by Betsy Byars
“Well, it’s Christmas.”
Bingo glanced up at the television, even though the thought of calling Melissa long-distance had left him oblivious to the Blob. Once again, it was the only place to look.
Television did serve a useful purpose, Bingo thought. It gave people a place to look when they didn’t have any other place to look.
On the screen things were coming to a climax. Soldiers were breaking in the door of the high school.
The woman sensed Bingo’s attention and explained quickly, “They have to get fire extinguishers. See, the Blob can’t stand cold. Fire extinguishers are full of something called C02.”
Bingo said, “Ah.”
Why was he saying all these ahs? Did the ahs sound as strange to everyone else as they did to him? Was it a sort of medicinal ah or—
Bingo’s dad said, “Bingo, why don’t you go down to the gift shop and get your mom a magazine.”
“Sure, I’d be glad to.”
As his dad handed him the money, the woman said, “Later they’ll drop the Blob off in Antarctica, wherever that is, but they don’t actually show it.”
“Maybe that’s because they’re going to let it slip off on the way, like onto Cincinnati so they can have a sequel.” Bingo broke off and told them all, “Well, I’ll be right back.”
A Wall of Silence
BINGO WAS SITTING BY the phone, trying to decide if he wanted to call Melissa now or later. He wanted to call now, of course. However, if he did call now, then he couldn’t call later, and Bingo knew he would want to call later too.
While he was thinking about this, he reached out and rested one hand on the phone. The phone startled him by ringing.
Since his hand was already on it, there was nothing Bingo could do but pick it up. “Hello?”
A girl’s voice said, “Bingo?”
Bingo’s dad called from the bedroom, “Is that your mom? If it is, I want to talk to her.”
“No, Dad, it’s for me.” Into the telephone Bingo said, “This is Bingo.”
“Hi, it’s me again, Boots.”
“Yes—Boots.”
Bingo felt he had to say her name because she was probably more sensitive about being named Boots than he was about being named Bingo. Certainly it could not be pleasant to be named for footwear.
“Bingo, I just wanted to apologize for getting so upset on the phone the other day.”
“You didn’t get upset—Boots.”
“I did too! I threatened to cry!”
“Well…”
“And it was silly. I was just so excited when I saw Gypsy Lover on my sister’s bookcase, and then when you said yours was a different Gypsy Lover, well, I just wanted to cry, well, not cry, but like—”
Bingo’s dad called, “Don’t tie up the phone, Bingo. Your mom might be trying to call.”
“—like when you’re sad, you cry; when you’re, like, disappointed, which is what I was, then you get upset, which I did.”
“Oh, I get upset myself sometimes.”
“I know—like in the mall that day. That’s what attracted me to you.”
“What?” Bingo said. He thought he hadn’t heard right.
“That’s what attracted me to you!” she repeated.
Bingo, learning that he had heard exactly right, let out a sort of cry. His mother would probably have called it a hoarse cry, Bingo thought, and this time his mother would have been correct.
Bingo’s heart began to sink. Although he was experienced in holding mixed-sex conversations—by this time he had had over a dozen of them—he was not experienced in ending them. And this was one of those mixed-sex conversations that needed ending.
“That,” Boots continued as if he had not cried out—or perhaps she heard hoarse cries so often she placed no importance on them, “and, like, that you’re a writer. I love intelligence. I feel so stretched when I’m with an intelligent person.”
Bingo was now unable to speak at all. He couldn’t even swallow. His heart had moved up into his throat and was stuck there like a cork.
Boots said, “What attracted you to me?”
A silence followed.
The silence lengthened.
Bingo realized that this silence was stretching into one of the longest silences that had ever taken place on telephone lines. And it was fast becoming a silence that could never be broken, Bingo knew that much about silences. Certainly he couldn’t break it. And she obviously wouldn’t.
He was becoming tied by silence to a girl named, of all things, Boots. And the tie was as binding as if rope was involved.
It was an absolute silence now. Boots wasn’t even breathing into the phone.
For a brief moment, Bingo wondered if she had taken the easy way out and fainted, like girls did in olden times. But if she had, wouldn’t she have dropped the phone? Wouldn’t there have been a clunk and a dial tone?
His mind burned with questions.
Wasn’t there some way the telephone company had of dealing with emergency silences like this? Didn’t they monitor lines to make sure they were being spoken into? Was there any hope the operator would break in and say, “If you’re through using this line, please hang up. If you need assistance in hanging up, please hang up and dial the operator.”
No such miracle occurred, however, and the silence continued.
How long could a silence like this go on, Bingo wondered—for eternity? Infinity? Would the National Enquirer write it up? BINGO AND BOOTS BOUND BY SILENCE—NOW IN TWENTIETH YEAR?
Bingo closed his eyes in desperation. In darkness, the silence took on shape and form. It was as hard as concrete. It was so unyielding that if he stretched out his hand, he could actually feel it like a wall surrounding—
He broke off. He had heard of this phenomenon! It was a wall of silence! He was entombed in a—
“Bingo!”
Bingo looked up, startled. His eyes were glazed with the horror of his recent entombment. He saw his father dimly, as if through a mist.
