But Aunt Lucy did not have a single mole that I knew of. She did have long, glossy, brown hair and a happy smile, and Amanda said she was really good at makeup. I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t a makeup kind of girl. But when Amanda met Aunt Lucy last Christmas, she pulled me aside and whispered, “Omigosh, is your aunt a model?”
“No,” I said.
“She could be,” Amanda said.
“Okay, but she’s not.”
“But she could be. Omigosh, did you notice the silver sparkles on her eyelashes? I totally want to have sparkly eyelashes when I’m a grown-up!”
The second reason Aunt Lucy was my favorite aunt was that despite being a grown-up, she wasn’t old and wrinkly and boring. She was young and not yet married, so she spoiled me, Sandra, and Ty rotten whenever she visited. She took us to the movies and bought us kids’ packs with popcorn, candy, and Coke, and she didn’t make us substitute a juice box. She didn’t even lecture us about caffeine!
The third and last and best reason that Aunt Lucy was my favorite aunt was because she had a friend from college who lived in New York City! And her friend asked if Aunt Lucy would take care of her apartment while she was traveling for a job-thing, and Aunt Lucy said yes, and she invited Sandra and me to come and stay with her for an entire weekend!
IN NEW YORK CITY! THE REAL NEW YORK CITY! AND MOM AND DAD SAID YES AND BOUGHT US PLANE TICKETS AND A DRESSY OUTFIT APIECE, IN CASE WE POSSIBLY ENDED UP GOING TO THE THEATER!!!
And now—it was incredible—here I was, zooming through the skies on my way to the Big Apple. Right now the other fourth graders at Trinity were singing “Kumbaya” in music class, but not me. I was too busy flying to New York with my sister for an entire long weekend!!!
Amanda wanted me to bring her an “I ♥ New York” shirt. Chantelle wanted me to get her a famous person’s signature.
I said, “Like whose?” And she said, “Anybody’s! Or wait, I know. Al Roker’s, from the Today show!”
I didn’t know who Al Roker was, or even what that show was, so Chantelle explained that it was a talk show her mom loved.
I said, “Okay, I’ll try,” and my teacher jumped in and said that in that case, would I also get the autograph of another handsome man from that same show?
“Okay, I’ll try,” I said again, but now I felt bad because I’d forgotten the second man’s name. Oh, well. It probably wouldn’t matter, because Mom said I probably wouldn’t see either of the two handsome men. She gave an entire speech about it, explaining that yes, there were a lot of famous people in New York, but that Sandra and I needed to remember several things:
First, famous people were people just like us, only famous, and we shouldn’t be overly starstruck.
Second, even though New York was full of famous people, we shouldn’t expect them to pop up everywhere like Whac-A-Mole moles. (Actually, I added the “Whac-A-Mole” part.)
And third, she wouldn’t mind having Al Roker’s autograph herself, or the autograph of the man whose name I’d forgotten. She wasn’t picky.
I hoped I did see someone famous, because what if I really did come home with famous people’s signatures? What if I came home with ten or twenty or thirty famous people’s signatures? Think how amazed everybody would be! From then on I would be famous, pretty much!
I got so excited that I had to fan myself with my ticket, and Sandra had to tell me to stop.
“Winnie, I mean it,” Sandra said, because it wasn’t the first time she’d asked. “Quit.”
“Sorry. Sorry!” I needed to remember to be nice to Sandra, because without her, I wouldn’t be here. There was no way Mom would have let me fly on my own, even though I’d have been fine with it. Even though I did accidentally forget I had two quarters in my pocket, and when I went through security, the beeper went off and two security guards had to pull me aside and they scanned me with a special metal detector wand.
Sandra was mortified. I thought it was awesome. It’s possible I would have found it less awesome if Sandra hadn’t been with me, however.
Over the airplane’s intercom, the flight attendant announced that we’d reached our cruising altitude and we could now use laptops or iPods if we wanted. Sandra didn’t have an iPod, but she plugged her headphones into the jack on her armrest and slipped them over her ears.
I poked her and asked, “What are you listening to?”
