The Mutual Admiration Society

by Lesley Kagen

  I know that our mother has got to report to work by 8:15 a.m., but what I don’t know is how long she’ll be taking money for gas or tire-changing or whatever else a cashier at a filling station does, besides hopefully steal some of the big bills out of the till so we don’t lose our house. Will she be up at the Clark for the same eight hours that she spent at the hat shop called Turner’s Toppers that she quit after two weeks? It’s not like I’m going to miss her or nothin’, I just need to know when she’ll be back, so Birdie and me don’t get caught with our hands in the cookie jar.

  I fake-yawn and ask Louise very ho-hum, “When will you be home for supper?”

  “I won’t be,” she says as she brushes one more coat of polish on the last of her nails. Usually she chooses something eye-catching, but I guess clear polish must be better for cashiers than Revlon’s Matador Cape. “Mister Gallagher and I are going out to Mama Mia’s to celebrate my first day on the job.”

  Hmmm. It’s good news that she’s going to be gone all day and into the night, because it gives my sister and me lots of time to do our snooping. And usually I’d also be 100% glad that we wouldn’t be saying Grace tonight over one of her revolting “gourmet” meals, but I am not happy one iota about her going out to eat with what’s-his-name at Mama Mia’s Ristorante. The last time the Finley family ate there together, we had such a swell time. We were celebrating ten years of Louise and Daddy’s being married. She was still called Mom then, and her and him slurped spaghetti like Lady and the Tramp, and on the drive home, I laughed so hard at Daddy’s jokes that I got the hiccups and Birdie stuck her head out of the woody car window and lapped the fast air the way she loves to, and Louise sang “That’s Amore” and didn’t even mind that her hair got mussed when her husband pulled her closer.

  I haven’t figured out yet how to stop memories of the good old days from squeezing my heart so hard, so the missing sadness jumps out of the shadows and bushwhacks my heart again. It travels up my throat and wants to come out of my eyes, but I’m trying with every ounce of strength I got not to break our mother’s #2 Commandment—“Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”—because blubbering could tick her off enough to sentence us to Gert’s porch for the whole day, too.

  So I swallow, snort back the sad, and ask her, “If you’re goin’ out, what are Robin and me supposed to eat for supper?”

  “TV dinners.”

  At that news, Daddy’s “little dreamboat”—another nickname he called my sister, whose brain doesn’t have an anchor, so she tends to drift off to parts unknown—shouts, “Ship . . . ship . . . hurray!” because she really adores the gummy brownie that comes in Swanson’s fried chicken dinner and she is not at all good at remembering famous sayings.

  “Theresa.” Louise snaps her gold compact shut and drops it into her red pocketbook. “Missus Klement has agreed to check in on you two until I get home tonight, and if she has to call me at work to report that you and your sister left the house for any reason other than to take the garbage out or go to confession—” The ah-OO-ga horn that belongs to her new boyfriend’s Chevy blares below the bedroom window. “Do not climb over the cemetery fence or peek in people’s windows or . . . or get yourselves into any other fixes, or I’ll . . .” It must be a wave in the mirror or my eyes playing tricks on me or something, because her reflection looks sad when she says, “I’ll have to take away your Three Musketeers bars for an entire month, Robin.”

  Uh-oh.

  Birdie’s “all for one and one for all” bars are almost as important to her as Daddy’s Swiss Army Knife is to me, because besides being delicious “The Three Musketeers” is a nickname he used to describe him and his girls when we’d snuggle in bed or be up at Lonnigan’s Bar together or gazing at the constellation called Orion on our back porch or anyplace else Louise wasn’t.

  But instead of Birdie doing her impression of a chicken about to have its head cut off after Louise threatened to take away her most important candy the way I was almost sure she would, the unpredictable kid whips her hand out of mine, jumps to her feet, and shouts at our mother at the top of her opera lungs, “You are so, so, so, so beautiful! You remind me of Ida Lupino!”

  Oh, for the love of God.

  Just once, once, couldn’t she remember that Louise despises Ida Lupino?!

