Wish You Were Here

by Hilma Wolitzer

  I blew my nose to avoid making any comment on that, and Ma took the tray away and went back to Macy’s.

  A little while later the mail came, and there was a small package addressed to me. I wondered who’d sent me a present—it wasn’t my birthday or anything. Then I took it up to my room and opened it. It was only that free sample I’d sent a dollar away for, something called Troo-Gloo. A piece of paper wrapped around the tube said that Troo-Gloo was guaranteed to mend everything but a broken heart. There was a picture of some old Mr. America holding a vase. Under the picture it said that the vase had been discovered, shattered, in an ancient pharaoh’s tomb. After being repaired with this sensational scientific formula, it was as good as new. Even Mr. America couldn’t pull it apart!

  That’s what they said, anyway, but I had my doubts. After all, I’d seen lots of things advertised on television that turned out to be fake. I looked around for something to test it on myself, and there was nothing broken in sight. Finally I decided to use two pencils that were on my desk. I followed the instructions in small print on the tube and squeezed a stripe of Troo-Gloo down the side of one of the pencils. I had to let it dry for a few minutes before I laid the other pencil on top of it. You were supposed to put a heavy object on the glued things, and then wait twenty-four hours. I used my dictionary, which weighs a ton, and wondered if Troo-Gloo really worked. If it did, the guy who invented it would probably make a fortune. People were always breaking things they couldn’t fix. I wished I could invent something, too. How else was I going to get rich real quick?

  For the first time since I’d started saving for the trip, I considered stealing. My heart went out of control just thinking about it. My mother’s a real fanatic on the subject of private property. You never take anything that doesn’t belong to you, period. You’re even supposed to try and return something to the owner when you find it by accident. Pop has a joke he’s told lots of times. “If I found a million dollars,” he says, “I’d give it right back—if it belonged to a poor person!” He always explains afterward that he was only kidding, that stealing is bad, even from a millionaire.

  Yet I did steal something once, when I was a little kid. Celia and I were at the candy store, while our parents waited in the car for us. She was picking up the Sunday Times for them, and I was tagging along. There was a line of people waiting to pay for their newspapers, and I wandered around the back of the store, touching things and looking them over. I was just playing, and had no idea what I was going to do until I did it. That moment is as clear in my mind as the day it happened. There was this box of yo-yos on a low shelf. They were bright red and blue. I had never worked a yo-yo myself, but I’d seen older kids do really neat tricks with them, like loop the loop and walk the dog. It seemed like a lot of fun, and not that hard. I took one of the yo-yos from the box and shoved it into the pocket of my shorts. It felt as if it was on fire, as if it would burn a hole in my pocket and fall right through, giving me away. It didn’t, though. I walked to the front of the store just as Celia was paying Mr. Popper, the man at the cash register. “Open the door, Bernie,” she said, hefting the heavy newspaper in her arms. “Hurry up!”

  I followed her out of the store, feeling excited and kind of sick. I wanted to run, and to throw up.

  What got me was that nobody noticed anything. All those people in the store, and then my own mother and father smiling at us as we climbed into the backseat of the car.

  We had to stop for a red light at the next corner, and I saw a police car on the opposite side of the road. I expected the roof light to start spinning and flashing and the siren to go off. I slumped down low in my seat, waiting to be arrested, to be taken away in handcuffs. The light changed, the police car passed us, and we went home. Daddy and Ma went into the den and put some music on the stereo. They spread the sections of the newspaper on the floor in front of the sofa and began to read. I couldn’t believe that yo-yo was really in my pocket. I had to touch it a few times to make sure. Instead of going outside, or up to my room to try it out, I hung around the den, on the end of the sofa, looking over my father’s shoulder at the pictures in the sports section. My body felt so heavy I could hardly move.

  “It’s such a nice day, Bernie,” my father said. “Why don’t you play in the yard?”

