“Can I make toast?” I asked.
“Yes. Hey, guys, I’m late. Here’s a spare key, and here’s a map. The Shedd’s right here. Not far,” he said, pointing. He was hurrying around, worried about being late. I thought about all the Dale Hickey teachers eating breakfast in the morning, getting ready to leave for work. I realized I’d never thought about that before. I sort of assumed that they just disappeared when school was over and magically showed up again at eight fifteen the next day.
I followed him out. He stopped at the front door. “Be back by five,” he said. I knew he wasn’t kidding around.
“It’s a big city, Jammie,” he said again. “You be careful.”
“I know. I will.”
“You got my number?” he asked.
“Yes.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him everything—what was weighing on my heart—but he was hurrying and I thought, Not now.
“Okay, then.” He checked his watch and stepped out into the hall. “See you tonight.”
The door closed and I heard his key turning in the lock. And a little part of me felt hard and sealed shut, like it was me he was locking up.
“So the aquarium?” I asked Danny a few minutes later as we cleaned up our toast plates.
“Yeah. Sure.” He scooted crumbs off the table into his cupped hand. “Only there’s one other thing I have to do first.”
“What?”
“There’s something I want to see.”
“Is it near the aquarium?”
“I have to check the map,” he said.
While he studied the map, I realized it was pissing me off, the way Danny was figuring stuff out alone, like I wasn’t even there. “You could tell me, you know,” I said. “Maybe I could help you find it.”
“It’s just a house,” he said, squinting at the map, not looking up.
“ Whose house?”
“Just a house! Jeez. Quit being such a frickin’ pest.”
“Listen, Danny. I’m not going to let you haul me all over Chicago like some five-year-old in a stroller.”
We were looking at each other. In my head, I could hear the cartoon sound of someone slamming on the brakes, skidding to a stop.
“My dad’s house,” he said.
Out on the street, I finally knew I was in a strange place. I smelled coffee in Styrofoam cups and bus fumes and people hurrying. There was no silence. Birds sat in the empty trees along the sidewalk, but I couldn’t hear them like at home. In summer these trees along the sidewalk would be thickly green and the air sweet and humid. I wondered if the birds sang then.
Uncle Bread was right about the cold. Fortunately, I’d brought mittens. Danny held the map in his bare hands, looking at it hard, as though it held a secret. He didn’t even notice the woman with four little boys dressed alike in gray pants and blue parkas, or the old lady wearing an ankle-length gray wool coat and smudged pink Converse sneakers. People walked as though they really wanted to get where they were going.
On West Belmont, we passed Pedicute Nails and a public library and the House of Hookah Lounge. Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church made me homesick for New Faith Gospel. More bars, a hair salon, and a place where people did your taxes. We stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts: a cruller for me, a chocolate glazed for Danny. “For the train,” he said, paying before I could get out my money.
We walked slowly past a video store, an army surplus, and a pharmacy, munching our doughnuts wrapped in paper napkins instead of saving them for later. Now the sidewalk was full of people walking the same direction, hurrying past us. A woman in khaki pants and heavy black boots knocked the rest of Danny’s doughnut out of his hand as she accidentally bumped against him. I pulled off a piece of my cruller. “Here,” I said, handing it to him.
We only had to wait about ten minutes before the train pulled up on the elevated tracks. We were headed north, away from the city, so there were plenty of seats. We found two in the front of a car. “How far are we going?” I asked, trying to see the city out of the scratched, sooty windows.
“Evanston. It’s the first city after Chicago,” Danny said. “We have to switch trains.”
We rode the Red Line until Howard, which was the last station. I was worried that it would be complicated to switch trains. How many trains were there, anyway? How would we know which was the right one? Danny seemed to know, though. We rode a few minutes more. I was feeling sick from the doughnut and the closed-in air when the train chugged slowly to a stop. “We’re here,” Danny said. The second we stepped out of the car, I felt better.
Evanston was still a city, but different. Some of the sidewalks were made of soft, worn-out bricks. We saw lots of college kids, not so many old people, and no one in pink Converse Sneakers. “Now where?” I asked.
Danny looked again at the map. “This way,” he said. “Toward the lake.”
Now we were on a street thick with trees and lawns and houses that looked like castles. Mansions, Mama would have said. I wished I could have called her and told her. I would have said, “You wouldn’t believe it.” The kinds of houses you see in magazines or on TV. It was like elephants in the wild or Disneyland: something I knew was real but figured I’d never see. Three-story houses, all different from each other. Some of brick, with white shutters; some with stained-glass windows and towers and wraparound covered porches with matching furniture. One had huge bunny rabbits made of ivy in pots on either side of the front door.
“Your dad lives here?” I asked and it came out a
“I guess,” he said.
We kept walking. No cars on the lawns or even on the driveways or parked at the curb. And no leaves on the sidewalk, although lots of the trees were bare. I wondered if leaves were like litter here. Everything was quiet, especially after Chicago. The only sound was of the soles of our shoes on the pavement. Nothing else, not even a dog barking. Were you allowed to have dogs here? At home, dogs barked all the time.
Finally Danny stopped and nodded at the house across the street. “That’s it,” he said.