She held one earpiece away from her head. “Huh?”
“What are you listening to?”
“Music. Shush.” She dropped the earpiece back in place and closed her eyes.
I stuck out my tongue. Then I poked her again.
“What?” she said, her eyes flying open.
I waved. “Hi!”
“Hello, and now good-bye. Look out the window. Read your book. Do whatever you want, but let me take a nap. Please?”
Well, hmmph, I thought. I couldn’t believe we were on a plane and she wanted to nap. What was wrong with that girl?
I looked out the window. All I could see were clouds. No earth. Certainly no Atlanta, though I knew it was down there. It didn’t disappear just because I wasn’t there. It wasn’t like playing peekaboo with Ty when he was a baby, when he thought I could make a yellow rubber ducky vanish entirely—as in, gone—just by hiding it from his sight.
Wouldn’t it be weird if things did disappear the moment you stopped looking at them? If the world only existed when you were around to see and smell and touch and feel and taste it?
If that was the case, did that mean I didn’t exist to Sandra, since her eyes were shut?
I poked her again. Her eyes flew open, and I smiled my cutest smile. Why, look! It’s me!! I hoped my smile said. Your darling sister!
“Winnie, you are driving me crazy,” she said through gritted teeth.
I patted her head and said, “You can go to sleep now. I won’t bug you anymore.”
She didn’t look convinced, but she once more closed her eyes.
As for me, I stayed true to my word. Yes, I was flying through the air with the great big world all around me, and yes, I felt tiny, but I also felt . . . mighty. The world wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was I, because how could I? Here I was already.
We landed in New York at five o’clock. The airport was crowded and dirty, and Sandra made me hold her hand as we pushed a path through all the people. She said she didn’t want to lose me, but I think she didn’t want me to lose her. Yes, Sandra was my big sister, but guess what? Sometimes she needed me just as much as I needed her.
When we got to baggage claim, we were faced with a milling group of people wearing suits and brimmed caps, all of them holding up signs with people’s names on them. One said “Mr. Yamasuto,” and another said “Continental World Explorers.”
“Who are these people?” I asked.
“Limo drivers,” Sandra told me.
“Whoa. Are we taking a limo?”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Sandra said.
I didn’t mind. It was thrilling enough just to soak in how different everybody in New York was. All sorts of people lived in Atlanta, like white people and black people and Hispanic people and people who were Asian. But the two biggest groups were white people and black people, for sure.
Here, I couldn’t pick out a “biggest” group. It was a total mix. I saw one man wearing a tall black hat and a long black coat, and along with a thick beard, he had long curls that hung down in front of his ears. Near him, I saw an Indian woman with a jewel in the middle of her forehead. She was wearing a silky dress that reached the floor, and her little girl was wearing one just like it. I saw Muslim women wearing head scarves and white people with dreadlocks. I saw three tall, gangly guys with dark skin, white teeth, and big smiles. One of them made a peace sign at me, and I grinned and made a peace sign back.
Then I spotted Pretty Aunt Lucy. Like the limo drivers, she was holding up a sign. It said, “The Perry Girls!” She’d decorated it with gold and silver star stickers.
“Aun
t Lucy!” I called, waving like a maniac. Her eyes landed on us, and she rushed over and hugged us tight.
“You’re here!” she exclaimed. “You’re really here!”
“I know!” I cried.
“We’re actually in New York,” Sandra said, and for once she wasn’t being sarcastic. She was just as in awe as I was. “I can’t believe it.”
“Well, let’s get out of this smelly airport and get you two some dinner,” Aunt Lucy said. “You girls like pizza, right?”
We nodded.
“Great, because New York is famous for its pizza.” She took my travel suitcase and pulled it for me. Sandra and I followed her through the maze of sights and smells, including a poster of a hungry-looking baby with the words NO CHILD SHOULD GO WITHOUT.
Aunt Lucy caught me reading it and stopped so abruptly that I bonked into her.
“Ack. Sorry!” I said, but she said, “No, no. My fault. It’s just . . . that billboard . . . I guess I should warn you that you might see some homeless people while you’re here.”
