Take Me Back

by Sally Mandel

  “I liked your letter about the animals,” Amy said.

  Though separated by a mere two hours’ drive, they often wrote to one another. This week, Mrs. Adams had reported watching out the window as the neighbor’s dog, Earl, chased a cat across the lawn. The cat scrambled up a tree, which startled a bird who flew off with a squawk. Amy pictured the sequence of events as if they were illustrations in a children’s book, the pages rigid cardboard: DOG, GRASS, CAT, TREE, BIRD.

  “It would be even cooler if Mr. Trueheart started it off by running after Earl,” Amy said.

  “Well now, perhaps Missus Trueheart ran him out in the first place and I just didn’t notice.”

  Amy giggled, imagining the timid Mrs. Trueheart flailing after her portly husband with a frying pan.

  Once the Yorkshire pudding batter had been prepared, Mrs. Adams went to fetch some sugar from the pantry cabinet. “We’ll just add a little to the whipped cream once it’s stiff enough,” Mrs. Adams said. She handed Amy the blender, knowing that she liked to make the cream thicken around the rotary blades.

  “Uh oh,” Mrs. Adams said, peering into the sugar carton.

  “What’s the matter?” Amy asked.

  “Ants in the sugar,” Mrs. Adams said. “Funny, this is a brand-new box.”

  “What can we do?” Amy asked.

  Mrs. Adams deliberated. “Well, the store’s closed by now. But we do have a sieve.” She waited a moment, giving Amy time to think about it.

  “Gran!” Amy protested, delighted.

  “Mm, yes, those peaks are just about perfect.” Mrs. Adams dumped some sugar into the sieve. It was dotted with little black insects.

  “At least they’re not moving,” Amy said.

  Mrs. Adams shook the sugar through the sieve. The ants, just slightly larger than the holes of the mesh, collected in a neat pile. She and Amy stared at them for a moment. “Do you think they’d be off limits to a vegetarian?” Mrs. Adams wondered. Just then, Amy’s mother appeared in the doorway.

  “What are you two up to?” Stella asked.

  “Nothing!” Mrs. Adams and Amy answered in unison. Mrs. Adams hastily opened the cabinet under the sink and dumped the ants and the sugar carton into the trash basket.

  “Amy, have you got a milk bottle?” Stella asked. “You’ll need water for the streetcars.”

  “Sure, Mom,” Amy said, her face red from the effort to control herself.

  Stella gave her a long look. “And when you’re done in here, why don’t you come try on your costume.” She went off down the hall.

  “Oh, dear!” Mrs. Adams gasped, as she and Amy collapsed in laughter.

  Finally, Mrs. Adams took a shaky breath, straightened her apron and said, “All right now, honey, you go on and take care of your costume. I’ll finish up in here.”

  “Is it safe to leave you alone with the food?” Amy asked.

  “A reasonable concern,” Mrs. Adams replied.

  “Do you notice that all the kids who’ve come to the door so far were wearing store-bought costumes?” Amy’s mother asked at the dinner table.

  “Yeah,” Amy said. “Most of the people in my class bought theirs.”

  “Well, I think that’s just so sad,” Stella remarked. She had dark hair like her mother, though nobody could figure out where she got her dimples.

  “Well, it’s a new world, isn’t it?” Mrs. Adams said. “Both parents are working these days, so there’s nobody to bother with making a costume from scratch.”

  “I work and I make the effort,” Stella retorted.

  “Yes, darling, but not everybody is plugged into an electrical outlet every hour of the day.”

  “It’s not a matter of energy,” Stella complained. “It’s a question of commitment.”

  “Uh oh,” Simon said. “We’re only on salad and she’s getting her knickers in a twist already.”

  “Oh, quit it, you pompous old limey,” Stella said, whacking him with her napkin. He grabbed the end of it and they started a good-natured tug-of-war.

  “Yuk. You guys are so immature,” Amy said.

  “Pride ourselves on it, leafy greens,” Simon remarked. His nicknames for Amy tended to follow patterns. Last month, they were celestial—“moonbeam” and “comet tail.” She gathered that she was now in for vegetables.

