Criss Cross

by Lynne Rae Perkins

  It was the perfect place to change your clothes on the way to school. You could drape the clothes you were taking off over the branches while you got the other ones on. Debbie stepped out of a pair of turquoise, white, and orange plaid double-knit bell-bottoms. Patty unbuttoned a flowered blouse and tossed it onto a branch that already sported a brown jumper. The air was warm. They stood on top of their shoes in their underwear, the rain softly piffing on the leaves all around. Two Eves in the Garden of Eden.

  “If you think about it,” Patty said, “it shouldn’t even matter what we wear. People will like us for who we are.”

  Debbie knew this. She even believed it was true. But she also believed that certain articles of clothing could transmit almost impenetrable counter signals. Like camouflage.

  “How will they know who I am if I’m wearing these?” she asked.

  Patty laughed.

  “They’re all right,” she said. “Sort of. They’re better than a jumper.”

  “I think they’re equal to a jumper,” said Debbie. “Or less than. Jumpers can be okay.”

  The reason they were changing their clothes in a rhododendron bush was cultural evolution. Both of them had mothers who were stranded in the backwaters of a bygone era, and who were unable to grasp many current trends and ideas. You could argue and argue, but they weren’t going to get it. At some point you just had to go change your clothes in a bush.

  First, though, you had to acquire the clothes you wanted to change into, which were slightly faded bell-bottomed jeans that almost touched the ground, or did touch it, even dragging a little bit. And if you weren’t yet financially independent, or had spent all your money on movies and pizza, you had to get your mother to buy them for you.

  That could be hard.

  It wasn’t hard for Debbie to get her mother to go shopping. But Helen Pelbry was opposed to spending money on something that was going to drag on the ground and get ruined. She could not hear the siren call of the dragging jeans.

  Debbie heard it. She believed that it was the only way to wear pants that made any sense. That wearing the dragging jeans did not actually guarantee that good things would happen to you, but not wearing them could almost guarantee that the good things wouldn’t.

  She felt sure that when she found the perfect pair, her mother would recognize their perfection and relent. But they weren’t finding the perfect pair. They had been searching for hours, in every store in the airy, light-filled Merionville Mall. The fountains burbled, and sunlight poured in through the skylights, encouraging the tropical trees and flowers, but Debbie and her mother had become acutely focused on the two inches of the earth’s atmosphere just above the carpet of the dressing room floor.

  Though the jeans were wrong in other ways, too. It was almost dreamlike, how many ways they could be wrong in, ways that a person would not have imagined. They had wandered into quicksand, into a shopping swamp. A fog of fatigue and unreality crept up on Debbie. She could tell that her mother was getting exasperated, too. They stood close to each other in a tiny dressing room with the maximum number of items hanging from a hook on the wall. Debbie was wearing a unique pair of turquoise, white, and orange plaid bell-bottoms that hovered three inches from the floor. Her mother had found them.

  “What’s wrong with these?” she asked Debbie. Her voice was careful. Her face was composed, with a trace of hopefulness. Her purse dangled from the crook of her crisscrossed arms.

  Debbie considered. She tried to be objective.

  The plaid was all right, maybe, kind of, but the pants were so short, and they had a peculiar, zingy bell curve that would always be there because they were made of some miracle fiber that “remembered” its shape, washing after washing. It was amazing how wrong they were, but they did have a weird perfection, as objects. Not objects you would wear. Just objects you would look at. Like a vase. That was it, that was the shape. The shape of an upside-down, plaid vase. Or two of them, her feet blooming out on long stems.

  Maybe her resolve was broken by some mild tranquilizing vapor seeping out of the ventilation vent along with the air-freshening perfume. Maybe there were subliminal messages in the upbeat, impersonal music softly emanating around the flimsy partitions. Maybe she just wanted her mother to be happy, and for them to be having a nice time together, the way they always had. Maybe it finally seemed stupid to care so much.

  Debbie heard herself saying, “These are good. I really like these.”

  In the instant she said it, she almost believed it. She wanted it to be true. If she could have spent her whole life in the tiny private dressing room, she might have worn those pants a lot.

  She said the same thing about the next pair she tried on, a pair of jeans with a machine-embroidered image, at the bottom of one leg, of a bunny nibbling on a bunch of carrots. In this case she had an ulterior motive. They were, by sheer accident or luck, the right length.

  “I can hem them,” she said, wondering why she hadn’t thought of it before. She was fibbing, but it was a noble fib, because she was really saying, “I love you. I want us to be having fun.” She was also saying, “If you really love me, you won’t make me hem them.”

  But her mother only heard the words she said aloud. Her face relaxed. She looked pleased and relieved.

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “They’re great,” said Debbie. “I like them a lot.”

  In the hollow of the rhododendrons, Debbie and Patty used the seam rippers they had smuggled out of their mothers’ sewing boxes. Debbie was carefully removing the bunny and the carrots, dropping bits of white and orange thread on the dirt. Patty was taking out the large hems she had sewed in her jeans the night before, like Penelope unraveling her weaving in the Odyssey, only backward and for different reasons.

