Outside Looking In

by James Lincoln Collier

  Mr. Clappers said, “What do you steal for, Ooma? Do you need the money?”

  Her face got confused again. She looked down at her shoes. “I don’t know,” she said. “It makes me feel better.”

  “It’s kind of a habit,” I said.

  Mr. Clappers laughed. “Well, it’s not a very good habit to get into. You’re likely to land in jail.”

  Just then, a woman came out of the rear door of the motor home and down the little steps. She was sort of plump and had a round face and glasses and white hair all fluffed up around her head. “Who are you talking to, Edgar?” Then she saw us. “Oh,” she said. “What a pretty little girl.”

  “Her name’s Ooma,” Mr. Clappers said. “She steals.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true, not a pretty little thing like her. How would you kids like a can of soda? I’m sure you would, wouldn’t you?” She went back into the motor home and came out with two cans of Sprite. She was also carrying a wet washcloth. “Here you are,” she said, handing us the Sprites. “Now, Ooma, I’m just going to wash off a little of that dirt so I can see how pretty you really are.”

  That was going to be a mistake. “Maybe you better not,” I said. “Sometimes she bites people when they try to wash her.”

  “I’m sure she won’t.” Mrs. Clappers knelt down in front of Ooma and ran the washcloth over her face. Ooma spluttered and tried to curse through the washcloth, but, amazingly enough, she didn’t bite or hit. She just stood there letting Mrs. Clappers do it. “There,” Mrs. Clappers said. She stepped back a little and cocked her head, like she was looking at a painting to see if she’d got it right. “That’s much better.”

  Ooma was looking kind of shocked. She was as surprised as I was that she’d let Mrs. Clappers wash her face without taking a bite out of her hand. Ooma reached up and rubbed her cheek to see if it felt any different. The whole thing was making me feel kind of funny. I mean, I felt good, but funny—some kind of feeling I didn’t understand. I stood there frowning and trying to get hold of it, but it kept coming and going the way feelings do, hard to catch as a butterfly. Then I realized that the steaks must be done and we better get back. “Mrs. Clappers, J. P. asked if we could borrow some mustard.”

  “J. P.?” Mr. Clappers said. “Who’s J. P.?”

  “That’s our dad.”

  “Oh,” Mr. Clappers said. “That the plump gent with the mustache who stopped by yesterday?”

  “Yes. He wanted to know if we could borrow—”

  “Seemed like an interesting gent,” Mr. Clappers said. “We had a long philosophical discourse about the evils of the system.”

  “J. P.’s supposed to be a great philosopher. He’s writing a book called The Journals of J. P. Wheeler. It’s going to be famous someday.” Suddenly I wished I hadn’t said that. I always believed that J. P. was a great philosopher, but saying the words right out, so I heard them in my ears, it sounded sort of foolish. I went hot and prickly. “Anyway, that’s what they say.”

  Mr. Clappers nodded. “I’m sure he will be.”

  “Now, Edgar,” Mrs. Clappers said. “These children came over to borrow some mustard, not to entertain you. They have to get back. I’ll just get a jar of mustard for them.” She went back into the motor home.

  I decided to get the conversation around to fishing. “Is that a fishing reel?” I said, pointing to the parts on the table.

  “It will be if I ever get it back together again,” he said. “You like to fish?”

  “I used to, when we lived on the old com—when I was little.” I didn’t understand why I felt ashamed to tell him about the old commune. “Just with a hand line, mostly. Trot—somebody used to take me out in an old boat we had.”

  “Well, Fergy, you’d better come fishing with me sometime.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Only I don’t have any fishing stuff.”

  “I’m sure I can dig up some tackle,” he said.

  Then Mrs. Clappers came out with the mustard, and we went on back through the woods to our campsite. All the way along, I kept trying to puzzle out what that funny feeling was that I’d got from talking to Mr. and Mrs. Clappers. Then we got back to the campsite.

  “What took you so long?” Gussie said.

  “Mr. Clappers is kind of talky,” I said. “He asks a lot of questions.”

  J. P. nodded. “You got to be friendly with them?”

  “She washed my face,” Ooma said.

  Gussie looked surprised. “Washed your face?”

