You're a Brave Man, Julius Zimmerman

by Claudia Mills

  Julius and Ethan grabbed two seats together on the bus, as far back as Julius could sit without getting carsick.

  “Can you sleep over tomorrow night?” Ethan asked, once Madame Cowper had counted nez in French and the bus was on its way.

  “Probably,” Julius said. “I have to ask my mom. But I think she’ll let me. I mean, I have to have some fun this summer.”

  “How’s Edison doing?”

  “Okay. He’s a pretty good kid, really.”

  Ethan looked skeptical. “Have you had any more … problems?”

  “Not since the Big One. Right now I’m trying to get him to use the potty.”

  “Man!”

  Julius felt embarrassed by Ethan’s admiration, especially since he seemed as far away from that goal as ever. “So Alex isn’t here,” he said. “I guess his dad didn’t call her, after all.”

  “I bet he did, and she didn’t let him push her around. Have you ever met Alex’s dad? He’s a lot like Alex. The time I saw him, it was at the pool, and he was making fun of Alex in front of all the other guys. He called him a chicken when he wouldn’t jump in the deep end. I’d hate to have a dad like that.”

  “Me too,” Julius said. He thought gratefully of his own gentle, good-natured dad. And even his mother—she was always after him for one thing or another, but she never picked on him in front of anybody else. He had to give her credit for that. He just wished that he could be the son she had always wanted, or else that she could learn to want the son she already had.

  “Do your parents bug you about stuff?” Julius asked Ethan.

  “Sure,” Ethan said. “Not during summer much, but when we’re in school, yeah, they bug me about homework, getting it done, checking my work. But not like Alex’s dad.”

  “Sometimes…” It was hard for Julius to get the sentence out. “Sometimes I don’t think my mom likes me very much.”

  He thought Ethan might look shocked, but he didn’t. All he said was “Oh, moms always love their kids. Just because they yell at us sometimes doesn’t mean they don’t love us.”

  Julius knew his mom loved him—she still wanted to hug him and kiss him, even though he thought he was too big for that now. But he didn’t know if she really liked him. His mom liked people who did well in school, people who read books, and not any old books, but long, hard, boring, age-appropriate books.

  Julius let the subject drop.

  * * *

  When they got off the bus at the museum, Madame Cowper counted nez again. Vingt-deux. Twenty-two. Didn’t she know that the number would be the same as it had been when they got on the bus, since they had made no stops along the way?

  Once inside, Madame Cowper led them grandly to the French Impressionist exhibit, where a museum lady was going to give their group a special tour. The museum lady and Madame Cowper must have been friends, because they acted thrilled when they saw each other.

  “Lila!” the museum lady said to Madame Cowper.

  “Angie!” Madame Cowper said to the museum lady.

  Then they hugged each other. It was embarrassing to watch, but it made Julius feel better to know that Madame Cowper had at least one friend, someone who obviously thought of her as a person, not as a French teacher. Or as a cow. For the first time, he wished Alex were on the trip.

  Madame Cowper’s friend certainly knew a lot about French Impressionist painting, and Madame Cowper did, too. The pictures themselves were terrific, much better than Odalisque or those naked baby angels. Even when Monet painted the same haystack over and over again, it was always different. The guy could paint. His pictures almost made Julius want to try painting. He could paint a picture of Octavia dancing, like the Degas paintings that hung near the Monets. But painting people had to be harder than painting haystacks. Probably he should start out with haystacks.

  The exhibit was a large one, with paintings on loan from museums all over the world. When the tour was over, Madame Cowper counted nez again.

  “Dix-huit. Dix-neuf. Vingt. Vingt et un.”

  Twenty-one.

  She counted again. “Vingt et un.” Twenty-one. Who wasn’t there?

  Ethan was the first to figure out who was missing. “Lizzie,” he said.

  Madame Cowper gave a cluck of worried irritation. “Monsieur Winfield, Monsieur Zimmerman, would you go back through the galleries to see if perhaps she is lost? The rest of us will wait here.”

