The Mutual Admiration Society

by Lesley Kagen

  But as good and helpful as hats, shades, and drinking glasses are, I got my sights set on something much, much better. I want the same TOOLS OF THE TRADE that Gert’s got. Hearing aids. They’re not much to look at, but I’m not kidding, those little plastic shrimp that hook around her long ears are so powerful that she can hear you burping the alphabet or making farting noises under your armpit in the front pew of the church when she’s all the way in the back. Oh, having hearing aids of my own would be so helpful for blackmail and detecting eavesdropping! Betcha I could be five cars away and still hear a greaser bragging to one of the gang at the Milky Way Drive-In, I scored third base offa Mary Catherine O’Donnell at the necking tree last night or It’s me who stole over two hundred clams outta the Pagan Baby collection box, or the best confession ever, Yeah, I was the one who snatched and murdered Sister Margaret Mary, ya wanna make something of it, Clyde?

  From where Birdie and me are hiding, I watch with held breath as our rancid neighbor with the A+ hearing moves from her picture window over to her smaller shouting-at-us window. “Church paper drive, my foot!” she screams. “I see you and your sister crouched in those bushes, Theresa Finley, you little banshee!”

  “No, she doesn’t. She’s trying to trick us,” I whisper to Birdie.

  “If you don’t come out, I’m calling your mother and telling her what you’ve been up to!” Gert bellows.

  When I feel Birdie tighten, I tap my finger against her cute mouth and say, “Zip it, lock it, and stick it in your pocket,” because I wouldn’t put it past her to jump up and shout back to Gert, Tell Mommy I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry! So just to make sure she doesn’t, I wrap my arms around her little body and start singing softly the same thing I always do when we’re hiding. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi.” When I reach, “twenty-one Mississippi,” which is my lucky number, because it was Daddy’s, I remind my partner in crime one more time to keep her trap shut before I separate the bush branches to check and see why Gert has suddenly gone quiet as a tomb.

  Damnation!

  Her bunions must not be bothering her this morning as much as I wanted them to, because our bulky neighbor has made it out her door, down her porch steps, around the prickly hedge, and to the back of our house in record-breaking time. She must’ve decided that we weren’t crouched down in the cemetery bushes after all, which is good, but now she’s coming over to check on us the way Louise asked her to before she left for the Clark station, which is not good.

  “Open up!” Gert bellows as she pounds on the back door of our house.

  When Birdie and me don’t do her bidding, she takes something out of her flowery housecoat pocket in a frenzy and starts talking in the secret language they teach at St. Nazianz Seminary, which is where boys go to become priests after high school if they can’t get any girls to put out for them.

  “Dominos vobiscum,” Gert shouts in Latin.

  What is that she’s choking in her meaty hand? Is that . . . no. That can’t be her precious bottle of Holy Water she brought back from her pilgrimage to Lourdes, could it?!

  “Theresa Marie Finley, in the name of His Holiness Pope John the Twenty-Third and our savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, and His mother Mary,” Gert yells as she dips her fingers into the purple bottle and makes the sign of the cross on our back door. “I demand you show yourself immediately!”

  What . . . in . . . the . . . hell . . . is . . . she . . . doing?

  It sorta looks like something that Kitten Jablonski told me the church had to do to her older sister, Dawn, who got in Dutch for getting caught too many times with her blouse off in the back of some boy’s hot rod. When my confidential informant was describing it to me, her exact words were, “It’s called an exercism. The bishop sent a special priest to our house to shout a bunch of Latin, throw Holy Water on Dawnie, and force her to do Royal Canadian push-ups so the devil would hop outta her.”

  Even though Kitten’s information is usually so reliable, I didn’t believe her at first because that exercism business sounded sorta off the wall to me, but whatta ya know? Here’s Gert Klement proving once again that famous saying “Seeing is believing.”

  Gert says as she holy sprinkles our house again, “This is your last chance, Theresa, before I . . . I . . .”

