by Lila Perl
Glenda sniffed. “My mother says California is for kooks. She says she wouldn’t live there.”
“Do you believe everything your mother says? I mean you never really saw California, did you? And even if she was right, what’s so bad about kooks? Does everybody have to be the same?”
Glenda tossed away the blade of grass she was chewing on. She looked out past the front yard and past the picket fence, squinting hard, as though maybe she’d find the answer to my question out there. I followed her glance but there was nothing out in the street except three little girls, about eight or nine years old, wheeling fancy doll carriages and wearing their mothers’ high-heeled shoes.
“Listen,” Glenda said, suddenly leaning forward on her rock so that her legs just about came bursting through the husky-size light-blue denim jeans she was wearing, “you ask too many questions. I gotta think about all that stuff. All I know is, my Mom was real good to Madame Cecilia when she first moved in. My Mom used to come over here and chat with her. Sometimes she brought a pot of soup. Madame Cecilia was awfully skinny. She didn’t do much food-shopping or cooking. She used to say her spirits brought her food.”
“I thought your Mom and the other neighbors didn’t like Madame Cecilia because she was running a business in the neighborhood.”
Glenda looked confused. “Well, they didn’t. But it wasn’t so bad in the beginning. It was only after those weirdos began moving in with her.”
“You mean if somebody was running a business like a dressmaker’s or an undertaker’s or something like that in the neighborhood it would be okay just as long as they didn’t have any dirty-looking people who couldn’t speak English working for them?”
“Oh crumb,” Glenda shrilled, pulling her fingers through her crinkly yellow hair in exasperation. “How should I know? There’s probably some law against that, too.”
I got up on my knees and pushed the hair out of my eyes. Between the grass clippings and trying to talk some kind of sense to Glenda, I was getting pretty tired.
“Well,” I said, “I think it was kind of mean to kick the poor old lady out. I like gypsies and all that stuff.”
Glenda grunted. “Well, you wouldn’t like ’em living next door to you.”
She got up from the rock and pulled the bottoms of her jeans down to her ankles. They had crept up and caught around her calves while she was sitting. Then she smoothed her shirt down over her stomach. She was always arranging her clothes like that. What a mountain of jelly! In spite of all the stupid things she’d been saying, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. Anyhow, you could see she didn’t really know any better. She was just rebroadcasting everything she’d heard her mother say.
“Listen,” Glenda said, “I’m getting hungry. How about you coming over to my house for lunch? Think your Mom would let you?”
Let me? Glenda didn’t know my Mom. I jumped inside the house, hoping Glenda wouldn’t follow me.
Inez was setting up her harpsichord in the dining room. The living-room floor was full of those big pots she used for batiking and linen-dyeing and such. There was a den off the living room, and I could see Inez’ and Drew’s bedrolls and a couple of knapsacks dumped in there. I guess that’s where they had decided they would sleep. My air mattress was probably upstairs in one of the bedrooms. At least, I hoped that was where it was. (My family never slept in beds because they were so heavy and clumsy to lug around.)
I kept looking behind me, just to make sure Glenda hadn’t decided to trail me into the house after all, while I told Inez I was going over to Glenda’s for lunch.
“Fine,” Inez said, wincing at the same time because of a sour twang from one of the keys she was fingering on the harpsichord. “Drew and I are having wheat germ and black grapes and Roquefort cheese for lunch. You probably wouldn’t care for that. Have a good time.”
Glenda’s house was just the way I’d expected it to be inside. It had rugs and lamps, tables and chairs, wallpaper and window drapes. The beds were in the bedrooms and the food was in the kitchen. And what food! The kitchen table, set into a dining nook, had a great big shiny chocolate cake sitting on it. I thought I’d just about go out of my mind.
Meantime, Glenda was at the refrigerator bringing out bread and butter and mayonnaise and lettuce and sliced tomatoes and pickles and milk. From somewhere else, she got a big bowl of potato chips and a platter of crisp fried bacon.
