Journey to an 800 Number

by E. L. Konigsburg

  “Conventions are funny things, Bo,” he said. Father had taken to calling me Bo all the time now, and I hardly reminded him about it anymore. Actually, I had altogether stopped reminding him.

  “Conventions are a way of life,” he said.

  Sabrina had said the same thing.

  “Everyone comes together united by something. They’re all doctors or they’re all doctors of cancer or they’re all doctors of cancer of the pancreas. Or the liver or the esophagus. But, here’s the funny thing about the people. I’ve never seen them at their meetings, but they never talk about what it is that unites them when they’re not at a meeting. Houses. They talk a lot about houses and the cost of them. And the stock market. And the cost of stocks. That’s what they talk about mainly: what things cost.

  “We’ll have good meals, but it will be the same thing every time. The people will be different.

  There are certain types that always show up at any convention, and you’ll get to meet some of each type.”

  We plugged in at the ranch about noon. Father unleashed and fed Ahmed while I made sandwiches for lunch. Then we drove into town and Father bought me two western shirts and two bandannas for around my neck. I already had jeans. I decided to buy boots with part of the money Mr. Malatesta had given me. I discovered that the boots I really wanted took all of it. Father said, why not? And I said that meant the boots were worth fifty kiddy rides on Ahmed, and Father said, so what? And so I bought them. After all, I had promised Mr. Malatesta to spend the fifty dollars foolishly, and boots didn’t seem foolish unless they were expensive, and I explained my thinking to Father.

  He didn’t agree. “To buy fancy and expensive boots is not foolish, but talking about it is.”

  I understood what he meant.

  We got back to the dude ranch before the first bus of conventioneers arrived from town. Father introduced me (as Bo) to the people who worked at the ranch. One of them was Ruth Britten, and she seemed more glad to see Father than any of the others. I watched her a lot. The first convention group that came were social workers, and I have never seen a more sincere bunch of people. Ruthie Britten asked one man if he would like another cup of coffee. He did not say, “Yes, thank you” or “No thanks,” he said, “How kind of you to ask,” and then he turned to the person sitting next to him and asked, “How do you feel about another cup of coffee, Sam?” And Sam said, “Do you think it’s decaffeinated?” and the first man said, “Good question. Shall we ask?” Sam said, “I suppose we should.” The first man turned to Ruthie, who was standing there holding the coffeepot, and asked, “May I ask, please, is the coffee decaffeinated?” and she said, “No, it isn’t, but I’ll speak to the management about it. You decaffeinated drinkers need more representation.” The man smiled at her and then smiled at his friend and said, “That’s true. This young lady has made a good point.” Then Ruthie Britten lifted her coffeepot and said, “How about it, boys? Feeling brave?” They both nodded and took seconds.

  I liked that Ruthie Britten, and on the way back to the camper that night, I told Father about how she had handled those two men. “What’s she do besides wait on tables?”

  “She drives the bus to Denver to pick them up. She’s smart all right,” Father said. “She’s a school librarian down in Lafayette, Louisiana, the rest of the year. She works here summers during the height of the convention season. We’ve been meeting at Oakes’ Ranch for about four years now. Tonight will start our fifth.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes,” Father said. We were back at our camper now, and he was pulling his shaving things from out of the closet. He put them into a little zipper kit that I didn’t even know he owned. He took out a fresh shirt and a change of underwear, too. He said as he started toward the door, “Better set the alarm. Breakfast is at seven down at the ranch house. Allow yourself fifteen minutes to walk there. See you in the morning.”

  “Well!” I said, “you sure seem to have recovered from your illness in a hurry.”

  “Thanks to your fine care.”

  “Care!” I said. “Care is something you seem to know nothing about. You don’t even care if I’m left all alone in a strange land with not even a telephone to call on.”

  “Ruthie’s camper is just four down—on the left. You won’t even have to call very loud.”

