by Laura Tucker
I looked up at the brass plate above the door with its dim row of numbers and thought about mysteries.
Last summer, when Alex was still obsessed with those books, he’d found a small circle of faded purple buttons behind some bushes in the park.
“It’s a clue, guys,” he’d whispered as he was dragging us into the brush to see the buttons, so excited I thought he was going to pee his pants.
Alex’s sister Maggie had been with us that day, upset about Rolando, this sick bird she’d found and taken to the pigeon lady. The bird had died anyway, and Maggie was pretty bummed out about it, so Linda had told her she could go to the park with us. (Maggie can be funny, but she drives Alex up the wall and asks too many questions, even when you aren’t worried that she’s dripping with some disgusting bird disease. So we only bring her to the park when Linda makes us.)
It seemed like he was right about the buttons, though. There were six of them, the kind you’d see on an old lady’s blouse, laid out in a small, perfect circle, and even Richard and I couldn’t help but be curious. Who had left them? What did they lead to? And what did it all mean?
Alex ran the investigation. He made me measure and draw the position of each button, so we’d be able to replace them exactly. We collected them, examining them for clues with a magnifying glass we’d borrowed without asking from the science lab at school, and we dug a deep hole to see if anything was buried underneath. (Maggie wasn’t allowed to touch anything, so she held a funeral service for Rolando on the bench where we could keep an eye on her as we dug.) Then we filled in the hole, put the buttons back, and staked out the bushes from behind a Daily News left behind on a bench.
We did that for three weekends in a row. And you know what we found?
A big fat nothing.
There was no answer to The Mystery of the Mauve Buttons—or none we could find, anyway. Just six ugly buttons in a circle in the dirt behind a bush in Washington Square Park.
In books, clues were tidy arrows pointing toward a logical conclusion, and detectives were always in the right place at the right time. In real life, though, everything was more confusing. Sometimes there were lots of explanations for why something had happened; sometimes there was no explanation at all. You couldn’t always tell what was a clue. And even when you could, most of the time those clues didn’t add up to anything more than a pile of old-lady buttons.
The elevator chunked to a stop at the seventh floor.
Nobody knew how to get in touch with my dad—and if they did, they weren’t telling me. Our quest to find Apollo’s True Lost Love was a bust before it had even gotten off the ground. And I had no idea how to make my mom better.
The metal door scraped open, and a hungry Alex shouldered past me into the hall.
Even though I’d made fun of them, I’d kept reading those mysteries long after the boys had lost interest. (Richard’s breaking point had been a particularly pathetic animatronic dragon in a cave. He has a good sense of humor about most things, but he takes his monsters seriously.) Even Alex had tired of the formula eventually, the way the kids always knew exactly what they needed to know, the way the leads always added up to a solve.
Trailing the boys out of the elevator, I had to wonder if those tidy endings hadn’t been the real reason I’d kept reading.
JUST A SKETCH
The hallway was filled with the most amazing dinner smell; I crossed my fingers that it was coming from Richard’s house.
“Hi, Mom,” Richard called out as he unlocked the door. “We’re home.”
The smell was coming from his house. I closed my eyes and took a deep, grateful sniff before going to say hi to his mom.
Alex says there are too many rules at Richard’s house, but they’re just different from the ones at his—more about everybody chipping in to help, and less about staying out of Linda’s way.
I love Richard’s. His apartment is the opposite of mine. When my parents moved into our loft, the bathroom didn’t even have a door; Apollo helped my dad make walls for the bedrooms when I got too big to sleep in a basket. Richard’s apartment is a series of little rooms, connected by passageways, every inch of them lined with books and records. Everything is white at my house, but every wall at Richard’s is painted something deep and warm, the colors of the earth, and every one of them has a painting or a photograph or a piece of cloth hanging on it.
