The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza

by Jack Gantos

  “You moron!” she hollered back. “I know how to put panties on. I just can’t seem to keep these up and I need to know why. So get in here.”

  “I’ll be no help,” I promised. “Because my eyes will be closed.”

  “Fine,” she grumbled. “Then I’ll come out.”

  “Nooooo,” I moaned. “Don’t come out.”

  She began to pull on the inside doorknob.

  I held the knob on my side.

  “Let go, you loser,” she demanded. “Or I swear, when I get out of this bathroom I will beat you until you beg to put on these underwear and run down the street screaming ‘I’m a girl! I’m a girl!’”

  That was a worrisome thought.

  I jumped away from the door as she pulled it open.

  “Now tell me what I’m doing wrong?” she asked.

  I stared at her. It was confusing. The panties were all droopy on the outside of her dress and the waistband was so big that it hung off the hem.

  “I’m guessing they are too big,” she said, gathering them up. “Did you buy panties or a slip, because this is kind of like a slip.”

  “I think they are too big,” I guessed, and looked away.

  “Then you have to take them back,” she ordered.

  At that moment I would’ve rather sewn her new underwear myself. “Isn’t there a rule that you can’t return used underwear?”

  “Then get me a new pack,” she said impatiently.

  “Okay,” I said. “But take care of Carter Junior, and if any strange men come to the door don’t let them in unless they speak Chinese, and then it’s Mr. Fong, the Pig-zah delivery man, who is the nicest man in town.”

  “Don’t fret,” she said coldly. “I’d slash into bite-sized pieces anyone who would harm the baby.”

  “One more thing,” I asked. “What size panties do you wear?”

  “A girl’s medium,” she said.

  “Got it,” I sang out. “I’ll be right back.”

  Once again I nervously scampered down to the store. When I entered the lingerie department the same clerk was still there.

  “Hi,” I said, sort of out of breath. “I made a mistake,” I panted. “My sister is a girl’s medium.”

  “Is she really your sister?” she asked with her hands on her hips. “Really?”

  “Nah,” I said right back, and gave her my big grin and planted my hands on my hips. “She’s my blind girlfriend—the love of my life! She’s the sunshine that brightens the hundred million smiley-faces on my Pigza planet!” Then I grinned so she could see all my teeth but the missing few.

  She frowned at me and then stiffly marched over to a case of panties and picked out the correct size. I paid with a pocketful of change for the cheap pink ones, and ran home.

  This time the panties fit and Olivia was smiling and smoothing down her dress when she came out of the bathroom. “You passed the test,” she said warmly, and took a calming breath.

  “What test?” I asked.

  “The mature boy test,” she replied, and gave me a little hug and we awkwardly bonked our foreheads together but I didn’t mind.

  “You could actually say the word panties and go buy some at a store without falling apart,” she said. “Most boys are so immature. Most of them would drop dead at the thought of it and that would make me really angry.”

  “I am the mature man of the house,” I replied proudly, with a little swagger in my fake manly voice as if I bought girl panties every day of the week. Nothing to it. Piece of cake. Then I glanced down at Carter Junior. He was staring directly up at me and he looked kind of worried, kind of nervous. He’s showing what I’m really feeling, I thought—only he’s not faking it.

  Suddenly the doorbell rang and the dogs started yapping.

  “Ding-dog!” I shouted. “I’ll get it.”

  “Don’t!” she shouted. “It might be for me.”

  “It’s just Mr. Fong,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  I hoisted Pablo and Pablita onto my head, grabbed Carter Junior, and opened the door. It was Mr. Fong, right on time.

  “Pig-zah pie!” he shouted merrily, and pulled it out of the hot box.

  “Thank you,” I said, and grinned.

  I set Carter Junior down on the porch between my legs, and then reached into my pocket for the food stamps. Just when I slipped them into his hand I thought I saw a shadow lurking behind a car across the street. But it was probably Pablo’s paws hanging in front of my eyes.

