He qualified. “He’s not a criminal criminal.”
“Leo, he is a criminal criminal criminal.”
He put his finger in the air as if to make a grand point. “He’s not a criminal criminal criminal criminal.”
Someone had to put a stop to this, so I said, “All right, I give.”
He smirked. “I knew you’d say uncle.”
Say uncle? I thought. I’m crying uncle.
Leo began tapping in his sneakers in the vast open space that my packing created in the room.
As I continued making labels, my brother did some spiral dance thing. I didn’t know the correct terminology for it, but I knew it made me dizzy just looking at him.
“You never like to share, Maine.”
He had some nerve coming up here, not helping, dancing, and telling me that.
“I never like to share?” I asked.
“That’s what I just said.”
That did it. I put down that duct tape and stepped to my eleven-month-younger brother. “How come I’m always the one who has to give up my room?”
He stopped twirling. Even with his chin up, he was a few inches shorter than me. “How attached could you be to this room? You were only up here for a few weeks.”
I growled. “Exactly, exactly.”
“You keep agreeing with me. What’s the big deal? Daddy said it’s just till the end of March.”
“It’s not even February.”
“February’s right around the corner and is the shortest month. Besides, it’s not even like you have to share a room with me this time.”
My eyes narrowed. “I’m still displaced.”
Before he stormed out of the room, Leo snapped at me. “Our uncle needs a place to stay, Maine. Don’t be so hardhearted.”
I threw up my arms; there was no use. Just like Mr. Mand, Leo had some serious left leaning going on.
Later that afternoon, I entered my temp room and Tracy John breezed by me saying, “Make yourself to home.” Despite the circumstance, I felt it was nice to be welcomed. But as I took a look around, my glad expression turned to a frown. It wasn’t just the poster of Tony Dorsett on the wall. Or the Jim Brown poster on the wall. Or even the poster of Lynn Swann on the wall.
I looked in the closet. Tracy John had his helmet and shoulder pads and toys and puzzles there.
I looked in the drawers: He had all his boy’s size-eight clothing there.
I looked under the bed. He had a bin that was brimming with his shoes and sneakers there.
That slickster! Tracy John hadn’t moved his things to the side one inch to make room for me.
I called to him and received a bored “Yeah?” in return.
“Could you come in here for a minute?” I asked him. After a few moments, Tracy John arrived, wearing his customary bright-eyed, innocent look.
I grabbed his football, shaking it in front of him. “How am I supposed to live around all this paraphernalia?”
“What did you call this?” Tracy John asked.
“Paraphernalia!”
Tracy John took it out of my hands. “This is a football.”
_____
So there I was in my makeshift Dallas Cowboys—oriented room, just like a prisoner back inside after a short furlough. I pushed the irony of my current surroundings to the back of my mind and took out the book from English class. I always enjoyed reading at times like these because books made me feel like I was escaping. The Pearl opened with a picturesque view of Kino and his family. They were enjoying a porridge breakfast when this loving portrait was shattered as a scorpion crept into their adobe hut and stung Kino’s baby son. Panicked, Kino rushed the infant into town to get medical care. Unfortunately, the doctor had nothing but money on his mind. Since Kino had no funds, he wouldn’t examine Kino’s son.
He sent his servant to the entrance to say he wasn’t in.
Kino got so mad that he smashed his fist against the iron gate.
By this point I was hooked, and I probably would have read past the assigned pages to the end of the book if I hadn’t gotten a phone call. It was Raymond. Since I didn’t have a line of my own, I stretched the cord into the hallway, for privacy. We talked and laughed until Ma came by and told me to wrap it up.
Raymond and I did that “you hang up first, no, you hang up first” thing until Ma made her second round and a second order.
I went back to Tracy John’s old room (my new room) and then it started. The music from above. Uncle E had come in while I was on the phone, and he settled into his new home, the attic, with a song. Yes, he had the unmitigated gall to start up with his hit parade.