“We might?” I said.
“Actually, you definitely will, and I’m so sorry. It’s awful. It’s terrible and depressing . . . but you get used to it.” Her brow wrinkled. “Actually, you don’t. Or at least, I haven’t.”
She looked so worried that I took her hand. I didn’t know what to say, so I just gave her a small smile.
She managed to smile back. “Well . . . we’ll just do the best we can, right?”
“Right,” I said.
We reached the airport exit and stepped into the warm outside air. Almost everyone seemed to be smoking, and I thought, Whoa, lung cancer city. There was a lot of litter, too. I saw a guy flick the butt of his cigarette plainly onto the sidewalk, and I considered going over and reminding him to be nice to Mother Earth.
I took a step in his direction, but Aunt Lucy said, “This way, Winnie,” and steered me to the back of a long line of people waiting to get a taxi. A woman in a blue outfit like one a cop might wear was moving down the line saying, “Destination? Destination?”
She wouldn’t reach us for a minute or two.
“Can we go to the top of the Empire State Building?” I asked.
“Sure,” Aunt Lucy said.
“What about the Statue of Liberty?” Sandra said.
“If you want. I’ve heard it takes about three hours to get in, though.”
“Three hours?” Sandra repeated.
“Or we can take a ferry and look at it from the harbor. We don’t have to decide this very second.” The uniformed taxi lady reached us, and Aunt Lucy said, “Central Park South.” She said it like she was a woman of the world. I was impressed.
The taxi lady ripped off a stub of paper and handed it to Aunt Lucy, saying, “Number twenty-two.”
I headed toward the end of the line of taxis, because that’s what I’d seen the other people do. The taxi lady grabbed my shoulder and turned me around.
“I said number twenty-two,” she said. “Clean your ears out, girl.”
“We go this way,” Aunt Lucy told me, and I trotted behind her to a different line of cabs.
“Did that lady tell me to clean my ears out?” I said.
“She did,” Sandra marveled. In Atlanta, people didn’t randomly tell you to clean your ears out.
Aunt Lucy laughed. “Welcome to New York.”
Aunt Lucy’s friend’s apartment was the size of my entire bedroom, although it was split into different sections. But Aunt Lucy said apartments were hard to come by in New York, and that Catherine—that was her friend—felt lucky to have found hers, because “it was in such a great location.”
I didn’t know what made the location so great. I wasn’t suggesting it was un-great. I just didn’t know how to tell it apart from what I’d seen on the cab drive from the airport. Looking out the window, all I saw were streets and cars and taxis and a hundred thousand people at least. Some looked like businessmen and -women, others looked a lot less fancy. Like, there were moms pushing babies in strollers and chubby men wearing baseball caps and plain old normal kids, too. There were even kids my age walking along alone, going wherever they were going.
There wasn’t much to do in the apartment, since it was so small. So we dropped off our suitcases and headed back out, this time on foot. My head spun from trying to take in all the sights, and then I saw something that made it spin right off my head stalk, practically. I saw a man with crazy white hair that looked like a bird’s nest, and in that bird’s nest of hair was an actual parrot!
A live parrot was living in the man’s hair!
“Winnie, stop gawking,” Aunt Lucy said, because without realizing it, I’d stopped stock-still in the middle of the sidewalk. I couldn’t help it! There was a man in front of me with a parrot in his hair!
“Yeah, and close your mouth before a bee flies in,” Sandra said. “Or somebody’s cigarette.”
“But, Sandra! That man! He had a—”
“Bird in his hair,” she finished. “I saw.”
“But—”
“But what? You act like you’ve never seen a man with a bird in his hair before.”
“I haven’t.” I frowned. “Have you?”
She dropped her nothing shocks me, not even a bird in a nest made of hair act. “Are you crazy, you crazy girl?!” she exclaimed, thwonking my head. “Winnie! That man had a bird in his hair!”
One sad thing was that Aunt Lucy was right about there being homeless people. On the way to the pizza place, I saw a man holding a tin can with a taped-on piece of paper that said, Help a vet.
