“You have zero imagination, Becky,” I said, and walked out the door.
This was officially an emergency of life.
Mr. Mee’s Weak Spot
Forget about car washes and bake sales. My money was on Mr. Mee.
I was still trying to win my bet (prize winnings to be determined) with Mr. Mee, and counting on him being rich. I’d pretty much exhausted my supply of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! facts, but that was okay, because at the public library I’d found a book just loaded with this stuff.
“I’ve got one you won’t know,” I said when I stopped in the school library after school. I crossed my fingers for luck. “Answer me this: What is the driest place on earth?”
I knew he’d say Sahara Desert. I hoped he’d say Sahara Desert. Who wouldn’t say Sahara Desert?
Mr. Mee didn’t say Sahara Desert. He said, “Antarctica.”
“Oh, forget it,” I said. I leaned over, yanked The Book of General Ignorance out of my backpack, and put it on the counter. It made a thud. The amount of general ignorance, page-wise, is vast. Even Suso would be impressed.
Mr. Mee eyed the book. “An excellent resource.”
“You’ve read it?”
“Of course,” said Mr. Mee. “I read everything.”
“You know a lot,” I said to Mr. Mee, “even for a librarian.”
Mr. Mee kind of snorted. “Thank you,” he said. Then he picked up his bottle of water and held it in front of me. “But that’s a bit like saying I’m in possession of a lot of water. When you consider the incalculable amount of H2O there is on the planet, I’m nearly waterless.” He wiggled the water bottle and it sloshed. “There are puddles and ponds and lakes and lochs, oceans and rivers of knowledge whose existence we have never even guessed at, let alone explored in our leaking, bobbing boats.”
“If you say so,” I said. I hoisted my backpack onto my shoulder.
“Josephine,” Mr. Mee began, “I meant what I said.”
“When you said what.” My backpack slid down my arm and I hitched it up again.
“I’m much older than you are,” said Mr. Mee. “I’ve read more. But in the great scheme of life, I don’t know any more than you do. And you know things about which I know nothing.” He smiled and adjusted his glasses. “I’ve merely the one bottle of water.”
“Hey!” I said. “That reminds me. Did you know you can drown in a teacup?”
“Yes.”
“Rats.”
Mr. Mee pointed at me. “You have a water bottle too. And in time, you’ll see that all the water you really need is already in the bottle.”
I guessed I’d have to think on that, along with the words of Suso.
That’s when Winky Wheaton stumbled in, wearing his baseball cap and carrying an armload of the large-print books Mr. Mee orders for him, which was only four, each one being practically as large as The Book of General Ignorance.
“On your way to baseball practice, Elwyn?” said Mr. Mee.
“Yup,” said Winky.
“That’s the one with the net and the putter and the whiffles, yes?” he said. A joke.
“And the kilts,” said Winky Wheaton, playing along.
Aha and aha! I thought, willing my face not to do anything lively. Three can play that game. The game of sports. Mr. Mee does not know anything about sports! I’d found Mr. Mee’s one weakness.
Sneakily, I waited till Mr. Mee was busy in the reference stacks and the parent volunteer had taken over the desk. Then I checked out all the sports books I could fit in my backpack. The Psychology of Champions, Principles and Practice of Sports Management, and Soccernomics, to name a few of the titles. I also borrowed a two-inch stack of Sports Unlimited back issues, and some recent newspapers, for the Sports section. Then I put on the blank expression I perfected in coed health class, and walked right by Mr. Mee and out the door.
Becky Gets Creative
Turns out I was wrong about Becky having no imagination. She hung a long chain of crafty cut paper all around my desk and chair, only instead of a string of paper dolls holding hands in the spirit of friendship, it was underwear on a clothesline. Very funny, Becky.
“What is the meaning of this?” Mrs. Blyth-Barrow wanted to know.
“Ask Josie!” said Becky Schenck.
I crumpled up the whole string of Becky’s little art project and shoved the wad of construction paper out of sight in my desk.
Becky answered for me. “She peed her pants! She was washing them in the bathroom! That’s against the rules!”
“Josie, please see me in the hall.”
“Me? What about her?” I said.
I could hear a long psssssssss behind me as I followed Mrs. B-B out of the classroom.
