You're a Brave Man, Julius Zimmerman

by Claudia Mills

  “Monsieur Ryan! Today I am giving only one warning. If you cannot treat these works of art with the proper respect, you will not accompany us to the museum on Friday.” Apparently Madame Cowper could speak in English when she wanted to make a point clear enough. “Comprenez-vous? Do you understand?”

  Alex glared at her, but she held his gaze. He didn’t make any more smart-alecky remarks as she showed the class little naked baby angels on a ceiling painting by Fragonard and naked girls in Tahiti painted by Gauguin. But as the class was getting ready to file outside for the morning break, Alex collected his rubber band from the floor beneath Odalisque, and snapped it at one of the naked baby angels.

  Instantly Madame Cowper bore down upon him. Julius caught in his breath.

  “Monsieur Ryan, donnez-le-moi.”

  Alex gave her the rubber band.

  “Donnez-moi votre permission slip.”

  His face completely sullen and resentful now, Alex returned to his desk, picked up his permission slip, and handed it to Madame Cowper. As the rest of the class stared, she ripped it in half, then in half again, and deposited the pieces in the wastepaper basket.

  Alex lost his temper. “You can’t stop me from going. This isn’t school. My dad paid for this class.”

  “We shall see, Monsieur Ryan, we shall see.”

  Julius couldn’t help but be thankful that for once the person in trouble was not Monsieur Zimmerman. He might not be able to pour quiche or do le Hokey Pokey, but at least he was able to stay out of trouble in French class, and to look at French paintings of naked ladies without cracking up.

  * * *

  Julius arrived a few minutes early at Edison’s house that afternoon. He wanted a little extra time to talk to Mrs. Blue.

  He took a deep breath and made himself start in: “Um—Mrs. Blue—I was wondering—well—do you think it’s time for Edison to start using—the—um—the potty?” He kept his voice low so that Edison, busily playing with his trucks at the other end of the room, wouldn’t hear.

  Mrs. Blue sighed. “I don’t know. We bought him a little potty some time ago—you may have seen it in the bathroom—but so far he’s shown no interest in using it. And the books I’ve read all say that parents should wait until the child shows interest. But one of my friends said that her children never showed any interest, so she just had to train them anyway. She used stickers.”

  “Stickers?”

  “As a reward. She made a chart and put it on the refrigerator. But I don’t know. Edison is such a sensitive little boy … And he gets upset so easily.”

  Julius wasn’t about to disagree.

  “Edison’s daddy doesn’t seem worried about it, but he doesn’t really worry about anything. What do you think, Julius? You’ve gotten to know Edison pretty well during the past two weeks. Do you think he’s ready?”

  It took Julius a moment to realize that Edison’s mom was actually asking him—a twelve-year-old boy—for advice. Somehow he had always assumed that moms just knew these things, like what foods their kids should eat, and what time their kids should go to bed, and when their kids should start using the potty. But Mrs. Blue plainly didn’t have a clue.

  Julius thought about her question. He was ready for Edison to be potty-trained, but was Edison ready?

  “I think so,” he finally said. “The other day, when I was changing his diaper, he told me that he wanted to change it himself.” Never before had so many gruesome details been left out of a story.

  “Maybe you’re right. On my way home today, I’ll stop and buy some stickers. You might try mentioning it to him—casually at first, so as not to put him off. You know how negative he is.”

  Julius made no comment.

  “Maybe you could play some sitting-on-the-potty games.”

  “Sure,” Julius said, as if he had been playing sitting-on-the-potty games all his life.

  Sitting-on-the-potty games sounded pretty terrible, but not as terrible as changing-poopy-diaper games. Julius had taken his first step—a small step, but nonetheless a real step—toward his biggest summer goal. It might not be his mother’s top-ranked goal for him, but for Julius it would be a real accomplishment.

  9

  Ever since the conversation in the ice cream parlor, Julius had started actually to like Octavia Aldridge. He had been intrigued by her right from the start: for one, she was beautiful; for another, she obviously thought she was terrific. But now he genuinely liked her, too. It seemed impossible that she could ever genuinely like him, and yet she had asked him out for ice cream. That, however bizarre and unbelievable, was a fact.