I would say this was the last straw, but who was I kidding? I’d been strawless since Uncle E first reappeared at our door. As one dreamy ballad melted into another heartfelt standard, I felt my head come that much closer to exploding. Since this was a live performance and not a TV show, there was no turning down the volume. Despite it all, I found myself nodding off. I thought, Well, I guess there’s nothing I can do, at 10:25 p.m., against the winds of change.
Uncle E was up and I was down. He’d won this round, but I hadn’t given up on having my day of victory.
seven
“I hope I don’t keep you up.” I overheard my deadbeat creep uncle talking to Ma the next morning. “I’m just so used to strumming a few songs before bed.”
Good God, was there no avoiding him? He was right at the kitchen table. How was I supposed to enjoy my breakfast looking at his mug? I encroached upon the room with a frozen smile and a quick wave.
“It’s delightful to hear your music, Escalus,” Ma said, and urged me to agree. “Isn’t it soothing, Charmaine?”
I opened the fridge door. “It’s like a glass of warm milk.”
Just then another fan club member entered the room. “Uncle E,” Tracy John said, and walked right into his open arms. “Are you going to sing every night?”
“Oh, he couldn’t do that, Tracy John,” Ma said. “He’d wear out his voice.”
“One could hope,” I said under my breath. Luckily, my comment went unheard.
“You know, taking up the guitar again was the best thing I could have done,” Uncle E said. “Before I did, I felt so pent up, I felt like there was a rock band in my head—”
A rock band in his head? That sounded like something diagnosable. I wondered if those voices told him to shoplift from Value City.
“My blood pressure was sky-high.”
Ma nodded and said, “A lot of us have high blood pressure.”
“We sure do,” Tracy John agreed.
“As a matter of fact,” Uncle E said, “music lowers blood pressure.”
Well, if that didn’t take the whole biscuit. How lucky to have three doctors in one household. I don’t know how I could have missed the eight years Tracy John spent attaining MD status.
The next thing I knew, Uncle E had pulled his guitar out.
He sang that song “Cool Water,” a melodrama about two men stuck in the desert who kept seeing mirages. The amusing part was the over-the-top chorus, “He’s a devil, not a man, / And he spreads the burnin’ sand / With water, cool, clear water.”
Ma gushed, “Your music is like music to my ears.”
“I couldn’t say it better myself, Ma.” I manufactured enthusiasm as I faced them; then I turned my back and rolled my eyes in safety.
I slipped away with my Rice Krispies and sat in the alcove.
Leo came down the steps and heard the snap, crackle, pop emitted from my bowl. “What are you doing eating here on the steps?” he asked.
“That jailbird has taken over the kitchen,” I said.
Leo raised his fist in the air and shouted, “That’s the spirit!”
eight
“Maine used to be in Leo’s room but then she got her ladytime,” Tracy John said, despite my wild gesturing to him to cut it. We were in public, after all. More importantly, we were out with my boyfriend.
“Ladytime?” Raymo
nd asked.
“That’s what Auntie told me it’s called,” Tracy John said. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he added, “It comes once a month.”
When he finally clammed up, I explained, “Horace going into the service opened up a room.”
“So you used to live with your brother?” Raymond asked, oblivious to my meltdown.
“Yes.” Though I had too much melanin in my skin to blush, I still felt the need to duck my head down.
“Now that Uncle E is with us, I’m with Leo,” Tracy John continued.
Raymond nodded along, but I would have given a million pennies for his thoughts on the matter. Did it cross his mind that the Upshaws had a hint of kookiness? Thankfully, the topic shifted as the waitress came by to drop off menus and a basket of breadsticks.
“Spider-Man,” Tracy John began. “Does it get boring never eating meat?”
“There are a lot of things you can eat instead of meat.”
“Like what?” Tracy John asked, settling back in the booth.
“Legumes.”
