Playing With Matches

by Suri Rosen

  There was no answer. Ilana rapped on the door with more force and there was still no response. I stood up and joined her outside the Porta-Potty.

  “Are you okay?” she said to the metal wall of the bathroom.

  A muffled sound rumbled inside.

  “Jonathan, are you in there?” she shouted.

  A strained voice emerged from inside the titanium cage. “I’m stuck. The door’s jammed.”

  “Of course, I’d never do it,” she whispered to me. “But I’m almost tempted to leave. Like now.”

  “I do have a ton of work to get done,” I said.

  “It’s win-win.”

  “Help me,” Jonathan said. “I can barely breathe in here, I can’t take it.” He sounded like a strangled sheep.

  “Is he crying?” Ilana asked, her eyes two huge circles of surprise.

  “I’m not crying,” Jonathan blubbered.

  “Let’s try to force it open,” I said. I raised my arms and hammered my fists against the door, but it didn’t budge. It was titanium after all.

  “No, no, no. We need something large that we can use like a battering ram,” Ilana said.

  “Excellent idea.” I peered around me, looking for an appropriate stick. I glanced at the perimeter of the park and could see the light in the Bernsteins’ den still on. It would probably make sense if I could go back to the house and grab one of Uncle Eli’s tools, but I couldn’t take the risk of getting caught.

  We fanned out through the pine trees, crunching on pine needles, searching for an object that was light enough to lift but strong enough to force the door open.

  “I got it,” Ilana yelled from the blackness. She emerged from behind a mound dragging a large branch across the grass.

  We picked it up at each end and hoisted it waist high. We swung it three times and on the third count bashed it against the door.

  The door didn’t budge.

  “What do we do now?” Ilana said, biting her lower lip. “It must be really hot in there.”

  “How about we count to three,” I said. “Then we run toward this thing, jump up higher, and try to bash it with the weight of our bodies.”

  She gave the Porta-Potty a doubtful look. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I guess we could try.”

  We stepped back twenty-five yards or so away from the door. On the count of three we raced to the Porta-Potty and hammered the trunk against the door. The door didn’t open but the entire booth slowly tipped precariously backwards. Ilana’s mouth opened wide in horror as it teetered back. Jonathan yelped from inside. For a couple of seconds it looked like the structure would fall over, releasing gallons of raw sewage all over the cage — and Jonathan. I held my breath as the tiny box shuddered, trying to make up its mind. The Porta-Potty finally settled back in its upright position with a thud. It was a few seconds before my heart slowed down to a regular beat.

  “I told you, I’m not crying,” Jonathan sobbed.

  “That’s it,” Ilana said. “I’m looking up the city’s number. It’s got to be awful in there.” She grabbed the phone from her jacket pocket and wandered over to the bench. I stood guard next to the Porta-Potty, unsure of what to do next. A septic, chemical smell seeped out of a vent on top.

  “Jonathan, don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here,” I lied.

  I glanced at my watch. It was 10:45, and I had around eighty hours of homework. I returned to the park bench to say goodbye just as Ilana got off her phone.

  “Public Works is coming in fifteen minutes and they said to wait,” she said as she dropped onto the bench.

  Excellent. I was going home now.

  “I’m so grateful you’re not going home now,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t even think of going home now,” I answered.

  We chatted for thirty minutes until a black flatbed truck motored up the walkway and came to a stop next to the gazebo. Two burly city employees wearing night reflective vests jumped out of the cab. The one wearing a black toque with a Toronto Raptors insignia on it grabbed a red metal tool kit from the back of the truck.

  “Okay,” he said. “Where’s your friend, ladies?”

  Ilana pointed to the bathroom. Raptors strode to the toilet and pulled out a screwdriver from his tool box. As he began to jimmy the lock I turned to leave. Finally.

  “Rain, thank you so much for staying,” Ilana said quietly. “I’d feel so awkward being alone with these two guys.”

  “Please,” I said. “I wouldn’t even think of going home now.”

