Taking Care of Terrific

by Lois Lowry

  "Joshua!" called his mother in concern. "Nasty, nasty, nasty! Cynthia, do you have a Kleenex? Wipe his hands off, would you?"

  I sighed, quietly so Ms. Cameron wouldn't hear me, and wiped Tom's spotless little hands. On the tree root, the caterpillar snuggled into his little yellow furry coat, glad to be rescued from the sidewalk. Probably the instant we were out of sight around the corner, Ms. Cameron would come out with a can of insecticide and blast the poor thing away, muttering "Nasty, nasty, nasty." Then she would go off to pour tea at her meeting of the Save the Earth Society.

  "You better watch it," I told Tom as we turned the corner and headed down Chestnut Street. "Don't mention Hawk in front of your mother."

  "Or the bag ladies," he replied.

  "Or Popsicles."

  "Or dogs," he said, pausing to pat a scruffy one that had just lifted its leg against someone's steps. The dog wiggled its behind, trying to wag a stump of a tail, and followed us down the street a short distance until it was distracted by something edible in the gutter.

  "There he is!" called Tom, dropping my hand and running ahead of me as we entered the park. "There's the Hawk!"

  Hawk was on a bench near the entrance, his saxophone case open in front of him with a few quarters in it, tossed there by passersby. He was wearing the same faded jeans, the same monster sneakers, and a torn shirt that said PROPERTY OF UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT across the front. There was a hole through ATHLETIC. He had sweat on his dark forehead; it trickled in streams down his face and glistened in his beard. The saxophone glistened in the afternoon sunlight, too, as his fingers slid from key to key. He was playing a song I'd never heard. When Tom plopped down in the grass beside the bench, Hawk winked without taking his mouth away from the sax, and he eased into the melody of "Hush, little baby don't say a word."

  I sat in the grass near Tom, took my sketch pad out, and began trying to do a drawing of Hawk. Hands are hard to draw. Hands moving on a saxophone are impossible.

  Tom Terrific sang.

  Two nuns walking on the path stopped, listened, consulted each other in whispers, and finally tossed a dollar bill into the saxophone case. They walked on, giggling.

  When the song ended, Hawk put his saxophone down carefully on the bench and wiped his face with a wrinkled handkerchief. "It's hot, man," he said. "Popsicle time. Popsicles on me today. You earned me a buck, Terrific."

  A shadow fell across my open sketch pad, and I turned. The same bag lady, in her black coat, was blotting out the sun as she stood there watching us.

  "Hawk," I said as quietly as I could, nodding toward the bag lady, "why don't you play one more before we get Popsicles? You have an audience, I think."

  He murmured, "Right." He picked up his instrument and started into what I recognized as "Stardust." Terrific didn't know the words to that. He lay back in the grass, his arms folded behind his head, and listened with his eyes closed. Behind us, the bag lady hummed. I could see her shadow sway in the rhythm of the song.

  When he had finished "Stardust," Hawk said to the woman, "Popsicles all around. My treat."

  But she turned, muttering. I could catch the fragments of what she was saying, the same as the day before: "Root beer. They change everything without asking anyone," and with heavy, shuffling steps she moved away, still talking to herself. We watched her go, watched her move down the path to disappear behind some bushes and a statue and the groups of picnicking people, like a huge black bird seeking shade.

  Hawk shrugged. "Guess she don't want one," he said cheerfully. "Watch my horn a minute."

  He loped with his long, thin legs over to the Popsicle cart and came back with three green ones. We sprawled in the grass and slurped.

  "You know what, Hawk?" I asked. "That woman, you know why she didn't want a Popsicle? She told Tom and me yesterday."

  "She didn't really tell us," Tom corrected. "She was just telling. We were standing there, but she didn't even look at us."

  "Okay. Anyway, Hawk, she said that they used to have root beer Popsicles, and she liked those because her father used to make root beer, and it reminded her of her father—"

  "Me too," said Hawk. "My daddy used to make root beer, too. I remember the smell. Summer nights, we kids used to sit on the porch drinking Daddy's root beer."

  "Well, anyway," I went on, "she said the guy with the cart stopped carrying root beer because not enough people bought them."

