C, My Name Is Cal

by Norma Fox Mazer

  I can’t remember feelings like that from so young. Except for one teacher, Mrs. Eisenor. I used to sit and stare at her arms. She always wore sleeveless blouses, and her arms were big and fresh-looking.

  Around fourth grade, I really started liking the girls in my class, but I didn’t talk about it—or show it, either, I guess. I had my feelings, but I kept them all inside.

  Garo shoved against me. “You’ll get valentines. You get them every year; the girls all give you valentines. Smoochy, smoochy!”

  I packed a snowball, took aim. “Garo, my boy—” The snowball smacked into a tree. “I don’t care, one way or the other. That stuff is for elementary school.”

  “No, the girls are still doing valentines.” He put his puppy dog face in mine. “This is the day you find out if girls like you. I know what you’ll find out, but I’m afraid what I’ll find out. I’m telling you, Cal, today might be very detrimental to my mental health.”

  “Who is it that you want to get a valentine from, anyway? You have some particular girl in mind?”

  He changed the subject. “Remember Valentine’s Day in grade school? Remember third grade? Remember Jeanne Foster? The worst day of my life!”

  “She was the one with buck teeth, wasn’t she?”

  “She did not have buck teeth.”

  “Sure, she did. Did she send you a valentine?”

  “I wanted her to. I was positive she would. She told me out on the playground that she was going to send me a valentine. I waited all day. I kept thinking she was going to give it to me in private. It was like waiting to be picked for the softball team in gym and never being picked.”

  “Garo, you’re always picked for the team.”

  “It’s only true when you’re there.”

  “Garo, you’re crazy as a coot.”

  “No, it’s the truth. When you’re there, Cal, they pick me. When you’re not there, they go right over me.”

  Garo has a way of building me up beyond what I really am. He asks me questions and then waits for my answers, as if I’ve got all the right ones. Once he asked, “Cal, how many toes are there in the world?”

  He was serious, I think. Or maybe it was a joke I didn’t get. That’s possible. Actually, it’s an easy question if you know the world population, except that the population is changing instantly, constantly. I once saw a display in a store window showing X billions of people in the world. The last number flipped without stopping. Bip bip bip bip bip bip bip bip bipbipbipbipbipbipbip … While I stood there, 650 people were added to the world. It was sort of frightening. The world doesn’t get any bigger, but every second more people are pressing in on it.

  The way Garo looks up to me makes me uneasy. I’m not that smart. I don’t do anything special. I’m not a sports genius. I’m not good with music. I’m not scientific. OK, I’m good in school, but so what? I like to read and I remember things, which is why I like studying, but it’s not as if I’m forcing myself to do something I don’t enjoy.

  Maybe I like school because Mom’s father was a school principal in Chicago. My grandmother died a long time ago, and my grandfather lives alone. Mom says he’s not a happy man, and she never got along with him. “He didn’t want me to marry your father, who had no special education.”

  Considering the way things worked out with my father doing his disappearing act, maybe my grandfather knew something. I asked Mom once if we’d ever visit him. “No,” she said. “N. O. If that man doesn’t want to know he’s got a grandson, then I don’t want to know him.”

  “Do you know Leslie Branch likes you, Cal?” Garo said.

  “Get lost. She does not. Where’d you hear that?” Leslie Branch has thin red lips and a sharp nose. She’s cute, like a tall witch would be cute. She flashes her eyes.

  “She told me herself. She said she wished she could kiss you.”

  “I heard that she likes everything in pants.” I’d also heard that she kept a record book, with the ambition to kiss every boy in our class and then get it into the Guinness Book of World Records.

  “She kissed me,” Garo said happily.

  This was news. I’d never thought much about Leslie before, but now I felt jealousy. “When did this happen?”

  “The other day in gym, I mean, after gym. On the stairs going down to the locker rooms.”

  “A real kiss?”

  “It wasn’t a sock in the mouth.”

  I’d had party kisses, but not the real thing. “What was it like?”

  “Oooh, soft, and—” He began weaving around with a crazy smile, hugging himself, acting dopey. He fell down in a bank of snow. “Oh, boy, Cal, oh, boy!”

