Bingo Brown, Gypsy Lover

by Betsy Byars

  “Well, yes….”

  “All I thought about was how a baby would upset my life, my life.”

  “Well, it was a shock to you, Bingo.”

  “And now I realize that, well, it would have upset my life, but there’s such a thing as a welcome upset. And now I realize that’s what a baby brother would have been—a very pleasant upset, one that would have added to my life.”

  He ducked his head.

  “And now all I can think about is how much it’s going to upset my life if the baby brother doesn’t—” He paused for the right word. “—doesn’t happen.”

  “It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen.”

  They looked at each other across the sunlit kitchen. “And while we’re waiting for it to happen,” his grandmother added, “I’m going to fix us some breakfast.”

  She opened the cabinet where she kept her pots and pans and pulled out a small skillet. At that moment the phone rang, and Grammy picked it up on the first ring.

  “Sam?” She listened. “Oh, Sam.”

  She put the skillet over her heart and turned to Bingo. Tears filled her eyes. “He’s here,” she told Bingo. “Jamie’s here. They’re both all right.”

  She put down the skillet and held out the phone to Bingo. “You talk to your dad. I’ve got to lie down. Look, I’m starting to shake.”

  “Dad?”

  “Bingo! Jamie was born fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He and your mom are fine.”

  “How big is he?”

  “Well, he’s small—four pounds, fifteen ounces, but he gave a loud cry in the delivery room. I can’t tell you how good that sounded to me. He got a score of two on his cry—that’s as good as a baby can get.”

  “He got scores?”

  “Every baby born in the United States does. It’s called an Apgar score.”

  “And two is good?”

  “It’s the best. They checked him at one minute, and his score was eight—out of a possible ten. He got a two on his respiratory effort—that’s his cry, a two on his heart rate, a one on his color—”

  “What was wrong with his color?”

  “Well, his body was pink, but his extremities—his arms and legs—were blue. He got a two on his reflex irritability and a one on his muscle tone. Then—”

  “What was wrong with his muscle tone?”

  “He didn’t kick as well as they wanted him to.”

  “Well, he couldn’t! His legs were blue!”

  “Then they scored him again at five minutes—that’s the most important score. At five minutes, his color was good and so was his kick. He got all twos. Bingo, your baby brother is a perfect ten!”

  The Stocking Stuffers

  “IT’S HARD FOR ME to believe it’s Christmas eve.”

  “Not for me, Bingo, I feel very Christmasy,” his grandmother answered.

  They were in his grandmother’s Honda, driving to the hospital. Bingo had on his favorite jeans, his favorite shirt, and his favorite jacket—his new one.

  He would have to give his mother an explanation for that, of course. His explanation would be, “Mom, you told me to wrap it up and put it under the tree and I did those things. You didn’t tell me I had to wait till Christmas to wear it, so I didn’t.”

  He knew his mother wouldn’t care. She would understand that he wanted to look especially nice today.

  He flipped down the sun visor and checked his image in the mirror underneath.

  “You look fine,” his grandmother said.

  “You do too.”

  “I was saving this pants suit for something special, and I said to myself, well, there’s never going to be anything more special than this, that’s for sure, and so I put it on. Then I had bought this purse for myself for Christmas—ever since I was a little girl, Bingo, I have always given myself a Christmas present. The family used to laugh about it. ‘To Rose, From Rose,’ the cards used to say. This is what I got myself this year.”

  They drove in silence for a few blocks, and then his grandmother said, “One thing, Bingo…”

  “What?”

  “Don’t expect too much.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, just that sometimes new babies—Oh, sometimes they’re wrinkled, and maybe a little discolored—”

  “Dad said he got a two on his color. Dad says he’s a perfect ten!”

  “I know, but sometimes—Oh, the face is puffy or—When your mom was born, one of her ears was lying flat on her cheek, like that.” She pressed her own ear forward.

  “Grammy, I’ve been looking in the nursery every day since Mom was admitted. I know what newborn babies look like.”

  “Yes, but every baby you’ve seen has been full-term.”

  “Sure, but full-term doesn’t mean beautiful. I’ve seen some pointed heads and flat noses. I’m not blind. I’ve seen hair sticking up like a punk rocker’s. But with all that, I never saw one that was really and truly what you would call ugly.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear.”

  His grandmother parked the car and they walked together into the hospital.

  As they rode to the fifth floor, Bingo said, “If someone had told me last Christmas that I would be doing this this Christmas, well, I…”

  The door to the fifth floor opened and Bingo stepped out. All morning long Bingo had had an urge to get to the nursery. And now, as he started down the corridor, the urge grew into a need and then into a frenzy. He broke into a run.

  Behind him his grandmother called, “Wait for me.”

  But he couldn’t wait. He couldn’t be stopped. He was like Roadrunner, with his legs moving so swiftly they were an invisible blur to all the considerate people who were stepping aside to let him pass.

  He ended up at the nursery window, slightly out of breath. He put one hand on the wall to support himself.

  Then he saw his brother.

  Bingo would have known him anywhere.

  He was the little one in the back.

  His grandmother arrived then. “Can you pick him out?”