  So Julius made a point of suggesting to Edison that they play outside. The heat had broken; the breeze was brisk and refreshing.

  “Let’s go play outside, buddy.”

  “No!”

  “You can ride your bike.” It was just a little plastic trike, and Edison didn’t even pedal it; he scooted it along with his feet, like something out of The Flint-stones. Still, Julius knew that Edison was proud of it.

  “No!”

  “You can make chalk pictures on the driveway.”

  “No!”

  Desperate, Julius cast about for another idea. “You can … sit on your potty.”

  This suggestion didn’t trigger the standard response. “My potty isn’t outside.”

  “We can take it outside. Maybe the potty would like to see Edison’s yard. Poor potty, stuck all day in a yucky bathroom. Let’s take the potty on a little outing.”

  Edison giggled. Julius took that for a yes.

  He got a reasonable amount of sunblock on Edison and then went into the upstairs bathroom to get the potty. It occurred to Julius that emptying that potty would not be appreciably more pleasant than changing a diaper. But he would cross that bridge if he ever came to it.

  At the back door, he suddenly had a pang of doubt about carrying the potty into the yard. Forget A Tale of Two Cities. He should be reading a book on potty training to see what it said about taking a potty out of the bathroom. You didn’t want to make the kid think the whole world was one big bathroom. But you also had to make going to the potty seem like fun.

  It was too late, anyway, now that he had said all that stuff about how the potty needed fresh air and sunshine.

  “All right, Edison! Out we go!”

  In the yard, Edison tried putting the potty in different places: on the patio, next to the grill, in the sandbox, laughing hysterically at each one.

  “My potty likes the sandbox,” Edison said, still laughing so hard that he almost tumbled over.

  “Okay. Leave it in the sandbox. But no throwing sand, potty!”

  “Hi, Julius, hi, Edison.” Octavia was leaning over the fence. She would have to appear in time to overhear Julius engaged in conversation with a potty. Julius was willing to bet things like that had never happened to Romeo. Should he make a joke about it? No. It was better to pretend that the potty wasn’t there.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, getting up and taking a couple of steps away from the potty. That way it wouldn’t be in her direct line of vision when she looked at him.

  “Fine. Why is there a potty in the middle of the sandbox?”

  Edison looked up, evidently pleased at the question. “My potty likes the sandbox.”

  Julius shrugged apologetically, as if he couldn’t be expected to understand the strange workings of the three-year-old mind. In a low voice, he said, “We’re playing potty games today. You know, to get him used to the idea of using it.”

  “Potty games.” Octavia had a way of repeating Julius’s words that made them seem totally inane. Then she laughed, the merry, affectionate laugh he had heard before. “You’re a brave man, Julius Zimmerman.”

  Sheepishly, Julius laughed with her. Her laugh would be a good stage laugh; it made her audience want to join in.

  “When is your audition?” Julius asked.

  “Wednesday. Down in Denver, at my drama school. My mom works there, so I ride in with
her.”

  “Do they tell you right away if you get it?” He tried to make the question sound casual, but he could tell it annoyed her.

  “No, they don’t tell you right away if you get it.” Her sarcastic mimicry of his words stung. “They’ll post the cast list on Friday. Want to hear one of my songs?”

  Julius was relieved that her voice had turned friendly again. “Sure.”

  Lightly, Octavia swung herself over the fence. Julius hoped it was all right. Mrs. Blue had told him he couldn’t have friends over during his babysitting hours. Of course, Ethan had come, but that had been a rescue mission, not a social call. And this was a performance, not a social call. And Octavia wasn’t exactly a friend. Anyway, it couldn’t matter that much which side of the fence she was standing on.

  Julius seated himself on Edison’s little wooden swing. To his amusement, Edison sat down comfortably on the potty. Julius wondered if Octavia had ever performed to an audience seated on a potty before.

