Taking Care of Terrific Read online

  Her shoes were tied now, but her coat still flapped around her, and her hair still flew from its hairpins in gray strands and wisps. It was she who had been singing the ancient lullaby with Tom. Now she muttered to herself, hefted her purse more firmly onto her shoulder, and began to turn away.

  The saxophone player called to her and to Tom Terrific. "Couple of good singers, you two," he said. "We could get us a gig in a club somewhere, hey?"

  But the woman wasn't listening; she had turned and was shuffling down the path. Tom Terrific scratched a mosquito bite on his ankle and said shyly, "I know lots of songs."

  "Me too," said the tall black man as he began to take the saxophone apart and put it into its case. "You come around here a lot?"

  "I'm his babysitter," I explained. "We'll be coming here most afternoons. How about you?"

  "Long as she doan rain. Maybe we could make some more music together, whaddaya think, fella?"

  "Sure," said Tom T.

  The musician snapped his case closed and stood up. Tall, tall, taller. His legs unfolded like umbrella handles. He came over to where we were sitting on the grass and stood beside us, his shadow extending out across the path. "What's your names?" he asked.

  "Cynthia," I lied, "and this is Tom. Tom Terrific."

  The man leaned down, held out his giant, skinny hand, and shook ours, one after the other. "You can call me Hawk," he said.

  "Hi, Hawk," said Tom. "You play good."

  "And you sing good." He glanced at my sketch pad. "You don't draw so bad, either, Cynthia. Man, it's hot. I'm gonna get me a Popsicle. You guys want one? And where'd that lady go to?"

  We looked around, but the bag lady was gone.

  "I have to have Tom home in half an hour," I explained, "and I'm not supposed to let him eat stuff. But a Popsicle sure would taste good. Hey, Tom, if I get you a Popsicle, could you not drip on your shirt so your mom won't know?"

  "I won't drip," said Tom Terrific. "I promise."

  So Hawk and Tom and I walked over to the man at the Charles Street edge of the Garden, the man with the Popsicle cart. We all bought green ones. I paid for mine and for Tom's, and he ate it carefully, holding it out in front of him so that the melting ice fell to the path and not down the sleeves of his shirt.

  "Gotta split," said Hawk, after he had devoured his Popsicle in two bites and Tom and I were still slurping at ours. "See you guys tomorrow."

  "Long as she doan rain," Tom reminded him.

  Hawk grinned his wide, slow grin. "Long as she doan rain," he said. He loped off across the Public Garden, carrying his saxophone case.

  Tom Terrific and I went for a walk along the path, finishing our Popsicles, before I took him home. It was almost five o'clock. Tom was counting something again. I could hear him murmuring "fourteen, fifteen" between slurps.

  The woman in the black coat was sitting on a bench near the Beacon Street side of the Garden as we headed toward the exit there. She was fiddling with her pocketbook and muttering.

  "Hi," said Tom Terrific cheerfully to her. "We got Popsicles but I'm not going to tell my mother."

  "Root beer," I heard the woman mutter, not looking at us. "They used to have root beer and it tasted like the root beer my father used to make, but not now, oh no, now they don't have root beer ones anymore, they say nobody wants them, they only have green and orange, but they never asked anybody, really, they just decided that about root beer without consulting anyone, they always do that, decide things without consulting anyone..."

  Standing there, finishing our Popsicles, we watched her for a long moment. I didn't have any idea what she was talking about. She wasn't talking to us, anyway. I think she was talking to her pocketbook.

  Finally we walked away, through the Garden exit, to go back to Tom's house. Tom kept counting. "Twenty-one, twenty-two," I heard him saying to himself.

  "Now, Tom Terrific," I said as we turned onto West Cedar Street, "you'll have to change back to Joshua when you get home."

  "I know." He hugged his stuffed bear and plodded along beside me.

  "And we broke a few rules. We ate stuff, and we talked to strangers."

  "I won't tell," he said firmly, and I believed him.

  Just before we reached his house, he said suddenly, "They shouldn't do that."

  "Do what?"

  "What she said. They stopped having root beer Popsicles and they didn't even ask her. It was the kind she liked because it made her think about her daddy."

