“I beg your pardon?”
“It just has that sound to it, somehow, like maybe it could be.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ian said. They had reached a red light, and he was able to glance over his shoulder at her. “Juice? What?”
“And that pool is full of germs; I think everybody pees in it,” Agatha said. “And Sister Audrey makes the sandwiches so far ahead they’re all dried out before we get to eat them. And anyhow, what’s she doing in a children’s camp? A person who’d put a baby in a Dempster Dumpster!”
By now, those words were like some secret joke. Thomas giggled. Ian looked at him in the rearview mirror.
“You’re laughing?” he asked.
Thomas got serious.
“You think Sister Audrey is funny?”
A driver behind them honked his horn; the light had turned green. Ian didn’t seem to hear. “She’s just a kid,” he told Thomas. “She’s not much older than you are, and had none of your advantages. I can’t believe you would find her situation comical.”
“Ian, cars are getting mad at us,” Agatha said.
Ian sighed and started driving again.
I’m just a kid too, Thomas wanted to tell him. How would I know what her situation is?
They took a left turn. Daphne sucked her thumb and slid her curled index finger back and forth across her upper lip, the way she liked to do when she was tired. Thomas kept his eyes wide open so no one would see the tears. He wished he had his grandma. Ian was his favorite person in the world, but when you were sad or sick to your stomach who did you want? Not Ian. Ian had no soft nooks to him. Thomas tipped his head back against the seat and felt his eyes growing cool in the breeze from the window.
On Lang Avenue, with its low white houses and the sprinklers spinning under the trees, Ian parked and got out. He climbed the steps to Cicely’s porch, meanwhile taking off his cap. “Ooh,” Agatha said. “He’s got horrible hat-head.” Thomas had never heard the phrase before, but he saw instantly what she meant. All around Ian’s shiny brown hair the cap had left a deep groove. “He looks like a goop,” Agatha said. That was her way of comforting Thomas, he knew. It didn’t really help much, but he tried to smile anyhow.
When Cicely came to the door, she was wearing bell-bottom jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. A beaded Indian headband held back her long messy waterfall of curls. First she stood on her toes and gave Ian a kiss. (All three of them watched carefully from the car. For a while now they had been worrying that Cicely didn’t like Ian as much as she used to.) Then she waved at them and started down the porch steps. Ian followed, clamping his cap back on.
Daphne took her thumb out of her mouth. “Hi, Cicely!” she called.
“Well, hey, gang,” Cicely said. “How we doing?” She opened the door on the passenger side and slid across to the middle of the front seat. The car filled with the moldy smell of the perfume she’d started wearing.
Ian got in on the driver’s side and asked, “Have a good day at work?”
“Great,” Cicely said. (This summer she worked part-time at a shop where they made leather sandals.) She moved over very close to him and brushed a wood shaving off his shoulder. “How was your day?”
“Well, we got a new order,” Ian said.
“Right on!”
He pulled into traffic and said, “This woman came all the way from Massachusetts with a blanket box, her great-grandfather’s blanket box. Asked if we knew how to make one just like it, using the same methods. Exactly the kind of thing Mr. Brant likes best.”
Cicely made a sort of humming noise and nestled in against him.
“Soon as she left Mr. Brant told me, ‘Go call those kitchen people.’ People who wanted an estimate on their kitchen cabinets. ‘Call and cancel,’ he said. Cicely hon, stop that, please.”
“Stop what?” she asked him, in a smiling voice.
“You know what.”
“I’m not doing anything!” she said. She sat up straight. She slid over to her side of the car and set her face toward the window. “Mr. Holiness,” she muttered to a fire hydrant.
“Pretty soon we may give up kitchens altogether,” Ian said, turning down Waverly. He parked at the curb and cut the engine. “We’ll build nothing but fine furniture. Custom designs. Old-style joinery.”
