Outside In (2 page)

“What do you mean,
sick?”
said Uncle Joe’s voice.

“We’re
all
—” We couldn’t hear the end of what Aunt Bonnie was saying.

“He did the right thing,” said Pete. “He died for what he believed in. But when I talk to you about what I believe in—”

Dave hauled me away from the wall, down the driveway toward the front of the house. I had a handful of ivy, which I dropped on his head. He brushed it off angrily.

I said, “Don’t you want to know what they’re fighting about?”

“Don’t you think I know? Martin Luther King,” said Dave.
“He”
—he wagged his head toward Pete in the house—“wants to join the army.”

“He’s only sixteen!”

“Yeah, well, he can join up in a couple of years.”

“So, why argue now?”

“Because he’s dumb enough to tell them about it.”

“Maybe he just wants them not to be surprised when he goes.”

“What, and miss all the fighting?”

“In Vietnam he won’t miss any fighting,” I said. Pete Asconti, one of those guys in camouflage clothes in the jungle?

“He wants them to fight with him here, now.”

“Well, they are.” We couldn’t hear the words anymore, but we could sure hear the voices. Aunt Bonnie sounded
as if she were crying, and Pete and Uncle Joe were just plain mad.

Dave fired the ball at the curb, and I missed the catch again. The ball was gone. Dave stormed up onto the front stoop of his house.

“You going in?” I asked.

He took a tennis ball out of the milk box and came and stood on the white dotted line in the middle of Marvin Road, flinging the ball at the curb and catching it on the fly. It was a good game, but I didn’t want to go up against Dave in the dark. I went across the road and sat on the white rock at the end of my driveway. My house waited behind me, old and gray with a wide front porch and two old pine trees that swept dark, graceful branches over the front yard.

Through the driveway window I could see Mom doing dishes, dancing to music from the big green radio on top of the refrigerator. The kitchen light shone on her strawberry blonde hair, the French braid rolled up and pinned neatly at the back of her neck. I could figure out what the radio was playing by the way Mom moved her body and her lips. “I Say a Little Prayer for You.”

She cranked open the window when she saw me, and the music came spilling out. “Chérie, don’t sit on the ground,” she called. “You’ll get a frozen derrière.”

Dave Asconti almost spit out his teeth laughing.

“I’m sitting on a rock!” But the window was already closing.

“What does Pete want to join the army for, anyway?” I asked.

“He wants to kill somebody, didn’t you know that?”

“He thinks he’s so big,” I said. But my mother still called him Little Petie.

“He’s going to kill
me
,” Dave said. Then he said, “They shot King on his balcony.”

“Huh?” That word,
balcony,
made me think of the one in
Romeo and Juliet.

“His hotel balcony.”

“What was he doing there?”

“Looking out, what do you think?”

I pictured the only hotels I knew. “At the beach?”

“Beach? What beach? It was Memphis, Tennessee!”

My rear felt bony on the rock. Dad was in our living room, watching the news like Uncle Joe and Aunt Bonnie and Pete, the blue light flickering out the uncurtained windows. Aimée was probably in there, too, ignoring the news, on the floor behind Dad’s chair, la la la, not thinking about a thing, playing with her elf dolls.

I could have gone in. I had math homework that wasn’t done yet. But I didn’t like the news, all those newspaper-gray movies of soldiers in Vietnam and pictures of the White House and people with signs, yelling. I couldn’t ignore them, any more than Dave could ignore his family.

Suddenly I was tired. I wanted to be inside my house, sitting on the floor, tying the twigs in my pocket into the shape of chairs or tables or boxes or something. Instead I sat outside and watched Dave field, letting my derrière freeze on the cold rock, both of us waiting for the day’s fighting to be over.

T
OUGH LUCK FOR DAVE,
Lucy had sold her paper route to me, not him. She said it would go to the highest bidder, and I bid fifteen dollars. She said I beat out Dave and Sandy, but I knew for a fact that Dave had made enough money shoveling snow all last winter to outbid me.

