Outside Looking In

by James Lincoln Collier

  Our grandfather said, “Ooma, do you remember your mother’s birthday?”

  “You mean Gussie?”

  I knew he was asking to make sure we were really Gussie’s children. It worried me, because we didn’t know the answer. “We weren’t supposed to call them Mom and Dad,” I said. “J. P. said that was a power trip.”

  “All right,” he said. “Gussie’s birthday.”

  Ooma gave me a look, still confused. She put her thumb in her mouth and said, “I don’t know.”

  I said, “We’re not supposed to have birthdays. J. P. says birthdays are bourgeois. Giving birthday presents is just materialism under the guise of altruism.”

  “You poor children don’t even know your own birthdays?”

  “Sure we know them,” Ooma said. “We went to some school once and Fergy found out.”

  When we went to that school, Gussie had to show our birth certificates. I snuck them out of her purse and looked at them. Remembering it, I blushed. “I happened to see our birth certificates.”

  “You mean, you’ve never had a birthday party, either of you?” our grandfather said.

  “No,” I said. “It would be too materialistic.”

  He said nothing. Then he said, “But you don’t know your own moth—Gussie’s birthday?”

  “No,” I said. He was relaxed and his face was smooth, but I knew he was suspicious. What would happen to us if they didn’t believe us?

  Then our grandmother said, “Perhaps you know her middle name?” She looked at me and at Ooma and back to me. Now I was really worried, because we didn’t know that, either. “J. P. didn’t like it too much when Gussie talked about being a little girl and all. She was supposed to forget all about you.”

  “So you don’t know her middle name, either?”

  “No.”

  His face was still smooth and relaxed, but he was certain to be pretty suspicious of us now. How could I prove we were her children? I couldn’t think of anything. “So you don’t know anything about your moth—Gussie’s childhood? What kind of things she enjoyed, that sort of thing?”

  Ooma took her thumb out of her mouth. “Sure we do,” she said. “She used to sit on the porch and eat strawberry ice cream in ginger ale with a funny spoon you could suck through.”

  Our grandparents looked at each other. “Go on, Ooma,” our grandmother said. “What else did she do?”

  “She was scared of the dark and cried, and her mother had to come in and hug her so she wouldn’t be scared.”

  They weren’t so relaxed now, but were listening to her carefully. “Anything else, Ooma?” our grandfather said.

  She looked at me, confused again, and put her thumb in her mouth. I said, “She had to go to the Boston Symphony and learn to drink tea, and she had lots of lessons. Piano lessons and dancing lessons and horseback-riding lessons and—” Suddenly I realized it was pretty insulting of me to be bringing up the things she hated them for. I started to blush. “I mean—”

  “That’s all right, Fergy,” our grandmother said. “We came to realize that we had organized her life too much.”

  Our grandfather said, “You seem to know quite a lot about her childhood, when you get down to it, Fergy. I thought you said J. P. wouldn’t let her talk about her past.”

  “Well, he didn’t want her to, but she did, anyway. Ooma always asked her to tell about it.”

  “She liked to talk about her childhood, then?” our grandmother said. “She remembered some nice things?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “She sure did. She remembered the silverware gleaming on the table and flowers cut fresh every day. It was all so beautiful, she said. J. P. didn’t like it when she talked about that stuff, because it was materialistic, but Ooma liked to hear about it.”

  “What else pleasant did she remember?”

  “The streetlight,” Ooma said. “She loved the streetlight because it kept away the dark.”

  Suddenly, Grandfather laughed. “Margaret, I don’t think we need pursue this. I think we have the right children here.”

  When he said that, I felt happy enough to burst, for I knew they would let us stay, at least for a while. I looked around me at the fancy furniture, the garden out back, the pictures of our ancestors. What would it be like to live here and be rich? I couldn’t imagine it; I couldn’t get the feeling of it at all.

