Wish You Were Here

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “I am not jealous. He happens to be a first-class jerk, but I’m going to get them something anyway.”

  “You’re the jerk,” Celia said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Well, at least I don’t go around making out with toy horses!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

  “Yes, you did, Bernie Segal!” She threw the wig and the brush on her bed, and grabbed the neck of my T-shirt.

  “Hey, let go of me!” I said.

  “Spy!” she hissed. “Fink!”

  I pulled her hair, hard, and got away. This fight was getting out of hand, and I wanted to stop myself, and I couldn’t. I made loud kissing noises. “I love you, dearest Jackie,” I said, amazed at how much I sounded like Celia that day long ago.

  Her red face got very pale. “You—you—shrimpy little moron!” she said. “You and your stupid allergies! If it wasn’t for you, we could have a dog, or a cat. The whole family has to suffer because of you!” She went to the dresser and picked up the little plastic horse. “Here, you Indian giver,” she said, shoving it into my hand. “And you can forget about the play—you’re fired!”

  “You can’t fire me! I quit!” I shouted back, and without thinking, I snapped the horse in two.

  It was a wonder Ma didn’t come upstairs to see what was going on. She was probably too busy making out with her jerky boyfriend in front of the fire. I ran to my room and slammed the door. My blood was pounding, and I felt starved for air. The noise of my breathing filled the whole room. I lay down on my bed, trying to get calm. I remembered Dr. Cardoza telling me that emotions can affect asthma. What was it she’d said? Try to deal with your feelings before they deal with you.

  But my feelings were too powerful. I hated Celia, and I hated myself. And suddenly I missed my father in that terrible way I’d missed him right after he died. A big need to cry made the tightness in my throat and chest even worse, but I wouldn’t give in to it. The pieces of the plastic horse were still clenched in my hand. I shoved them into the night-table drawer and took my emergency inhaler out. I hadn’t had to use it for a long time, and I’d been really happy about that. Now I just held it to my mouth and waited for relief.

  After a while, I could breathe quietly, and a lot easier. But the anger, or the depression—whatever you called it—stayed and followed me from one bad dream into another.

  Mendel’s Pea Plants

  “OPEN YOUR TEXTS TO page 63,” Mrs. Jacobs said, “and look at the third problem.”

  When I opened my algebra book, the ad fell out. I hadn’t looked at it for days, since I started getting really discouraged about ever saving the ninety-nine dollars. The day before, when I saw that there still wasn’t any mail from my grandfather, I sort of gave up hope. I took a dollar bill out of my bank and sent it off to the address on the sweepstakes poster. Then I treated a couple of friends to ice-cream sundaes and canceled my Saturday sitting job with the twins. I was going to the mall instead, to play Donkey Kong and Space Invaders, and buy candy. Later I’d give Grace whatever money was left, toward Ma’s wedding present. I couldn’t give it to Celia, because we weren’t speaking. We’d probably never speak to each other again.

  My grandfather hadn’t even sent me a fish postcard recently. I’d started worrying about him—maybe he was sick, or in some kind of trouble—but that morning Ma said she’d had a letter from him the other day and he was fine. He’d made friends with some people in his building, and they were going to have supper together once a week. That news made me feel better and worse at the same time. Better, because I knew my grandfather was okay, and worse, because he was so busy with his new friends he couldn’t find five seconds to answer his own grandson’s letter. What was wrong with me—did I want him to be lonely?

  “Can you give us the solution, Bernie?” Mrs. Jacobs was saying.

  I hadn’t even found the problem yet. While I searched the page, she called on someone else—one of the brains—who came up with the answer right away. Algebra! Of course, Celia wasn’t tutoring me anymore, either. If, by some miracle, I did get to Florida, I still needed good grades at Plainview High. I’d have to go to school down there, too, and my records would be sent. I wanted my grandfather to be proud of me. But how could algebra ever matter in the rest of my life?

  I started to crumple up the ad, and then for no reason I straightened it out and put it back in my book. After class, Pete and I walked down the corridor toward the gym. “You really bombed in there, Captain Marvel,” he said. “How’re you going to pass the big midterm next week?”