  After dinner, when it was dark, we went for a family stroll. I put Carter Junior in the shopping cart and Olivia and I walked off our pizza bellies. Every now and again, I’d look over my shoulder but I didn’t see anyone following us.

  The next morning I was heating up Dad’s uneaten slice of pizza in the microwave for Carter Junior’s breakfast. I had strapped the baby in his high chair and kept him quiet with a cup of juice. He had woken me up early from his padded playpen next to my bed. Olivia had moved into Mom’s room upstairs.

  “How’s my special gift today?” I said to him and smiled my big carved-pumpkin smile. He smiled right back, and I felt that smile fill me up with orange jack-o’-lantern happiness. I knew it was going to be a great day when I could feel what Carter Junior was feeling because he was pure goodness.

  Then I looked out the back window and spotted Olivia standing perfectly still in a small circle of freshly kicked up dirt in our messy backyard. She must have gotten up before sunrise when it was pitch-black, but darkness didn’t mean any particular time of day for her. And she must also have been very quiet because the dogs hadn’t barked when she opened the rear door.

  One thing about being with Olivia is that I could stare intently at her from a distance and she would never know it. What is she up to? I wondered. Her feet were sprinkled with loose dirt and dead grass, so she had probably knelt down and covered them before jabbing her stick into the ground and standing to strike a mystifying pose. Her body was kind of a tree trunk in a dress with her two arms spread out like branches bent upward at the elbows. Her fingers were stretched wide apart like naked twigs reaching for leaves that had just blown away. Her long braids of hair were roped and pinned into circles on top of her head and formed a little basket, or a donut-thing.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing, but guessing what people are up to is a game that’s usually a lot more fun than actually knowing what they are up to. Maybe Olivia was Artemis, the Greek goddess of hunting, I thought. Mrs. Fabian had showed us pictures of her in the forest with a bow and arrow. Or better yet, maybe Olivia was someone who had just looked into the deadly eyes of Medusa and was doomed by her freezing gaze.

  Before I could think of more good Greek ideas Carter Junior started rocking his high chair back and forth like a kidnapped person trying to escape. The buzzer had gone off on the microwave and I was slow to give him his slice of pizza. In less than a minute he had walked his chair halfway across the kitchen floor as he headed for a face-first smash into the counter. I grabbed the chair, unclipped his seat belt, and hauled him outside along with his blanket and warm slice.

  “Hey, Olivia. Do you want me to tell you what I think you are doing?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she shot back as if she’d been expecting me, and held her pose.

  “Then you tell me,” I asked. “Pleazzz!”

  “I’m the Statue of Liberty for blind girls,” she replied proudly, and jutted her chin out as she straightened up her posture. “Blind girls should be as free as the birds, and to prove it I’m going to stand here until a bird starts building a nest in my hair.”

  “Oh, I thought that was a donut-thingy made out of hair,” I remarked.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she scoffed.

  “I’m not entirely,” I said, grinning impishly and running circles around her. “I’m smart enough to know that birds don’t build nests in the fall. So you might be out here for a long, long time.”

  “It doesn’t matter how long it takes,” she said with det
ermination, and puffed out her chest. “I always have months and months of thoughts to think about. You have to remember that blind girls are daring explorers of the infinite dark world inside the universe of their minds.”

  “So what are you exploring?” I asked, and blurted out a goofy guess. “Like, are you mapping the dark side of the moon?” I flinched once I said that because I deserved a swat from her blind-girl stick.

  “Well, to be perfectly honest,” she replied in a voice that was unusually hesitant, “in a way you could say I’m always mapping the dark side of the moon. I wish I were exploring the bright side and could see the man in the moon and climb up his nose and crawl out of his eyes and holler into his ears. But I’m stuck on the dark side, which is all black except for one mesmerizing object which is my nemesis.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Can’t you find it in the dark?”