Dr. Charles collects textiles from all over the world. She hangs her favorite pieces, but she has so many that the little closet near the table where they eat is filled with carefully folded fabric. Every once in a while, you have to take everything out and wipe the shelves down with a clean rag, and then refold everything with new creases. Once a year, she uses a piece of very fine sandpaper on the cedar shelves that Mr. Charles put in there for her.
I’d clean that closet with her every single weekend if I could.
Dr. C thinks girls shouldn’t always get stuck with housework, but Richard’s dad had to get ready for work—he’s a conductor on the subway, usually the number 2 out to New Lots. Plus, I like helping her, and Alex and Richard don’t, so it was just the two of us in the kitchen before dinner.
She gave me a big pile of clean lettuce to spin dry, and then we tore it up together into smaller pieces. When that was done, she asked me to choose some fabrics from the second shelf of the closet, and then showed me how to put three different ones on the table, laying them at angles so that you could see part of each one.
Even though it’s the boys’ job to set the table and to bring the food, I stood at Dr. Charles’s elbow, waiting for her to finish the dressing so I could take the bowl to the table. Our salad bowl at home is a big dinged-up metal bowl that my mother got from a restaurant supply place on the Bowery, but the salad bowl at the Charles’ house was carved by hand from a piece of wood so dark it’s almost black. The top edge dips and curves, following the grain of the wood. It even has a hole, right up near the top, where there was a knot in the tree it was made from. I couldn’t wait to see how it was going to look on the table on top of the fabric we’d laid down.
When we were getting ready to call the boys to set the table, Dr. Charles leaned up against the kitchen wall and looked me right in the face.
“Is everything okay with you, Olympia?”
I looked down at my dirty sneaker and nodded. “Everything’s okay. I’m hungry, that’s all.” I made myself smile and meet her eyes. Eye contact is very important when you’re lying.
Richard’s mom nodded and turned back to the stove, but not before she’d looked at me a while longer.
* * *
Dinner was a green salad and chicken in a slightly spicy red sauce with peanuts in it, which we ate on top of buttery rice with peas and broccoli on the side. Everything was so good, I filled my plate three times. I ate even more than Alex did.
Afterward, the boys cleared the table and turned on the eight o’clock movie. Richard likes to watch movies with aliens and spaceships and monsters. Alex likes anything where people run around and jump from buildings and get thrown out of speeding cars. WPIX’s Saturday eight o’clock movie usually works for both of them.
I don’t care about aliens or car chases. Also, it’s difficult for Alex to stop moving long enough to watch a movie, so he was wagging one of his legs in the air, which makes me want to slap him.
I wouldn’t, though. Even if it hadn’t been for the ding-a-ling day.
Back when we were five, I followed Alex around for an entire day calling him a ding-a-ling. When I say the entire day, I mean The Entire Day. I called him a ding-a-ling on our way to kindergarten, I called him a ding-a-ling at snacktime, and then at recess I got everyone else to call him a ding-a-ling.
Even back then, Alex was good at tuning out, because of Linda. Still, by the time our moms had picked us up and taken us to the playground after school, he was getting pretty mad. “Cut it out, Ollie,” he said, stamping hi
s foot, and I could tell it was a warning. But the ding-a-ling thing had taken on a life of its own.
When we were little, our clubhouse at the playground was the cool, damp spot under the big slide. We used it for base when we were playing tag. That day, when we got under there, I said, “You’re it, ding-a-ling,” meaning I wanted him to chase me, but Alex had had enough: He hauled off and hit me, hard, on the arm.
I didn’t blame him for hitting me. If it had been him calling me a ding-a-ling all day, I would have decked him flat-out before we’d gotten to school, and I probably would have tried to spit in his mouth while I had him pinned.
But Alex had made a bad mistake: He’d hit me in full view of the moms on the playground benches.
In a flash, there were twenty moms consoling me like I was going to die from the punch.
And they went absolutely nuts on Alex.
His own mom was the worst. “You don’t hit girls, Alex,” Linda hissed, over and over. “Ever. You never, ever hit a girl.”
