Right again. I had borrowed a seven of spades from another deck. Next thing I knew I ended up walking with her all the way from Bixby School to the stable where Daisy, her horse, lives. That’s right, she actually has a horse, who she cares for every day after school. Don’t get the idea she’s rich, any more than I am. She just loves horses so much that she worked every weekend—mowing lawns, babysitting, and cleaning out garages—to buy one. Horses are expensive to keep—and they eat a lot. That’s why Amy was cleaning the chalkboard. The janitor’s supposed to do it, but he never does, so Mr. Winters pays her to do it each day with a lunch bag filled with Quaker Oats, which she gives to Daisy. She loves that horse—and all animals.
“We shouldn’t eat animals,” she said. “They have feelings. That’s why I’m a vegetarian. In fact, I’m circulating a petition to get the cafeteria to offer a vegetarian choice for lunch. Better than that gross stuff they call ‘Farmstyle Stew,’ whatever it is. Will you sign it?”
I nodded. She was right: The stew was disgusting. Nodding was all I could do, because I couldn’t speak, too astounded that I was actually walking with Amy O’Shea.
She had lots of big opinions. She hated the fact that girls weren’t allowed to wear pants at school: “Don’t you think it’s unfair? Boys get to wear pants, and there are all kinds of things you just can’t do wearing a dress, like run and climb. All because of Mrs. Gabbler, who thinks we should be ‘ladylike.’ Who wants to be ‘ladylike’? Not me. I want to be free! And patches. Why can’t we wear patches on our clothes? What are we supposed to do when they wear out, throw them away?”
But her biggest feelings were about the war in Vietnam. “America shouldn’t even be there,” she said. “Nixon should end the war and bring the soldiers back. Then Tommy could come home.” That’s her older brother. He’s nineteen and in the Army, somewhere in Vietnam. She loves him and is really worried about him. Talking about him seemed to upset her, so she changed the subject, asking me about magic and how long I’d been doing it.
That’s the one thing I can always talk about, and when I told her about the birthday parties I did on weekends, her eyes lit up.
“You get paid? How much?”
“Fifteen dollars a show,” I said proudly.
“That’s pretty good,” she said. “But I bet you could charge more if you had an assistant. It would be more professional.” She thought for a minute, then said, “You could charge twenty-five dollars.”
She was right. Having an assistant puts a magician into a whole different league, like Mister Mystery, who has the lovely Linda Lee. He makes her float in the air and cuts her in half and everything.
“Let’s say you pay your assistant one-third of what you make—that’s eight dollars and thirty-three cents. That leaves you sixteen dollars and sixty-seven cents, which is more than you’re making now, and you would do a much better show.”
And, just like that, I had an assistant, who happened to be the most popular and smartest and prettiest girl in all of Bixby School. The next week she came over to my house to practice. I thought it would take a long time to teach her the tricks—how to set them up, what to bring out and when. But she got everything the first time.
A couple weeks later we did a show at the Temple City Library, where Mrs. Molatsky works, and this guy from the Temple City Times wrote an article about it—on the front page! Suddenly everyone was calling for birthday parties and Cub Scout meetings, and we were charging twenty-five dollars, just like Amy said, sometimes thirty, and, once even forty! My mom was driving us to shows almost every weekend, sometimes to two shows on the same weekend! I make sure to pay Amy right after each show, so she can buy food for Daisy. The rest pays for my magic lessons, and whatever’s left over goes to my family, though I don’t want her to know that.
At Amy’s suggestion, I had business cards printed up at Quik-Copy. They’re really cool, fluorescent red with a top hat on them, and the name “Joel Edwin.” It had been Mister Mystery’s idea to use my first and middle name as a stage name, instead of my last name. “That way,” he said, “your audience will laugh at your jokes instead of, well, you know . . .”
