For Columbus Day, she sent me a fleet of little ships made of walnut shells. The sails were rice paper skewered on toothpicks. I must be the only kid to ever get a Columbus Day present.
At a police auction, Aunt Jane outbid everyone on a stack of ancient fingerprint cards and was certain I’d be thrilled to receive them. I thumbtacked the used ones to my bedroom wall and speculated about what ghastly crimes had been committed by the people whose identities were revealed in loops and whorls of black ink. I played detective with the blank ones and fingerprinted Zander, Carmella, Luke, and the deMichael children.
Another time Aunt Jane bought a basket of sewing stuff at a yard sale—ribbons, beads, buttons, and embroidery thread, along with a tomato-shaped pincushion studded with pins and needles. She included a step-by-step guide to embroidery stitches.
A string of origami cranes left over from a No Nukes rally arrived in a cigar box. “I’ll never forget that event,” she told me later. “It was the nineteen eighties and my bridge club decided we needed to be politically active. So we chose a good cause and campaigned our hearts out until Billie Maygarden got arrested. The handcuffs scratched the gold bracelet she’d inherited from her godmother and she refused to participate after that. So as a compromise we agreed to work at the homeless shelter. That’s where Billie met Milton, her fourth husband. Imagine!”
Aunt Jane simply doesn’t believe in trash. “Everything is useful to someone, somewhere,” she wrote on the note accompanying a bear claw dangling from a leather strap. “At the swap meet, I traded a broken toaster for this, and I do believe that the gentleman who ended up with the toaster thought he’d scored a major coup.” I proudly wore the black claw around my neck for months before passing it on to Chord in exchange for a stack of X-Men and Fantastic Four comics. (I later realized he got the better end of that deal.)
A package awaited me when I came home on the last day of school when I was nine. Aunt Jane’s return address sticker was plastered in the top left corner. I tore away the brown paper wrapping. Beneath it was a corrugated cardboard box embellished with paint, rhinestones, and glitter. “What in the world?” I muttered as I opened the box. I dumped its contents on the table. Out tumbled a pile of large plastic dinosaurs and a plain white envelope with
“Sweet Jane” written on the front. (Aunt Jane always called me Sweet Jane because of some Lou Reed song from the nineteen seventies.)
“Way cool,” said Zander, standing beside me. These weren’t regular plastic prehistoric reptiles. They’d been dressed and decorated. Painted and pierced and bejeweled. T. rex sported a black Mohawk, bulky brass zippers, and heavy chains. Stegosaurus was clad in black leather duds with numerous piercings in his armor plates. His claws were painted crimson. Triceratops was tattooed with a skull and crossbones. Silver hoops adorned his faceplates and eyelids. Black and white stripes ringed his thick tail. Chrome hose clamps circled Brontosaurus’s long neck. Large black and red anarchy symbols were painted on his massive torso in what looked like fingernail polish.
“Aunt Jane is so weird,” I said, tearing open the envelope.
Sweet Jane,
Some teenagers were selling these at the craft fair and they were the cutest things I’d ever seen. I immediately thought of you. The kids who made them called them Gothosaurs. Isn’t that clever? I hope you enjoy them.
Love,
Aunt Jane
“I wish she’d send me great stuff like this. Mom and Dad should’ve named me Jane,” said Zander.
I laughed. “Yeah, right. You’re a guy, remember?”
I gathered up my Gothosaurs and arranged them on the shelf above my bed. I had to admit, they were awesome.
Sharp thought it was a great idea. Naturally, because it was his idea. And it did seem like a good idea at the time (at least to a pair of nine-year-olds). A magical idea. One that would make this party shine brighter than all others. He swore me to secrecy. As usual, I fell in. If Sharp was Batman, I was Robin. If he was Scooby Doo, I was Shaggy. If he was Tarzan, I was Jane…. Well, I am Jane, so that one doesn’t really count. It seemed harmless enough, though, and wouldn’t everyone be charmed and surprised at Peggy’s celebration?
