by John Rowell
“You have a birthday coming up, Hunter,” she had said. “The record might make a good birthday present, what do you think?”
As it turned out, his birthday arrived before the Mary Poppins movie opened in town. (“Nothing ever gets here on time,” his father said. “Why is that, Grace? Do we live in the boondocks?”) So he had gotten the record first, and proceeded to learn all the songs. When his grandmother asked him what his favorite songs from the LP were, he found it impossible to answer. He had no favorites; they were all his favorites, and he could sing the words to every one of them. “I just … I just love them all,” he told her.
“I love them all,” he whispers again, to himself, as he stands under the dogwood tree on this Saturday evening, waiting for his mother to come out of the house, car keys in hand, ready to go. She will be dressed up in a Sunday dress and high heels and carrying a pocketbook. She peers out of the living room window, which is open. “Hunter! Are you ready to go, honey?”
He has been ready for weeks. For years.
“Uh-huh,” he says, still staring at the album cover, and then, remembering, says, “Yes ma’am.”
“Do you need to go to the bathroom one more time before we go?”
“No ma’am.”
“I’ll be right out.”
His father is also outside, watering the azalea bushes. As it turns out, he is staying home tonight—there is an educational program on TV he doesn’t want to miss. Hunter stands under the tree, and his father stands next to the bushes; finally, after a moment, their eyes connect across the small expanse of yard; the father holds a garden hose, the son holds a record album. Hunter’s father wipes his brow with his sleeve; it is a warm night, unseasonably warm for late April. “Hunter,” he asks, “are you taking the record album to the movie?”
Hunter looks at him warily. “Yes,” he answers. Of course yes. Why not? This is His evening. His evening. “Yes sir.”
“Is that a good idea, son? To carry the record with you to the movie? Why don’t you leave it here?”
Hunter says nothing, just stares at him.
“Suit yourself, then,” his father says, and returns to watering.
Hunter glances back down at the record jacket. Julie Andrews. Dick Van Dyke. He can’t read the names, really, but he knows which one is which. He has grown to love them without ever seeing them. Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman. They must be wonderful people to have written something like this. He knows what music is; his mother helped him look up “lyrics” in the Webster’s dictionary.
“A song is a poem set to music,” the kindergarten teacher has said.
Hunter thinks Julie Andrews is beautiful, and he thinks his mother is beautiful too.
“Look at this. Julie Andrews and I are the same age,” she told him, while reading him the liner notes on the album sleeve, which he often chooses as his bedtime story. He looked up at her, wide-eyed. He saw it made his mother happy, too, to know that she was the same age as a famous Walt Disney movie star. He was thrilled.
“I’m almost ready,” his mother calls out again from the living room window. “Don’t give me up. Ed? Ed, are you still watering?”
Earlier that afternoon, Hunter and his mother had walked up and down Mount Pisgah Avenue collecting for the Heart Fund. Hunter wore pedal pushers and PF Flyers and a Green Hornet T-shirt. His mother wore a light cotton red-and-white-checked dress, with white patent leather high-heeled shoes and matching pocketbook. She wanted to make a good impression for the Heart Fund people. The two of them took turns carrying the collection canister.
“Are you the little Green Hornet?” Mrs. Brinson, at 2601, asked him, bending down to put a quarter in the tin cylinder.
“No ma’am.”
“Isn’t that a sweet little boy?” she said. “All little boys seem to love those Superman-y things like that, don’t they?” she asked his mother, indicating his T-shirt.
“He’s just crazy about all kinds of entertainment,” said his mother.
At 2610, Mrs. Faircloth hemmed and hawed about giving to the Heart Fund.
“I’m going to see Mary Poppins tonight,” Hunter offered, aware of the awkward moment.
The older woman looked at him quizzically.
“Who?” she asked.
“It’s a Walt Disney movie,” he explained. “Julie Andrews is the same age as Mama, and she sings and dances on a roof with a broom and a penguin and she sits on a … um …”
He looked to his mother for the word.
“Banister,” his mother said.
