The Mutual Admiration Society

by Lesley Kagen

  Along with her excellent hearing, because her eyes bulge slightly closer to objects, Birdie can also see better than me or anybody else I know. (The kid can scout things out better than an Apache searching for a wagon train during a total eclipse.)

  “We can’t go over there anymore,” I tell my almost-always-starving sister, “because it’s almost time for breakfast and I know you wouldn’t wanna be late for that.”

  She licks her lips and says, “No, I certainly would not want to be late for breakfast,” and then her tummy growls to second that motion.

  “But before we go back into the house,” I tell her, “you know what you could do for me real quick?”

  “What could I do for you real quick, Tessie?” she says, looking a little less hungry and more like she’d knock herself over the head with a rock if I asked her to, because she might have a really cruddy memory and all other sorts of weird problems, but she really does love me.

  Quickly, before her big tummy can get control of her tiny brain again, I point at Holy Cross and say, “I’ve looked and looked, but I don’t see any evidence of a murder taking place over there, so could you take a quick peek?”

  “Why, what an absolutely splendid idea, young lady!” she cheers up and says. “I’d be delighted to lend a helping hand!”

  Oh, boy.

  She just started doing this lately. Out of the blue, for some unknown reason, she starts to act and talk old-fashioned. It’s not like she’s perfectly imitating voices the way I discovered I could do in St. Kate’s choir loft last year. I thought it was some kind of miracle, ya know? Like turning loaves into fishes. There I was making fun of Sister Raphael behind her back like I always did and still do, because she makes me sing with the boys, when . . . lo and behold . . . instead of my own husky voice coming out of my mouth, I sounded exactly like that crabby penguin! And it wasn’t just Sister Raphael. With some practice, I found out I could do pretty good impressions of just about anybody. That’s not what Birdie does. She just suddenly goes really old-timey on me every once in a while. She might’ve picked it up from the ton of movies and TV shows we watch that take place in cowboy and Indian times, gangster times, and monster times, I don’t know. I’m also not sure if I should make this problem #12 on my SURE SIGNS OF LOONY list. It’s kinda hard to pin down.

  My temporarily old-fashioned sister holds out her tiny hand bent at the wrist ladylike and says with a smile, “If you’d be so kind as to offer assistance, I’d be much obliged, Pilgrim.”

  Because she’s short, almost a midget really, she has as hard of a time seeing beyond the porch railing as she does peeking into our neighbors’ windows, so I “oblige” her by giving her an alley-oop, wait until she balances herself and has a chance to look around before I ask, “Well?”

  “Nope, no abandoned well.”

  “Dang it all, Bird!” She’s remembering where Lassie found Timmy on last week’s episode instead of doing what I asked her to. “You’re not lookin’ for an abandoned well. You’re lookin’ for a fresh corpse or some cops or . . . or anything else that might have to do with the murder I just got done tellin’ ya about a few minutes ago.”

  “Roger that,” she says in her regular old voice and goes back to eyeing the cemetery. After a few more minutes of intense Indian staring, she shakes her head and looks down at me. “I’m . . . I’m sorry, but I don’t see anything murderous, Tessie. All I see is Mister McGinty and Missus Peterman talking, Johnny Mahlberg riding his bike down the road, and”—she puffs out her chest—“a robin redbreast perched on top of Daddy’s tombstone.”

  This is not cutting the mustard.

  I don’t care how bad her and our mother want their breakfasts on the table by 7:30 a.m., I cannot let this life-changing, great-good-luck murder slip through my fingers. Birdie is such a spaz, but there’s probably enough time for very coordinated me to do a solo snooping mission over the cemetery fence. If I’m quick about it, I can also make my way over to Mr. Peterman’s final resting place to ask Mr. McGinty, who lives in a nifty shack not far from the Gilgood mausoleum, if he heard or saw anything suspicious last night. He is the caretaker, after all, and one of Birdie’s and my closest friends, so I’m sure he’d cough up any information he might have.

