Once Buddy was around, the days with the Simonsons fell into a sluggish order. There were some mandatory educational trips that my mother planned for all of us, excursions to the zoo and the arboretum, but when we weren't on those forced marches, Buddy was out in the alley with Cleveland or exploring the town with Malzena in tow, buying lunch at a joint called The Beef, and going to movies. Buddy and Cleveland took over my room, their underwear and socks and wet towels and comics on the rug, the desk, the beds, the closet floor. I remained in the basement. I had a job three mornings a week at the Field Museum and a regimen of tennis practice, but even when I was around, the dynamic threesome seemed to forget I was living in the house. It didn't matter. I didn't care. I had a freshly dead male baboon to work on, and in the long afternoons I'd take him from his plastic bag that filled the basement refrigerator and disassemble him bit by bit on the bar.
The first time Malzena saw him, I was slicing open the abdominal cavity, and the intestines, which I'd nicked, were predictably foul-smelling, the stench rising into the room. She narrowed her eyes, plugged her nose, swore, told me I was sick in the head, and retreated into the TV corner. At that point in the visit, she'd gotten bored with the array of Madeline's dolls, which had held her interest, as old as she was, for a day or two. After she'd exhausted that entertainment, and after Buddy arrived and the boys were outside in the alley, she often came downstairs and turned on the TV, an activity we were ordinarily not allowed before nightfall. The few Maciver rules were breaking for the wretched of the earth: dessert before dinner, and also after; chewing gum in the art museum; candy in the bedrooms; TV by day. I examined my baboon to the flickering light of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.
Because Mikey was gone, Madeline stood by during the dissections. She was just as surprised as I that the stomach smelled like a salady mix of leaves and fruit. She wasn't exactly interested, but she wasn't repulsed, either. It was something to do, sit at the bar as I worked. While I was at it I'd talk, explaining the systems both to her and to myself. I'd make an incision and draw back the layers of skin and muscle, and she'd bend forward to see, dutifully saying, "What's that for?" She asked the same questions on most days, which helped me refine my explanations. Every now and then she'd remember the animal--"Poor monkey," she'd say in a pouty voice--but on the whole her pity was perfunctory.
There was one day early on in the visit when Buddy came downstairs, I suppose because he knew he hadn't talked to me much. "Why don't you play ball with the alley gang?" he said.
"I never got in the habit," I said, truthfully, the Pindels and the Lembergers and the Van Normans so feral and loud, they'd scared me when I was little. I glanced down at my mother's faded blue smock, which I always wore for dissections, wishing that for once I hadn't put it on.
Madeline was sitting at the bar kicking a foot against her stool. "How you doing?" Buddy asked her, both of us, I guess, his charity cases.
When she didn't say anything, I answered for her. "Madeline's friend is on vacation."
"My boyfriend!" she clarified, suddenly enlivened.
I knew Buddy was looking at me for verification, but I kept my eye on the glory of the liver, so darkly purple.
"Where is he?" Buddy asked, a question that could only make Madeline go off to cry for the rest of the afternoon.
Chapter Ten
THERE CAME, ON ONE OF THOSE SUFFOCATING JULY NIGHTS during the Simonsons' visit, an upset, a cruelty that I suppose I should have been prepared for, that Buddy, ironically, had made me think possible. The house had been closed all day against the heat, and at last, in the early evening, it had become warmer inside than out. The doors and windows were opened, the sodden air beginning the slow drift through the downstairs. My father had grilled hamburgers on the patio, and we were all sitting at the dining-room table, beaded up with sweat as if we'd been digging trenches in the noonday sun.
Louise, fresh from Stephen's air-conditioned bungalow, happened by, bringing along her musical soulmate. "Good of you," I said to her, "to stop in." She had been coming home late every night, sleeping on Madeline's floor, and was usually gone by breakfast.
