by Alan Madison
“Ike probably ate him,” Dad teased, and I believed him. Ike would eat just about anything. Mom didn’t think it was much of a joke and frowned at the two of us.
“Uh-oh, I’m in trouble,” Dad moaned, reacting to her stony Swishback stare.
“We are just unlucky when it comes to fish. End of story,” she declared.
And it was.
“Ah veterzane, Julius,” I proclaimed, which meant “Goodbye, Julius” in German. Ike saluted the now empty bowl, which meant we needed new fish for our new start in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
Cat, Cow, Camel
There are twenty-six letters in the A to Z alphabet (only twenty-five with the missing X), but I have many more than twenty-five stuffed animals. For some letters, like C, I have three animals: a calico cat that my mother brought me when I was home with a cough, a brown-spotted cow that we got when we drove through Kansas, and a camel my never-met cousin Catherine sent me for my sixth birthday.
If I stand on my tiptoes on the tiptop stone steps of my new school in Alexandria, Virginia, I can see the pretty point at the top of the Washington Monument, and if I stand on my tiptoes on the top wooden steps of my back porch, I can see the capped columns of the White House, where the President lives.
Most everyone who lives here speaks the language I speak, but they sound completely different. When they talk they take entirely too much time saying vowels, like when they call me “Y’aaall” or ask if they can pet my “daawg.” Grandpa McCarther says I’ll get used to people’s “draawl” and before you know it will be talking with extra-long vowels too.
I say, “Nooo waaay!” slow-stringing out all the O’s and A’s in such a Southern drawl that it makes Grandpa laugh.
Our new house is very different from all the other houses we have lived in around the world because it feels like home. For the first time, I have my own room, Ike has his own room, and Mom and Dad have their own room too! There is an upstairs, a downstairs, and even stairs to a deep-down-in-the-ground basement that’s a perfect place for me to keep my wood building blocks and Ike to keep his collection of trucks.
The fenced-in backyard is a little square of patio mixed with grass that is too small for hide-and-seek but just wide enough for freeze tag. Dad built a little wooden doghouse in the far corner and Ike painted in black box letters N P L N over the rounded entrance. “Dogs can’t read vowels,” he explains, which is his first amazing display of Ike Sense in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
“Dogs can’t read at all,” I growl. “I think it’s mostly because you . . .”
But before I can finish saying that he doesn’t know which vowels to put or where to put them, Mom throws me a freeze-you-in-your-tracks, immediate-interrupting, Swishback frown that leaves me mumbling to myself while Ike, whistling happily, crawls into our doghouse to play with Napoleon.
Every morning in our new house, everything happens just about the same as the morning before it. Mom calls this our “morning routine.” I like the word routine because it rolls out of my mouth like a rhyme. I also like what it means: doing things unchanged every time. And I very much like having it because then there is a plan every school morning. As Dad says, “Having a plan is fun-da-men-tal,” which is a longish grown-up word for “very important.”
I always wake up and get into the bathroom first. After I finish washing but before I brush my teeth, Ike pounds on the door with his fist.
“Esme, hurry or I’m going to be late for school!”
“You should have gotten up earlier,” I slow-remind him, and continue to carefully brush my tops and bottoms from back to front. Ike, steam coming out of his ears ’cause he can’t get in, runs to tattle to Dad that I am hogging the bathroom. Before he can get back to tell me, “Esme, you better hurry cause Dad is coming to kick you out,” I am already gone. This always makes even more steam come out of Ike’s now burning red ears.
My clothes laid out the night before, I quickly get dressed, make sure my homework is in my backpack, place my scrap of blankie carefully in Katie’s pouch, arrange all of my A to Z stuffed animals properly in their bedzoo, and trot down the stairs to eat my cold cereal breakfast. When the big hand swipes the twelve with the little hand pointing to eight, the newspaper hits our front door. Thud! The sound is like a light switch that turns on our parents. They immediately come rumbling down the stairs in a big rush, jumbling their words and juggling their bags.