  Ordinarily, at this point on Halloween, Amy would be bouncing in her seat with impatience to get out the door. Strangely, though, tonight she felt like lingering, as if she might miss something by leaving. Perhaps it was because she had been told recently that her Grandmother Grace in England was terminally ill. At first, she had pictured her grandmother in a hospital bed in the middle of a railroad station with travelers hurrying past carrying luggage, though she knew perfectly well what “terminally” meant. She just wasn’t awfully sad, really, which made her feel guilty. Whereas, had it been Gran … oh, she couldn’t even go there.

  She looked around the table at her family. It was the first time she could remember a dinner with just the five of them at her grandparents’—no hangers on, no audience on the window seats. Not that she didn’t enjoy the usual party atmosphere, but this somehow felt special. Besides, her grandfather was in a good mood tonight. You never knew when he might be really cranky, or lose his temper in some scary unpredictable outburst. Whereupon, Gran would go into her room and close the door.

  “I brought a corpse for Wayne,” Stella said.

  “What’d you get him this time?” Amy asked.

  “A beetle. It was on the outside windowsill of my hotel room in Mexico City. The window was jammed, so I had to fetch the hotel handyman. He thought I had a few screws loose. And don’t you say a word, Simon.”

  “A word,” Simon said, winking at Amy.

  Amy found her mother profoundly irritating a good part of the time. Stella couldn’t just be, but was always doing, rushing around taking care of the whole world’s population. When she finally did sit down for a minute, her knee would keep bobbing up and down. Amy’s father thought it was amusing—adorable, even, though it annoyed Amy no end. But then Stella would go and do something so kind, like this, bringing back an insect for Wayne’s collection. For all Amy knew, Florence Nightingale had been really aggravating as well, always do-gooding halfway around the world.

  “If you hadn’t wound up fixing the international unwell,” William Adams told his daughter. “You would have been a damn fine naturalist.”

  “Hm, yes,” Lily remarked, “I seem to remember a story about a dead fish ….”

  “Oh, well, that,” Stella said.

  “Tell us, Grandpa,” Amy said. She’d heard the tale before, but wanted to hear it again now, wanted to prolong this feeling of contentment: the savory roast beef, the battered surface of the dining room table, the gleam of her grandmother’s chestnut and silver hair, the warm light encapsulating the five of them.

  “These two had gotten engaged,” Mr. Adams said, gesturing at Stella and Simon with the serving fork. It was hard to think of him as old with that muscular forearm and trim body, but then, he had had a heart “event” a few years ago. Everyone kept saying he was fine. “Your mother and I had a tennis game out by the lake,” he went on. “Doubles, against Phil and Ryan what’s-their-names.”

  “Mackin,” Stella said.

  “So, after we beat them, this one wanted to go for a stroll on the lakefront. And since I’ve never refused her anything ….” He waited for Stella to protest. She obliged, and he continued. “She finds a fish washed up on the shore. This big.” He held his hands a foot apart. “Weird-looking thing.”

  “It had wings or something,” Stella said. “Strange fins, too. Anyway, I wanted to get it home where I could really study it.”

  “So we chucked it in the trunk,” her father said, grinning at Stella.

  “A minor complication,” Stella explained to Amy. “We’d picked up the carton of wedding invitations that morning. They ended up sitting in there with the
dead fish while we drove home, taking our time ….”

  “We stopped for mini-golf if I remember.”

  “Yes,” Stella said, “and it got really hot that afternoon. In the nineties.”

  “And then we loaded up at the supermarket …”

  “Amy, you have no idea,” Mrs. Adams said. “When we sat down to address those invitations, well, we had to open all the windows and breathe through our mouths.”

  “Even the response cards stunk when they came back in the mail,” Stella said.

  “In her defense,” Mrs. Adams said to Amy, “your mother has always been the ideal person to have around when there’s a bat loose in the house.”

  Just then the front door opened and in walked a ghost pulling a streetcar nearly identical to Amy’s. “Hi, Amy,” Wayne called, his voice muffled under his costume. He stood in the dining room doorway. “You don’t look exactly ready.”