  Before you what, you holier-than-thou hag? Call your friend the bishop and tell him to send a special priest over to our house tonight who’ll force me to drop and do fifty in our living room?

  That’ll be the day.

  But my fragile sister, she doesn’t feel the same way. Birdie doesn’t do so good with yelling, orders, or threats of any kind, no matter how much Hershey’s chocolate I jam into her mouth. If she gets too worked up, she’s going to start squawking so loud that our neighbor wouldn’t even need her hearing aids to find us.

  Gert threatens again, “I’m calling your mother!”

  “Keep your cool,” I whisper to the kid whose slightly bulging eyes have got more white in them than they should. “Even if she does get a hold of Louise at the station, I’ll explain to her that the reason that we didn’t answer the door when Gert knocked was because . . . ummm . . . you and me went up to church so I could confess with the other kids.” Birdie won’t figure out that I’m lying to her to keep her from going berserk, because she won’t remember that I can’t say my sins for a few more hours and she can’t tell time. “Exactly the way she ordered me to do before she left for her job.”

  That famous saying about pride goeth-ing before a fall is very correct, because I’m so busy giving myself a pat on the back for thinking up that whopper that when my sister starts looking even more agitated and begins shaking her head low and slow, it takes me a second to figure out why the confession lie didn’t calm her down the way it shoulda.

  I could just kick myself! It’s too late now, but I should’ve come up with a different fib about a subject that Birdie is not so dang touchy about.

  Sure enough, sadder sounding than the seagulls who circled over my head on the day Daddy drowned, my sister reminds me about #9 on my TO-DO list. “Please just think about making a real confession to Father Ted before it’s too late, Tessie.”

  Her and me agree on most topics of conversation, but on this particular one, the Finley sisters are more parted than the Red Sea.

  Every night lately after we kneel next to our bed to say, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take,” Birdie throws her arms around my neck and cries on my shoulder.

  Dying in the middle of the night must happen all the time to Catholic kids or there wouldn’t be a prayer to ward it off, so I understand why she gets herself all hot and bothered. We already lost Daddy, and my sister is petrified that she’s going to lose me, too, not just in this lifetime, but for all eternity if I should croak in the middle of night when I’m slipping my hand under her heinie every once in a while to make sure she hasn’t wet the bed, working on my lists, shadowboxing, practicing my impressions and a couple of sure-fire jokes that are sure to get the crowd going before I sing the “Favorite Things” song that I’m going to perform for the talent portion of Miss America someday in honor of our father.

  Birdie is positive that instead of the Lord showing up to return my soul to its heavenly home, Lucifer will appear in our room to stab my soul with his pitchfork and drag it down to his place. The reason I haven’t been able to come up with anything yet to convince her that she’s wrong is because she isn’t. I was counting on her forgetting when I told her, but for some unknown reason, she perfectly remembers that my filthy-with-sin soul hasn’t been scrubbed clean in the longest time, since I stopped telling Father Ted my real sins in my real voice every week in the confessional and started telling him fake sins in my Shirley Temple voice, because for godssake, who wouldn’t believe anything that tap-dancing, yodeling kid told them?

  FACT: I got my reasons.

  PROOF: Loose l
ips sink ships.

  Sure, priests are supposed to keep what you tell them a secret, but it’d be pretty dumb of me to confess the whole truth and nothing but in my easy-to-identify voice to a regular at Lonnigan’s Bar who is known to knock back way too many glasses of Communion wine.

  Now, I’m not saying that I’m 100% sure that Father Ted would go blabbing my top snooping and blackmailing secrets to every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the parish. All I’m saying is that I need to BE PREPARED that half-in-the-bag priest could go blabbing my top snooping and blackmailing secrets to every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the parish. Gossip spreads faster around here than German measles and if our mother ever got wind of what my sister and me been up to, she’ll get out one of the only possessions she hasn’t given away of Daddy’s to Goodwill Industries. His brown leather belt. Birdie and me wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week. (That’s what is known as an understatement. No joke.) Even worse, Louise could get so steamed when she heard about our detecting and blackmail shenanigans that she’d lock us in our room and telephone St. Anne’s Home for Wayward Girls and the county loony bin and tell them to drop everything and come get the Finley sisters ASAP! (That’s what is known as being screwed. Also no joke.)

