Wish You Were Here

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Nat started to read to Grace again. I was glad he was at the beginning of the book. I didn’t want to be around when she found out that Charlotte dies. Grace was settled in his lap as if he was a nice big comfortable chair. I sat down on the sofa, facing them, and waited for a chance to break in.

  Nat has a deep voice, and he read with a lot of expression, as if he was acting out all the parts. Grace listened like somebody under a spell. I remembered sitting on my father’s lap, about a million years ago, while he read to me. I remembered how his heartbeat felt against my back. Grace was just a kindergarten baby when he died. She didn’t get much of a chance to do things with him, the way Celia and I did.

  While I waited to talk to Nat, I listened to the story, too. I couldn’t help it. There was nothing else to do. And I’d loved that book when I was younger. I never let Celia step on another spider after I read it. How could we be sure it wasn’t one of Charlotte’s children?

  Ma came in from the kitchen and sat next to me. When Nat got to the end of the chapter he was reading, he closed the book and said, “To be continued, Gracious.”

  “Oh, just a teensy bit more, Nat,” Grace begged, but he shook his head. “It will last longer this way,” he said. “Next week, same time, same place.” Grace stayed right there, on his lap.

  If a stranger came in the door that minute, they’d think we were a typical American family, enjoying a typical Monday night at home. Which shows that things aren’t always what they seem.

  I wished I could talk to Nat alone, but I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. “Uh, Nat?” I said. “Do you remember when you asked me if I wanted a job?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, if you didn’t get anybody else yet...”

  “The job’s yours, Bernie. That’s great! I’ve been putting it off because I’m too lazy to do it by myself.”

  “What’s this all about?” Ma asked.

  “Bernie’s going to help me clear out some junk and pack up to come here.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Ma told him. “His allergies—”

  “Nothing dusty, Jen. Just things in closets and drawers. I want to get some of it into cartons, and dump the rest.”

  “I thought you were so busy, Bernie, you didn’t have time to join a club,” Ma said.

  “Will you please quit bugging me, Ma,” I said.

  “I’m not bugging you. I’m just offering constructive criticism. And I wish you’d stop using that dreadful expression.”

  “What expression?” I asked.

  “I’ll probably only need him for one day,” Nat said.

  “But if it’s heavy work...He’s not really supposed to exert himself.”

  “Ma,” I said, “that’s not true. You can’t keep treating me like I’m sick. Even Dr. Cardoza says—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the boy’s arms, Jenny. And we’re not going to be cleaning the Augean stables, you know.”

  “Well...”

  “How come you’re not as concerned about me?” he teased.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll get your turn. All you have to do is sneeze a couple of times. She’ll be after you to put your sweater on, zip up your jacket, and turn down your earlaps.”

  “Bernie!” Ma said. But she was laughing.

  Nat was grinning at me. I had never said that much to him at one time before. I hoped he didn’t think this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It was only a job, only a way of getting out of there. “This weekend okay?” I asked, getting back to business.

  “Swell,” Nat said. “How about Sunday afternoon? I have to be at the store in the morning, to take inventory.”

  “Sure,” I said, standing up.

  “I’ll pick you up around one,” Nat said.

  I nodded, and the thing was settled.

  I went upstairs to study for the algebra midterm on Thursday. Working with Mary Ellen had been a big help. On Saturday, I’d sat for the Wolfe boys first, for three hours. They agreed to play “strategy” again, and again the peace and quiet was worth the money I had to give them. As soon as their parents came home, I went around the corner to Mary Ellen’s.

  I felt a little weird about going to her house. When I rang the bell, her father came to the door and took out his wallet. He thought I was the newsboy coming to collect. Her kid brother, Steven, showed up as soon as I walked in, and he looked me over as if he wanted to frisk me. And her mother tiptoed into the dining room when Mary Ellen and I were setting out our books and papers on the table. Her mother whispered, “Excuse me, please. I don’t want to disturb you. I just need to get the salad forks from the hutch cabinet.” She did that about six times, always tiptoeing, and apologizing, and scrounging in the drawers of the cabinet for something else. I think it made her nervous, having me there. What did she think I was going to do?

