“He’s a Blue Meanie from Yellow Submarine,” Dave said. Aimée didn’t like them, either. She sniffed.
“Aimée needs to go home.” I stood up. Joanie waved a Minnie Mouse glove at me. She wasn’t coming; she was staying with Nathan.
Dave followed me out the door like Dracula after his prey. I trudged up the hilly driveway, lugging the treats and Aimée’s crown, which she didn’t want to wear anymore. Her shoes were too tight, and she was sucking her cheek and sniffling, scared of the dark driveway or the Blue Meanie. She wouldn’t let go of the flashlight, although I could have used it better to light our way. She clutched the side of my red skirt with her free hand. I had a hard time negotiating the pitch-black driveway with her weight and the pillowcase and the crown. And Dave was tagging along beside me, his cape flapping in the wind, which had gotten colder while we were inside.
At first I was glad Dave was with us, but he walked too slowly. He kept trying to catch my arm to tell me something, but Aimée hauled me along so fast I tripped over Aunt Bonnie’s boots on the gravel.
“Dave, what?” I said in exasperation. We were almost at the end of the Rangers’ driveway, where we could see a little bit from the glow of the jack-o’-lantern.
“I want to go home,” Aimée said, looking around at the spooky Halloween trees and the empty road.
Dave held my elbow and whispered in my ear, “My dad asked me what I thought about moving to Ohio.”
I stopped and stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
There was a scuffle of laughing and pebbles in the driveway, and voices, and Joanie and Nathan came running up beside us. “Let’s hide and scare people,” Joanie said.
I shook my head at her, hoping she wouldn’t upset Aimée.
“Chérie,” Dave said into my ear, “I don’t want to move.”
“What does he want to go there for?”
“It’s where he’s from. I don’t want to, Chérie.”
“Well, why would you?” I couldn’t imagine Aunt Bonnie not living across the road, not yelling and playing the radio and making things for the elves and wearing her fancy clothes.
“What does your mom think?” I was trying to talk softly so the others wouldn’t hear. They were making a racket, flirting and giggling and pushing each other around.
“What’s the holdup?” asked Nathan. “Let’s go.”
“We’re going this way,” said Dave, pointing up Marvin Road, the other way from Joanie and Nathan’s neighborhood. His voice caught.
“Cher-EE.” Aimée pulled on my arm. “I want to go home.”
“We are,” I told her.
Nathan began rattling and rustling though his treat bag. “I got six doughnuts,” he boasted.
“In your bag?” Joanie put her head close to Nathan’s to look.
Dave said, “Mom’s not involved.”
“Not involved in what? Moving?”
“Shut up!” he said, almost desperately.
Aimée stood nearly in the middle of Marvin Road, trying to get me to follow her out there.
“We have to do something.” Dave talked as if he had all night.
I grabbed Aimée, with the flashlight in her fist, and pulled her back.
“Let go, Chérie,” she said.
“No,” I said angrily. “It’s dark. You’re in the road.”
She gave a loud sniff. Uh-oh.
In the driveway Joanie was begging Nathan for a doughnut as though she hadn’t just eaten a ton inside.
Dave said, “Pete wants to drop out and join the army.”
“He’s too young,” I said. Nobody heard Dave’s news but me.
“Chérie,” said Aimée. She shone the flashlight into my eyes. “If you don’t come, I’m going to go without you.”
“Gosh, just shut up,” I said. “Wait a minute.”
“Chérie, don’t say shut up, say fermez la—” she said.
“Hush!” I thought I heard a car somewhere along Marvin Road.
“Why would your dad go with just you?” I whispered to Dave. Maybe we could move, too. Somewhere else. Out of the county. Out of the state.
A car came fast around the bend. I snatched Aimée out of the road by her princess cape, almost knocking Dave down.
“Hey!” he said.
For a moment we were caught in the headlights. My heart nearly stopped. The car completely stopped. We watched its taillights go white. It backed up. It was a station wagon. In the dark it had no color.