  “Oh, come on, Wayne,” Amy said. “Casper? And what is that? It’s not even a real sheet.”

  “Mom wouldn’t let me use one. It’s a paper tablecloth.” The boy pulled it up over his head, revealing a startlingly handsome face. He had perfect skin that was perennially tanned despite his utter lack of interest in outdoor activities that didn’t include chasing bugs with a butterfly net. His idea of a good time was hunching over a magnifying glass with some spidery creature to study. His eyes were pale green, and fringed with dark lashes. Amy’s mother said that Wayne was a nerd disguised as a movie star, which seemed about right. Although it was the nerd part that attracted Amy since the two were toddlers. After they hit the fourth grade, they alternated reading chapters of Charlotte’s Web to one another. She liked that he had cried at the end. His looks, she could have cared less about.

  “Come sit for a second,” Mrs. Adams said. “Dessert is on its way.”

  Wayne looked at Amy. He was rocking on his feet, anxious to get going.

  “Mom’s got something for you,” Amy told him. Stella drew a chair up for Wayne and handed him a little cardboard box. “You can sit just for a second.”

  Wayne lifted the lid. “A fire beetle!” he exclaimed, dropping the box as if it were indeed aflame. It wasn’t clear to Amy whether her friend was joking around or genuinely spooked. Wayne picked up a fork and poked tentatively at the creature.

  “That guy’s been dead a long time, Wayne,” Amy said, and when he looked up at her in embarrassment, she felt like kicking herself.

  “Which is just how we like them,” Mrs. Adams said. “Dead as a doornail.”

  “Look at you,” Stella crooned at the insect. “Aren’t you a beauty, though?”

  Amy cringed. Her mother was always getting into ridiculous conversations with animals, which was dopey enough, but this one was even dead. She had been known to talk to a log burning in the fireplace if it looked particularly lively.

  Mrs. Adams smiled at Amy. “Who’s in the market for dessert?” she said.

  Amy got up. “I’ll go, Gran.” Amy went into the kitchen and began spooning the crisp out into bowls. How could she have missed that Wayne was afraid of bugs, even dead ones? Come to think of it, he always slapped on a liberal coat of repellant every time they went exploring in the woods. She had thought she knew everything about him.

  She distributed the desserts—setting an extra generous helping in front of Wayne, who was explaining that fire beetles were so luminous that just one could supply enough light to read by in the dark. Amy went to fetch the whipped cream. Returning to the dining room, she stood in the doorway, enjoying the cool smoothness of the bowl in her fingers. Her grandfather was talking politics to Gran, who listened intently, chin on hand, while Wayne, satisfied that the fire beetle posed no threat, was pointing out to Stella various features of its underside. Amy’s father gazed into the middle distance. It seemed a shadow had passed across his face, and that somehow the spirit of him had at that moment stepped out of the room. She wondered what he could be thinking about—certainly not sailing in his glider, which always made him smile. Since when had she found her family so absorbing, she caught herself wondering. But then the sight of Wayne’s arm waving at her broke into her contemplation, the expression on his face a desperate plea to get away.

  “Okay,” Amy said out loud, her voice seeming tinny to her ear, like a bad recording. Was she was about to get her first period? Just the week before, her friend Roseanne had gone all sentimental and weird and that night it happened. Not that Amy was in any hurry. The entire production sounded pretty disgusting.

  She went around the table dabbing whipped cream on the apple crisp. When she got to her grandmother, Mrs. Adams considered, then looked up with a smile and said, “No, thank you, dear. I don’t believe I will.”

  Amy grinned back at her. I love you so much I could die, she thought.

  Amy stood in front of the mirror in her Cookie Monster costume. She and Stella had labored for hours gluing pieces of blue crepe paper simulating fur to a blue pillowcase. The googly eyes were cardboard circles, the black eyeballs having wandered off in opposite directions.

  “My God, Amy,” Stella said. “You look like Mr. Wilcox.” Amy’s school principal, a humorless ex-shoe salesman, had a cast in one eye.

