Wish You Were Here

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Yeah? What?”

  I felt like blurting everything out then. It was hard keeping it to myself, and maybe Pete wouldn’t tell anybody. But I couldn’t take any chances, so I said, “Nothing important.”

  “You using dope?” Pete asked.

  “You know I’m not.”

  “Then what?”

  “I told you already—nothing.”

  “Could it be a little valentine surprise for a certain foxy chick?” Pete asked.

  “Cut it out, man,” I said, mad at myself for getting all worked up again.

  Luckily, Ronnie interrupted us. The kid was raising his hand, like a real little Goody Two-Shoes grind. It was amazing.

  “Yes, Ronald m’boy?” Pete asked.

  “Can I watch TV?”

  Pete looked at me and I nodded. “Okay,” he said. “But keep it down.”

  Ronnie turned the set on nice and low, and then Randy raised his hand. He wanted to know if he could look at some of his comics, and I told him he could.

  After ten minutes or so, Pete said, “Well, isn’t this great?”

  He was right. Except for a little squirming, some head scratching, and a few fake coughs, the twins were like statues. “Yeah,” I said. But I was thinking: Ten minutes, ten cents. Twenty cents, for both of them. The work was easier, all right, but I’d be working for peanuts.

  Then Ronnie shut off the TV and sat down again, sighing loudly.

  “What’s the matter, kid?” Pete asked him.

  “Do I have enough strategic devantage points yet?” Ronnie said. “I’m getting bored.” He banged his heels against the sofa.

  His brother looked up from a Spider-Man comic, his eyes kind of glassy. “Me, too,” he said.

  “Uh-uh,” Pete said. “You still have a ways to go.”

  “Listen, Pete,” I said. “Don’t you think we can stretch the rules a little, just this once, and let them play a board game, or cards or something?” The peace and quiet was beginning to seem worth any price.

  “All right, just this once,” Pete agreed. “As long as there’s no fighting.”

  The twins were like a couple of lifers let out of jail. In a few minutes they were doing something I’d never seen them do before—playing a regular, game of checkers. There were only a couple of bad moments: when Ronnie trapped one of Randy’s kings, and when Randy tried to move a man in the wrong direction. They argued, Ronnie socked Randy, and I was happy to tell them they’d both lost a few points. But they calmed down after that and finished two whole games. Then they got a deck of cards and started a friendly game of war.

  They were still playing when their parents came home. The older Wolfes were surprised to find their boys acting so normal. “What’s wrong?” Mr. Wolfe asked. Mrs. Wolfe felt their foreheads.

  Outside, Pete and I saw that the rain had changed to snow. After I paid off the twins, Ronnie galloped around, stamping out his footprints and eating snow. He yelled, “Look at me, Bernie! Hey, look at me, Uncle Pete!”

  Randy slid up to me. “For another sixty cents,” he said, “I won’t tell anybody you said the ‘S’ word.”

  “Get lost,” I told him.

  “A quarter?” Randy said.

  “How would you like to see stars?” Pete asked him. “Without a telescope.”

  “A dime?” Randy whined. “A measly nickel?” he said, as Pete and I walked off. “Okay, Bernie, I won’t tell. I was only fooling!”

  Just before we turned the corner, a wet snowball splattered against the street sign. We heard Randy calling, “You sitting for us next Saturday? You better, or else! You hear me?”

  Brainstorm

  NAT WAS COMING TO dinner. He did almost every Monday night. When I got home from school, Celia was chopping onions for the meat loaf, with tears streaming down her face.

  Ma was still at Macy’s in Roosevelt Field, where she’s a bedding buyer and Nat’s the manager of men’s wear. They’d first met in his department, when she went there to buy her father a birthday present. The salesman was away from the shirt counter and Nat waited on her. “Do you have something nice in a dress shirt?” she asked him, and he said, “Would you possibly consider me?” Celia thought it was the most adorable, romantic story she’d ever heard. I thought it was sickening.

  “Hey, John Henry,” she greeted me, wiping her eyes on her sweater sleeve.

  “Don’t call me that,” I told her.

  “Sure enough, John Henry,” Celia said.