Every year at the summer solstice, Peggy deMichael threw a party. It was a large affair with crowds of people, plenty of food and drinks, beautiful decorations, musical entertainment provided by Elliot and his friends, and games for the children. It was a tradition we all looked forward to.
The entire week before the party was devoted to preparations. The deMichael kids polished furniture and scrubbed bathrooms. They dusted and vacuumed and washed windows. Their kitchen was heaped with ingredients, dirty dishes, and platters of hors d’oeuvres. You didn’t dare enter or you’d risk being conscripted to grate cheese or peel potatoes.
In most households, it’s the Christmas decorations that get broken out once a year. At the deMichaels’, it was the lawn mower. That summer I watched from the shade of the patio as Sharp and Chord took turns forcing the rusted mower through the grass. It whined in mechanical protest as it chewed at the thick lawn, and stalled out every few feet. The first time I heard either of them cuss was during one of their annual yard-grooming adventures. I was shocked at the number of forbidden words they knew.
It was the night before the party. Sharp and I met in the deMichaels’ backyard after dark. He was armed with a large bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid. “Let’s start here,” Sharp suggested in a whisper, and I followed him to the largest of Elliot’s fountains, the one in whose pool floated the pizza-sized water lilies my mother always admired. The edges of the bright green leaves curled toward the sky to keep pond water from pooling in them. Their creamy white and buttery yellow blossoms seemed to glow in the darkness. Sharp stood at the spillway and poured Dawn into the stream of water. Within seconds bubbles began to form. “Perfect,” he whispered. “It’s gonna be fabulous.”
We went to a waterfall made from a series of flat stones forming a ragged tower. They were covered in a carpet of fuzzy green moss. I took the liquid from Sharp and squeezed it onto the highest stone. We smiled as the cascading water bubbled and foamed.
“We still have almost half a bottle,” Sharp said when we’d soaped the last of Elliot’s waterworks. “Might as well finish it off.”
We emptied Dawn into pools and ponds already foamy and white.
“Peggy’s gonna love it,” said Sharp. The deMichael kids all called their parents Mom and Dad when addressing them but Peggy and Elliot when referring to them in conversation. “I can’t wait till tomorrow.”
“Elliot’s raging,” said Luke the following morning when he walked into the kitchen with the newspaper. He grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl and polished it on his T-shirt.
Mom looked up from her coffee. “About what?” Elliot, very even-tempered, seldom raged.
“Bubbles.” Luke looked at me as he bit into his apple with a loud crunch.
“How could Elliot be mad about bubbles? Everyone likes bubbles,” said my mother.
Again Luke stared at me. “Someone put soap in all of his ponds. There are bubbles everywhere. It’s like a washateria gone insane. Wait till you see the water lilies. They’re wilted and slimy. What a mess.”
I went to the window. Elliot squatted in his backyard, siphoning water from a shallow pond with the garden hose. It shocked me to see the waxy flowers all brown and shriveled, half buried in dirty gray foam. Luke stood beside me. “The mosses’ll die, too, and the grasses in the little pond at the back fence. And all the rest. Elliot said the soap will kill everything.”
“I’m going outside,” I said.
All the deMichael children except Chord were at work around the property. I cautiously approached Sharp, who was filling the wheelbarrow with dead plants. “Does he know who did it?” I whispered.
“Yeah, he knows.”
My stomach lurched. “Who told him? Chord? That rat. Where is he?”
“I don’t know where he is. You know how he does
that disappearing act when we have chores to do.” Sharp sighed. “But it wasn’t Chord. I left my shoes on the patio.”
“That’s not evidence.”
“The empty Dawn bottle was with them.”
“Why’d you do a dumb thing like that?”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he said defensively. He heaped one last armload of dead plant matter into the wheelbarrow. “Besides. I didn’t think this would happen. I thought it would be beautiful.”
I followed him across the yard to the compost heap. “My parents are going to barbeque me,” I moaned, imagining how beserk my parents would go when they discovered my role in the destruction of Elliot’s gardens. The lectures and punishments. The restrictions. I hated the idea of summer vacation ending in June. “I’m cooked.”