Everything was going great until one afternoon, the middle of the summer, after a show at the Rosemead Library. Amy and I had packed up my magic suitcase and were just hanging out with Herrmann—she’s my rabbit—waiting for my mom to come pick us up, when all of a sudden I realized that I liked her. Really liked her. Like, liked her liked her. Like, I didn’t know what to do about it. Suddenly, I had a secret—and I sure couldn’t tell her.
Amy’s really smart, and beautiful, and talented, but nobody’s perfect. As observant as she is, she misses some things that are really obvious. For example, she has somehow failed to realize what a total dork I am. And I don’t want to push it because we’ve got a good thing going. If she knew I liked her, that would be the end of that. So I’ve managed not to say anything. With us, it’s strictly business, and always outside of school. In school, we don’t talk, which is why it was so weird—wierd?—that she had come up to me in Home Ec.
“Look, Joel, I need to talk to you about Sunday.” She seemed really upset. “I can’t come . . . I’m really sorry.”
“Uh. Okay,” I said. “No problem. I’ll be fine.”
That was an outright lie. This was really bad news. Sunday’s magic show was supposed to be our biggest yet! If there was ever a time I’d need an assistant, it would be on Sunday.
“I’m really sorry. It’s just that . . . I’ll be in San Bernardino. With my father.”
“Your father?”
She nodded, and I could see she was on the verge of tears. “He and my mom separated. He moved out two months ago.”
“I’m sorry—”
“I guess it’s better. They’re not fighting so much. But now he lives in San Bernardino, and I spend one weekend a month with him. He and my mom had to switch around the schedule, so now this is his weekend—he’s picking me up Friday after school, and will bring me back on Sunday night. And that’s why I can’t come.” She wiped her eyes. “Will you explain to Herrmann why I’m not there? And don’t let her drink too much water before the show.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at my egg, which was a gloppy mess.
“But I’m still planning on coming with you to Mister Mystery tomorrow after school. My mom will drive me there from the stable, and if you want, she can give you a ride home.”
“Hey, everybody!” called out Arnold Pomeroy. “Look at Joel’s egg! Guess the yolk’s on him!”
Mrs. Hernandez came over, muttered something about boys in Home Economics, and gave me another egg.
“Try again,” she said. “Gently.”
Another one of Mr. Culpepper’s funny sayings is “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.”
That may be so, but it doesn’t always work. Now I’ve got two huge things coming up—the assembly on Monday, which I don’t even want to think about, and Sunday’s show, which I’ve been thinking about for weeks.
This afternoon I spread out all my magic tricks on the floor of the den—my bedroom—to decide which ones I could do without an assistant. I sat on the floor beside Herrmann’s cage and looked over my list.
“Well, Herrmann,” I said, “looks like it’s you and me on Sunday. Amy can’t come.”
Herrmann looked a little sad, but she’s a rabbit, and always looks a little sad.
“The problem is that all the best tricks are the ones with Amy—and you. But, don’t worry, I still plan to bring you. We’ll make it work.”
The first trick to go was the arm guillotine. It’s a cool one, you’ve probably seen it before—it looks like you’re going to slice off someone’s arm, but in the end they don’t get hurt, even though the guillotine blade does go right through a carrot. When I do it with Amy, we have a whole comedy routine, and sh
e feeds the carrot to Herrmann. I suppose I could do the trick with a volunteer from the audience, but there’s always a chance that they’ll freak out. And even if they don’t, my grandmother definitely will.
I’d better tell you about my grandmother. It’s another one of those antonym things. Imagine a grandmother who is soft and nice, baking cookies, sending birthday gifts, and saying things like, “Well, isn’t that lovely?”
My grandma Anna is not like that. At least, not now. When I was a kid, she would babysit for us and sing Yiddish songs. I had no idea what they meant, but they were sweet. She also used to tell me funny things she had learned in English class when she came to America, like a poem that began “If wishes were fishes . . .” But her accent was so thick that it came out “Eef veeshes vere feeshes.”
