Gee Whiz

by Jane Smiley

  I would not say it was a party, but Leslie was there, too, which was interesting enough to make me forget for the time being that I had no idea what was going to happen with Jack. When I got there, the twins and Leslie were out on the deck, talking about what they’d done that day—they’d taken Leslie’s dog to the beach. Leslie had a hunting dog, a pointer, who loved the beach. The three of them were walking along way at the far end, and the dog was jumping in and out of the waves as if they were warm rather than freezing cold. Leslie and Alexis were chatting about hikes up into the mountains, and Barbie was lagging behind them, picking up pieces of clamshell, when the dog pointed for about a second, at a seagull, and then began to approach it, moving so slowly and carefully that Leslie didn’t realize what he was doing. And the seagull didn’t, either. “I was just wondering what Bingo was thinking.”

  I said, “What was he thinking?”

  “At that very moment, he ran and grabbed the seagull as it was taking off. He never did that before.”

  “Rusty killed a bobcat. It was a little tiny bobcat, but it was a bobcat.”

  Alexis said, “I thought Rusty’s job was to save baby animals.”

  Then we told Leslie about Staccato, who, right on cue, stalked across the deck with his tail in the air, just twitching the very tip. When he got exactly to the middle of the four of us, he sat down and started grooming his whiskers, as if to say, “Oh, you’re here—admire me!” We laughed.

  Barbie said, “We did sneak back down the beach with our faces averted, as if we didn’t know who this dog was.”

  Leslie said, “My dad got him for free from a guy who told us he wasn’t a gun dog. So, you never know.”

  Mrs. Goldman came to the door and said, “Dinner’s almost ready. You’d better have the exposition pretty soon.”

  Both Barbie and Alexis grinned.

  Barbie said, “You two have to be fitted with blindfolds.”

  Leslie laughed, and said, “I’ll bet!”

  Well, we were allowed to climb the stairs on our own, but when we came to Barbie and Alexis’s bathroom door, Alexis said, “Okay, put your hands over your eyes.”

  I realized that the paintings were finished. I closed my eyes and put my hands over them, then someone took my elbow and I heard the sound of the door opening. I did not open my eyes. Whoever was holding my elbow moved me a little bit here and there, then turned me and halted me. Then I felt something against my back, which I realized was Leslie. Finally, Alexis said, “Stop, look, and listen!” which made me laugh, because that’s what our kindergarten teacher always said, one finger pointed in the air. I opened my eyes. Right in front of me was Barbie’s solstice painting, deep red, flat, the horizon sunlit from the edge, fading above to stars and darkness. When I’d looked for a while at this, Barbie turned Leslie and me to the right, which was west. Now I was looking at Alexis’s ocean painting, the fog pale and vapory, and the tops of the rocks dark and wet-looking. The horizon was bright and blue, as if the fog was coming onto the land, but the ocean was sunny behind it. We were now turned to the north, and there was Alexis’s field of lupines, just a long green slope to a distant road, and beyond that a dark hillside. But the lupines, purple and green and painted one by one, spilled down the slope so luxuriantly that you could almost smell them. Now we turned again, and there was Barbie’s second painting, and it was very strange. She had taken the view from the living room—the very view we had been looking at when we were talking about Leslie’s dog and watching Staccato—and she’d reduced it and reproduced it on the bathroom wall, including on the door, which was closed. Even the time of day was the same—toward dusk, with long shadows reaching into the canyon. Down in the left-hand corner, small but beautifully done, was Blue, staring off into the distance, his mouth slightly open, as if he was whinnying. I said, “Wow!”

  Leslie said, “These are great.” She put her hand out and just touched the solstice painting with the tip of her finger.

  Barbie glanced at me, and said, “I wanted to paint him galloping, but that’s a lot harder, so I just painted him calling me,” and she laughed. “Alexis completely hogged the purple and I was lucky to get any green at all.”

  “Well, you used up all the red.”

  Now they were both giggling.

  Alexis said, “You’re the first to see them besides Mom. We haven’t even let Dad in. He comes in tonight.”

