by Galia Oz
“Enough already, Adam!” I said. My cousin, who hadn’t eaten any eggs, was floating at this very moment on the monkey bars and wouldn’t even look at me. I stood there totally disheartened, watching the boys play soccer. Scribbles, I thought. Handwriting so bad that you could hardly read it…Something was humming in my head, and I was beginning to get an idea about what it was telling me, and I started moving really quickly between the shoulders and the legs that were in motion all over the soccer field, and I grabbed Danny by the sleeve—one second before he kicked the ball—and I said to him, “It’s you.”
The other boys yelled at me to get off the field, but I had no intention of moving. I tugged on Danny’s shirt and dragged him aside. He stared at me in shock, and I said to him, “How much wood…,” and by the look on his face I saw that I was right, that it really was him.
Danny told me that Blue Dawn the principal talked to him after he made Effie fall that day and told him his punishment was to do some nice things for Effie, simple as that. So he decided to buy her chocolate and balloons but not to let her know that they were from him. And on the notes, he wrote in his terrible handwriting, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” because he couldn’t get it out of his head ever since the kids in first grade told everyone that about 2,500 years ago students used to yell it on field trips.
I told him that he had always been a miserable creature, and that once he may have been miserable, mean, and violent, and now maybe he wasn’t as violent as he used to be. “But still, I don’t like you,” I said. “You’re a miserable lost case. And stupid.” Danny smiled as if I had said something really nice, and I tried but I really couldn’t be mad at him.
Then all the soccer players crowded around us, so Danny gave me a push but it didn’t hurt, and I pushed him back, and that was how we made it look like we were fighting, so no one would notice anything, and Danny ran onto the field without turning back, and I walked away slowly and quietly and tried not to jump for joy, and all I wanted to do was find Effie and help her down from the top of that ladder.
In the afternoon, when we were both in the backyard, Effie was in a good mood, and she wanted to talk. We sat under the big tree, and she stroked Shakshuka and gave her the hairdo of a princess, and said, “You have to want me to win the races. I’m your cousin.”
“But Shakshuka’s my dog,” I said.
“But I’m your cousin,” Effie said. “And besides, Shakshuka is never happy when she wins. She doesn’t even know that she’s won. So you should root for me.”
Brody said that even when Danny tried to do something nice, it always turned into a disaster. I guess that was true. There were kids who always did good deeds, and others who always caused problems, and then the principal put her heavy hand on their shoulder, and they promised to be good. Danny was like that. Sometimes I passed him in the corridor, and when no one was looking, I said, “How much wood…” just to annoy him, and he said that was not the way to say it, that I had no sense of rhythm, but he was obviously wrong because how could anyone mess up a tongue twister if they got the words right?
When we ran races behind our building, Shakshuka usually beat Effie, and sometimes I rooted for Effie but not always.
I also didn’t care when my musical cube broke one day after I gave it to the Munchkins. It might have been a smart toy, but Monty was smarter and he managed to take it apart and pull out the noisy piece, and he was happy because every time he shook it, the music played, and Max began to dance and Monty clapped his hands, and Mom just sighed and said, “Why is it always the worst toys that live forever? Am I going to have to listen to that terrible noise for the rest of my life?”
But Mom should have known better. After all, she was the one who always said that you had to choose which things to take to heart.
Nobody believed it when Effie decided to be best friends with Donna Silver, but that was exactly what happened. And nobody believed Adam when he told us that the security guard at our school was once a brilliant professor but now she was a member of a gang of jewel thieves, and I still didn’t believe it, well, okay, maybe a bit. And nobody would have believed that my dog, Shakshuka, would bring home a cat, a nasty cat that didn’t like anyone, but she did, and we adopted him. We made a big mistake with that cat, but my mom said that with cats, you couldn’t change your mind, and if we got a little devil for a cat, we just had to take care of him and love him the way he was, even if he did have an ice cube where his heart should be, because you didn’t choose family, family was something that happened to you, and that was just the way it was.
The cat must have latched on to Shakshuka one day in the yard and followed her home, and when we opened the door she barked as if to tell us to take care of him because he was a kitten, but she also barked at the cat so he wouldn’t bug her too much because she wasn’t his mother.
But worse than our evil cat was that Effie became friends with Donna Silver. When Donna Silver decided that someone was her friend, that person didn’t have room for anybody else. Donna Silver had an invisible circle that surrounded her, and whoever didn’t belong couldn’t get in, even if that person stood right beside her or sat right beside her in class. And the ones who belonged in her invisible circle were always inside it, even when they were at the other end of the building, and that was how it was from the very first minute, ever since she moved to the neighborhood and started coming to our school. She couldn’t run as fast as Effie, this Donna Silver, but she was the girl everyone came to watch when she did the long jump, and the day she broke a record some of the kids from the other class started singing:
“It’s Silver, Silver!
Silver, she’s the thriller!
And it’s Donna, Donna!
Donna who we wanna!”