“See, I thought we’d have bacon-and-tomato sandwiches. You like those?”
“Mmmm, do I.”
“My Mom’s not home. She’s at a luncheon. She goes to a luncheon just about every other day. That’s why she has this weight problem. But she can’t help it, see. Because she belongs to all these clubs and organizations, and she’s on all these committees. She knows about a million people. Boy, you can never get us on the phone because she’s always on it. Talk, talk, talk. My father says she talks enough for both of them. That’s why he doesn’t talk much.
“My Mom made the cake. We’ll have some for dessert. It’s from a mix but she adds things and fixes it up so it tastes like real homemade. She won’t tell anyone the secret. Not anyone. She fried the bacon for my lunch before she left and said it was all right if I asked you over.”
I eyed the platter of bacon. It was enough for about six sandwiches—and not the kind you get at the 5-and-10 lunch counter, either.
“Of course, my Mom’ll be dropping in at your house to say hello and meet your folks, maybe in a day or two. She thought it would be better to let them get settled a little first. But she’s real friendly. You’ll see. I’ll bet she’ll be inviting your Mom over for cake and coffee first thing.”
All this time, Glenda was busy making toast and slicing pickles and tearing off chunks of lettuce. When it came to preparing something to eat, you couldn’t accuse her of not getting plenty of exercise.
“How do you like our house?” she asked, crunching a mouthful of potato chips.
“It’s great,” I said, peering into the dining room and beyond that to the living room. In many ways it reminded me of Aunt Minna’s except that it was much bigger. And although Aunt Minna had a lot of old things, all very neat and clean of course, everything in Glenda’s house seemed new and shiny and expensive.
“It’s so … planned out,” I said. “Everything matches. I mean, it all goes together.”
“That’s because my Mom had it done by an interior decorator. You know, one of those ladies who always keep their hats on. Of course, my Mom didn’t follow everything she said. A lot of it was her own idea, too. That’s so there’d be some … individuality.”
By this time, we were wolfing down the first of the sandwiches. Glenda made them so thick that slices of tomato came squooshing out from between the slices of toast and, while you were pushing them back in, strips of bacon came shooting out from the other side.
“These really are good,” I said. “They’re even better than alphabet-burgers.”
Glenda actually stopped eating and looked at me in astonishment. “Than what?”
“Alphabet-burgers. Oh, you wouldn’t know what they are. Nobody does. Because Toby and I invented them a couple of months ago. They never existed before that.”
“Who’s Toby?” Glenda pounced.
“My brother Toby.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother. Little or big?”
“Sixteen, going on seventeen.”
Glenda smiled slyly. “Well, what do you know about that! But, wait a minute. Where is he? Hey, he’s not in reform school or something like that?”
“Of course not! What an idea.”
“Oh well, I’m just asking. I didn’t mean anything bad. See, I know a kid from around here who nearly went to reform school. Same age. He goes to Havenhurst High. I bet you wouldn’t believe that, from this kind of a neighborhood and all.”
I told Glenda about Toby staying in California with the Gonzaga family so he could finish school there, but I could see she thought it was a peculiar arrange
ment.
“What’s he like, anyway? Is he cute?”
“Very.” I could see Glenda was interested, so I rubbed it in good about how terrific-looking Toby was and how independent and how we always had a thousand girls hanging around our house in California just waiting to get a look at him and hoping he’d take notice of them.
“Hmmm. I hope I get to meet him one of these days.” Glenda was taking a breather between sandwiches, leaning forward with her elbows on the table and her knuckles curled up against her temples and a dreamy expression on her face. “So what about these alphabet-burgers that you two invented?”