  "Yeah," I said. "I guess so."

  He tugged at my hand to make me pay attention. "People like to think about their daddies," he pointed out.

  I sensed then that there wasn't a Mr. Cameron around, only a Ms. "I know they do," I said, and I squeezed his hand.

  "Probably they all want root beer Popsicles," he said sadly.

  "All who?"

  Tom Terrific sighed. We were on the steps of his house now, and in a minute he would be Joshua Cameron again. "All the bag ladies," he explained patiently. "There were twenty-four bag ladies in the Garden. I counted them."

  Chapter 7

  Dinner at my house takes many different forms. Sometimes my mother has to work late at the hospital, so Dad and I eat together; he usually reads the Wall Street Journal, and I stare out the window while I chew. Every now and then he remembers I am there and looks up and says something like, "What happened at school today?" Then I come up with some incident from History class, or Gym, which he listens to politely. Or else I remind him that it is summer, or spring vacation, or whatever; he nods, says "Of course," and goes back to his paper.

  Sometimes Dad has to work late at the office; then Mom and I eat together. She thinks it is the height of rudeness to read at the dinner table. She talks. She asks my opinion about world news, Boston politics, the weather, or any book by Jane Austen. My mother read all of Jane Austen when she was in college; she hasn't had time to read any books since, only articles about brain tumors.

  None of those things interest me. But that doesn't matter, because when I try to give my opinion in response to my mother's questions, she watches me when I talk. Then she says things like:

  "I wonder if Dr. McCracken took your braces off too soon. That left incisor doesn't seem quite straight to me, Enid."

  Or: "You haven't been snipping at your own bangs, have you, Enid? Call and make an appointment to have a trim tomorrow. You look very jagged across the forehead."

  Or: "I really think it's time to bundle up some of your clothes and take them to a Goodwill box. You're not still fond of that shirt, are you?"

  (It all goes with the name. Enid. Squalid. Sordid. Putrid.)

  But some nights all three of us are home for dinner. Then Dad doesn't read, and Mom doesn't scrutinize my skin, hair, teeth, and clothes for flaws. Mrs. Kolodny wears a clean white apron; she sets the table with grandmother's silver and lights candles. We have Conversation.

  Here is what Conversation sounded like that night at my house:

  Me: "This afternoon I babysat for this really cute little boy who lives over on West Cedar Street."

  Dad: "Where on earth did Mrs. Kolodny buy this beef, Evelyn? It's like shoe leather."

  Mom: "I assume you saw this morning's Boston Globe. Can you imagine nurses threatening to strike? It's an absolute outrage."

  Me: "His name is Joshua Warwick Cameron the Fourth. How about that for an outrage?"

  Dad: "This beef is an outrage. Did she get this at DeLuca's? Enid, go out to the kitchen and get me a steak knife. You shouldn't need a steak knife to cut roast beef."

  (Enid exits, stage left, to kitchen. Enid returns, with steak knife.)

  Mom: "What ever happened to humanity, anyway? If those nurses go on strike, who's going to suffer? The patients, that's who."

  Dad: "I was served better beef than this in the army, in 1951, in Korea."

  Me: "I'm going to take care of him every afternoon, from three to five, if the weather's decent. I'll take him out for walks and to the Public Garden and stuff
."

  Mom: "And can you guess what their so-called grievance is? That they weren't consulted about the changes in scheduling. How on earth can the administration consult every single employee in a hospital, for heaven's sake? Scheduling is an administrative decision."

  Then a weird thing began to happen. Up until that moment, the conversation had been absolutely boring to me. I didn't care about the texture of the beef; mine seemed just fine. And I didn't care about the administrative problems of the hospital where my mother works. But all of a sudden, a little bell began to go off in my head. It was dinging "Root beer. Root beer. Root beer." I looked up from my plate.

  Dad (laying down his knife and fork): "Enough. I have to battle with partners and clients all day long. I'm not going to fight with roast beef on top of that. I'm going to go watch the news. Speak to that woman about the purchasing of meat, Evelyn."

  Exit Father, stage right.