  I looked up. They’d even done the ceiling, in shades of blue, with the stars getting bigger and more numerous to the east. No moon. The bathroom, which was fairly small, felt huge.

  Alexis said, “Mom says when we come home in the spring, we can try doing something to the sink and the bathtub. Enamel paint might work. There are also these acrylic paints that dry to be waterproof.”

  Leslie said, “Does your mom let you do anything you want?”

  Barbie said, “She always says ‘within reason,’ which means we have to come up with a reason that she actually believes.”

  I took this to mean yes.

  For supper, we had quiche made with ham and mushrooms, along with spinach as a salad and homemade French bread—apparently, when Marie was there, she had taught Mrs. Goldman how to make long baguettes, and so every menu had to start with bread and end with something else French. This time it ended with crème brûlée, which was a vanilla custard sort of thing with a burnt-sugar crust over the top, and so delicious that Leslie took three bites. What was funny was that Barbie and Alexis spoke to their mother only in French, even though she spoke to them in English. Every so often, after she said something to them, they turned to one another and carried on a very fast conversation with many gestures and nods of the head. Finally, Mrs. Goldman said, “You girls are trying to make me crazy, but it isn’t going to work. Abby? Leslie? Would you like anything else? A cup of tea, maybe? Mint tea?”

  Alexis said, “Here’s the problem with California.”

  Leslie laughed, and Barbie said, “Do tell.”

  “New Year’s Eve comes here almost last. The only worse place is Hawaii. I mean, in Australia and New Zealand, and then Rome and London, it’s all over, and in New York, they’ll start celebrating at Times Square in about an hour and a half. By the time we get to do it, everyone else in the world is tired of the whole thing.”

  “Where would you do it?” said Leslie.

  Alexis said, “Australia, for sure. It’s summer! Fireworks and a swim!”

  Mrs. Goldman of course said Paris. She had been there for New Year’s right after the war—it wasn’t a huge celebration, but it was full of relief, and hopeful. Mr. Goldman had spent his high school years sneaking away from his parents’ house in Trenton and getting as close as he could to Times Square—he made it once, his junior year. Barbie said London, and Leslie said the North Pole, but she didn’t know why. I couldn’t think of a place, so I didn’t say anything.

  Barbie came along when Mrs. Goldman drove me home. As soon as we were out of their neighborhood, she said, “Are we sure that this is the same Leslie we’ve known since kindergarten? Maybe what that camp that she went to does is substitute entirely different people for the ones who show up on day one.”

  “At school, we just do what she says. Sophia does what she says. Lucia does what she says. I do what she says. Even Kyle Gonzalez does what she says.”

  “No!” said Barbie.

  “Yes. We had to do the dissection of the fetal pig, and she told him how to hold the scalpel, and he held it the way she said. I saw from across the room. She talked, he cut, and she wrote down the notes.”

  “We haven’t gotten to dissecting yet,” said Barbie.

  “It was pretty bad. Stella said the smell was making her want to puke, so she brought her father’s bottle of Brut cologne and poured it into the pig when the teacher wasn’t looking. Then it really stank!”

  “In the Middle Ages, artists bought corpses from grave robbers and dissected them to see how the body worked. You have to see all the layers.”

  We drove
in silence, then she said, “I guess she’s going to another camp this summer. She’s already sent in her application. It’s in Canada. They canoe from lake to lake for six weeks, portaging between lakes. They gather herbs and fish for their own food.”

  I hadn’t heard this. I said, “I get the feeling she’ll do anything.”

  Barbie said, “I’d like to be that way.”

  Her mom said, “I thought you were that way already.”

  They dropped me off, and we spent a quiet New Year’s Eve like we always did, Mom and Dad yawning at about nine-thirty, me offering to do the last check on the horses. The question still lingered in my mind—where would I spend New Year’s if I had the chance? Danny was surely at a party, Leslie was still at the Goldmans’, Jerry was probably cooking something somewhere. The only thing I could think of was something I couldn’t do, that no one did—it was riding my horse across a field lit by the full moon, no danger anywhere, no holes or cliffs or wild animals, just a long, smooth gallop, me leaning forward in my two-point position, hearing his breathing, feeling his warmth, sensing his strides as they opened and closed, my hands light on the reins, his mouth light in my hands. The old year would disappear into the new one easy as you please, marked only by a jump in a fence line, up and over and onward.