  “Maybe I can iron them out in the home ec room,” she said. “So they hang down better.”

  “And then maybe you can smoosh them up so they’re not all crispy,” said Debbie.

  “I don’t care so much if they’re crispy,” said Patty. “Just so they’re long enough.”

  While they were working, a pair of playful chipmunks chased each other through the branches, and a few fat robins, seeking refuge from the rain, now more a downpour than a drizzle, chirped. It felt very Arcadian, as if a shepherd might appear with a harp and some grapes.

  What appeared instead was a car blasting down the alleyway, throwing up wild sprays of puddle water as it clunked in and out of potholes. The two girls froze, only their eyes moving, and remained hidden. In the noise and commotion, neither one noticed that behind them a startled chipmunk had jumped from a narrow limb to the ground. A slender gold chain was momentarily tangled around his front paws. He dragged it for a short distance before he got free of it and scampered away. It settled down into the neatly mowed grass of someone’s backyard, in the rain, getting wet.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Fable of Lenny

  At least the windows were open. Even so, the odor was thick and pungent. Debbie experimented with different methods of breathing. Nose only. Mouth only. Hand casually over nose. Nose casually over right shoulder, hunk of hair used casually as an air filter. She was looking for ways to inhale that would not make her want to gag. She tried pulling her T-shirt up over her nose. Probably the smell was something you could get used to. She was used to her dad’s cigarettes, but Lenny’s chewing tobacco had a sour, heavy mintiness suggestive of putting your nose in the armpit of someone who had applied scented deodorant after already having sweated.

  Every now and then he leaned out of the window and spit.

  “That stuff stinks,” said Phil. “How can you stand having it in your mouth?”

  “I like it,” said Lenny.

  He did like it, sort of. He was going to like it, once he got used to it. It had startled him, at first, to have the flavor inside his own mouth, but it was the taste of the smell of his father, and his father’s friends. It was strange to him, but it was also friendly.

 
; Debbie, between Lenny and Phil, breathed shallowly the aromas of laundered cotton and her own skin and scrutinized her bare feet, up on the dashboard. She had put decals on her toenails that afternoon, but she thought she might take them off later. They were the last set left in the package, and they weren’t very good. All the good ones were used up. From any farther than six inches, these were just irregular black squiggles with some blurry blobs of purple and blue. It looked like she had banged her toes one at a time with a hammer. Lenny looked at them, too. He couldn’t make out what they were. Dragonflies? Skull and crossbones?

  “What are those on your toes?” he asked. “Are they supposed to be grapes?”

  The lump in his cheek caused him to speak a little less clearly, as if he had a lump of something wedged between his gum and his cheek. Which he did.

  “Fish,” Debbie said to the inside of her T-shirt. “Tropical fish.”

  “Maybe you should just chew gum,” suggested Phil. “Since when do you dip snuff, anyway?”

  “The guy I work for over at the garage asked me if I wanted a pinch,” said Lenny. “So I decided to try it.

  “I like it,” he said again. He was sticking to his story.

  The garage where Lenny swept up a few hours a week, emptied trash, helped out, was run by a friend of his dad’s. Sometimes Jerry let him do easy jobs, like changing oil and spark plugs. He could have done quite a bit more; he knew how. It seemed to Lenny as if he had always known how. Or could figure it out, if he didn’t.

  That’s how he saw himself. Debbie and Phil saw him that way, too. They also saw another Lenny, though, inseparable from the current Lenny, the mechanical whiz dirt-bike Lenny. They saw the Lenny of their childhood. The bookworm Lenny.

  The fable of Lenny was that when he was younger, he read encyclopedias for fun….

  His mother, Edie, brought them home one at a time from the A&P. They were a promotional item, a new volume each week for $1.49 with a $20.00 purchase. She had already brought home a complete set of china this way, as well as stainless-steel flatware and Pyrex baking dishes.

  The encyclopedias were handsomely bound in brown leatherette and embossed with black and gold lettering. They came with a wooden shelf that held the entire set. Edie put them back on Lenny’s dresser to get them out of her way.

  Lenny watched as the shelf filled up with the elegant-looking books. And one day he pulled one out and opened it, to take a look. It was the ? volume. He opened it in the middle, to a page about birds and how they fly. The page was composed entirely of diagrams, with short captions to explain them. Not too unlike the comics in the paper that were his main reading material up until then.

  Lenny didn’t know yet that he had a mind that was interested in and quick to understand how things worked.

  He looked for a while at the drawings without making any particular mental effort. Then, in his brain, the drawings converged briefly into a three-dimensional animated model of a bird, complete with the effect of its shape on the movement of air around its body. It was an unusual physical sensation, like a glowing or buzzing, to have this happening inside his head. His head felt, not larger, but as if everything else in there had backed up against the walls to make room for this display. It was interesting. He let it happen for some minutes, then flipped back and forth through the pages to see what else was in there.

  When Edie came looking for him, she found him on the floor of his room, sitting in that funny way he had, with his legs forming a W, his round, blond Polish head bent over a picture of some kind printed in color on a clear plastic page. It seemed to be about blood and veins. Yuck, thought Edie. She didn’t like being reminded that people had insides.