  “He’s the little one in the back.”

  “Oh, he’s so tiny!” His grandmother tapped on the window as if to get his attention. “And, Bingo, he favors you!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Grammy, why isn’t he moving?”

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “It doesn’t look like—sleep. Anyway, Dad said he was kicking and crying.”

  “For the first hour after birth, he probably was. Babies are alert when they’re first born, watchful, I guess you’d say, and then they fall into a deep sleep.”

  “For how long?”

  “Three or four hours.”

  His grandmother signaled again, and Bingo realized she was after the nurse’s attention, not the baby’s. The nurse was getting a baby ready to go home, putting him in his stocking. The baby was awake and seemed to actually enjoy being a stocking stuffer.

  When the nurse finished, she looked up and saw them at the window. Bingo’s grandmother pointed at the crib in the back. The nurse smiled, nodded, and pushed the crib closer to the window.

  “Oh, look at him. Look! Here’s Grammy,” she said. “Here’s your Grammy. Oh, isn’t he precious, Bingo? Jamie, here’s Grammy. Welcome to the world.”

  Jamie was all the things his grandmother had warned him about—puffy, discolored, wrinkled, but she hadn’t warned him Jamie would have a tube in him.

  “What’s the tube for?” he asked.

  He watched the clear liquid dripping into his brother.

  “They’re feeding him through that. When a baby’s little like Jamie, they cut the cord long in the delivery room so they can feed him through it.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know why they wrap them up so tightly in their little blankets?”

  “No.”

  “So they’ll feel secure. That’s way back from the Bible—swa
ddling clothes. And you know why they have those little happy faces stuck on each crib? I was so curious I asked about this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they have learned that little babies, even tiny little babies, can recognize a face. They actually did an experiment on this somewhere. They put up faces on one side of the crib and another design on the other and the babies all watched the faces.”

  Bingo was finding out so much about babies that he could hardly take it in. These little things had minds! They knew stuff! They—

  His grandmother sighed with pleasure, breaking Bingo’s train of thought. “I could stand here all day,” she said, “couldn’t you, Bingo?”

  Bingo intended to.

  “It’s all a miracle to me. This is a room full of miracles,” she said.

  Then she shifted her Christmas purse and said, “But I do want to run in and see your mother. Are you coming?”

  “In a minute.”

  “Bye-bye, Jamie. Grammy’s leaving now. Bye-bye, love, bye-bye, you precious thing.”

  She left and Bingo drew closer to the window. He wanted to welcome his brother in private.

  After the After-Shave

  THE DOORBELL RANG. BINGO thought it might be the postman with another package.

  So he took the fudge off the stove, wiped his hands on his apron, and then proceeded to the door.

  As Bingo entered the living room, he could see through the window that it was not the postman. It was Cici Boles. His heart sank, for Cici Boles had a present in one hand.

  Bingo continued to the door, but not quite as briskly as before.

  “Oh, hello, Cici.”

  Although he had only opened the door a crack, she managed to slip through the crack and into the living room.

  “Bingo, will you do me a favor?” she asked in a rush.

  Although Bingo had already wiped his hands on his apron back in the kitchen, he began to do it again. “If—if I can.”

  Bingo had backed up, and he could now see out of the window. A strange car was parked in front of their house on the wrong side of the street. A strange woman was looking out the car window, watching the house as sharply as if she were a private detective.

  The woman was Cici Boles’s mother, Bingo thought, and this brought Bingo the first comforting thought of the afternoon. If Mrs. Boles hated to wait in the car for Cici as much as his mother hated to wait in the car for him, then the visit was going to be a short one. His mother would have already started sounding the horn.

  “The creep next door—” Cici nodded toward the Wentworth house. “That stupid nerd brought this over and left it at my house.”

  She showed Bingo a poorly wrapped box. He could read the initials on the gift tag—C. C. and B. W.—which Wentworth had printed with such hasty hope.

  For a moment Bingo hesitated, wondering if he should launch directly into the story of the reject drawer and Wentworth’s shopping spree there.

  But the package, while poorly wrapped, did not appear to have been unwrapped. And if it hadn’t been unwrapped, then it couldn’t have been seen. Cici’s anger was, therefore, about something other than receiving Brut.

  Bingo decided to maintain silence, but his hands began to twitch with eagerness. The postman’s Brut was within his grasp. If he kept his cool…

  “That nerd had the nerve to bring me this.’ ”

  “Er, what is it?”

  “I don’t know! Some stupid stuff! You can smell it through the paper.”

  She thrust the package under Bingo’s nose. Bingo inhaled the faint, pleasant scent of Brut.

  “Possibly perfume,” he said tactfully.

  He raised one hand to take it, but she had already pulled it away. She lifted it to her own nostrils. “It doesn’t smell like any perfume I ever smelled before.”

  Bingo extended his hand as if to have another smell. “May I?”

  “I stormed around the house and stormed around the house.” The package went with her as she stormed around Bingo’s living room, recreating the scene. “So finally my mom goes, ‘Well, you don’t have to accept the thing, you know. You can always refuse it. Give it back.’

  “I said, ‘I can?’ Because I didn’t know that, did you, Bingo?”