  Through the window I could see Celia hanging upside down from the top rung of the jungle gym. She was free and happy—nothing was going to fall out of her pocket. A couple of the neighbor’s kids were on our swings. They pumped so hard the legs of the swing set were shaking. Every kid in the world was having a great time at that moment, except me. I didn’t answer my father. I just sat there staring at a picture in his paper of a baseball player sliding into a cloud of dust.

  My mother put her part of the paper down. “What’s the matter with you, dear?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, and started to cry.

  They didn’t exactly have to beat a confession out of me. I was blubbering all over the place in about a second. My father held me in his arms, saying, “Shhh, honey. It’s all right. Whatever it is, it’s going to be all right.”

  Between big, shuddering sobs, I told them about the yo-yo. I took the evidence out of my pocket and dropped it into my mother’s lap. They looked at each other, and then my father said, “What do you think we ought to do, Bernie?” I remember that he said “we,” not “you.”

  “Bring...it ba-ack?” I asked, hiccupping.

  “Yes,” my father said. “That’s a good idea.”

  He drove me to the candy store, and we went inside together. There were a few more people picking up their newspapers, and my father waited until they were all gone. Then he took my hand and led me behind the counter. “Tell Mr. Popper,” my father said. “Go ahead, Bernie.”

  “I took this,” I said, and quickly added, “But I’m not a real crook and I’m sorry!” I put the yo-yo in Mr. Popper’s hand.

  “You never did this before, sonny?” he asked.

  “N-never,” I said.

  “And you wouldn’t do it again?”

  “Never!”

  “Then I would say you’re definitely not a real crook. Case closed!”

  And that was that, the end of my life of crime. Nobody said anything else about it that day. When my father and I got home, my body felt much lighter. I was able to go outside and play with Celia and the other kids.

  Weeks later, my father bought yo-yos for Celia and me. He showed us how to work them. Celia caught on right away, but I couldn’t do it. No matter how hard I tried, my yo-yo wouldn’t ride smoothly up and down like hers. It spun around in circles, or rolled out across the floor without coming back. Twice the string knotted, and my grandmother had to open the knots with one of her knitting needles. I was pretty good at other toys that took skill, like my gyroscope, and my interlocking-blocks building set. Only the yo-yo gave me trouble, and after a few days I threw it into the toy chest and didn’t play with it again.

  Now I sat up in bed and thought about taking the ten bucks I needed from one of Gracie’s banks. Or from my mother’s pocketbook. The sickish feeling I’d had after stealing the yo-yo came back for a few seconds, and I knew I couldn’t do it. “Never!” I’d told Mr. Popper, and never it was.

  I got up and put the television on. I watched a soap opera for a couple of minutes, turned to the next channel, and watched another one. Hardly anything ever happened on those shows. Time passed so slowly. Half the people were doctors. Most of the other half were patients lying in hospital beds with tubes in their arms and up their noses. On one show a man had lost his memory and couldn’t remember his doctor’s name. On the other one, a woman refused to sell her priceless art collection to pay for an operation to save her husband’s life. A nurse and a doctor kissed each other behind a screen. He called her Nancy and she called him Dr. Gomez. I imagined kissing Mary Ellen. During the commercial I looked in the TV Guide, but there was nothing good on, so I shut off the set and climbed back into bed. Then that comic-strip l
ight bulb blinked on over my head. I knew how I would get the ten dollars!

  The World’s Fair Ring

  CELIA DIDN’T CATCH MY cold, but Grace did. On Monday, the first day of our spring break, she stayed in bed, propped against two pillows, drawing.

  Ma had taken the day off so she could shop and cook for our Passover seder that night. Celia was at Gary’s house, rehearsing, and I was elected to stay with Grace while Ma went to the market. I looked through the pile of drawings next to her bed. There were still no flowers in any of them, but you could see some changes for the better. There was a little less death and disaster, for one thing, and people were doing more everyday things, like driving buses and wheeling babies in carriages. In one picture, a cow was crossing a city street. In another, the sun was a yellow smudge at the corner of the page.

  “How do you feel?” I asked Grace. She smelled from the Vicks Ma had rubbed on her chest, and from the cherry lollipop she’d started and then stuck to a Kleenex on her night table.