  “She kissed you on the lips or the cheek?” I asked.

  “On the lips. Smackola!” Garo rubbed his mouth. His freckles stood out. “She kissed me, but I think—you know what I think? She really wanted to kiss you. That’s why she kissed me.”

  “That makes sense,” I said.

  “Well, she told me—she said she wanted you to kiss her, and I should tell you. So I think she kissed me like a bribe. Get it? So I’d tell you, and you’d do it. You know, now I’m sort of a walking advertisement for her kiss. This is good stuff, Cal. It’ll be a real experience for you.”

  I started thinking about it and I got excited, but I didn’t like to show it, so I grunted.

  “Will you do it? Will you kiss her?” Garo asked.

  “Not if she’s the one you want a valentine from.” It was a shot in the dark.

  “No, it’s not Leslie! You can kiss Leslie as much as you want. The one I want is—” He cut himself off. “No, I can’t tell. She isn’t even looking at me. Not that way.” He slapped himself in the face. “I’m getting depressed,” he moaned.

  “Garo, you’re getting depressed over nothing, man. Whoever she is, she’s going to send you a valentine. I have a feeling.”

  He looked at me. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really,” I bluffed.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Okay? One word from me and everything is fine? Why does he do that? Why does he let me say bull and get away with it? I was just saying the first thing that popped into my head, trying to calm him down.

  “Knock, knock, Cal,” he said.

  Garo and his jokes. They’re usually bad. “Who’s there?”

  “Picasso.”

  “Picasso who?”

  “Picass I have a song in my art.”

  “Picass I have a song in my art,” I repeated. I didn’t get it, but I made it sound like I was just being ironic and a little bored with Garo’s basictype humor. Then I got it. Picass I have a song in my ’art. Double joke. Picasso was a famous painter. “Funny,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s a good one.” Garo bounded alongside me. He only gets worried, like about the valentines, sometimes, and then it blows right over. Sometimes if I’m a little glum, his cheerfulness gets on my nerves.

  Once when he was babbling about Life and Happiness, I said, “Garo, your mother is dead. Is life perfect? No, it isn’t.”

  “I know that.” His freckles stood out as if he were going to cry. Garo can cry. I can’t. I used to when I was really little, I can remember crying into Opha Kangaroo’s fur pocket. But then I stopped. I stopped myself when I was ten years old. I felt ashamed that I cried. I felt mad at myself every time I cried. So I stopped.

  But I’ve heard Garo cry lots of times, even now that he’s fourteen, mostly from thinking about his mother. It was mean of me to bring it up like that. But as fast as he admitted that life could never be perfect, he added, “But it’s almost perfect. I’ve got you and Nina and my father. And even my father’s job is perfect.”

  Which was sort of a family joke, something Mom, Garo, and I agreed on a long time ago. Not because Alan is a pilot and Garo can fly anywhere he wants for free, which he can. But because Alan is a fanatic about a clean house and rules and quiet and anything else you can be a fanatic about. Fortunately for all of us, he has a job that keeps him away from home mos
t of the time.

  When he does come home between flights, we all get a little tense. He has a way of running his finger over shelves you’d never think about otherwise, and looking for things that are out of place and pointing this stuff out to Mom. Maybe it’s a good quality in a pilot—I mean, being so meticulous. He probably would never do anything careless that might hurt the passengers on his plane.

  Usually Mom laughs at him, but sometimes it gets to her. I remember once Alan found dust in some closet or other and called her to see. She blew up. She screamed, “Mr. Vitulli! Do you want a dust-free house, is that your main concern, or is your son your main concern?”

  She sent Garo and me out of the house, but we didn’t miss a thing. It was summer and all the windows were open.

  “I’m doing my best,” Mom yelled, “to take care of your boy, and if my best isn’t good enough for you, fire me.”

  That scared me. If she quit Alan, where would we go? Where would we live? How would Mom make money for us?

  “I’ll find someplace else to work, Mr. Vitulli. I didn’t get fat on this job. I’ve always been this way!”

  Garo’s freckles were so bright he looked like a speckled egg. “She doesn’t mean it,” I said. But I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure, but I had to say something to Garo. He looked ready to puke.

