by Lisa Howorth
* * *
—
The next afternoon, to our disappointment, Elena was still not around to help us with the Fabulous Family Fiesta posters, and we couldn’t find Beatriz. In Max’s Big Chief tablet, we had made a perfunctory list of things we needed to be doing—1. CHAIRS 2. TABLES 3. DECORASHONS 4. PUNCH—but had not actually done anything else beyond asking for permission to throw the party in someone’s backyard. Mrs. Friedmann declined, citing the likelihood of her husband’s garden being trampled, and Ivan didn’t want to do it at his house—and we knew Josef wasn’t likely to agree anyway. That left Brickie and Dimma, who were less than enthusiastic but said they’d allow it if we couldn’t do it anywhere else. Brickie had said, “What do you think you boys are? The United Nations?” and “Talk to your grandmother.” Dimma had said, grudgingly, “It’s a nice idea, but I expect you boys to plan it and see it through, including cleaning up. Don’t forget that next week both your sister and your mother are coming for a visit, and that won’t be a convenient time. And then there’s your trip to Rehoboth with your father right before Labor Day, so plan accordingly.”
I knew exactly when my mother was coming home and had been thinking how wonderful it would be if she came for the party. “But, Dimma, don’t you think that it would be fun for Mama to be at the Fiesta? She loves parties!”
Dimma looked sad. “I don’t think she’s up to attending parties yet, John. She’s still very…tired. I think she only wants to spend time with you and Liz. Not with all the neighbors.”
Without Elena, and with nothing else to do, we decided to mount our bikes and ride to our empty school to hunt for spiders there. This late in summer, they’d be cleaning and readying the building for the new year, and it was always weird and fun to sneak in when only the old deaf janitor, Mr. Offutt, was around. We’d sneaked in the year before, and on our teacher Mr. Sullivan’s desk, we saw a list of students and their IQs. We didn’t know what IQs were, but we were shocked to see that our refugee friend Gellert had an IQ of 135, when everybody else’s scores were just over 100. We’d decided that IQs must have something to do with a student’s height or athletic abilities.
We were pedaling down the lane when Beau and D.L. came out of their house and summoned us to play war. We didn’t want to, but it was best not to rile the Shreve boys up. They carried their guns—we weren’t sure if they were toys or actual pellet guns, but the Shreves were very realistic and could shoot dried black-eyed peas. They aimed them at us.
“Our mom just made cookies,” said Beau. “We can have some after.”
That made the offer slightly more enticing. “Okay,” said Max. “But we can’t play too long because we’ve got something to do.”
“What? Looking for more bugs?” said D.L.
“Don’t you guys even care that Russian spies dropped a spider bomb on Washington?” I countered.
Beau and D.L. looked at each other, skeptically amazed. “How do you know that?” Beau said.
“My grandfather told me. He found a poisonous one in his office.”
“We’ll ask our dad. He’ll know if it’s true. The FBI knows everything,” D.L. said.
Then Beau addressed Ivan. “So your dad probably knows, too, since he’s a Russian spy.”
“He is not,” Ivan said. “He’s not even Russian.”
“Oh, sure,” Beau sneered.
“And your aunt is, too,” said D.L. It disturbed me to hear Elena dragged through the mud with Josef, and I knew it had to offend Ivan. “She’s definitely a Commie and hangs around with them.” They kept their guns trained on us—also disturbing.
“No she’s not and no she doesn’t,” Ivan said, as forcefully as he could, his face flushed. “They left Russia to get away from Commies.”
“That’s just propaganda,” I said to Beau, pretty sure Brickie’s word meant lies.
D.L. looked me in the eye through his gun sight and said, “And your grandfather has a secret pen name for the stuff he writes: ‘Guy Sims Fitch.’ ”
“What?” I sputtered. “No he doesn’t!” What was D.L. talking about—could Mr. Shreve know things about Brickie that I didn’t know?
“Are y’all gonna play, or not?” Beau demanded.
“Not if you keep saying stupid things to us,” Max said.
“Okay,” Beau said. They lowered the guns. “We take it back.” Beau put one hand behind his back, no doubt crossing his fingers.
I sighed. “Which war and which battle?” I asked.
D.L. said, “We haven’t played Bridge on the River Kwai in a while. Let’s play that.”