Time held that meal in a single everlasting moment, the nine of us plastered into the leather seats of my grandmother's chairs, the nine of us spearing our pickles and coaxing the ketchup along the glass neck and blasting the mustard from the plastic bottle, the rectal spurts making Buddy & Co. plus Madeline laugh uproariously. The hilarity seemed to take their minds off the heat. Cleveland had three burgers spilling off his plate, and one full bag of potato chips from the Jay's box in his lap. There was no one like my cousin, as always, to make the forest, the black night, or the dinner table a good time. He told his stirring anecdotes about schoolboy Buddy at the military academy, the beleaguered lad who must outsmart his captors. Cleveland nodded with great appreciation, as if Buddy were merely giving voice to his own experience. Whether I was sitting across from Cleveland or next to him or passing him in the kitchen, I felt the pressure of his hand on my back, the hot palm between my shoulder blades.
When Buddy paused to take a bite my mother said, "Louise, I'll bet Malzena and Cleveland would like to hear you and Stephen play after dinner. I don't think they've heard your music yet."
Louise thrust her knife into the center of her bun. For a few seconds she glowered at her sculpture as if it were a voodoo cello, as if she couldn't wait to slash up her instrument. She did remember something of her manners, and at last looked up to smile wanly at Malzena. I was beginning to see why my mother had wanted the Simonsons on our block, in our house, in our rooms, in our beds. She had said portentously, "It's possible they'll have something to teach you." She knew how I'd feel about the superficial cheerfulness of the neighbors, and she was sure it would do me good to watch the Simonsons bear the burden of our kindness. She also knew how I'd feel standing on the lip of the swimming pool fighting my base instinct, my revulsion at the water. Mid-course, I could see that Project Share wasn't for the Simonsons' education--no, not any of it. Project Share was for Louise and me, for the Maciver brats, to show us the world, to introduce us to our real feelings. Project Share would make us examine our limited viewpoint; Project Share would make us understand the shallow nature of any tolerance we might think we had. We would come to despise ourselves, and through that self-hatred rise up against all injustice, not with swords but with our sharpened pens and ancestral plowshares. Oh, what a skillful leader Mrs. Maciver was!
Cleveland and Buddy had moved on to recapitulate the stunning plays of the afternoon pickup game. "Your dunk shot, Bud,"
Cleveland was saying.
Bud?
"Your number-A specialty. You slams into me, I steals the ball--"
"You popped it in, Cleve, score for the team." Good old Cleve could stand at the hoop, catch the ball spinning on his thumb, and set it in the basket.
With the kind of savage indignation you might reserve for condemning tyrants, Malzena announced that I was sick in the head to be taking apart a monkey.
My father looked up from his coleslaw. "Have you ever done a dissection in a science class?" he asked her.
Before the Simonsons could tell us about their sad, awful school with the broken windows, the textbooks gnawed by rats, Buddy managed to unglue himself from his seat and stand. He pushed up the imaginary sleeves of his lab coat, and primly fitted the safety glasses over his ears. The Buddy Show! My father had unwittingly opened a new vein for his nephew, a subject rich in comic possibility, the mad scientist mixing yet another series of volatile compounds over his Bunsen burner. Not since the silent-screen comedians had we seen anything so funny, so very, very funny, nothing funnier than Buddy, all innocent curiosity, measuring poison into his beaker. Such an actor, such a mime, the acid foaming over onto his hands, he rubbing his nose, his chest, and, out of sight, his privates. Ha-ha-ha-haha-ha! His mouth was a long oval; his eyes were first shut tight and then, in wild surprise, they snapped open. Malzena laughed so hard she tipped over in her
chair. Madeline put her napkin to her face, beyond the giggles to joy. If Mikey O'Day had been with us, he would have screamed. My mother, my own mother sang out, "Oh, Buddy!" before laughter overtook her.
