The Curtain Went Up, My Trousers Fell Down

by Henry Winkler

  “I think my tutoring with Heather has really worked,” I said. “I feel like long division and I have finally made friends.”

  “How pleasant for you,” she said, picking up her red pencil. “Now if you’ll allow me some air, I shall mark your paper.”

  Frankie had already told me that I had to get twenty-eight problems right to get a B-plus. That meant I could miss four.

  Before she even looked at my answers, Ms Adolf took her red pencil and wrote “minus one” at the top of my paper.

  “How could I have missed anything?” I asked her. “You haven’t even got to my answers yet.”

  “You didn’t write your full name and the date in the upper right-hand corner. That counts for one whole problem off.”

  “But, Ms Adolf,” I said, almost crying, “my initials are right there: HZ.”

  “Remember Adolf’s Rule Number Six?” she said. “Print your full name and the date legibly in the upper right-hand corner.”

  “You can’t take a whole point off for that!” I whined.

  “I can, and I did, Henry.”

  With that, she moved her red pencil over to the answer column and began to check my answers. I never took my eyes off that pencil as she moved it down my answers. I counted each red cross. Number four was wrong. She paused at number seventeen, and I held my breath. Then came the red cross. That was two problems wrong. Plus the name thing, so that was three. She didn’t make another cross for a long time, and I could feel myself starting to smile.

  You did it, Hank Zipzer. You aced this test!

  But then came problem number twenty-seven. I never liked that number twenty-seven. It had an unlucky sound to it. And I missed it, all right. I felt my answer was pretty close to right, and I pointed that out to her.

  “Shouldn’t I get some credit for getting really close?” I asked.

  “Mathematics is a precise science,” Ms Adolf said. “Now, if you’ll let me continue.”

  “Please do. But you’re not going to find anything else wrong. Four wrong is my limit.”

  Four wrong was a B-plus. I knew I wasn’t going to miss any more. I could just feel it.

  Ms Adolf’s red pencil slid all the way down to the bottom of the answer column without making another cross. Four wrong! Four wrong was a B-plus!

  I started to jump up and down like a nutty kangaroo.

  “Not so fast, Henry,” Ms Adolf said. She placed her pencil on the very last answer of the test. And she put a big, fat red cross next to it.

  “No!” I said. “That problem couldn’t be wrong. I remember going over it twice.”

  I pointed to my work on the test paper.

  “See,” I said. “Five hundred and sixty divided by twenty. It’s twenty-eight. I figured it out. I know it’s right. Look, I wrote twenty-eight right there on my paper.”

  Ms Adolf pointed to the answer column.

  “It says eighty-two here. Not twenty-eight.”

  “But I just flipped the number around when I transferred my work to the answer column. It happens.”

  “Once again, Henry, let me refer you to the word ‘precision’. Right is right and wrong is wrong. And your answer is wrong.”

  She took her red pencil and moved it to the top of the test. “Minus five,” she wrote in big red letters. Eighty-four per cent.

  Eighty-four per cent was a B.

  “Ms Adolf,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest. “There’s been a terrible mistake. I technically missed five, but if you look at it untechnically, I really and truly only missed four actual maths questions!”

  “In my book, it is still minus five,” she said.

  “But I’m supposed to get a B-plus. I have to get a B-plus.”

  “If I were giving you a grade in whining, you would certainly get a B-plus,” Ms Adolf said. “Perhaps even an A. But your grade on this maths test is a B, Henry. And that’s final.”

  “But…”

  She took her red pencil and put a giant circle around the B at the top of my paper. Any other time I would have been thrilled to get a B. But when I looked at that big red grade on the top of my test paper, all I wanted to do was rip it to shreds.

  FRANKIE AND ASHLEY WERE waiting for me outside the front door of school.

  “Dude,” Frankie said. “Show me the B-plus.”

  I showed him the paper with the big red B on the top.

  “OK, Zip. So that’s a little lower than we had projected,” Frankie said.