  “I kind of liked it,” Ooma said.

  Gussie frowned at J. P. “I don’t think she had a right to do that. Doesn’t she think I keep the child clean enough?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it, Gussie,” J. P. said. “She was only trying to be friendly.”

  “He said he would take me fishing,” I said. “He said he’d dig up some tackle for me.”

  J. P. grunted. “So you’re making friends with them. I figured as much. They taught school for years and miss having kids around. Ooma, just see that you don’t cause any trouble with them. Hear me?”

  SIX

  THE NEXT MORNING after breakfast, J. P. told Ooma and me to bring the jar of mustard back to Mr. and Mrs. Clappers. We went off through the woods with it. It was another nice day, with the sun falling through the trees and the birds flashing through the sun and the little animals racing over the dead leaves and shooting up into trees when we came by. We got to the motor home. Nobody was sitting at the table under the awning, so I went up the little steps and looked through the window in the door. Mr. and Mrs. Clappers were eating breakfast and watching the news on TV. I was amazed at how much stuff they had in there—a good-sized table and a sofa that I figured turned into a bed, and an easy chair, and an icebox and everything else. I knocked. Mr. Clappers looked up and saw us. He waved us to come in. I opened the door. The air was filled with the smell of eggs and coffee and English muffins with butter on them. All we had had for breakfast was doughnuts and Coke. “We brought you back the mustard,” I said.

  “Oh, you should have kept it,” Mrs. Clappers said.

  “Come in, come in,” Mr. Clappers shouted from the table. “Have you had your breakfast? How about a muffin?”

  “Well—” I said.

  “Boy, would I love some damn eggs,” Ooma said. “We never get eggs.”

  “Ooma—”

  “Oh, that’s all right, Fergy,” Mrs. Clappers said. “Come on in.”

  So we went in. Mrs. Clappers made us some eggs and gave us each an English muffin with strawberry jam while we were waiting for the eggs to cook. While we ate, Mr. Clappers gave me a long talk about fishing. He said that the lake was full of bass; he’d almost caught one two feet long, but it broke the line and got away. “You have to come out with me. Maybe we’ll go this evening. The best time is dusk.” Well, I wanted to go, all right, so I said I’d ask J. P. Then we finished up our eggs, and I said thanks and made Ooma say thanks, and we started back. As we were going down the steps I heard Mrs. Clappers say, “They’re really nice kids. It’s a shame they’re not growing up in a better environment.” I got that funny feeling again—nice, but strange. I couldn’t understand it.

  This time we left Ooma and Trotsky to look after the campsite, and the rest of us went out and worked a couple of shopping malls. We didn’t do too bad, but the problem was, J. P. said, we were too far out in the country, and pretty soon we’d work the area out. We couldn’t stay at that campground forever.

  That disappointed me. I liked being there in the woods with the little animals dashing around and maybe getting a chance to go fishing in that lake. And, to tell the truth, it was nice getting to know normal people like Mr. and Mrs. Clappers. Of course, I didn’t really know what normal people were like; I’d never known any. But I’d read about them in books and seen pictures of them in magazine advertisements, and I had a pretty good idea of how they lived. The thing about normal people was that they were all part of the same thing. They all had turkey on Th
anksgiving and firecrackers on the Fourth of July and noisemakers on New Year’s Eve. We didn’t believe in the Fourth of July because it was a celebration of war, and on Thanksgiving we usually had hot dogs or something, because how could you cook a turkey on a camp stove in a van? Normal people all belonged to something. We didn’t belong to anything except ourselves.

  Anyway, J. P. said I could go fishing with Mr. Clappers, and I did. He caught a bass and I caught a sunny. My sunny was too small to keep, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind that at all. I liked sitting there in that little fiberglass rowboat, watching the sun go down behind the trees at the edge of the lake, feeling the night breeze come up, and talking to Mr. Clappers. It was so easy and peaceful that I didn’t care if I caught anything at all.

  Mr. Clappers certainly had a curious streak. He asked me a lot of questions about how we made our money, if Ooma and I went to school, and where Gussie and J. P. came from and all that. It was embarrassing to me, because I knew that it would sound pretty weird to him.