  "I would," said Hawk cheerfully, licking his empty stick.

  "Me too," said Tom Terrific.

  "Well," I confessed, "I wouldn't because I don't like root beer. But I don't think it's fair, Hawk. There are a whole lot of bag ladies around—Tom counted twenty-four yesterday—and probably all of them wish there were still root beer Popsicles. But nobody pays any attention to what they want because they're bag ladies."

  Hawk was listening intently. He was grinning.

  So I went on. It's nice to have someone listen to what you're saying. "But the reason that no one listens is because they don't make a scene. They just mumble, and nobody pays any attention, and they don't even talk to each other. Probably not one single bag lady here ever talks to another one, so they don't even know that they all want root beer Popsicles. It seems to me that they ought to organize."

  Hawk's eyebrows moved up higher on his glistening brown forehead. "Like the Teamsters?"

  I shrugged. "I don't know anything about the Teamsters. But like nurses at a hospital. If they want more money or different schedules, they all go on strike. Then the administration has to listen, right?"

  "Right," said Hawk. Tom Terrific was examining a worm that he had found in the dirt.

  "Right," said Hawk again. "Trouble is, the Popsicle guy don't care about the bag ladies' business. Twenty-four root beer Popsicles now and then, that's not going to make him a millionaire. He's probably already a millionaire anyway. You notice he's branching out into balloons?"

  I sighed. Hawk was correct. Even if the bag ladies went on strike, it wouldn't have any effect. None of them bought Popsicles anyway. So much for my great idea.

  "I have to go to the bathroom," Tom Terrific announced.

  "Wait a minute," said Hawk thoughtfully.

  "I can't wait very long," said Tom.

  But Hawk hadn't been talking to him. "It's true," he said, "that the guy doesn't care about their business. But what if they organized and picketed? Caused a disruption. Then other people wouldn't buy Popsicles, and his business would be affected—"

  Tom Terrific stood up. "I have to go the bathroom right now" he announced loudly.

  "Good grief," I said. "I don't even know where a bathroom is, Tom. Maybe you could just go behind a bush."

  Tom looked stricken. He shook his head firmly. "No," he said.

  I looked around, but didn't see any signs of a public restroom. "Think you can make it all the way home, Tom? I don't know where else to take you."

  "I'll take him," said a voice. "I'm going myself."

  We turned, and there was our bag lady again. It was the first time she had ever spoken directly to us. And she wasn't mumbling crazily, or anything. "I'll take him," she said again, quite clearly, and held her hand out to Tom Terrific.

  Well, I might have broken a few rules, let him pat a dog or two, given him Popsicles. But I wasn't about to send him off to a public bathroom with a bag lady. Tough to explain that to his mother if he disappeared and I never saw him again.

  "I'll come along," I said. Tom took her hand, I followed behind, and we headed down the path.

  I glanced back at Hawk. He rolled his eyes, grinned, waved, and picked up his saxophone.

  She was shuffling along at a pretty quick pace, and Tom trotted beside her. In a minute the three of us had reached one of the Arlington Street exits from the park. I still didn't see anything that looked like a bathroom. All I could see were taxis, people, bicycles, cars, and more people. The intersection of Arlington and Newbury was always a big traffic jam.

  "Stay her
e," said the bag lady to Tom, and she left him on the curb. She walked right out into the traffic, her black coat flapping, her gray hair flying around her head. Cars slammed on their brakes. There were screeches of tires, angry yells from taxi drivers, and a whole orchestra of honking horns. She held up one hand like a policeman. In a second all the traffic had stopped.

  "Come on!" she called to us. Hastily, embarrassed, I took Tom's hand and we crossed the street. She brought up the rear, and behind her the traffic started up again; a few drivers called out a final insult.

  "Terrible street," she muttered. "They ought to put a light there." She took Tom's hand from me and, at her quick, flapping pace, headed for an entrance. I cringed. For the first time I realized where she was going. I more than cringed; I wanted to disappear, to die on the spot.

  The bag lady was planning to pee at the Ritz.

