by Anne Tyler
He hid Ezra’s left sneaker, his arithmetic homework, his baseball mitt, his fountain pen, and his favorite sweater. He shut Ezra’s cat in the linen cupboard. He took Ezra’s bamboo whistle to school and put it in the jacket of Josiah Payson, Ezra’s best friend—a wild-eyed boy, the size of a full-grown man, who was thought by some to be feebleminded. It was typical of Ezra that he loved Josiah with all his heart, and would even have had him to the house if their mother weren’t scared of him. Cody stopped by when Ezra’s class was at lunch, and he slipped behind the cloakroom partition and stuck the whistle in the pocket of Josiah’s enormous black peacoat. After that there was a stretch of Indian summer and Josiah evidently left his jacket where it hung, so the whistle stayed lost for days. Ezra was very upset about it. “Have you seen my whistle?” he asked everybody. For once, Cody didn’t have to listen to “Greensleeves” and “The Ash Grove,” played on that breathy little pipe, whose range was so limited that for high notes, Ezra had to blow extra hard and split people’s eardrums. “You took it,” Ezra told Cody. “Didn’t you? I know you did.”
“What would I want with a stupid toy whistle?” Cody asked.
He was hoping that when it turned up in Josiah Payson’s pocket, Ezra would blame Josiah. But it didn’t happen that way. Whatever passed between them was settled without any fuss, and the two of them continued to be friends. Once again, a cracked, foggy “Ash Grove” burbled in every corner of the house.
Their mother went on one of her rampages. “Pearl has hit the warpath,” Cody told his brother and sister. He always called her Pearl at such times. “Better look out,” he said. “She’s dumped all Jenny’s bureau drawers.”
“Oh-oh,” Ezra said.
“She’s slamming things around and talking to herself.”
“Oh, boy,” Jenny said.
Cody had met the other two on the porch; they’d stayed late at school. He silently opened the door for them, and they crept up the stairs. Each took a great, lunging stride over the step that creaked—although surely their mother would not have heard them. She was making too much noise in the kitchen. Throwing pots through windowpanes, was what it sounded like.
They tiptoed across the hall to Jenny’s room. “What a mess!” Ezra breathed. Heaps of clothing covered the floor. Empty drawers had been hurled everywhere. The wardrobe stood open, its hangers stripped, and Jenny’s puff-sleeved dresses lay in a heap. Jenny stared from the doorway. “Jen?” Cody asked her. “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” Jenny said in a quavery voice.
“Think! Some little thing, something you’ve forgotten about …”
“Nothing. I promise.”
“Well, help me get these drawers back in,” he said to Ezra.
It was a two-man job. The drawers were oak, cumbersome and inclined to stick. Cody and Ezra grunted as they fitted them into the bureau. Jenny traveled around the room collecting her clothes. Tears had filled her eyes, and she kept dabbing at her nose with one or another rolled pair of socks. “Stop that,” Cody told her. “She’ll do it all again, if she finds snot on your socks.”
He and Ezra gathered slips and hair ribbons, shook out blouses, tried to get the dresses back on their hangers the way they’d been before. Some were hopelessly wrinkled, and those they smoothed as best they could and hid at the rear of the wardrobe. Meanwhile Jenny knelt on the floor, sniffling and folding undershirts.
“I wish we could just go off,” Ezra said, “and not come back till it’s over.”
“It won’t be over till she’s had her scene,” Cody told him. “You know that. There’s no way we can get around it.”
“I wish Daddy were here.”
“Well, he’s not, so shut up.”
Ezra straightened a sash.
After they’d put everything in order, the three of them sat in a row on Jenny’s bed. The sounds from the kitchen were different now—cutlery rattling, glassware clinking. Their mother must be setting the table. Pretty soon she’d serve supper. Cody had such a loaded feeling in his throat, he never wanted to eat again. No doubt the others felt the same; Ezra kept swallowing. Jenny said, “Let’s run away from home.”
“We don’t have anyplace to run to,” Cody said.
Their mother came to the foot of the stairs and called them. Her voice was thin, like the sound of a gnat. “Children.”