  He took it all in like it was normal to live in a beat-up van and not go to school and have a sister who stole. But it surprised me when he said, “It must be sort of fun to live that way and not go to school, Fergy.”

  I didn’t know what to answer. I felt like telling the truth and saying that it wasn’t fun, that I was scared about being so dumb and tired of never being normal. But I didn’t want it to sound like I hated my own parents or was against J. P.’s ideas. So I said, “I guess it’s okay.”

  He flipped the line out in the direction of the setting sun, and I saw the spinner fall into the top of the sun and fall out again at the bottom and plop into the water. “Your dad must be a pretty smart guy,” he said.

  I didn’t want to talk about J. P.’s journals to Mr. Clappers anymore. “I guess so,” I said.

  He began to turn the reel slowly, working the spinner backward toward the boat. “I guess you’d like to be like him when you grow up,” he said.

  I looked over the side of the boat like I was seeing a fish. “I guess so,” I said. I wished he would stop asking so many questions, and he did. He began talking about where the fish might be biting better, and I began to feel good again. When it got dark we went in. I had a Coke at his motor home, and then I went back to our campsite.

  The next day it was the Wiz’s turn to stay home and watch over the campsite. As for Ooma, J. P. said she could spend the day with Mr. and Mrs. Clappers. “They like kids. They won’t mind having her.” Then he told Ooma, “You better be good, or I’m going to wallop you.” It was surprising to me that J. P. was allowing us to be down at the Clapperses’ so much. Usually, he didn’t like us to spend too much time with regular people, in case we picked up their ideas.

  After that, Ooma got to going down there every day and staying all day. The first thing she wanted when she got there was to have Mrs. Clappers wash her face and hands, tuck her shirt into her jeans, and tidy her up generally. It even got to where Mrs. Clappers gave Ooma a shampoo and put her hair up in pigtails. Ooma was mighty proud of them, and she stood in front of the mirror they had in the bathroom of the motor home, turning her head from side to side to make her pigtails swing.

  Gussie frowned when she saw the pigtails. “I didn’t know you wanted pigtails, Ooma,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me? You didn’t have to get Mrs. Clappers to do it.”

  “It’s all right, Gussie,” J. P. said. “It’s a good thing for them to be friendly with the kids. There’s no harm in it.”

  Gussie went on frowning. “What does she think, I can’t take care of my own children? It doesn’t look right.” I could tell that she was worried about it, but she didn’t say anything more.

  I couldn’t get to the Clapperses’ too often because I had to go around to shopping malls, but usually I went down there in the evenings. If the weather was right, Mr. Clappers took me fishing, and if it was bad, we sat around the motor home watching TV and eating cookies. Mrs. Clappers said it was a pleasure having children around, it had been years since she’d had anyone to bake cookies for, and she missed it. “Not since Teddy grew up,” she said.

  “Who’s Teddy?” Ooma said, with her mouth full of cookies.

  Mr. and Mrs. Clappers looked at each other. Then Mrs. Clappers said, “Teddy was our son. He was killed in Vietnam.” She opened a bureau drawer and took out a picture of a man in an army uniform, smiling, and showed it to us.

  “Is he dead?” Ooma said.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so, Ooma,” Mrs. Clappers said. I knew I ought to say I was sorry, or something, but I felt too shy. So I just looked at the picture, and in a minute Mr. Clappers changed the subject back to fishing, and Mrs. Clappers put the picture away.

  We went on this way for a few days, and around the end of the fifth or sixth day I began to get some pretty funny ideas. What would it be like to live with Mr. and Mrs. Clappers? They had four bunks in the motor home, and it seemed like they had plenty of money. I mean, a motor home like that cost thousands and thousands of dollars, so they couldn’t be poor.

  Besides, they were teachers. They’d both taught in the same school for years. Mr. Clappers had taught social studies and Mrs. Clappers had taught science. I figured they knew enough to teach anything—English, history, math, anything.

  I began thinking about that a lot. I would lie in my sleeping bag at night listening to the peepers—and wondering. If we lived with the Clapperses, would they get tired of us after a while and stop being nice? Would Ooma start stealing from them? Or would it always be nice?