  “She meant to say that you remind her of Maureen O’Hara,” I quickly tell our mother as I wrap my hand around my sister’s bony leg, pull her down, and slap a pillow over her mouth before she can stick her other foot in it.

  I guess Louise is too busy giving herself two thumbs up to care about the Ida Lupino crack, because after she checks herself out one more time in the mirror and likes what she sees, she doesn’t roll her eyes at Birdie or me. She just stops to remind us on her scoot out of the bedroom door, “Do your chores, no shenanigans, and Theresa”—her lush mouth foxily curls up on one side—“don’t think for a second that I won’t check with the Radtke girl to make sure you went to confession,” and off she goes. The only evidence she leaves behind is the smell of her Paris perfume, the heart-shaped ring she found next to her plate this morning sitting on the vanity next to her red lip prints on a piece of Kleenex, and a little kid who loves her like nobody’s business.

  Because I can’t trust Birdie not to chase down the stairs after her yelling, Hey, Ida Lupino, how about a little hug?, I sit on her round tummy, pin her down to the bumpy white bedspread, and wait until I hear the Chevy squeal away from the curb to tell her, “She’s gone and we got important detecting to do. I’m gonna finish the dishes and I want you to go up and dig around in our closet for my old sneakers, then get the white towel out from under the bed and hang it outta the window to let Charlie know to meet us under the weeping willow soon as he can. Do not hang the yellow towel. That’s the signal to meet us in his bomb shelter.” Birdie is looking up at me from the bedspread blanker than a gravestone before it’s engraved. “Can you remember all that, honey?”

  “Can I remember all what, Tessie?”

  “While I finish doing the dishes . . .”

  But before I can finish repeating what I just got done telling her about the shoes and the towels, my wiry sister bucks me off her pelican tummy, rolls off the bed, and skips out of the room chuckling to herself like she pulled a fast one on me. Poor thing.

  6

  THERE’S NO FART LIKE AN OLD FART

  Birdie can go even more high-strung and ornery if her next meal isn’t within grabbing distance. So after I dried off the dishes, I slapped together her favorite sandwich—peanut butter and marshmallow, nicknamed P B and M—and toss it into her favorite brown bag that’s got the picture of a Red Owl on the front before I move on to the last very important thing I need to do before the Finley sisters can get over to Holy Cross and get down to work. I tug the folded-up piece of paper and stubby yellow pencil out of my shorts pocket, smooth the paper out on the kitchen counter, add on a new #2, and move everything else down.

  TO-DO

  Take tender loving care of Birdie.

  Solve whatever happened to Sister Margaret Mary for big blackmail or reward bucks.

  Make Gert Klement think her arteries are going as hard as her heart.

  Catch whoever stole over $200 out of the Pagan Baby collection box.

  Practice your Miss America routine.

  Learn how to swim.

  Be a good dry-martini-making fiancée to Charlie.

  Do not get caught blackmailing or spying.

  Just think about making a real confession to Father Ted, before it’s too late.

  Once I’m happy with the order of things, I slide outta my back pocket my detecting and blackmail notebook that matches my navy-blue eyes. Next to Birdie and Daddy’s Swiss Army Knife and his Timex watch, this notebook that’s full of facts, proofs, blackmails, dollar amounts, snooping times, and loads of other top-secret information is my most prized possession that I printed KEEP OUT! THIS MEANS YOU! on the front of, because I shudder to think what my fate w
ould be if Louise ever got a hold of it. After I flip it open to a clean page, I write:

  THE CASE OF THE MISSING NUN WHO MIGHT BE KIDNAPPED AND MURDERED

  I am going by the book, and I cannot be sure my suspicions about Sister Margaret Mary are 100% correct until I can check off all the steps that Modern Detection taught me I needed to do after a crime has been perpetrated:

  Find a dead body.

  Search for a suspect with the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime(s).

  Gather evidence against said suspect through observation and interrogation.

  Because I’m pretty sure that Birdie and me are going to find kidnapped and murdered Sister M & M behind the Gilgood mausoleum, I tick that one off and go straight to the next step.