  Together, Ethan and Julius retraced their steps. The galleries had become crowded, and there was no sign of Lizzie anywhere. Then, in the very first gallery, Julius caught a glimpse of her familiar red curls. She was standing, motionless, in front of one of Monet’s water lily paintings.

  “Hey, Lizzie,” Ethan said.

  She didn’t move.

  “Lizzie,” he said again, and touched her on the arm.

  She gave a little scream. “Ethan?” She looked puzzled to see him.

  “Madame Cowper sent us to find you,” Ethan said. “The tour is over. We need to get on the bus to go to lunch.”

  Julius wondered if Lizzie would be upset that she had missed almost the whole tour, and 90 percent of the Impressionist paintings. If she loved paintings so much that she could spend almost two hours in just one room, it was a shame she had missed looking at so many. But she didn’t seem to mind. Maybe if you looked at a couple of paintings that long and hard, you didn’t need to look at any others.

  “I’m never writing poetry again,” Lizzie whispered as she followed Ethan and Julius through the museum. Julius glanced at Ethan to see if he looked relieved. Last year, much of Lizzie’s poetry had been about Ethan. Ethan mainly looked intent on getting back to the others without losing Lizzie to any more rhapsodies.

  “Unless…” Lizzie stopped walking, so the boys had to stop, too. “Do you think someone could do that with words? Write a poem about water lilies that would make people see them—really see them—understand them—the way Monet did?”

  Ethan didn’t answer, plainly at a loss for what to say.

  “Maybe,” Julius ventured. It seemed a safer answer than yes or no.

  Lizzie turned to him. “Do you really think so?”

  What Julius really thought was that he hoped the bus hadn’t left without them. His stomach yearned for the restaurant.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Sure,” Ethan echoed.

  Lizzie sighed blissfully and allowed herself to follow the boys again. If Ethan said it, apparently that made it true.

  When they rejoined the group, Madame Cowper’s face lit up with relief. “Mademoiselle Archer, we were beginning to worry.”

  “I was looking at the water lilies,” Lizzie explained softly.

  “Monsieur Zimmerman, Monsieur Winfield, merci beaucoup!” Madame Cowper didn’t scold Lizzie for not staying with the group, perhaps because she loved the paintings, too, in her own way, as much as Lizzie did. “Allons-y!” she said. “C’est l’heure du déjeuner. It is time for our lunch.”

  Julius couldn’t have agreed more.

  * * *

  Julius’s family seldom came to Denver, so Julius didn’t know the city very well. When the bus stopped to drop them off, he didn’t know which part of the city they were in, except that it was some part without sky-scrapers or the gold dome of the State Capitol.

  After the nose count, the class filed off the bus and waited on the sidewalk for Madame Cowper to lead them to the restaurant. They had walked half a block, past several restaurants and shop windows, when, across the street, Julius saw a girl who from the back looked exactly like Octavia. Could it be Octavia? Her acting school was somewhere in Denver. But what if he called her name and some strange girl turned to look at him scornfully?

  What if he called her name and Octavia herself turned to look at him scornfully?

  He took the plunge. “Octavia?”

  She turned around. It was Octavia. And, unbelievably, incomprehensibly, Octavia was crying.

  Julius didn’t hesitate. He ran up to Eth
an. “If Madame Cowper misses me, tell her I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I can’t talk now. I saw a girl I know, and she’s in some kind of trouble.”

  As Ethan hurried to catch up with the rest of the class, Julius darted across the street to where Octavia was still standing.

  Suddenly he knew what was wrong. “You didn’t get the part.”

  Octavia turned away from him so he couldn’t see her face, but she didn’t run away. She just stood there, facing the dingy brick wall of some drab Denver apartment building, sobbing soundlessly.

  “Hey,” he said gently. What could you say to someone who had had a big disappointment, someone who had never been disappointed before? Every possible line he could think of was inane or insulting. Still, he had to say something. “It’ll be okay,” he said. Inane and insulting.

  Octavia whirled around to face him. “No, it won’t!” At least she was angry now, rather than defeated.