  The other city employee had a thin grey ponytail under his black baseball cap. He watched Raptors struggling with the lock then returned to the truck to retrieve a crowbar.

  Ilana narrowed her eyes and folded her arms across her chest. “Can’t you just use a drill to cut open the door?” she said to Ponytail.

  “Are you kidding?” he said. He smacked the side of the Porta-Potty with an admiring gaze. “Nothing gets through these babies. They’re built out of solid steel.”

  Jonathan banged on the inside of the unit. “Get me out of here. Now. Get this thing open, already.”

  Ponytail tried prying open the door with the crowbar without any luck. He turned to Raptors. “It’s like … a malfunction! Can you believe this?”

  “Never seen anything like it.”

  “We need to take it back to the shop,” Ponytail said.

  “You’re right,” Raptors said. “We can leave it for the boys to fix in the morning.”

  “No! Don’t leave me, I’m dying.”

  “Okay,” Ponytail said. “We’ll bring it to the shop and try a chainsaw.”

  “Ilana,” Jonathan cried from inside the Porta-Potty. “Please don’t leave me.”

  “He’s right, he shouldn’t go alone,” I said. What would happen if these men just left him there all night?

  “Thank you, Rain. I was worried that I’d have to go alone. You’re a sweetie.”

  Before I had a chance to protest, the men began moving the structure. They tipped it enough to load the Porta-Potty onto a dolly, secured it with strapping, and lowered a ramp from the flatbed. Then they gingerly pulled the structure onto the truck where they secured it with rope.

  “You have a car?” Raptors said.

  Ilana and I both shook our heads no.

  He looked at Ponytail for an instant.

  “Well, maybe you guys should ride in the back of the truck with him. We don’t usually transport these things when they’re … occupied.”

  I rolled my eyes and Ilana scrunched her face up and mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.” Once Jonathan’s bathroom was secured with a series of ropes to the truck, Ilana and I climbed on to the back and eased ourselves down on the cold metal. The truck slowly wended its way through the walkway, while Jonathan shuddered under the straps and cords.

  We heard a moan. “It’s sloshing in here.”

  Ilana shook her head. As the truck slowly rumbled through the park onto the street, I leaned against the rear window of the cab and gazed upward. It was a clear night and the full moon was so bright and low it looked like a wayward planet that had accidentally fallen out of the sky.

  And was about to crash on my head — a great big ball of disaster.

  A date with disaster, to be exact. And it was my entire fault. My success with Tamara and Jeremy had come too easily for me to fully grasp how tricky it was to make a match.

  “Are we there yet?” Jonathan’s voice came from inside the Porta-Potty. We were barely out of the park. I looked up again with a sigh. The moon was so completely in your face it was impossible to ignore.

  Ilana must have been thinking the same thing. She leaned back on her elbows and gazed up at the sky like she was moon bathing. “Incredible, huh?” she said.

  “My dad loves talking about Apollo 11,” I said.

>   “Nineteen seventy-five must have been an amazing time,” she said.

  A hollow voice floated out of the bathroom. “It wasn’t 1975.”

  “Um, I think I know what I’m talking about,” Ilana said with a snort to the Porta-Potty. She turned to me. “My parents used to talk about it all the time.”

  “Don’t you think I know the year of my bar mitzvah?” Jonathan said with irritation.

  “What?” I said. I could not have possibly heard him correctly.

  “Never mind,” Jonathan said. “Just talking to myself. It’s the fumes.”

  “Ilana,” I whispered, my eyes bulging. “My grandfather died the year they landed on the moon and that was the year my father had his bar mitzvah.”

  “How old is your father?” she asked in a tight voice.

  I gulped. “Fifty-eight.”

  Ilana and I looked at each other, our faces frozen in shock.

  “Oh my god,” Ilana said in a horrified whisper. “Jonathan is fifty-eight years old.”

  Ilana and I both shuddered.