“A bansitter,” he continued. “And she slides up it.”
“My, what a talkative child,” the woman said, after a moment. “And so taken with things. Do you go to Sunday school too?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Here’s a dime, then.”
At 2102, for a young couple who had just moved into the neighborhood, he sang, in its entirety, the song about a spoonful of medicine going down like sugar.
Clink went a fifty-cent piece into the canister.
“What a talented child I have,” said his mother, holding his hand on the way home.
Now, waiting for her, he leans against the dogwood tree and holds Mary Poppins against his chest. He shuts his eyes and practices the “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” song in his head. It is, by far, the hardest lyric to get right.
“Let’s go, honey,” says his mother, finally emerging from the door, and fishing in the white patent leather pocketbook for the keys to the Rambler.
He carries the album into the car, somewhat defiantly.
“Have a good time,” says his father, sitting on the porch steps and stuffing his pipe with Kentucky Club.
“You could still come with us, you know,” she says slowly, standing next to the car, twirling the car keys on her index finger. Hunter fidgets—why is she not getting in? His father made it clear he doesn’t want to go—why is she wasting time?
“I can’t miss this program, Grace,” his father says, lighting the pipe and puffing.
“Oh, what program is it that’s so important?”
He looks at her. “The one about the Korean War. I told you that.”
“Mama, let’s go!” Hunter says, as loudly as he can. “We have to go now !”
He cannot miss even one minute of Mary Poppins. He cannot allow them to do that to him.
The Miracle Theater—at last. Hunter and his mother join a long line of people waiting to get in—parents with children, some teenagers, a few adults by themselves. Many of them are dressed up, as if for church, as Hunter and his mother are, and the people, the spectators, are talking and laughing—he feels the hubbub in the air; he didn’t realize other people would be as excited as he is about Mary Poppins.
Suddenly, while standing in line, he realizes that he has left his album in the car.
“Mama, I have to get my record!”
The line begins to move.
“Oh, Hunter, sweetie. You don’t need it now. Look, we’re going in.”
He has no choice but to clutch her hand and walk beside her; he is jostled by other patrons, by other children the same height as he, though they don’t really notice or look at him. He notices a little girl carrying a Mary Poppins umbrella—it is bright pink, with a green parrot head for a handle. Before he can get a good look at it, the girl and the parasol disappear in the crowd. The uniformed ushers point the way for the spectators through the auditorium doors on either side of the concession stand, over which a bright neon sign blinks out a message Hunter’s mother reads for him: “MIRACLE THEATER: SHOWPLACE OF THE SOUTH.”
“This way for the seven o’clock show!” the ushers shout out, cupping their mouths with white-gloved hands. “Through these doors for Mary Poppins!”
Hunter and his mother find seats in the center. Seated next to him on his right is a teenage boy, who holds hands with a teenage girl seated on the boy’s other side. They nuzzle each other a bit, the way cats do, Hunter thinks. He watches them, fas
cinated; he stares at their hands, their clutching, interlocking fingers. When the boy catches him staring, he whispers, “Whatcha lookin’ at, little boy? Huh?” Hunter quickly turns his head away to face the screen, which is still draped with its massive gold and orange curtain. And in a moment, the lights go down and the curtain lifts, slowly rolling itself up into ornate folds and finally disappearing at the top. Hunter holds his breath as the gray screen suddenly begins to flicker with color and the music from the speakers surrounds the entire auditorium.
And he reaches over, takes his mother’s hand, and holds it, interlocking their fingers, staring straight ahead as Mary Poppins, finally, begins.
“How was the movie?” his father asks, waking up on the couch at the jangle of keys in the door. The TV is tuned to The Hollywood Palace, where Van Johnson and Juliet Prowse are executing a lively song and dance.
Hunter stands in the doorway with a tear-stained face, hiccuping little sobs.
“It was good,” he chokes out.
“His record got warped in the car,” Mother says. “He left it by accident, and you know how warm it was tonight.”
Hunter holds the record up for his father to see; it is clearly misshapen, a curve now, instead of a plane.