  Then Mom and I were alone at the dinner table. She took one last bite of baked potato, sighed, and pushed her plate a little bit away from her. She looked tired and exasperated. But for once the exasperation wasn't focused on me.

  "Mom," I said, "what would happen if just one nurse complained about the changes in schedules?"

  "One nurse? Nothing. She'd be told to take it or leave it. They can always replace one nurse."

  "What's going to happen if all the nurses go on strike?"

  She sighed again. "They'll negotiate. The hospital can't function with all the nurses out. Eventually they'll come to some satisfactory arrangement. In the meantime, I have several patients who..."

  She went on talking, but I stopped listening. My mind was off in the world of root beer Popsicles. Okay; so root beer Popsicles aren't as important as people lying in hospital beds; I know that. But the principle seemed the same. I kept thinking of that old woman, sitting all alone on a park bench with her worldly goods in a big black pocketbook and maybe no place to sleep that night except in a doorway, and I could hear her muttering, "They never asked anybody really, they decide things without consulting anyone, they always do that..."

  Maybe it wasn't as important in the great scheme of things as nurses, whose schedules had been changed without anyone consulting them. Maybe it wasn't as life-and-death as people in hospital beds, people who were sick and needed nurses to bring their medicine and take their temperature and maybe just talk to them a little bit if they were scared.

  But it was the same basic thing. It was comfort. What if all you had in the whole world, besides a black bag and a chilly doorway, was a memory of a father who once made root beer, and sometimes a Popsicle that brought that memory back? And what if they took that little bit of comfort away without asking you?

  One old lady. As Mom said, one person complaining means nothing. Take it or leave it, they would say. But if a lot of people went on strike...

  And Joshua Warwick Cameron IV, Tom Terrific, champion counter, bless him, had told me that there were twenty-four bag ladies in the Public Garden.

  After dinner was over and Mom went into the study to watch the news with Dad, I wandered out to the kitchen to visit with Mrs. Kolodny while she cleaned up the dishes. She was puttering around, humming, and she had all the machinery running: the dishwasher, the garbage disposal, even the washing machine and dryer. Mrs. Kolodny says she likes to run the machinery; it makes her feel like Captain Kirk in Star Trek, gives her a sense of power.

  "Hi," I said. She didn't hear me. It sounded like the Industrial Revolution in there, with all those engines going at once. I pushed the buttons that stopped the washing machine and dryer, then the switch for the garbage disposal, and finally she turned around, startled by the silence. Only the dishwasher was churning away now.

  "Oh," she said. "Hi. You didn't eat your broccoli."

  "I know. I hate broccoli." I flopped down in a kitchen chair and kicked off my sneakers.

  "Me too," said Mrs. Kolodny. "You want some junk food?"

  "Sure. What do we have?"

  She reached into the back of a cupboard, pulled out two Ring-Dings, and tossed me one. "Don't tell your mother."

  "I won't," I said, talking around a mouthful of sticky chocolate. "Hey, Mrs. Kolodny, I want to talk to you about something."

  She sat down heavily in the opposite chair and unwrapped her Ring-Ding. "You ever read Jane Airy?" she asked.

  I told you already that Mrs. Kolodny is a reader. Almost every afternoon she goes over to Newbury Street, to the secondhand paperback bookstore.

  But I haven't told you what she looks like. Mrs. Kolodny is without a doubt the most colorful person I know. Her hair is blue. Honestly. She dyes it that color; she told me so. It's actually white, but once, years ago, she put on some stuff to "brighten up the white"—that's what the label said it was supposed to do—and her hair turned blue. And she liked it. So now she uses the same stuff, once a month, and dyes her hair blue.

  Her skin is sort of yellow-gray. Her nose is bright red, and the whites of her eyes are pink. Through her support stockings, you can see that her legs are crisscrossed with knotted purple veins.

  She's an honest-to-God human rainbow.

  My mother says that with the exception of the blue hair, which is just an idiotic idiosyncrasy, everything else is a visible symptom of a serious illness. I heard her tell Mrs. Kolodny that once. She wanted her to make an appointment with an internist.