  The Ritz-Carlton is one of the oldest, the most elegant, the most expensive, and the most snobbish hotels in Boston. Movie stars and kings and sheiks and millionaires stay at the Ritz when they're in town. Once Paul Newman was there, when he was making a movie in Boston, and people stood on the sidewalk outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

  My mother told me that once an admiral went there for dinner wearing a dress uniform, the white kind with brass buttons up to the chin, and they wouldn't let him in the dining room because he wasn't wearing a tie.

  Someone at school said that Shirley MacLaine tried to go into the Ritz bar one night after she did a performance of a play, and they turned her away because she was wearing pants. (The same person said, "So then she took her pants off, right there in the lobby"; but I don't believe that part.)

  Once when I was there for dinner (my parents take me there each year, on their anniversary), I saw a man wearing a turtleneck shirt trying to enter the dining room. The maître d' took him aside, and after a minute he came back wearing a tie they had loaned him, wrapped around his turtleneck. My parents hissed at me to quit staring, but I couldn't help it; he looked so stupid, and his wife kept glaring at him while they ate. You could almost tell she was muttering, "I told you to wear a tie."

  I was wondering what they were going to say when we tried to go inside. It was so mortifying that the only thing I could do was pretend I was Paul Newman's daughter (ridiculous. Would Paul and Joanne name a daughter Enid?). I stuck my nose into the air and fantasized that I was going to meet my dad in the lobby.

  To my amazement, the doorman, in his dark blue uniform, said "Good afternoon" and held the door open for the three of us, as if every day of his life a bag lady, a little boy walking cross-legged now because he was about to wet his pants, and a fourteen-year-old girl in jeans came sweeping through.

  Apparently the bag lady had done this before because she knew the way right to the john. It was just in time for Tom Terrific.

  When we came back out of the hotel, the doorman was helping a Japanese man take about thirty-seven leather suitcases out of a taxi, so he couldn't hold the door for us again. But he nodded, said "Good afternoon" a second time, and didn't blink an eye as the bag lady went into her death-defying traffic-stopping number once more.

  Then we were back in the safety of the Public Garden.

  "Thank you," I said to her. "You really saved Tom's life. Or at least his dignity."

  "Who's the Negro?" she muttered abruptly.

  I looked around, startled. There were lots of black people in the Garden; there were Chinese, Puerto Ricans, WASPs, and anybody else you could think of. I didn't know who she was talking about. And I hadn't heard anybody say "Negro" for about ten years, except maybe my great-aunt Eleanor, who tends to use obsolete language. Every time she comes to visit she asks, "Enid, do you have a beau?" and for a minute I think she's asking about a hair ribbon.

  "What?" I asked the bag lady. "I'm sorry; I don't know who you mean."

  "With the instrument," she said brusquely.

  Oh. Of course. "His name is Hawk," I said.

  "You tell him," she muttered, looking at the ground, "I'll do it. I think it's a good idea, it would serve them right, nobody ever fights back, I'll do it if he will, if other people will, you tell him."

  "You'll do what?" I asked, puzzled. My I.Q. isn't all that monumental. Enid almost rhymes with stupid, of course.

  She looked up, her little eyes bright and piercing. "Picket," she hissed. "Disrupt."

  "Why don't you tell him?" I asked; but she had turned already and was plodding away, disappearing around the cement corner of a statue's base. High above her, looking out with glazed eyes over his straight bronze nose, George Washington sat with impeccable posture atop his pawing horse. He stared ahead through the trees, his gaze blank. So did all the other people in the Garden as the bag lady shuffled past them, their eyes like the blind eyes of statues.

  When we got back to our corner of the park, Hawk was gone. A man wearing a business suit was reading the Boston Globe on the bench where Hawk had been. It was getting late.

  I took Tom Terrific's hand and walked him home. He counted things along the way. Twelve dogs, six taxis, and eight bright orange parking tickets on the windshield of illegally parked cars.

  Chapter 9

  Seth Sandroff called after supper. Probably he couldn't dream up any vandalism that day, and he was tired of tormenting his sisters and looking for someone else to drive crazy.