Suddenly there was wild yelling. Small, hard things flew through the air into our faces and smashed into us. Aimée cried out, hurt. I pulled her toward me and tried to block both our faces, but not in time to avoid the sharp crack and splat of what could only be eggs. Slime dripped down our faces and hair and the fronts of our costumes. The driver stepped on the gas. Now gravel sprayed into our faces, too. When the car had gotten a few yards ahead, heads stuck out the windows, and someone yelled, “Suckers!”
Pete Asconti.
“I’ll kill you!” I screeched after the car.
Aimée cried out, holding her head.
“It was just eggs, Aimée,” Joanie said. She grabbed the pillowcase from me and used it to wipe Aimée’s face. “You’re okay.”
Aimée howled, “A rock hit me! Am I bleeding? It hurts!” If only there were a house nearby, but there was only the millhouse, back down that long, dark driveway. Nathan felt around on the ground and leaped up with something in his hand.
“It’s an apple,” he said.
I grabbed Dave by the shoulders and shook him. “Your brother!” I yelled. “Driving around in cars throwing apples at little girls’ heads!”
“I didn’t—” Dave sputtered.
I threw the apple like a fastball at the ground at his feet, where it splattered. “And you, keeping us here at the end of the driveway, right? Great plan!”
“No!” he said, stepping toward me. “It’s not my fault!”
“Then whose fault is it?” I asked. How could Pete Asconti throw an apple at Aimée’s head? Whom had he been trying to hit?
Dave held me off him. “Chérie, it was Pete, not me.”
“Keep away from me!” I gave Joanie the pillowcase of candy and squatted down with my back to Aimée. Still sobbing, Aimée threw her arms around my neck and climbed onto my back. I tucked my arms under her legs and piggybacked her up the hill toward home.
They let us go. Nobody followed. Thanks, Joanie. I heard no more cars, so I hiked right up the middle of Marvin Road. Aimée’s arms choked me. But she suddenly stopped crying. “What about Dave?” she asked.
“What about him?” I said.
“He’s just standing there, Chérie.”
“So let him!” I said. I couldn’t turn to look.
“He’s still there, Chérie,” said Aimée.
We were at the top of the hill, at the end of Onion Lane. I stopped to get my breath and look back. I couldn’t see Dave. I said, “There isn’t anything I can do about the Ass-contis, Em.”
I almost started blubbering myself. Right then would have been the crying moment, looking down the dark hill toward the Rangers’ driveway, toward Dave in his Dracula suit. But I didn’t start crying. I didn’t wait for Dave. And I didn’t go back.
“I was doing the best I possibly could,” I told my parents later. “She was right with me every second.” But Aimée was going to have a black eye from that apple. How could I have gone back?
CHAPTER 15
TUESDAY WAS ELECTION DAY, and no school. Richard Nixon won, and nobody seemed really happy about it, not the way they would have been if Bobby Kennedy had won. It was safe news to watch at least.
Dave came over and sat on the porch while I was folding papers—pictures of Nixon making peace signs as if he thought he was some kind of hippie—and said he thought a hide-and-seek game would be a good idea.
“You’ll do anything to get out of your house,” I said. His face showed just how right I was.
I hadn’t
talked to Dave since Halloween. He had been over a few times with Aunt Bonnie, who was helping Mom handwash a zillion tiny baby clothes and hang them on the line “in the sunshine.” The way they said it, it sounded as if sunshine had been invented to dry babies’ clothes. I’d avoided him, and he’d gone back home.
Later he found me on the porch trying to make a Thanksgiving cornucopia out of dried grass for the elves. It kept falling apart, not like the basket Joanie had made in the summer, when the grass was fresh.
“You should hear him,” Dave said. I braced myself for some dumb comment from Pete, something to explain why Dave and Sandy went on doing whatever Pete said, no matter whom it hurt.
“I’ve heard all that he has to say,” I said.
“I mean Dad.”
“Oh. Well, I can hear him,” I said. Uncle Joe was in a very loud mood. I’d already heard him holding forth about raking while Pete stood red-faced, furious, rake in hand. Now his voice rose as the front door of the lemon yellow house opened and Aunt Bonnie came tip-tapping, her salmon pink cardigan buttoned tight. Her eyes looked round, anxious. She hurried past us, tousling both our heads, and into my house. Now what?