  Miss Cumberland had taken attendance and already started telling us that we had to start moving toward the modern era, and so jump to the year 1066 and go on from there. Kyle Gonzalez, without even raising his hand, said, “William the Conqueror.” Miss Cumberland nodded but put her finger to her lips. Just then Sophia opened the door, looked around for me, walked over, plopped her books on the desk, and sat down. Miss Cumberland said, “Do you have an excuse, Sophia?”

  Sophia said, “I had to go to the bathroom.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Miss Cumberland said, “I mean a written excuse, of course.”

  Sophia shook her head.

  Miss Cumberland cleared her throat and continued while Sophia started staring at me. Finally, when she knew I was looking at her, she turned up her right hand, which was on the table. On her palm, she had written, “May I come for a trail ride Saturday?”

  She knew I would want to giggle, but I didn’t dare. I just nodded. We opened our books, and Miss Cumberland explained about the Saxons and the Angles and the Vikings and Normandy, which was in France. All the time the Romans were busy in Rome, other tribes were spreading across Europe from the southeast to the northwest, bringing their languages with them. She reached up and pulled down a map. Sophia lifted her other hand. Written on the palm of that one was “9 a.m.?”

  I nodded, but this time I did laugh, and this time Miss Cumberland did say, “Is something funny, Abigail?”

  I apologized.

  When class was finished, Sophia stood up and, as usual, marched out of the room without saying anything. But I noticed that her hair was down, swaying back and forth as she marched.

  That afternoon, Dad was outside the high school in his truck, pulling the trailer. We were off to pick up Blue. And it was finally raining, which meant that I had to run across the parking lot and throw myself into the truck, but also that Dad was humming a little and in a very good mood. The high school was much closer to the stables than to our house, but even in that short distance, the rain intensified and intensified, until Dad had to slow down because the wipers weren’t doing a good enough job of clearing the windshield. He even had to turn off the radio, because the sound of the rain on the roof of the truck was so steady and loud.

  When we got to the stables, Jane was out in her rubber boots and her English raincoat that went all the way down past her knees. When Dad started backing up, she waved us almost into the stable yard. Every ring was deserted, every tree was dripping, every jump was glistening with moisture, every horse was huddled into his stall, wrapped in a blanket of some kind, eating his hay. As we led Blue out into the downpour, fifteen heads popped over stall doors, ears forward, mouths chewing, seeming to say, “Oh, you poor poor thing!”

  Blue was good, though. He loaded right up and stood quietly all the way home. As we drove east, the downpour dissipated, until it was just a drizzle at our house, but Dad was hopeful—we had just beaten it, that was all. It would follow us and green up the hillsides.

  And it did. That night, the horses gathered under the trees while the rain drummed on the roof, pounded the windows, replenished the water tanks, made puddles everywhere. When Dad came in after the morning feeding, while I was eating my oatmeal, he said, “Four inches in the gauge.” He was grinning.

  It was sunny by noon, and bright by the time I was heading home on the school bus. I couldn’t ride Blue because the arena was wet, so I cleaned my tack and swept the barn aisle and even went upstairs and straightened the shelves in my room. Then I started my homework, an “imaginative paper” about what I would have done if I had been on the Titanic the night it went down. I knew what Mom and Dad would have done—they would have prayed. So I wrote that down. Dad would have opened his Bible and found a passage for guidance, so I did that. The passage I found was one that Dad had marked (which was probably why I found it). It was from the book of Job. It read, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Normally, the book of Job kind of scared me, but I thought this was a pretty good passage for my paper about the Titanic.

