Outside Looking In

by James Lincoln Collier

  “If we’re going to all be in it together, how about letting the rest of us in on the decisions every once in a while?”

  “I’m not going to argue with you about it,” J. P. said. Gussie didn’t say anything more about it, and neither did he, and for a while nobody said anything, until Ooma asked Gussie for something to eat. But I didn’t care, for I wasn’t going to be living with them much longer.

  The trouble was, I didn’t have anyplace to run away to. There wasn’t any use in just running away and living in the streets: It had to be someplace where I could go to a regular school and live a regular life and get into the Boy Scouts and the school band and be on some team. But where?

  Suddenly it came to me: Gussie’s parents. They had plenty of money and a big house with lots of rooms in it—at least they had had all that once, fifteen years before when Gussie had run away. Maybe they would be glad to have their grandson come and live with them. It would be some surprise for them. I didn’t think they even knew about me, or Ooma. Had Gussie ever written them a letter about us? I decided it would be a good idea to find out as much about them as I could. Maybe they didn’t live in that big house anymore. Maybe they didn’t even live in Cambridge. They could even be dead. But I wanted to find out about them as quick as I could. We were heading generally westward. J. P. had decided that it would be best to get out into sparsely settled country like Oklahoma or Wyoming, so we were working our way through Tennessee toward Arkansas, and from there planning to angle off to the Northwest. The longer I waited to run away, the farther from Cambridge I would be.

  So, over the next couple of days I pretended to have got over my sulks and be feeling better again, and I began asking questions, like I was just trying to while away the time. “Gussie, when you were a kid, did you have your own room?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to hear all that stuff again, do you?”

  “Yes, we do,” Ooma said.

  “I should think you’d be bored of it by now.”

  “No, we’re not bored. Tell us,” Ooma said.

  “Yes, I had my own room. We had a big house with lots of rooms.”

  “How big was it?” Ooma said. She didn’t realize how helpful she was being to me by asking questions.

  “Oh, it was big,” Gussie said. “A big, white clapboard house with a porch running along the front. There was a little yard in front with an iron rail fence going along the sidewalk. There was a gate in the fence and a flagstone walk coming up through the little yard. Sometimes, on hot summer nights, we would sit on the porch and watch the people walking along the sidewalk. We would eat strawberry ice cream out of glasses full of ginger ale. We had long silver spoons with handles like straws. You could eat the ice cream with the spoon or suck it up through the silver straw. My father liked strawberry ice cream, so we always had it.”

  “How could you see the people going along in the dark?” Ooma said.

  “There was a streetlight right in front of the house. I remember that streetlight, because my room was on the front of the house and the streetlight shone in at night when I was going to sleep. I liked that, because even when my mother pulled down the shade, some light glowed through it so the room wasn’t so dark and scary.”

  “Were you scared of the dark when you were little?” Ooma said.

  “Oh, yes,” Gussie said. She had a kind of faraway, dreamy look in her eyes. “I always thought something was out there in the dark. A big, old wooden house like that creaks at night as the boards cool down. I’d hear that creaking and I’d think it was an evil being coming across the floorboards to get me. Or when the wind blew the branches around in the streetlight, the shadows would jump off the wall toward me, and if I was half-asleep I’d jerk awake and scream, and my mother would have to come into my room and hug me until I calmed down.”

  I thought she might stop, so I asked a question myself. “Why wouldn’t they let you have your light on?” I said.

  “They said it wasn’t good for me to give in to my fears. They didn’t want to spoil me. That was a big thing with them. Because we had a lot of money and servants, they were afraid I would be spoiled. I wasn’t supposed to do any work like washing the dishes or shoveling the snow. We had servants for that. I was supposed to grow up to be a lady and know how to manage servants. So, in order to keep me from being spoiled, they sent me to a tough private school where I had a lot of homework. Besides that, I had to take dancing lessons and piano and horseback riding and tennis and flower arranging and watercolor painting. I was supposed to be cultivated. I was always taking something. Every afternoon after school there would be lessons of some kind, and I had all that homework, too. We had a subscription to the Boston Symphony and I had to go every Sunday, and after that we called on people and I had to learn how to make conversation with them and drink tea without spilling any on my lap. You know, in the end I envied the servants, for they were free to do what they wanted once they got their work done. My work was never done. Then J. P. came along, and I learned what a terrible life I’d been leading. I learned that there was such a thing as having fun. What was the use of having all that money if I never could do anything I wanted?”

  Well, it sounded pretty good to me, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I said, “What did your parents think when you ran away with J. P.?”

  “Oh, they were amazed and horrified. They couldn’t understand it. I was only sixteen, remember. They had no use for J. P. They thought he was a bum. They sent the cops after me, and the cops brought me home. I ran away again the next day, and that time they let me go. I guess they thought I would get it out of my system and come creeping home in a little while. But I never did.”

  “Did you ever tell them you and J. P. got married?”

  “No,” she said. “I haven’t laid eyes on them since.”

  “They don’t know about me and Ooma?”

  “J. P. thought that would be a bad idea. He thought they might try to take you two away from us.”