“Then what?” I would say. “What if wishes were fishes?”
She would shrug, then say, “Eef eefs and ands vere pots and pans . . .”
I never did figure out how the poem went, but I liked it. And I liked her. She would have our family over for dinner and make the best blintzes, these Jewish sweet-cheese-filled pancakes. Every time she saw me she’d say how much I looked like my father when he was young, call me bubala, then pinch my right cheek. It drove me crazy. Why always the right one? I think it made my face lopsided.
But then everything changed. She started to put strange things in the blintzes—once I found gravel—so we couldn’t eat at her house anymore. We still went to see her, but she would get really upset, yelling at my mother. Since then she’s gotten a lot worse. Now I would happily let her pinch my right cheek as much as she wanted, if she would go back to being the grandma she was when I was young.
Most of the time now she’s just really mad, screaming mad. Usually it’s about the gas men—whoever they are—who she says are coming to throw gas at her. My dad says it’s not her fault; it’s because something terrible happened to her before she left the old country. But that was sixty years ago, and he has no idea what it was.
She used to live in Pasadena, which isn’t far from here by car, maybe seven or eight miles. But then, about a year ago, she got so worked up about the gas men that she walked all night to our house, and when we went out in the morning, we found her asleep on the porch (which is not very comfortable—it’s coated with AstroTurf, which looks like grass but is actually prickly plastic). We didn’t know what to do, so my dad woke her up and drove her home.
A month later, she did it again. Then again a couple weeks after that. We never knew when we were going to wake up and find her on the porch. The funny thing is that when she was sleeping there, she looked so peaceful. We learned not to wake her up suddenly, because that’s when she would start screaming.
“The gas men! They’re following me! They’re throwing gas at me!”
I once made the mistake of trying to argue with her. “Grandma,” I said, “that’s not possible. You can’t throw gas!”
She paused for a second, then started shaking her head. “Shah! Where’s your father? And your mother—what’s she doing to him?”
The biggest problem with my grandmother is that she’s convinced my mother is trying to kill my father. She used to call over here about fifteen or twenty times a day, and when we answered the phone, she would start to scream. “Your mother! She puts poison in his food! Don’t let him eat it!”
We weren’t supposed to tell her where my father was working. But she found out anyway, and called there again and again until she reached his boss. Then she told him all about how my mother was trying to kill my father. After that happened a couple of times, he lost his job.
I know that sounds crazy, but to really understand how crazy it is, you’d need to know my mother. The only way she’d be dangerous is if you could poison someone with niceness. She never gets mad, even when she should. If holding in laughter can cause an embolism, can being too nice make you bust a gorgle? That would be bad. I couldn’t understand how she put up with my grandmother saying those horrible lies.
“How can you stand it?” I asked her once.
“Oh,” said my mother, “life is difficult for her. She’s—not well.”
“Yeah? I get sick too, but I don’t call people murderers!”
“We have to be understanding,” she said. “She’s suffering. Because of what happened when she was leaving Poland.” There it was again. “Besides,” said my mom, “when she starts to scream, I just do this.” My mom reached a hand to her hearing aid. There was a short squeal as she turned it off and smiled weakly.
My grandma hadn’t come over for a while, but then, one morning last summer, I found her on the porch, right in front of the door. I could have gone out the back door, and probably should have. But I figured I could jump over her no problem.
Big mistake.
I actually did make it over—I’m sure I didn’t touch her. But a few seconds later, she woke up and started to scream, so loudly and for so long that the neighbors called the police. That had happened a few times, and the officer who usually came was pretty nice about it. My dad, who can charm anyone, explained that she was upset because she lost her cat—which wasn’t true, as she never had a cat. The officer managed to calm her down, saying they’d find the cat, and gave her a ride back to Pasadena in his police car.
