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Oddballs
William Sleator
To my family: Please forgive me!
Games
The best presents our parents ever gave to my sister, Vicky, and me were our little brothers.
I was nine and Vicky was seven and a half when Danny was born. We had been looking forward impatiently to his arrival, especially Vicky, who loved playing with dolls. She had always enjoyed making the dolls fight with each other; when the dolls wore out, she ripped off their arms and legs. Now she is a nurse.
We tried to be more careful with Danny. But it didn’t take us long to discover that a human baby with a brain was a lot more fun to play with than a stupid doll.
Before Danny came along, Vicky and I had invented a wonderful game to play on car trips. We pretended we were BMs. We’d wrap ourselves up in an old brown blanket in the back of the station wagon and tell each other our life stories as excrement.
This game had begun on a trip to Canada in 1952, when everybody was celebrating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Like most little girls, Vicky idolized the young queen. And so, in the BM game, she usually began her existence as an Oreo cookie or a Hostess cupcake, eaten by Queen Elizabeth at a royal banquet in Buckingham Palace. Vicky always claimed to remember exactly what it had been like in our mother’s womb, and she was equally vivid about her metamorphosis from cupcake to BM inside the queen’s glamorous intestinal tract. Vicky also described in detail the marble palace bathroom, bigger than our living room at home, and said that being flushed down the queen’s toilet was utterly more fun than riding the Tilt-a-Whirl.
My adventures were less ritzy. I had been sick from overindulgence two times in my life: Once I had eaten several pints of freshly picked blackberries at our grandmother’s house; another time I had devoured too much tzimmes, a Jewish meat-and-carrot stew that was a specialty of our aunt Miriam. My stories tended to begin with these two items, eaten at the same time, making me a purple-and-orange-striped BM. “That’s not fair!” Vicky would scream. “BMs aren’t striped!” And I would point out that just because she had never seen a striped one didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
But once Danny was born, and Vicky and I were often required to change his diapers, the subject of BMs lost a lot of its charm. We needed a new way to amuse ourselves in the car. And there was Danny. The game we came up with we called Babaloo Bum.
It started on a trip out West when Danny was about six months old. We were in the back of the station wagon with Danny and all the boxes and suitcases, traveling on a bumpy road. Danny loved to be bounced and rocked, which got tiring after awhile. It occurred to us to let the car do this for us. We put him on top of a suitcase. His shifting weight, combined with the bouncing of the car, made the suitcase rock back and forth. But we didn’t try to steady it. Danny was enjoying himself; he had no idea that anything might go wrong. It was a total surprise to him when the suitcase tipped over and slammed him onto the floor. He howled.
Chuckling, we set the suitcase on end to make it a little more unstable, balanced a smaller suitcase on top of it, and perched Danny on that. Danny immediately stopped crying and began to smile adorably, comforted by being rocked. The suitcases toppled; Danny hit the floor again and wailed. We shrieked with laughter. Mom and Dad, knowing we would never hurt Danny, were amused by our merriment.
The next time we set him up there, we chanted “Babaloo Bum! Babaloo Bum!” He clapped his hands and beamed at us, still oblivious to his danger. Soon our stomachs were sore from laughing. Amazingly, Danny didn’t catch on for a long time, and the game entertained us for most of the trip. In fact, it’s the only thing I remember about it.
When Danny was about fifteen months old, Mom got pregnant again. We tried to explain to him what was going to happen. We would show him a picture of a baby in a magazine and say, “See this cute, adorable baby, Danny? Aren’t we lucky because soon we’re going to have a cute, adorable baby in our family, too.” We knew he understood when he tore the picture out of the magazine, flung it to the floor, and screamed, “No baby!”
The new baby was not as cute as Danny. His head was too big; he looked bald because his hair was so blond; he had a disproportionately large mouth and ears that stuck out Whenever Aunt Ronnie saw him, she would remark, with a self-satisfied cackle, “He looks just like Uncle Arnold.” Uncle Arnold was a mental incompetent who had spent most of his life in institutions.
But Aunt Ronnie’s opinion was not a serious problem for the baby. Danny was. From Danny’s point of view, the baby was a usurper who had taken too much attention away from him. The baby, who had a sweet and gentle nature, adored his older brother. Danny accepted this affection on good days, helping him build things with blocks and other toys. On bad days, he slapped him around.
Then there was the problem of the new baby’s name. As our parents had decided not to have any more kids, this was their last opportunity to name a human being, and they wanted to make a truly creative statement. They came up with lots of interesting names—so many that they couldn’t decide which one they preferred. There were also several relatives they felt it would be nice to commemorate by naming this kid after them, but how could they name him after one and not the others?
So they didn’t name him anything. Our father referred to him as “that other kid.” Vicky and I called him the new baby, which soon evolved into “Newby.” And for the first years of his life, while our parents continued to put off the decision, Newby was his name.
When Newby was about two, even Dad, who tended to procrastinate, realized they had to do something about his name. But they still couldn’t decide. The only solution was to name him everything. And so in the end, the name they put on his birth certificate was Tycho Barney George Clement Newby Sleator.