It didn’t make sense. Even in kindergarten we knew it was not okay to hit a kid who was smaller than you were, but I was about two inches taller than Alex was at the time, and my feet were bigger. He was stronger, because even then he was always doing some weird trick over and over and over again, but not by much.
And I had really, really been asking for it.
Still, he never hit me again after that, no matter how much I deserved it, although I never pulled another stunt on him like the ding-a-ling day. And I never hit him, either, since he couldn’t hit me back.
Sometimes, we called each other ding-a-ling as a joke. But I always let him start it.
Alex’s leg wagging drove me nuts, so while the boys watched their movie, I wandered back into the kitchen to see if Richard’s mom needed help.
She was putting the leftover chicken from the big red pot into a bowl with a plastic top for her lunch. I felt bad about my third helping. There was probably less left over than she’d thought there’d be.
“The movie’s not your thing, Ollie?” I shook my head, and she twinkled back. I’m pretty sure Dr. Charles doesn’t watch monster movies when Richard’s not around. Richard’s not allowed to watch them, either, unless his room is neat and his homework is done and he’s finished practicing his piano for the week.
The kettle whistled, and I watched as Dr. Charles swished a bit of hot water around the bottom of the teapot, dumped that out, added a spoonful of loose tea, and poured water from the kettle over it. “Tea will be ready by the time we’ve turned this place over to the boys,” she said, and set me up transferring broccoli and rice into Tupperware containers.
When the food was all put away and the dishes rinsed and stacked in the sink, Dr. Charles called Alex and Richard in to wash them. She said it was okay if they only did dishes during the commercial breaks as long as the kitchen was clean by the time the movie was over.
Then we took our tea back out to the table, which was still set with the three different cloths. Dr. Charles flipped over one with a sauce stain, then poured the tea through a strainer into big pottery mugs. It tasted delicious, like Big Red gum.
Full of spicy chicken and colors and cinnamon tea, I started to think that maybe I could say something to Dr. Charles about my mom. I knew that whatever she did would be the right thing; she was that kind of person. And she seemed to be waiting for me to say something.
But just as I opened my mouth—before I had any idea what I was going to say—Mr. Charles came out of the bedroom. He’d taken a shower and was wearing his MTA uniform, a blue shirt with a red tie and a blue cardigan over the top. He looked very handsome, and Dr. Charles smiled when she saw him.
“Have a good night, you,” she said, as he leaned over the table and kissed her next to her eye. “A safe one.” She worries about him working nights, but he’s loved trains since he was little. This may be why he’s got so much patience for Richard’s monsters.
He straightened up and winked at me. “After a dinner like that, what can’t I do?”
The boys came out of the kitchen to say goodbye. Alex’s T-shirt was soaked through with dishwater so he just waved, but Richard gave his dad a hug, and the boys went back to their movie.
Mr. Charles nodded to me on his way out the door—“Always a pleasure, Ollie”—and then he was off, exactly like the dad on a television show going off to work in the morning, except that it was night.
Alex and Richard were lying on their stomachs in front of the TV, watching the movie. I turned my body so I wouldn’t have to see Alex’s fidgety leg and opened my notebook to draw Richard’s dad before the image of him faded from my brain. I sketched his neat moustache and his left eye, which droops a little. I didn’t look up until there was a heavy-duty crash from the kitchen, followed by an extremely loud silence. Dr. Charles shook her head at the urgent whispering that came after that, then got to her feet. I hadn’t even noticed it was a commercial break.
My drawing of Mr. Charles wasn’t completely done, but I’d run out of steam, and it was tricky to remember all the details of his nose and chin without him being there. I took a sip of my tea, cold now but still delicious, and flipped through the pages of my notebook, stopping to look at a drawing I’d done of my mom in her bed.
I’d made it while I was sitting outside her bedroom earlier that week, leaning against her closed door. I’d taken to sitting there sometimes after I’d dropped off her cigarettes and Tab. It made me feel like we were together, even if being in the room with her was too hard.