  “Mother didn’t send me halfway across the Continental USA to spend a month with you only to be abandoned.”

  Father shrugged. “I’m spending this night and all the nights that we’re at Oakes’ Ranch at Ruthie’s. Now if you want to make a complaint of child neglect, you just take a bus into Denver and catch that convention of social workers. They’re all good listeners, and they’ll like your story.”

  “What if there’s an accident and the camper catches on fire?”

  “Don’t play with matches,” Father said. “See you at breakfast.”

  I didn’t have to set the alarm, for Father knocked my door at six-thirty. “Better get up, Bo,” he said.

  I looked out the window, and there was Ruthie Britten standing next to Father, looking all clean and scrubbed in her blue jeans and plaid shirt, waving to me like a basic television sit-com mother. She wasn’t young. She wasn’t as young as Mother. And she wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t as pretty as Mother. And she had fat thighs.

  “Hurry up, now, hear?” she called. “Well wait for you, and we’ll walk on over together.” Ruthie had a definite Southern accent.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “We are,” Father said, and he put his arm around Ruthie’s waist and started to turn her to-ward the ranch house.

  “All right!” I called. “I’ll come.”

  I dressed in a hurry. My jeans, one of my new shirts, my boots, and my navy blazer.

  We sat at long tables for breakfast, and the talk was mostly of what the schedule was for the day and about pro football, which had started its demonstration games. I was the only non-adult there, but I don’t think these people would have changed their descriptions of things if I had been a girl non-adult instead of a boy. I listened for a good time and calculated that if you took four adjectives out of their vocabularies, you would cut their descriptions down to nothing. It’s easy to guess three of the adjectives; the fourth is hyphenated.

  Everyone carried his plate with him from the table and stacked it on a counter in the back of the room. There they all spread out in the directions they needed to do their chores for the day. Father headed toward Ahmed, and Ruthie Britten headed toward the kitchen. Father gave her a squeeze around the neck before they went their separate ways.

  No one invited me to go one way or another, and I pretty much didn’t know what to do with my-self. I suppose that in my Fortnum blazer I didn’t look ready to work in either the kitchen or the stable. I suppose that if I had volunteered to help someone with the horses or with the food, they would have accepted my offer. But I didn’t see any reason to offer my services to anyone. I stuck to my part of the bargain and acted like a visitor to a foreign country. I found a newspaper lying on one of the tables. I picked it up and carried it with me back to the camper. Since I had the whole morning with nothing to do, I did a thorough job of reading it after I took off my jacket. It was the day that the paper ran the ads for the grocery stores, and since they had to print enough news to fit the spaces in between the ads, there was a lot to read.

  One of the articles was about Renee. With a picture. It showed Renee holding up a bandaged hand. The article said that they still had not caught the person who had pushed her, and they still didn’t know how much use she would have of her hand.

  I cut that article out of the paper immediately after memorizing it, and I wrote the date at the top, and I would have embedded it in plastic if I had plastic and if I had known how to embed things in plastic when you had it. I put it in an envelope instead and sealed the envelope and put it in the breast pocket of my blazer right under the Fortnum crest. I laid my blazer across the bed carefully so that the
clipping wouldn’t wrinkle or fall out. I decided to write Sabrina something very clever as soon as I thought of it.

  Father came for me about eleven-thirty. He said that the Oakes’ Ranch would be receiving two busloads of Lambda Gammas for lunch and an afternoon of fun and games. I thought that Lambda Gammas were South American beasts of burden, but he told me that Lambda Gammas, who called themselves LG’s, were a sorority. Fun and games meant that the rodeo riders would do demonstrations of roping and tying for anyone who cared to watch.

  “What will Ahmed do?” I asked.

  “He will be available,” Father answered. “How about coming on over to the ranch house and helping to set up? They’ll have to get this group fed and entertained and everything cleared away before the next batch arrives for supper.”