“Bingo!”
The mist began to recede. His father’s form, his face became distinct. Bingo saw with joy that he could even make out the frown on his father’s face.
“Bingo, I asked you not to tie up the phone. Your mother might be trying to call.”
Bingo gasped “Thank you” to his father.
These two words, although barely audible, served to release him from the spell of silence. He now felt he was capable of speech.
He spoke into the phone. His voice was as normal as if he had used it only five minutes ago instead of twenty years. “My dad just came into the room. He says I have to hang up now. Good-bye—Boots.”
Bingo put down the phone. He stood and faced his father who was still standing in the doorway. His frown had softened to a look of puzzlement.
“Dad—”
“What?”
“Anytime you see me sitting with the phone in my hand—this is really important to me—anytime you see me sitting there and I’m not saying anything and you don’t think anybody’s saying anything to me, then you say the exact same thing you just said.”
“I’ll try to remember that, Bingo.”
“Because what you said was perfect.”
Bingo walked past his father and into his room. He lay down on his bed.
Well, one thing had come out of all this, Bingo thought. A decision had been made. He was incapable of another mixed-sex conversation any time in the immediate future.
He would definitely call Melissa later…much later.
The Fifth Floor
“BINGO, WHEN I SAY who this is, please, please don’t hang up. It’s Boots.”
Bingo did not hang up, but he held the phone away from his ear so it wasn’t touching him anymore.
“Yes, Boots?”
“Well, the other day when I called—I’m not talking about the in-between times, like when I called and your dad said you couldn’t come to the phone. This call is not about the times you couldn’t come to
the phone, it’s about the other day when you did come to the phone. Do you remember?”
In Bingo’s mind the silence rose again, as powerful and eternal as the Great Wall of China.
“Yes.”
“And remember how I asked you what attracted you to me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what I meant was—I knew you weren’t attracted to me, but, like, I thought you might be attracted to some part of me. Like people tell me I have nice hair, so you could have said ‘hair,’ or something like that, ‘legs,’—except that you wouldn’t have said ‘legs’ because you’ve never seen me out of jeans, have you?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Oh. But, anyway, I hope you will accept this as my explanation.”
“I will.”
“And, Bingo, one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“I won’t be calling anymore.”
“Oh.” Out of politeness, Bingo tried not to put all the relief into that Oh that he was feeling.
“My sister told my mom that I’d been reading Gypsy Lover to a boy over the phone, and so I’m forbidden to call you except to, like, apologize.”
“Oh.”
“But you can call me. I can take calls, but I can’t make them.”
“Good-bye—Boots.”
Bingo was reliving this phone conversation in his mind as he went up on the elevator to the fifth floor. His spirits seemed to be rising along with his body.
Even an unwelcome conversation could be dealt with manfully. And if a silence did develop in spite of all a man’s efforts, then the man could walk with the phone to the front door—Bingo had checked the length of the cord and this was possible—the man could walk with the phone to the front door, press the doorbell—ding-dong—and say, “Oh, there’s someone at the front door. I must go.”
This would not be a lie. There would be someone at the front door. The fact that the someone at the door was the same someone who was on the phone…Bingo was getting to the point in life where lies seemed unmanly.
It also seemed to Bingo that people didn’t place as much importance on adulthood as they used to. Nobody ever said, “Be a man,” or “Be a woman.” It was as if becoming an adult was something that just came with age.
Maybe so, but Bingo wasn’t going to take any chances with his adulthood. When something felt unmanly, he was not going to do it anymore.
Bingo’s thoughts trailed off as he approached his mother’s door.
Bingo’s mother had now been in the hospital for three days, and Bingo was used to it. He actually enjoyed visiting her now. There was an air of festivity on the fifth floor.
The nurses had put up a little tree, and the babies in the nursery were being stuffed into stockings when they went home. Bingo enjoyed seeing the little round faces peering seriously, yet hopefully, out of the red flannel stockings. Babies made extremely nice stocking stuffers.
The nurses knew his name by now, and one of the older nurses—a Mrs. Hanna—had come in to say she had been in the delivery room the very night when Bingo popped into the world.
“Really? Then can I ask you something?” he had said. “This is something I’ve wondered about all my life.”
“Ask away.”
“The doctor that delivered me—did he say ‘Bingo’ every time a baby popped out?”
She thought about it. “No, I believe that was the only time he ever did that.”
That had made Bingo feel better about his name and about himself.
He entered his mother’s room with a smile. His mother had a new roommate who had just had twin girls.
“I was trying so hard not to have them till New Year’s Eve,” the women was telling Bingo’s mother tearfully. “If you have the first baby born in the New Year, see, you get lots of presents. Sky City gives you a complete layette. Rogers’ jewelers gives a silver rattle.”
“Look, you’ll manage,” his mother told her.
“I’m not sure I can manage one, much less—!” She held up two fingers for emphasis. Then she pulled a tissue from a holder and blotted first one eye and then the other. “Plus, one of them has a flat nose.”
“Oh, no, they’re pretty.”