  Grace was at the kitchen table, drawing. She wasn’t bad for a second-grader, but everything she drew was pretty grim. I looked over her shoulder and saw that this time she’d made two fighter planes dive-bombing these tiny people. There was no happy-face sun in her picture, or any fluffy white clouds. The one tree was a dead-looking stump and the roots looked like twisted fingers. No wonder that kid had bad dreams. She’d never go to sleep unless her door was open and her Miss Piggy night-light was on.

  Now Grace was in her usual drawing trance. Whenever her eyeglasses slipped down her flat little nose, she pushed them back without missing a stroke. She hadn’t even looked at me since I’d come into the room. I could have been a burglar or a mad killer, for all Grace cared. I tried to snap her out of it by yelling, “Help, Gracie! Police! Murder!” Then I went out in the hall and stuck my head in the doorway, with my own arm wrapped around my neck and my eyes crossed and bulging. Grace glanced up for about a second and said, “Stop it, Bernie, or I’ll tell Mommy on you.”

  “Well, it’s certainly great being welcomed home by your loved ones,” I said. I helped myself to some cookies and went upstairs to my room. It was the messiest room in the house, just the way I like it. All the clothes and stuff lying around made it more homey. I couldn’t have a rug or curtains because they’d pick up dust, and dust was one of my allergies. To make up for it, my mother had hung some new wallpaper. I stared at the pattern of hundreds of snowflakes, every one of them exactly alike. I remembered the day my father let me look through the microscope in his school lab, at three real snow-flakes on a frozen slide. I’d squinted until they came into focus, all of a sudden, and I saw how each one was different, and beautiful. “Like people,” my father said. “Everybody special in a different way.”

  I picked up my tin globe bank, with the countries and oceans painted on the outside, and my money on the inside. I knew how much was in there—nine dollars and fifty cents. Still, I shook it to hear the rustle of the bills and the rattling of the coins. Only eighty-nine fifty to go.

  I lay down on my bed with the bank, pulled out the stopper, and took four quarters out. Then I lined them up on my sweatshirt, like four shiny silver buttons. I realized that I hadn’t thought about my father for a while. I hadn’t cried for much longer than that, the way I used to every night, here in my bedroom, or locked in the bathroom with the water running. Even the heaviness in my chest, that was much worse than asthma, was gone. I took a deep breath, and there was nothing but good old air going through.

  Rabbi Stein had promised I’d feel better in time. And my parents’ friends who came to see us during the shiva—the week of mourning—said the same thing. So did the psychologist the whole family went to for a few sessions after Daddy died. “Everyone mourns,” he told us. “It’s natural, and it’s necessary. But grief passes, believe me. It’s like a serious illness you get better from. Someday you’ll only think about your father occasionally, and without sorrow. The time of mourning will be over.”

  I hated sitting in that brown office, with Ma and Celia sobbing, Grace sucking her thumb, and me aching all over from trying not to cry in front of them. I couldn’t imagine forgetting about my father, ever, for a single minute.

  Grace brought a few of her drawings along to one session, and the psychologist said they showed her artistic talent, and also her anger. He said that sometimes anger was the other side of sorrow, of depression. Grace was depressed, according to him, and angry with our father for going away, for dying.

  I was angry w
ith the psychologist, and even angrier with God. My father couldn’t help having the heart attack that killed him. It happened without any warning while he was teaching his bio class at Northport High. He was explaining photosynthesis when he suddenly staggered, and then collapsed in his chair, holding his chest. Someone took him to the nurse’s office, where the kids with bellyaches and nosebleeds usually went. He lay down on the cot, and he died before the ambulance came. He’d been a very popular teacher who cared more about people enjoying science than he did about tests and grades. Many of his students, and other teachers from the school, came to his funeral and cried during the eulogy. Rabbi Stein said how heartbreaking it was when someone as young and deeply loved as Martin Segal was struck down, but that God’s will must not be questioned. It had to be accepted and endured.

  I made a secret vow at that moment not to accept it as long as I lived. Yet I did. Two years later, I could eat and sleep and laugh, and I had to remind myself to think about my father.