  She smiled a little at that stupid joke. “Oh, I can find it,” she replied. “Since I was a little kid I’ve been staring at what I call the black box. From the moment I saw it floating squarely in the middle of my mind it’s been my dream to open it and map what’s inside.”

  “Why don’t you?” I asked.

  “All my life I’ve tried, but it’s more like a black vault,” she said with frustration. “Or everything I can’t see compressed into a solid tomb of blackness.” She grimaced, then bit by bit lowered the angle of her arms to give them a rest.

  Carter Junior was busy gumming his pizza, which smelled cheesy-good and made me hungry. “Did you get some breakfast?” I asked her. “I have some peanut butter snacks inside.”

  “Don’t leave,” she replied. “Talking out loud gives sound to my thoughts, and that really helps me think.”

  “Okay,” I happily agreed. “So tell me more about what’s in your head, because you can’t see me and I can’t see what you see.”

  “I’ll try to explain it,” she said, and slowly stretched her neck and rolled her shoulders. “But it’s hard, and really frustrating, because what I’m going to tell you is what I wake up to every day, and go to sleep with every night.”

  She made a loose cage with the fingers of one hand as though what she was about to describe was trapped in her palm. “Within my mind is a black space,” she started, “blacker than blindness really—as black as a black diamond at the center of the earth, or it could be like a black glass of water poured into the black ocean. It could be an endless black echo folding into itself like a shadow inside a shadow. I can describe blackness a thousand ways but within all that velvety darkness of my blind mind is that gleaming black box. It’s right before my eyes—teasing me. All I want to do is open the box, but I can’t. I can’t break into it, and so what’s in it can never break out.”

  “So what do you think is in it?” I asked.

  She smiled. “I’ve mapped that question backward and forward,” she said, “and I truly believe inside that box are trapped all my hopes and dreams.” She paused and propped her hands on her hips and looked off into the distance. I could tell she was staring at the black box as if she were staring into the black eyes of the snorting Minotaur. Then she stomped her foot on the ground and cried out, “I wish I could just take my stick and smash that box!”

  “But you are my hopes and dreams,” I said. “Right here in front of me.”

  “That’s nice of you to say,” she replied, “but I need my hopes and dreams inside of me. And as time goes on I fear my frustrations and anger will just set that box on fire. I can already imagine the flames as black as black knives with hot black points leaping up and down. Some days I feel them and they feel like bad dogs clawing at my legs. Those raging springs of fire will turn everything I hope for into a box of black ashes.”

  “That sounds pretty awful,” I said.

  “And it’s ruining my life,” she said fiercely. “But I can’t even find the front or the back of the box, or the top or the bottom. What I do know is it’s as smooth and seamless as a solid cube of glass.”

  She turned toward me and set her moody face into a dark scowl as if her jaw was a black box full of angry words. But I could see right into her and I could close my eyes and feel the weight of that black box pressing the hope out of Olivia. I felt her sadness, but I could feel her courage too. Her dark scowl was more like a black bar of soap, I thought, and the more she talked about her anger the more she wore it down and washed it away. I could feel that to be true.

  “I think you’ll be fine,” I said. “Just be pawzzz-i-tive.”

  She frowned. “That’s not likely to make anything better for me.”

  “Being pawzzz-i-tive never made anything worse,” I countered, and then I gave her my bug-eyed pawzzz-i-tive look that always made Carter Junior laugh.

  “The only thing that is going to make me better,” she continued, “is to get my hands on that black box. You would think I could because it just floats there—hovering over me like a massive weight that defies gravity. I reach for it but I can never quite touch it, and yet it seems to box me around. When I feel hopeful I think that someday gravity will slowly give out and gradually it will get closer and closer to my hands until I grasp it, and snap it open, and release everything good I’ve been hoping for. But until that happens there is a voice inside me that says I can’t do anything useful, and can’t be anything, and can’t say anything that is not ugly and destructive.”