I told her the whole story, but leaving out the stuff about Inez’ and Drew’s raw-food kick and all the other diets they’d been on. Then I told her what A-burgers and B-burgers stood for, and said she should try to guess the rest we had invented up to L. C was easy, of course, but she got stuck on D. I knew she would. So I told her I’d let her be a partner, starting with Mburgers, if she guessed five of the ten letters from C to L. She already had C, so she only needed four more. Without Toby around I sure could use another person to share alphabet-burgers with. And who was there to choose from, aside from Glenda?
Glenda was still trying to guess D when the front doorbell rang. “Come with me,” she said. “It’s probably somebody selling something.”
We went to the living room, and Glenda tried to peek out the window first to see who was there. There didn’t seem to be anyone so she opened the door wide to look out. The next thing we knew something came flying into the room, something big and white that swirled over our heads in a loop exactly as though it was alive.
“What is that thing? Get it!” Glenda shrieked. The front door was still wide open and outside I thought I heard the sound of boys’ voices laughing and hooting.
Glenda made a wild leap to catch the flying, white whatever-it-was as it nosedived toward an end table with a lamp and a lot of small china and glass knickknacks on it. As Glenda and I both swooped toward the lamp, my foot caught in one of the table legs which turned outward. Glenda tripped over my foot, and the next minute there was a terrific thud followed immediately by an awful crash!
I had managed to pull away and catch my balance just in time. But Glenda hadn’t. She, the lamp table, and knickknacks were all in a terrible tangle on the floor. And everything seemed to be broken. Everything, that is, except Glenda. Suddenly a head appeared in the doorway. He was a kid, about our age, with light brown hair and eyeglasses and a laugh like a braying donkey.
Glenda looked up in a blaze of recognition. “Roddy Fenton!” she screeched. “I’ll kill you! I’ll brain you! So help me, I’ll break your head!” To my amazement, Glenda scrambled to her feet in an instant and rushed out of the house. I watched her from the doorway, puffing her way down the street after him, still screaming, “I’ll brain you, Roddy Fenton! I’ll kill you… . I will, I will! So help me!”
I stood there in Glenda’s mother’s decorator-decorated living room and wondered what to do. There was so much broken stuff all over, I felt like somebody waiting for the ambulance to arrive and afraid to touch the wounded in case of doing more damage.
Suddenly my eye fell on the white “thing” that had come soaring into the room. It was lying among the broken bric-a-brac. I reached down and picked it up and saw that it was nothing but a paper airplane, but a very cleverly constructed one. I began to unfold it to see how it was made and I realized there was writing in it.
At first the printed-out words didn’t make sense. Then they did. They were in verse form and here’s what they said:
To the new girl … .
Somebody fat
Killed a cat.
You’ll find out
She’s a rat.
WATCH OUT!
I was still standing there in Glenda’s living room, holding the note in my hand, when I heard Glenda’s feet scraping tiredly up the front steps. I folded up the paper plane very small and pushed it deep down into the pocket of my dungarees.
Glenda staggered into the living room and flopped down in one of the soft plushy chairs. She was beet-red and dripping with sweat.
I sat down opposite her.
“Did you catch him?”
“Of course not.”
She began rubbing her fists into her eyes. At first I thought she was just rubbing them and then I saw she was crying. She was a terrible sight. I was pretty upset about the note and what it said, but still I went over to her and offered her a wrinkled-up tissue from my shirt pocket.
She shook her head and took out a lavender-colored one, neatly folded, from her own pocket. She began wiping her face hard with it, trying to make out that the whole thing was sweat instead of a mixture of sweat and tears, like it really was.
“Gee, what a mess,” she said after awhile, looking across at the toppled-over end table. “I shouldn’t even be sitting here. I’ll get this chair all damp and filthy. My mother’ll have a fit. Oh boy, that lamp’s broken for sure. What are we going to do?”
“I’m sorry I got in your way, Glenda. I guess I made you fall.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said miserably. “I’d have probably broken the stuff anyway.”
The message in the note was really bothering me but I couldn’t bring myself right then and there to ask Glenda if she’d been the one to leave the dead cat on our doorstep. Was Glenda a sneak? Or was Roddy Fenton a liar? How could I tell? I didn’t know him at all—and I didn’t even know Glenda very well.