My father gives us top-of-the-head kisses, orders us off to school with a “have a great day,” and like many of the other fathers on our block drives away to work.
Every morning my mother does the exact opposite: she drives us to school like many of the other mothers on the block, and then gives us “have a great day” hugs and right-cheek kisses. Either way is okay by me because sooner or later we get our kisses.
Dad says that at work he marches his soldiers around and around all day, every day. He jokes that when they get tired he makes them march asquare. When Ike and I don’t laugh, he explains that you can march soldiers “around” but you can’t march them “asquare,” because really there is no such thing.
“It’s a joke,” he explains, and we nod and smile. We don’t want to hurt his feelings. Dads like to tell those types of not-so-funny jokes.
Every day at school, my teacher, Ms. Pitcher, makes us read and write, and when we get tired we do arithmetic. She never marches us.
Every day at home, my mother cleans up the house, shops for food, and then writes a story. She says she marches all right, but to her “very own beat.” I’m not sure what that means but it makes me smile inside when I imagine the way it would look.
My mother, Penelope Lulu Swishback McCarther, is a reporter for the Drum & Bugle, the monthly newspaper for all the soldiers and their families. Her mother, Bernice Lorelei Swishback, my grandmother, was a reporter for the Weekly Gazette, which was the weekly newspaper for all the families of Midway, Missouri. Her mother’s mother, my great-grandmother, whom I was named after, Esmerelda Louisa Hockenfuss, was also a reporter, but for the Daily Telegraph, which came out each morning for all the families of Argonne, Oregon. Mommy says that her family has been working in newspapers since the beginning of time or at least since the beginning of newspapers.
When I’m old enough, and no longer in the army, I’ll probably work in newspapers too.
Diana Moon Duck
My babysitter in South Korea, Hong Moonduk, which was as funny a name to me as Esmerelda Swishback McCarther was to her, gave me a stuffed duck before we left for Dad’s next post. I named her Diana Moon Duck and placed her in the center of my pillow. Hong felt this was quite an honor and bowed her head slightly to tell me so.
Saturday is my favorite day of the week because there is no school and there is absolutely no army. It’s also the morning my dad cooks us breakfast. Pancakes.
From Tallahassee to Tokyo, every corporal and colonel knows that my dad makes the absolute tastiest top-dog pancakes from a top secret recipe that was handed down from his father, August Aloysius McCarther the Second, my grandfather, who got it from his father’s father, my great-grandfather, August Aloysius McCarther the very first.
When I’m old enough, I’ll probably make extra tasty, top-dog pancakes too. But until then, I just help my dad.
I am best at beating the batter, Ike is best at greasing the griddle, and Dad is, of course, far and away the finest flipper between here and just about anywhere. While we are working, Mom sits sipping coffee and reading the Drum & Bugle. She makes sure that there are no mistakes in either the newspaper or the manner in which we prepare pancakes. Dad says she is a “super supervisor.”
To make sure our pancakes come out consistently top-dog tasty, it is extremely important to do everything precisely the same way it was done the Saturday before, and the Saturday before that, and before that. To do this we follow Dad’s pancake rules.
See, my dad has rules for just about everything: there’s the playground rules, the travel rules, the many, many school rules, a
nd the very crucial cooking pancake rules. Like routines, “Rules are fun-da-men-tal,” he says, “because when things start to go wrong you can always count on rules to save you. This way there are things you don’t even have to think about — you just follow the rules.”
He calls these things “no-brainers.”
“No-brainers! How’s about no-stomachers! Or no-nosers!” Ike snorts and laughs, then proceeds through the whole body from eyes to toes before Dad stops him.
“If you have hard-and-fast rules that you always follow, it leaves more room in your head to think about important things,” he explains precisely to the still-giggling Ike.
Dad learned all this rule business in the army, where there are more rules “than you can shake a stick at.” I’m not sure what the “shake a stick at” part means, but Dad says it a lot.