There were too many secrets lately. I had even made Aimée promise not to tell what Pete did on Halloween. If she told, I said, I’d tell Dad she wanted him to teach her to ride her bike but was too embarrassed to ask him.
Hate Pete though I did, I didn’t want Uncle Joe to have anything else to hold against him. If Uncle Joe knew it was Pete who’d given Aimée that black eye … I didn’t know what would happen. And if something did happen, it would be my fault for telling on Pete. That was the trouble. So I made her say she’d bumped into a tree branch in the dark. Everyone was too busy thinking about other things to question it.
I’d never asked Dave to explain what he’d said that night on the road. What did I care if he moved? When he asked to come along when I rode my route, I said, “What would you want to do that for?” He sat on our porch watching as I rode away.
I dreamed we were driving out of Washington, trying to find the way to the thruway so we could go home to Connecticut. But Dad couldn’t find the way, and Mom kept getting lost on her map. Or maybe the streets kept changing, I don’t know. Instead of the thruway entrance we kept driving into that neighborhood with the kids playing on the sidewalks. Now people were rioting there. People were yelling, things were banging, and glass was breaking. The ground rumbled and quaked in Arlington Cemetery, where we suddenly found ourselves. Up the hill at Kennedy’s grave it looked as though people were fighting. Bombs were going off, and Dad was yelling, “Mitchie, what does the map say?” Mom cried, “I don’t know! Everything keeps changing!”
Somehow Aimée was the most real thing in the dream. Just as when we drove through for real, she was crying. When I woke up, Aimée was in my bed with me, and she really was crying, sitting up and watching me sleep and crying.
“What is it?” I said.
“Mommy’s gone,” she said.
“Gone?” I sat up fast.
“To have the baby,” she said.
A smile burst over my face bright as light. Aimée fell over on my pillow and cried.
“What are you crying about?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” she said. “Mommy’s gone.”
“Well, she’s coming back, jerko. With our new baby.”
Aimée just stared at me, as if to say, “And?”
“It’s going to be really good, that’s all,” I said. I lay down and put my arm around her.
As she fell asleep, I realized that we were alone in the house. My stomach was still quaking from my dream. Big help the Ascontis across the road would be if someone crept in the window over the roof or, worse yet, came in from downstairs and sneaked up the steps to where Aimée and I were.
I slipped out of bed and dialed the telephone in Mom and Dad’s room. Uncle Joe answered the phone. “Aunt Bonnie?” I said. “Can I talk to Aunt Bonnie?”
“It’s all right, Cher,” he said gently, in the familiar voice I’d been hearing all my life. Maybe I could still trust Uncle Joe after all. “She’s right downstairs.”
I went down and found her dozing on the couch. “Chérie? How about some TV, hon?”
She put on the late movie, and we sat together on the couch, drinking hot chocolate. “We would have been okay,” I lied. “You didn’t have to come over.”
“I didn’t want you to wake up to an empty house,” Aunt Bonnie said. “Not the way you’ve been feeling.” She had bunny fur slippers with a little heel over pale blue thin socks. I don’t remember what she had on the rest of her. I remember only her feet—and her arm around me.
“Thank you,” I said. What did she mean about what I’d been feeling? We watched Cary Grant driving somewhere in a convertible. “Is Mom—”
She didn’t let me finish. “Your mommy knows what she’s doing, mademoiselle. You’ll see.”
Some actress was with Cary, but I didn’t know her name, and I didn’t feel like asking. Too cozy, too sleepy …
“Mademoiselle, you and David are still friends, aren’t you?”
I opened my eyes and looked at Aunt Bonnie. Her eyes close to mine had that round look again. I couldn’t let her look so anxious for me. “Yeah,” I said. I tried to sound sure, but I wasn’t.
“Oh, good. I wasn’t sure, lately.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, feeling like a fibber.
“He needs a friend now, Chérie. His best friend, y’know?”