  “Fifteen years,” our grandmother said. “It’s been fifteen years since we’ve seen her. Of course, she’s written from time to time. We always have had some rough idea of what she was up to. It was always terribly painful for us to have grandchildren growing up and not to be able to see them.” She stopped for a minute. Then she said, “Tell me, Fergy, do you think she’s happy living the way she is?”

  I sat there thinking about that. Was Gussie happy or wasn’t she? I remembered times when she sat around with J. P. and Trotsky and the Wiz drinking wine and singing. She seemed happy when she did that. Or sometimes if we were camped out in the woods, she and Ooma would go for long walks and come back with wildflowers and braid necklaces out of them. She seemed happy then. But was she really happy?

  “Well,” I said, “I guess she must have been once, because she wouldn’t have stayed with J. P. all these years if she wasn’t. I mean, she believed in J. P.—that he was a great man and someday his journals would be famous. But I don’t know if she’s so happy anymore. She didn’t like it when J. P. and the Wiz stole the motor home.”

  Our grandmother didn’t say anything, and I could tell she was wondering if she could get Gussie to come home again.

  “Fergy,” our grandfather said, “what do you think about J. P.?”

  “J. P.?”

  “I mean, do you believe he’s a great man?”

  “I used to,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  “Yes, he is,” Ooma said. “He is, too.”

  “I’m sure he has many good points, Ooma,” our grandmother said.

  “So that’s why you left, Fergy? Because you decided that your father wasn’t a great man?”

  I hadn’t thought about it that way. I’d thought I’d run away mainly so I could go to school. But now I could see that there was more to it: Once you stop believing in your father, you kind of hate him for not being a great man anymore. He seems like a phony to you, and you don’t like him anymore. But I didn’t want to say any of that. So I said, “Mostly, it was because I was worried about not going to school. I got tired of being dumb and having to believe a whole lot of stuff I didn’t want to believe and worrying about Ooma stealing all the time and—” Suddenly I realized that I shouldn’t have mentioned about Ooma’s stealing.

  “Does Ooma steal?” our grandmother said. “Do you steal, Ooma?”

  Ooma gave me a quick look. Then she put her thumb in her mouth and nodded.

  “What do you steal, Ooma?” our grandmother said.

  She took her thumb out of her mouth. “Whatever I want. Gussie and J. P. let me.”

  “Is that true, Fergy?”

  There wasn’t any use in lying about it. “It’s kind of a habit. She doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”

  Then the maid came in and said that dinner was ready. Our grandparents stood up. “Would you like to wash?” our grandmother said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Come on, Ooma.”

  “Why the hell do I have—”

  I grabbed her arm and pulled her off the sofa. “Come on,” I said. They had a bathroom right there in the downstairs near the dining room. I’d never been in a bathroom so nice and clean and sparkling. It had big fluffy towels and smelled of some kind of sweet soap, and there were pictures of wildflowers on the wall. I wondered if those pictures had been there when Gussie was my age.

  “God, it’s pretty in here,” Ooma said.

  “Now, you wash up good,” I said. “And from now on, cut out the swearing and behave yourself.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do,” she said.

  “If you don’t be good, I’m going to
punch you,” I said. “Besides, they won’t give you any strawberry ice cream.”

  So she washed, and when she got done I snatched up the washcloth and went over the parts she’d missed. She was pretty dirty. There were stains all over her jeans—dirt stains from lying in the woods, ketchup stains from the hot dogs, and a whole lot of other stains I couldn’t identify, they were so old. I looked down at my own jeans; they weren’t much better. I decided that I’d wash all our clothes in the bathtub or something before we went to bed, so they’d be dry in the morning.

  We went into the dining room. It was something, all right—just the way Gussie always described it. The table was set with a white cloth and sparkling glasses and silverware; and, in the middle, a bowl of fresh flowers. There was a big, old wooden sideboard against one wall with dishes and bottles of wine on it, and on the walls there hung more old-fashioned people. I didn’t know that anyone could have so many ancestors.

  But the white tablecloth worried me, for I knew that within two minutes it would be six different colors where Ooma was sitting. “Maybe we ought to put a newspaper under Ooma’s plate.”