Sharp dumped the wheelbarrow load and turned to glare at me. “Your shoes weren’t there. No one knows about you,” he said.
“Yet.”
“I’m not a snitch. I won’t tell.”
I didn’t believe him in spite of our code. This was big. Too much for one person to bear the responsibility for.
By evening, all the bubbles were gone. The waterworks looked sterile. Their flowers and grasses had been stripped away and thrown on the compost heap. The mosses carpeting the stones had turned a dull muddy color. When I stood near them, the smell of rotting vegetation assaulted me.
The rest of the yard looked festive. Strings of Japanese lanterns were stretched between the trees. Tiny white lights were twined around the trunks and into the fronds of the palms. Mason jars half-filled with sand flickered with tea-light candles on the tables. Wreaths of fern and baby’s breath circled the jars.
I looked around for Sharp, wondering if he was angry with me. Then Chord walked up. “Where’s Sharp?” I asked.
“You won’t be seeing his face for a good long time. Jazz and I are smuggling in bread and water.”
“Is he coming to the party?”
“No way. He’s not allowed to leave his room ’cept to go to the bathroom. And he has to do yard work all summer. Elliot says he needs to learn to appreciate the balance of nature.”
I looked up at the second-story window of what I knew to be the bedroom Sharp shared with Jazz and Chord. Light was spilling through the glass. I wondered what Sharp was doing…. Reading, practicing an instrument, seething?
I glanced across the patio at Elliot and my father, engaged in an intense conversation. Certain that Dad was learning of my part in Elliot’s backyard environmental disaster, I knew I’d soon be in as much trouble as Sharp. I decided to visit the food table and fuel up before I got evicted, or imprisoned, or entombed, or whatever. I took my plate to the farthest corner of the yard, where there was an arbor with two benches and a small pond. The structure was made of gray limbs that were long and straight, with the bark and smaller branches stripped away. Elliot had built it years ago from the remains of a tree that had snapped during a hurricane.
I sat on the bench. The sweetness of the jasmine climbing the arbor mingled with the pleasing aromas wafting from my plate of food. I suddenly wondered if the koi that usually swam in the pond had survived our crime. I began to eat. I wasn’t exactly gluttonous, but maybe filling my stomach would displace the guilt lingering inside me. Was it my fault Sharp had been stupid enough to tattle on himself? I absently tossed a crust of bread into the little pond. Had the soap killed Elliot’s fish? I gazed into the water but saw no movement, only the vaguest reflection of my own face—but it was dark, after all. They had to be in there, with their lovely, nearly translucent tails spreading behind them.
The wind chimes hanging from the arbor tinkled and I looked up at the house. Sharp stood in the window, the light behind him illuminating his hair like a halo. A halo? Or was that my guilt again? I popped a shrimp into my mouth but it stuck in my throat. I felt an unreasonable, ridiculous urge to confess—to go to Elliot and beg his forgiveness. I took a sip of punch to wash down the shrimp. Why should I fess up just because Sharp did? Is it my fault he’s so stupid? I asked myself defensively as I bit into a cheese straw. He knew what was at stake. He should have kept his big mouth shut.
Sharp’s silhouette left the window. I saw him cross to the doorway, where the light switch was mounted, and then the room went dark. I imagined him lying on his back staring at the ceiling, furious with me.
Luke, now almost fifteen, sat down on the bench across from me with his long legs sprawled out in front of him. “So, Janie, you’re letting Sharp take the heat all alone?” he asked. Luke and my father were the only two people on the planet who got away with calling me Janie. Sometimes Chord or Zander taunted me with that nickname, but I always made them pay. Zander I’d just beat up, since I was bigger than he was, but Chord I rewarded with a squeeze-and-twist pinch that left an angry purple mark tattooed on his forearm.
I pretended confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“Elliot’s gardens.”
“Sharp was really dumb to do that,” I said casually.
“Yeah. But now he’s busted and you’re in the clear. Don’t you feel guilty?”
