Slob

by Ellen Potter

  “That’s why you woke me up?” She collapsed back down on the mattress and pulled the covers over her head.

  “This is important, Jeremy. What do you think?”

  She didn’t have to think very long. She answered instantly, “No, I’m absolutely positive that she wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s very protective of her collection.” Her voice was muffled under the blanket. “She keeps them all in individual plastic sleeves, and she puts on these white gloves when she reads them.”

  “That is really weird, you know.”

  There was a pause during which I guessed she was trying to think of a way to defend Arthur. But she couldn’t, so she said, “Yeah, I know.”

  “Will you ask her anyway?” I said. “This is really important.”

  “What’s so important about old Retro TV Magazines?” she asked. She took the blanket off her head to look at me.

  I told her all about my new idea. She listened carefully. She doesn’t usually understand the stuff I explain to her, but she always listens carefully. I told her that if I could pull in some television signals from two years ago, I could check the old TV guides and figure out the date when those shows were first being aired. That way I could put a date on the old signals.

  “That’s so cool,” she said. “Yeah. That might totally work.”

  She sounded so optimistic, which I appreciated. I know people would say it’s just because she didn’t understand how difficult this thing was and how slim the odds were that it would work. But I didn’t care. It boosted my confidence to hear the faith in her voice.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m seeing Arthur tomorrow anyway. We’re working on the official GWAB statement to be read at The Blue and White Rebellion. I’ll ask her about the television guides then.”

  I thought about asking what The Blue and White Rebellion was, but I decided I probably didn’t want to know.

  “Later,” Jeremy said, “I’m going to attempt to teach her how to skate backwards, although she’s still a little shaky on the forwards part. She has really weak ankles. You wouldn’t think it from looking at her, would you?”

  The next day, Jeremy called me from Arthur’s house.

  The answer was no.

  To be exact, it was, “You must be kidding! He couldn’t pay me enough to borrow my collection!”

  “She won’t budge either,” Jeremy said. “I’ve tried.”

  I had been expecting this.

  “Let me talk to her,” I said.

  “It’s not going to help,” Jeremy said. In a whisper, she added, “Actual spit flew out of her mouth when she said ‘pay.’ ”

  “Just let me try.”

  There was a pause during which I could hear the muffled arguments between the two of them. Finally, there was a scraping noise and Arthur’s sullen voice came on.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Arthur, I think we can make a deal,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Just listen. In the back of my closet I have a bag that is stuffed full of clothes. Boys’ clothes.”

  There was a hesitation. “Your clothes, you mean?” she asked.

  “From two years ago.”

  Again a pause. “Look, I don’t want to be mean or anything, but I really don’t think I would fit into your clothes.”

  “I wasn’t fat two years ago,” I said. “I was like you. Not fat, not thin. If you don’t believe me, ask Jeremy.”

  She did. She clanked the phone down immediately. There was some discussion. Mostly I could hear Jeremy’s ardent voice. She was probably listing all the choice boy clothes in the bag. I know she went through the bag herself when she first joined GWAB, but she’s such a small, skinny kid that she was swimming in my old stuff. Arthur, on the other hand, would fit into them perfectly.

  “She says okay.” It was Jeremy on the line now.

  “Great.”

  “But there are rules. She’ll lend the collection to you for two weeks, that’s it. You have to keep them in order, and you have to wear gloves when you handle them.”

  I heard Arthur’s voice in the background, and Jeremy added, “She says she will know if you haven’t worn the gloves.”

  I briefly had an image of her dusting the Retro TV Magazines for fingerprints.

  “Not a problem,” I said.

  “All right. You can bring the clothes to Arthur’s house now and we’ll make the switch.”

  It was all very dramatic, as you can see. I didn’t mind, though, because it felt dramatic to me too.

  This might be it, I kept thinking. A hundred years from now, people would still be talking about the Birnbaum Retro TV Magazine Theory, the way they talk about Newton’s apple.