Cicely wasn’t listening. All three of them sitting in back could tell that, just from the way she kept her face turned. But Ian said, “We might hire another worker, too. At least, Mr. Brant’s thinking about it. I said, ‘Good, hire several, and give me a raise while you’re at it,’ and he said he might do it. ‘I won’t be a single man forever,’ I told him.” Ian glanced over at Cicely when he said that, but Cicely was still looking out the window.
It was amazing, how he could talk on like that without realizing. When even they realized! Even little Daphne, sucking her thumb and watching Cicely with round, anxious eyes!
Thomas all at once felt so angry at Ian that he jumped out of the car in a rush and slammed the door loudly behind him.
Their grandma said they had to change clothes at once, this instant, because Aunt Claudia was arriving at five-thirty and they looked as if they’d spent the day rolling in a barnyard. She told Ian to run Daphne a bath, and she said, “Clean shirts for the other two! And clean shorts for Thomas. Hair combed. Faces washed.”
But the minute Ian’s back was turned, Thomas followed Agatha up the narrow, steep wooden stairs to the attic. He trailed her into the slanty-ceilinged attic bedroom that was hers and Daphne’s, that used to be Aunt Claudia’s when she was a girl at home. “Agatha,” he said, putting on a fake frown, “do you think we should’ve bought Aunt Claudia a present? Maybe a card will be too boring.”
What he was after, of course, was a glimpse of their mother’s jewelry box. He knew Agatha had to open it to return the mustard seed.
“You heard what Grandma said,” Agatha told him. “A handmade card means more than anything. What are you in my room for?”
“But she gives us presents,” Thomas said. He sat on her bed and swung his feet. “Maybe we should’ve made her something bigger, a picture for her wall or something.”
“I mean it, Thomas. You’re trespassing in my private room.”
“It’s Daphne’s room, too,” Thomas said. “Daphne would be glad to have me here.”
“Get out, I tell you.”
“Agatha, can’t I just watch you put the mustard seed away?”
“No, you can’t.”
“She wasn’t only your mama, you know.”
“Maybe not,” Agatha said, “but you don’t keep secrets good.”
“I do so. I didn’t tell about the jewelry box, did I?”
“You told our father’s name, though,” Agatha said, screwing up her eyes at him.
“That just slipped out! And anyway, I was little.”
“Well, who knows what’ll slip out next time?”
“Agatha, I implore you,” he said, clasping his hands. “How about I look at the picture and nothing else?”
“You’ll get it dirty.”
“How about I hold it by the edges, sitting here on the bed? I won’t ask to look at anything else, honest. I won’t even peek inside the box.”
She thought it over. She had taken the mustard seed from her pocket and he could see it glimmering between her fingers, so close he could have touched it.
“Well, okay,” she said finally.
“You’ll let me?”
“But just for a minute.”
She crossed to the closet, which was only more attic—the lowest part of the attic, where the ceiling slanted all the way down. It didn’t even have a door to shut. Thomas would have been scared to sleep near so much darkness, but Agatha wasn’t scared of anything, and she stepped inside as bold as you please and knelt on the floor. He heard the box’s bottom drawer slide open, and then the clink of the mustard seed against other clinky things—maybe the charm bracelet Agatha had let him sleep with once wh
en he was sick, with the tiny scissors charm that could really cut paper and the tiny bicycle charm that could really spin its wheels.
She came back out, holding the picture by one corner. “Don’t you dare get a speck of dirt on it,” she said. He took it very, very gently between the flat of his hands, the way you’d take an LP record. The crinkly edges felt like little teeth against his palms.
It was a color photograph, with JUN 63 stamped on the border. A tin house trailer with cinder blocks for a doorstep. A pretty woman standing on the cinder blocks—black hair puffing to her shoulders, bright lipstick, ruffled pink dress—holding a scowly baby (him!) in nothing but a diaper, while a smaller, stubbier Agatha wearing a polka-dot playsuit stood alongside and reached up to touch the baby’s foot.
If only you could climb into photographs. If only you could take a running jump and land there, deep inside! The frill at his mother’s neckline must have made pretzel sounds in his ear. Her bare arms must have stuck to his skin a little in the hot sunshine. His sister must have thought he was cute, back then, and interesting.