Lucy had unfolded our bids one by one, scrunched them up, put them in her blue jeans pocket, smiled, and said, “It’s yours, Chérie. When do you want to start?”

Dave said jealously that he’d sub for me if I got sick, as if he wished I’d get some disease. Lucy said she would, too, but I knew I’d ask Dave, since he was so interested in the
Bridgefield Bell,
always asking me what the biggest headline said.
BLACKS RIOT IN MANY CITIES
was what it was saying lately.

Dad said he was surprised that a sister would pull the route out from under her brother like that, but I figured Sandy got Lucy to do the bidding secretly because he was too lazy and addicted to the four o’clock movie for a job. Sandy could always figure out what went wrong with Uncle Joe’s slide projector and other machines, and he made money fixing, when he wanted to.

All this was beside the point. Lucy told me, when I rode with her on the route her last day, “I just wanted a girl to have it.”

My route was Marvin Road, Onion Lane, and Chauncey Road between Marvin and Henry Street. It made a triangular sort of block. Twenty-nine houses. Twenty-nine
Bridgefield Bells.

My job wasn’t the kind where I stood on a street corner yelling things like “Extra! Extra! Students face troops in Paris!” That was something I could hardly imagine (what students? Lucy and Pete?), never mind yell about. I thought, What if a customer came to the door and said, “So! What’s the news?” I read the paper and tried to figure it out. And, as they advised us in the newspaper office, I kept my eyes open in my neighborhood for events that might be a scoop. At any moment those first few weeks of my route, I was ready to report, like a girl version of Walter Cronkite, “Well, the way I see it, we’re beating holy heck out of the Vietcong, but there sure are a lot of them left. And Robert F. Kennedy is going to run for president. And how about those Mets?”

Nobody asked.

Aunt Bonnie’s dog’s name was Faux Pas, which sounded like Foe Pa. What it meant in French (Mom had thought of the name, of course) was up for discussion.

“It means breaking the rules,” Aunt Bonnie always said.

“Not exactly,” said Mom, who got all
A
s in French all the way through college. “It’s being impolite by mistake—like using the wrong fork or saying something you shouldn’t.”

“Like telling a secret?” I’d suggested.

“Like burping?” Aimée said, doing it.

“Faux
means ‘fake,’” said Aunt Bonnie. “Like faux fur.”

“No, false,” said Mom. “And
pas
is a move, an action,
like something in a dance.” She bumped her hip against Aunt Bonnie’s.

“One false move,” Dad had said to Faux Pas. “One false move, and you’re dead!” Faux Pas ignored him as she ignored all males.

Uncle Joe had looked up from the
Time
magazine he was reading, head down and nose hidden, in the corner of our living room. “It means a mistake.” He was right, I thought, because what else could you call adopting a dog that liked only girls when all you had in the house was boys?

We all went to the Ascontis’ to watch Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. Their house was bigger than ours.

I got plenty of news from the
Bridgefield Bell
and
Life
magazine. I didn’t need to see it all in real-live action on the TV screen. It was bad enough to see it lying around the bathroom floor after Dad had been in there for one of his extended stays.

Soldiers in Vietnam carrying their wounded buddies through the jungle. Helicopters that were probably made in Dad’s factory dropping off new soldiers to take the hurt ones’ places. Little kids waiting in line for food in Africa. People pointing across the hotel balconies to the room on the other side of the parking lot where the shot that had killed Dr. King had come from. The news showed the riots that happened after Dr. King was shot, in Chicago or Memphis or Washington, DC, and once, in nearby Hartford, Connecticut, while Uncle Joe swore and Dad said softly, “Not so much of that, Joe,” although I thought Dad really didn’t blame him.

Aunt Bonnie sat in silence, playing with her big hoop earrings.

Mom sat wiping tears away with her fingertips, then
rested the back of her hand against her cheekbone, across her mouth. “So brave,” she told me as we all were watching Mrs. King, elegant and still, in her black veil.

Dad said, “You’d be as brave if anything happened to me, Michelle. At least I hope you would.”