  I went into my closet and dug through all the crap that had accumulated over the past two years—salvaged items that I knew I’d never use and old school notebooks. Way in the back was a black Hefty bag. I dragged it out, tearing the bag in the process. If I hadn’t had to transfer all the clothes to an old duffel bag, I probably wouldn’t have looked at them. I held them up, one by one. Had my body once fit into these things? It was almost unimaginable. I felt like I must have been a totally different person. Like I had died and been reborn as someone else. I remembered things I had forgotten about too, the way you do when you look at old photographs. I could remember that I had worn one particular shirt on our trip to Ottawa, or how my NY Yankees shirt always made my parents squabble about baseball teams—my mother was from Boston.

  After all the clothes were in the duffel bag, I zipped it up. Done, I thought. I’ve seen them, and I won’t ever have to see them again.

  I couldn’t figure out if that made me happy or sad.

  I took the bus to Arthur’s house because the duffel bag was too heavy to carry the whole way if I walked. She lived on the fifth floor of an old walk-up apartment building, and the duffel bag wasn’t light, so by the time I pushed the door-bell, I was huffing and puffing and sweating like a hog.

  Arthur’s mother answered the door. She looked perplexed for a moment to see a kid she didn’t know holding a duffel bag, like I was coming to stay for a few weeks. Thankfully, Jeremy and Arthur had hurried up behind her, dragged me into Arthur’s room, and closed the door.

  I looked around the room in amazement. Without Arthur, eBay probably would collapse.

  The entire room was decorated with retro television paraphernalia. Her walls were covered with posters of Charlie’s Angels, Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, plus a bunch of other shows I’d never heard of. There was a special section by her bed devoted entirely to some greasy-haired guy in a leather jacket. She had a bookshelf without any books. Instead the shelves were crammed with retro TV lunch boxes and action figures.

  In every direction you looked there was something retro TV. Even up. A cheesy paper mobile hung from a thumb-tack in the ceiling with photos of the leather jacket guy dangling from wires.

  The Retro TV Magazines, however, were nowhere in sight.

  I felt a tug at my duffel bag.

  “Is this them?” Arthur asked. She looked practically feverish, she was so excited.

  “Yes,” I said, tightening my grip on the bag. “Where are the Retro TV Magazines?”

  “Oh. Okay.” She said this like she was disappointed I had remembered the bargain. She went to her dresser and pulled open the drawers, one by one, six drawers all together.

  Holy cannoli.

  The Retro TV Magazines were there, pressed together in their little plastic bags. No clothes. Just Retro TV Magazines. She had even made dividers to separate the years.

  “Wow.” I said.

  “I told you,” Jeremy said.

  I started to walk toward the dresser, but Arthur quickly turned around with her arms spread protectively in front of the drawers. She went over the rules again. I agreed again. Still, she hesitated.

  “How about he swears on Him?” Jeremy suggested.

  “Good idea,” Arthur s
aid.

  “Who’s Him?” I asked. I looked around the room for a shrine, like Nima has. The entire room was a shrine.

  Arthur went to her bookshelf and picked up a little action figure. A greasy-haired man in a leather jacket, with his hands shaped in a thumbs-up position. It was the guy on the mobile.

  “Arthur Fonzarelli. The Fonz,” Jeremy explained. “He’s on this old TV show Happy Days. She worships him.”

  “Oh, got it.” So I held The Fonz in my left hand, put my right hand over my heart, and solemnly swore that I would take excellent care of the Retro TV Magazines and would always remember to wear the gloves.

  That seemed to do the trick.

  She packed them up. I only needed the ones from the past two years, and the most current one—which she hated to part with, but did—so they actually fit into a single carton. She also put a pair of white gloves in the box and gave me a meaningful look.