It was enormous: made of gray stone, each window flanked by black shutters. A circular driveway curved around a perfect lawn so green it looked painted on. I wondered how they watered it; I looked for hoses and couldn’t see any. I noticed, though, a red bike with training wheels leaning against the porch wall. It was out of place, the only thing that didn’t go.
“You gonna knock?” I asked.
He was quiet a long time.
“No,” he finally said.
We stood there for a while, him staring.
“Maybe we should go,” I said. “Maybe they don’t like you just standing around in this town.”
“Okay,” he said, but he stayed still for a minute longer, his eyes glassy, making me think of one of Mama’s mule deer.
We decided to go to Navy Pier because I was hungry again and an ad at the train station said there were rides. We got pretzels at Auntie Anne’s and walked to the east end of the pier. We sat under the flags—slapping in the wind like sheets on a clothesline—and looked out at Lake Michigan, which wasn’t anything like Lake Taney-como or Table Rock Lake. Lake Michigan was like an ocean. You couldn’t even see across to the other shore.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen your daddy?” I asked, pulling off my mittens so I could hold my pretzel.
“Eleven years,” Danny said. “He and my mom fought a lot. It was better that he left. Better for her. She didn’t cry so much.”
“My parents would have gotten divorced if my daddy hadn’t died on the 475,” I said. “Everyone gets divorced, practically.”
“Yeah.” Danny swallowed the last bite of his pretzel. “It’s just ... I don’t get leaving. I get not wanting to be married anymore. I get not wanting to fight. I even get moving out. But leaving, really leaving. I don’t know,” he said, looking out across the silvery water.
“ You left,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, after a minute. “But if I could have go
tten an apartment across town, I would have.”
“So did your daddy get married again?”
“Yeah. To Susannah, who my dad says I’m supposed to call Mom when I write them thank-you notes. I’m not calling someone Mom when I haven’t even met her.”
“That would be hard.”
“They have two kids. Liam and Abigail. Dad sends me pictures along with a check for my birthday. I think they’re like ten and six. I think.”
I tried to imagine what it would feel like to learn that Daddy had another family somewhere, with kids. In Georgia, maybe, where he drove his truck so much. I wondered if I would feel like they were my family, too, and decided I wouldn’t.
“They’re blond,” Danny said. “They don’t look like me at all.”
“Did your daddy go to your bar mitzvah?”
“He sent a check.” Danny wiped his mouth with his napkin. “He’s an asshole.”
“Then why were you looking at his house?”
“Just because, okay? Just because he’s an asshole doesn’t mean I can’t want to see where he lives.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I mean, your father’s dead, right? But I bet he’s buried somewhere and you go to the grave, right?”
“It’s not a grave, exactly. It’s a drawer. One of the worst fights Uncle Bread and Mama ever had was when he offered to pay for a headstone. Mama said no, even though she couldn’t afford to do it herself. Uncle Bread said Mama was being pigheaded, and Mama said she had no use for college graduates who thought they were better than regular folks. Then she said, ‘Mind your own damn business,’ which I always remember, because Mama almost never swears. So Daddy ended up in an urn at the columbarium in Mount Jessup.”
It was so easy to tell him things.
“Okay, well, whatever,” Danny said. “You go there, don’t you? And maybe talk to him a little? Or just remember things he said, things you did together?”
“Yes. I tell him how pissed off I am that he’s dead. I say that even though Mama says he wasn’t drinking, I’m not so sure. Just because I’m not so sure of anything, not because he drank that much. Not that I remember, anyway. But that’s what happens when your daddy dies when you’re four. You don’t know anything for sure.” I sighed. “If he’d lived and I’d had a normal growing up, I’d be surer about things.”
He reached over and held my hand. Like it was nothing special, like we held hands all the time. Still looking out over the water, he said, “Going to my dad’s just now was like going to a grave.”
I was afraid to say anything, afraid to move. I wasn’t cold anymore. I wanted us to sit like that forever.
“My mom works two jobs just so she can pay the rent,” he said.
“Danny, I—”
“Dan,” he said. “I think that would be better. I think I would like it more.”
“Dan,” I said, and just that—his new name on my tongue—made a shiver run through me.
“Come on,” he said, standing up and pulling me with him. “Let’s go for a ride.”
eleven
THE amusement park on Navy Pier didn’t have as many rides as the state fair in Sedalia, but I don’t like to do too much spinning and whirling anyway. The only thing I really like is the Ferris wheel, and the one at Navy Pier was the biggest I’d ever seen. There was no line, so the ticket taker let us have a whole gondola to ourselves. Dan and I sat on the same side, close, me waiting for him to take my hand.
But he didn’t.
The wheel started slowly and picked up speed, tossing us into the air, then holding us lightly as we fell. It took a few turns to get used to the way the earth arranged itself neatly as we rose and splattered into chaos and noise as we tumbled back down toward it. I settled into the rhythm—the magic of the up; the eyes-shut, dizzy down—and prayed in my head that even though I knew God had way more important things to do, would He please just let it go on and on, the up and down, me in this bubble with Dan forever.
Then the wheel started stopping, giving each gondola a chance at the top. “The buildings are so tall,” Dan said.