  “But loads better than you usually do,” Ashley added.

  “Good point, Ashweena. Listen, Zip, you’ve got to emphasize that to your dad,” Frankie said. “This is way better than you usually do. Just keep hitting the ‘way better’ part. He’ll come around.”

  I hoped he was right. All the way home, I hoped he was right. All the way into the lobby of our building, and up in the lift, I hoped he was right. As I got out of the lift and the doors closed, I heard Frankie repeating, “Remember, Zip, the key word is ‘way’. You did ‘way better’.”

  I put the key in the lock and took a few deep breaths in and out, repeating, “I am relaxed.” And then, just to be truthful, I added, “Not really, but kind of.”

  My dad was working at the dining-room table. I tried to determine if he was in a good mood or a bad mood. I thought I saw a few crumbs around his mouth and chin area, which was a good sign, because if he had recently eaten a piece of cinnamon crumb coffee cake with his afternoon cup of tea, that would have definitely put him in a good mood.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, with a big smile in my voice.

  He didn’t look up. Uh-oh. That must’ve meant we were out of the cinnamon coffee cake and all we had were those two-day-old honey oat bran muesli bars.

  “So you’ll never guess what happened today in school,” I said, pulling up a chair and sitting down across the table from him.

  “Is this about maths, Hank?” he asked.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “And it’s good news.”

  For the first time, he took his fingers off the keyboard and his eyes off the computer screen.

  “You got your test back.”

  “That I did,” I said. “Now, Dad, you know that I usually get a D or lower in maths, especially a topic like long division, which can be very tricky.”

  “Cut to the chase, Hank.”

  “So, Dad, I am happy to tell you that I zoomed all the way up the grading scale. I did way better than I usually do.”

  “Hank, what did you get?”

  I used the table as a drum, and I made a drumroll using the tips of my fingers. It sounded as much like “ta-da” as I could get it to.

  “I got a big, gigantic, first-time-ever B! Can you believe it, Dad? I can’t.”

  OK, I’ll admit there was a silence. A pretty long silence. But I didn’t get discouraged because I thought he was probably thinking exactly how to congratulate me for my big improvement. So I stayed quiet and let him come up with the words himself.

  “A B was not our agreement, Hank.”

  Oh no. This wasn’t going the way I had hoped. There was still time to turn it around.

  “Dad, you have to admit, this is the best I’ve ever done. This is huge. Frankie and Ashley were really excited. Even Ms Adolf nodded her head at me. And in a positive way.”

  “You know the rule, Hank. My expectation was for you to get a B-plus. You agreed.”

  “But, Dad, she took points off just because I didn’t transfer one of my answers correctly into the answer column. You have to admit, that’s not maths.”

  “That’s work habits, Hank. And yours are half-baked, as usual.”

  “I’ll do better next time, Dad. I’ll bake my work habits until they’re really well-done.”

  “Hank, a deal is a deal. As your father, my job is to set the standards and your job is to meet them. Full stop.”

  “No, Dad. That’s not your job. Your job is to work at the computer and drive the van on family vacations and shout out all the right answers on Jeo
pardy! when we watch it together. That’s a really important job, Dad.”

  “I’ve made a decision, Hank.”

  “Not about the play. Tell me it’s not about the play. Is it?”

  “You’re going to have to go and tell the director that you can no longer participate.”

  At that very moment, my brain turned to cream cheese. I heard what my dad was saying, but it sounded like he was six million miles away, and his words were coming out of his mouth all slowly and gooey, like the last little bit of maple syrup that hardens at the bottom of the bottle.

  “Dad, they’re counting on me. If I don’t play the king, do you know who will? Nick McKelty, that’s who. That’s like putting pantaloons and a crown on a cow.”

  “Nick McKelty is not my concern,” my dad said. “I am not doing this just to punish you, Hank. I’m doing this for your own good. Schoolwork comes first.”

  Schoolwork comes first.