  Ooma was sitting with her chin propped up in her hands. “I wish we could go visit them,” she said. “I wish we could sit on the porch and eat strawberry ice cream with those funny spoons.”

  “How about laying off that stuff, Gussie?” J. P. said. “You’re putting all kinds of ideas in their heads.”

  “I think they ought to know something about their grandparents,” Gussie said. “It’s hard enough that they can’t ever see them.”

  “Your father had me jailed, remember, Gussie?” J. P. said.

  “J. P., if I decide I want to see my parents sometime, I’m going to do it,” Gussie said.

  “Over my dead body,” he said. “That man had me jailed. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the enemy.”

  “I’m going to make my own decision about that,” she said.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” he said, looking pretty grim. It seemed like for Gussie that stealing the motor home was kind of the last straw. It had really got her sore at J. P., and I figured something might come out of it. But I wasn’t going to take a chance on that. J. P. had a way of getting people to do what he wanted, and there was no telling what Gussie might do.

  I was bound and determined that I was going to see my grandparents, though, so I waited my chance until I could talk to Gussie alone. A couple of days later we were camped in a field somewhere. J. P. was working on the other van with the Wiz and Trotsky, and Ooma was watching—she liked to listen to J. P. swear when he was working on something. Gussie was cooking supper. I came over to her and said, “Do you think we’ll ever see our grandparents?”

  She turned around and looked at me. For a minute she didn’t say anything. Then she said, “Fergy, you’ll be grown-up in a few years. Then you can do anything you want.”

  “Maybe they’ll be dead by then,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Your grandfather is only sixty-two. He’s likely to live a long time yet.”

  “Do you think they still live in the same place?” I said.

&
nbsp; She went on looking at me. “Why do you ask that, Fergy?”

  “Well, I mean when I’m a grown-up, if I want to go visit them.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I see. Yes. The house has been in my mother’s family for four generations. She would never sell it.”

  “They would be pretty surprised, I guess,” I said. “I mean, seeing as they don’t even know they have grandchildren.”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said, “They know. Every once in a while I write them a letter. Just so they know I’m still alive. It would be just too hard for them if I didn’t. But I’ve never told J. P. I just write them a little bit about how everybody is. They know about you and Ooma. I don’t do everything the way J. P. wants.”

  “Do they ever write back?”

  “No. How could—” But then we heard J. P. and Ooma coming back, and we had to change the subject.

  Ooma was pretty curious about her grandparents, that was clear, and suddenly I decided I ought to take her with me when I ran away. She was headed for trouble. She’d got so much in the habit of stealing that she didn’t see anything wrong with it and did it all the time. And if she didn’t go to school and learn to read and write and add and subtract and all the rest of it, by the time she grew up she wouldn’t know anything at all. She wouldn’t be able to get a job, and she’d have to steal to earn her living. Sooner or later, she was bound to get caught stealing something big and go to jail for it.

  So I ought to take her with me. She wouldn’t like going to school or living in a regular house. She liked being dirty and traveling around in a van. But I figured I ought to take her for her own good, if I could talk her into it.

  To tell the truth, there was more to it than that. The idea of running away by myself and hitching from Kansas or someplace all the way back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, without any money was kind of scary. I knew I’d feel a lot better if Ooma came along. She’d be company for me.

  But first I had to talk her into doing it. It was a couple of days before I had the chance. By that time, we’d got out to Arkansas and were camped way out in the country on a dirt road that ran through some woods. The woods ran down into a little valley. There was a stream at the bottom. The dirt road stopped there. Across was just more woods. As soon as we got camped that afternoon, I walked down there with a bucket to get some water. It was pretty down there, with the sun shining oil the water, making it sparkle, and the birds peeping and chattering in the trees. I squatted down to look for fish. A trout sat in the little pool, keeping itself still in the water by flicking its tail a little. I brought the water back up and said to Ooma, “There’s some fish in the stream down there. Come on, I’ll show them to you.”

  Ooma liked it when I paid attention to her, because I was her big brother, so she was glad to come. We walked on down the dirt road through the woods to the stream. I crouched down and she crouched down beside me, and we squatted there for a while watching the trout. Then Ooma got bored and got a stick and tried to poke the trout with the stick to see what it would do. But, of course, it darted away the minute the stick touched the water.

  “Damn it,” she said.

  “You can’t catch a trout with a stick,” I said. “They’re too skittish.”

  She threw the stick into the water and watched it float downstream. Then she sat down and began to take off her ratty old sneakers. Her feet were filthy. “I’m going in there and stand still and see if it’ll come to me.”

  “It won’t,” I said. “The water’s going to be cold.”

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  “Boy, your feet are dirty,” I said.

  “None of your damn business,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. She finished taking off her shoes. Then I said, “It’d be pretty interesting to see what Gussie’s old house looks like. I mean, all that fancy silverware and the gardens. I bet they have a Rolls-Royce.”

  “Or a Mercedes.”

  “I wish we could visit them and find out.”

  “Gussie would never let us,” Ooma said. “She hates them.”