Now that his official, legal first name was Tycho, Mom and Dad decreed that we should all start calling him that. And so Newby became Tycho. It wasn’t easy to remember at first, but Vicky and I liked the novelty of this game and persisted until it became natural to us. The only person in the family who did not enjoy the situation was, of course, Newby, who refused to answer to Tycho for weeks, pouting and looking the other way whenever we said it. We thought this response was very funny.
Having an often abusive older brother, and the fact that everybody in the family started calling him by a completely different name when he was two, were probably the seeds that resulted in Tycho’s first great act of independence: He refused to be toilet trained. It was a brilliantly simple and effective method of asserting his control; in spite of being the youngest, he was able to put us all at his mercy. His third birthday came and went, and then his fourth. He was still wearing diapers.
Our parents didn’t worry about this. But Vicky and I had to change him a lot. “Tycho, will you please do it on the toilet,” we would beg him as we cleaned him in the bathtub.
“When I’ve five,” he would obstinately insist.
“Big boys don’t do this, Tycho, only disgusting little babies,” I told him.
“No one will want to play with you if you have smelly BMs in your pants,” Vicky added, dumping bubble bath into the tub. “The other kids will hate you and make fun of you.”
“Four-year-olds who go in their pants get a horrible disease and die, Tycho; it says so in Mom’s medical books.”
“Please just do it on the toilet, and we’ll give you all the candy you can eat for the rest of your life.”
He remained steadfast, unyielding, true to his principles. “When I’ve five” was his constant refrain.
As Tycho’s fifth birthday approached, our relief was tinged with uncertainty
. It would be wonderful if he kept his promise, but what if he didn’t? Would he be able to go to school? Would he ever have a girl friend? Would we spend the rest of our lives changing him?
On his fifth birthday, Tycho very calmly and skillfully went on the toilet, as though he’d always done it that way. He’s been using the toilet ever since.
Without Tycho’s messes to clean up, car trips became a lot pleasanter. By this time, Danny and Tycho were both too old for Babaloo Bum, so we made up more sophisticated games to play with them in the car. In one game, Vicky and I would ask Danny and Tycho to choose which one of us they liked better. They greeted this question with groans, but they were trapped in the car and couldn’t get away from us. “If you choose me, I’ll give you my dessert tonight—and if you choose Billy, I’ll throw you out the window,” Vicky would coolly inform Tycho. At first he believed her and would burst into tears. But this game didn’t last very long. The marvelous rewards and terrible retribution each of us promised for being chosen or not were never carried out, and Danny and Tycho grew bored. Since the game no longer had an emotional effect on them, it had lost its appeal.
The best car game was called What Would Be Worse? At first it was pretty easy; we would merely ask them to choose between two fates. Even Tycho had no problem coming up with the answer to “Would you rather inherit a huge mansion and be insanely rich for the rest of your life or die without any money at all in a sewer among rats?”
But questions like that weren’t much of a challenge, so we quickly began making them more difficult. “What would be worse?” we asked. “To be impaled on a bed of nails and take three days to die or to have all your arms and legs cut off and live?” Or “What would be worse? To spend the rest of your life in jail for a crime you didn’t commit or for everyone else in the world to die except you?” Danny and Tycho would become quite bothered by these questions, brooding and sighing gloomily over them for miles, while Vicky and I tried to suppress our chuckles.
Baby-sitting was another good opportunity for games with our little brothers. As adolescents, Vicky and I enjoyed having the run of the house without parental supervision. But Danny and Tycho would sometimes get worried when Mom and Dad went out at night. We got so tired of answering their repeated questions about where Mommy and Daddy were, and when they were coming home, that we were inspired to invent a new game.
“Would you like to hear a little song?” we would ask them. They nodded innocently. We’d go to the piano; I’d play a mournful and heartrending tune, and Vicky would sing:
Once there were two little boys,
And one night their mommy
And daddy went out.
They kissed the little boys good-bye
And drove away in the car.…
Now I added melodramatic tremolo, like the music in old-time movies. Danny and Tycho began to sniffle. Vicky’s voice grew gentler:
And their mommy and daddy
Never came home again.
The little boys cried and cried,
But nobody ever came.
Nobody came to say good-night;
Nobody came to give them their bottles.
They never saw their mommy and daddy again.
By this time, Danny and Tycho would be sobbing uncontrollably, tears rolling down their cheeks. Even after they knew the song by heart, it still invariably made them cry. And when it was over, they’d always wipe their eyes and beg us, “Play it again. Please play it again!”
Baby-sitting was also our chance to teach them every obscene word we knew. Our parents were not upset when Danny and Tycho repeated these words to them. But Danny and Tycho also taught these words to their friends in the neighborhood, and their parents were not charmed when they heard their toddlers cursing like teenage gang members. Still, Vicky and I persisted. We spent hours and hours coaching Danny to memorize all the verses of a song called “Canal Street,” which was full of nasty words and lewd situations.
Then our grandmother came to visit. Grandma and I were playing Scrabble, pondering silently over the board, when Danny strolled into the room. In his sweet, childish, soprano voice, he began to sing. “Walking down Canal Street, knocking on every door—”
“Wait, Danny!” I said, horrified. “Don’t bother us now. We’re concentrating.”