“It’s like they’re people in a crowd, all different shapes and sizes,” I said. “All pushing to be first. Or showing themselves off to us.”
He laughed. “That’s a funny way to look at it,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he meant funny in a good way or a bad way.
When our gondola got to the top, I thought, We found it, the one place in this whole dang city where it’s finally quiet. We just looked without talking, and it was like holding your breath: the stillness, the waiting for what would happen next.
When the wheel started to turn again, he said, “Do you think it’s creepy when people who are different in age like each other?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but inside I felt as though he’d shoved my heart into a wood chipper and I was watching all the chopped-up pieces shoot out the back end.
“At my school, they think it’s creepy,” he said.
We didn’t talk again, just sat as the wheel spun and stopped, spun and stopped, lowering us back to earth. We stepped out of the gondola, and the ticket taker looked me up and down the way some men do, probably thinking what I’d look like in a few years, or maybe even thinking about me now, which made me sick. But I smiled at him—something I never do with strange men—just to remind myself how pretty I was, how Dan was someone I didn’t even know, some loser who couldn’t even dream about kissing a girl like me. Just some short kid who played chess.
“We still have time for the aquarium,” he said.
I was tired from all the running around, the trains and the walking, the tall buildings, the cold. But I didn’t want to go back to Uncle Bread’s, where we would be alone together and it would be obvious that we were just kids who had hitched a ride on the same bus, nothing more. It was only two o’clock, and we didn’t have to be back until five.
Besides, I had never seen a whole building that was an aquarium. In my neck of the woods, people aren’t so much interested in looking at fish as in catching and eating them.
“Fine with me,” I said.
It was almost three by the time we got there. We wandered from room to room, each one walled with different tanks. I worried that the fish swam the same circles day after day and maybe missed the ocean, where they could swim straight if they wanted. But they seemed happy enough. Or maybe fish aren’t happy; maybe they don’t have enough brain to be happy. Maybe not being dead is good enough for them.
Asian arowana, bonnethead sharks, dwarf caimans, giant octopi. Anacondas and eels. Moon jellies. I loved the parrotfish, their colors like bolts of cloth at Turner’s. We watched them for a long time in Waters of the World. They slipped past the glass, gnawing at coral, smiling their goofy, bucktoothed smiles at nothing.
“It says they poop sand,” Dan said, reading from the plaque on the wall. I didn’t answer, because boys only talk about poop with other boys or girls they don’t really like.
We noticed the Australian lungfish lying like a log at the bottom of the tank. Granddad, he was called, the oldest fish in any aquarium in the world, at least eighty and maybe older. Speckled and dull, with a soft-looking snout. Unmoving. I thought, What a terrible life. But the plaque said that he had a primitive lung, that when the water was low, he would swim to the surface and gulp air into his mouth.
“I didn’t know fish breathed air,” I said.
“Only this fish,” Dan said admiringly.
Next to us, two women whose little boys had pressed to the front of the crowd were gazing at the tank. One of them shivered a little. “That lungfish gives me the creeps,” she said. “So ugly!”
“I don’t like the way he just lies there,” her friend said. “Can you imagine being at the beach and putting your foot down on that? ”
“Jason, stop licking the glass!” the first mom called to her kid. To her friend she said, “I like the parrotfish more. So pretty! And the way they look like they’re always smiling.”<
br />
Dan moved on to another gallery, but I stayed watching Granddad for a while longer, trying to make up for the moms and their horrible, glass-licking children. I wanted him to know he was appreciated just for what he was, that he didn’t have to swim around smiling.
We left the aquarium at around four. The gray afternoon was giving itself up to darkness and the cold was biting into my bones. We saw people clogging the stairs up to the train. “Maybe a bus would be better,” I said.
We were studying the map when I looked up to see a policeman walking toward us, looking right at us. He was tall, with a round belly that hung over his belt: he took up all the space in front of me.
“You kids need some help?” he asked.
Dan talked before I could. “No,” he said. “We’re fine.”
The policeman stared at us for a minute. “You from out of town?”
I nodded, and Dan said, “Yeah, our folks are waiting for us. At the hotel.”
I knew the second he said it that he’d made a mistake.
“Which hotel?” the policeman asked.
Everything slowed way down; it almost seemed as though the other people on the sidewalk froze in their tracks. Then Dan grabbed me and started running.
At first I just followed, holding Dan’s hand, ignoring the crowds of people we were dodging in and out of, keeping my eyes on him. I could hear the policeman behind us yelling, “Hey! Hey!” and I saw people noticing him and looking at us, but no one tried to stop us. I was sure I was going to get grabbed, but people just looked. Maybe it was a big-city thing. In Luthers Bridge, we would have been stopped for sure.
There were so many people. I’d never seen so many people except on television when there was a parade or a football game. Where had they come from? Then I realized they were flooding out of the buildings, that work was over and they were going home. “Come on! ” Dan called, and I urged my feet faster to keep up. One block, then another. At the third, the light was red, and he pulled me to the left, across the busy street. I heard the policeman yell, “Hey! ” again, but it seemed farther back than before.
Prettiest Doll Page 9