Tracy John asked, “What’s that?”
I told my cousin legumes meant beans, which caused him to spring into that odious jingle: “Beans, beans are good for your heart—”
I wasn’t going to let this get out of control. I talked over him. “Don’t finish that rhyme, Tracy John.”
Baffled, Raymond asked, “How does the rest go?”
How sheltered could he be? “You really don’t know what he’s talking about?” I asked.
“No, but I like poetry.”
Tracy John took a breadstick out of the basket. “Do you like poems about bad air?”
“All right, Tracy John,” I said.
Raymond chuckled at us both and volunteered to recite his own verse. “Let me see if I can make one up just off the cuff. Roses are red—”
Tracy John leaned on his elbow. “I’ve heard this before.”
“Violets have beards,” Raymond continued, then paused to think for a moment before coming up with the next line. “Do you think I’m weird?”
“Yes,” Tracy John answered.
After ordering, Tracy John tugged at Raymond. “Can a plane land somewhere where there’s dinosaurs?”
I gritted my teeth at him. “Are you going to start that again?”
An excellent mimic, Tracy John gnashed his teeth back at me. “I saw it on TV.”
“Was that on last Saturday night?” Raymond asked.
Tracy John nodded.
“I know what you were watching. That was The Twilight Zone.”
My exclamation of “What? Tracy John, you know you’re not supposed to be up that late!” collided with Raymond’s “I love that one! I’ve seen that episode a dozen times.”
I wagged my pointer finger at Tracy John. “Wait till I tell Ma you’re staying up till all hours of the night over Basil’s house.”
He stuck out his tongue, then said, “You tell everything, Maine.”
“I think the writers of that show were playing around with the idea of how time changes during travel,” Raymond said. “Why, some states are even split. It’s nine o’clock by one end of the state, and ten o’clock the other. Depending on where you fly, you could actually go back in time. The show exaggerated that fact and had people landing in prehistoric times.”
Tracy John gave him a confused look.
“Where did you say Horace is stationed?” Raymond asked.
“Hawaii.”
Raymond checked his watch and made a calculation. “That’s Pacific Standard time—which would make it a quarter after five in the morning.”
“How do you know?” Tracy John asked.
“Because it’s 10,145 miles away, give or take,” Raymond said confidently.
Tracy John looked at me. “He’s good.”
After that, Raymond really strode into action. He outlined how the world revolved around the sun, and then he went into others of Galileo’s theories, and that’s where I got lost.
My cousin, however, kept nodding and seemed to be following along. He asked Raymond, “How come there are pictures of dinosaurs?”
“They’re not from a camera. They are sketches, Tracy John,” Raymond told him. His voice radiated adult authority. Then he said that confusions such as Tracy John’s were very common. He told us about Orson Welles, who read The War of the Worlds over the radio and made the people of New Jersey go into a panic, thinking aliens were actually invading Earth.
“Boy, they were really dumb,” Tracy John said.
I laughed. This, coming from the kid who until just a moment ago was afraid of running into a pterodactyl.
Next, Tracy John decided to really take advantage of Raymond’s fountain of knowledge. He came out with both barrels blazing.
“How come glasses of water with ice in them sweat after a while?”
“Where do stars go during the day?”
And my favorite, “If electricity is in the air, how come Unc has to pay an electric bill?”
To each question, Raymond supplied not just any old answer but an informed one. I was in awe of his encyclopedic recall and played Watson to his Holmes.
Later, at the movies, Tracy John sat between us. Though we’d just eaten, we shared a big tub of super-buttery, somewhat salty popcorn. How could you see a flick without it?