  The first time I came across #2, I thought that Mr. Lynwood “My friends call me Woody and my enemies call me their worst nightmare” Bellflower had written “mean, motive and opportunity,” so I almost closed up my detecting business before it even had a chance to take off.

  There are so many mean people in the neighborhood that my suspect list for a crime would be too heavy to carry around in my pocket without my shorts falling down around my ankles. It wasn’t until I went back and reread #2 that I saw it was mean with an s, but that threw me into a tailspin, too, because other than meaning more than one mean person, I had no idea what means meant. So, of course, as a kid who takes reading and spelling very seriously, I did what I always did when I got confused over a word. I rode on my Schwinn bike to North Ave. and looked it up at the Finney Library that I really love. (I would steal the big dictionary they got up there if I could, but I think Mrs. Kambowski, the crabby librarian who works with nice Miss Peshong and acts like she owns the joint, might have my number, because I think she nailed it to its pedestal.)

  When it comes to detecting, means was defined by Merriam-Webster as having the ability to commit a crime. For example, you couldn’t be guilty of running somebody over if you didn’t know how to drive a car, or you couldn’t stab someone seventeen times if you didn’t have any hands to hold a butcher knife in, or if you wanted to sew slipcovers out of a person’s skin—you couldn’t do that, either, if you didn’t own an upholstery knife. So if Sister M & M is dead, like I think she is, The Mutual Admiration Society is going to have to look for a suspect who is strong. I can’t really tell just by looking if our principal has any muscles underneath her black habit, but I have seen her break a chalkboard pointer in her bare hands, so she would put up a good fight. And if nuns were allowed to play basketball, she would be a starting forward, so she could not be kidnapped and murdered by a guy who only came up to her rosary beads on a good day.

  Figuring out the motive, which is why somebody would want to kidnap and murder Sister Margaret Mary, well, that’s going to be a lot tougher, because nobody likes her, except for my bighearted sister, who likes everybody. But take it from me, a person of much sounder mind, the Creature from the Black Lagoon has a better personality than the principal of St. Kate’s.

  But tracking down someone who had the opportunity to commit the crimes? That should be a breeze. All The Mutual Admiration Society has got to do is search for someone who could’ve been in the cemetery last night at 12:07 a.m. yelling, “I’m warning you! Watch yourself! You’re treading on dangerous ground!,” not someone who had laryngitis or was working the night shift at one of the factories.

  Because I’m their leader, I can’t turn up at our Mutual Admiration meeting under the weeping willow tree without a couple of smart detecting ideas. My partners in crime are counting on me as much as all of us are counting on President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower. So while I’m waiting for Birdie to come back downstairs wearing my old sneakers after she hung out the white towel from our bedroom window that’ll let Charlie, our Sergeant of Arms, know where to find us, I flip another page of my navy-blue detecting notebook over and jot down a new list:

  QUESTION OR SURVEIL

  Mr. McGinty.

  Kitten Jablonski.

  Butch Seeback.

  Mr. Johnson.

  Suzie LaPelt.

  Of course, after I tell my fiancé about our new case, I’ll listen to what he has to say, but since we’ll already be at the scene of the crime soon, my vote would be to talk to our good friend Mr. McGinty first. The way I wanted to earlier when I saw him from the back porch talking to Mrs. Peterman about her husband’s burial. Hardly nothing happens in the cemetery that the caretaker doesn’t know about.

  8:14 a.m. Birdie still hasn’t shown up in the kitchen, which means she probably forgot why she went upstairs in the first place. I bet she’s in our mother’s bedroom. Sitting at the vanity table and trying on her shiny jewelry and smelling her lotions and playing with her makeup, because unlike me who really doesn’t go for that sort of thing, Birdie is a lot like Louise in some ways. She can’t help it, poor thing, that’s just the bad luck of the draw of blood.

  I take a giant step to the bottom of the stairs, and yell up, “Get down here ASAP!”

  Due to her dawdling, I’m sure that’s gonna take her a while, so just as I’m about to take the garbage out the way Louise told me to, I’m surprised to hear the running of little feet over my head and my sister hollering back, “I’m ready, Frank!”