  I considered asking his help, and then I remembered that Pete had to work hard himself to get by in algebra. “Study, I guess,” I said gloomily.

  In phys ed we climbed the ropes, the one thing that smaller, wiry guys like me are best at. While I was shimmying up one rope, Gary Kramer was coming down another one, really fast. Seeing him reminded me of the play. I missed the money I’d been getting from Celia, but I realized that I also missed The Member of the Wedding, the characters and the story, and being part of it.

  When I got to science, Hornberg was drawing a diagram on the blackboard. With the chalk squeaking, he wrote in big letters: MENDEL’S LAWS OF INHERITANCE. Under that were little connected boxes, with leaves inside, that were supposed to be pea plants. The two at the top were called the parent plants, Hornberg said, and they passed down the way they looked—how tall or how round—to their offspring. According to this scientist, Mendel, plants have something called dominant and recessive traits. The dominant ones show up more often than the recessive ones. Round seeds and tallness in pea plants are dominant—wrinkled seeds and shortness are recessive.

  Mary Ellen asked if the same laws were true for humans, and Hornberg said they were. Barry Marks, the class clown, moaned. “Oh, no!” he cried. “I’m gonna have wrinkled seeds!”

  Hornberg waited until we all stopped laughing. Then he explained that tallness dominated in humans, too, and so did brown eyes. When a tall, blue-eyed man marries a short, brown-eyed woman, he said, most of their children are liable to be tall and have brown eyes.

  I sat up straighter in my seat, listening carefully. My father was tall and blue-eyed. And my short mother has brown eyes. Celia and Grace’s eyes are brown, like hers, and mine are blue. Two out of three. Celia is tall, and Grace is small for her age. Did this mean I had a better chance than I’d thought to be tall? I knew that boys can shoot up all at once, and sometimes they don’t reach their full height until they’re eighteen, or older. Most girls mature earlier than that. Celia was probably as tall as she’d ever be. I was starting to feel pretty good. It was possible to learn something worthwhile in school, after all.

  When the period ended, Mary Ellen didn’t rush out of the room, the way she usually did. She hung around, fussing with some papers on her desk, and I worked up the nerve to walk over and talk to her. “Hi, there!” I said, thinking I sounded as dopey as Nat. Mary Ellen and I had already said hello, across the room, at the beginning of class.

  She smiled at me. “I guess I’m destined to be a shrimp,” she said.

  “I have a fighting chance,” I answered. “Going to English?” I continued, as if there was this big choice of places to go during fourth period.

  “Uh-huh,” Mary Ellen said. “You, too?”

  “Why not?” I said, and we sort of drifted out of the room together, and went side by side down the corridor. Everybody else, the thundering herd of kids changing classes at the same time, faded into the background, like the crowd in a movie when the two stars are talking to each other. I found myself complaining about algebra, and although she was sympathetic, she said that she loved any kind of math, that it was always her best subject.

  “Are you going to be a mathematician?” I asked, and she shook her head. “Then why do you need to know all that stuff? Why does anybody?”

  “Well,” she said, “it helps you to think better.”
She paused. “Bernie, are you worried about the midterm next week?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “If I flunk it, I probably won’t pass for the quarter. I just squeaked by on the other tests.” I didn’t mention that I’d failed a couple of them.

  “Would you like to study with me sometime?” Mary Ellen asked. “I mean, we could help each other.”

  “You mean you could help me pass and I could help you flunk?”

  She laughed, and it was such a nice sound. “Something like that,” she said.

  We were at the door to our English class. The other kids were starting to come back into focus. “I’ll call you, okay?” I said, and sat down in the wrong seat.

  Scott Corsico, who usually sat there, tapped me on the head with a notebook. “You got amnesia?” he asked.

  “Yeah, who are you?” I said. Then I moved over a couple of rows to my own seat, and English began.

  There was no mail for anybody on the hall table at home. And the atmosphere was awful. When Celia didn’t talk to you, her silence was really loud. She scraped her chair extra hard every time she sat down or got up. She banged pots around at the stove, and when she slammed doors the whole house shook.