“Oh, Hunter,” his father says. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you to leave it here.”
“Ed,” his mother says.
“Let me see it,” he says. He examines the disc. “Oh … this is …”
“I know,” Hunter sob-hiccups.
“Let’s play it and see what it sounds like,” says his father, taking it to the stereo console.
And when the needle bobs up and down on the record, what they hear is: “Just a waaa … waaa … of suuuuugaaaaaa … helllps … theee … waaaaaa…. waaaaaa … go downnnnn … a waaaaaaa … waaaaaaaa … go downnnnnnnnnn …”
“Well, maybe we can get him another one,” says his father. “What do you think, Grace?”
“Oh, well, I don’t know,” says his mother, by which she means: It’s not in the budget.
Hunter’s father lifts the boy up onto his lap. Hunter buries his face in the big, rounded shoulder; his tears instantly dampen the sleeve. His father’s lap is a warm, safe place; held tight against his father’s chest, he can smell the strong, dark aroma of pipe tobacco. Even as he cries bitterly on his father’s shoulder, he breathes in to get more and more of the Kentucky Club, suddenly craving the smell, the scent of his father.
“Why … why did it have to happen?” he sobs.
“Hunter,” says his father, pulling Hunter’s chin off his shoulder with his thumb and forefinger, and smoothing his damp hair off his forehead. “Your mother and I have something to tell you that I think will make you feel better. And now seems like a good time, I guess.”
“I think so,” his mother says, sitting down next to them on the sofa.
“What? What is it?” Hunter says, still sob-hiccuping.
“Well, sweetie,” she says, glancing at his father. “We have a special surprise to tell you about. And what it is …” She glances at his father expectantly.
“Go ahead,” he whispers.
She smiles. “Well … in a few months, you’re going to have a little brother or sister.”
“What do you think about that?” his father asks, beaming. “How do you feel about that, son?”
“Good, I guess,” Hunter says, brightening a little, but suddenly sleepy. He feels overwhelmed; first the movie, then the warped record, and now … a new brother or sister. Being responsible for so many things makes him tired.
“Let’s get you to bed, little man,” says his father, and he carries him off to his room on his shoulder, lifted high, like a hero.
Under his Mighty Mouse sheets, Hunter lies awake in the dark room lit only by the tall streetlamp outside his window. There is so much to think about before going to sleep … Perhaps he is starting to see things more clearly. Maybe if he can persuade his parents to get him a Mary Poppins umbrella, like the one he saw the little girl holding at the theater, he won’t mind so much not getting a new record. He knows all the songs by now anyway. He wonders if they make the umbrellas in other colors besides pink—pink, he knows, is for girls. Perhaps he can convince his parents to buy him a yellow one. Or maybe he could get it himself … The people in the neighborhood seemed to enjoy hearing him sing on their front porches today when he collected for the Heart Fund. He could walk up and down Mount Pisgah Avenue tomorrow with a can and collect money to buy his umbrella. A door-to-door entertainer: he could sing songs from the movie, he could tell them all about Julie Andrews. He will tell them he has to buy the Mary Poppins umbrella before the new baby comes, because he’ll use it to shelter the baby from the rain, and the parrot-head handle will talk to the baby just as it talked to Mary Poppins, and will stop him, or her, from crying. The neighbors will smile down on him once again, and his can will clink with shiny fifty-cent pieces. They will recognize him as a smart and resourceful child, a loving, generous, talented child, and they will reward him for that.
Yes … they will give generously to the Hunter Fund.
II.