“What’s going on, Josie?” Mrs. B-B’s voice was soft and gentle as a “Peace be with you” at church. I almost told her the truth. But Becky making fun of me wasn’t the problem. Mrs. B-B finding out about Grandpa and the bills was the problem.
“I did that, what Becky said,” I told her. “I—I had an accident.”
Mrs. B-B looked thoughtful, is how I’d put it. “Is there anything you need, Josie?” she said. “Anything at all?”
Sometimes when people are nice to you, you’re afraid you’ll crack and all the goo—feelings and sadness and all that—will leak right out. You’re afraid there won’t be any going back. So I said, “No! Nothing!” as if she was the crazy one.
A Sour Note
Joe Viola got sent down!” cried Winky Wheaton. He waved a newspaper right in my face. His magnifying glass jumped on its lanyard.
Grandpa must have paid the water bill somehow, and I hadn’t had to wash any more clothes in the girls’ bathroom, so that was good. Also good: the cafeteria was serving Oaty Cakes for breakfast. I dug in. “Shent dow’ where?” I said.
“To the Hot Dogs, of course! Don’t you know anything?” he added, wicked happy. I don’t know if I’d ever seen all his teeth at once like that.
“But this can’t mean anything good about his sluh—hah, hmm, his you know what.”
“I know and yes it’s bad news for the Believers’ shot at the playoffs, that’s for sure, but still I can’t believe it. I get to meet him in person! I don’t even have to go to Boston, where my parents won’t let me even go anyhow, and it’s just till he gets his game back, it’s not like he’ll be here long, but he’s been tanking in Boston and oh this is exciting! Must. Remain. Calm.” Winky was breathing shallow and talking wicked fast.
I grabbed the newspaper. VIOLA HITS SOUR NOTE. “Catchy!” I said.
Winky: glare, glare, glare.
Me: “A viola is a musical instrument?”
Winky: “I KNOW THAT!”
Well, I still say the Hamburg Catch-up! has a way with words.
Winky grabbed the paper back and pressed it to his chest and squeezed out a noise I’d never heard before and hoped I’d never hear again. Kids as far away as the table by the emergency exit turned and stared.
* * *
That reminded me of the time I asked Winky, “How about if you wanted to describe how you see as a sound, could you do it that way?”
Winky: “Yes. It’s definitely a high, static sound, like a piercing, almost silent scream of a lady dressed all in white. And with long, white-white, super-white hair.”
Me:
Winky: “And at the same time it’s low, very low, a vibration really, like an earthquake, it’s so low.”
Me:
Winky: shrug.
Me: “So it’s a high and low sound, both, plus shaking.”
Winky: “Right.”
Me:
The closest Winky could ever get to some description I could use to understand his vision was “kaleidoscopic in the center, with a ring of reality around the edges.” No Major League Baseball player sees that ball coming toward his bat through a kaleidoscope and hits it. No way, no how. But Winky could.
* * *
I poked the newspaper. “Well, bad news for Joe
Viola is good news for us!” I said.
And Winky said, “Eeeeeeee!”
One Prong Short
The sun was low by the time Grandpa’s truck rolled down the driveway after a couple hours on Saturday running errands. We sat there and remained silent, like the plaque tells us to, while the truck coughed and lurched and stopped. I checked out the truck window to count the number of squirrels compared to me. (Math!) At first it had been just a couple of squirrels. Grandpa liked putting some peanuts-in-the-shell on the mudroom steps, and watching the squirrels come and get them and hide them away. By then we were outnumbered like the last of the living in a zombie movie and going through a bag of nuts a day.
Grandpa went out to his workshop in the garage, and I went in and made the macaroni. When I called, “Dinner!” Grandpa came inside carrying a little wooden house. It had a pointy little flagpole on its little tiny porch, and a hole where a front door would be. “It’s a squirrel house,” he told me. “I’ll shove an ear of corn on this spike, and Mister Nutkin can sit right here and nibble away. And he can go inside for a snooze, if he likes.”
We ate dinner with the squirrel house in the middle of the table, right beside the ketchup. Grandpa kept moving it a little this way or that way, sliding it a half inch to the left, pushing one corner to get a better view.
