Whistling In the Dark Page 3

  Mother said, “Don’t be silly.” And then she gave us her powdery cheek to kiss and we could hear her heels smacking against the wooden steps that led down to the front porch and then finally the door slamming shut.

  We sat there for a while not saying anything, but I was feeling bad because we weren’t ever supposed to be in Mother’s room without her. Troo said suddenly, “Let’s play dress-up.”

  She slid open the jewelry drawer and fingered the green glass beads and a silver medallion on a long chain and Daddy’s old Timex, which I thought Mother’d given away to Goodwill Industries along with everything else. It made me so happy to see the watch that I slipped it on my wrist and held it up to my ear and it was still ticking. I wished I could wind it back so far that I would have a do-over of the day Daddy died. So I could say sorry. Troo lifted out the beads and put them around her neck. Then she pulled the cherry red lipstick out of the fancy golden tube and spread it on her pouty lips and rubbed them together like we’d seen Mother do. Troo was looking at herself in the mirror, turning her head from side to side.

  “You look just like her,” I said, staring at her reflection.

  Troo smiled and got some of the lipstick on her teeth and said, “I know.”

  I pulled out another drawer and saw a picture of Daddy laying on top of Mother’s white chiffon scarf. It was the picture from when he just got back from the Air Force and he had his uniform on and you could tell he was so happy to be home. Next to him, Mother was looking off into the distance like she hadn’t even realized he was there.

  “Let’s go,” I said, because I was starting to feel worried about Mother, and maybe if we went to the front window we could see her walking over to the hospital and we could yell something out to her like get well soon!

  I let Daddy’s watch slide off my wrist and set it back in the drawer. “You should wipe off that lipstick.”

  “No,” Troo said, and plumped out her lips even more.

  “Troo.”

  “I ain’t takin’ it off.”

  “Troo!” We weren’t ever supposed to say ain’t. That was something Mother told us the riffraff said.

  Troo laughed and pulled on a pair of short white gloves she found in the drawer. So I walked to the living room by myself and stuck my head out the window. I could smell pink peonies mixed in with the chocolate chip cookie smell coming from the Feelin’ Good Cookie Factory. Mother was small up on the corner of North Avenue. I was sure that would be the last time I’d ever see her again because look what happened to Daddy when he was in the same hospital. So I started to yell to her to please come back! But then she turned the corner and was gone. And she didn’t come home in a week or so like she said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We were on our way to meet Mary Lane the next morning at one of our usual summer hangouts. Washington Park was 1,747 steps away from our front door and had everything a person could ever want or need. There was that lagoon that we skated on in the winter and fished in during the summer and where they’d found Junie. There was also a band shell that looked like a giant clam where we could go hear Music Under the Stars and a swimming pool that had a high dive. And best of all, on the far side of the park, there was my absolute favorite. The zoo!

  We were almost to the park, right in front of Fitzpatrick’s Drugstore, when Troo bent down to tie her shoe and said out of the blue, “I’m thinkin’ about running away to France,” and didn’t say anything else.

  I looked into the drugstore and wished I had a dime for a soda because even though it was still early morning, it was already so hot that my eyeballs were sweating. “France?”

  I had no idea where she got this idea of France from. Probably out of a book at the Finney Library, where they were giving away these passes to the Uptown to the kid who read the most books. The librarian kept track of our names and how many books we’d read on this worm body that was called Billy the Bookworm and hung outside the boys’ bathroom. Troo’s most favorite thing was going to the movies, so she moved her name up the bookworm’s body when the librarian, Mrs. Esther Kambowski (Polish—a real break for Troo) wasn’t looking. Troo didn’t give a damn if she cheated. I didn’t feel that same way, but I almost never disagreed with her because of that promise I’d made to Daddy in the hospital. I still hadn’t told Troo what he’d said about the car crash not being her fault, because she always got so mad when I brought it up and Troo, you didn’t like to get her mad. Her mad was tall. And deep. Like a volcano, she could blow when you least expected it.

  Mary Lane knew Troo was cheating on that bookworm ladder and had threatened to tell Mrs. Kambowski. Thank God it was Mary Lane because nobody woulda believed her anyway, because everybody knew that she told the biggest and fattest lies around.