And that was how it went, on and on, that rhyme, and she brought Effie right over to her side, the side for the best girl athletes, and at recess they walked around holding hands. And Donna always brought huge fruits from home for her snack, peaches the size of soccer balls, and she ate and talked really quietly because that was how she was. Everything she said sounded like a whisper, and Effie listened to her as if there wasn’t anybody or anything else in the whole world, and she didn’t even blink. When I asked Effie to come over and eat spaghetti with me after school, she could never come because she was walking Donna home.
But that wasn’t enough for Donna, and sometimes she got together five or six girls, really close until all their heads were touching, and she was in the middle, whispering something, I never managed to hear what, and the girls were all crowding in to get closer, and then when she was sick of it she pushed them away so she could have some space.
First she gave one girl a rough shove on her shoulder, saying she couldn’t get enough air, and she pushed the girl aside just like you’d push aside a chair that was in your way, but as if it was all a joke. Then the other girls moved away by themselves.
One time I tried to talk to Effie. “What does Donna Silver want with you?” I asked. “You don’t make noise, you hardly talk. You’re so spacey. And she’s a queen….”
Effie said, “I’m also a queen. I’m the fastest runner in the whole school.”
“She’s a better long jumper,” I told her.
“But I’m stronger than she is,” Effie said.
“Exactly,” I said. “She wants you because you’re the best toy there is, the strongest.”
“Enough already, Julie,” Effie said, and her eyes had that look they got when she was running like the wind, eyes that said, “You can do what you like, but you can’t stop me.”
“I’m her friend. And you’re just mean,” she told me.
Brody said I was overreacting, that it would pass. Donna would get tired of Effie and find another girl to be her toy. “And anyway, what do you expect?” he said. “You think she should hang around just because she’s your cousin? You don’t even notice her most of the time, she’s just like Shakshuka for you,
but now just because she’s hanging around with Donna, you’re starting to go nuts.” Brody was like that, he always said the worst things, but he was still my friend and besides, there was nothing I could do about Effie.
I told him he didn’t know what he was talking about, that you couldn’t compare a dog with a cousin. It was true that they both ran fast and didn’t talk much, but other than that, they weren’t anything alike.
Brody thought I was jealous. But why should I be? Should I be jealous of the strawberries that Donna Silver ate at recess, which were so red you couldn’t believe it, each one like a fat, smiling heart? Strawberries were just fruit. No, it was only that I was worried about Effie because Donna Silver could be really nasty, and she once said that Effie’s legs might run fast but the rest was too slow, only nobody remembered that except for me.
Even Effie didn’t remember. Today she passed me going down the stairs and other than a tiny “hi,” we didn’t say anything, just looked at each other and quickly looked away. Brody didn’t understand anything if he thought Shakshuka and Effie were the same thing. Shakshuka would never walk past me as if she didn’t know me.
I went out to the yard and looked down so I wouldn’t have to see anyone and I tried to just watch where I was putting my feet, but I couldn’t help it and I looked up once, and of course there was Danny coming toward me. It was amazing how Blue Dawn had managed to totally wear him down with all her anti-violence talk. Now she was on to something new and she was always talking about how we had to give each other personal space, which meant you couldn’t push or crowd together or hug each other without permission, and for sure you couldn’t hit anyone.
So Danny hardly hit anymore, but he had to cause trouble somehow, so he pushed stuff off my desk, and once he put a ladybug in my pencil case, and now when he saw me he shot out his leg in the air as if he was about to kick a soccer ball and managed to step on my foot because with him there was no such thing as personal space. And then he said, “Oops, sorry, that was an accident.”
“You’re such a pain,” I told him.
Danny asked, “What happened to your hands?”
“My cat scratched me,” I said, and I turned my hands over to show him all the scratches.
“You have an attack cat,” Danny said. “What do you want with a cat like that?”
I explained to him that my mother thought if we got an evil cat, it must have been what we deserved. Danny listened to my explanation and then stepped on my foot again, pretending it was another accident. “Enough, it hurts,” I said. “You’re the one who deserves a cat like that. Maybe you want him?”
Danny didn’t answer. He saw his friends in the distance, and that was the end of the conversation. As he walked away, I shouted after him, “That cat would really suit you! His head is also as empty as a soccer ball.”
Just then I saw Adam standing with some kids near the water fountain, telling them that the security guard at the gate to our school was once a genius professor until she realized that she had special powers.
I tried to picture the security guard, who sat by the gate chewing gum and fiddling with a big bunch of keys, and I thought she didn’t look anything like a professor, but Adam said it was one hundred percent true, she was once a great professor, and lots of people said she was the smartest woman in the country, but then she discovered that she could see through walls, and at first it drove her completely crazy because she’d go walking down the street and without meaning to, she could see the people inside their houses, and so as not to spy on them she tried closing her eyes, but even through closed eyes she could see everything, and in the end she realized that she could be really rich, and she joined a gang of thieves and they divided up the work—she looked through the walls of the houses to where the diamonds and gold were hidden, while the thieves went in during the night and took them, and afterward they divided up what they stole, and now she really was a rich woman, but she worked as a security guard so no one would suspect her.