And so--another aspect of her plot revealed. She had arranged for Buddy to visit us alongside the Simonsons; she'd meant for Buddy to demonstrate how to be an unaffected host to those less fortunate than the Macivers. Somehow she'd known what he was capable of, that he'd save the Simonsons and thereby us. I pushed back and began clearing the table. Louise did the same, both of us scraping and stacking and clattering, the high-quality staff of 422 Grove Avenue. When it hit her that she was either going to have to do serious cleanup or else play for her Project Share siblings, she and Stephen retired to the living room to rune. The prodigies were working on a Chopin polonaise, a tempestuous march that was beyond their reach, that did not show off their talents to best effect. They played it too fast, roaring down the scale together, the perspiration spinning off of Stephen's brow. My sister, having acquired a new habit, the sign of true genius, was grunting. Malzena came to the edge of the room and, either amazed or disgusted, stared, her mouth wide open. Cleveland sat on the hall steps, elbows bent on his knees, chin in his hands, the posture of acute boredom. The instant Buddy came from the bathroom, the two of them were slamming the front door and down the walk, shouting for Malzena to get a move on. They were going to the pool to have a swim before the place closed.
I couldn't in fact help but wonder at Buddy's surprising ability to speak our guests' language, to treat them as if they'd always been at our house, as if they were there for his pleasure. Off they went down the street, bumping into each other, sniggering, and poking, Buddy at one point doing a handspring. I suspect he took them into the bosky part of the park to smoke dope every night, before or after the swimming. He'd never spent much time with us in Illinois, and I'm sure I seemed painfully priggish in my own town. It must have been a relief to him, to have someone on hand who could share his hobbies. I realized that I'd never had an interest in repeating at home any of the derelict behavior Buddy taught me at the lake; that kind of thing was only entertaining if we were alone in the boathouse, Buddy showing me how. I always came back from my grandmother's seemingly uncorrupted and went straight to school with my intentions and seriousness intact.
Although the children in our neighborhood played outside all day long, when twilight overtook the yards they came into their finest hour--like birds they were, twittering up a storm as the sun went down. That night Madeline wandered over to the Pilskas', where several girls, hard into the horse phase, were running around jumping over boxes and whinnying. Every now and then it struck me that Madeline had a knack for her station in life, that she must have given herself a talking-to: I guess this is what I am, and so I might as well embrace it. I had felt that acceptance especially when I watched her with whoever was horse crazy in the moment, Madeline with her wonky gait effectively doing hurtles. Once she had Mikey, she didn't, as I said, join in as much, but she probably stood by patting the Pilskas' terrier and watching the girls canter and jump, or balk at a fence, Boxy Pilska whipping her own rump with a stick.
"You should be with Buddy," my mother had the gall to say to me in the kitchen. There were drill bits and nails, a crowbar on the counter next to stacks of dirty plates and the condiments and the bowls of leftovers. "He seems to be having a good time, but I'm not sure he should be doing the part of host when he's the guest."
I closed up the nail boxes severely. "Someone's going to swallow a screw with their raisin bran," I muttered. I started down the basement without saying anything more. Although the baboon had been refrigerated, it was beginning to smell in that putrefying way, and I wanted to keep working, to finish my dissection while I could still stand it.
"I'll have you know that Buddy has risen in my estimation," she chirped after me. "I won't think ill of him again."
I paused at the landing. The one weekend I'd seen him, the summer before, he'd coaxed me through the trials of learning to get good and stoned. He'd been patient with my coughing, very encouraging. We had laughed ourselves silly and eaten contraband Dolley Madisons. I could have told my mother that I had no interest in getting high with the inner-city teens, that the single poker game I'd played was as far as I was willing to go toward depravity during vacation. Nor did I mention that Buddy had won thirty dollars from Cleveland, robbing the pauper of his last shekels.
Before I could speak, my father appeared. "Leave the mess, Julia. Let's take a walk before it's dark."
I didn't know how to frame what I wanted to say to my mother, but now there was time to think of just the thing. I went down the rest of the stairs to my baboon, imagining my parents walking out into the town; perhaps they'd keep pushing on, the waning light drawing them forward. I liked the idea of them strolling toward the setting sun, a Sisyphean exercise, walking without end.
For some time while I was downstairs, Stephen and Louise played a gigue or a gavotte, a cheerful dance from the days when no races mixed in the drawing room. If my mother returned I would tell her that once Lu and I were released from the bondage of our childhoods we were going to join the Klan. In addition to burning crosses on lawns, we would fight right back up to the Supreme Court for segregation.