  One time she told us that her father’s weenie did not look like a weenie at all but more like a bratwurst. Mary Lane said she knew that because she saw her mother and father having some of the sex on the bathroom floor, probably right after they had their baths. So not only was she a huge liar, Mary Lane was a peeper, which was a person who really, really, really liked to spy on people in their houses. She liked to light fires, too. Not because she liked fires but because she was just nuts about the fire trucks that showed up after she lit the fires. She was my and Troo’s best friend. (We always called her Mary Lane because almost every family on the block had a kid named Mary so you had to find a way to tell them apart.) Mary Lane was also the skinniest person alive. I mean, you have never seen a person who was not a pagan baby living in Africa who was this skinny. Troo and me figured that’s because she had six brothers who probably ate all the food in the house when her father went to work and her mother did the wash.

  And even though Troo thought Mrs. Kambowski wouldn’t believe lying Mary Lane if she really did rat her out about cheating on the Bookworm, Troo still came up with one of her famous plans. Just in case.

  “We are having what is known as a rendezvous. That’s the French word for meeting up with someone,” Troo said. We’d climbed up onto different branches in our favorite zoo tree across from Sampson the gorilla’s pit and were watching Mary Lane coming down that zoo path. Her wrinkled white shorts and dirty red-checkered shirt waving off her body made her look kinda like a flagpole. “I’m just gonna push her into Sampson’s pit.” Troo wiggled to the end of the branch. “I gotta win those movie passes.”

  I was pretty sure she was just talkin’ big and wouldn’t really push Mary Lane in. Pretty sure. Ever since Daddy’s car crash I couldn’t always tell what Troo would do. Sometimes I even thought my sister got a little brain damaged in that accident just like Uncle Paulie.

  We hopped down from the tree and were leaning over the black iron railing just staring at Sampson, acting like we didn’t know Mary Lane had arrived even though we knew she did because she always smelled like stale potato chips.

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?” Mary Lane asked, coming up next to us.

  Sampson. I adored Sampson. Really adored him. Daddy used to bring me and Troo to this zoo after we’d drive in from the farm to pay a Sunday afternoon visit to Granny. Daddy adored Sampson as well and would sit and watch him and laugh right along. So I’d known Sampson practically since I was born. And now I always came to Sampson when I was feelin’ out of sorts. I would imagine Daddy sitting next to me on my park bench and putting his arm around me and saying in his deep voice, “Sal, my gal, a lot of people say that the lion is the King of the Jungle. But I would have to disagree with those people.” Then Daddy’d point at the gorilla and beat his chest and his voice would come out all stuttery. “I would have to say that Sampson is the King. Just look at him. He is magnificent!” I would look back at Sampson and nod my head like I was agreeing with him, but I was secretly thinking to myself that it was my daddy who was the King. Of the sky and the land. And he was magnificent!

  Troo said loudly to Mary Lane, “Sampson’s got something he wants to show you, but you gotta get closer. He’s hidin’ it behind his back. Just clim
b over the railing and lean over and you’ll see it perfectly clearly.”

  Always ready for any kind of peeping, Mary Lane hopped right over and walked to the edge of the grass next to the pit. Troo turned and grinned at me and then climbed over the railing to join her. I didn’t think that gorillas ate people, but the fall alone woulda killed skinny Mary Lane. Break her in half like a piece of cold gum.

  Sampson was watching us carefully, foot tapping. I always thought he was singing to himself “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” That was one of Ethel Jenkins’s favorite songs and she taught it to me. Ethel lived over on Fifty-second Street with Mrs. Galecki and was my and Troo’s other best friend.

  “Hey, Mary Lane, you know about that Bookworm ladder? You really aren’t gonna tell Kambowski that I cheated, are you?” Troo asked this real sweetly, like she can when she wants something real bad. Granny calls it her dolly voice.

  Mary Lane turned toward Troo. “Yeah, I am.”

  The lion roared and a couple of flamingos ran for cover.