  She looked like she was going to throw up. “That is so gross.”

  “What difference does it make?” the indignant voice echoed from the Porta-Potty. “You didn’t think I looked old.” The guy was twenty-five years older than her. What was he thinking?

  “Let’s get out. I’ll spring for a taxi,” Ilana said as she rapped the rear windshield of the cab with her knuckles. “I think my obligation to Grandpops is over.”

  The men agreed to let us off at the next gas station. Ilana called a taxi and we waited in the crisp autumn night.

  “You won’t abandon me, will you,” she said quietly.

  “But we’re both going home now.”

  She shook her head but I knew what she meant. After I had blown tonight’s match so badly, I owed her. The taxi dropped me off at the Bernsteins’ where I unlocked the keypad and tiptoed into the dark vestibule.

  The hall flooded with light. “Rain?” It was Leah. “Where were you?”

  My mind raced. How on earth was I going to get out of this one? “Rain, what’s going on? It’s almost midnight.”

  “I … I had to work on a project with someone in my class,” I said as I brushed a clump of grass from my skirt. “It was a social … studies project.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “With who?”

  “You don’t know the name,” I said as I edged past her and scurried upstairs to the safety of my bedroom.

  chapter 14

  The Red Sox Are Home

  The next day I got back two failed quizzes: history and math. Matchmaven was definitely taking a toll on my life. After school I trudged into the kitchen where I found Bubby Bayla sitting at the table filling in a crossword puzzle. An envelope lay in front of her.

  “This is yours, Rain,” she said, sipping from a mug that reeked of coffee substitute.

  I grabbed the envelope, and looked down at my dad’s handwriting. The familiar scrawl was a flood of sunshine, coating me like caramel.

  “Open it!” Bubby said.

  This was one bored Bubby. “Can I have a second, please?” I said. I wanted to savour the angular handwriting before I tore it open.

  Inside was a framed photo of me and my dad at a ball game from two years ago, with a short note tucked into the back.

  Dear Rainy,

  Since I can’t be there to watch the games with you, I convinced Mira to upgrade her cable package to get all the MLB sports stations. You’ll be able to watch the new Red Sox games in the spring as a reward for what I know is going to be a successful school year. In the meantime, you can catch some re-runs (after your homework and chores are done, of course) — there’s a great Ortiz game this Sunday. Enjoy and have a great week.

  Love, Daddy

  “So?” Bubby asked.

  Technically I’ve lived most of my life in New England. If we weren’t living in Boston we spent a month every summer with my grandparents in Brookline, Massachusetts. We’d go to at least four ball games while we visited and more when we lived in Boston or Providence.

  To me the Red Sox are home.

  “My dad got me all the baseball channels,” I said, turning to leave. “There’s a classic David Ortiz game this Sunday.”

  “Big deal.” Bubby snorted. “Players today are a bunch of overpaid children.”

  I scooped up the envelope, ready to flee.

  “They don’t make them like they used to,” she said.

  “With all due respect, Bubby,” I said, “that cliché is so 1950. Ortiz is one of the most talented hitters in the league.”

  “With all due respect, young lady, if you never saw Ted Williams hit then you don’t know from talent.”

  I paused.

  “Believe you me, that was a player,” she said, rapping her clenched knuckles on the kitchen table with surprising geriatric energy.

  Bubby Bayla? The Red Sox? I turned back to the kitchen.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Your butterballs are like midgets. I saw the Red Sox play in Fenway Park back in 1948. Now that was a team. Mickey McDermott pitched and Williams played.”

  “Wow.” I dropped into a kitchen chair. “Fenway Park? But are you … from Boston?”

  “Please,” she said. “Toronto. But back before the Blue Jays or the old Exhibition Stadium, I had the Sox.”

  “But what about Uncle Eli?”

  Her eyes squeezed shut and she clutched her chest, like she had angina.

  “Are you okay?” I said, alarmed.