“Aww, rats,” said Max, who knew he was going to have to be the pompous collaborator, Colonel Nicholson. Beau and D.L. liked to humiliate all of us, but especially Max.
“We should get Kees and Piet to play,” Beau said. “Or we won’t have anybody to play the chickenshit guy.”
“Unh-unh!” I said. “The last time we played war with them we made Kees and Piet be Jews and we pretended their own Airstream was a gas chamber and locked them in. We were the American troops coming to liberate the camp, but the General caught us, and he went crazy and said if we did it again, he’d ‘spank us blue as a mulberry.’ ” This was the moronic event that had ended our swimming privileges at the De Haans’.
“Wow!” said D.L., impressed. “Where were we? I bet the General has some special Nazi spanking things.”
* * *
—
We dumped our bikes and began taking directions from D.L. and Beau. We made the infamous bridge with some planks and sawhorses hauled from the Shreves’ shed, which was chock-full of webs, but Beau and D.L. wouldn’t give us time to examine them. For the prison camp, we wrenched a few cinder blocks from under Mr. Shreve’s fishing boat, causing it to list dangerously. We set the cinder blocks around a campfire made with sticks and trash. Beau lit it. I had to put on Beau’s baseball cap with a washcloth hanging down the back of my neck because I was the evil Colonel Saito, which wasn’t all bad because I’d get to abuse the heroic Allies, Joyce and Warden, played, naturally, by the Shreves.
The Ally soldiers, Beau, D.L., and Ivan, gathered around the campfire, smoking their stick cigarettes, talking tough and complaining about being forced to build the bridge by a bunch of Japs. Max, as the traitor Colonel Nicholson, ranted at them about how crappy their bridge was and insisted they build one that would be a monument to British military genius. After he left, the Allies talked about what an asshole he is, and spit a lot. Then I came over with a willow switch, hollering in fake Japanese, and whipped the three of them, which I did harder than necessary to Beau and D.L. I made the Allies stack and unstack cinder blocks, over and over in the broiling sun, until Beau took out a Rich’s shoe box rattling with cherry bombs and put it under the bridge. The Allies pretended to go to sleep, whispering plans to kill Saito and blow up the bridge. Then I forced the Allies to march around in a circle. They began whistling the movie theme song and wouldn’t stop, even though I was screaming at them. Then Beau stabbed me with a rubber knife and ran to light the shoe box as Ivan and D.L. yelled, “Here come tons of Japs on a train!” This was the point where D.L. always began reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which had nothing to do with Bridge on the River Kwai, but D.L. loved the Little Rascals episode where Alfalfa did it: “ ‘Half a league, half a league / Half a league onward / All in the valley of death / Rode the six hundred.’ ” Then the cherry bombs caught and the train and bridge “blew up.” Beau and D.L. kicked my and Max’s dead bodies a few times, also harder than necessary. Ivan stood on top of the Shreves’ mulch pile, shaking his head sadly, saying, “Madness! Madness!” We were all still for a moment in the cherry-bomb smoke, as if the movie credits were rolling.
The Shreves’ back door opened and Mrs. Shreve shouted, “Good heavens, boweez! What were those explosions? What’s that smoke?”
“Aww, Mama, it’s just cherry bombs,” said D.L., proudly surveying our tableau of destruction.
“I wish y’all would quit playin’ with those annoyin’ farcrackuhs! And please put all that stuff back where it came from. Deeyayall, put out that far. Your daddy will not ’preciate a burnt place on the lawn. And y’all have practice in thutty minutes.” She smiled graciously at me and Max and Ivan, and held out a plate of cookies. “Would y’all boweez like some cookies? Theyuh peanut buttah.”
We took some cookies and Ivan stepped up and told Mrs. Shreve, “We’re going to have a Fabulous Family Fiesta for the neighborhood soon! It’s a potluck. We’ll let you know the details. We hope your whole family will attend.” Max and I looked at each other, marveling that shy Ivan had become quite the Beaver Plan ambassador.
“Whah, how loveleh, boweez! And all the adults are invahted?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Ivan said. “It’ll be in John’s yard, and his grandparents and Elena and Max’s mom and dad and everybody is coming!” I wondered how Ivan was so certain about everybody.