  “But you are not ugly and destructive,” I said. “You are beautiful and really smart.” I cringed after I said that because usually when I say nice things to her she gets angry and hits me with her stick.

  “I’m only sure of one thing,” she said with conviction. “I’m mean. You know I can be awful. I am to my mother and I am to you, and I was awful at blind-girl school too.”

  “It hurts me when you hit me with the stick,” I said. “But it hurts me more when you say mean things because they stay inside me and lash out over and over again and I can’t get out of their way.”

  “Well, I’m not making excuses for how I am,” she continued, “but let me tell you that it’s bizarre to live a life where you cry black tears, and throw up black vomit, and pee black pee, and have emotions that are like black tides raising and lowering me as if I’m just a small rowboat at the mercy of storms I cannot see. Believe me, when the tide of anger rises within me an ocean of raging black waves beats me and everything around me against a black shore.”

  “What about the tide of happiness?” I asked.

  “That tide rarely arrives,” she said with regret. “But occasionally it does and the black ocean around the box seems at rest, like ripples of fur on a sleeping animal—happiness for me is still black but somehow it feels warmer.”

  “Like Carter Junior,” I said. “No matter how nutty I feel he always makes me feel better.”

  “Yes,” she said, “babies always make me float along on a high tide of happiness. They can’t see that I’m blind and even if they could they wouldn’t care.” She reached toward me and tapped at the air like when I search for a light switch in the dark. “Give him to me.”

  I bent over and picked Carter Junior up and pressed him to her shoulder and she closed her arms around him and held him tightly, then drew him to her face and sniffed the crown of his head.

  “As a child,” she said a little more gently, “once I discovered the black box inside the cavern of my mind I imagined that my whole past was in that box. And maybe in the past there was a time I could see, I thought—when I was a happy tiny bean inside my mother and growing like a sponge soaking up all the blood and oxygen and food and love. If I could see a dim light inside her before I was born, then in the box are memories deeply hidden of that time when everything around me was colored bloodred. If the black box would open maybe those red memories would be released and join my black world, and then my world would take shape with red on black instead of black on black. If I just had one other color. Just one! Then by contrast I could stand on a stage in my mind where I am red and only my shadow is bla
ck. Then I could see myself in all my greatness and I would make anger the smallest part of me.”

  As she spoke her expressions changed and Carter Junior’s expressions changed just like he was a little sock puppet on her hand. He mimicked every true feeling without understanding a word she was saying.

  “But red on black or white on black or orange or green—it doesn’t matter,” she continued. “The colors in my rainbow will always be black. So now I’m just all words inside and sounds and feelings and smells and tastes but no colors. Words are my colors. They paint everything for me but only as words. I love words, but at times I just wish I could hold an apple in my hand and see that it was red. With my hands I can feel the outline of things—I just wish I could color within those lines.”

  I felt like a black apple that had fallen out of her tree. But the more I watched her the more all of Carter Junior’s orange glow inside me began to darken until I felt as if the sun were sinking instead of rising.

  I looked at Carter Junior and he started to squirm in her arms. “You are having angry thoughts again,” I said to Olivia.

  “How can you tell?” she replied.

  “Carter Junior feels what you feel. I think you need to put that black box into a time-out and give him a kiss while I go into the house and change my meds,” I said. “You are upsetting both of us.”

  But before I left I picked up a little piece of the pizza crust that Carter Junior had dropped on the grass. I roughed it up between my fingers, then as quietly as possible I sprinkled the crumbs into the nest of hair that Olivia had made for the birds.

  I looked at her determined face. It was set exactly the same way as when I first stepped out the back door. Who knows what she was thinking about, but I knew what I was thinking.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said.

  When I walked into the house the phone was ringing. I picked it up in the kitchen.

  It was Mom.

  “Joey,” she whispered. “Joey, is that you?”

  Just from her voice I could tell she wasn’t on her way back home.