  “Please, honey,” I say to my ants-in-her-pants sister, who could blow our caper at any second if she gets any more worked up. “You’ve gotta try really hard now to stop thinkin’ about me kickin’ the bucket in the middle of the night and going to Hell. Maybe . . . maybe you could think about something yummy instead! Something like . . .” I reach behind me and wave her favorite Red Owl grocery bag that’s got the P B and M inside that I just realized sounds more like something you’d do on a visit to the little girls’ room, and maybe Birdie, who I suspect can ESP my mind, just realized that, too, because she turns her nose up at the sandwich, which isn’t like her at all. Not giving up, I bring up another one of her favorite subjects to convince her to chow down, which will keep her mouth busy with something other than squawking. “Remember how Daddy used to tell everyone up at Lonnigan’s, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry—’”

  “For tomorrow we all could die.”

  “No, no, no, no, you’re not remembering that right. What Daddy used to say is, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we all could . . . ahhh . . . spy!’”

  Feeling pretty good about that lie, I take one more look through the branches to make sure Gert is still on our back porch or on the way back to her house, but my sister must’ve moved around enough to draw her attention our way, because that old buffalo is stampeding straight toward the bushes we’re hiding in with an I-got-you-now look on her ugly puss. Of course, she can’t climb the cemetery fence to grab us, she’s too decrepit, but if she makes it to the fence, she will be able to look through the black bars and down into the bushes.

  “She’s comin’,” I squat back down and tell Birdie. “Quick. Get down on your tummy and back out very slowly, because if she catches us, she’ll . . .” I don’t want to rile her up worse than she already is, but what choice do I have? “She’s gonna rat us out to Louise and ya remember what she told you this morning she was going to do if we got caught outside of the house doing something we’re not supposed to?”

  Luckily, a small part of Birdie’s small brain does recall again that our mother threatened to take away her precious Three Musketeers bars, because she doesn’t have to think long and hard about the answer to my question the way she does most.

  She lickety-split drops to her belly, looks up at me with her run-of-the-mill blue eyes that have turned a steelier gray than the barrel of a gangster’s gun, and says outta the side of her suddenly gone old-timey mouth, “Well, whatcha waitin’ for, toots? An engraved invitation? Let’s blow this pop stand.”

  8

  UH-OH

  Birdie and me are snaking our way through the familiar gravestones at our home away from home on our way to the biggest burial joint in the whole cemetery, which belongs to Mr. Gilgood. When he was still alive and kicking, the richest man in the neighborhood lived in a house that does not look like all the rest of our wooden houses. Mr. McGinty, who knows a lot about other things besides digging graves because he has a World Book Encyclopedia of his very own in his shack at the cemetery where Birdie and me visit him all the time, told me that Mr. Gilgood’s place was so different because it was built by somebody name of Frank Lloyd Wright, who I think was one of the famous flying brothers because that house on 67th St. has always looked a little like an airliner to me.

  I can only guess who or what my sister is thinking about on our trip to the scene of the crime—probably Daddy and Charlie and chocolate-covered cherries—but when we scoot past one of the graves that’s blanketed in going-away presents on our way over there, what I’m wondering about for the umpteenth time is if I’m being a dope who is ignoring opportunity knocking loudly at my door.