I remember carefully slicing the duodenum from the stomach, my heart beating with the excitement of my precision. I was just about to take out the pearly heap of the small intestines, having the idea to lay the jejunum and ileum along the bar to measure them. All the while, I was telling myself I was glad, very glad to be in the basement, my hands in the cool, slippery, decaying baboon insides, much better than swimming with Buddy on a sweltering night. I might have been speaking out loud when I felt the movement. I looked once to see if the cat had come down. It was a speck in my eye, I thought, not Tiffers. I might have gone on with the dissection if the floater hadn't coughed.
"Stephen!" I cried, nearly throwing the guts in the air. "I didn't see you."
He was standing at the foot of the stairs, staring at the child-sized corpse laid out on the counter. "Where's Buddy?" he said.
"Buddy?" I wiped my filmy hands on my sissy-boy smock. "He's at the pool, I think. It closes at nine, so he'll probably be home soon."
"Okay." He was his pale self, but he seemed more uncomfortable than usual, clutching his ribs.
"Is something the matter?"
"I'm not sure. I don't know--if Madeline is all right." He jerked around to look up the stairs. "Wait," he said. "I hear them."
I laid the plastic over the baboon and followed after him, asking what he meant. By then I could hear Buddy in the kitchen with Louise. At the first I thought, What does Stephen know about Buddy? Why does he need Buddy? He had only just met my cousin at dinner. At the top of the stairs I saw the star guest striding out the door even as Louise was trying to tell him something. He'd made the motion to Cleveland, the universal cocking of the head that meant Come. Before I could ask what was going on, the rest of them were down the back-porch steps, Stephen and Louise and Malzena, all walking purposefully to the alley.
For a minute there seemed to be nothing in that night but insect noise, the crickets belting out relief after the heat of the sun.
For a flash there wasn't even us. I had been in that strangeness before as the hum of the teeming world came up into the air, and I was glad that the street lights right then slowly began to burn on, that illumination the beacon to bed. In the distance the mothers started their calling. Some of them stood on their porches and rang old cow bells rescued from the family farmsteads, and others opened their doors to sing out the names. All at once I was so homesick for my mother, for her old self, my old self, her calling me in for my bath. Where had we gone, she and I? Where were we? The younger children were tearing from their games, blowing through the yards to their houses.
The Pindels' garage, across the alley, was built like a barn, the lower part for cars and an upper loft that Jerry had claimed for his pri
vate, No Trespassing pad. Two years had passed since the Ludwig-drum incident, The Spellbinders getting along with the drummer's own battered instruments. When Mikey had lost interest in his birthday toy, Mr. O'Day stashed the set in the attic where, safely quiet, it gathered dust. The Pindels' lower garage was always open, the red station wagon at the ready. In front of the Ford, Buddy said to us, "Stay here. I'll take a look-see."
"What's happening?" I asked for the fourth time. "Bud."
"Let's go, Cleve," Buddy said. The two of them began to climb the ladder to the trapdoor; the others, their fearful faces turned, watched the ascent. I was damned if I was going to stay downstairs, damned if I, Brains, was going to be kept from the look-see, kept from rescuing Madeline, if that's what the matter was.
With expert slowness Buddy pushed the trapdoor open and tiptoed into the short hallway. "Quiet," he said in a thread of a whisper, although we hadn't made any noise outside of breathing. I feel certain that Cleveland, too, stopped respiring at Buddy's order. Maybe Buddy had assumed I'd come along; of course, that was it. He knew I'd fall into place as the second-in-command, no discussion necessary. There was canned music coming from the loft room, guitars twining sweetly up the scale, and in the dark the faintest smudge of light under the inner door. I hadn't been in the loft for years, not since it was used as an attic, the storage place for broken fans and steamer trunks from the grandfathers. Buddy turned the knob. Maybe because I was with Buddy, I had the sense that whatever was going to happen, large or small, would matter, that even if behind that door the scene was insignificant, we would more or less remember it. And so we pressed together, trying to see through the crack, Cleveland, against the prohibition, murmuring, "Mother-fuck!"
When Madeline Was Young Page 15