“So of all things she chose to work as a guard?” Brody was surprised.
“That’s how she r-r-relaxes,” Adam explained. “The noise the kids make r-relaxes her.”
Brody said he didn’t believe a word, and I felt the same, but still I went over to look at her from where she couldn’t see me. Adam usually talked about things that happened far away, things that you couldn’t see, but this time we could see that security guard with our own eyes.
“Do you think she looks like the smartest woman in the country?” I asked.
“If Adam says so, it must be true,” said Brody sarcastically, but still we decided that tomorrow we’d get up early in the morning and have a look around the gate to see what the security guard was doing. We didn’t know exactly what we were hoping to find, and Brody said that she certainly wouldn’t hide the gold and diamonds in her little wooden booth, but we figured we’d have a look anyway. What did we have to lose?
When I got home, I went all the way around the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to walk past the cat and I gave Shakshuka a hug. I had to admit, the cat was really beautiful, and sometimes he looked at everything through half-closed eyes and seemed perfectly happy, as though he’d never seen anything so pretty before in his whole life, as if there was nothing lovelier than the garbage cans in our yard, the waist-high weeds, the fence with the peeling paint, and when he was in that kind of mood you could even stroke him and he purred, but after a little while he started to scratch you for no reason, and maybe because of that we still hadn’t found a name for him because to give someone a name you had to spend time with him, and the Munchkins and I always ran away from the cat before that could happen.
Sometimes Monty just couldn’t help himself and he touched the cat, and the cat couldn’t have cared less that Monty was just a baby and he scratched him too. Max crawled out of the cat’s way as fast as he could, to be on the safe side, and when he did that he looked like a small animal running away from a big, strong animal. And sometimes when the cat walked past him, Max turned to stone and looked at the cat without moving his eyes, convinced that the cat was a tiger and that he, Max, was a little boy in the jungle, and somehow he understood, or maybe it was just his baby body that understood, that it was better not to move and then the tiger wouldn’t hurt him because it would think he was a tree or a rock.
Mom said that from a young age, kids needed to understand that the world wasn’t a perfect place, and that not everything in life was fair, and that was the reason people chose cats for pets. And Dad laughed. Dad was the kind of person who took things in stride. He was the only one who dared to pick up the cat, he didn’t mind getting scratched, and he was the one who went and bought him a red collar and wrote “Cat” on it, along with our phone number, so that if the cat ever got lost and people found him, they’d know what kind of animal they found.
Shakshuka also took the cat in stride. At first she would get mad at him every time he jumped on the table or on the kitchen counters, and that was how he learned that he wasn’t allowed to do that, but now they played together like best friends, and when you watched them, it was hard to tell whether she was the one who adopted the cat or the cat was the one who adopted her.
That was how it was. Everybody except for me seemed to know how to take things in stride. I sat on the floor under the table so I could be with Shakshuka, and I told her that she was probably the best dog in the world for adopting such an evil cat. I could never be as nice as she was. Maybe my dog could teach me how to become more generous. If you asked me, I’d say that cat should be sent back to where he came from, returned to I didn’t care where, but there was nowhere to return him to, and anyway, nobody was asking me.
In the morning, Brody and I got to school early and we saw that a pipe had burst in the middle of the little kids’ yard, and the water was flowing like a stream under the high monkey bars. Someone standing next to us said that soon workers would come to fix it, but then Brody jabbed me with his elbow and said, “Look,” and
I looked and saw the security guard with a wrench in her hand, her legs soaked to her knees, fixing the pipe herself.
“N-n-no surprise,” said Adam, who arrived at just that minute, hopped over the new stream, and already knew exactly what was going on. “Our security guard has golden hands. With those hands, she breaks into houses. Maybe she’s the one who caused the pipe to burst in the first place, you know. Maybe it’s all part of her plan. Maybe she and the other thieves go through the pipes under the ground to get into the building where the bank is, at the end of the block.”
“Wait a minute,” Brody said. “First you said that she only looks through the walls to see where the gold is, and the other thieves go and steal it. You said she doesn’t break into the houses herself. So how does she suddenly have golden hands?”
Adam said it was true, that was the way they divided up the work in the beginning, until she discovered that they were cheating her—she would show them where the gold was and then she’d go home, and they would do the stealing and keep everything for themselves, without leaving her anything. That was when she decided to break in along with them, and because she was such a brilliant professor, she became the best burglar.
At morning recess, Donna Silver came right up to us. At first she stood quietly, watching Adam trying to separate his sandwich from its paper wrapping, and then she asked what the story was with this kid, so Brody explained very seriously that this week it was our turn to look after Adam, and that we took turns in our class because he always had to have someone watching over him, otherwise he went around bumping into trees and poles, or filling his pockets with dirt.
Adam made strange faces and looked up at the sky and pretended he was trying to bite my shoulder, and I gave him a little slap as if I was angry, and we all thought we were putting on a really good show, but Donna Silver wasn’t impressed at all, she just whispered, “Yeah, yeah, very funny,” and strolled along with a forgiving smile on her face.