  After a while, she left us alone, and Mary Ellen and I got to work. First she gave me a little pep talk about not feeling stupid. She said the worst thing is to pretend you understand something because you’re ashamed to admit you don’t. I wasn’t to do that, no matter how long it took me to get a concept. Once I understood it, she said, I’d get confidence—it would be fun. I thought that was going too far, but I promised to be honest with her.

  Going into that algebra book was like going into a dark forest where you can’t make out anything. I mean, I was lost. We worked and worked, and I did feel stupid, and ashamed, but I kept my promise. Mary Ellen was the opposite of Celia when it came to patience. She explained everything to me about a thousand times, without getting mad once. Then, all of a sudden, something happened, and I was out of the forest! I felt like that guy in the comics who gets an idea and a light bulb goes on over his head. I mean, I didn’t just memorize the problems, I understood them.

  “See?” Mary Ellen said. “I told you it would be fun.” She said it was my turn to help her now, and I read problems to her from my algebra book and checked her answers against the ones in the back. She got every one of them right. I could see she didn’t actually need my help. She just wanted to even things up, so I wouldn’t feel like an idiot.

  I turned the pages and came to the airlines ad. It was so creased and yellow it looked as if someone had been sleeping on it for a few years. Mary Ellen said, “What’s that?” The ad was facedown and she was looking at the other side, where there was this other ad for brassieres.

  I flipped the paper over. “It’s just about flights to Florida,” I said.

  “Are you going to Florida, Bernie?” she asked. “My grandmother lives there.”

  “She does? So does my grandfather! Maybe they know each other.”

  As soon as I said it, I realized what a dumb remark it was. Florida was a whole state, and it turned out that Mary Ellen’s grandmother lived in St. Petersburg, which is miles and miles from Miami. I ended up telling her that I was thinking of paying my grandfather a visit one of these days, that I was checking out the airlines. It wasn’t a total lie, and it wasn’t the whole truth. After all those weeks of planning alone, it felt great to talk about it. I told her that my grandfather was a retired fisherman. She talked about her grandmother, who used to be a nurse, and who lived with Mary Ellen’s aunt now. Neither of us had ever been to Florida, or seen a palm tree. “When I get there,” I said, “I’ll send you a baby alligator.” She took it for granted that my family knew about my plans, and that I was going during the spring break or summer vacation. I didn’t set her straight. It was easier to change the subject, to ask if she wanted to stop studying and do something else.

  We went outside and hung around on her front lawn. The skinny snowman had melted, but there was a little white hill with a yellow streak on it where the poodle must have peed. We weren’t out there more than two minutes when that same dog came running up to us, barking like crazy.

  Mary Ellen bent down and petted him, saying, “Who’s a good doggie? Who’s the best little doggie in the world?”

 
I had my hands in my pockets, and was worried that she’d think I was afraid of dogs, or didn’t like them. So I reached down and patted Cupcake on the head a couple of times. I hadn’t been this close to a dog for a long while. His fur was surprisingly thick and silky. As soon as I touched him, he began jumping on me and licking my hand.

  “Hey!” I said. That dog jumped so high he could have been in the Olympics, doing the hurdles. I dropped onto my knees on the lawn, and he started kissing my face. I grabbed his floppy ears and then his snout, fooling around with him, shaking his head back and forth. He put on this fake growl, his tail waving like a cheerleader’s pom-pom. “So you want to fight,” I said. “Then come on, put up your dukes!”

  Mary Ellen got into it, too. The dog went nuts, leaping from one of us to the other, yipping and growling, slobbering all over and wagging his whole rear end.

  We were all rolling around oh the grass when someone whistled from the house next door and Cupcake took off like a little black streak across the lawns. Mary Ellen and I were laughing so hard we had trouble getting up. Finally I was able to stand, and I pulled her to her feet, too. I realized I wasn’t having an allergic reaction to the dog—no sneezing, and my eyes weren’t watering. We were outdoors, which may have made a difference, but still it seemed amazing.