“But I’d love to hear his little song,” Grandma said. “Go on, Danny.”
And so he sang “Canal Street,” one verse after another, not forgetting a single gross syllable. Grandma and I sat there, our eyes on the Scrabble board, until finally Danny wandered away.
Something had to be done. But we couldn’t just tell Danny and Tycho never to say those words; that would only guarantee that they’d use them at every possible opportunity. So we took the opposite tack. We invented the word drang.
“All those other words we taught you, it doesn’t matter if you say them,” we told Danny and Tycho. “Just go around and say them to everybody.”
“You mean that?” Danny said, narrowing his eyes.
“Sure.” Vicky shrugged nonchalantly.
“I mean, at least they’re not saying”—my voice dropped—“that other word.”
“What other word?” Danny wanted to know.
Vicky and I looked at each other. I started to speak. “No, don’t tell them!” Vicky said quickly.
“Tell us!” Danny insisted.
We pressed our lips together and shook our heads.
“If you don’t, we’ll tell Mommy and Daddy what you and your friends did the other night when they went out and you thought we were asleep,” Danny threatened. “Won’t we, Tycho?”
Tycho nodded obediently.
“You wouldn’t!” Vicky snapped at them, though of course she knew Danny would.
“Maybe we better tell them,” I said grimly.
Vicky sighed. She looked around the room to be sure no one else was there. “The other word is … drang,” she reluctantly whispered.
“It’s the worst word in the world,” I added.
Danny’s eyes lit up. “Drang?” he said experimentally, testing the sound on his tongue.
Vicky and I shuddered and closed our eyes. “Don’t! If anybody ever hears you say that, they will never forgive you, and they’ll hate us because they’ll know we taught it to you.”
For about one day, Danny and Tycho ran around saying “drang” to Mom and Dad and Grandma. They taught it to their friends, who repeated it to their parents. It was sweet to see our two little brothers getting along so well.
But saying “drang” produced no satisfying response; nobody was shocked and horrified. Soon they knew we had tricked them. It was their first scientific experiment. Our credibility was destroyed.
Danny and Tycho were very clever. They went right back to saying all the other words, and there was nothing we could do about it.
Frank’s Mother
When I was in sixth grade, my best friend was a kid named Frank. We hung out at my house a lot more than his. One reason for this was that both my parents worked—Mom was a pediatrician and Dad was a physiology professor at the university—and after school there would always be several hours at my house when no adults would be around. Frank, knowing his mother was watching the clock for his return, would dutifully call her as soon as we got to my place and tell her where he was (without, of course, mentioning that my mother wasn’t there). Then we could do what we wanted.
We stood on the back porch railing and peed out into the yard. We studied the color photographs in my mother’s medical books. Some of the pictures, of hideous skin diseases, for instance, were thrillingly gross, giving us weird pangs in our stomachs. Other pictures were fascinating for different reasons.
We played catch with eggs. There was a lot of tension to this game because we were both lousy athletes, and we knew that it would not be long before an egg would smash on the floor or on the kitchen counter. Then we would scrape the egg into a big bowl and make fake vomit. We’d dump in oatmeal, brown sugar, vinegar, syrup,
raspberry jam (for bloodiness), and whatever else seemed disgustingly realistic. When we were satisfied with our artistry, we would splash the mixture onto the sidewalk in front of the house. Then, hiding on the front porch, we’d watch the reactions of passersby, praying that someone would step in it.
Even when Mom did come home, it was still fun at my house because she was very relaxed and did not fuss over her kids. She had her own things to do and would leave us alone. Frank and I would go up to my room, which was a refinished attic—we lived in a big old house, and I had the whole top floor to myself—where we could read comics and use bad language and have private conversations about anything we wanted.
Mom was unconventional in many ways. She let my sister and brothers and me read anything we wanted and never objected to any of our friends or quizzed us about where we were when we weren’t at home. She thought it was great that I loved puppets and loathed baseball. She never tried to make us finish our food at meals, which was probably why none of us ever had any eating problems. Though Mom was proud of her Jewish heritage—her mother and father were poor immigrants from the Warsaw ghetto—neither of our parents was religious. Many kids we knew went to synagogue or Sunday school; we never attended any religious services. On Sunday mornings (Dad worked on Saturdays), the whole family had a large, leisurely breakfast together, while Dad played chamber music on the phonograph.
Since Mom was a pediatrician, I never entered a doctor’s office until I went away to college. Mom gave us all our shots, and none of us was the least bit afraid of the needle. In fact, a couple of times Mom took Vicky to her clinic. She gathered the kids around and gave Vicky a shot of some innocuous substance while Vicky stood there beaming, to try to prove to the other kids that it didn’t hurt.
Mom did not wear high heels or makeup, which was very unusual in those days. “Why should you worry about what some stranger thinks about you?” she would ask us. But she wasn’t obnoxiously rigid about this. When Vicky was a little girl, she would beg Mom to please wear lipstick whenever she came to school, and Mom would oblige, not wanting to embarrass her.
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