrol gave the pilot a fifty-dollar summons and a reprimand.
And, thanks to Nonno Frankie, I began to find life much more bearable in Travis. Of course, Jennifer was my best friend, but I got to know some of the other kids better and do things with them, too. I became friends with Richard Cahill, Cry Baby Rooster Head, Jeanette up the street, and several other, normal teenagers. And even though I collaborated mostly with Jennifer on a lot of science and history projects, the most attention I ever got was from something I did with Richard Cahill. We decided to team up to write a takeoff on a strict math teacher by the name of Mr. Stern. We called our piece “A Geometric Nightmare,” and it got published in our school newspaper, The Crow’s Nest. When it came out, a lot of kids came up to Richard and me and said they really liked it and thought it took a lot of guts for us to write. Nonno Frankie went Ho! Ho! Ho! for twenty minutes when I let him read it. To tell you the truth, I had more friends than I’d ever had in my life and I began to feel good about myself. I also began to learn some of the more colorful sides to the town, such as:
1) Travis had a volunteer fire company.