  Troo said, “Are you sure you want to do that? I’d feel real bad if you accidentally fell into the pit and they didn’t find you until feeding time. Or if Sampson was hungry right this minute”—she lowered her voice—“they might never find anything but your bones.”

  So I guess gorillas did eat people but Sampson would be pretty disappointed if he ate Mary Lane, who had as much meat on her as a coat hanger.

  Troo nudged Mary Lane a little closer until the tips of her half-undone high-top black tennis shoes, the ones she always had on, were half over the pit and half on the grass.

  “You ain’t gonna push me in, are you?” she asked. Troo was up close behind her so she couldn’t escape.

  “Thinkin’ about it,” Troo said, spitting her gum down toward the pit so Mary Lane would completely understand exactly how far she would fall. (I wouldn’t have let Troo push her in, just so you know that about me.)

  “Go ahead,” Mary Lane said, and squished her eyes closed.

  “Are you tellin’ me you don’t care if I push you in this pit and you’d probably die and go to purgatory for all eternity for the millions of lies you told?” Troo asked, amazed.

  “I never been to a movie theater and I want them passes and the popcorn and soda.” Mary Lane took a big breath and held it. “I’ll die to defend them. And I never told a lie in my life, Troo O’Malley.”

  “That’s your biggest lie ever,” Troo said, and she looked at me and I looked at her and we both turned our heads back to Mary Lane, who was beginning to remind me very much of St. Joan of Arc.

  “Okay, okay, I was just kiddin’ around.” Troo laughed and pulled Mary Lane away from the edge. “Go ahead, tell Kambowski.” Right away, because of the mental telepathy, I knew that Troo was workin’ on another one of her plans that would involve a librarian and an obituary.

  Mary Lane stepped back and looked over at Troo like nothing at all had just happened. “You know who Sara Heinemann is?”

  “Of course,” Troo said, and then we went to sit down on the green park bench across from Sampson. Troo handed out pieces of Dubble Bubble that she always seemed to have.

  Mary Lane stuck the gum in her mouth and said, “She’s missing.”

  “W hatta ya mean?” I asked, trying to read the Pud comic that came in the gum.

  “Just what I said. Sara’s missing. Been gone for a couple of days now,” Mary Lane said. “My dad told me not to talk to any strangers.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to picture the girl I thought might be Sara Heinemann. “She the third-grader with the blond ponytail that likes dodgeball so much?”

  Mary Lane nodded. “She lives four houses down from me, right next to Judy Big Head. (Mary Lane was not being uncharitable. That really was Judy’s last name. She was an Indian.) “Sara’s probably been kidnapped just like I was.”

  Troo rolled her eyeballs at me. Last summer, Mary Lane had told us that she’d been kidnapped by Germans who wore hardly any clothing and they forced her to make pot-holders all day long and she only escaped by swimming across a huge lake full of slimy trout. What really happened is her parents sent her to camp up in Rhinelander. So this story about Sara Heinemann missing was just another one of her big fibs that you had to expect from her. For some reason I could never figure out, a lot of Mary Lane’s lies were about kidnapping. And weenies.

  “She’ll probably turn up, she probably just got lost. That happens all the time,” I said. But what I was really thinking was that if Mary Lane was right and Sara really did get kidnapped, they probably would never find her alive again. That’s how it’d been with Junie. First she went missing and then they found her dead body over at the lagoon. I worried for a while after Junie’s funeral that somebody would kidnap Troo. Granny took me home and made me cinnamon toast and told me not to be such a worrywart. That murders like that, like what happened to Junie Piaskowski, that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Granny was usually never wrong. Then again, like she always said, there’s a first time for everything.

  “You know what I’d like to do?” I said, looking at Sampson’s sad eyes. “I’d like to kidnap him and take him back to his family.”

  Mary Lane laughed and said, “You know, O’Malley, that’s a weird kid thing to say. Kidnapping a gorilla and taking him home. That’s weird.”

  She should talk about weird.

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Troo said. “And on the way there, we could stop in France.”

  Mary Lane started laughing again until Troo smacked her a good one and said, “What’s so funny about France?”

  “What the hell do you know about France?” Mary Lane asked, not rubbing her arm.