  “All right, it’s not going to be okay.” At that moment, talking to Octavia felt oddly like talking to Edison.

  “Oh, shut up.” She turned away again, and Julius could tell from her shaking shoulders that she had resumed her silent sobbing.

  He tried shutting up, but after a moment of uncomfortable silence, he couldn’t help asking, “Did you get any part?”

  Without turning around, Octavia spat out, “If you can call it a part. Not Laurey, not Annie. I’m in the chorus, but I have a few speaking lines. Do you call that a part? I don’t call that a part. I call that a joke.”

  “Were there some people who didn’t get anything?”

  The question provoked Octavia to turn around and face Julius again, the better to discharge her fury. “Of course there were people who didn’t get anything. And I’m supposed to be happy—grateful—thrilled—not to be one of them? Lucky me, there are some people in the world who are worse off than I am? Lucky me, at least I’m not starving on the streets of Calcutta?”

  The reference to starving made Julius think of the rest of his class, seated in the French restaurant, waiting to order. How angry would Madame Cowper be when this time his turned out to be the missing nose?

  But he couldn’t leave Octavia in the state she was in. He tried again: “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that I’m your friend”—was that too presumptuous?—“that I want to be your friend, and if you feel bad, I feel bad, too. And if I could think of something to say that would make you feel better, I’d say it.”

  “Oh, Julius.” To his shock, Octavia hugged him and then stayed there, within the circle of his arms, leaning against him and crying fresh tears.

  “Come on, don’t cry.” He kept his arms awkwardly in place and struggled to think of something else to say. “Every actress has setbacks, right?” That had to be true.

  “I’m not an actress anymore.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “No, I’m not.” Octavia broke free from Julius. “If I’m going to be a second-rate actress, I’m not going to be an actress at all. Second-rate doesn’t happen to be my style.”

  Were you second-rate because you didn’t get one part? But Julius knew better than to argue with her. He looked down the street, searching for inspiration.

  There it was: an ice cream parlor, two doors down. He had already missed the beginning of lunch; he might as well miss the middle of it, too.

  “Look,” he said, “actress or not, what you need right now is ice cream.”

  Madame Cowper would be furious with him, even more furious than she had been with Alex. But that couldn’t be helped. He’d get Octavia some ice cream, make sure she was okay, and then find the French restaurant—how many French restaurants could there be in that part of Denver?—and try to explain.

  11

  The restaurant turned out to be easy to find. Luckily, it had a French-restaurant-type name: Chez Jacques. Julius didn’t want to go in. Facing Madame Cowper after he had run off on his class trip felt like facing his mother on report card day.

  He made himself push open the restaurant door and peer into its dim interior. He could see small tables with red-checked tablecloths; on each one stood a wine bottle holding a candle. Toward the back, a large group was seated at two long tables. His class.

  “Alors! Monsieur Zimmerman, what have you to say for yourself?” Madame Cowper left the table and came forward magnificently to confront him.

  “Nothing,” Julius muttered. The less he said, the sooner the conversation would be over with.

  “Rien? Come, come, Monsieur Zimmerman. We have been waiting for you for une demi-heure. Half an hour. You must have some explanation to give us.”

  When Julius didn’t answer, she went on, as if to prompt his memory, “Monsieur Winfield told us that you saw une amie. A friend. Is that true, Monsieur Zimmerman?”

  Glad that the others were out of hearing, Julius replied, half under his breath, “She was crying, okay?”

  “And you leave your class in the middle of a class trip whenever you see une amie qui pleure—a friend who cries?”

  Well, how often was that? Finding a crying friend on the street in Denver was hardly an everyday occurrence. And finding a crying Octavia was like being struck by lightning and winning the lottery on the same day: the odds were definitely against it.

  “Yes,” Julius said, a note of defiance in his voice. “I do.”

  Madame Cowper’s expression softened. “Asseyezvous, Monsieur Zimmerman. Sit down. It is too late for you to order a meal—you must tell your friend not to cry so long next time. But perhaps you would care to join us for dessert.”