  “Mrs. Nina, calm down,” Alan was saying in his deep, soothing Captain of the Ship voice. “Mrs. Nina, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that you’re not doing a superior job. Mrs. Nina! Mrs. Nina, are you calm now? Is it okay? Is it okay?”

  Alan calls Mom Mrs. Nina, because when we first came here, she said she definitely didn’t want him calling her Nina. “Too familiar.” And she even more definitely didn’t want to be called Mrs. Miller. “I do not like being reminded that that is my legal name,” she said.

  So she’s Mom to me, Mrs. Nina to Alan, and Nina to Garo. And Garo’s father is Mr. Vitulli to Mom, Dad to Garo, and Alan to me—or sometimes Captain, if I sense he’s in an especially friendly mood.

  Chapter 3

  “Hi-i-i, Garo! How are you, cutie?” Leslie Branch shoved into the signing line ahead of Garo. Dave Ramsey, an author, had come to our school to talk to us. We were lined up in the library so he could sign our books. I had one he wrote called Secret of the White Roof. I’d read it three times and brought it from home. Garo had a Ramsey book called If I Die … He’d bought it this morning, because it was the skinniest one for sale. Garo still wasn’t a great reader.

  “You don’t mind me cutting in, do you, hon?” Leslie gave me a flashing glance, but it was Garo she spoke to. She was wearing a pink sweater with rabbits around the border. She kept patting Garo on the head. “Curly curls,” she said.

  Garo blushed, his freckles seemed to melt all over his face. Was he thinking about her kissing him? The girls think it’s cute when Garo blushes. They tease him and shove him around. They like him. I told him it was foolish for him to worry about valentine cards, and I was right. He got plenty! I got a few myself, including one from Leslie with her lipsticked mouth print on it.

  “I heard this book is really creepy,” Garo said to Leslie. On the cover, it showed a skull sort of hovering mistily in the air, and a boy hiding behind a tree.

  “Are you going to read it?” she asked. She looked over at me again.

  I acted like I didn’t notice.

  “Sure I’ll read it,” Garo said. “I’ll probably read it tonight.” He jerked his thumb at me. “And this guy will read three books tonight.”

  “Shut up,” I muttered, looking away.

  “I want Mr. Ramsey’s signature,” Garo went on. “Someday it might be worth a lot of money.… Got your pen, Cal?” He held up his pen. “See this,” he said to Leslie. “That’s his mom.” The pen had NINA MILLER, ASSISTANT TO CUB SCOUT TROOP 19, EAST DRUMLINS imprinted in gold. That was from way back when Garo and I went through our Cub Scout phase. We were selling embossed pens to raise money. Mom had ordered four dozen.

  After Mr. Ramsey autographed her book, Leslie Branch stopped by me. “Want to sign my book, too?”

  “I’m not an author.”

  “I just thought you might like to.” I thought it was a pretty dumb thing to do, but I took her book and wrote my name in it. Then I drew a skull and crossbones under it.

  “What’s that for?” Leslie asked.

  I shrugged. “Poison.”

  “You’re poison?” She gave me a big smile. “I drink poison every Saturday night.”

  Just as Leslie left, Fern Light and her skinny friend, Angel Hayes, pulled the same stunt on Garo and pushed into the line ahead of him. All the pushy girls in school know Garo. He didn’t mind. He just started telling me a joke in a loud voice.

  “What did the man who jumped off the Empire State Building say as he went past the thirty-sixth floor?”

  Fern Light turned and looked at him with raised eyebrows.

  “So far …” Garo broke up laughing. “So far … so good!”

  “That is a very low form of humor,” Fern said. She has thick dark eyebrows and really big, slightly bulging dark eyes. She has definite opinions about everything and makes sure everyone knows them. Angel Hayes, on the other hand, hardly ever says anything. She’s Fern’s devoted follower. She’s got a little mole on the corner of her lip, which was twitching almost as fast as Fern’s eyebrows were wagging.

  I think those wagging eyebrows made Garo a little crazy. He started telling another bad joke in the same loud voice. “What did the man say when he was asked if the basement was damp?”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Why, that place is so dry down there, the bugs die of thirst.”