  “I have some correspondence to do before the evening group comes. I’ll have to give it to someone to take into Denver to general delivery.” General delivery was where Father had picked up his mail in Dallas and in Tulsa.

  “The mail comes here, too, Bo. It’s one of my standard summer mail stops.” They deliver it once a day, and they pick up anything that needs to be mailed.

  “I guess my letter can wait,” I said. The truth was that I had not yet thought of something clever to say to Sabrina. I reached for my blazer, remembered the clipping, and decided not to wear it. It was getting warm outside anyway.

  The buses arrived, and almost everyone who got off was a woman. About one out of three of the women had a child with her. About three out of the four children were girls. And one of them was Sabrina Pacsek.

  I didn’t know whether I should run back to the camper to get the clipping, or run to meet Sabrina. Before I could even make a decision, my new boots had carried me halfway across the pasture, and my hands were up in the air, yelling, “Sabrina! Sabrina!” And she heard me.

  She waved back and said, “Hi, Max, what are you doing here?”

  Before I could catch my breath I told her. She was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt and a chino kind of jacket She took the jacket off, folded it so that the lining was outside and slung it over her arm.

  “Where’s your mother?” I asked.

  “Right over there,” she said.

  I looked to where she was pointing, and there I saw a woman who—except for the bare fact that she looked exactly like Lilly Pacsek—didn’t resemble her at all. She no longer had the wife-of-the-delegate hairdo; she had her hair cut just below her ears, and it was held in place by a single barrette. It was blonde, sprinkled with careless gray. She was not wearing a pants suit or blue chiffon; she was wearing a plaid cotton skirt, a cotton tee shirt and a button-down navy blue sweater. Lilly Pacsek looked exactly like all the Fortnum School mothers except my own. In Havemyer, it’s called preppy.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “We’re attending the convention of Lambda Gammas.”

  “But I thought your mother is a travel agent. How can you be a Lambda and a travel agent?”

  “The same way you can be a Southern Baptist and a travel agent or a Rotarian and a travel agent. What you do has nothing to do with it. Lambda Gammas are a college sorority, and they have a convention every other year to get together to discuss their goals. And all their goals are social and charitable.”

  “Where did you convene last time?”

  “Mother and I didn’t attend last time.”

  Something was wrong with Sabrina’s answers, but I couldn’t tell exactly what, so I didn’t say anything.

  “How are Ahmed and Woodrow?” she asked.

  “They’re both fine now,” I said. “And so is Renee. I got a clipping from this morning’s paper that shows her picture and her bandage.”

  “Yes, I have it,” she said.

  “You mean you don’t want mine?”

  “I never collect duplicates. Definitely no. Duplicates and freaks are a contradiction of terms.”

  I thought about that a minute, and I decided that she was right.

  Lilly came over toward us and greeted me. She shook my hand with enthusiasm. And even before she finished pumping on my hand, Sabrina asked her mother if she couldn’t help her off with her sweater since it seemed so warm at the ranch. “It’s all right, dear,” Lilly said. “It’s still cool in the shade.”

  “Here, let me help you off with it,” Sabrina insisted and then, instead of standing behind her mother, stood in front of her and began tugging at the sweater to pull it off. Lilly was saying, “Sabrina, dear, it’s all right! I’m really not too warm.” But Sabrina persisted and got that sweater off her mother’s back and folded it inside out and handed it back to her mother. Lilly was wearing a sleeveless tee shirt, and there in the high, thin air of Denver, Lilly stood with her arms folded across her chest, her hands rubbing the goose bumps of her upper arms. Sabrina was trying to hide their HELLO tags, and I made up my mind to find out why. I decided to sit between the two of them at lunch. It would give me a better chance to see one tag or the other and I wouldn’t mind sitting next to Sabrina anyway.

  “Is Woodrow here?” Lilly asked.

  “He’s here. If you find a waitress named Ruthie Britten, you’ll find him right nearby.”