It was spooky that he had no memory of that moment. It was like talking in your sleep, where they tell you in the morning what you said and you ask, “I did? I said that?” and laugh at your own crazy words as if they’d come from someone else. In fact, he always thought of the baby in the photo as a whole other person—as “he,” not “I”—even though he knew better. “Why were you hanging onto his foot?” he asked now.
“I forget,” Agatha said, sounding tired.
“You don’t remember being there?”
“I remember! I remember everything! Just not why I was doing that with your foot.”
“Where was our father?”
“Maybe he was taking the picture.”
“You don’t know for sure?”
“Of course I do! I know. He was taking our picture.”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, too,” Thomas said. “Maybe these aren’t even us.”
“Of course they’re us. Who else would they be? I remember our trailer and our yellow mailbox, and this dirt road or driveway or something with grass and flowers in the middle. I remember this huge, enormous rainbow and it started in the road and bent all the way over our house.”
“What! Really? A rainbow?” Thomas said. He had an amazing thought. He got so excited he slid off the bed, not forgetting to be careful of the picture. “Then, Agatha!” he said. “Listen! Maybe that’s how we could find where we used to live.”
“What do you mean?”
“We could ask for the trailer with the rainbow.”
She gave him a look. He could see he’d walked into something, but he didn’t know what.
“Well, they must have maps of things like that,” he said. “Don’t they? Maps that show where the really big, really famous rainbows are?”
“Thomas,” Agatha said. She rolled her eyes. Clearly it was almost more than she could manage to go on dealing with him. “For gosh sake, Thomas,” she said, “rainbows don’t just sit around forever. What do you think, it’s still there waiting for us? Get yourself a brain someday, Thomas.”
Then she took hold of the picture—with her fingers right on the colored part!—and pulled it out of his hands and carried it back to the closet.
“Thomas?” Ian called from the second floor. “Are you cleaned up?”
“Just about.”
He would never know as much as Agatha did, Thomas thought while he was clomping down the stairs. He would always be left out of things. People would forever be using words he’d never heard of, or sharing jokes he didn’t get the point of, or driving him places they hadn’t bothered to tell him about; or maybe (as they claimed) they had told him, and he had just forgotten or been too little to understand.
“Last night I dreamed a terrible dream,” Aunt Claudia said at dinner. “I think it had something to do with my turning thirty-eight.”
She was twisted around in her seat, feeding baked potato to Georgie in his high chair. Over her shoulder she said, “I opened the door to the broom cupboard and this burglar jumped out at me. I kept trying to call for help but all I managed was this pathetic little whimper and then I woke up.”
“How does that relate to turning thirty-eight?” her husband asked her.
“Well, it’s scary, Macy. Thirty-eight sounds so much like forty. Forty! That’s middle-aged.”
She didn’t look middle-aged. She didn’t have gray hair or anything. Her hair was brown like Ian’s, cut almost as short, and her face was smooth and tanned. Her clothes weren’t middle-aged, either: jeans and a floppy plaid shirt. Whenever Georgie got hungry she would tuck him right under her shirt without unbuttoning it and fiddle with some kind of snaps or hooks inside and then let him nurse. Thomas thought that was fascinating. He hoped it would happen this evening.
“You know what I believe?” she asked now, wiping Georgie’s mouth with a corner of her napkin. “I believe what I was trying to do was, teach myself how to scream.”
Grandpa said, “Why, hon, I would think you’d already know how.”
“I was speaking figuratively, Dad. Here I am, thirty-eight years old and I’ve never, I don’t know, never said anything. Everything’s so sort of level all the time. Tonight, for instance: here we sit. Nice cheerful chitchat, baseball standings, weather forecast, difficult ages eating in the kitchen …”
By “difficult ages,” she meant the older children—ten to fifteen, Agatha to Abbie. The “biggies,” Grandma called them. The people with exciting things to say. Thomas could hear them even from the dining room. Cindy was telling a story and the others were laughing and Barney was saying, “Wait, you left out the most important part!”