  Our grandmother laughed. “She’s as bad as all that?”

  “She likes to eat with her fingers,” I said.

  “Well, we won’t worry about it tonight, Fergy,” our grandmother said.

  We sat down, and in a minute the maid came out of the kitchen carrying a plate with a lot of slices of beef on it. I figured she would put it down on the table so our grandmother could serve it. But she didn’t. She went and stood by our grandmother, and our grandmother helped herself to a slice of beef with a big serving fork. So that was the idea. Then she went around to Ooma and stood there.

  I said, “yOu’re supposed to serve yourself, Ooma.”

  “Oh,” she said. She reached up with her hand and snatched a slice of beef off the plate. And then, as the maid started to move away, she snatched another one. “I love this kind of meat,” she said.

  I went red as a tomato and hot as fire. She was bound to get us thrown out of there before dinner was over. “She’s really okay,” I said. “She doesn’t know better. Maybe I can teach her.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Fergy,” our grandfather said. “We don’t mind.”

  But I did worry about it, for I could see that it was going to be mighty tough to teach Ooma their ways. She wasn’t used to that style at all. Then the maid came around to me, and I picked up the fork and caught hold of a piece of meat and managed to get it onto my plate without dropping it on the floor.

  Next, the maid brought in the boiled potatoes. When she came around to Ooma I said, “Use a spoon, not your fingers.”

  Ooma gave me a look, but she picked up the spoon out of the serving dish and took a jab into it. A potato hopped out and landed on the floor. I went red. “See what you made me do,” she said. She slid out of her chair, picked up the potato, and put it back into the bowl. Then she kneeled up in her chair and took a couple of potatoes out of the bowl with her fingers. “I love these kind of potatoes, too.”

  I looked at our grandparents. They were smiling. “Are you sure you can eat all that, Ooma?” our grandmother said.

  “Sure I can. You should see how much I can eat.”

  Our grandfather burst out laughing. “I’ll bet you can,” he said.

  “What’s so damn funny?” she said. “I can eat a hell of a lot.”

  Next, the maid came out with a bowl of peas with butter melting on them. “She doesn’t want any,” I said. “Peas make her break out.”

  “That’s a damn lie, Fergy. I love peas.”

  “Sheila, I think you’d better help Ooma to the peas,” our grandmother said.

  That was a big relief. I managed to help myself without spilling more than a couple on the table. Ooma was already digging in, hanging onto the meat with one hand while she sawed at it with the knife, splashing stuff off her plate, eating the potatoes with her fingers, so that in five minutes there was food scattered all around her. Some of her peas were halfway across the table to me. She didn’t mind. She just picked the stuff off the tablecloth and ate it as she went along. I tried not to watch. Besides, I wasn’t so hot at table manners myself and had to keep watching our grandparents out of the corners of my eyes to see how they cut their meat and what they did with their forks and knives when they picked up their glasses of water. It took a lot of concentration, and every time they asked me a question I had to stop eating, because I couldn’t answer questions and watch my table manners at the same time. So I didn’t get much of a chance to worry about Ooma; and by the time we were finished with dinner, her place looked like a map, it had so many different colors on it.

  After dinner, our grandmother took Ooma upstairs to give her a bubble bath. Ooma had never heard of bubble baths, and she was willing to try one. My grandfather took me back to the living room so we could talk and he could drink his coffee. What sort of plans did I have for the future?

  I didn’t want to come right out and say that I wanted to live with them. That was bound to sound like I was trying to get myself rich out of them. So I just said that I wanted, somehow, to go to a regular school and join the Boy Scouts and play trumpet or something in a school band and be on some kind of a team.

  “What about Ooma?” he said.

  “She only came because I made her come,” I said. “But she shouldn’t stay with Gussie and J. P. anymore. She’s already got a habit of stealing things, and she’s bound to get into real trouble sooner or later. The trouble is, she doesn’t like being regular. She likes being dirty and stealing and living in vans.”