  That’s a very solid plan except for the fact that only a complete moron would leave her 98% unpredictable sister on the back porch all by herself to get into God only knows what. So after I tell Birdie, “Get down offa there before you break your neck,” I’m seesawing on whether I should lash her to the railing or the screen door handle with the cat’s cradle string she’s got in her pocket before I run over to Holy Cross, when wouldn’t ya know it, the biggest party pooper on the planet wrecks my investigating plan, the same way she did last night when she got home from her stupid date.

  “Theresa Maria,” our mother shouts from inside the house. When I don’t answer, she very foxily moves on to the smallest chick in our henhouse. “Robin Jean? Where are you?”

  Uh-oh.

  I spin back around and reach to slap my hand over my sister’s mouth, but she ducks and shouts back, “Me and Tessie are on the back porch, Mommy!”

  Damnation!

  Birdie shouldn’t have told her where we were or called her that, but she can’t help it, poor thing. She cannot resist our mother the way I can. Louise is to my sister what necks are to Count Dracula.

  FACT: After the widow Finley quit her job at the hat shop that she got so we could eat after Daddy died, she came up with the idea of finding a new husband to pay the bills.

  PROOF: She didn’t think she’d be able to catch a guy if he thought he’d be stuck with two more mouths to feed besides her luscious one. So if she should happen to come across Mr. Tall, Dark, Handsome, and Not Married when we were out doing errands, she wanted him to think she was a kindly relative or a do-gooder taking two little girls who weren’t her daughters for an outing and not who she really was, which was our very foxy mother weaving a wedding web. “Once I get a decent man to fall for me, girls, when the timing is right, I’ll introduce him to you two,” she told Birdie and me with eyes that looked full to the brim with what I’m sure were probably crocodile tears. “After I seal the deal, you two can start calling me Mom again, but until then, you need to call me Louise.”

  She must’ve not heard Birdie call her the forbidden “Mommy,” or me, “Tessie,” because she doesn’t say anything when she pokes her red head through the squeaky back screen door other than, “What are you two doing out here?”

  Because I’m the Finley sisters’ mouthpiece, I step up and say, “We were just—”

  “I didn’t ask you, Theresa,” our mother says when she steps onto the porch with a look on her face that could freeze the cemetery pond in the middle of August. “I asked Robin.”

  Of course, I’d be worried as hell if I thought Birdie was going to cough up that information the way she did our whereabouts, but I can tell by the way she’s giving Louise the once-over that my sister’s mind hopped its rickety rails the second she got a load of our mother in the gray pencil skirt, black nylons with seams that run in a perfectly straight line up her bathing-beauty legs, a blouse the color of blooming lilacs, black high heels, and gold earrings.

  When Birdie doesn’t answer her quick enough, Louise snaps her fingers and says, “Pay attention, Robin. I want to know what you and you sister—?”

  “Holy cow!” her daughter with the half-baked brain shouts at our mother. “You look good enough to eat!”

  Now, I’d love to disagree with her, but I can’t. This morning and every morning, noon, and even when she’s sleeping, our mother really is one very scrumptious-looking broad.

  Birdie sniffs the air—she’s also got an excellent sense of smell—and adds on to the compliment that she already flung Louise’s way, “And you smell so yummy, too. Like . . . like pears in the night!”

  I have to try very hard not to laugh, because I get a big kick out of it when she gets mixed up like that, so did Daddy,
but our mother, who must’ve gone to the little girls’ room to stare at herself in the mirror when God was handing out funny bones, does not find Birdie telling her that she smells like pears in the night hilarious. So before Louise can get her pert nose pushed outta joint even further, I jump in and explain, “What Robin meant to say is that you smell very nice, too. Like your Evening in Paris.”

  Louise sighs strong enough in my sister’s direction to fluff her too-long bangs, then does a sudden about-face and asks me, “You two weren’t thinking about paying a visit to the cemetery, were you?”

  She always had a conniption fit when someone tattled to her after they spotted Birdie and me visiting Holy Cross, but now that she’s running for treasurer of the Pagan Baby Society she almost froths at the mouth when she gets wind of any gossip about the Finley ghouls, which is what some people around here call us instead of the Finley girls, on account of our never-ending love for the dead.