  Suddenly I didn’t think that was so. I didn’t have any reason for thinking that; it was just a feeling I had. “She doesn’t hate them, Ooma. She just couldn’t get along with them when she was a kid.”

  “How come she never goes to see them?”

  “J. P. won’t let her. I think she would take us to see them if J. P. would let her.”

  “I’m going to ask her,” Ooma said.

  “You better not,” I said. “J. P. will get sore at you.”

  She got up and walked into the stream. “Damn,” she said.

  “I told you it would be cold—a mountain stream at this time of year.”

  “I didn’t think it would be that cold.” Still, she stepped out into the middle and stood there looking around for the trout.

  I lay back on the ground, with my hands under my head, staring up at the sky through the trees. “Maybe we could go there by ourselves sometime,” I said.

  “Go where?” she said. “This damn water is sure cold.”

  “Go to Cambridge and visit our grandparents.”

  She skipped out of the water and sat down next to me. “I thought you said J. P. would never let us.”

  “What if we didn’t tell them? What if we just took off?” I looked at her to see what she was thinking.

  “How far away is it?”

  Ooma never looked at maps, and she didn’t know where anyplace was, or how far it was to anyplace. Half the time she didn’t even know what state we were in. “It isn’t too far,” I said.

  “How would we get there?”

  “We could hitchhike.”

  She put her thumb in her mouth. “I wish we’d gone to live with Mr. and Mrs. Clappers,” she said.

  That surprised me. I thought she’d completely forgotten about them.

  “Me, too,” I said. “But J. P. and Gussie would never have let us.”

  “What if we just took off the way you said and hitched?”

  “I don’t know if Mr. and Mrs. Clappers even like us anymore,” I said.

  She took the thumb out of her mouth. “Why not? Mrs. Clappers said I was pretty if I would wash my face and fix up my hair.”

  I sat up. I was beginning to get an idea. “Ooma, they probably think we helped J. P. steal their motor home.”

  “Why would they think that? We didn’t steal it.”

  “They probably think we made friends with them just to get them away from the motor home so J. P. could steal it. I don’t think they would like us anymore.”

  She stared at me. “Yes, they do like me,” she shouted.

  “I’m not so sure,” I said.

  She jumped to her feet. “That’s a damn lie,” she shouted. I’ll kill you for saying that. Mrs. Clappers likes me, she likes me.”

  “Calm—”

  I was still sitting and she was standing. She jumped on me, clutching her arms around my head and squeezing. I staggered up and pulled her loose. She swung at me with her fingernails. I grabbed her arms and held her away from me. She kicked out at my legs, but I was able to dance back, still holding her. “Calm down, Ooma,” I said. “Okay, we’ll go and find them. We’ll find them and see if they like us or not.” But we would head for Cambridge instead.

  NINE

  WHAT WERE THEY LIKE, I wondered? It seemed like from what Gussie said they might be strict. But maybe they would be kind, too. I tried to imagine what they looked like. I figured they must have white hair, or gray hair, at least. I figured they must have really nice clothes, too. But that’s about all I could imagine. How would I find them? I knew my grandfather’s name was Gordon E. Hamilton and I could look up his address in the Cambridge phone book, if he was still living there. Then what would I do—just go to the house and knock on their door? What would I say when they answered? It was clear that I had a lot of things to think over.

  I began by working out a careful plan for getting away. We’d
have to sneak out of the motor home around three in the morning, a couple of hours before daylight. We’d steal J. P.’s money and a couple of maps. For once I didn’t mind stealing: After all the stealing J. P. had done, he deserved to have something stolen from him. Then we’d sneak away. They wouldn’t think much of it if they heard us going outside. We had a chemical toilet in the motor home, but we were used to going outside and did it most of the time, anyway, so as not to wake everybody up.

  We’d travel as fast as we could, walking. In two hours at night, we’d be able to cover six or seven miles. Whenever we heard a car coming we’d duck into the woods, if there were any, or lie flat in a field. They wouldn’t know which direction we’d gone in, or whether we’d turned off at some crossroads, and it would take them a lot of time to cover all the roads around there. By that time, I figured, we’d have been able to hitch a ride to get away from that area, and after that they’d never catch us. They might think we’d headed for California or down South or something.

  Now that I had got Ooma into it, I was eager to get going. But we had a couple of days of rain, so I waited. Every night I watched the news on TV—we could get only one channel out there—to see what the weather was going to be like. Finally we got a weather report saying it was going to be clear for a few days, and I knew we should go that night.

  I wanted to take some extra clothes if we could. You always should look respectable when you’re hitchhiking, and if we were ducking around the woods or lying down in fields we’d want to be able to change. But Ooma hardly had any extra clothes, and I didn’t have very many. I also wished I could have washed Ooma up a little, but it would have looked pretty suspicious if I had.

  So I waited until Gussie had gone down to the stream to wash some clothes, and J. P. and the Wiz were doing something to the engine of the van, and I snuck a clean shirt each for me and Ooma, and a couple of maps out of the motor home. I took them up the dirt road a ways and hid them in the woods. I put a stick on the ground by the edge of the dirt road, pointing in the direction of where I’d hidden the stuff.