  “You’re giving me a conniption,” she said breathlessly. Which I found both confusing and disturbing. I mean can you actually give someone a conniption? Were they contagious?

  Do conniptions even exist?

  Fortunately she opened her eyes and calmly took a sip of non-coffee. I breathed a sigh of relief that the conniption was over.

  The wall clock ticked in the silent kitchen as a plan hatched in my head. “You know, the game is supposed to be a pretty exciting one.”

  She shrugged.

  I sighed and thought about my pathetically non-existent social life. Tamara and Jeremy and Dahlia Engel aside, of course. And Professor K.

  “Would you like to watch the game with me?” It was an olive branch. And a very generous one on my part. Maybe old ­people were the only friends I could make at this point. I mean I did like knishes and seltzer, after all.

  Bubby eyed me with a mixture of surprise and suspicion.

  “Nah.”

  This was how low I’d sunk — I was being rejected by a cranky great-grandmother.

  “But what if we got some snacks,” I said, zeroing in on Bubby’s weakness. “Maybe, you know, invite some other people. Who like the Red Sox.”

  Yes, I admit it. I was groveling.

  “You’ll get some nice food? Maybe even some chips?” Bubby said. I swear she was eighty going on six.

  “For sure,” I said. “It’ll be like a party.”

  “Fine. Sunday night, when your aunt and uncle are at the wedding.” I was disappointed about having to wait five days to watch the game together but I thought better of arguing with her in case she changed her mind. At least it gave me something to look forward to. And considering the state of my social affairs, it was a big deal.

  Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a matchmaker, but I’d planned some choice parties last year with Maya and Danielle. I decided to turn the Red Sox “party” into a geriatric extravaganza. I drew up a red-food themed menu that was salt-free and low in cholesterol.

  Over the next few days I bought red plastic-ware and cut out large socks from red construction paper. It was the only break that I took from matchmaking. Aunt Mira was pleased that I was taking the initiative in looking after Bubby so she generously threw in thirty dollars for refr
eshments. This was progress; it was a new peak on the Mira frontier.

  Leah even smiled at me a few times. Suddenly I wasn’t planning a party because I was lonely and bored. I was doing a good deed. For the elderly.

  My mother called the next evening.

  “Honey, I’m so proud of you. Aunt Mira told me that you’re making a lovely party for her mother-in-law’s friends.” I sank into the couch in the family room. Bubby wasn’t around, for a change.

  “Actually,” I said. “I’m kind of charged about it. We’re going to watch a Red Sox game thanks to Daddy.”

  “I’ve never really thought of Mrs. Bernstein as a baseball fan, but go figure,” Mom said.

  “I guess Toronto is full of surprises.”

  “Rain, are things going okay?” she said, which meant that news of the two failed quizzes hadn’t travelled across the ocean. “Are you meeting people?” Clearly she had been talking with Mira. I saw no reason why Professor K. or Bubby’s friends didn’t count. And the concern in my mother’s voice wasn’t hard to miss.

  “Don’t worry, Mom. I’m fine,” I said, thinking of Dahlia. I guess you could say that one non-hostile conversation was the new companionship. And I now had Bubby’s crew to party with.

  After all, what are six or seven decades between friends?

  chapter 15

  Five Full Days of Dread

  I was a bit shaken up after Ilana and Jonathan’s dating debacle. Introducing Tamara and Jeremy had been so easy; I had no idea that matchmaking could be so complicated.

  I briefly considered ending my illustrious matchmaking career, after eight distinguished days of service. But there was no way I was going to abandon Ilana after that horror-show date. And Leah needed even more help. On Monday I entered the kitchen in pursuit of licorice and I found Mira buttoning up her blazer.

  “Leah, please come,” she said as she arranged her scarf. “Sheva Brand is such a fantastic speaker, I’m sure you’d enjoy her.”

  “Is it … women only?” Leah said.

  “One hundred percent,” Mira said with a knowing look. Leah was so terrified of running into Ben, she never left the house when she wasn’t at work or at school.