  There were noises coming from downstairs, breaking into my thoughts. I could hear my mother calling hello, and then Nat doing the same. I got up, put the quarters back in my bank, and the bank on its shelf. From the top of the stairs, I had a good view of Nat’s bald spot.

  My mother blew me a kiss, and Nat said, rubbing his hands together, “Hi-ho, Bernie-o! Boy, I’m so hungry I could eat a horse! Should we have a fire?”

  “I’ll make it,” I said, sounding fresher than I’d meant to.

  “Good!” Nat said, still being nice in that way I hated. “I’ll set the table, with Gracelet’s help.”

  “Forks on the left, Nat,” Grace told him, picking up her papers and crayons.

  Celia came into the den doing her Frankie Addams walk. She moved very slowly, like a zombie. Then she stood there with one hand to her forehead, as if she had a headache, while I stacked the kindling and logs in the fireplace. “Oh,” she said in that drippy voice, “are you building us a little ol’ fire, John Henry? I just love a fire, don’t you? I can look inside it and see all these shapes and colors and people and animals! It makes me so dizzy and happy and sad and I don’t know what!”

  “You’re mental, Celia, do you know that? A genuine, certified fruitcake.”

  “Oh, grow up, creep,” she said.

  “Look who’s talking! The itty baby who still goes around playing let’s pretend and talking to all her imaginary friends.”

  Celia answered me right back, of course, and I did the same to her. Sometimes it felt good to let off steam like that, fighting over nothing and calling each other names. But other times—right then, for instance—it was just plain boring. And anyway, I had a brainstorm. “Say, Celia,” I said. “Truce. I have a proposition for you.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll help you rehearse your play.”

  “You will? Really, Bernie? You’ll be John Henry?”

  “Sure. I’ll be him, and even some of the other guys if you want me to.”

  “Wait a minute. Why?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

  “Because I’m a great brother, that’s why. And because I need some dough.”

  “You expect me to pay you?” she screeched.

  “Hold it down, will you?” I said. “Why not? It’ll be a business arrangement. And my rates are real cheap.”

  “You little twerp! Did I ever charge you a penny for trying to force simple arithmetic through that thick skull of yours?”

  The truth was I had done very well in simple arithmetic, and almost everything else in the lower grades. I only ran into trouble when simple arithmetic turned into complicated math. But I decided not to argue about it. Instead, I said, “Flattery will get you nowhere, dear sister,” and put a match to the newspapers I’d twisted under the logs. With a whoosh, the paper burst into flames. “A dollar an hour,” I added.

  “What! You’re the one who’s mental, Segal. Fifty cents.”

  “Seventy-five,” I said. “Take it or leave it.”

  “What do you need the money for?” she asked.

  “None of your beeswax.”

  “Are you smoking grass?” she demanded.

  What was the matter with everybody? Did I look like a pothead? “No,” I said. “I’m shooting heroin.”

  “Very funny,” Celia said. Then her face changed. It got softer, as if she’d had a happy thought. “Oh, I know what you want the money for,” she said.

  “You do?” For an instant, I believed her, the way I believed when I was little that she could read my mind.

  “For the wedding,” she said, and I nearly freaked. “You want to get them a present!”

  “Yeah,” I said, very relieved. “That’s right, I want to get them a present.”

  “Well, that’s sweet, Bernie, really sweet. I mean, you don’t always act overjoyed about Ma and Nat. I used to think you were jealous or something. Listen, maybe we can chip in and get them something great. Nat’s so nice, isn’t he? And Ma won’t be lonely in her old age.”

  That made me think of my grandfather, and the real reason I needed the money.

  Celia went on about how terrific Nat was, how wonderful everything would be after the wedding. We were going to go on family camping trips, she said. We were going to put another bathroom in, at last, and fix up a playroom in the basement. She talked and talked. Why didn’t she just shut up?

  I said, “Okay, then, it’s a deal,” and escaped to the dining room. Nat was sitting alone at the table he’d set. The silver was laid out a little crooked, the way I usually did it. Nat said, “There’s time for a round of ping-pong before the horse is ready. How about it, Bernie?”