“Do you want a salad? Is it salad you want?” I said. I was thinking about that full-color brochure and the salad bar at the old folks’ home.
“Sure, sure,” Grandpa said.
“We could make vegetables some nights.”
“Right you are,” he said.
We ate our macaroni in silence for bit.
“Rutabaga!” said Grandpa.
“It’s nice, Grandpa,” I said. I meant the squirrel house.
Grandpa smiled proudly, as if he’d built the Great Pyramid of Giza. “This squirrel house is going to make us a lot of money, Josie.”
“It is?” Money! Yay!
“See, I’m not going to make just the one,” he said. “This is what we call a prototype. I’ll make a hundred squirrel houses.”
A hundred squirrel houses?
“And sell ’em,” said Grandpa. He tapped the side of his nose and narrowed his eyes.
Do people really want to invite a lot of squirrels to their yards? is what I was wondering, when Grandpa pushed his chair back and got up. “Thanks for the chow,” he said. “Places to go, people to see. Man of action! Not a thing in the world to worry about.” Then he dashed out the door and to the truck to go who knows where, trailing squirrels as he went.
* * *
“If it wasn’t for the squirrels, I might have believed him,” I said to Winky. We were swinging on the tire swing at Winky’s house. We could hear the TV going full blast inside, through the window. I wound myself up and stuck out my feet and let the tire spin. “You should get Joe Viola to show up,” I said. Winky’s idol had been in town a whole week already, and Winky still hadn’t gone to try to meet him. Winky said he “oughta get a haircut first,” “had to clean the garage,” and was “coming down with something.”
“You said he’s a charity machine,” I said. I spun a little. “I’m a charity.”
Winky went inside and came back out with a snack of leftover Super Tuna Noodle-Bake and two forks. We ate to the tune of the opening music of The Sands of Time.
“Fingers crossed isn’t going to cut it,” I said to Winky. Then I laid out my three-pronged plan for keeping Grandpa and me afloat:
Schemes, like the carnival and the yard work.
Grandpa’s mystery money: cash, deposits, withdrawals.
My bet with Mr. Mee.
Winky climbed onto the tire swing and kicked it around. “This plan is one prong short of a typical fork,” he said.
Then I heard something that gave me a big idea. It was characters talking on the TV. “You’re dead to me, Brock!”
I thought about that. I thought of Mom’s explanation of my dad. “Dead to me!” But not actually dead. No more dead than Brock was, probably.
I grabbed Winky’s feet when they spun by and stopped the tire in its tracks. “I know what the fourth prong is.”
A Memory at Moody’s
Grandpa, are you sure, a hundred percent, that you don’t know anything about my dad?”
I had gone up to the attic to search for clues to the fourth prong. Before then, I had never been tall enough to reach the string for the pull-down stairs! Up there with the spiderwebs, I’d found a commemorative keepsake birth certificate with my name and two tiny inky footprints and a tiny pink bow; some old Boston Believers programs; ticket stubs to various events; some old clothes; some snapshots of people I didn’t know. Was one of the men in the pictures my father? Grandpa didn’t know who anybody was.
Now we were at Moody’s for breakfast, sitting in our favorite booth. I’d heard the truck go out again in the night, and in the morning Grandpa was in what he calls “fine spirits.” So far, he hadn’t blurted once!
“I don’t know the first thing about him, Jo-Jo. She didn’t like to tell me things,” he said. “Your mom and I, we disagreed.”
“About what?”
“Everything. Loudly. She did not enjoy having old farts for parents, for one thing. Your grandma Kaye and I had given up hope of ever having a child of our own, at our advanced age. Cindy hated our music, hated our food, why she even hated our sense of fashion.” Grandpa smoothed his shirt-front, an old plaid flannel number from G-mart, and winked.
“You look good,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said, and took another sip of his coffee. “She never thought much of Hamburg, Maine. She left a note and hopped a bus for parts unknown the very day she graduated high school. I guess she didn’t find what she was looking for, because two months later she was back. Married, divorced, and pregnant. And she settled down right here.”
Disappointing. But at least we could enjoy Debbie Moody-Cote’s waffles. Then, who should come bustling over but Mrs. Beverly Moody, out from under her retirement, I guess. She told us Debbie and her husband, Lewis Cote, had gone up north on vacation to Canada, and so she was minding the fort till next Thursday.
“You are well, Martin?” she said to Grandpa. Mrs. Moody’s family come from Montreal, and she has that French Canadian way of talking where the words in a sentence are just a little out of order.
“Fit as a…” Grandpa’s voice trailed off and his eyes searched the ceiling for the word, which I said.
“Fiddle.”
“Fiddle!” he blurted as if he’d said it first. “Fiddle-faddle.” This he added for no good reason that I could tell.
“Interested in purchasing a squirrel house, Bev?” Grandpa asked Mrs. Moody, straight out of the blue.
Mrs. Moody didn’t even blink. “Non,” she said. She shook her head so sharp the pencil in her bun about fell out.
“Give it some thought,” Grandpa said. I didn’t think she would.
“Very good,” said Mrs. Moody. “So.” She took a little pad out of her apron pocket and the pencil from her bun. “Anything you like, you order and we whip it up.”
“Pancakes!” Grandpa said.
Mrs. Moody nodded and jotted on the pad and said, “Oui, crepes, absolument.”
I was about to order the same thing, because everybody knows Debbie Moody-Cote just doesn’t have the knack like her grandmother with those thin, delicious pancakes. But then I had a memory.
* * *
My memory was of sitting in this same booth with Mom, and how she would always order Mrs. Moody’s special apple-upside-down cake. It was sticky, and cakey, and sweet and even a little bitter, which you’d think would not be tasty, but it was. It was so good, my mouth started watering just thinking about it. Mom would always put her fork down and pat her tummy and say she was too full to finish, and I’d get the very last bite, which everyone knows is the stickiest and very best bite of all. In my memory I even heard Mom’s voice! I heard her! How she ordered the apple cake
off the old menu, which was partly in French.
* * *
And so with Mom’s voice whispering in my mind’s ear, I said to Mrs. Moody, “Do you have the tart tarteen?”
Mrs. Moody tapped her pencil on her little pad and looked at me funny and cocked her head and said, “But of course, oui, if you like,” and she wrote it down and away she went with our orders.
It wasn’t too long before she came back with Grandpa’s crepe pancakes, and my… bread and butter.
“Tart tarteen?” I said, looking up at Mrs. Moody. “Apple cake?”
“Ah, oui, I see, but you ordered the tartine.” She pointed at the plate of bread and butter. “Bread and butter is tartine. The cake is tarte tatin.” She tapped her ear. She said it like “ta-taan.” She shook her head. “I don’t have it today. Tomorrow, oui, yes. Today I can bring you out something… beignet? Fritter?”
It’s sad and troubling when you forget important parts of your favorite memory.
The fritter was wicked good, though. I patted my tummy and said I was full and I gave the last bite to Grandpa.
Hot Dogs and Fireflies
That night, Winky and I went to watch the Hamburg Hot Dogs bark at the Manchester Pollywogs, under the lights. Some baseball teams have names that make you figure they buck or fight or that they’re mighty or what-have-you. Hot Dogs bark. One time, a Hot Dog fan bit as well as barked, and he was escorted out by Security in the person of Asa Pike, who is also an officer at the county courthouse in downtown Hamburg.
It was Joe Viola’s first game as a Hot Dog. “How does he look?” Winky wanted to know. “Looking fit? Looking ready? Looking hungry?” He punched his fist into his glove a couple of times.
Joe Viola was not on the lineup for tonight’s game, but he was suited up. His red hair clashed yuckily with the hot dog–colored uniforms. He wasn’t wearing Number 23, of course. That was his Boston Believers number. Now he was Number 5. He looked like a smudgy version of the Number 23 baseball card I knew so well. Sort of like the time they replaced Brock, on The Sands of Time, with a new actor who looked a lot like the old one but not exactly. Viola sat on one end of the bench, apart from the other players, tight-lipped (except for when he spat a stream of brown liquid out the side of his mouth) and greasy-cheeked and unshaven and basically the Webster’s dictionary picture of a slump.
Josie Bloom and the Emergency of Life Page 6