  Grace was at the kitchen table, drawing for a change. Both Celia and I spoke to her more than usual, to make up for not speaking to each other. Celia asked Grace what she’d done in school that day, and a lot of idiot questions about her little friends. I told her some of Pop’s favorite jokes from the Middle Ages. “Listen to this one, Gracie,” I said. “This man in a restaurant calls the waiter over and goes, ‘What’s this fly doing in my soup?’ And the waiter goes, ‘It looks like the backstroke!’ ”

  When I saw that she didn’t get it, that she was just blinking at me, I started in about the Hayden Planetarium again. But Grace wasn’t that excited about it anymore. She didn’t like to talk while she worked, anyway, and she finally bent over her paper, ignoring both of us.

  She was making one of her most elaborate drawings. It looked like World War III, there were so many bodies lying around. And some kind of hairy monsters with chain-saw teeth were hanging out of trees, gobbling up the survivors.

  A couple of weeks ago, when Nana was here, she went to the refrigerator and was stopped dead by Grace’s black drawing. Nana stared at it, clucking, and then she said, “Why don’t you make some nice flowers, sweetheart?”

  Ma always says that people should be allowed to draw or write or say anything they want—that’s freedom of expression. But now I felt like asking Grace to put in a couple of daisies or tulips, too, just as a sign of hope.

  I went upstairs to my room, thinking who am I to talk. I was pretty hopeless myself. I plopped down on my bed and heard something crackle. I reached under me and took out a letter. It was from my grandfather, and it felt thick. I wondered who’d brought it upstairs, and then I tore it open. There was another, smaller envelope inside, with a piece of paper folded around it. On the paper, he’d written:

  Dear Bernie,

  Sorry this took so long. Your old Grandpa has been busy lately, and a little forgetful, besides. I was very glad to hear from you, and liked your good news about the algebra test and your allergy shots. So you have a surprise for me! Well, I may have one for you, too. Maybe we can exchange surprises pretty soon. Hope the enclosed is enough for your needs. Don’t worry about paying it back.

  Love from Grandpa

  P.S. Answer to question: collies.

  I opened the smaller envelope and there was money inside, a single green bill. At first I thought it was five dollars. I saw the number 5. But the bill looked funny, and I realized the picture on it wasn’t Abe Lincoln. It was Ulysses S. Grant. And then I saw that it said fifty dollars, that it was a fifty-dollar bill! I almost ran downstairs to tell Celia and Grace, forgetting for a minute that Grandpa’s loan was a secret, and that I wasn’t talking to Celia, anyhow. “Oh, boy!” I said. “Oh, boy!” I jumped up and took my bank off the shelf. I knew exactly how much was in there—twelve dollars and sixty cents. I spilled it out on my bed, on top of the fifty-dollar bill, just to look at it all together. Why did I have to be such a sport at the Dairy Queen? And why did I ever send that buck away for the sweepstakes prize? Still, I was richer than King Midas, maybe even richer than old Gracie. Sixty-two dollars and sixty cents! How much did I need to make ninety-nine? I was so slap-happy I couldn’t think. I found a pencil on my bed and did the figuring on one of Grandpa’s envelopes. Thirty-six dollars and forty cents more and I’d be in the air, on my way!

  Then I remembered that I’d canceled my sitting job for the next day. I went to the telephone in Ma’s room and called Mrs. Wolfe. She hadn’t been able to get anybody else to stay with the twins, and she sounded as glad as I was that my plans had changed. As soon as I put the phone down, it rang. I picked it up, and Celia must have picked up the kitchen extension at the same time. She said hello before I could, and I heard that guy with the funny voice—Stuart—say hello back to her. I was going to hang up, because I’m not that nosy. I’m not a spy, no matter what Celia said. I don’t listen in on other people’s phone calls, or hold their letters up to the light, or anything like that. I was going to hang right up, when Stuart said, through a handkerchief, or his nose, “So what’s going down, sweet babes?” I was really amazed that anybody talked like that to my sister. Celia wasn’t amazed. She said, “Nothing much, Stuie-Youie. You know, the same old grind.” Then he said all this baloney about missing her, and that his friend who drove could get his dad’s car the next day—did she want to go to a movie? And she said she wished she could, but she had to rehearse for that dumb play all afternoon. They went on and on, repeating things a lot, like, “So, what’s happening?” “Nothing. What’s happening with you?” “Nothing. What’s happening with you?” I was getting sick and tired of listening. I would have hung up in a second, but I was afraid that Celia would hear the click and come flying upstairs to kill me. If I was a real spy, I would have known how to hang up without making a sound. I realized I had to call Mary Ellen one of these days and arrange for us to study algebra. Was I supposed to talk to her the way Stuart talked to Celia? Why didn’t they say goodbye before my ear fell off or I died of boredom. Blah, blah, blah. I sent them telepathic messages: Bye-bye now, so long, th-th-that’s all, folks!