  “I did read that—I believe it was in ‘Dear Abby,’ and you can usually trust her.”

  His hands were twitching so hard now he had to put them in his apron pockets.

  “But you have to do it before you open the package, my mom says, or else whoever gave it to you will think that you didn’t like the gift. My mom was very clear about that. ‘You have to make it clear that no gift would have been acceptable, otherwise the boy—’

  “ ‘—the nerd,’ I put in.

  “ ‘Otherwise the boy might try to get you something else.’ ”

  “Your mother sounds like a sensible woman.”

  Bingo glanced out the window to see if the sensible woman had, by some miracle, put her hand on the horn. To his dismay, he saw she had turned her attention to the Wentworth house. She was now watching it as closely as if she were trying to see through the siding.

  “Well, anyway, that’s where you come in.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, I want you to give it back for me.”

  Bingo stepped forward. “Why, I’d be glad to.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t think you’d agree.”

  “Well, it’s Christmas.”

  “And will you say, ‘Cici can’t accept this. She’s sorry. Her mom doesn’t allow her to accept gifts from boys’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me hear you.”

  “Cici can’t accept this. She’s sorry. Her mom doesn’t allow her to accept gifts from boys.”

  “Oh, Bingo. I’m so glad I came to your house instead of his. I told my mom this was the nerd’s house.”

  “I’m the nerd?”

  “That’s why I came in the house so quickly. My mom has seen him, and if she saw you, she’d know you weren’t the nerd.”

  Outside the horn sounded twice—music to Bingo’s ears. He extended his hand.

  “I just couldn’t face him,” Cici said, trying to look pretty and—in Bingo’s opinion—failing miserably.

  “Of course not. I’ll face him for you. I face him all the time. Facing him is nothing to me.”

  His hand had been extended so long, his muscles were beginning to tire.

  “Well…”

  He reached out and gave the package a gentle tug. Cici did not release it.

  “Why are you so eager to have this package?” she asked. She wasn’t even trying to look pretty now. Her eyes were narrow with suspicion.

  “I’m not so eager.”

  “You are too!”

  “Look, you asked me to give the package back. I said I’d give the package back. If you don’t want me to give the package back…” He tried to keep the yearning out of his voice, the twitch from his fingers.

  “What’s in this package, anyway?” Cici asked. She shook the package and Brut sloshed around in the bottle.

  “P-perfume, we said, didn’t we?”

  Cici broke the tape that sealed one end and lifted the flap.

  “Don’t do that!” Bingo cried.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you open it, you can’t give it back! Your mother said that and Dear Abby did too.”

  A low, deliberately handsome voice spoke from the doorway. “What did Dear Abby say?”

  Bingo and Cici turned. They stared, openmouthed, at Billy Wentworth in the doorway. He was smiling, but it was the anxious smile of someone who has recently given after-shave to the girl he loves.

  There was a silence. Outside, Cici’s mother blew the car horn four times, then four more.

  Cici said, “Oh, here!” She rushed at Wentworth and thrust the package into his stomach. “Take that!” He looked as stunned as if she had given him a knockout punch instead of a bottle of after-sh
ave.

  She flounced to the door. Then she turned and her face was terrible to behold. Some people should never, ever get angry, Bingo realized, because their faces aren’t made for it. If they have little eyes, the eyes get littler. If they have a big nose, it gets bigger. Cici Boles was now a caricature of herself.

  Bingo and Billy Wentworth drew together in a sort of unconscious effort at protection.

  “And I never want to see either one of you stupid nerds again!”

  She ran out the door, down the steps, down the sidewalk, around the car, got in, slammed the door, and said something short to her mother.

  “Scratch off!” came immediately to Bingo’s mind, for the car shot away from the curb and drove at an accelerated speed out of sight.

  Well, never seeing her again wouldn’t be any hardship on Bingo, that was for sure, but he was aware he was not the only stupid nerd involved here. The stinging remark had been hurled at dual stupid nerds.

  He glanced at the other one.

  It was not a pretty sight to watch a man’s dreams wither and fall at his feet like autumn leaves, but Bingo did not look away.

  “Well,” Wentworth said. He squared his shoulders with such manliness that Bingo was proud to live next door to him. “At least I got the postman’s after-shave back.”

  “Yes, that’s what counts.”

  Bingo accompanied him to the porch and stood with his hands in his apron pockets, seeing Wentworth home.

  At the Window

  BINGO THOUGHT THE BABY was dead. Actually he was sure of it.

  Jamie had not moved in fifteen minutes. That was how long Bingo had been standing at the nursery window, and in all that time Jamie had not taken one single breath.

  Other babies had howled, yawned, stretched, scrunched up their foreheads, and taken little peeks at the world. One even had the hiccups.

  Jamie had done nothing. He did not move, he did not breathe. There could only be one reason for stillness of this nature.

  Bingo looked to the nurse for assistance. The nurse was changing another baby—a baby that probably didn’t need changing, while his brother who did need attention desperately lay—

  The nurse finished changing the baby and glanced up at the window. Bingo hated to ask her to please check and make sure his brother was still alive, because he had already done this several times in the past two days.