  The Sandroffs live on Commonwealth Avenue, about three blocks from our house. His father owns a TV station. His mother, as I've said, is a child psychologist; but mostly she gets her kicks out of being a Well-Known Personality. She wrote a book once, called Get in Touch, subtitled Living with Adolescents, which a lot of people bought because, let's face it, a lot of people don't much like living with adolescents, and her book told them how to do it without committing suicide. So she was on the Today Show, simpering dumb answers to dumb questions asked by Jane Pauley; and after that she was on a lot of talk shows, and now she is the Dr. Joyce Brothers of the parental world.

  She's a first-class phony. One of the things her book harps on is "learning to love yourself," after which, of course, you will "learn to love your teenager," following which your teenager will, presumably, learn to love you. Wilma Sandroff loves herself so much that as soon as she became a TV personality, she went off to a beauty farm to lose twenty pounds; then she had her hair bleached platinum blond; then she had a facelift. Now, instead of looking like a forty-five-year-old woman, she looks like a Miss America contestant about to do a flaming-baton routine to the accompaniment of "I Feel Pretty."

  She loves her teenagers so much that once, in front of three of his friends (who later told me about it), she told Seth that his acne made his face look like a piece of volcanic rock. Seth loves her so much that when she said it, he threw an algebra book at her.

  Seth is in my class at the Carstairs School, and his sisters are in the seventh grade. Seth's sisters are twins. Despite the fact that one of Wilma Sandroffs book chapters is titled "Your Kids Are Individuals," she named the twins—ready for this? Got an airsick bag handy?—Arlene and Marlene, and she made them dress identically until last year, when they were eleven. Last year they were picked up for shoplifting in Hit or Miss. They were shoplifting non-identical clothes. The social worker assigned to the case suggested to the Famous Dr. Sandroff that maybe she should let them dress the way they want (precisely the same suggestion that Dr. Sandroff had made to one million parents in her book). Now the twins dress the way they want, which outside of school is mostly in punk rock style, and they call their mother Plasticface behind her back—or to her face, when her face is looking out of the TV screen. The twins plan to run away as soon as they're old enough to get waitress jobs in some remote state where they can never be found.

  Everybody at the Carstairs School knows about the Sandroff twins' plan to run away. There is even a movement afoot, headed by Seth, to hold a bake sale to raise money for identical bus fares to Montana. But Wilma Sandroff doesn't know about it because she is always off appe
aring on talk shows, telling people how to get in touch with their adolescents. Arlene and Marlene plan to get in touch with her someday, by postcard with no return address.

  I feel sorry for Seth, but it's almost impossible to like him. His personality is like a rattlesnake's. When I recognized his voice on the phone, I recoiled a little, as if he might strike with poison fangs right through the wires. Somehow even his "Hello" sounded sarcastic.

  "So, what are you doing this summer, Enid?" Seth asked.

  "Not much. All my friends are off at camp. Trina Bentley's at horse camp, and Emily Went-worth's at tennis camp, and—" I stopped. It occurred to me that Trina and Emily wouldn't want me telling anything about them to gross Seth Sandroff.

  "I'm taking art classes at the museum," I added, "and babysitting. What are you doing this summer, Seth?"

  "Working at the station. They had to give me a job because my father owns it. But I like it okay." Seth was talking about his father's TV station.

  My eavesdropping mother appeared in the hall, where I was talking on the phone. She'd apparently been listening from the living room.

  "Is that Seth Sandroff?" she whispered loudly. "Ask him if he'd like to come over for dinner some night."

  My mother is actually a Wilma Sandroff fan. She has an autographed copy of that asinine book. I made a hideous face at her and formed the words "Go away" silently with my mouth. My mother shrugged and went away.

  "—pretty sneaky," Seth was saying. I hadn't heard the first part because of my mother.

  "What? What's pretty sneaky?" I asked. "I didn't hear what you said."

  Seth laughed, an evil sort of laugh. "I said I know what you've been doing, Enid. And who you're hanging out with." His voice sounded like those guys in old movies, the ones who say, "We know you have the secret formula, heh-heh."

  I tried to figure out what he meant. The people in my art class are mostly kids from suburban schools, kids I hardly know at all. They seem nice enough, most of them. But I don't hang out with them.