  It was getting dark, so I went inside for my books, and to say goodbye to Mary Ellen’s folks. Her brother said, “Are you still here?” And her father put one hand over the kid’s mouth, while he shook my hand with the other one. Her mother said, “Come see us again, Barney.”

  Mary Ellen walked me to the corner. “Families,” she said.

  The Invisible Hero

  THE PLAINVIEW HIGH PLAYERS were at our house again. Ma and Nat had gone to a concert at the library, and Grace and I were upstairs in my room. The rehearsal was going strong, and the actors must have really been projecting, because a lot of what they said came up through my floor. Mr. Rooney was there this time, shouting directions at everybody. Grace put one of her Muppets records on my stereo, but I could still recognize Ruth, and Celia, and Gary being John Henry. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, so I wouldn’t have to listen, and I wanted to lie on the floor with one ear pressed against it, so I wouldn’t miss a single word. I couldn’t do either, because Grace was with me. I had lured her into my room, for company, by promising to let her look through my box of treasures. The box was a big one that Pop had given me a long time ago, when I was at the shoe store. According to the faded label, there was once a pair of men’s boots in it. Style: Ponderosa. Color: Saddle. Size: 11.

  Now it was filled with stuff I’d collected over the years. There were some valuable old baseball cards, of Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and Roger Maris. If you held them to your nose, you could still make out the sugary smell of the bubble gum. Grace liked to sniff the cards, but she wasn’t very interested in the players or their statistics.

  I kept a few good shells and stones I’d picked up on the beach at Sunken Meadow. Some of the shells still had sand in them and they reminded me of summer. There were other things in there I’d meant to throw out but always put back in the box at the last minute, like the dried peach pits, the pair of lead soldiers (the only two left from a whole battalion), and one perfect report card, from first grade. Under Comments, the teacher, Miss Minelli, had written: “Bernard is a bright and inquisitive boy, with excellent language skills and well-developed large and small motor coordination. He is socially mature and interacts well with his peer group.” I’d gotten A’s in the couple of subjects you have in first grade, and my father had signed the card at the bottom: Martin Segal. He had a great handwriting. It slanted forward, and the I of Segal ended in a fancy loop. I practiced copying his signature for a while, and when my father noticed me doing it, he laughed and said I’d make a terrific check forger.

  Grace sat on my bed and took things out neatly, one at a time, making little piles of them around her. A pile of marbles, and shells and stones, and peach pits. She pinned my button collection all over the tops of her pajamas. They were mostly campaign buttons for men who’d run for President and lost. There were also some novelty buttons with sayings like KISS ME I’M IRISH, BE KIND TO YOUR BEHIND, IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU’RE STANDING ON MY TOES.

  I don’t even know where I got some of them.

  The thing Grace liked best she saved for last. It was a genuine treasure—a ring my grandfather had given me that he’d bought at the 1939 World’s Fair. It was made of silver, and it had a blue-and-orange enamel picture of the Try Ion and the Perisphere—a tall triangle and a short fat ball. They were the symbols of the Fair. I wore the ring for a while right after my grandfather gave it to me, but it kept falling off and I was afraid I’d lose it. So I threw it in the treasure box and usually forgot about it until Grace brought it out again. It was way too big for her bony little fingers, even for her thumb. She’d try it on and hold it up, turning it in the light, the way some grownup women look at their diamond rings. Sometimes she’d ask if she could wear it to school for just one day, and I’d always say no. She swore she wouldn’t lose it, but little kids lose things no matter how careful they say they’ll be, and I never let Grace borrow it.

  This time she went through the same routine, saving the ring for last and then slipping it from finger to finger, saying, “I’ll be careful, Bernie. I promise. I’ll wear my mittens all day.”

  That broke me up. “How are you going to read and write with your mittens on?” I asked her.

  “Come on, Bernie, please,” Grace said. “I’ll be your friend.”

  “You’re already my friend. You’re my sister,” I told her, thinking of Celia, who was my sister, too, and my enemy.