  “I don’t have all day, Theresa.” Louise rat-a-tats her pointy fingernails on the porch railing. “Were you or were you not thinking about going over to the cemetery?”

  “Mea culpa,” I shout. “I see your lips moving, but . . .” I stick my finger in my right ear and wiggle it back and forth. “Did I mention to you that the school nurse told me that Micks can get something called potato ears and the only way to cure it is if you buy me some hearing aids soon as you can so—”

  “Knock it off and answer my question,” our mother tells me even more fired up.

  Because I am always BE PREPARED, I tell her, “A course, we weren’t thinkin’ about going to the cemetery,” with the wide-eyed look I practice every morning in front of the bathroom mirror that is a combination of Karen from the Mickey Mouse Club with a dash of Thumper thrown in. “We only came out here because . . .” I steal a peek over the porch railing to make sure what I’m looking for hasn’t completely keeled over yet. “Because we wanted to surprise you with some flowers.” I tilt my head toward them so Birdie understands which flowers I’m talking about and doesn’t try to go running off to Bloomers florist shop to pick out a bunch. “We wanted to thank you for working your fingers to the bone for us, isn’t that right, Bir—Robin?”

  My forgetful sister, who believes that’s the truth and not the snow job that it is, says, “That’s right, Theresa Finley,” and then she sticks her spindly arms through the rails, plucks the half-dead white flowers growing next to the porch, and offers them with one of her smiles that’s so irresistible that even our chilly mother thaws a little.

  Louise pats Birdie on the head when she takes the droopy twosome from her, and even says to me in a slightly less mean way, “Breakfast should be on the table, Theresa. What’s the holdup?”

  “Not a holdup, Mommy!” Birdie claps her hands and yells with her big opera lungs. “In the middle of the night, Tessie heard yelling and a bloody scream and then she saw a tall, skinny person who wasn’t Mister Howard Howard ’cause he’s short and eats too many jelly donuts with his Jim carry a limp body behind the Gilgood mausoleum so she is ninety-five percent positive that somebody got great-good-luck murdered in the cemetery last night!”

  4

  THE BUTTINSKY

  “Goddamnit all, Theresa!” our hot-blooded mother says in a voice that I’d bet even money would set my hair on fire if she was standing a foot closer. “How many times have I warned you about filling your sister’s head up with your . . . your foolishness? Doesn’t she have enough problems as it is?”

  How dare she?!

  I spend a lot more time with Birdie than she ever has and I know a lot more about her “problems” than Louise ever will. The Finley sisters share everything. Missing Daddy, the cemetery, snooping, blackmailing, detecting, the Schwinn bike and Radio Flyer, a bed, head lice, and both of us go nuts for my fiancé, Charlie.

  Feeling steamed about Louise’s crack about Birdie, I’m about to turn the tables and read her the riot act, when who, of all people, should save me from going toe-to-toe in another losing battle with the Queen of Sheba, but our next-door neighbor, buttinsky, and #1 person on another one of my important lists, when she appears on the other side of the three-foot hedge that separates our backyard from hers to call out, “Good morning, Louise, dear.” She looks down her nose at us. “Girls.”

  SHIT LIST

  Gert Klement.

  Butch Seeback.

  Sister Margaret Mary.

  The grease monkey who fixes cars at the Clark station and tries to peek in the little girls’ room window when you got to stop to tinkle because your sister can’t make it home from the Tosa Theatre after she drinks a large root beer.

  Brownnoser Jenny Radtke.

  What’s-his-name.

  Everybody’s got to have a hobby or two to make life worth living, and one of Mrs. Gertrude B. Klement’s top ways to have fun—besides being the president of the Pagan Baby Society, the most important and powerful club at St. Kate’s—is doing everything she can possibly do to further tarnish my already not-so-sterling reputation. (No joke.) She’s trying day and night to get me banished from the neighborhood immediately, if not sooner. When she’s not at church with the other Pagan Baby gals boxing up patchwork quilts, Breck shampoo, Ivory soap, Pepsodent toothpaste, Kleenex, and Ban deodorant to send to little kids who live on the Dark Continent of Africa, Gert spends her every waking hour trying to gather enough evidence against me to prove to my mother that all I need to put me on the straight and narrow path is a much firmer hand, which just so happens to be the specialty of the nuns at St. Anne’s Home for Wayward Girls.