Our routine on the weekend is really different from our school days. There are no alarms set, so we wake up late, there’s no yelling about the bathroom, no newspaper thud, no rushing, jumbling, or juggling, and best of all, there is no cold cereal.
Saturday mornings, when the cuckoo clock begins the first of eight cuckoos, Ike and I slip downstairs, drop our aprons over our heads, and tie the string over our bellies, each with the exact same double-looped bow. We try to finish before the mechanical bird sticks its tiny red-tufted head out to deliver the final high-pitched cuckoo.
While we wash our hands in the kitchen sink, Dad, in his green-and-yellow-squared flannel robe, rubbing the top of his buzz-cut head, pounds down the stairs. Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he inspects our cooking uniforms. When satisfied, he yawns, “Okay, troops, we are ready to cook.”
We salute, bringing our open right hands sharply to our foreheads and then karate chopping them down. This is military speak for “ready, willing, and able.” Dad says we should always end it with “sir, yes, sir,” to show the proper respect for a commanding officer.
“Sir, yes, sir!” Ike and I cry in unison.
“One cup flour,” he commands.
“Flour is made from flowers,” Ike states as usual.
Dad smiles and I roll my eyes around my head because every week Ike always swears that flour (F-L-O-U-R) is made from flowers (F-L-O-W-E-R-S) and that is why they are spelled differently. This makes zero sense, which is exactly Ike Sense, because then they should be spelled exactly the same!
“Actually, Ike, flour and flower are spelled differently because they are quite different things,” explains Dad patiently for the umpteenth time. “Flour — F-L-O-U-R —comes from wheat, which is a plant but really doesn’t have flowers — F-L-O-W-E-R-S — at all.”
“No, Dad, I am absolutely, positively sure of it, they are the same.” Ike continues to insist, then dumps the cup of flour into the bowl.
Under Dad’s watchful eye, we exact-measure and combine the salt and baking soda into the bowl. Then, trying not to make too much of a mess, we carefully measure out the wet ingredients: water, oil, and the top secretest ingredient — “Yogurt!” Ike yells. “Yogurt, yoooguurt!” he screams. Ike feels that yogurt is the absolute funniest word he has ever heard and as soon as dad starts spooning out the glistening white goo, he starts giggling and rolling the word out of his mouth, either drawing out the soft-sounding “yo” or cutting off the hard-syllabled “gurt” and sometimes even attempting to do both. “Yoooogrt!” Mom chuckles from behind the spread-open Drum & Bugle as Ike goes through his word acrobatics while I remain silent because I feel llama is an even funnier word.
Dad knows a lot of funny words, but during pancake making he is always partial to spatula.
“Spaaatulllaaa, spa-chew — la, sssspit-u-laaa.” He bounces the word over and over, making it funnier and funnier until Ike and I are both laughing so hard we nearly fall off our stools.
“Augie, the pancakes, please,” Mom warns.
Dad stops and, wearing Napoleon’s bad-dog look, drags back to the batter.
I wooden-spoon-mix together all the ingredients, from the Ike Sense–spelled flour to the somewhat funny-named yogurt, while Ike quick-drops pats of butter onto the hot griddle. Mom super-supervises this part, letting out an aaahh sound of approval each time Ike places a pat correctly and an ooo-ooo-ooo sound of disapproval each time his hand comes down too close to the stove.
Dad big-spoons batter onto the burning black metal. It flattens and soon little bubbles begin bursting. After we count out five of these tiny explosions, Dad does the famous fancy McCarther flip. He skillfully slides his “spaaatuulaaa” under one round and snaps his wrist, revealing both the colorful tattoo on his wide forearm and the brown cooked side of the perfect pancake.
A most definite Dad cooking rule is: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” This means that when it comes to a particular pancaking post, whether it is buttering, mixing, or flipping, you have your very own job to do, and you should never ever trade or even ask to trade — you just do your job. Our cooking tasks have become total no-brainers and given the excellent eating results, I have to say that Dad’s pancaking rules most definitely do work.