There are lots of things people can say about my best friend Lynette and me, and we know they do, but one thing they can’t say is that we’re not creative people. They cannot say: “Oh, that Lynette and Hunter … they’re just not creative.” No one can utter that phrase and not be known among the entire eighth grade of Stafford Hills Junior High for a bald-faced liar. For instance: last week, our math teacher, Mrs. Wright, who also goes to our church, told our class to come up with our own word problems as a homework assignment. Now some of our friends said they thought that was a lazy thing for her to do, since teachers are the ones who usually give out the problems so students can come up with the answers, but Lynette and I chose to see it as a chance to be creative—the only creative thing, in fact, we can ever remember being told to do in a math class in all our eight years of school. So this is what I came up with: “If, in one month’s time, Hunter goes to see four movies at the mall and watches forty-six television shows, and his friend Lynette goes to see two movies and watches twenty-nine television shows, between them, how many movie and TV stars will they have seen?” I calculated it and came up with 219, because you don’t count the extras and people with small speaking parts, since they aren’t famous.
Lynette wrote this one, which I love: “If Lynette buys Tiger Beat, Fave, 16, and Teen Beat once a month, how many times will she have kissed pictures of David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman, Donny Osmond, and all the Cowsill brothers over a six-month period?” And her answer was: 684, which I thought was just about right. That’s probably as many times as I’d kiss them, too, but I wouldn’t tell even Lynette that.
So as hard as this is to believe, Mrs. Wright didn’t like our word problems! (Though I think it’s important to note that the rest of the class did.) She said she thought that perhaps we’d “missed the point of the assignment.” We didn’t agree, we believed we had brought something extra to the assignment, something to liven it up and make it “fun.” She told us to try it again, saying flat out that we were concentrating too much on having fun and not enough on the true meaning of the mathematical task at hand. Lynette and I made faces at each other as soon as Mrs. Wright turned her back. But since we’re good Presbyterians, we took the high road, as our minister is always telling us to do, and did not say what everybody else was thinking too, which is that Mrs. Wright is, in fact, the laziest teacher at Stafford Hills Junior High. We also think, however, that Mrs. Wright missed our point, which was to turn eighth-grade math from drudgery to entertainment, sort of the way, I reminded Lynette, Mary Poppins turned medicine into candy. So about this, we are right, and Mrs. Wright is wrong.
It’s so incredibly cool to have a best friend like Lynette who hates math as much as I do; we don’t understand why anybody should have to do math homework in the first place when there are: a) so many cast albums and soundtracks to be played, and b) so many movie
s to see and TV shows to watch, and c) so many movie-star and teen magazines to buy and read. These are the topics we prefer to multiplication and long division.
Plus, it’s the remedial math class! Lynette says we’re like the Count of Monte Cristo, being unjustly punished with imprisonment—in this case, in the math class for dummies—even though we both freely admit we can’t do math to save our lives. I said I thought this was God’s way of holding us back for a couple of really mean things we did to my little brother and Lynette’s little sister when we were in the fifth grade, even though I prayed for forgiveness soon afterwards. And I told my parents if I decide that’s true, that if God is still punishing me for things I did a long time ago, and already asked forgiveness for, then it just might come to pass that I will have to stop attending Second Presbyterian Church because of it. They said you don’t give up being a Presbyterian simply because you can’t grasp integers and subsets, that God didn’t create mathematics to personally torture me. Lynette said they were blind to the truth! They said she was being dramatic.
Nevertheless, Lynette and I have something much more important to concentrate on: the new movie Cabaret starts at the Park Point Mall Cinema 3 on Friday, and we, of course, plan to be there. We’ve been talking about this for three months, ever since we first saw the previews of the coming attractions. Lynette is even going to leave JV cheerleading practice early on Friday so we can go to the first evening show and then to Farrell’s ice-cream parlor afterwards, just the two of us, like a date, although we know it’s not since we’re best friends. The only problem is that her mother, who at first was just going to drop us off and pick us up later, is now talking about taking us to the movie herself, and we are trying to figure our way out of that. Lynette and I go to movies by ourselves just about all of the time now, but unfortunately for us, Mrs. McKinney has recently started subscribing to Modern Parent magazine, which has some kind of a stupid movie guide for parents, and she read that Cabaret “contains some material not suitable for teens and preteens.” If Mrs. McKinney does actually take us to see Cabaret, I will die of embarrassment if she attempts to cover our eyes and ears should any unsuitable material suddenly appear on the screen. I may have to bite her.