  “As a matter of fact,” Troo said, “I know quite a bit about France.”

  “Sure you do.” Mary Lane slid off the bench, outta Troo’s reach.

  “France is where they speak the language of love,” I said, staring at Sampson.

  “Oui,” Troo said quietly.

  “We what?” Mary Lane said.

  “Aw, shut up,” Troo said, “before I change my mind about pushin’ you in the pit.” They were up on their feet now, toe to toe. Mary Lane shoved Troo and took off. I held Troo’s arms behind her back so she couldn’t go chase after her. She was madder than a hatter. When she finally broke loose, she spun around and got up real close to my face and yelled, “Sally O’Malley . . . your days are numbered.”

  As usual, my Troo genius was right.

  CHAPTER SIX

  That tasted like crap,” Hall hollered. He was sitting at the kitchen table, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, the ash falling onto the nice white plates that Mother had saved S&H Green Stamps for a whole year to buy. Nell had tried to make us supper again, but the tuna noodle casserole with potato chips on top ended up very black and the peas in the can she had cooked on the stove had no water in them and even the applesauce didn’t taste right.

  Mother had been in the hospital for over two weeks and she’d always done all the talking to Hall, so the three of us didn’t know what to say to him. Mostly, I just tried not to look at his white T-shirt that didn’t have sleeves so you could see that MOTHER tattoo laying against the muscles in his arm. His wavy Swedish hair looked like it did right when he woke up in the morning. And the sweat in the silky hair under his arms smelled like all the beer he’d been drinking.

  Hall had another puff of his cigarette and said to us like we were deaf, “You know, I don’t hafta take care of the three of you. You’re not even mine.”

  Nell said, “May I be excused?” and tried to stand up to clear the dishes, but Hall grabbed her arm and grumbled, “Sit your ass back down.” But then he changed his mind and said, “Never mind, go get me a beer,” and he shoved Nell so hard that she fell against the stove and her daisy sundress went up around her waist.

  My eyes started to burn and Troo was looking down at the floor and licking her lips hard and fast, like she did when she got nervous. She musta been sneakin’ into
Mother’s room because I could see a bit of that cherry red lipstick stuck in the corners of her mouth and I could smell Evening in Paris. Nell’s face looked like she had a fever when she pulled her dress down and then got up and opened the refrigerator. There was nothing much in there so that Pabst Blue Ribbon was easy to find. Hall wasn’t giving Nell hardly any grocery money. “It’s not my fault,” she’d shouted last night. Troo’d been getting so cranky about eating nothing but pigs in a blanket that she’d thrown one at Nell and gotten mustard all over her poodle skirt so it looked like it piddled.

  Hall took a long drink from the bottle Nell handed him and then wiped his mouth on the back of his arm and said, “You know, your mother and me”—and then he burped extra loud—“we been havin’ some problems for a while now and on toppa that, things aren’t goin’ so well over at the shoe store.”

  “Big surprise,” Troo said in her sassiest voice.

  Hall reached across the table so quick I didn’t even see it coming, and neither did Troo. He slapped her on the back of her head. Hard. She just looked at him through her hair that had been knocked around her face and didn’t say a word. So he did it again. Harder. Hall should’ve known that Troo would never cry, if that was what he was waitin’ for. When he hauled his arm back again, he lost his balance and fell off the kitchen chair and just stayed there on the dirty tan linoleum and started crying out, “Helen . . . Helen . . . Helen.”

  We sisters looked at one another and got up and went out on the front porch and listened to the crickets and didn’t say much. Because there was not much to say about something like that. About a man who you lived with but you hardly even knew, and didn’t want to know, laying down on your kitchen floor crying out your almost dead mother’s name. Later, when the streetlights came on, Troo, who hardly ever could stay quiet for long, said, “What a goddamn dickhead.”

  The next morning, Nell poured Wheaties and what little milk was left into our bowls. And then she started scraping last night’s supper dishes under the running sink water because the smell of the crusty tuna was so bad. “Mother has something else wrong with her besides her gallbladder. I wanted to tell you last night, but then . . .”