  “I hab a code, Berdie,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “You poor little punk. But you’ll feel better soon. Look at me.” I sat down at the end of her bed, after moving a few crayons aside. “Can I get you something?” I asked. “Water, tea, applesauce, Jell-O?”

  Grace shook her head. I asked her if she wanted me to read to her from Charlotte’s Web, but she said that Nat was going to do that, after the seder. She was pretty limp and bleary-eyed, and I couldn’t get her interested in anything. I wondered if it was the best moment to spring my latest plan. I decided to go for it, that this might be one of the last times we’d be alone together in the house. “Grace?” I said. “Do you want to look at my treasure box?” I held my breath, waiting for a spark of life, and it came. Her eyes lit up, and she nodded.

  “Good!” I said. “You stay right here, all snuggy and warm, and I’ll bring it in to you.”

  It was torture, watching her take all the things out, one by one, and examine them as if she’d never seen them before. The few times that I still looked at my collection, I just dumped it all out on my bed and pawed through it. I tried to amuse myself now while she handled each stone and shell, pinned the buttons to her pajamas, and sniffed at the baseball cards. How could she smell anything with that stuffed nose? I whistled and hummed, looked at the pictures in Charlotte’s Web, and moved a Tonka truck across the mountains and valleys of Grace’s quilt. Where did a kid her age get so much patience?

  If she didn’t hurry up, someone was liable to come home before she was done.

  If I was Grace and loved that World’s Fair ring so much, it would be the first thing I’d take out. I thought of how she saved the best food on her plate for last, too—the french fries, or spaghetti, or corn on the cob—and how I’d devour my favorites and just push the rest of it around, hoping it would disappear. At Grace’s age, Celia used to eat the inside of her baked potato, stuff the skin with the food she didn’t want, and neatly close it. I bet you could figure out a lot about people from the way they ate. And from the way they took things out of a treasure box.

  Grace was surrounded by tidy little batches of junk now. The ring was the only thing left, shiny and lonesome at the bottom of the box. Before she reached in for it, she blew her nose a few times, fogging up her glasses, and drank some of the pineapple juice Ma had left for her on the night table.

  Come on, come on, I thought, and at last Grace put her hand into the box again. She was breathing hard through her mouth. When she picked up the ring, she gave this hoarse little honk, and I knew I had it made.

  Still, I couldn’t help pitching some sales talk. “Sterling silver,” I said. “See? It says so inside. And it’s from 1939, so it’s practically an antique. Grandpa said it was the best World’s Fair ever. Heinz gave out these little pickle pins to everybody, free, but he lost his. Of course, he had to buy the ring. That was an expensive souvenir.”

  Grace didn’t say anything. She just breathed loudly and moved the ring from finger to finger.

  “General Motors had a ride called Futurama you could go on, and there was a terrific swimming show called the Aquacade, like a ballet in water.”

  Grace said, “Berdie?”

  Here it comes, I told myself. “What?”

  “Cad I borrow it? Please?”

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “It’s too valuable. It’s liable to get lost.”

  “I wode lose it, Berdie. I probise.”

  “Sorry, kiddo, no can do,” I said, feeling pretty cruel. I remembered when my missing mother—in the hospital for three days—came home carrying a blanket-wrapped baby. I was a big boy already, almost six, and for months I’d been told no, Ma wasn’t getting fat because she’d eaten too much, but that my new sister or brother was inside her belly, waiting to be born. Ma even put my hand against it, and I could feel something moving around in there.

  I loved and hated Gracie on sight. She’d turned me into a middle child and an older brother with hardly any warning. And what a big fuss everybody made over somebody that small. She’d squawk and Ma would open her blouse to feed her. There were spit-up bibs and stinky diapers, and all that equipment! I heard Grandpa say how happy he was that his Grace’s name was being carried on. I knew he was talking about my other grandmother, the one who died when I was a baby. Our Grace was named for her. Jewish people did that, Daddy said, so the dead person wouldn’t be forgotten. I was named for Daddy’s grandfather, Celia for Ma’s aunt.