  I wondered what Ooma would think about it. I wanted to ask her, but I was afraid of putting ideas in her head, because she might blurt something out to J. P. and Gussie. But then, one night as we were walking through the woods back to our campsite, she brought it up herself.

  “Mrs. Clappers said we could stay for dinner,” she said.

  “Did she?”

  “She was making pork chops and said she had plenty. Pork chops and applesauce and mashed potatoes. I wish we could have stayed.”

  “I don’t think we should bother them all the time,” I said.

  “Mrs. Clappers said they like it when we come to visit them.”

  Neither of us said anything, but walked on through the woods, with the sun going down behind us and the shadows coming up into the woods. Then she said, “Fergy, do you think if we asked them they’d let us live with them?”

  “I don’t think we ought to,” I said. “J. P. and Gussie would have their feelings hurt.”

  “I don’t give a damn if they do,” she said. “Do you think we could, Fergy?”

  I sure wanted to. “I don’t know, Ooma. I’ll think about it. Just don’t bring it up to anybody.”

  A couple of mornings after that, I took Ooma through the woods to the Clapperses’ campsite as usual, around eight o’clock. Mr. and Mrs. Clappers were having breakfast. Ooma just slid into her seat next to Mrs. Clappers, who began to serve out some scrambled eggs and bacon. “How about you, Fergy?” she said.

  “I have to get back,” I said.

  “Take a prune Danish, anyway,” she said. “I made them this morning.” She passed me the plate, and I took one. It was still hot from the oven and smelled wonderful.

  “Fergy,” Mr. Clappers said, “how would you and Ooma like to go on a picnic tonight? There’s an island a couple of miles down the lake covered with pines. We were thinking of going down there in the boat around five o’clock and having supper while it’s still light.”

  The funny thing was, going on a picnic was no big thing for me. “I’d spent most of my life on picnics—camping someplace and eating sandwiches or cooking hot dogs over the camp stove. For me, the most fun would be to go into a regular house and eat supper on a table. So the picnic part wouldn’t be very interesting to me. But going someplace with Mr. and Mrs. Clappers would be nice—it would be like living with them for a little while. “I have to ask J.P.,” I said.

  “Well, you ask him,” Mrs. Clappers said
. “You tell him we invited you two especially.”

  So when I got back to our campsite I did, and he said, “Fine, by all means, stay as long as you like; I’m sure you’ll be in good hands with them. No rush about getting back.” And that night around five o’clock, I went through the woods to their campsite. They were ready and waiting for me. They were pretty cheerful—both of them talking at the same time, and Ooma just as excited as she could be, opening up the picnic basket and showing me all the things that were in it. “Look, Fergy, deviled eggs and ham sandwiches and macaroni salad and goat cheese—fffyyck—and brownies and pickles and cake. I helped on the deviled eggs. You mash up the yellow part with mayonnaise and mustard and stuff and jam it back inside.” Oh, she was excited, all right, even though she’d spent all of her life on picnics, just like me.

  We walked through the woods to the lake. Mr. Clappers carried the little outboard motor for the boat, I carried the picnic basket, and Mrs. Clappers carried a blanket. The boat was just big enough to hold us. Mrs. Clappers had the whole front to herself because of being plump, and Mr. Clappers sat in the rear running the motor. We kept tipping from Ooma’s squirming around, and Mr. Clappers kept shouting out “Trim the ship” and singing some song called “Oh, the Life of a Sailor,” until Mrs. Clappers told him to stop it, he sang like a horse, he never could sing, and there wasn’t any use in trying to learn now. The sun was still up in the sky. A little breeze ruffled the water, and, up above, gulls were circling and wheeling and squabbling among themselves. All of a sudden I just filled with happiness. I don’t know what it was, but it just came over me and I sat there feeling it all, happy as I’d ever been. I couldn’t remember a time when I’d been so happy.

  We got to the island and pulled the boat up onto the beach. Then we climbed up into the pine forest a little bit. Oh, it smelled just beautiful there. The ground was covered with needles, soft as a cushion, and through the trees we could see the sun sparkling on the lake, like flakes of gold. “It’s pretty here, isn’t it, Fergy?” Mr. Clappers said.

  “It sure is,” I said. I still felt happy. “It’s the prettiest place I’ve ever seen.”