They filed down, dragging their feet. They stopped at the first-floor bathroom and meticulously scrubbed their hands, taking extra pains with the backs. Each one waited for the others. Then they went into the kitchen. Their mother was slicing a brick of Spam. She didn’t look at them, but she started speaking the instant they were seated. “It’s not enough that I should have to work till five p.m., no; then I come home and find nothing seen to, no chores done, you children off till all hours with disreputable characters in the alleys or wasting your time with school chorus, club meetings; table not set, breakfast dishes not washed, supper not cooked, floors not swept, mail in a heap on the mat … and not a sign of any of you. Oh, I know what’s going on! I know what you three are up to! Neighborhood savages, that’s what you are, mingling with each and all. How am I supposed to deal with this? How am I expected to cope? Useless daughter, great unruly bruising boys … I know what people are saying. You think my customers aren’t glad to tell me? Coming in simpering, Well, Mrs. Tull, that oldest boy of yours is certainly growing up. I saw him with a pack of Camels in the street in front of the Barlow girl’s house.’ And I have to smile and take it. Have to stand there on exhibit while they’re all thinking, ‘Poor Mrs. Tull, I don’t know how she can hold her head up. It’s clear she doesn’t have the least ability to handle those children; look at how they’re disgracing her.’ Sticking potatoes on people’s exhaust pipes and letting the air out of tires and shooting at streetlights with BB guns and stealing hubcaps and making off with traffic signs and moving Mrs. Correlli’s madonna to Sonny Boy Brown’s kitchen stoop and hanging around the hydrants with girls no better than tramps, girls in tight sweaters and ankle chains, oh, I hear about it everywhere …”
“But not me, Mama,” Jenny said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t do those things.”
Well, of course she didn’t (only Cody did), but she shouldn’t have pointed that out. Now she’d drawn attention to herself. Pearl turned, gathered force, and plunged. “You! I know about you. I couldn’t believe my ears. What should I be doing but coming down the church steps Sunday when I see you with that Melanie Miller from your Bible class. ‘Oh, Melanie …’ ” She made her voice shrill and prissy, nothing like Jenny’s, really. “ ‘Melanie, I just love your dress. I wish I had a dress like that.’ Understand,” she said, turning to the boys, “this was a cheap little number from Sears. The plaid wasn’t matched; there was a ruffle at the hem like a … square dance outfit and a bunch of artificial flowers pinned to the waist. A totally inappropriate dress for a nine-year-old, or for anyone. But ‘Oh, I wish I had that,’ your sister says, so everyone thinks, ‘Poor Mrs. Tull, she can’t even afford a Sears and Roebuck dress with artificial flowers; I don’t know how she manages, slaving away at that grocery all day and struggling over her budget at night, cutting here and cutting there, wondering will she scrape by, hoping nobody runs up a doctor bill, praying her children’s feet will stop growing …’
“And Melanie’s mother, well, it’s just like opening the door to such a person. First thing you know she’ll be walking in here big as life: ‘Mrs. Tull, I happen to have the catalogue we ordered Melanie’s dress from, if you would care for one for Jenny.’ As if I’d want to dress my daughter like an orphan! As if I’d like for her to duplicate some other child! ‘No, thank you, Mrs. Miller,’ I’ll say. ‘I may not be able to afford so very much but at least when I do buy, I buy with finished seams. No, Mrs. Miller, you keep your so-called wish book, your quarter-inch hem allowances, smashed felt flowers …’ What’s wrong with us, I’d like to know? Aren’t we good enough for my own blood daug
hter? Doesn’t she feel I’m doing my best, my level best, to provide? Does she have to pick up riffraff? Does she have to bring home scum? We’re a family! We used to be so close! What happened to us? Why would she act so disloyal?”
She sat down serenely, as if finished with the subject forever, and reached for a bowl of peas. Jenny’s face was streaming with tears, but she wasn’t making a sound and Pearl seemed unaware of her. Cody cleared his throat.
“But that was Sunday,” he said.
Pearl’s serving spoon paused, midway between the bowl and her plate. She looked politely interested. “Yes?” she said.
“This is Wednesday.”
“Yes.”
“It’s Wednesday, dammit; it’s three days later. So why bring up something from Sunday?”