  “Oh, lord,” Fern said. She stepped up to the table where Dave Ramsey was sitting. “Hello, Mr. Ramsey! Thank you for being here. Would you please sign this book for Iris? That’s spelled I. R. I. S.”

  “Certainly,” Dave Ramsey said. He bent over the book. He had a bald spot on top of his head.

  “Iris is not your name,” Garo said.

  Fern turned around. The eyebrows started wagging. “Oh, thank you for informing me, Garo! Oh, heavens, if you hadn’t let me know, saved me in the nick of time, BIG identity crisis!” Next to her, Angel Hayes’s mole was smiling.

  I socked Garo on the arm. “Hey,” he said feebly. He stared after Fern as she left, with that puppy dog look on his face. That’s when I finally got it. Fern was the girl he’d been hoping would send him a valentine. She didn’t.

  “Hey,” I said, and socked him again. “Cheer up.”

  Then the author looked up. “Well, boys, how do you want me to sign your books?”

  Garo put his book down on the table. “Write, ‘For my good friend, Garretson Vitulli.’”

  Garo hung around with me at basketball practice. He handed the ball off to me, below the basket. On the way home, he said, “If I ever grow enough, I’ll make the team.”

  “Garo, you say that as if it’s your height, I mean your lack of height, that kept you off the team.”

  “Well, it did.”

  “No. You’ve got a nice jump shot. You know what Coach said. You didn’t take the game seriously, you joked around too much.”

  “I’m too short,” he said.

  “Look at Paxson on the Bulls. Look at Price. Look at Jackson. All little guys—and all great players.” I sounded slick, self-confident, like I knew all the answers. Who was I to talk about Garo’s lack of concentration? I’m not that great, I’m not great at all. I was one of the last picks for the team. The best thing I can say about myself is that I really like the game. I could run the ball up and down the court all day. And then turn and leap, like I’m Michael Jordan.

  And I like the game, too, because when you’re playing basketball, you can’t think of anything else. Nothing but basketball. And that’s good, because there are times when I can’t stop thinking about things—like my father. Like, where is he? And why hasn’t he ever come to see me? And what would he think of me?

 
I wonder if he’d like to see me play. Every game, at some point, the thought flashes through my mind that he’s in the stands, watching. I think it helps my game. But then other times, I wonder, Does he hate me? Does he think anything of me? I get all these questions rushing around in my brain, sort of like mice in a cage. And then I think about what I’ll do when I get out of school, and that makes me crazy, too, because everything is a question. And I don’t have any of the answers.

  Chapter 4

  Mom was on the phone with Tom Lustig when Garo and I came back home. I could tell who it was from the way she turned her back and said, “Well, I better get off now … the endless appetites are here.” Then she listened. Tom is a big talker. I suppose he’s her boyfriend. She never says it. She says, “My friend Tom.” My friend Tom is a commercial photographer. My friend Tom takes pictures to put on the boxes products come in. You see that toaster box with that picture of a happy smiling woman taking toast out of her wonderful XYZ toaster? My friend Tom took that picture.

  Mom posed for one of Tom’s pictures once for a weight loss product called Wate Pow(d)er. It showed her with her head tipped back, drinking a Wate Pow(d)er Cocktail.

  “Your Aunt Shirley called today,” Mom said to Garo after she hung up.

  “What does she want?”

  “Don’t know, hon. She wants you to call her back.”

  “Do I have to? Calling California’s expensive.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mom said. “I know how much you worry about the phone bill. I told your aunt you’d call.”

  “What do you bet she wants me to come visit again?” Garo made a face.

  He was right. Friday after school Mom and I drove him to the airport to get the plane to Los Angeles. Garo can fly any time he wants to. He’d flown out to Los Angeles just a few months ago to visit his Aunt Shirley. She’s his father’s sister.

  It’s always different for me at home when Garo’s away. Mom has more time, and we do more things together. We went to the movies Friday night, Saturday we had lunch at Ground Round and went shopping, and that night we stayed up late watching an old Jimmy Cagney movie. It was fun being with Mom alone.