  Jeremy helped me home with the carton, and I spent the rest of the afternoon looking at lists of TV shows, deciding what television channel to zero in on. And yes, I wore the white gloves. The nature of Retro TV Magazine narrowed down my options quite a bit. It was like the people who wrote this thing were still living in the 1970s. Sure, it listed the names of the people who would appear on the late-night talk shows and it gave very brief descriptions of what you could expect to see on the new shows. But when it came to the old reruns, it gave these long, detailed descriptions of the episodes. Like “The Love Boat, Episode Title: ‘Ex Plus Y.’ A divorced couple take the cruise with their new partners and keep bumping into their exes. Does all their bickering mean that they are still really in love? Also, two teens are caught in a budding romance while some feisty senior citizens threaten to mess up Julie’s new romance. Trivia Question: What Happy Days heartthrob plays one of the teens?”

  And on and on. It was pretty ridiculous. But I needed to have detailed descriptions of the old shows to figure out when they were aired and pinpoint the time that the star Nemesis was bouncing back the radio waves.

  Jeremy came in, sat down on my bed, and watched me for a little bit.

  “Hungry?” she asked. “Mom left us some casserole thing.”

  Mom always worked late on Saturday, so for dinner we had to fend for ourselves.

  “Not really,” I said with my nose tucked into the Retro TV Magazines.

  “Really?” She looked at me so strangely, which made me realize it was strange that I wasn’t hungry.

  “Have you figured out which channel you’re going to tune to?” she asked.

  I just had. “The Freakout Channel. It’s all seventies shows, all the time.”

  “Okay.” Jeremy clapped once. “Now we have the right channel. What do we do next?”

  She enjoyed feeling like she was a part of Nemesis. And she was, in a way. She scavenged a lot of the materials for Nemesis, so I felt it was only fair to let her help a little.

  I let her help me set up some of the equipment and explained to her that we were only testing things out at this point. That we would probably get no results whatsoever, and that was normal. There were lots of adjustments that still had to be made.

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” she said breezily. I really don’t think she understood.

  I tuned the TV to channel 74, which is the Freakout Channel. We don’t get that channel on our regular TV, but with luck it would come through with the help of Nemesis, just like the farm channel did. Only a whole lot clearer.

  Nothing happened. I adjusted the satellite dish for a few minutes, hoping, hoping . . . The sound came through first, then the picture. Yes! It was the Freakout Channel. The picture was far from perfect, but it was clear enough. We sat there on the bed, watching this show called Mork and Mindy, which funnily enough was about a guy from outer space. He lands on earth and moves into the attic of this cute girl’s place. I watched enough of it to get the gist of the episode then checked the most current Retro TV Magazine for today’s listing. There it was. The very same episode. Okay, I admit there was a part of me that was hoping we’d pick up a two-year-old signal right off the bat. But the sensible part of me knew that it probably wouldn’t happen that easily. It was lucky that we’d been able to pick up the Freakout Channel at all.

  After Mork and Mindy, we watched an episode of Sanford and Son, then The Love Boat, then two back-to-back episodes of Gilligan’s Island, then I Dream of Jeannie. After a while I felt Jeremy’s eyes on me.

  “What?” I said, keeping my eyes on the screen. If we caught some two-year-old signals, it might be only a second-long glimpse of the “wrong” show and I didn’t want to miss it.

  “Maybe we should call it quits for the night,” Jeremy said.

  My eyes left the screen. She was right. I think I had been temporarily hypnotized by hope and a blond genie in a pink harem outfit.

  10

  There wasn’t much time to work with Nemesis on Sunday. Sunday is Family Day. Mom always digs through the newspapers to find something “interesting” for us to do together. It’s pretty hit or miss. That Sunday it was miss.

  She said she was taking us to a puppet show, which we objected to immediately.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not five years old, Zelda,” Jeremy said.

  I watched Mom press her lips together and blink a little too quickly when Jeremy called her Zelda. Mom hears the most hair-raising things every day and she has to always keep her cool, but I could see how much it bugged her every time Jeremy called her Zelda. Of course, so could Jeremy, which is why she did it. Still, Mom is stubborn too, so she said, “It’s not a kids’ puppet show, Caitlin. It’s supposed to be very sophisticated.”