“They’d better be because I sure can’t afford plastic surgery.”
Bingo’s mother turned to him with a smile. She rubbed her hands together. “Bingo, where’s the fudge?”
“What?”
“Didn’t you make the fudge?”
“You told me not to!”
“I said that out of depression. Bingo, you knew I didn’t mean it.”
“Mom!”
“Bingo, quit kidding and bring out the fudge.”
His mother’s cheeks were pink and she had a girlish glow. There was something about being on an all-girl floor that seemed to sharpen the femininity of the patients, Bingo thought. And something about being on a floor where babies were being stuffed into decorative stockings and sent out into a world bright with artificial lights brought out their playfulness.
Anyway, Bingo hoped this was playfulness, because he really and truly had not made any fudge.
The woman in the next bed said, “Plus I’m a welfare patient and they’re going to kick me and the twins out tomorrow. If I could only have held on to those twins for ten more days…” She reached for another tissue.
“I’m trying for three weeks,” Bingo’s mother said with a smile. She crossed her hands over her stomach and looked up at the ceiling as if into the future.
Then she brought herself back and looked at Bingo.
“Bingo, I keep going over this in my mind. I’m thirty-two weeks pregnant. Full-term is forty weeks, so I’ve got eight weeks to go.
“Now, for every week that I hold on to this baby, he gains five or six ounces. Now right now he probably weighs four and a half pounds. But in three weeks he would weigh over five pounds.
“I feel like if I can just hang on for three more weeks, we’ll have it made.”
“Lots of luck,” the mother of twins said sourly.
At a Darkened Window
“GOOD NIGHT, HARRISON.”
“Good night, Grammy. Thanks for the ride.”
“You are more than welcome. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Bingo got out of the car and shut the door. He started up the walkway and then stopped. Bingo had just seen something he didn’t like.
At the side of the house, at Bingo’s window, there was a menacing figure. The menacing figure was beating his fist on the side of the house.
Behind him, his grandmother’s Honda drove away, but Bingo continued to stand in place. He didn’t even bother waving at the car as he usually did.
The figure had a familiar menacing look. And the cries from the figure had a familiar menacing sound. “Hey, Worm Brain!”
Bingo straightened his shoulders. He had never seen Wentworth from this view. He had only seen Wentworth’s face, framed in the window.
Seeing it from here, Bingo realized what a serious breach of etiquette, to say nothing of manliness, it was. He was incensed by it. This was one menacing figure that was going to regret menacing.
Bingo started forward. The lights from the Wentworths’ Christmas decorations, blinking on and off, lit the way.
Bingo’s steps were quick but quiet, and he closed the distance between himself and Wentworth without a sound.
“What are you doing?” he asked. His quiet voice seemed to crackle with just the right mixture of authority and outrage, creating electricity in the still night.
Billy Wentworth swung around. His arms were up, stiffened into dangerous weapons, ready to deliver something, Bingo knew, they had been wanting to deliver for years. His mouth was pulled back in a snarl.
Bingo stood firm, arms at his sides.
“Don’t do that!” Wentworth said. “I thought you had better sense than to sneak up on me. Don’t ever sneak up on me! That’s a good way to get your head chopped off! Man, I’ve had karate!”
&
nbsp; “And breaking into people’s windows,” Bingo went on, all authority now, “is a good way to get arrested.”
“I was knocking on your window, not breaking in, Worm Brain.”
“So you say.”
They looked at each other. It was Wentworth who began to sag first. “I’m in trouble, Bingo.” The use of the name Bingo rather than the usual Worm Brain told Bingo the trouble must be serious.
“What’d you do?”
“Remember I asked you if you thought Cici was going to give me something for Christmas?”
“Yes, and I said I thought she wasn’t because she couldn’t stand the sight of you.” Not only was Bingo not going to flinch from a karate chop, he also had no intention of flinching from the truth.
“Yes, you do remember.” Billy Wentworth swallowed. “But I couldn’t get it off my mind. I wanted her to give me something. I wanted to see what it would be. I never got anything from a girl before.”
Bingo was glad he was not in that bleak position. He had gotten many, many—well, actually he had only gotten one, but it was the kind of extraordinary gift that left him with the feeling that girls had been showering him with gifts for years.
“So then I thought, what’s stopping you,” he pointed to himself, “that’s me, from giving her something.” He pointed to an imaginary Cici. “Then she,” another point at Cici, “will have to give me something back.”
There was a pause. Bingo said, “So?” even though he really didn’t want to hear any more.
“So, I said to my mom, ‘I’ve got to give this girl a Christmas present and I don’t have anything to give. She said, ‘Get something out of the reject drawer.’ See, my mom has a whole drawer full of things she has gotten that she didn’t want, notepaper and decorated soaps, things like that—this is where we do our shopping for teachers. My sister got a nice scarf for Miss Prunty, her music teacher, just last week.”
Billy Wentworth swallowed. Bingo waited.
“I go to the drawer and open it. Pickings are slim because everybody’s been at it, it being Christmas, but there was one decent bottle of perfume. I know Cici uses perfume because I’ve smelled it on her.”