“If anything happened to you—well, it’d better happen to me, too, Patrick.” She ran her fingers through Dad’s rust-colored hair, looked into his very brown eyes.

My stomach dropped as if I were on a roller coaster. “Can’t we watch
The Dating Game
instead?” I asked desperately. They all gave me pitying looks. I stood up and brushed off my jeans as though they were full of crumbs, not knowing what to do with my hands.

“Chérie, why don’t you and Dave and Aimée go upstairs and make something?” Aunt Bonnie said. “David, get out those new Magic Markers.” Make something, draw something. But Aimée just sat behind Dad’s chair, the way she did at home, rocking her elf dolls in the little stick chairs I’d made. She didn’t seem to notice the TV.

Dave wasn’t bothered by the news, either. We weren’t even all the way up the stairs before he asked, “What did the paper say?”

“Today’s?”

“No, yesterday’s, stupid. Of course today’s!”

“Helicopters kill fifty Vietcong,” I said. I could still say a headline like that without wanting to throw up.

I’d read the helicopter headline twenty-nine times because it was printed on the part of the front page that showed along the fold, under the rubber band, of the twenty-nine papers I’d delivered.

Dave always wanted to know the numbers killed or wounded, because Uncle Joe did. It was Dave’s way of predicting what things would be like around his house.

Dave got out his markers in a bored sort of way and started looking for paper. His bookcases were full of books, and he couldn’t find any paper right away. I didn’t help, just watched.

Dave’s house was newer than ours, so while my room had old dark wallpaper with red things on it, his had shiny tan paneling. He had a painting that Aunt Bonnie had done of a baseball floating, or maybe it was flying. You couldn’t see any signs of movement, just the background of sky. No hand or glove or anything. He had a red rug, a Red Sox bedspread, and all those books. Nothing to make anything with except for Magic Markers and—

On top of the bookcase was a Mousetrap. Not a real mousetrap, but the game Mousetrap, a plastic set-up game of causes and effects. On the TV commercials the players changed how it went together every time, but Dave had set it up just once and left it.

Dave found paper and laid it across a book for me. But I dropped it on the bed and went on studying the Mousetrap.

“Here’s the marble, Cher,” Dave said, and tossed it to me. Of course I missed it. I smiled and picked it up off the rug. He sat down on the floor with
Kidnapped.
It felt weird, how we were hiding out from the news up there in his room. It was a relief, too. He read, and I figured out how the Mousetrap worked.

I dropped the marble into a little basket at one end of the game. It dropped down onto a seesaw, which sprang up and hit a lever, which rang a bell, which pulled a string, and so on until a clamp released and a plastic net dropped down to trap a mouse.

“Set it up again if you want,” Dave said politely.

“I don’t want to set it up,” I said. “I want to build it.”

“How?” His dark eyebrows wrinkled.

“Out of stuff,” I said.

“What stuff?”

Sticks and plastic gimp string and buttons and … How did they mold plastic anyway? Maybe Dad would know, or Aunt Bonnie. “I’m not sure.”

Dave shook his head and went back to his book. I sat on the rug beside him and picked up a marker. I drew the mousetrap, so I could take it home and begin to make one of my own.

Dave sat closer and rested his book partly on my knee. Once he leaned over and looked at my drawing. I smelled old book, grass, pineapple Life Savers. “Where are you going to get a mouse from?” he asked.

“That’s the whole point,” I said. He grinned at me, went back to his reading.

After a few moments he looked at my drawing again. “My grandpa in Massachusetts?” he said. “He sets mousetraps. They break the mouse’s neck, you know. When the little bar snaps down.”

“Thanks for the gory details,” I said.

“It’s reality, Chérie,” he said.

“So’s this,” I said, and showed him my fist.

He grabbed my wrist. “Anything to hold my hand,” I said. He pushed his feet against my knees, shoved himself away from me across the rug. But then he stopped, his feet still on my knees. We sat there like that—Dave read, I drew—and waited out Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral.