Summer of the Gypsy Moths (11 page)

“
I
caught Treb digging like crazy earlier. Right where those pumpkins are. I figure you got something dead in your fertilizer. Probably fish meal. Sorry. Don't think he did any damage, though. I smoothed it all back. Although…”

I forced myself to breathe naturally. In and out. Through my nose. Louise was deep, really deep.

“Although a funny thing—I didn't see any sign of those pumpkins of yours. It's been two weeks. They ought to have sprouted by now….”

“Huh,” I said, and my voice was only a little squeaky. “
That's
weird.”

“Well, thanks for telling us,” Angel said. She took a step toward the door, but George wasn't going anywhere.

“Where's Louise?” he asked.

“She's out,” Angel answered.

George looked puzzled. “Her car's here.”

“Her boyfriend picked her up,” Angel said, practically yawning with how bored she was trying to sound. As if Louise went out with boyfriends every day.

George didn't even try to hide his surprise. “Her
boyfriend?
”

“Yep, her new boyfriend. They're on a date. The one who sent her those roses over there. He left his jacket.”

I busied myself washing some dishes because I couldn't even look at Angel.

“Louise has a boyfriend? Since when?”

“Since a long time ago, actually. He's actually her old boyfriend. But he went out on a spy mission years ago, and he got caught and everyone thought he was dead. And then he got amnesia, which is why he forgot about her all these years. Do you want to look at his jacket?”

“Look at his…? Ah…no. No thanks. I'll be off. Those fish aren't going to catch themselves, you know.”

 

Later that night, I sat down with a notebook and a pen, doing something I never thought I'd get to do until I was
an adult. Angel walked into the kitchen just as I was finishing, and my pride took over my good sense. “My first one,” I said, holding up my notebook.

“First what?” Angel asked, pretending to be bored.

“My first hint. I'm sending a hint to Heloise. And the best part is that it's for one of her favorite subjects—old panty hose! Hints about onion bags are actually the most popular. Old panty hose are second, though—I've got about a dozen hints about those.”

“Old panty hose? Who do you know who even has old panty hose?” Angel glanced up toward Louise's room. “Oh, right.”

“Right,” I said. And I guess I was just kind of crazy with relief and happiness from my afternoon, because there's no other explanation for what I did next: I handed her my notebook. “What do you think?”

Angel read aloud,
“Dear Heloise, I love your column. I think if more people took your advice, the world would be a better place. I am very proud to be able to tell you a new use for those old panty hose after they get runs in them. You can tie pieces of them around blueberry bush stems (or other trees or bushes!) and slather them with Crisco so gypsy moth caterpillars won't climb up and eat all the leaves! Sincerely, your friend, Stella. P.S. Please feel free to use my real name.”

I looked up at Angel, and too late I saw my mistake—she was thinking up something smart to say to ruin my
letter. But then her expression changed.

“That's a good one,” she said, all sweet. “I'm going to write her a letter, too.”

“You can't just write her a letter,” I explained. “Heloise is very busy. She gets hundreds of letters a week, and she has to test out all those hints. Of course she has a whole bunch of people to help her now. Still, she can't take time to just say ‘Hi, how are you?' kind of stuff. You can only write if you have a really good hint.” Like mine. Which Heloise was going to love.

“Oh, I have a really good hint all right,” she said. She took my pen and ripped a fresh page out of my notebook. When she sat down at the table, I stood behind her because I couldn't help it—I wanted to know what her hint was.

Dear Heloise,
she wrote.
I have a really good hint for what to do with those old panty hose after they get runs in them.

“You can't just copy mine,” I warned her.

“Don't worry. This is definitely my own idea.” She gave me another big smile—this time so fake she might as well have been wearing wax teeth. I read what she wrote anyway:
The best part of my hint is that it will work for onion bags, too: THROW THEM AWAY!!!

I tore up her letter and threw it at her, which just made her laugh.

I
went outside to put my letter in the mailbox, and then I walked around back and lay down on the picnic table. What made me maddest was that she was ridiculing Heloise—Heloise, who never did anything but good in the world, who made millions of people's lives better. I went over some of my favorite tips I'd learned from her, and after a while, I calmed down.

There was no moon, but a couple of the cottages had yellow lights on in the bedrooms. Fireflies drifted up like embers from an imaginary campfire, and the air was soft and sweet with honeysuckle. It was a pretty night. The
phrase reminded me of what George had said that first time we'd met him—that it was a pretty day. I wondered if he was on his boat now, with his crew. I wondered if he slept at sea sometimes, if his sleep “fingerprint” had to do with the waves.

“Shove over.”

I shimmied over to the edge of the table. Angel arranged herself on the other edge. Not touching. The crickets stopped chirping, as if they were waiting to see what would happen next. After a while, her flip-flop brushed my sneaker. I shifted my foot away.

She tapped it again, harder. “About tonight,” she said.

I wasn't in the mood to talk about it, but a small “hmmm” slipped out.

“I'm sorry. But you're kind of obsessed with this Heloise person.”

“I know I am,” I said after a while.

“So what is it with her, anyway?”

I clasped my hands under my head and sighed. I still didn't want to talk about it, but I was suddenly too tired not to. Being an iceberg takes a lot of effort. “When my grandmother died, we had to clean out her stuff. My mother said I could keep one thing, and she'd have to yard-sale the rest. I picked her Hints from Heloise clippings.”

“How come?”

“Because you could count on things at my grandmother's. Everything was always where it belonged. You could go blind at my grandmother's house and you'd do fine—you'd never trip over a pile of laundry or crash into a chair that had been tossed into the hall. By the time we had to clean out my grandmother's, I'd been living with my mother in this little apartment for a couple of months, and well, it was really different.”

I stopped. It suddenly hurt to draw a breath. I had missed my grandmother so much when we were cleaning out her stuff. I had missed her Hints-from-Heloise home. I had been so scared by how my mother had paced and paced in that little apartment.

I breathed in, taking careful little sips. “Anyway. I figured maybe those clippings held some secrets to how things were at my grandmother's, so I should pick them. Since then, I've been collecting them myself, mostly from magazines I find lying around, in recycling and stuff. A couple of times I ripped them out of magazines in waiting rooms—I don't think that's stealing, do you? Well, I guess maybe it is.”

“Nah,” Angel said. “I don't think you should worry about that.”

I tipped my head back. Even upside down, Louise's house looked just right. “You know, if Louise had had
grandchildren, I bet they would have loved visiting here. I wish I'd told her I appreciated things like how she always made chili on Sundays, or always had cupcake liners in the baking cupboard or stamps and envelopes in the drawer. She was always prepared.”

“I guess,” Angel said. She was quiet for a long minute after that. “I'm sorry for messing with you about that letter,” she said at last.

“That's okay. I don't have much of a sense of humor these days. Too hungry.”

Angel snaked her hand into her pocket and pulled out two Dum Dums. “I had the brilliant idea of checking my winter jacket yesterday.” She handed me one. “Truce?”

We lay there for a while, considering the sky and how delicious a stale Dum Dum could taste. And then I heard it. “Listen to that, Angel. That raining sound. It's gypsy moth caterpillars. George told me. I really wish we didn't have to lie to him, by the way. About Louise having a boyfriend, I mean. Anyway, he said these caterpillars chew all night and their droppings rain down. It's called frass.” I rolled over to face her. “Why didn't you admit you heard it when I asked you?”

Angel cocked her head, listening. “I've never heard that before.”

“Come on. When you lie in bed and everything else is
quiet, you have to be able to hear it. Why wouldn't you tell me?”

Angel shrugged. “I don't hear anything at night. I sleep with my earphones on.”

“Oh.” I finished the lollipop, making sure I had extracted every molecule of candy from the stick. It occurred to me that since I'd just spilled so much to Angel, maybe I could get away with asking a question. “What's with the music all the time, anyway?”

“It's not just music,” Angel said. “It's fado. Portuguese songs about fate. You wouldn't understand.”

“So explain it.”

“You can't explain fado, you have to feel it. It's about
saudade
, and there's no English for it. The closest might be ‘the ache of missing someone,' but that's not it.”

“So it's songs about missing people?”

“It can be. It's about how hard life is. About how dangerous the sea is, how much love hurts, about being poor. Sad stuff like that. Actually, mournful is a better word.” Angel levered herself up on her elbows. “In fact, that's how you know if your fado performance was successful—if your audience is crying.”

“So why do you listen to it?”

“My mother was a
fadista
. She used to perform at a club in New Bedford. The CD was hers. She listened to it, and
now I listen to it.”

And then I put it together. “So that's what I heard that afternoon. Huh…fado.”

Angel shook her head. “I don't have speakers. You must have heard something else, maybe a radio from the cottages.”

“No. It was coming from upstairs, from your side, I'm sure.”

Angel's face closed. She rolled off the picnic table and went inside.

Angel was wrong. I did understand about
saudade
. I knew the ache of missing someone. The only thing was, sometimes I didn't know who that person was.

Suddenly, I felt a prickle on my ankle. I brushed at it, but the bristly thing stuck. I stifled a scream and slapped the gypsy moth caterpillar off. Then I marched inside, pulled out Louise's gardening books, and set to work learning about the enemy.

Scientific name:
Lymantria dispar
. Carolus Linnaeus is a hero of mine. He's the one who classified everything—every single living thing. He put it in a family tree and gave it a name that makes sense. That guy was all about orderliness. I bet if he and Heloise had lived at the same time, they would have gotten married. If Heloise and Carl had had a kid, that kid would have been a lot like me. Anyway, the
name Linnaeus gave the gypsy moth means “destroyer.”

And according to Louise's gardening books, the gypsy moth is one of the worst invasive pests. It was brought to the United States in 1869 by a French scientist living in Massachusetts, who thought if he bred them with silk-worms, he'd end up with a tough moth that spun silk. Instant billionairehood, he probably figured. What he ended up with instead was a big mess: It wasn't love at first sight for the two species, and then some of the gypsy moths escaped into the wild. Within a couple of years, they were spreading like crazy, devouring the delicious forests of New England.

Or the caterpillars were. When they first emerge from their eggs, the larvae hang from branches by long silken threads. The wind spreads them, sometimes a mile or more away. The caterpillars grow by molting five or six times, eating constantly at night between the molts, until they turn into moths, sometime in July.

I put the book down and rolled over and scratched where the caterpillar had been stuck. My skin crawled all night.

M
onday evening, I took the first babysitting job. It was for Katie Sandpiper, while the rest of the family went out for a baseball game. “Katie's a little too
fragile
for crowds tonight. We've been having a meltdown here,” Katie's mother told me on the phone.

When I walked in, Katie's face was red and furious.

“She got gum in her hair,” Mrs. Sandpiper explained. “I've been trying to cut it out, but she won't let me get near her. Maybe you could try when she's…” Mrs. Sandpiper tipped her head onto her folded hands and closed her eyes.

“I'm not going to sleep!” Katie warned her fiercely. “Not ever!”

One look at Katie's face and you could almost believe that.

As soon as the car had pulled away, I checked the cupboard. “Katie, how about if we put some peanut butter in your hair?” I asked.

“Okay!” she agreed, as if she was astounded at what a good idea I'd had. “And jelly in yours!”

“No, this one's just for you. Come on with me.” I handed Katie the jar of Jif and walked her over to our house. Angel was at the kitchen table, hunched over a catalog.

“This is Katie. Watch her for a second.” I plunked Katie on the counter, then went up to my room and read over the hint that I had remembered.

I came back and spooned out a clump of peanut butter and completely wrapped the gum snarl with it. Angel put her catalog down to watch, but she didn't comment.

“Where's your mommy?” Katie asked as I began to work it in.

“She's not here. Bend your head down.”

“She's in the garden,” Angel offered. “She's
always
in the garden.”

I shot Angel a look, and she raised her eyebrows,
innocent. “Well, she is. In fact, Katie, we can't get her
out
of the garden.”

“Oh.” Katie leaned up to my ear. “Is that your sister?” she asked in a loud whisper.

“That's my…um…friend. That's Angel.”

While Katie and Angel eyed each other, I worked the peanut butter in. Gradually, the gum wad broke up into oily balls, just as Heloise had promised. I began tugging the pieces out.

“So where's your kids?” Katie asked me.

“Katie, I'm eleven. Angel is twelve. Actually, I'll be twelve, too, next Thursday. We're too young to have kids. Now lean over the sink for the last part.”

Katie asked a dozen more questions as I lathered dish soap through her greasy hair, and a dozen more while I washed that out. Back at the cottage, she never stopped chattering while we ate Popsicles and I taught her to play Candy Land. She was still at it when her family got home.

“I beat Stella twice times at Candy Land, and she doesn't have any kids,” she told her mother as she paid me. “And her mommy was in the garden tonight.”

Mrs. Sandpiper looked up. “How's she doing? Getting around better?”

“Oh, about the same.”

And then she noticed. “Hey!” she said, riffling through
Katie's hair in amazement. “Look at you!”

I told her how I'd done it, and she peeled another ten out of her wallet. “Genius bonus.”

 

Tuesday was the Fourth of July. Mrs. Gull came over to ask if we wanted to come to the parade with them. Angel and I exchanged fast looks and shook our heads right away.

“I think we'll just hang around with Louise,” Angel said. “Keep her company.”

I nodded and slid Angel a smile. That was exactly how I was feeling too. “Do you think about her much?” I asked when everybody had left. “Do you ever wonder where she
is
?”

Angel made a face and yanked her thumb in the direction of the garden. “Just past the zucchini,” she said.

“That's just her body. I know where that is. I mean the part of her that was kind of crabby, but kind of looking out for us, too. Like when she made brownies that time, she pretended it was just to use up some eggs before they went bad. You know, the part that was…her? Do you ever wonder where that is?”

“Nope,” Angel said. “It's out there with the rest of her, I guess. With the worms.”

“All right, all right. Change of subject.” I went to the window. “It's kind of foggy, but I think I'll go to the beach.
You want to come with me?”

“I don't swim.”

“Oh.” And then I decided to risk it. “Because of…your father?”

“I don't swim,” she said again, sharper. “I don't know how.” She left the kitchen, and I heard her climb up the stairs to her room.

I followed her and knocked on her closed door. “Look, I could teach you,” I offered. “To swim. You want to?”

When Angel didn't answer, I opened the door a little.

She was on her bed, thumbing through a catalog. “No,” she said without looking up. She didn't seem mad, but she didn't seem in any mood to be argued with, either. I decided to change the subject again.

I waved my arms over the sea of wrinkled clothes that carpeted the room from wall to wall. “Um…time to mow the laundry?”

Angel turned around and pretended to be seeing the problem for the first time. She raised her shoulders in a “Go figure” shrug. “Louise isn't keeping up,” she mused.

“Funny,” I said. But then I thought about it. Louise always did our laundry. “Puh. I don't like people messing around my machines” was what she said every time I tried to do a load myself. She was so firm about it, I didn't bother telling her I'd been operating washing machines and dryers
since I was nine. But maybe Angel hadn't.

“Angel, do you know how to do laundry?”

Angel rolled over and studied the ceiling as she considered the question. “I get the basic concept. But…um…” She flipped over again and went back to her catalog.

“Look. Bring it down. We have to do all the wash from the cottages anyway.”

Angel let out a big dramatic sigh, but she got up. We stripped her bed and rolled her clothes into the sheets. I led Angel down to the cellar and introduced her to the machines and how they worked—Angel looked like she was taking a tour of the NASA rocket launch controls. And all day long, we did laundry—five loads of sheets and towels for the cottages and three whole loads for Angel's things. Afterward, I gave Angel a lesson in folding, and she devoted herself to folding her clothes with so much care, you'd have thought she was making origami cranes. In between all this, we watched television and ate up the rest of the cottage food.

When it was time for Louise's soap, I went upstairs to take a nap—for real, this time. I woke up in a panic. In my dream, I was trying to remember who Lorraine M. was, and it was close, but every time I tried to grab it, it drifted away.

I got up and crossed to my window. The fog had lifted
a little, but everything still looked gray and soft. Below, in the garden, Angel was giving her report.

“He walks in, thinking he's going to have this great reunion with his wife—he's got the flowers and the chocolate, the whole deal. He walks in, all ‘Oh, darling, I know it's a shock, but how I've missed you!' stuff. And then he stops. He looks at the table. Two wineglasses. Two. He gets the picture and storms off before she can explain.

“Then for the rest of the show, all anyone talks about is how
confused
they all are. They're all so confused about him appearing out of the blue. They're confused about how they feel about him. They're worried they're going to confuse him. He's worried he's confusing them. They should call it Lame Valley, if you ask me. Oh, I did the laundry today. You have some cool machines.”

At the window I couldn't help smiling.

 

That evening, I sat on the back steps watching the families have their cookouts. The last light of sunset pouring over the scene reminded me of syrup, but that was probably because I was so hungry. The kids ran around with sparklers, and once in a while a firecracker bloomed in the distance with a deep thud.

Angel came out and sat at the far end of the steps. “Happy Independence Day.” She blew through her hair.
“We sure are independent.”

“We sure are.” In front of me were the cottages that were going to need cleaning again on Saturday, and behind me was Louise's house, where there wasn't any food and there was an endless stream of chores to do. I felt like a traitor to my country, but just then, independence didn't seem all it was cracked up to be. Independence seemed like another way of saying nobody cared about you.

“Angel, the other places you lived. Were they that bad? Worse than here?”

Angel leaned over and scratched at a mosquito bite on her shin. “No. Well, one was, but mostly they were okay—they were okay places to live. The people took in foster kids because they wanted to do a good deed, I guess.” She paused and rested her head on her knee. “But I wasn't anybody's
destino
, you know?”

She went in and left me alone with my independence again.