  Now that’s a sentence I can honestly say I hate.

  AT BREAK THE NEXT DAY, I broke the news to Heather. I looked for her at tetherball, which is her favourite game, but she wasn’t there. Finally, I found her pacing up and down along the back wall of the playground, which has a huge mural painted on it to look like the desert of Arizona.

  “Hank,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you. I’m having trouble with the scene where the king is disrespectful to Anna. And I’m still nervous about the dancing part…”

  “Heather,” I said. “I can’t be the king.”

  I thought it was best to just say it. But she didn’t get it.

  “I understand,” she said. “Just like I’m having trouble being Anna, which is why I thought we should rehearse this section before we show it to Devore.”

  “No, Heather. You’re not understanding what I’m saying. I got a B on my maths test, and my father is sticking to our agreement. I can’t be the king.”

  “It’s all my fault,” she said. “I didn’t do my job as your peer tutor.”

  “It’s not you, Heather. I did better than I’ve ever done on a maths test.”

  “So what happens with the play?” she said. Slowly, I could see the horrible realization dawn on her. “Oh no. McKelty.”

  “Maybe he’ll surprise us,” I answered. But we both knew that the only surprising thing about Nick McKelty was how he could constantly break the world record for obnoxiousness.

  If I thought telling Heather the news was hard, telling Devore was no picnic, either. I went to the hall after school and asked if I could have a word with him before the rehearsal started. When I told him about my father’s decision, he seemed stunned. I don’t think anything like that had ever happened to him. I’m pretty sure people who act in off-Broadway shows don’t get their acting privileges taken away by their dads.

  “But surely your father knows the age-old rule of the theatre world,” he said, tossing his black cape over his shoulders. “The show must go on.”

  “My dad doesn’t exactly live in the theatre world,” I tried to explain. “He lives more in the Do-As-I-Say-Or-You’re-Grounded world.”

  “But doesn’t he understand that your journey through the world is travelled on the river of the arts?”

  “He gets seasick on rivers. Once he even threw up when we took a boat tour around Manhattan. He was sick right into the East River.”

  “I was speaking more of a poetic river,” Devore said.

  “He gets a little nauseous around poetry too.”

  Devore paced back and forth, rubbing his goatee.

  “The only solution is for me to call your father and discuss the matter,” he said at last.

  “That would only make my dad more angry,” I said. “I made a deal, and I came close to holding up my end of it. But I didn’t, and a deal’s a deal.”

  I had to stop talking then, because I could feel the tears just on the other side of my eyeballs, waiting to flow down my cheeks. I turned away from Devore and took a seat in the folding chairs where only the understudies were sitting.

  Devore took a deep breath, then clapped his hands and cleared his throat.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the cast and crew,” he said. “I have a very important announcement. As of today, Mr McKelty will play the part of the king.”

  You could hear everyone in the room groan in unison. From their places up on the stage, Frankie and Ashley looked over at me with such sad looks. I could tell they felt sorry for me, and to tell you the truth, it gets really old always being the one your friends have to feel sorry for.

  The only one in the hall who didn’t groan was you-know-who. When he heard the news, Nick McKelty shot out of his chair, pumped his fist like he had just hit a home run in the World Series and did a victory dance so twitchy you could see his stomach jiggle under his shirt.

  “Now you guys will see what a king really looks like!” he shouted.

  “Mr McKelty, we don’t have time for your shenanigans,” Devore said. “Take your place on the stage.”

  McKelty clomped up to the stage, his shoes making a loud echoing noise in the silent room.

  “Places, everyone,” Devore called.

  But no one moved. Frankie was in the wings with his headset still around his neck. Ashley had stopped adjusting Heather’s costume, and was just standing there looking at me with tears in her eyes. Even Luke Whitman, as the elephant boy, actually took his finger out of his nose for a moment. That was a first.