  “And you say J. P. stole that motor home? Do they do that sort of thing often?”

  “No, nothing so big, usually. At least as far as I know. All they ever stole before was food out of supermarkets, or maybe a couple of cans of oil from a gas station or something.”

  He sat there stirring his coffee and staring down into it. “They’re bound to get into serious difficulties sooner or later,” he said. “It’s not a good situation, Fergy, and you’re right to want to get out of it. And get Ooma out of it, too.”

  “The only thing is, it may be too late for Ooma to change.”

  He sipped at his coffee. “What made you change? How did that come about?”

  I frowned, thinking about it. “I guess I always was this way. I never liked being dirty or stealing or any of that, right from when I was little, back on the old commune. Even then I liked going to school and learning things. They had a kind of weird school on that place one winter when they didn’t have anything interesting to do, and I liked going to that, even though it was only wildflowers and sex education.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, but rubbed his hand on his chin. Then he said, “How do you intend to do any of this—go to school and join the Boy Scouts and so forth?”

  There wasn’t any way around it now. I had to answer straight out. “I—I hoped maybe we could come and live with you.”

  He sat there rubbing his chin and thinking. Finally he said, “Fergy, you have to understand that legally you belong to Gussie and J. P., and there’s no way we can keep you here if they want you back.”

  I didn’t know if that meant he might let us stay or was thinking of excuses for sending us back. “Maybe they won’t find out where we are.”

  He shook his head. “Sooner or later they’ll find out. We have to expect that.”

  I still wasn’t sure which way he was deciding. “Maybe it’ll take a while,” I said. “Maybe by that time I’ll be old enough to decide for myself.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But I wouldn’t count on it. They’re surely going to be looking for the two of you. In time, it’ll occur to them that you might have come here.”

  What could I say to talk him into it? There must be something I could say. I stared down at the carpet, trying to think of something. “Maybe J. P. wouldn’t want to come here to get us.”

  “He’ll come, once he knows,” he sai
d.

  I knew that was right. I couldn’t think of anything more to say.

  “Fergy, don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “We’re not going to turn you away. We’ll be very happy to have you stay here for the time being, anyway. Let’s just see how it works out.”

  Just then, Ooma came downstairs with our grandmother. She was clean and her hair was braided and she was wearing a cute little pink dress. I was amazed at how pretty she looked. “Look, Fergy,” she said. “Gussie’s dress when she was my age.” She was pleased as could be with herself. Then we went out onto the porch and ate strawberry ice cream in ginger ale, watching the people go along the sidewalk in the streetlight. Ooma got strawberry ice cream all over the pink dress, which I guess is why our grandmother picked that color. But I didn’t care, because I was mighty happy.

  THIRTEEN

  SO WE STARTED to live with them. They had lots of space, and we each had our own room. It made Ooma nervous sleeping in a room all by herself; she’d spent most of her life sleeping in the back of a van with a bunch of people lying all over each other, and she wasn’t used to being alone. At first, she would come into my room as soon as I shut my light off and crawl into bed with me. I let her a couple of times, but then I told her she couldn’t. I loved having a room of my own. I could hardly get over the idea of it. I had a bureau and a bookcase full of books and a view out the window at the beautiful back garden. Sometimes I would just look around at all the things and say under my breath, “It’s mine, it’s all mine.” It surprised me every time I thought about it.

  They bought us a whole lot of clothes, too, stuff I’d never had before, like a jacket and a necktie and real shoes instead of sneakers. I got Grandfather to show me how to tie the necktie, and I stood in front of the mirror practicing and practicing until I got it. Sometimes I would get all dressed up in the tie and jacket and the regular shoes and just stand there and look at myself in the mirror. I was kind of ashamed of myself for being proud when I did that. I felt guilty for being rich and having all kinds of wonderful things, when there were so many poor people in the world who had practically nothing at all. But I couldn’t help myself. I liked having things and being able to dress up and all; and I decided it would be okay to be rich, if I felt guilty about it sometimes.