Despite being made in the thirties, The Adventures of Robin Hood was in color. It starred the dashing Errol Flynn as the swashbuckler of Sherwood Forest. I loosely knew the story of how Robin stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but I still hated the part when the sheriff of Nottingham dropped his weapon and our hero gave the villain a chance to pick it up, because it never worked the other way around when Robin lost the upper hand. It was still quite a welcome respite from those disaster films that were out right now, like Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, and The Towering Inferno. Whose bright idea was it that the public wanted a secondhand view of a catastrophe? Besides, vintage movie houses like this had a better ambiance: the red carpet, the chandeliers, the ushers in full uniform. Best of all, the floor wasn’t sticky with spilled soda like at the Sameric downtown.
Tracy John seemed amused during the show, and at its conclusion I asked him, “Did you like Robin Hood, Tracy John?”
“I guess,” he said, “but how come he had a dress on?”
Raymond and I chuckled at that, and then burst out laughing when he added, “He had on stockings too.”
nine
Unfortunately, you really can’t increase your chest size through exercise, just the underlying muscles. But when you’re barely an A-cup, every little bit helps. As I disrobed for the night, I caught sight of how tiny I still was and realized that I’d better get to it.
I assumed the position. I concentrated. I envisioned myself at least a double-D as I squeezed my hands together. I closed my eyes, and when I reopened them, I saw Tracy John staring at me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
I crossed my arms over my chest and scooted him back into Leo’s room.
“I want my red shirt,” he said.
“Why don’t you take everything out of the room that you need, so you don’t have to keep coming in here for everything?”
“He doesn’t have to do that,” Leo said. “You said yourself this is only a temporary move.”
“Yeah,” Tracy John told me, and walked around me back into my/his room.
Leo eyed me up and down, suppressing a laugh. “You need to eat a bucket of lard, Maine.”
“Leo, you can stick your entire head in a bucket of lard.”
When I finally turned in, I heard it. Uncle E’s music. I had to hand it to him. For someone who had been through fire and rain, his voice was remarkably clear and smooth, like polished glass. He found that one right pitch and didn’t veer up or down from that mark, and he accompanied himself beautifully on the guitar. Listening was like watching a lazy river. Too bad he’d chosen a jump song that required vocal acrobatics. He was a romantic
tenor, after all, and his voice was suited for slower songs. I was no record mogul, but I did know something about music.
All throughout elementary school, I was in choir. The only reason I signed up was because Millicent and Cissy wanted me to join with them. From grades one through six, I was under the tutelage of Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Connelly, the director. She wore thick makeup, and I imagined she must have been very pretty in her youth, and this was her way of trying to hold on. She had raised knuckles due to arthritis but that did not stop her from tirelessly banging on the keys. She also was unswayed by the fact that the neighborhood had flipped ethnically. She carried on like it was still primarily Irish American.
Though we were of African descent, and thus had never dined on corned beef and cabbage, we performed numbers like “Oh Me Name Is McNamara, I’m the Leader of the Band” and “Will You Go, Lassie, Go?” (which, contrary to our initial belief, had to do with a woman, not a dog).
The look on Daddy’s face was priceless during the end-of-year concert. He said something that I didn’t understand the humor of at the time, but now I do. Our last song was the famous “Tooralooraloora.” Daddy commented, “I’ve heard of Black Irish, but that was ridiculous.”
Now that I get his joke, I wondered: If I dragged my bony ass to Ireland, would I be considered a bonny lass?
At any rate, that was the stuff Uncle E should have stuck to. I was convinced that he could tear up “Danny Boy.”
The fine drizzle that had been going on all day finally threatened to turn into a storm by the end of school. Of course, Raymond thought ahead as he waited for me by the monument in front of the school. He had brought his big, green mushroom umbrella. He rushed toward me as I began to walk in his direction.
“Maine,” Millicent and Cissy called. They were under Millicent’s pink flat-topped covering.
I looked in their direction.
“Hey, I was just going over Raymond’s. Why don’t you come too?”
“No thanks. We don’t want to be a third wheel,” Millicent said.
Raindrops spat on my face, and I ducked my head under Raymond’s covering. “You won’t be a third wheel,” I said.
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