  As if I’d cued her with ESP, Celia’s voice came through the floor then, saying her line about not belonging to a “we.”

  “Put everything away now, Gracie,” I said. “You have to go to bed, it’s almost nine o’clock. The ring, too, kiddo.”

  When Grace was in her room, with Miss Piggy lighting up the shadows, I went downstairs for some orange juice. A few of the kids in the living room saw me go by and waved and said hi. Celia didn’t even look at me. She made me feel invisible. I stayed in the kitchen, drinking the juice slowly, listening to the rehearsal. If I really was invisible I could have just gone in there, sat down in a corner, and watched.

  And that morning I could have gone to school early, before Mrs. Jacobs showed up, gotten into her desk drawer, and sneaked a look at the answers to the algebra test. As it turned out, I didn’t need to do that. Not that the test was easy. For the first few minutes I kind of panicked, staring at the problems. Everything Mary Ellen had taught me flew right out of my head. I wished she was there, although I wouldn’t have been able to even look at her. Mrs. Jacobs accuses you of cheating and gives you an automatic zero if you look at the ceiling during a test. I made myself calm down and think, and finally I began to remember what I’d learned. I sweated over a couple of the problems anyway, but at least I’d finished all of them when Mrs. Jacobs said, “Drop your pencils!” like a cop ordering you to drop your gun.

  I couldn’t stay in the kitchen much longer without someone thinking I was listening on purpose, so I went back upstairs and lay down on my bed. Soon I started worrying about the air fare again. Nat hadn’t said how much he’d pay me, and I’d felt too embarrassed to ask him, especially in front of my mother and Grace. I still had some Saturdays left to sit for the twins. Would I make enough? Maybe I should try to raise a little more than enough, in case of some emergency I hadn’t thought of yet. I couldn’t remember if you had to pay for your lunch on a plane, or if you were supposed to tip the flight attendants. And I had to be able to call my grandfather from the Miami airport to let him know I was there.

  I had only flown once, four years ago, when the whole family went to Canada for a vacation. What I remember best from that trip are the silver wings they gave all the kids, and how the plane seemed to hang in the sky, above the clouds and what looke
d like painted mountains.

  Maybe I could pack a couple of sandwiches to take along, and call my grandfather collect when we landed. I wondered what his surprise was. I was sure it was nothing compared to mine!

  If you were invisible, you could get on a plane without buying a ticket. If there were no empty seats, you could just sit on the floor somewhere. You might even squeeze into the cockpit with the pilot, and watch him pull back the throttle and take off.

  If some guy decided to hijack the plane, if he held a gun to the pilot’s head and said, “Take me to Chicago!” the invisible guy could sneak up behind him, knock the gun out of his hand, and wrestle him to the floor. The pilot would get into the act then, and the plane would drop through the clouds, doing a couple of tailspins before the pilot realized the hijacker had been knocked out by some mysterious force and he could take over the controls again. In the meantime, everybody would be screaming their heads off.

  There was this old movie on TV about an invisible man. He wrapped his face in bandages and wore clothes and sunglasses when he wanted people to see him. Otherwise, I guess you’d have to go around completely naked.

  The people on the plane would figure out there was an invisible man aboard, and they’d ask him to identify himself because he was a hero. They’d want to thank him, and maybe give him a medal. Where would they pin it?

  I fell asleep thinking about that and didn’t wake up until the Players were gone and Ma was home. She shook me gently, telling me to get undressed and not to forget to brush my teeth. I was so zonked I stumbled into the bathroom. I only had enough energy to brush my front teeth, drop my clothes, and put on my pajamas. Ma turned back the covers, after clearing some of the junk off my bed. I lay down again and shut my eyes, becoming invisible.

  Nat the Gnat

  I’D BEEN TO NAT’S house in Syosset twice before, because I had to go. Once, last summer, he invited all of us to a barbecue, so we ate outdoors, which was fine with me. I only went inside to use the bathroom. Most of the day I sat under a tree, reading. Grace asked Nat why there wasn’t a swing set or a jungle gym in his yard. He told her that he used to be married but never had any kids.