  “Is Ruthie Britten a good friend of his?”

  “A close one,” I answered.

  Father found us and asked Lilly to save him a space on the bench near her, and Lilly did by putting her pocketbook down on the bench to her right and laying her sweater over the top of it. I sat on the other side of that space saver. I was determined to see Lilly’s HELLO badge. Lilly was talking to the woman on her left and saying, “It’s all right. These things happen.”

  The woman, who had the same hairstyle as Lilly and the same way of dressing, began telling Lilly a story about when she and her husband—may he rest in peace—had arrived in Karachi, Pakistan, for a convention of computer specialists and they had had no record of their reservations. No record at all. And her husband had had to call the American Embassy to find them a place to stay and they couldn’t find them a place to stay either, and so they spent the night at the Embassy itself. “And, my dear, let me tell you, the accommodations were so fantastic that I was tempted to do the same thing the following year when we were scheduled for a conference in Algiers. But, of course, I did not. A person can only pull that sort of thing off once in a lifetime.”

  “Yes,” Lilly answered. “Thank goodness, our problem was much simpler.”

  Sabrina saw that I was listening to her mother’s conversation, so she nudged me with her elbow and said, “Did you know that the Crisco Kid died?”

  “The Crisco Kid?”

  “Yes. He was ten. He had a rare skin disease called epidermolysis bullosa. Made blisters form all over him. Even his tongue. And webs grew between his fingers and toes. They had to paint him twice a day with Crisco. Was the only thing he got relief from. That’s how he got his name, the Crisco Kid.”

  “How do you catch epiderm … whatever?”

  “By having the wrong parents. You inherit it from them.”

  “Did he die of it?”

  “No, he died of a heart attack.”

  “Don’t you think that having this epidermolysis stuff helped?”

  “Oh, sure. Just as having Cockayne’s disease helped Penny die of chicken pox.”

  “You’ve got it backwards,” I said. “The chicken pox and the heart attack helped Penny and the Crisco Kid die of their own special diseases.”

  Sabrina studied me a long time and then said, “Maximilian, what you don’t seem to understand is that once you’re a freak, a born one or a man-made one, anything you do that’s normal becomes freakish.”

  “By your logic, then, anything freakish that a freak does is normal.”

  “Sure. Now, you take David.”

  “I know a lot of Davids. Which David?”

  “The boy in the bubble in Houston. His name is David. The family won’t reveal his last name. He has something wrong with him so that his body cannot
fight germs, so he lives in a room-sized container where air is pumped in and germs are kept out. If you were to sneeze at David, you could kill him. He’s nine years old now, and the only reason he has reached the age of nine is that he’s never tried to be normal. He’s never tried to be anything but a freak.”

  “But Renee was not born defective. She’s the victim of an accident. She can still live a normal life.”

  “I wouldn’t call it normal.”

  “She can overcome what happened to her.”

  “Overcoming is not normal. Overcoming means always having to do that plus whatever else she wants to do. It’s like she will always have to put something on before she puts on her clothes.”

  “She always will have to put something on before she puts on her clothes. It’s called underwear. Unless you want to tell me that girls don’t wear underwear, and judging from what I’ve seen on television and in my mother’s trousseau, I would say that they do, and I’d also say it’s pretty expensive.”

  Sabrina did not blush. I had hoped she would, but would have been disappointed if she had. She said, “Overcoming is not like putting on underwear before you put on your clothes. It’s like putting on a suit of armor before you put on your clothes. Everything you wear takes the shape of the armor.”

  “I’d say that makes it basically hard to relax.”

  “And to pretend.”

  “Why would anyone want to pretend?” I asked.

  “Everyone wants to pretend sometime. Needs to. But freaks like David who lives in a bubble or the Crisco Kid or Renee cannot. They cannot live with disguises. Only normal people like you and me and Lilly and Woody have any choice about whether or not we want to present ourselves or present a disguise.”