Pearl threw the spoon in his face. “You upstart,” she said. She rose and slapped him across the cheek. “You wretch, you ugly horror.” She grabbed one of Jenny’s braids and yanked it so Jenny was pulled off her chair. “Stupid clod,” she said to Ezra, and she took the bowl of peas and brought it down on his head. It didn’t break, but peas flew everywhere. Ezra cowered, shielding his head with his arms. “Parasites,” she told them. “I wish you’d all die, and let me go free. I wish I’d find you dead in your beds.”
After that, she went upstairs. The three of them washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away in the cupboards. They wiped the table and countertops and swept the kitchen floor. The sight of any crumb or stain was a relief, a pleasure; they attacked it with Bon Ami. They pulled the shades in the windows and locked the back door. Outside, the neighborhood children were organizing a game of hide-and-seek, but their voices were so faint that they seemed removed in time as well as in space. They were like people from long ago, laughing and calling only in memory, or in one of those eerily lifelike dreams that begin on the edge of sleep.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, a girl named Edith Taber transferred to their school. Cody had been new to so many schools himself, he recognized that defiant tilt of her head when she stepped into his homeroom. She carried a zippered notebook that wasn’t the right kind at all, and over her skirt she wore what appeared to be a grown man’s shirt, which no one had ever heard of doing. But she had thick black hair and the kind of gypsy look that Cody liked; and he was also drawn by the proud and scornful way she walked alone to her classes—as friendless as Cody was, he thought, or at least, as friendless as he felt inside. So that afternoon he walked a short distance behind her (it turned out she lived just one block north of him), and the next afternoon he caught up and walked beside her. She seemed to welcome his company and talked to him nearly nonstop, every now and then clutching her coat collar tight against her throat in a gesture that struck him as sophisticated. Her brother was in the navy, she said, and had promised to bring her a silk kimono if he made it through the war. And she didn’t find that Baltimore was very cosmopolitan, and she thought Miss Saunders, the English teacher, resembled Lana Turner. She said she felt it was really attractive when boys didn’t slick their hair back but let it fall over their foreheads, straight, the way Cody did. Cody raked his fingers through his hair and said, well, he didn’t know about that; he’d always sort of supposed that girls preferred a little wave or curl or something. She said she just despised for a boy to have curls. They walked the rest of the way without speaking, although from time to time Cody whistled parts of the only tune that came to his mind, which happened to be “The Ash Grove.”
He couldn’t walk her home on Wednesday because he had to stay late for detention, and the following day was Thanksgiving. There wouldn’t be any more school till Monday. All Thursday morning, he hung around the front porch in the damp November chill, gazing northward to Edith’s street and then wheeling away and taking midair punches at a cushion from the glider. Finally his mother emerged, rosy from the kitchen, and coaxed him inside. “Cody, honey, you’ll freeze to death. Come and shell me some pecans.” They were having a meager meal—no turkey—but she’d promised to make a pie for dessert. Already the house smelled different: spicier, more festive. Cody would have stayed on the porch forever, though, if he’d thought there was a chance of seeing Edith.
After dinner they all played Monopoly. Generally, Cody’s family didn’t allow him in their games; he had this problem with winning. He absolutely insisted on winning any game he played. And he did win too—by sheer fierceness, by caring the most. (Also, he’d been known to cheat.) Sometimes, he would even win when no one else suspected it was a contest. He would eat more peanuts, get his corn shucked the fastest, or finish his page of the comics first. “Go away,” his family would say when he approached (nonchalantly shuffling cards or tossing a pair of dice). “You know what we said. Never again!” But this afternoon, they let him play. He tried to hold back, but once he’d bought a hotel on the Boardwalk, things got out of hand. “Oh, my, I should have remembered,” his mother said. “What’s he doing in this game?” But she was smiling. She wore her blue wool dress and her hair was coming out of its bun, which made her look relaxed. Her token was the flatiron. She skipped right over the Boardwalk, but Ezra was next and he hit it. He didn’t have anywhere near enough money. Cody tried to lend him some; he hated it when people just gave up. He liked to get everybody thousands of dollars in debt, struggling to the bitter end. But Ezra said, “No, no, I quit,” and backed off, holding up one palm in that old-mannish way he had. So Cody had to go on with just Jenny and his mother, and eventually with just his mother. They played right down to the line, when she landed on the Boardwalk with three dollar bills to her name. As a matter of fact, Cody had a pretty good time.