Here in the dining room, there were no important parts. Just dull, dull conversation among the grownups while the “littlies” secretly fed their suppers to Beastie under the table. Cicely was holding up a pinwheel biscuit and carefully unwinding it. Ian kept glancing over at her, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Well, Claudia,” Grandma said, “would you prefer it if we moaned and groaned and carried on?”
“No, no,” Claudia said, “I don’t mean that exactly; I mean … oh, I don’t know. I guess I’m just going through the middle-aged blues.”
“Nonsense, you’re nowhere near middle-aged,” Grandma told her. “What an idea! You’re just a slip of a girl still. You still have your youth and your wonderful life and everything to look forward to.” She raised her wineglass. Thomas could tell her arthritis was bad tonight because she used both hands. “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” she said.
Macy and Grandpa raised their glasses, too, and Cicely set aside the biscuit to raise hers. Ian, who didn’t drink, held up his water tumbler. “Happy birthday,” they all said.
“Well, thanks,” Claudia told them.
She thought a moment, and then she said, “Thank you very much,” and smiled around the table and took a sip from her own glass.
The cake was served in the living room, so they could all sing “Happy Birthday” together. But really just the grownups and the little ones sang. The difficult ages seemed to think singing was beneath them, so after the first line Thomas didn’t sing either. Then just as Claudia was blowing out the candles, Mrs. Jordan arrived from across the street along with two of the foreigners. The foreigners brought a third foreigner named Bob who apparently used to live with them. Bob greeted Thomas by name but Thomas didn’t remember him. “You were only so much high,” Bob told him, setting his palm about six inches above the floor. “You wore little, little sneakers and your mother was very nice lady.”
“My mother?” Thomas asked. “Did you know her?”
“Of course I knew her. She was very pretty, very kind lady.”
Thomas was hoping to hear more, but Mrs. Jordan came over then and started filling Bob in on all the neighborhood news: how Mr. Webb had finally gone to be dried out and the newlyweds had had a baby and Rafe Hamnett’s sexy twin daughters were making life a l
iving hell for his girlfriend. Thomas wandered off finally.
His grandma was passing the cake around on her big tole tray. She served the grownups first. She said, “Macy, cake? Jim, cake?” She offered some to Ian, too, but of course he said no. (At church they didn’t approve of sugar, as Grandma surely knew by now.) She thinned her lips and passed on. “Jessie? You’ll have cake.”
Ian asked Cicely, “What do you say to a movie after this?”
“Well, I kind of like made plans with some friends from school,” Cicely told him.
“Oh.”
“Melanie and them from school.”
“Okay.”
“I’d ask you along except it’s, you know, like all just college talk about people you never heard of.”
“That’s okay,” Ian said.
Thomas hooked his fingers into one of Ian’s rear pockets. He slid his thumb back and forth across the puckery seam at the top. What did this remind him of? Daphne sucking her thumb, that was it. Curling her index finger across her upper lip. He leaned his head against Ian’s side, and Ian put his arm around him. “I should get to bed early anyhow,” he was telling Cicely. “Rumor has it tomorrow’s another workday.”
Now Grandma was offering her tray to the children. She said, “Thomas? Cake?”
“No, thanks.”
“No birthday cake?” she asked. She put on a look of surprise.
“Sugar is an artificial stimulant,” he reminded her.
He expected her to argue like always, but he didn’t expect she’d get angry. Ian was the one she seemed angry with, though. She turned toward Ian sharply and said, “Really, Ian! He’s just a little boy!”
“Sure. He’s free to make up his own mind,” Ian said.
“Free, indeed! It’s that church of yours again.”
“Excuse me. Mrs. Bedloe?” Cicely said. “Maybe Thomas is just listening to his body. Processed sugar is a poison, after all. No telling what it does to your body chemistry.”
“Well, everybody in this room eats sugar and I don’t exactly notice them keeling over,” Grandma said.
“Me, now,” Cicely said, “I’ve started using non-pasteurized honey whenever possible and I feel like a whole new person.”