  Little by little, my hatred and jealousy of the baby disappeared, and the love stayed. I loved her now, but that didn’t keep me from my mission. “It’s getting close to lunchtime,” I said. “We ought to start putting the treasures away.”

  Sighing, still wearing the ring, Grace unpinned the buttons and dropped them one at a time into the box. She arranged the stones and shells next to them, the marbles next to the stones and shells. I waited until the last moment, when everything but the ring was put back, and then I said, “I can’t lend it, Gracie, but I’m thinking of selling it.”

  “Dode!” she cried.

  “Well, the thing is, I need some dough. I don’t want to sell the ring. It’s kind of like a family heirloom. But what can I do?”

  Grace looked ready to cry. Her face scrunched up the way it used to when she was a baby, and I felt worse than cruel—I felt like a cold-blooded rat fink. I had to go through with it, though. “It would be better if I could keep it in the family,” I said. “If someone in our family was willing to buy it.”

  “Mobby?” Grace asked.

  “No,” I said. “Mommy has a ring—you know, the sapphire Nat gave her. And Celia doesn’t even like this one. But she has rotten taste, and she has that World’s Fair banner from Grandpa, anyway.”

  Grace is a very smart kid, and she must have figured things out by then, but stinginess isn’t something you get over fast, like a cold. She closed her eyes, and I could almost see through her forehead, see the battle going on in there between Grace who wanted the World’s Fair ring more than anything and Grace who wanted to keep her money forever.

  “A dibe?” she croaked, without much hope.

  “Gracie, you’re just being silly,” I said. “I have to have ten dollars.”

  She moaned and slid under the covers, so that only the top of her head showed.

  I had to force myself to be tough. Look at all I’d gone through already—sitting for the Wolfe boys, giving up candy (most of the time), helping Celia, and Nat...And that night at the seder, Grace would find the afikomen, the special matzoh Pop would hide, and he’d buy it back from her. In our family, the youngest child is always allowed to find it and collect the reward. Last year she got five bucks.

  Grace came out from under the covers, an inch at a time. “Okay,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  She was already out of bed, reaching for the Tinker Bell bank. She opened the latch behind the chipped wing. Poor Tinker Bell. Poor Grace. There was a ten-dollar bill in there, but she left
it and counted out the whole thing in small change.

  When I put the money in my jeans pocket, I felt as if I’d gained about ten pounds. “Listen,” I said. “I’ll fix the ring up for you, Gracie, so you can’t lose it. I’ll wrap adhesive tape around the back. And I’ll shine it up like new with Ma’s silver polish.”

  She put the bank back on the shelf, and admired the ring on her thumb.

  “One other thing,” I said. “This has to be a secret between us, that I sold it to you. You have to swear, Gracie, or the deal’s off.”

  She put one pinky to her lips and then raised it, our sign for swearing something.

  “You have to make believe I’m letting you borrow it for a while. And someday when I’m rich I’ll buy it back from you, if you don’t want it anymore. I swear.” And I touched my own pinky to my lips before raising it to heaven.

  Flight 17

  I HAD IT! I HAD more than I needed. I counted it a few extra times to be absolutely sure, and there was a hundred and three dollars. With the ten from Gracie, the dollar saved from my allowance, and the pay for sitting with Ronnie and Randy that afternoon, I’d reached my goal. And with hardly any time to waste—in four more days I’d be on my way to Florida.

  The twins had become kind of attached to me, but they had funny ways of showing it. When I was leaving their house, Ronnie jumped onto my back like a monkey, and Randy punched my arms and legs all the way to the door. “Don’t go home yet, Bernie,” they warned, “or you’ll be sorry!” It took both their parents to get them off me, and then I was free.

  After counting the money on my bed, I made up my mind to get my plane ticket right away, before the price changed or something. It was four-thirty, and I had to hurry because the Let’s Go! travel agency on South Oyster Bay Road closed at five. I crammed the bills and coins into my wallet and pockets and ran downstairs. Ma called to me as I was walking my bike out of the garage. “Where are you going, Bernie?”