This drawing had come so quickly it had felt like I was tracing it, like someone else was moving my hand. She was looking up and away, one arm thrown back over her head, her eyes fixed on a spot at the corner of the ceiling. I’d drawn the dented, empty can she’d been using as an ashtray on top of the messy stack of art books by her bed, the sheets crumpled around her and her thin foot, dark on the bottom from going without shoes, poking out of the frayed bottom of her jeans.
The drawing was good, even though my dad had left right when he was starting to teach me about perspective, and I wasn’t sure I’d gotten the bottom half of her body totally right. He always says practice is the most important thing, anyway. Just draw, Ollie. Get it wrong! Who cares? Paper is cheap. Look carefully. Draw. Then do it again.
He’d been right about practice, because I had gotten better. Since my mom had gone to bed, I’d been drawing all the time.
I pushed the open notebook away from me. As good as the drawing was, I didn’t want to look at it. What I wanted was to stay at the Charles’ house forever, following the rules that made things nice, sitting down for dinner as a family and cleaning up as a team and drinking cinnamon tea.
“Smaller than the Taxonomy, that’s for sure.”
I’d forgotten all about Dr. Charles, on her way back to the table from the disaster in the kitchen. I was tempted to close the notebook quickly, but it’s better not to act like your notebook is secret. If you do, then everyone is always making a big deal out of seeing what’s inside. Not that Dr. Charles would, but I knew that hiding the picture would make her curious.
She leaned over to look more closely. “This is your mom, Ollie?”
“It’s just a sketch.” I shrugged, sounding even to myself like she’d caught me doing something wrong. “I was just messing around.”
She traced the lines with her finger without touching them. “You’re getting really good. I’m seeing a big improvement, even since the last monster you drew for Richard. Leaps and bounds.”
I was glad she could see it. Mostly, though, I was relieved that she wanted to talk about drawing, not my mom.
She sat down at the table again, the notebook between us. “It’s miraculous to me, what you can do. You know I can barely draw a stick figure.”
I brushed off the compliment. “My dad says you have to look, and then draw what you see. And practic
e, as much as you can.”
She laughed. “I’m not sure it’s that easy. Anyway, a lot of people don’t see anything at all. Helping people to see what’s there—especially everything they’d rather ignore—is one of my jobs, too.”
I’d been one of those people. The first time we talked about Manet’s Olympia, Dr. Charles told me, “The model’s name was Laure.” I’d been confused: Apollo had told me that the woman who’d posed for Olympia had been an artist called Victorine Meurent. But there are two women in that painting, and Dr. C was talking about the servant behind Olympia, the one that people—including me, until Dr. C told me her name—tended to ignore.
Dr. C looked down again at the drawing I’d made of my mom, and I saw it the way she must be seeing it: the disheveled bed, my mom’s rawboned hands and her too-thin wrists, her eyes looking away. I couldn’t tell what Dr. C was thinking, and I had to resist the urge to grab the book right out of her hands.
“Journalists and academics like me look closely, but we can only record exactly what we see. Other people transform their experiences, even the hard ones. They turn difficult things into beautiful ones. They’re the artists. And that’s what you are.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything, but the tender, careful, proud feeling she’d given me stuck with me the whole rest of the movie, like I had a kitten asleep on my lap.
KIND OF SUSPICIOUS
There aren’t very many cars on Greene Street at night on the weekends, so Alex and I walked down the middle of the street to avoid the shadowy doorways and the black garbage bags by the curb, which rustled when we passed.
Rats love SoHo.
That morning, there’d been an impatient feeling in the air, like the birds and the blossoms and the little green buds were all saying, Come on, lemme show you what I’ve got. Now that it was dark, that feeling had intensified into something urgent. Suddenly I understood why my dad always says teenagers don’t have to go looking for trouble in this weather; it comes to them.