Then the younger two talked Cody and Pearl into putting on their old skit: “The Mortgage Overdue.” “Oh, come on! Please! It wouldn’t feel like a holiday without it.” Cody and Pearl ended up agreeing to it, even though they were rusty and Cody couldn’t remember the dance step that came at the finish. This was something salvaged from his mother’s girlhood, the kind of piece performed at amateur recital contests or campfire circles. Pearl played Ivy, the maiden in distress, and Cody was the villain twirling his waxed mustache. “Ivy, sweet sweet Ivy, lean upon my arm,” he cajoled her with an evil leer, while Pearl rolled her eyes and shrank into a corner. She could have been an actress, her children thought; she had it letter-perfect, the blushing gaze and the old-fashioned singsong of her responses. At the end the hero came and rescued her. Ezra and Jenny always claimed to be too shy, so Cody had to take the hero’s part as well. “I will pay the money for the mortgage on the farm,” he told the maiden, and he danced her into the dining room. The dance step came back to him after all, but his mother’s tongue got twisted and instead of wedded life she said leaded wife and collapsed in a heap of giggles. Jenny and Ezra gave them three curtain calls.
That evening, Cody went out to the porch and looked northward some more in the twilight. Ezra came too and sat in the glider, pushing back and forth with the heel of one sneaker. “Want to walk toward Sloop Street?” Cody asked him.
“What’s on Sloop Street?”
“Nothing much. This girl I know, Edith Taber.”
“Oh, yes. Edith,” Ezra said.
“You know who she is?”
“She’s got this whistle,” Ezra said, “that plays sharps and flats with hardly any extra trouble.”
“Edith Taber?”
“A recorder.”
“You’re thinking of someone else,” Cody told him.
“Well, maybe so.”
Cody was silent a moment, leaning on the porch railing. Ezra creaked companionably in the glider. Then Cody said, “A black-haired girl. Ninth-grader.”
“New in town,” Ezra agreed.
“When’d you see her?”
“Just yesterday,” Ezra said. “I was walking home from school, playing my whistle, and she caught up with me and said she liked it and asked if I wanted to see her recorder. So I went to her house and I saw it.”
“To her house? Did she know you w
ere my brother?”
“Well, no, I don’t think so,” Ezra said. “She has a parakeet that burps and says, ‘Forgive me.’ Her mother served us cookies.”
“You met her mother?”
“It would be nice to have a recorder, someday.”
“She’s too old for you,” Cody said.
Ezra looked surprised. “Well, of course,” he said. “She’s fourteen and a half.”
“What would she want with a little sixth-grader?”
“She wanted to show me her whistle,” Ezra said.
“Shoot,” said Cody.
“Cody? Are we going to walk toward Sloop Street?”
“Nah,” said Cody. He kicked a pillar.
“If I asked Mother,” Ezra said, “do you think she would get me one of those recorders for Christmas?”
“You dunce,” said Cody. “You raving idiot. Do you think she’s got money to spare for goddamn whistles?”
“Well, no, I guess not,” Ezra said.
Then Cody went into the house and locked the door, and when Ezra started pounding on it Cody told their mother it was only Mr. Milledge, having one of his crazy spells.
Monday morning, he looked for Edith on the way to school but he didn’t see her. As it turned out, she was tardy. She arrived in homeroom just after the bell. He tried to catch her eye but she didn’t glance his way; only gazed fixedly at the teacher all during announcements. And when the first bell rang she walked to class with Sue Meeks and Harriet Smith. Evidently, she was no longer friendless.
By third period, it was clear she was avoiding him. He couldn’t even get near her; she had a constant bodyguard. But what had he done wrong? He cornered Barbara Pace—a plump, cheerful redhead who served as a kind of central switchboard for ninth-grade couples. “What’s the matter with Edith?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Edith Taber. We were getting along just fine and now she won’t speak.”
“Oh,” she said. She shifted her books. She was wearing a man-sized shirt with the tails out. Come to think of it, so were half the other girls. “Well,” she said, “I guess she likes somebody else now.”