This time, though, there was a new police officer—with a crew cut—who didn’t buy the cat story. What’s more, as he came toward my grandmother, she started screaming at him, calling him a Cossack and a whole bunch of other things in Yiddish, saying that he was the gas man. He didn’t like that at all. He looked so mad, I thought he was going to handcuff her, but instead he backed up to his car and radioed the police department. About ten minutes later this big white van pulled up. Four huge guys got out—and one of them was carrying something. You know what it was?
A straitjacket—exactly like Houdini’s! It even had leather straps. The big guys held her arms as they slid on the jacket and fastened the straps. As soon as they did, she stopped screaming and stood there with a confused smile on her face.
“See that?” my dad said. “She’s fine. All calmed down. She was just upset about her cat. So, why don’t we take off the jacket and—”
“Stand back, sir,” the officer said to my father.
I watched my grandma, mesmerized. I knew that Houdini would have escaped from it in a couple of minutes, or less. I knew exactly how he would do it too. He could dislocate his left shoulder, which is the first thing you have to do to escape from a straitjacket. Although there are lots of things dislocated about my grandmother, her shoulder isn’t one of them. I knew she wouldn’t escape.
Eventually they took her to the Los Angeles County Sanitorium. Sanitorium is one of those funny words, because it should probably be called an Insanitorium. I never went there, but my mom and dad did, several times, and came back haggard, which is a vocabulary word for “looking exhausted and unwell, especially from fatigue, worrying, and suffering.” When I asked my mom about it, all she said was, “Well, the wallpaper is nice.”
That’s how I knew it was really bad. If there’s even a tiny speck of good somewhere, my mom will find it. So if wallpaper was the best she could do, that meant it was horrible. I think it actually made my grandma a lot worse, being around all those crazy people. They only let patients make phone calls once a week, on Sundays, when she would call us five or six times. Whenever I answered, I tried to bring up subjects that wouldn’t upset her, but it wasn’t easy.
“Hi, Grandma! How’s the food in the sanitorium? Are you making friends?”
“Shah!” she’d say. “Where’s your father? What’s she doing to him?”
“I hear the wallpaper is really nice. What color is it?”
“Poison! She gives him poison!”
Eventually I would have to hang up, and because there was only one phone, she would get in line and call again. After about a month,
and several trips to the courthouse, my dad arranged to have her moved to the Jewish Home for the Elderly and Infirm of Greater Los Angeles.
A week after she got there, we all went to visit. I don’t know what the sanitorium was like, but I can’t imagine it was much worse than this. All the people were sitting around a big room, in green plastic chairs. A bunch were arguing, some were asleep, and some were just chewing. A radio was playing really loud classical music, I guess to drown out the other noise.
The whole place reminded me of this Jell-O parfait they advertise on TV. We’ve never had it—my dad says it’s goyisha food—but the commercial makes it look pretty cool. It’s a powder you mix with boiling water, then put it in a special glass that’s swirly and shaped like an ice-cream cone. Somehow, it makes three layers—foamy on top, creamy in the middle, and see-through at the bottom. I have no idea how it does that, but the exact same thing had happened to the air in the Jewish Home.
The top layer was all smoke, mostly from cigars. The bottom layer smelled like cleaning fluid, with just a hint of throw-up. And the middle layer was pure noise. Not just any noise, but kvetching.
If you’re only going to learn one Yiddish word, I suggest kvetch. It means complain, but in a Yiddish way, which is a high art. I only know a little Yiddish, but it was clear that everyone there was trying to outkvetch each other.
On the far side of the room, sitting all alone, was my grandmother. Not screaming, not sleeping, not chewing, not even kvetching—just sitting. When we gave her the flowers we’d brought, she stared at them but didn’t speak.
It was so horrible that I didn’t want to go back a second time, but my dad said, “It’s a mitzvah to visit the sick.” People think mitzvah means “good deed,” but it actually means “commandment,” something you have to do, so I went. And it’s a good thing I did, because on that second visit, as we walked in, something amazing happened.
Dreidels on the Brain Page 8