The short stacks are piled high on each of our plates, the maple syrup slow-flowed, and the only sounds heard are the rushed clicks and clacks of forks on plates and the rumble of satisfied ummms.
Then, after the full rounds are reduced to last bites, we start to talk over the past week’s victories and defeats, chores for the day, and challenges for next week.
“How was school this week?”
“I had a spelling quiz.”
“Me too.”
I twist my lips at Ike’s false chorus.
“On Wednesday I will pick you both up right after school. You both have dentist appointments,” Mom said.
Ugh! I think.
“Uchhh,” Ike phlegms, nearly choking on his last bite.
“Young man,” warns Dad, and slides seconds onto our plates. Without further fuss we return to eating and dig into our second stack.
This is an absolute authentic account of how every Saturday we, the Swishback McCarthers, would cook the tastiest pancakes in the whole world.
Well, until that Saturday.
Elephant
My father’s older brother, Uncle Colin, who Mom does not really like because he sometimes tells bad fibs, and my aunt Alma, who Mom really likes because she doesn’t, gave me Edgar my elephant for my fifth birthday. Edgar reminds me that fibbing can get you into big trouble. Fibbing, which is a lot like lying, is the worst thing you can do in our house. It will automatically earn you a trip to your room and a long lecture.
It was a Saturday morning in the kitchen like all others before it. We were beating the batter and beginning the butter when my father, the finest flipper from Fiji to France, put his spatula down and his thick arms around us.
“Esmerelda, Isaac . . .”
Oh, no, I inside-fretted. Anytime he called us by our full first names, something big happened, like we’d get another pet or . . . move to another country. Napoleon left his spot next to the fireplace and slow-walked closer, head down, probably expecting to hear that we were adopting the stray cat that wandered our block, or . . .
“I have to go away,” he said immediately, so as not to make us worry any longer.
“We’re moving again!” moaned Ike.
“No . . . no, this time I have to go alone.”
It was scary silent except for the angry hiss of butter skiing across the skillet.
“We’re not moving?” I asked, relieved and worried at the same exact moment.
“No. I have to go to a faraway place for one hundred days and ninety-nine nights,” he answered in his most deeply serious voice.
All I could think to say was, “That’s a long time.” So I said it: “That’s a long time.”
For a second I feared that last night bandy-legged blue bugs from the remotest jungles of Nostomania had crept into my head and I had become a fustilug destined to say whatever came to mind without any thought of how it might hurt someone else’s fee
lings. But Dad calmed my fears.
He slid his hand onto my shoulder and answered directly, “Yes, it is. I don’t want to leave you but it is my duty.”
“Duty” is what the army calls it when you have to do something that no one in the whole entire universe really wants to do.
“But why?” asked Ike, who was too young to understand the word duty and old enough to really love the word why.
Our minds raced around the short silence, trying to figure out possible reasons for his leaving.
“Because my commander says so, and when he says so, in the army we just do.”
He spooned the batter onto the sizzling skillet. The small circles sputtered and spit. When he stepped to the side he revealed my mom sitting at the kitchen table, the Drum & Bugle unopened, weak smile, eyes rimmed red. She must have been crying and looked like she was going to start to cry again, but she didn’t. It was her duty not to cry in front of us. So I did my duty and I didn’t cry in front of Ike, and since I didn’t — Ike didn’t. So we sat, doing our duty, holding our tears tight inside, heads down, concentrating on swishing the remains of our pancakes in the brown swamp of thick syrup on our plates. We didn’t talk about what had happened that week, or what was happening that day, or most especially what was going to happen. This Saturday morning was silent except for the sizzle of the last batch of McCarther pancakes.
Frog
One vacation, we drove all the way from Frankfurt to France. Since Ike and I never even asked once, “Are we there yet?” we were allowed to pick out souvenirs. Ike grabbed a snow-filled globe with a tall pointy tower at its center and I chose my frog and named him Freddie. In France they sometimes get so hungry they eat frogs’ legs, so by bringing Freddie back to Germany, where they do not eat such things, I had saved his life.