“What’s this kid Roddy Fenton like?” I asked her, as we carefully picked up pieces and tried to put things back as close as we could to the way they had been.
“Oh, I don’t want to talk about him,” she said, lowering her head over the debris.
“Well, has he been living in the neighborhood a long time?” I asked hesitantly.
“Oh yeah. Since always. Look,” she said, raising her head—I could see she was even redder than before. “This kid’s a troublemaker. He’s made a lot of trouble for me. He turned all the kids around here against me. That’s why I’ve got no friends in this neigh—” She stopped abruptly. “What was that thing he threw in here anyway?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said, “just a paper airplane.”
“The dumb idiot.”
After that we went back in the kitchen and Glenda cut the chocolate cake. She had two big pieces and I had one and a half.
“Listen,” she said after awhile, “I’m not supposed to open the door to people if I don’t see who they are first. So don’t say anything to my mother about Roddy Fenton being here at all, huh?”
“Okay,” I said, “but what are you going to tell her about how all this mess happened?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Glenda said, “I’ll think of something. But whatever happens, we’ll stick together, huh? Like Monday, with school starting and all, I’ll call for you and we’ll go together. We’ll really stick together. These other kids around here, oh, some of them are okay. But actually, well … really, to tell you the truth, most of them give me a pain.”
Glenda took another big bite of chocolate cake. But right after that she put her head down and made a funny choking sound in her throat. Maybe she had too much cake in her mouth. I couldn’t tell. So I said, “Thanks, Glenda, really thanks a lot for the lunch. It was great. But I think I have to go now. I promised to help my Mom around the house this afternoon.”
“Yeah,” she said, without looking up. “Bye now.”
I was just sure she was crying again.
5
I was pretty busy over the weekend, but on Monday morning, bright and early, Glenda was waiting for me on the corner so that we could walk to school together. It was nice strolling along under the big leafy trees, sort of like Crestview.
The school was new, a junior high school that had just been built the year before. I’d only seen it once, the week before when Drew took me over there to get me registered. All the way to school Glenda kept talking about the dream s
he’d had the night before.
“I dreamed the school burned down. It was so real, Sara. You know all that yellow brick? Well it melted. Like butter. The school turned out to be nothing but a big pool of dirty melted butter.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “A school like that couldn’t burn down. It’s probably the most fireproof building in all of Crestview—um, Havenhurst, I mean.”
Glenda looked at me oddly but she didn’t say anything.
As soon as we got near the school Glenda started waving to people she knew. Later she explained that they’d all been sixth-graders together at the elementary school she had gone to until last June.
“That’s Mary Lou Blenheim,” Glenda said, after calling out “Hi” to a tall girl with a pasty face and long straight hair that was so blonde it was practically white. “She moved here last year. Her family comes from down South.”
Just then we piled into a whole group of girls who knew Glenda. They seemed so friendly I wondered why Glenda said all the kids in the neighborhood were “against” her.
“Hi Glenda. Did you have a good summer? Who’s your friend?” There were two of them who always seemed to speak together. One of them, it turned out later, was named Cathanne and the other one was named Patty.
Glenda’s eyes were really sparkling. “This is Sara,” she said, “my friend from California. She’s living here now, just a couple of doors away from me. Isn’t that great?”
Another girl came over to talk and so did a couple of small runty boys. They were probably twelve or thirteen, but why were boys always so small for their age? Glenda repeated the same information to them. I kept wondering why she was telling everyone I was her “friend from California.” It made it sound as though we’d been friends for years and years. And then I realized that was exactly how Glenda wanted it to sound.
Suddenly Cathanne, who had long red hair and a nose with a very sharp point, got up very close to Glenda’s face and squinted. “You’re not supposed to wear lipstick to school, you know. You want to catch it the very first day?”