  When Louise is gone for the night, I like to pop some corn and curl up on the sofa and watch TV shows like 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye so I can get some free detecting pointers, but those whodunnits? They’re way too hard for Birdie to keep straight in her brain. Besides Walt Disney Presents, what tickles her fancy are game shows. She’s not smart enough to shout out any of the answers to the questions the way I do, she just loves the shiny prizes, and when the duck comes down on one of her favorite shows of all, that’s always good for one of her great belly laughs that can give even the saddest person a little hope.

  Because she loves all my impressions, to reward her for doing what I told her to, after she hops off the last stair and makes the turn into the kitchen, I reach around and grab my ponytail, hold it over my lip, and tell her like Groucho Marx, “Close, but no cigar, little lady.” She laughs so hard that her pelican tummy jiggles out of the top of her shorts and I have to stop walking around with my knees bent and stick it back in. “By the way, honey, the famous saying is, I’m ready, Freddy, not I’m ready, Frank, and . . .” I point down. “You got the right sneakers, but they’re on the wrong feet.” I bend over to switch them up. “This is a big, big day that could change our whole lives, so ya gotta keep trying your hardest to listen to me and do whatever I tell ya to, okay? Try to keep your drifting to a minimum, and especially”—I make bunny ears in the sneaker laces and change my voice to my most serious one, the one Perry White of the Daily Planet uses when he’s talking to Jimmy Olsen, who can get flighty, too—“you can’t do any wild-streaking, okay?”

  Wild-streaking is the bottom of Birdie’s barrel. Out of nowhere, she’ll take off to parts unknown without me, and it can be hours before I finally find her at Daddy’s pretend grave or the Finney Library or the candy aisle at Dalinsky’s Drugstore or the flower shop with her nose in a bouquet of pink roses or etc. You name a place in the neighborhood and I’ve found my wild-streaking sister there. Even the last place nobody wants to find themselves in. Up a tree in the cemetery’s Phantom Woods. And maybe the worst part of all is that I can’t even BE PREPARED for one of her streaks. They’re like the weather in the month of March. They blow in like a lion and go out like a lamb, and as far as I can tell, I don’t think she’s in charge of them, any more than she’s the boss of when she drifts off to parts unknown or any of the other weird stuff she does. But over the years, I have noticed that if Birdie gets too starved or too bored, a wild streak is much more likely to rain on our parade.

  I’ve lectured her about listening to me, and I’ve already taken care of keeping her tummy happy when I made her the P B and M, so after I get the sneakers laces double knotted, I slip off the rubber bands I got around my wrist, and tell her
, “Time for your beautification routine.” This is one of her favorite parts of the morning, so I don’t even have to tell her to turn around. I finger comb her hair into two blah-brown pigtails, then I come back to the front of her, lick my pointer finger, and wet her eyebrows down so they all go in the same direction, pinch off a booger that’s hanging from the bottom of her upturned nose, and rub off most of Louise’s red lipstick she smeared way outside the lines of her lips when she was upstairs messing around with our mother’s things. But there’s nothing I can do about the Evening in Paris perfume she dabbed behind her ears except hook her too-long bangs behind them to hide the smell. That’s the best I can do until we catch up with Charlie and he raises Birdie’s bangs with his sharp whittling knife. I could it do with a scissors, but she thinks I make her look like Moe from the Three Stooges and she’s right.

  When I’m done straightening her out, she bats her eyes and asks me the same thing she asks me every morning. “How do I look, Tessie?”

  So I say back to her the same thing I say to her every morning. “You are so, so, so, so beautiful. You remind me of Ida Lupino.” Then I wink at her and then she winks back at me in her adorable slightly bulgy-eyed way and that can go on forever, so I put a halt to it by pointing down to her right shorts pocket to make sure she has what she needs to keep her tiny mind occupied when we’re over at the cemetery. Birdie cannot, I repeat, not do any bored wild-streaking on this life-changing day. We’re on a deadline. “You got your hobbies?”