  “Mr McKelty, I hope you’ve been watching very carefully these last two weeks, and paying attention to what Hank has been doing,” Devore said. “An understudy must fit seamlessly into the production.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m not copying him,” McKelty said. “I’ve been practising my own style at home. You’re not going to believe what you see.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I heard Devore whisper under his breath.

  Mr Rock had been sitting at the piano, watching everything unfold. I could feel him observing me, but I was glad he didn’t say anything. Those tears were still there behind my eyeballs, and I wanted them to stay right where they were.

  “Let’s begin with the scene where Anna and the king dance for the first time,” Devore said.

  “Goody,” McKelty said. “I’m a great dancer.” Then he turned to Heather. “Come on over here, pigtails. I’ll give you a twirl around the stage like Zipzer could never do.”

  “Do I have to?” Heather asked Devore.

  “I’m afraid so,” Devore said. “Take your places. Mr Rock, if you will.”

  Mr Rock put his hands on the piano and played a big, fancy introduction. Frankie put on his headset, Ashley gave Heather a final fluff-up and McKelty grunted like a wild boar. I guess it was his way of saying to Heather, “Shall we dance?”

  He galumphed over to her and put his pawlike hand around her waist. With no warning, he grabbed her and started to spin in a circle. He twirled her so fast that she spun totally out of his grasp, careened across the stage like a spinning top, bounced off Luke Whitman, bumped into at least four kindergartners playing the king’s children and landed in a heap on the throne, sideways, with her legs over the arm of the chair.

  “Now that’s how a king does it!” McKelty shouted, strutting across the stage like a peacock.

  “Mr McKelty, I suggest you control your enthusiasm before you throw your dance partner through the wall,” Devore said.

  Heather looked like she was going to cry.

  I couldn’t watch another second. I jumped to my feet and raced down the aisle, across the hall, through the double doors and out into the corridor.

  I just stood there, hating my brain. For not remembering to put the date on my maths test. Come on, that is so simple. For missing the first three easy problems. Why didn’t I check my work like Ashley said? For not copying over the right answer on that last problem. I should’ve got that right. I mean, I knew it.

  “Hank, you forgot this.”

  I turned round and there was Mr Rock, holding m
y rucksack. As usual, I had left it behind.

  Is there anything I can do right? I can’t even leave a room without forgetting something.

  “Thanks, Mr Rock,” I said, taking the rucksack from him. I turned to leave.

  “Hank,” he called after me. “If you really want to be in the play, there’s got to be a way.”

  “It’s not fair,” I said, feeling all my frustration come rushing out at once. “And besides, you don’t know my dad.”

  I let loose with the whole story and some of those tears, too. I wasn’t embarrassed, though, because Mr Rock is the kind of teacher you can say anything to. I don’t know what I would do without him. He just listened to me talk, nodded, and then listened some more.

  “Have you tried telling your feelings to your father?” he said, when I had finally come to the end of my words.

  “Trust me, I did.”

  “Then you have to do it again,” he said. “You’re going to have to make yourself heard.”

  “Changing my father’s mind about anything is impossible.”

  He nodded. We were both quiet. In the silence, we heard Nick McKelty’s horrible, screeching voice blubbering through his lines.

  We looked at each other and we both understood what I had to do.

  “I’M NOT GOING OVER THIS AGAIN, Hank,” my father was saying. “This conversation was finished yesterday.”

  “But this conversation is not that conversation,” I tried to explain. “Well, it is kind of like that conversation, but it’s not exactly that conversation. This conversation has a whole new twist.”

  We were in our living room, and my dad was doing a crossword puzzle in his La-Z-Boy chair in the medium-recline position. That’s his favourite position, except when he’s watching Jeopardy!, when he goes into full recline. He says leaning back helps the blood get to his head so his brain thinks of the answers faster. I tried it once when I had to study for a geography test and had to learn all the capitals of the African continent. All that blood rushing to my head just made me dizzy.

  “You wait right here, Dad. Don’t change locations. I’ll be right back.”