  Grrrr. That was approximately the sound that came out of Jeremy’s mouth. Unlike Mom, she has no training in keeping her cool.

  Mom was right in the end. It was not a kids’ puppet show. It was about this lady puppet that has loads of boyfriend puppets, and after about fifteen minutes, most of the puppets had no clothes on. Mom made us all stand up and leave.

  “Sorry about that, guys,” Mom said when we were outside the theater. I wasn’t sorry I’d seen it though. It was kind of fascinating in an embarrassing sort of way, but when Jeremy whispered that one of the boyfriend puppets reminded her of Andre, I was glad we’d left when we did.

  To make up for it, Mom bought tickets for us to take the Circle Line, a boat that sails around the island of Manhattan. It was a very touristy thing to do, which means it was also expensive. Normally Mom would have said that we couldn’t afford it, but maybe she thought the bracing watery breezes would purify our brains of the puppet show contamination.

  It worked in a way. Ten minutes after the boat set sail, I forgot all about the naked puppets and all I could think about was Gilligan’s Island. It was one of the shows I was watching on the Freakout Channel. In case you don’t know it, it’s this show where these people get stranded on a desert island and are always trying to find a way to escape. But they’ve made the island pretty comfortable with these nice huts and they put on plays and have golfing competitions and turtle races, which makes you wonder if the reason they never escape is because they don’t really want to.

  Manhattan is an island. Of course, everyone knows that, but it’s so smooshed with buildings and people and police sirens and street fairs and restaurants that it’s easy to forget it. You think it’s the center of the universe when you’re in it. From the boat, though, you can’t believe how puny it all is.

  “Weird,” Mom said in this dreamy kind of voice.

  “Yeah,” both Jeremy and I said at the same time. We all understood each other. All three of us were outside on deck even though it was cold. The wind was making us all squint, and Jeremy’s hair was flying every which way.

  “Our mother and father took us on the Circle Line one time,” Jeremy said.

  I sucked in my breath. There was a moment of silence during which I was grateful that I had the island of Manhattan to focus on while waiting for someone to say the r
ight thing. I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be me.

  “I bet they had more sense than to take you on it in frickin’ arctic weather,” Mom said.

  That was the right thing to say.

  We laughed, not the least because we’d never heard Mom say “frickin’” before.

  “No, it was summer,” Jeremy said. “And remember that kid on the bridge?” she said to me.

  I nodded, actually surprised that I did remember.

  “What about the kid on the bridge?” Mom asked. She was half smiling at us, as though this just was an everyday conversation rather than the first time we had all spoken about my parents since we came to live with Mom.

  “The kid was standing on one of the bridges, and right before the boat went under the bridge, he pulled down his pants and mooned us,” I told her.

  “And remember what Dad did?” Jeremy said. “He laughed so hard that Coke shot out of his nose, and that made Mom laugh so hard that she started snorting. Remember how she snorted when she laughed hard?”

  We stayed out on deck the whole trip, even when everybody else went inside the cabin. By the time we reached the pier, my fingers were stiff with cold and Jeremy’s face was as red as a radish, but I think I can safely say that we all went home feeling better about everything than we had in a long time.

  After an early dinner I went into my room and right away turned on Nemesis. All that talk about my parents made me more determined than ever. Their faces appeared so clearly in my mind—my dad’s black moustache that twitched when he was about to say something funny. The kind green eyes that always had tired pouches beneath them. My mother’s eyes were also green, but a different green from Dad’s. So light they were almost the color of ginger ale. Sometimes she watched Jeremy and me so intensely, it was like she was wondering what we were going to be like when we grew up, and I always had the urge to tell her not to worry, we’d be fine. I really wish I had.

  I turned on the TV and waited. I reasoned that if I did manage to catch an old signal, there would be a sudden change in the quality of the picture—more staticky, just like in the “ghost” images at The Black Baron Pub. And then, of course, the show would be different than the one I had been watching.