  “‘Many a New Day.’” Octavia announced her selection as formally as if they had been in Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver. Then she opened her mouth and sang.

  If Julius hadn’t decided at the beginning of the summer that he was through with love forever, he would have fallen in love with Octavia the moment the first notes poured out. She had an amazing voice, clear and true and lilting. And her face as she sang was alive with expression, the kind of face a movie camera would love, the kind of face you could watch forever without being bored.

  When she finished, Julius applauded, clapping so hard his palms stung. For once agreeable, Edison joined in from his potty-seat perch.

  “You’ll get the part,” Julius said, all doubt banished now. There couldn’t be two girls who sang like that and who looked like that when they sang.

  “That’s the plan,” Octavia said. Although she sounded as calm and conceited as ever, it was clear that she was pleased by Julius’s response.

  “How long does the play run?” he asked.

  “Eight performances.”

  If he weren’t through with love, Julius would attend all eight and use his Edison Blue earnings to buy her a bigger bouquet of roses each evening. And on the final night he’d send her so many flowers that her entire dressing room would be filled with them and she’d have to hire a limousine to take them home with her.

  It was a good thing that he was through with love.

  * * *

  On Tuesday, apparently daunted by Madame Cowper’s swift and terrible punishment of Alex, no one else shot any rubber bands or spitballs at the art pictures.

  During the break, Alex announced to the others loudly, “I told my dad that the Cow ripped up my permission slip for Friday, and he’s going to call her tonight and make her let me go.”

  Julius marveled at how differently his own parents would have responded. They would never take his side against a teacher. His mother, especially, always seemed willing to assume that Julius was in the wrong. Julius knew other kids whose parents came complaining to the teacher when they got bad grades. But when Julius got bad grades, his mom came complaining to him.

  He was glad they weren’t getting a grade in Intensive Summer Language Learning. Though maybe Julius wouldn’t have done too badly. He was starting to understand more and more of what Madame Cowper said to the class, and that morning he had had the right answer twice when she called on him.

  “Do you think he can?” Ethan asked. “Make her? I mean, it’s her class, isn’t it?” Julius knew that Ethan’s parents were more like his than they were like Alex’s.

  “My dad’s a lawyer,” Alex said, “and when he says, ‘Jump,’ other people say, ‘How high?’ You’ll see. Madame Cowper’s going to be the Cow that jumped over the moon.”

  * * *

  On Wednesday, Julius realized that he had forgotten to ask Octavia what time her audition was. Morning? Afternoon? He wanted to be able to beam good-luck thoughts to her. Not that she needed luck. As far as Julius was concerned, she was ready for Broadway.

  That afternoon, Edison hurried out cheerfully to his potty, still stationed in the sandbox. His new favorite game was to hide things in it. The day before, he had spent the whole afternoon filling the potty with matchbox cars and then taking them out again. He loved best the moment when he raised the lid to reveal his hidden treasures. Today the treasures were pinecones, gathered from under the three tall trees that bordered the Blues’ backyard.

  Toward three o’clock Octavia appeared in her yard.

  “Hey, Octavia!” Julius called over to her, trying not to sound too eager for her news. “How’s it going?”

  “Okay,” she said, coming over to the fence. “Good,” she corrected herself. Had Julius imagined a hint of self-doubt in her first reply?

  He hoped she would volunteer information about the audition, but when she didn’t, he made himself ask, “How was the audition?”

  This time she had the correct answer ready: “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “It was an audition, all right? I read, I sang, I danced. What else do you want to know?”

  “Do you think you did okay?”

  “What is this, the Inquisition?”

  “It’s called friendly interest,” Julius said stiffly. Was it too much to assume that he and Octavia were friends?

  “Look!” Edison interrupted. As Julius and Octavia watched, he pointed to the potty, filled almost to overflowing with pinecones.

  “Wow!” Julius said, as he had the last six times Edison had shown him the pinecones.

  “I’m sorry,” Octavia said. “All right, since you asked: there was another girl there, who auditioned after me. She was good, that’s all.”

  Julius stopped himself from asking: As good as you are? And he didn’t tell her she was sure to get the part, because he could tell how lame it would sound.