“Well, we will suhttenly be theah and will bring some refrayushments. We ’preciate the invitation.”
We helped the Shreves put back the bridge junk, leaving them to deal with the fire and cinder blocks. The boat was obviously going to fall off its dry dock, and we didn’t want to be blamed.
* * *
—
It seemed too late now to ride to Rosemary, and we were really hot after the campfire and warfare, so we went next door to Ivan’s, hoping Elena had returned and we could make the posters. I was wondering about what D.L. had said about Brickie having a secret pen name, but it made no sense to me. Maybe I’d ask him.
Ivan’s house was quiet, and Ivan said, “Good—nobody’s home. We can watch TV.” We yanked off our sweaty T-shirts and threw them on the floor, grateful for the dark coolness of Ivan’s living room and the bananas Maria brought us, saying, “You eat—es good for you.” Looking back, I’ve often thought that if not for Estelle and Maria, we boys might have been seriously undernourished. Except for Brickie at breakfast, nobody but those two ladies paid much attention to what we did or didn’t eat.
* * *
—
Then Beatriz showed up, wearing sporty orange clam diggers and a matching top I’d never seen, saying, “Hi, guys!” and sat down with us to watch TV. I handed her half of my banana, and we told her about the Fiesta. She jumped right in enthusiastically. “We should have dancing and entertainment! We could put on a skit!” Looking like a raven-haired Pippi Longstocking, she stretched out both braids excitedly and was full of ideas, most of which sounded lousy to Max because they involved dancing, singing, or costumes, but they sounded fun to me.
Ivan turned on the cartoon show Clutch Cargo, which Max thought was lousy, too. “You guys are such babies sometimes.”
Beatriz said, “Max, Ivan is your host. Why are you so crabby?”
“He’s not my host, he’s my friend. I’m crabby because I don’t want to talk about stupid skits and we had to play war with Beau and D.L. instead of hunting spiders.”
Beatriz said sympathetically, “Okay, I get it. I thought I heard those dopey boys setting off cherry bombs.”
She sat back, and we settled in, eating our bananas and enjoying the big oscillating fan and the way the cooling blue velvet of the sofa soaked up our sweat. Soon all of us, even Max, were absorbed with Clutch, flying around the world heroically.
Halfway through the episode, we heard flip-flopped feet coming down the stairs. I hoped it was Elena, but when Ivan stiffened, sat up, and left, saying he had to go to the bathroom, I knew Josef must be home. The flip-flopping continued down the hall to the kitchen. In a minute Ivan’s dad came into the living room, wearing his bathrobe and carrying the newspaper.
He greeted us, smiling pleasantly, but a little creepily. “Hello, kids. You don’t mind if I read the afternoon paper in here, do you? This is the coolest room in the house.” Without waiting for an answer, he sat down, crossing one leg over the other, and opened his paper. “This spider business must be keeping you boys busy.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Then, from the depths of his robe, I spied a rat’s nest that looked more like fur than hair, with a bulbous purple thing peeking out from it. I giggled nervously, looking at Beatriz and Max, who only stared intently at the TV, Max red-faced. I pretended to be examining my banana.
Suddenly Ivan appeared outside the window, waving furiously for us to come outside. Max jabbed me with his elbow, and we rose, Max casually grabbing our shirts, while I signaled to Beatriz. “We’ve got to go now,” Max said, and Beatriz said, “Bye!” as the three of us scooted for the front door.
On the porch I whispered, “Did you see that? He didn’t know we could see his wiener!”
Max said, “Don’t tell Ivan. He’ll just be embarrassed.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Beatriz added. “I see my brother’s all the time. Once my cousin in Brazil tried to make me touch his.”
I couldn’t imagine this, although I tried to, and said, “Did you?”
“I just slapped it and said, ‘Put that silly thing away!’ ”
Ivan waited in the hammock. His pale burr head was already sweaty again. “Did…did he bother you guys?” Ivan asked, looking worried. “I didn’t think he was home.”
“Nah,” Max answered nonchalantly. “He was just reading in the paper about the spiders, trying to cool off.” He smiled and Ivan relaxed.
From the De Haans’ across the street came the annoying noise of fun in the pool. “I’m roasting,” I complained. “I sure wish we were in that pool.”