  Why don’t I like him more, I asked myself. He’s not that bad. Just because, I answered myself, that’s why. And because he’s sitting in my father’s chair. And because he’s alive.

  Lucky Ducky

  WHEN I GOT TO homeroom on Valentine’s Day, there were cards on most of the desks. Kids were running around yelling and throwing things at each other, like balled-up papers, and pieces of food from their lunch bags. Someone had drawn a funny picture of Mrs. Perry, our homeroom teacher, on the blackboard. She walked in and erased it, and then she banged on her desk with a big book to get everybody quiet. When that didn’t work, she sat down at the desk and started to read.

  The principal, Dr. Harvey, led the Pledge over the PA, made a few boring announcements, and wished us a happy Valentine’s Day before he signed off in a buzz of static.

  I opened the cards on my desk and saw that they were all the goofy, homemade kind. Two of them said, “Roses are red, violets are blue. With a face like yours, you belong in the zoo!” That same dumb poem shows up every single year. At least I’m more original. The card I’d made for Pete had a drawing of him looking in a mirror and combing his hair, which he’s always doing in real life. Underneath, I printed:

  To Pete

  Mirror, mirror on the wall,

  Who is fairest of them all?

  I am! I am!

  Love from Pete

  My card from him was supposed to seem as if it came from Mary Ellen. There was a stupid mushy message about eternal love and throbbing hearts. Pete, who’s a lousy speller, gave himself away by spelling “throbbing” with only one b. And the dope had signed her name in his own sloppy handwriting.

  I looked across the aisle at Mary Ellen, and she was looking back at me. She smiled, sort of shyly, and before I could do anything, she began shuffling through the pages of her loose-leaf book with one hand and nibbling on the fingers of the other one.

  I noticed how pretty she was, with that frizzy blond hair like a halo, and her dark eyes. And she was nice, besides—less silly than lots of girls I know. She didn’t dot her i’s with tiny hearts, or scream in science when Hornberg passed the garter snake around. We had English together, too, and when we read The Catcher in the Rye, we’d both chosen the same favorite part—about where the ducks go in winter when the lake in Central Park is frozen over. If it wasn’t for Pete’s kidding,
I would have been friendlier to her. You could just be friendly to a girl without swearing your eternal love. Pete’s a great guy and all that, but sometimes he’s a real asshole. The week before, when Mary Ellen was wearing a pink shirt with her name embroidered on the pocket, he’d embarrassed her in study hall by saying in a loud voice, “What’s the name of the other one?”

  If he wasn’t right there, I could have just gone over and talked to her about homework or something. We might even have walked down the corridor together, after the bell rang for first period. But Pete was there, and when the bell rang, Mary Ellen grabbed her books and took off.

  “Okay, Bernie, roll up your sleeve,” Dr. Cardoza said. I’d gone to her office straight from school, and I watched as she prepared my weekly allergy shot. When I first started taking them, I had to keep my eyes shut until it was over. I’d feel scared and sick to my stomach for hours, even days, before my appointment. But I got used to it, and now I could watch everything without getting uptight—as if someone else was getting the shot. Still, I wished it wasn’t me, that I was through being special in this way. And I wished I didn’t start sneezing and wheezing whenever I went near a cat or a dog. Then our family could have a regular pet, instead of a bowl of goldfish. Once, Dr. Cardoza said I might outgrow my allergies—lots of kids did—and I daydreamed about getting a beautiful collie. It would be even smarter than Lassie, a dog I could teach these neat tricks to, like finding lost things, and following me everywhere without a command. When I went to live with my grandfather, we could share the dog, or have two of them. I pictured us walking along the beach with our dogs, while dolphins jumped around in the water.

  Soon I felt the cool swab of alcohol, and then the sting of the needle. “All right?” she asked, like she always did.

  “You mean it’s over?” I said. “Your touch is getting lighter and lighter, Dr. C.”

  “Well, thank you,” she said. “I’ve had lots of practice.”

  “Mostly on me.”

  “You’re not feeling sorry for yourself, Bernie, are you? Things are going pretty well, I think.”