  At last, Celia said, “Well, I’d better start supper now, Stuie,” and he said, “Okay, sweet babes. Ciao! Later!” There was a loud click, quickly followed by another, and I was able to hang up, too.

  I sat on Ma’s bed for a while, and then I picked up the phone again. I called Information and got Mary Ellen’s number. Celia was downstairs, banging things around, so I knew she wasn’t listening. I dialed, and a little kid answered, saying, “Burns residence, Steven speaking,” as if he was an English butler. I asked for Mary Ellen, and he hollered right into the receiver, “Hey, M.E.! It’s for you! It’s a gee-you-why!” There were noises in the background, like someone running, and a few screams. I could hear Mary Ellen yell, “Mom, can’t you make him stop?” Then she spoke into the phone in her regular soft voice, “Hello?”

  There was no way I was going to call her “sweet babes,” or ask her what was going down. It was hard enough saying who I was, and did she still want to study algebra, like she said. She made it a little easier by asking if the next day was okay, and we decided to get together in the afternoon, when I was finished with my sitting job.

  “Do you want to come here?” she said.

  I was ready to say yes, when I remembered the black poodle that had barked at me on Valentine’s Day. If there was animal dander in Mary Ellen’s house, I’d be a sneezing, wheezing mess. “Uh—do you have any pets?” I asked.

  “No. Why?” she asked, sounding puzzled.

  “Oh, no reason,” I said. “Just curious. I once saw a dog on your block, that’s all. This black poodle.”

  “You must mean Cupcake. He belongs to our neighbors. Isn’t he cute? Poodles are my favorite dogs.”

  Pood
les are my least favorite, with all their yelping, and the silly haircuts people give them, and those ribbons on their ears. I like big, quiet dogs you can feel peaceful with. And Cupcake! What a dumb name for a dog. When I got my collie, I was going to call him Rusty, or Pal. But I said, “Yeah, he was pretty cute,” feeling glad that the poodle wasn’t hers, that my grandfather had sent the money, and that now I had a kind of date.

  Mary Ellen

  AS SOON AS WE finished dinner on Monday night, Celia left for a rehearsal at Ruth’s house. Nat and Grace went into the den, and I helped Ma with the dishes. She asked me why I didn’t have any after-school activities this term. “I thought you were going to try out for the debating team,” she said. “And you seemed to really enjoy the Science Club last year.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I’m busy.” And before she could ask me what I was busy with, I said, “And you’re always bugging me about algebra, so I’m studying more.” The truth was, it didn’t make sense to get involved in any clubs if I was going to leave for Florida soon. I could always join something down there. “Hey, Ma,” I said, “you wouldn’t care to give me a little raise in my allowance, would you? For studying so hard?”

  “Hay is for horses,” she said. “And you’re absolutely right—I wouldn’t care to give you a raise. But I’m happy to hear you’re working on that algebra.”

  After the dishes were done, I went into the den. Grace was sitting on Nat’s lap, in the big leather armchair, and he was reading to her from Charlotte’s Web. “She can read by herself,” I said. “She’s in second grade.”

  “Shut up, Bernie,” Grace said, and she swung her foot out to kick me, missing.

  “Everybody likes being read to,” Nat said. “Even me. Sometimes your mother and I read aloud to each other.”

  I didn’t want to hear what he and my mother did together, but I stopped myself from saying anything nasty. I’d decided to take Nat up on his offer to work at his house, and this was as good a time as any to let him know. The wedding was only a month away, and I still needed more than thirty dollars.