In the morning when we woke up, Dad was there to tell us that our baby brother had been born. “Guillaume,” he said. “Can you believe it?”
Guillaume is French for William. It sounded good. It would have been good if all we’d done was hear it. But when Mom sent home notes to Aimée and me, she drew little pictures of a round-headed baby and labeled them “Guy.” They sent out telegrams with “Guy” on them, too. People started calling up congratulating us on baby Guy. Only they didn’t say it the way Mom and Dad said it, “ghee.” They said it the American way, as if they were saying “wise guy.”
The Ascontis came over, all of them, as soon as Guy came home, and that was odd, because everyone was smiling. Pete got to hold the baby almost as soon as I did, and I swear they all smiled at him more than they did at me.
“Well, which is it, Ghee or Guy?” said Pete. “You ought to just call him Guy. That’s what everybody’s going to call him anyway.”
Dave said, “The kids are going to call him Wise Guy.”
“Only if they’re morons,” said Aunt Bonnie.
“Well, they are,” I said.
“Why don’t you call him Guillaume and forget the nickname?” said Uncle Joe.
Aimée said it best: “It feels weird to call him Ghee when you know it’s spelled Guy.”
“It’s Guy!” said Mom. “It’s spelled Guy, and it is Guy!” Except that she said it Ghee.
“This is America, not France!” roared Dad. “We should have called him Fred Flintstone!”
“Fred is easier,” said Pete, and patted the baby on the back.
“Little Fred,” said Uncle Joe.
“You’re kidding,” said Mom, looking from one of us to the other.
“We’ll all know he’s really Guillaume, Mommy,” Aimée said.
“Fred Witkowski,” I said.
“I like it,” said Dave. “It’s tough.”
“Get serious!” Mom said.
But Fred stuck. If only the good mood had, too.
Everything that you’re waiting for is different when it finally arrives. Once our baby was here and once he was Freddy the idea of sharing my bedroom changed drastically. I begged to have him in my room. And when I came home from school in the afternoon (on my bike, whether it was raining or not, and Mom hardly seemed to notice) and found him snuffling gently in his tiny bassinet in the dining room, I’d sit right down at the table next to him and do my homework, so happy to have him there.
“Let him get a little old
er,” Mom said at last. “Then I’ll put him down in your room in the afternoons.”
Dad smiled a “See? What did I tell you?” smile at Mom.
She said, “It can’t last forever. He’ll be a toddler before you know it, and then what?” The moving battle was still on.
Two weeks after Fred was born, a load of bricks was delivered to our house. It was Dad’s present to Mom for having Fred. “Other women get diamonds,” Mom said. “I get bricks.”
Some present: a brick path to lead from the back door to the little fountain. “You won’t be able to think of moving once you see this path winding through your yard,” said Dad.
It was the wrong thing to say. “It’ll sure make the house easier to sell,” Mom said dryly.
“What did you say?” Dad roared.
Aimée and I headed for the circle.
“You know,” said Aimée. “I can think of good things to do with those bricks.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
CHAPTER 16
ON SUNDAY MORNINGS THE BELL was fat with extra sections and ads and comics. You just slid the whole thing into a flat bag because it was too thick to fold and band. It was a big job, with twenty-nine papers. People wanted their papers when they got up on Sunday morning. So the paper girl had to be the first one up. I was.
That November Sunday morning Aimée got up with me and came downstairs for cereal. Mom and Dad murmured softly in their room, and I couldn’t hear Freddy. The possibility that they’d all had a good night’s sleep was the only good news of the day.
I turned on the lights and hustled out to the porch for the papers. The Sunday paper came in sections, not in one piece like the weekdays’. You had to fold the sections in a particular order: the magazine and circulars inside the entertainment section, the news outside that, and the funny papers on the very outside, so they would be the colorful first thing that the customer saw.
I usually laid them down in piles and went along like an assembly line, picking up one section at a time.
Not this morning. Thoughtless, drowsy, I turned over the stack of news sections and dropped them, the whole pile, as though stung, in pain. I wanted to scream, but instead I went silent.
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