  I make an exception when it comes to the boxes of the Stover’s candy that Evelyn Melman leaves once a week on Mr. Lindley’s grave—why the wife of the hardware store owner is sweet on this dead plumber who got burned up in a house fire is one of life’s little mysteries that I wouldn’t mind solving when things die down around here. (Joke!) But if I didn’t have the rule to steal only from people who have and never from people who have not, I could make such a killing at Louie’s Pawn Shop with the parting gifts that grievers leave on the graves of their departed loved ones. Woolly teddy bears in vests, Christmas wreaths with silver bells that I can hear tinkling through the crack in our bedroom window at that time of year, flags waving on the Fourth of July, crocheted afghans during April showers—I guess to warm their departed’s bones—and until recently, many of the tombstones had real gold St. Christopher medals hanging offa them. About the only person I can think of who has left something not so nice on a grave is Mrs. Eunice Hartfield. She propped a laminated picture on the tombstone of her deceased hubby that had a cigarette hole burned into the spot on his chest where his heart should’ve been after she heard at the church knitting circle that her best friend, Mrs. Dorothy Osbourn, was an even best-er friend with Mr. John Hartfield, so I guess that proves the famous saying “Hell hath no fury like a woman scored on” is true once and for all.

  And, of course, the other thing I can’t help but think about when my sister and me make our way to Mr. Gilgood’s luxurious mausoleum is that we’re breaking Louise’s #1 Commandment—The Finley Sisters Shalt Not Visit the Cemetery.

  Far back as I can remember, our mother hasn’t wanted us to hang out here, but she’s gotten even stricter since the day of our father’s pretend funeral and burial that she wouldn’t let Birdie and me go to. Because no matter how hard the Shore Patrol looked for Daddy’s body after he fell over the side of The High Life the afternoon we went fishing together, they never found him. Not in Lake Michigan, and he never washed up on one of the beaches, either. So that’s why his coffin that got carried out of the hearse by the six men named Paul was full of rocks and not Daddy’s bones.

  “Losing your father is a cross the three of us will have to bear, girls, but life goes on. Time heals all wounds,” is the kind of bull hockey that Louise preaches to Birdie and me about every day. “We need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.”

  But I guess, like Mr. McGinty taught me, there are times that bull hockey isn’t always bad. “Honesty is the best policy, Tessie, but it’s got no business attending a funeral,” is what he said. That’s because our friend knows that if those sad people who’ve lost their most precious one were told the hopeless truth, which is that once they’re done being numb they’ll start feeling all the time like they got the worst thirst that nothing can quench and know deep inside of themselves that they’re gonna spend every day of the rest of their lives looking for something precious they’re never gonna find, no matter how many times the sun rises and sets, that would be pretty much the same as telling them, You’ll never hear your sweet one’s voice, hug them, and laugh at their jokes again, so why don’t you save yourself a lot of
wear and tear and jump into that grave with them and get it over with?

  Why doesn’t Louise feel that way?

  She’s got no trouble quenching her thirst up at Lonnigan’s Bar with the guy she wants to replace our precious Daddy with. Sometimes I pretend that we need money so much that our mother is sacrificing herself by luring what’s-his-name and his payroll check into her wedding web, but it sure seems to me that she’s only thinking about herself. I have told her a million times that if she can’t pay the electric or heating bill or buy more food, that’s fine by us. Candles will do, and this winter Birdie and me can wear our coats and mittens in the house, and I can bring home school lunch in my uniform pocket for supper, but Louise won’t listen to me.

  But just because she doesn’t care about Daddy anymore doesn’t mean that Birdie and me don’t and I had no problem telling her that. She had the worst tantrum I’ve ever seen the night I waited at the kitchen table for her to come home from Lonnigan’s. I just couldn’t take it anymore and she’s not the only one with a temper around here, so I accused Louise of inflicting “cruel and unusual punishment” on Birdie and me because Daddy wasn’t here anymore to protect us. She shook her finger in my face and screamed, “You want to see some cruel and unusual punishment, little girl? Try feeding two kids and . . . and paying bills and holding your head up high after your husband cheated and . . .” I hollered back at her, “Liar!” because Daddy would never cheat at cards, or approve of her keeping his two “babies” away from him, or want her to go on dates with what’s-his-name. “You’re the cheater and you will never be the boss of us! What he says still goes!” Louise slapped me across the face, which was something she had never done before, and in the morning she made French toast with cinnamon, just the way Daddy always made it.