  Julius took the seat Ethan had saved for him and tried, without success, to slip into it inconspicuously as Marcia Faitak giggled and the rest of the class stared. For dessert, everyone ordered crepes filled with various kinds of jam. Julius chose strawberry. It was delicious.

  * * *

  Julius’s mother was out at some kind of boring computer meeting all day Friday and Friday evening, too. So Julius didn’t see her until Saturday morning, when she settled down on the couch next to him while he was watching some cartoons. He hoped she wouldn’t get on his case about watching them. He hadn’t seen Rugrats in ages.

  “So how was the class trip?” she asked him.

  “It was okay.” He kept one eye on Rugrats as he answered. Tommy and Chuckie in their dopey, drooping diapers reminded him now of Edison.

  “What was the exhibit like?”

  Julius shrugged. “It was a bunch of pictures. Some of them were pretty cool.”

  “Which was your favorite artist?”

  Julius tried to remember the name of the guy who had painted all the haystacks. It started with “M.” On the TV, Tommy and Chuckie were stealthily climbing out of their cribs.

  “Um…” Julius said. “I forget his name.”

  “Julius!” His mother clicked off the TV with emphatic abruptness. Julius knew she was mad at him now. “What happened to all your goals and resolutions? I thought you were going to give up cartoons this summer. Remember? Less TV, and educational programs only?”

  “There’s nothing on but cartoons on Saturday mornings,” Julius said.

  “Then why watch anything?” she said. “Tell me, Julius, tell me honestly, have you read any of A Tale of Two Cities this summer? Have you read even the first chapter?”

  There was no point in stalling. “Well, not yet.”

  “Three weeks of summer vacation have gone by, and you haven’t read anything!”

  “I’ve read a bunch of books to Edison.” That much was true. He had started with Once Upon a Potty, for obvious reasons, but then he had found a little bookshelf in Edison’s room with a whole bunch of books he had loved when he was a little boy: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Curious George, The Happy Lion. One afternoon last week he and Edison had been so busy reading the books they had forgotten to watch their cartoons. Did that count?

  “Julius, I’m glad you’re
taking your job seriously, I really am, but when we talked about your reading goals for the summer, we were talking about something more ambitious than picture books.”

  So it didn’t count.

  “Julius, I know you have a lot on your plate this summer, and you need some time to relax on the weekends, but it’s just as easy to relax with a good book as with TV. Reading is so important! It’s the foundation of everything else you do in school, and your schoolwork is the foundation of everything else in your life. Honey, you’re going to grow up and have a job someday. Have you given any thought to that, any thought at all?”

  Julius shook his head. So far all he knew was that he didn’t want to write computer manuals like his mom, or be an accountant like his dad.

  He hoped his mother wasn’t going to cry. That was the worst, when his mother cried. She had cried over his final sixth-grade report card, and the memory of it had made Julius feel sick inside for days. She wasn’t crying this time—yet—but she was looking pretty close to it.

  As he fiddled with the remote control for the TV, he accidentally turned it on.

  “Julius!” His mother snatched the remote away from him and clicked the TV off again. “I think we’re going to have to make some rules limiting television in this house if your resolutions aren’t working. I don’t want you watching any more TV until you’ve made some real progress on your reading goals.”

  As if to make the banishment of TV more concrete, she laid the remote on the highest shelf of the built-in bookcase in the family room. There might have been something funny about the gesture, for Julius was taller than his mom now and could reach higher than she could. But nothing was funny when his mother was so upset with him.

  She stalked out of the room, leaving Julius alone with the blank TV screen.

  * * *

  Should he call Octavia over the weekend to ask her if she was okay? Julius could imagine Octavia giving one of two answers to the question. A scornful no, as in: Of course I’m not okay. My whole life as an actress has been ruined forever. How could I possibly be okay? Or a scornful yes, as in: Oh, that. I’ve already forgotten about that. But thanks for reminding me about one of the most humiliating afternoons of my life.