  Now normally, I’m highly against being held prisoner, but lately I been wondering if gettin’ sent up the river wouldn’t be that bad of an idea. Not forever, ya know, just long enough to learn how to hot-wire cars like Kitten Jablonski did the last time she was up at St. Anne’s for slashing tires. That way, if Birdie and me can’t save enough money from blackmailing or solving crimes to buy bus or train tickets out of town, I could jimmy the wires in our woody car and we could drive off into the sunset. Only problem with that plan is that I’d really miss my very nice fiancé and a coupla the other people in the neighborhood that the Finley sisters got on our side.

  What would be better than running away is going to live with nearby relatives, ones who love us more than our mother seems to, but even though we’re Catholic—a religion that gives extra credit for baby breeding—Birdie and me don’t have the pick of the litter the way most everyone else around here does. All we got left in this world, besides one another, are Gammy and Boppa, our daddy’s folks. I really miss them, but we haven’t talked to or seen either one of them since right after he died thanks to our mother, who is having one of her 100% Irish temper tantrums. I’m not really sure why she’s so worked up. I think it has a little something to do with how hard Gammy and Boppa cry when they hug Birdie and me, but mostly I think she’s teed-off because our grandparents won’t give her any money. They would like to I’m sure, but they don’t have two nickels to rub together, either. So Louise won’t let them come visit, hangs up on them when they call, and has “ways of knowing” if I try to call them. And when it comes to someone from her side of the family taking Birdie and me in? Rotsa ruck. Supposedly, her parents are “eternally resting.” (They’re probably just lying on some beach and won’t tell her where.) She admits to having an older brother who is still alive and kicking, but she hasn’t heard from him in years. (More than likely, Virgil changed his name to Pierre and joined the French Foreign Legion to get as far away from his bratty little sister as he could.)

  For a while there, I decided that if Gammy and Boppa couldn’t come to us Birdie and me would go to them, so I hatched a plan and packed our plaid suitcase and everything. We were going to run away to their cute rock house in the country, but that journey dead-ended around 73rd St. when my sister got hungry and I wasn’t exactly sure how to get to our grandparents’ place. I guess that worked out in the long run for the best. Because on the walk back home, I reali
zed that Louise might not know the first thing about diagramming sentences or the capitals of the United States or mothering kids, but believe you me, the gal is smart enough to hunt my sister and me down at Gammy and Boppa’s house for no other reason but to bring us back to do her bidding while she’s out painting the town red with what’s-his-name.

  FACT: Birdie and me are stuck between a rock and a heart place. (No joke.)

  PROOF: I already got plenty of examples of Gert Klement trying to convince Louise to give me the boot, but in Chapter Four, Modern Detection warns detectives about the importance of gathering “substantial evidence” and I don’t want to fall down on the job.

  That’s why I pay a confidential informant name of Kitten Jablonski, the most in-the know kid in the whole neighborhood, to keep me up on all the latest dirt about the Finley ghouls that gets spread around by our evil next-door neighbor. And thank all that’s holy that I do, because Kitten told me last week that Gert added something new on her TO-DO list that’s even worse than getting me sent away to the Catholic juvie home.

  When Kitten and me bumped into each other at Dalinsky’s Drugstore, she was buying ointment for her skin, and I just got done boosting a few more rolls of Tums, because my guts have been taking Daddy’s death very hard. Of course, as usual, I was happy to see my lighthouse-tall eighth-grade informant that I look up to in more ways than one. (Joke!) But the same way I always do after I run into her, I had to take a giant step back. Not everyone knows this, but pimples are a kind of leprosy and I can’t risk one of the dozen she’s got marching across her face deciding to make a break for it and parachuting down to mine. (I’ve watched the Miss America contest on the television set many times, so I know that having peaches-and-cream skin and all your body parts is very important to the judges.)