  “How’re the potty games coming?” Octavia asked then, obviously glad to change the subject.

  “Great,” Julius said truthfully. Even if Edison never learned to use the potty for its proper purpose, he had been so happily absorbed in playing with it that he hadn’t had a single tantrum this week. You couldn’t ask much more of a potty than that.

  * * *

  On Thursday Julius was beginning to wonder if the potty that had served as a garage for model cars, a seat in a concert hall, and a storage container for pinecones would ever serve as a potty.

  Edison was busy filling the potty with sand, excavated from the sandbox with his toy backhoe. It was hard work for a hot afternoon, and his cheeks were pink with exertion. His hair clung damply to his small head.

  “Hey, buddy,” Julius began tentatively. “Most people don’t put sand in a potty.” As if Edison had ever shown any sign of caring about what “most people” did. “You know what most people put in a potty?”

  Edison obviously wasn’t listening. Julius lowered his voice to a whisper, as if he were about to communicate some fascinating secret. “They put in pee-pee.”

  At that Edison looked up. “What?”

  How much of the speech had Edison missed? Probably the whole thing. But Julius just repeated the last word: “Pee-pee.”

  Edison burst out laughing, as if pee-pee was the funniest word in the English language. Which maybe it was. Then he asked, “What’s pee-pee?”

  He had to be kidding. Pee-pee was … pee-pee. Julius didn’t know how to define it for Edison better than that. It was probably one of those words they didn’t even put in the dictionary.

  “It’s a kind of water that you make in your diaper,” he finally said.

  Suddenly Edison’s face cleared. “Wee-wee?” he asked.

  “Yes!” Julius should have asked Mrs. Blue what term she used with Edison. “Pee-pee is wee-wee!”

  If the word alone had been funny, the sentence defining it was funnier. Edison tried to say it himself, but his tongue tripped over the two rhyming pairs of repeated syllables. “Say it again!” he begged between gasping giggles.
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  Feeling exceedingly foolish, and hoping that for once Octavia wasn’t around to overhear, Julius repeated, “Pee-pee is wee-wee.”

  “Again! Say it again!”

  Okay. Anything in the service of the cause. “Pee-pee is wee-wee.”

  “Say it again!”

  Julius had an inspiration. “Look, I’ll say it again if you make some pee-pee in your potty.” Who needed stickers?

  “My potty has sand in it.”

  “We can take it out. I’ll help you.”

  Eagerly, Julius dumped out the sand. Then, for good measure, he took the potty out of the sandbox and gave it a good dousing with the hose. All clean and empty now, it sparkled invitingly in the afternoon sun.

  Not invitingly enough, apparently.

  “No!” Edison practically screamed. “Edison doesn’t want to make pee-pee wee-wee in his potty.”

  “Okay.” Julius tried to keep his voice cheerful. Book or no book, he knew enough about potty-training, or at least potty-training Edison Blue, to realize he shouldn’t make an issue of it, lest Edison feel honor-bound to turn against the potty for life. “Whatever you say, buddy. Whenever you want to. And when you do, I’ll say the funny rhyme again. Deal?”

  Edison still glared at him suspiciously, but he didn’t howl.

  From next door, Julius heard Octavia warbling her warm-up voice exercises, sliding up and down a series of ever-higher scales. If she was still worried about yesterday’s audition, it didn’t show: her voice rang out loud and clear.

  10

  Julius’s spirits lifted when he saw the school bus parked in front of West Creek Middle School on Friday morning. Yes! They soared still higher when he saw that Alex was not there. Even if the bus was old and bumpy and their destination was just the Denver Art Museum, still, a class trip without Alex Ryan was a clear improvement on ordinary life, at least on ordinary life in Intensive Summer Language Learning.

  Mrs. Blue had understood when Julius asked for the afternoon off. She would stay with Edison that day, so Julius didn’t have to worry whether Edison would like his new babysitter better, or whether the new babysitter would wonder why there was a sparkling-clean potty in the middle of the sandbox.