  The next day, we all knew, was the day of Danny’s physical. When I got home, Mom was pacing around the kitchen, and Rusty was staring at her through the back window—Rusty knew how to be worried. Mom kissed my cheek in sort of a distracted way, and put a snack on the table, two graham crackers and a banana, but she didn’t say anything—she just went into the living room and checked whether the phone was working, then replaced it very carefully on the hook. I went up to my room to change, then out the front door to the barn. I didn’t know what to hope for. Mom did not want Danny to go into the army. Dad didn’t say what he wanted, but I knew that he thought that if your country needed you, the right sort of man went and did what was asked of him. I also knew that he was sure that Danny was strong and smart. There were guys who thrived in the army because they had their wits about them. I only wanted what Danny wanted, but I wondered if he knew, deep down, what it was that he wanted.

  Blue came to the gate as soon as he saw me. His coat had dried with that clean roughness that horses get in a good rain, so all I had to do was brush him with the soft brush and tack him up. The arena was good already—the rain had soaked down into the dry footing and given it a little bounce. I mounted from the mounting block. While I was tightening my girth, Gee Whiz gave a loud whinny, long and plaintive, and Oh My answered him. Blue paid no attention.

  We walked to the arena. When we got there, I opened the gate from on his back (something he had never done before he came), then I closed it again (ditto). I asked him for an easy walk on a long rein—very good. I asked him for some loopy turns, a big figure eight, a small figure eight, some reinbacks, some transitions into and out of the walk, the trot, the canter. His transition from the halt to the canter was a great pleasure. I asked him again. He did it again. When he was well warmed up, we cantered in a leisurely way around the arena, crossed through the middle, did a flying change. I asked him to speed up. He did the best he could, but when I was no longer asking him, he slowed down again, to his gentle, not very exciting lope. Best not to be exciting. For Blue, exciting meant nervous.

  Once I was finished with him, I got Oh My out and tacked her up. Then I put Nobby on the lead rope, and I took the two of them out the gate and up and down the road, since the trail and the hills were very wet. All we did was walk, and three cars passed, but they behaved themselves. We went way past the gate to the Jordan Ranch. It was green all the way. I figured that the next day I would ride Nobby and lead Oh My, and they could both learn the same lesson.

  It got dark while I was giving the horses their hay. I went inside. Dad was doing some bills while Mom finished setting the table. I w
ashed up. No one said anything. Just by looking at the telephone, I could see that it had been silent as a rock. We had hash made from the leftovers of the prime rib—one of my favorite things, the meat all savory and ground up with the potatoes and onions. There was plenty of it, too, and maybe because we had nothing to say, we all ate a lot—cleaned our plates, cleaned the serving bowl, ate the last green bean. The phone was a dead thing.

  I helped Mom with the dishes, hung around for a few minutes, then gave up and went to my room. Of course right then the phone rang. It rang seven times. I guess after all the waiting, no one dared to pick it up.

  But then I heard Dad say, “Oh, hi! Nice to hear from you.”

  He would not say that to Danny. Too formal.

  And then, “Abby!”

  It was Jane, not Danny. She said, “What a rain! Did you feel horrible making poor Blue stay out in that downpour? With the water just running down his cheeks and into his eyes and turning the footing to mud?”

  I said, “Sort of.”

  She said, “Oh, darling! Well, you shouldn’t. It doesn’t matter what the weather is in California, it’s a paradise compared to everywhere else in the world. I’m sure he thought it was invigorating.”

  I said, “I hope so.”

  “But I have to soften you up. I really want that horse. It was so teeming yesterday that I didn’t tell you how good he was with both Melinda and Ellen. You know, the second time is the one that matters, and he was just as kind as could be, but willing. And Melinda feels comfortable on him—for certain she’s going to grow another couple of inches, and she’s quite long in the leg as it is. Of course, Ellen is about as big as a button up there on his back, but she thinks it’s thrilling.” She paused. “I also taught another student. Do you remember little Robert? He was in the show. I believe he cried. But he did fine on Blue, who is six times as agreeable as his horrible ancient pony who is a zillion years old and learned back in the nineteenth century to never listen to a mere child.” Another pause. I felt sort of overwhelmed. And Dad kept looking at me. Jane said, “I am raising my offer to twelve hundred, and you know that you can ride him out here, and take lessons, and show him, too. You don’t have to own a horse to enjoy him, Abby—in fact, many experienced equestrians would say that not owning a horse is the ideal situation.”