  "You have visible symptoms," I heard my mother say, "of liver damage, high blood pressure, and inefficacy of the peripheral vascular system. I want you to go to Dr. Goldberg for a complete check-up. You are a seriously ill woman."

  "Dr. Crowley," Mrs. Kolodny said huffily, "do I get the housework done to your satisfaction?"

  "Yes," said my mother.

  "Then you and I got no problem. The housework you can complain about if you want. My body, that's my problem, not yours."

  "But—" said my mother.

  "Butt out," said Mrs. Kolodny.

  If I ever told my mother to butt out, she would hustle me off to Wilma Sandroff's office for intensive therapy, and I would have "hostile interpersonal relationships" stamped forever on a chart.

  But nobody hustles Mrs. Kolodny.

  "No," I said to her, licking frosting off my fingers, "I never read Jane Airy. I never heard of it. Lend it to me if it's any good. Listen, I want to ask you a personal question."

  She tensed up. She doesn't like personal questions. Her bloodshot eyes narrowed to slits and she looked at me very suspiciously.

  "How much does my father pay you?" I asked. "Just in general terms. Do you consider yourself well paid?"

  She relaxed. She didn't consider money too personal. "Yeah," she said. "He pays me enough."

  "Well," I asked, "what if he didn't? What would you do if you thought he wasn't paying you enough? Or if you didn't like the working conditions?"

  She shrugged and began licking frosting off her own fingers. "I'd tell him so," she said. "Listen, in that Jane Airy book—"

  "Wait a minute," I interrupted. "What if you told him so and he said, 'Tough'? Then you'd be out of a job, right?"

  "I suppose," she said with a sigh. The sigh meant: so what?

  I was getting excited. "You'd be out of a job because they could get another housekeeper, right? But what if they couldn't? What if every housekeeper on Marlborough Street—no; every housekeeper in Boston —got together, and they all said they wouldn't work unless everybody's pay was raised?"

  Now she looked suspicious again. "Look, Enid, if you're trying to get me to join some club—"

  (Notice that name, Enid? The sound of it? How it has the same ending as stupid?)

  "No." I sighed. "It was just hypothetical. I've just been thinking about something. About the power that people have if they band together."

  Mrs. Kolodny heaved herself to her feet. "I'm not the banding-together sort. You want to band me together with someone, it better be tall, dark and handsome. Listen, in Jane Airy, she goes to work for this guy named Mr
. Rochester. Now this Mr. Rochester, he—"

  "You mean Jane Eyre!" I said. "Sure, I read that in school! That's a pretty good book!"

  "Don't tell me how it comes out," she warned. "I'm just getting to the good part now. But listen, if I ever want a different job, that's the kind of job I want, with a guy like Mr. Rochester."

  I got up and headed toward the kitchen door. I could tell she was dying to turn all her machinery back on. "I wasn't really talking about jobs, anyway," I said. "I was sort of talking about root beer Popsicles."

  But she didn't hear me. All the engines were chugging away again, and she was humming at the top of her voice. A love song. Mrs. Kolodny, the Technicolor lady, is a real romantic at heart. Wait till she reads further and finds out what Mr. Rochester has locked away upstairs.

  Chapter 8

  Bearable would be staying home today, Tom Terrific said. He had come down with polio. So we were minus Bearable and heading down the front steps of his house when the door opened and his mother called us back.

  "Here, Enid," she said. "Excuse me, I mean Cynthia. Take this with you, and maybe you and Joshua can identify birds in the Public Garden."

  She handed me a book and I glanced at the title. A Field Guide to the Birds. I stood there looking a little puzzled.

  "I heard him as you were going out the front door," she explained, "asking if Hawk would be there today."

  I laughed nervously and put the book into my backpack with my sketch pad and pencils. "Oh," I said. "He was probably thinking of a robin or a pigeon or something."

  Tom Terrific was down on the brick sidewalk, examining a caterpillar who was trying to make it to his destination without getting squooshed. He looked up, overhearing us, and said, "It was a pigeon. I only said hawk for a joke." He squatted, picked up the fuzzy caterpillar carefully, and deposited it on the roots of a sturdy tree that was growing out of a rectangle of dirt near the curb.