“Pfft! Nazi soup!” Max spat. I thought about Chevy Chase Lake, a gigantic pool close by, but we couldn’t go there because they didn’t let Jews in.
“There’s always your pool,” Ivan said to me.
Earlier in the summer, after she thought we’d suffered enough following the Airstream incident with the De Haans, Dimma had gone to People’s Hardware and gotten a blue plastic pool about two feet high and eight feet wide. We’d set it up in my backyard on the grass where a concrete pond had once been. The pond was filled in, but the fountain featuring a woman with a pitcher remained. Supposedly a woman had drowned herself in the concrete pond a long time ago. My mother loved the statue, and Sir Walter Scott’s poem, and called her the Lady of the Lake. Stevenson, our old yardman, who ironically bore the same name as the 1956 presidential candidate, which hugely amused Estelle and Brickie, planted trailing petunias in the pitcher every spring. A few flowers still hung down, pink-and-purple-striped, but they were spent and ragged now. At first we boys had been happy enough with the pool, but we were bored with it by July. Now the water was low and greenish, leaves and grass mowings floating on the surface, and its sides were slick with algae. “It looks pretty bad. Do you think there’s any polio in there?” Ivan asked.
“Nah,” I said. “We’ll fill it up with new water and it will be okay.”
We could see spider bodies on the bottom—none of the poisonous ones we were looking for—and mosquito larvae, wriggling like minuscule shrimp, but we didn’t care. “Aw, what the hell?” I said, echoing every adult I’d ever heard in my entire life.
Beatriz left; she didn’t have her bathing suit and said it was time for her to go home, and anyway, she added, it was “too icky,” and we would probably get sick from being in it and miss the Fabulous Family Fiesta.
I dragged the hose over and threw it into the pool, and we jumped in in our shorts. The three of us thrashed and splashed, hollering even louder than usual, hoping Kees and Piet would hear us. Once the water became deeper, we made a whirlpool by running around and around as fast as we could. I pulled off the remaining petunias from the Lady of the Lake and tossed them into the water. Then we drifted around with the flowers in the current of the whirlpool, looking up at the
softening sky, where swifts were circling with us, birds and boys thinking about food and roosting for the evening. Ivan said the swifts would be heading to South America for the winter. “They’ve probably been stuffing themselves with spiders for the trip.”
Pretty soon, grown-up voices sounded around the neighborhood, gathering their flocks for dinner and the night. Max and Ivan went home, and I went inside, calling out, “I’m ready for dinner!” as I let the back screen door slam behind me for emphasis, just in case anybody had forgotten I existed.
4
The next day we called a meeting—we liked to call our loitering “meetings”—on Ivan’s front porch. Elena was finally available, but she hadn’t emerged from her bedroom yet, so we went to the end of the walk and sat on the lowest step to wait. There were new spiderwebs on the old gate, and a few spiders in the corners of the steps, but we’d already examined those and knew them to be ordinary specimens—nothing we hadn’t already caught.
We’d tried to get Beatriz to come out for the meeting, but she had ballet lessons. Too often it was either that, or piano, or confession or catechism, or she couldn’t play because she had to help her mom with the cooking and cleaning, or with her poor sister, Zariya. We thought it was a drag that girls had so many dumb things they had to do all the time, and thank goodness we weren’t girls.
We sat and waited, taking a few minutes for some thoughtful scratching. Then we pulled up pieces of the walk to see what we could find. Max and I set fire to some ants—the kind that often stung us. We didn’t believe in burning ants who were on the job, although Ivan protested, saying, “Ants are always on the job.”
Suddenly Max cried out, “Oh, no! Not the Advice Lady!” An old lady in a ratty hat struggled up the lane with a tiny dog. We called her the Advice Lady because she came around and gave out unsolicited advice and predictions: Don’t play in puddles because you’ll get polio; don’t go without shoes because you could cut your feet and get lockjaw; don’t fool with dead animals. She cowed us a bit; she was imposingly large at a time when most people were skinny. We’d been told to be nice to her because she was pitiful and mentally ill. When she reached us, she said, “I see you boys playing with fire! You’ll burn yourselves to cinders! We have enough to worry about what with the spiders, and newcular war coming any day now!”