I still had my two quarters from the airport, which the airport guard had given back to me once he decided I wasn’t a threat to national security, so I dropped them in his can.
“God bless you, angel,” he said.
“Um, God bless you, too,” I said.
After our pizza—which was delicious, and which we folded in half before eating, because Aunt Lucy said that was the way New Yorkers did it—we walked back to the apartment. This time we passed a black woman and her little boy, who looked about Ty’s age. The little boy held a hat in his lap, and in the hat were coins and a few bills.
I looked at Aunt Lucy, who smiled and tried to be brave in the face of that distressing sight. She fished a five-dollar bill from her wallet.
“Sandra, do you want to give it to her?” I whispered, since I’d been the one to give the older man my quarters.
Sandra shook her head. She wanted the lady and her little boy to have the money, I could tell, but the situation made her nervous. Or upset. Or both?
I took the five-dollar bill and put it in the hat, and the mom said, “Thank you, baby.”
“You’re welcome.” I was holding an unopened can of Dr Pepper—I hadn’t gotten around to drinking it at dinner—and I had an idea.
“Is your little boy allowed to have Coke?”
“What’s that, baby?” the mom said.
“Soda,” Aunt Lucy told me. “In New York, Coke is called soda.”
I stored the knowledge away and tried again. “Can your son have soda? Is he allowed?”
“Yeah, baby, sure,” the mom said.
I offered my Dr Pepper toward the boy, who said, “Why’d you call that a Coke? That’s not a Coke. That’s a Dr Pepper.”
I frowned, because he had a point. I’d never thought about it, but in Atlanta, we called all soft drinks Coke, even when they weren’t. And I’d thought New Yorkers were the weird ones for calling Coke soda!
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you want it?”
“Yeah!” he said, scrambling up. “Thanks!”
It made me happy that a Coke—er, a Dr Pepper—would make his eyes light up like that. But it also made me feel lonely.
Later, when I was supposed to be falling asleep, I couldn’t. I think I was homesick . . . maybe because seeing that mother and her son made me miss Mom?
I missed Dad, too, and Ty and our house and my bedroom, but I missed Mom t
he most. Even though it was exciting to be here, home seemed awfully far away.
The next day we went to Central Park. I was tired, so Aunt Lucy bought me an espresso, and it was n-a-s-t-y. So she poured it into a much bigger cup, added lots of cream and five packs of sugar, and after that, it was scrumdiddliumptious ! And made me talk really-really-fast and do hyper dancing and bounce from foot to foot until finally Sandra said, “Winnie. Down.”
She said it like I was a dog, so I got down on my hands and knees in Central Park and started yip-yip-yipping.
“Omigosh,” Sandra said, edging away on the bench.
“But she doesn’t have a bird in her hair,” Aunt Lucy pointed out. “We need to remember that.”
Oh! Oh! And later we saw a famous person taking an afternoon stroll, and it was Al Roker! The real live Al Roker from the fancy morning TV show! He was with a pretty girl who we decided was his daughter. I wanted to run over and say hi, but Aunt Lucy said absolutely not, because New Yorkers respected celebrities’ privacy.
“But we’re not New Yorkers,” I said.
“We are today,” Aunt Lucy said.
“Can I take a picture of them?”
“No.”
“Can I draw a picture of them?”
“With what?”
“Well, can I just call out a general hellooooo, and if they happen to look over, then they happen to look over?”
“No, Winnie, you may not,” Aunt Lucy said. “And please get up off the grass. I’m not giving you any more belly rubs.”
When Sandra and Aunt Lucy weren’t watching, I went ahead and waved at the girl anyway. Just an itty-bitty, cupped-palm wave. The girl looked confused, but she waved back. My smile stretched wide. I could feel it.
That day and the next, we did tons of fun things with Aunt Lucy, like buying sea salt caramels from a famous chocolatier and seeing a musical version of Mary Poppins on Broadway and shopping at the Disney store, which had a window display of a huge doll made up entirely of normalsized dolls.