  “Oh, he’s all right,” Amy said. Mr. Wilcox’s conversation was liberally peppered with aphorisms, like how butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth and how your chickens were coming home to roost. She had no idea what he was talking about half the time.

  “Amy!” Wayne’s voice shouted. “Are we going or not?”

  “It’s a great costume, honey,” Stella said. “Are you sure you can see well enough through those eyeholes?”

  “I can see fine,” Amy said, grabbing her streetcar and her empty goody bag.

  “Don’t forget your fire extinguisher,” Stella said.

  Her mother’s anxiety pricked her like a mosquito bite. She lifted up the glass bottle filled with water. Wayne was holding the front door open.

  “Enjoy yourselves, peas and carrots,” Simon called out, his voice somehow forced.

  “Okay!” Amy called back. “I’ll bring you some licorice, Grandpa! Bye!”

  And they were out.

  “I thought we’d never leave,” Wayne said. “Cool bug, though.”

  “Gosh, what a perfect night,” Amy said, glad she’d worn a sweater under her costume. The chill in the air was charred by the scent of burning leaves from a bonfire. Amy pointed two blocks down where some trick-or-treaters dragged their streetcars behind them, casting flickering colors against the darkness.

  They set theirs on the sidewalk and lit the candles inside. Wayne had papered his windows all in orange.

  “Nice,” Amy remarked. “Who do you want to hit first?”

  “Oxbow Street. The Piersons and Steins always have good stuff.”

  On their way at last, they glanced behind them often to make sure that their candles hadn’t toppled over as the streetcars scraped along the crooked sidewalk. Wayne’s paper costume rustled noisily with each step.

  “I’m not sure I’m going to do this next year,” Amy said, surprising herself.

  “Come on, you can’t quit on me,” Wayne protested. “You’re going to make me hang out with Jeff and Coleen? All they want to do is spray shaving cream on cars.”

  “Jeff’s cousin has a crush on you,” Amy said. They were both silent a while. “My water bottle’s too heavy. I’m just going to park it here.” She set her bottle down next to a fire hydrant.

  “Me, too.” Wayne put his beside hers and they stood aside to make way for a batch of older revelers in dime-store masks who ran past, nearly toppling the streetcars.

  “Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with Mig,” Amy said. “She’s cute, and besides, she’s my blood sister.”

  “So she’s a cute vampire?” Wayne said.

  “It has nothing to do with teeth. You just prick your fingers and then press them together so your blood flows into each other’s bodi
es.”

  “Well, that’s pretty stupid.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  They walked in silence for a while and felt the temperature drop. It wouldn’t be many weeks before the snow flew.

  “Girls are always falling in love with you,” Amy said.

  “Well, I don’t know why,” Wayne said.

  “And all you can get worked up over is dragonflies and night crawlers,” Amy said. “It’s tragic.”

  They made stops at a dozen houses throughout the neighborhood, the last providing the promised licorice for Amy’s grandfather. They were just heading back when Wayne’s streetcar hit an uneven spot in the sidewalk and capsized.

  “Shoot!” Wayne said. He reached down to set it upright. The candle had jostled free and ignited one of the windows. In an instant, the entire box caught fire. Wayne reached for it.

  “Wayne! Leave it!” Amy cried. “We don’t have our water …”

  But it was too late. The blaze had leapt onto the boy’s sleeves.

  “Hit the ground!” Amy exclaimed.

  Wayne stood still, immobilized. Amy leapt at him, tumbling him violently to the lawn beside the sidewalk. She heard the comic-book oof! as she landed on his slender frame with her full weight. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and rocked back and forth, rolling him along the damp grass until the flames were extinguished. They lay there for a while, panting.

  “Jeez,” Wayne said finally. “Jeez, Ame. Thanks.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Amy asked. “Were you trying to set yourself on fire?”

  “I don’t know,” Wayne replied. “I wanted to save my streetcar.”

  “Yeah, and you just about gave me a heart attack,” Amy said.

  “Does this count to make you my blood sister?”

  “’Til death do us part,” she answered, with the appropriate eye roll.

  Wayne thought a moment. “I think maybe it’s ‘til death us do part.’”