  Lenny looked up with a happy grin.

  “What are you doing?” she asked him. She could see what he was doing; what she wanted to know was, why was he doing it?

  “Reading,” he said. “About how blood gets pumped around our bodies. Look at this picture.”

  “No thanks,” said Edie. “I just ate.”

  “Is it okay if I read these?” asked Lenny.

  “Sure,” she said. “As long as you put them back in the right order when you’re done.” She believed that saying yes should always be accompanied by a condition, or a warning. Or both.

  “And don’t sit with your legs like that,” she said. “You’ll get arthritis.”

  Reading the encyclopedias became one of Lenny’s favorite pastimes. He liked playing ball, too, or tag, or riding bikes. But he wasn’t that good at throwing or running or balancing. What he really liked was explaining to Debbie and Phil and whoever else was around how if you were way out somewhere in space, the Big Dipper wouldn’t look like the Big Dipper at all, because the stars weren’t really next to each other, it just looked that way from earth. He did it with tennis balls and golf balls and wiffle balls. He put them all around the yard, on the picnic table and the clothes pole and down on the ground, then made them sit in the one spot, the “earth spot,” where the balls formed the Dipper.

  He spent hours examining the individual pieces of gravel in the driveway to identify them.

  He looked at leaves and feathers and bugs through a magnifying glass. Everyone thought he would be a scientist or something brainy.

  “How come you know so many things,” his mother asked him, “and you don’t get better grades?”

  Lenny didn’t know. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “School is boring,” he said.

  It wasn’t exactly what he meant. But it was close.

  It was his father, Leon, who went down to the basement one day after work to take a shower and found Lenny sitting on the floor in a jumble of parts, with a screwdriver in his hand. He had taken apart an old vacuum cleaner.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Leon asked him. “Put that back together.”

  He just said it. He didn’t really expect Lenny to put it back together. The amazing thing was that Lenny did. Even more amazing, when Lenny flipped the switch, the vacuum cleaner, which hadn’t worked for years, roared to life. Leon stared.

  “Who showed you how to do that?” asked Leon. “Did you just figure it out yourself?”

  “I read about it,” said Lenny. “In a book. About small motor repair.”

  “Same difference,” said Leon. “I could look at that book and it would look like Greek to me.”

  Leon told everyone about Lenny and the vacuum cleaner. He told everyone when Lenny fixed the toaster, too.

  Lenny felt the satisfaction of understanding something in his mind and making it become real with his own hands. Multiplied by the light and warmth of his father’s pride. He started fixing things right and left. His metamorphosis from bookworm to gearhead was swift and complete, and he didn’t look back.

  It could have gone another way. Some perceptive science teacher could have seen past Lenny’s shyness and how he was flustered by taking tests. But that didn’t happen.

  The junior high shop teacher saw his abilities and appreciated them. He steered Lenny toward the vocational-technical track.

  Debbie and Phil were sorted into academic, which led to college prep. Everyone assumed that whoever was doing the sorting knew what they were doing. It was all done scientifically, with grades and test scores.

  Maybe it was some kind of tragedy that no one spotted who Lenny could be. Or maybe it wasn’t. Lenny didn’t need someone to tell him who he was. A bird had flown inside his head. He knew how vacuum cleaners worked. And there were a lot of other things he knew.

  He had started down a separate path, though, another path than the one his old friends were taking. It was hard to tell how far apart the paths would eventually veer. There were already signs of veering. No one in academic, for example, pinched snuff. Lenny hadn’t thought about that before, but he saw it now. He saw that Debbie and Phil had other opinions about it than he did. Phil was hanging out of the passenger side window, and Debbie had her shirt pulled over her nose. Lenny considered this. He was a considerate perso
n.

  “All right,” he said. He took the wad from his cheek and chucked it at the dirt around his mother’s petunias. But although he was stronger now, and more coordinated than he had been as a child, his aim was still lousy. The tobacco hit the side of the house with a wet, brown splat.

  “Rats,” he said. He looked around for a rag, found an old T-shirt, and got out of the truck to scrub it away before his mother saw it. Debbie and Phil got out, too.

  “I need your spit,” said Lenny. “Mine’s too brown.”

  They got down on their knees and took turns spitting at the brown stain on the concrete foundation block. In between Lenny rubbed with the old T-shirt until the small brown splat faded and spread to a large pale one that was hardly even noticeable in the spring twilight.

  CHAPTER 8

  Easy Basin Wrench, or

  Debbie has a Mechanical

  Moment, Too

  “Hello!” said Debbie.

  “What?” asked her father, from under the kitchen sink.

  “Hello!” she said again.

  “Hello,” he answered.

  “That’s the first thing it says in the instructions,” she said. “Then it says,

  Easy Basin Wrench with more quality and most quantity of every place. And is favored with the patronages of common sense and wisdom. The best for you and friends around the world.”

  “Does it say anything about how to use it?”

  “Let me see. It says, Precise teeth are biting sharply the slippery oil to a grip. Does that help?”