“Why should I?” I responded defiantly. I refused to meet his eyes though I could feel them on my face.
“I saw you, Janie.”
“Saw me what?”
“Saw you with the dishwashing soap. You and Sharp together. Course I didn’t know what you were doing…just thought it was another of your goofy games. I was sitting on the back porch with Banjo.”
I raked my fork across the plate. “Mind your own business,” I muttered.
“Peggy told Dad it’ll take years to replace those plants. And Elliot’s been babying them forever.”
“Plants die.”
“Those had a little help. A lot, actually.”
“Shut up, Luke. I didn’t do anything.”
“It’ll be expensive, too, to replace them. Apparently plants cost a lot. Specially water lilies and stuff like that.”
“Bug off,” I snapped.
“Your dirty little secret’s safe with me,” he said, walking away.
My plate was empty. My stomach was full. But I didn’t feel satisfied. I felt something else—something uncomfortable that I wanted to avoid. Something that made me turn away from the mirror when I went indoors to use the bathroom. It made me glad that, because of his punishment, I wouldn’t have to face Sharp for a while.
Dear Bubba,
Is it my fault Sharp was so stupid as to leave evidence of his crime? I was smart enough to erase all traces of my involvement, and he should have done the same. Someone that clueless deserves to get caught.
In the clear,
Gabriel
I Spy
Sharp sat beside me and smiled. “Elliot’s right.”
“About what?”
“Water.”
I looked at him as if he was speaking Sanskrit. His face was serious and his tone of voice indicated that he believed this information was of extreme importance. He patiently explained that he’d spent several weeks carefully listening and observing. “Elliot says faucet water and nature water sound different. Since a sprinkler is a machine, it has a constant rhythm. You can alter the rhythm by changing the water pressure or adjusting the settings, but its rhythm is still a static thing.
“But rain rhythms are controlled by the energies of the universe—by wind and the earth’s rotation and the size of the water droplets, stuff like that. And it can change from instant to instant. It’s much more lyrical. Much freer.
“The same goes for running water. The faucet produces a constant flow, but a river slips and slides to the sea at a rate that changes with every stone or curve.”
“You’re weird,” I said.
“But you get it, don’t you? And it makes perfect sense.”
“You’re weird,” I repeated.
But I did get it, and it did make sense. I just wondered why normal people would worry about such things. Sometimes I was frightened by Sharp’s ideas and
his assumption that other people pondered the same bizarre stuff he did.
“Jazz and Zander were wrestling in the house,” said Carmella, hands on her hips and head cocked slightly to the side. “That’s against the rules.”
“And Banjo was going crazy,” added Harmony. “Running in circles and barking like mad.”
“They knocked Mom’s African violet off the table.”
“We saw them.”
“There was dirt all over the place.”
“Then they stuffed the plant back in the pot, but it’s all smashed looking. It’s a mess like you wouldn’t believe.” Carmella looked smug.
“Wait till your parents see it.” Harmony shook her head.
“Guess what else?” said Carmella.
I looked at the two six-year-old tattlers and said nothing.
“You won’t believe it,” she added, hoping to suck me into their psychotic game.
Still I didn’t reply.
Harmony and Carmella leaned close to me, like we were all coconspirators in the same secret plot. “The Blackshires’ dog got picked up by the dogcatcher,” reported Carmella. Mr. Blackshire and his son, Jason, a classmate of Carmella and Harmony’s, lived in the green house on the corner.
“So?” I responded.
“You wanna know why?”
“Not really, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“Jason forgot to close the gate, and Tag got away, and Mrs. Thomson called the dogcatcher because Tag dug up her tomato plants.”
Harmony joined in. “Jason has to do jobs to help pay the fine. We heard Mr. Blackshire say so. He’s gotta rake the yard and wash the car and stuff.”
“He’s really mad at Mrs. Thomson. Calls her the mustard witch because of that yucky jogging suit she always wears.”
“Tell me…do you two little snoops report my private happenings to everyone else?”
Imaginary Enemy Page 3