Gee Whiz (10 page)

He sighed, and headed after Mom. On the way out of the kitchen, he touched Danny’s hair. I hadn’t seen him do that since Danny was a head or more shorter than he was—that would be when I was about eight.

Danny, Barbie, Jerry, and I cleaned up the kitchen, then I walked with Barbie out to Jerry’s car. Before she got in, she said, “Sorry.” And gave me a hug.

I said, “I’ll see you Wednesday.” Wednesday was the slumber party. Danny explained to Jerry how to get to Barbie’s house, and they left. It was cold outside, but I didn’t let Danny go back in the house. I said, “There’s nothing wrong with you, is there?”

“I don’t want anything to be wrong with me. It’s not like I haven’t thought about this. I don’t see any way out. I’ve listened to all the arguments. Believe me, Leah knows all the arguments. She goes to Berkeley, for God’s sake. She is furious with me.”

“I didn’t know you were seeing her still.”

“Well, we stopped for a while, but that was worse.” Then he added, “Maybe not worse than what’s going on now.”

“You should have told Mom.”

“I was going to wait until after Christmas, or maybe until after the physical, when I would know for sure.”

“Are you mad at Barbie?”

“I was for a moment, but it did save me having to bring it up. It’s like you’re standing at the edge of the cliff and looking
down, and maybe it’s easier if someone comes up behind you and pushes you over.”

Then I said, “Guys come back from Vietnam all the time. I think you’re going to be one of those.”

Danny kissed me on the forehead and we went into the house. I have to say that I hadn’t thought about this in a couple of months, not since Mom said that she found out that Sister Larkin’s cousin, who was on the draft board, was somehow “putting Danny’s file at the bottom of the stack,” and so, even though he had been eighteen for a long time, he hadn’t been called up yet. When Mom and Dad talked to Danny about it, Danny said that he didn’t know what to think about the war and he thought he’d like to see for himself. That was Danny all over—as Dad knew and Leah was probably now discovering, there was no telling him what to do. He was determined to make up his own mind.

Lots of families talked about the Second World War, and what their dads (and moms) had done, but Mom and Dad were too young for that—Mom was only eleven when the war started, and Dad was only twelve. Uncle Luke was a few years older than Dad, and by the time Uncle Matthew was old enough to sign up, the war was over. He got as far as boot camp in Missouri. All of my grandparents were born just before the First World War, but someone somewhere had been in the Spanish-American War—that was at the end of the 1890s. And so I supposed that Danny would be the first to go. I had a hard time imagining it, but I suspected that part of the reason Danny wasn’t all that upset was that he would see the world, or some of it. I could see how that would excite him.

Mom was sitting in the living room with her knitting in
her lap, and Dad was thumbing through his Bible. No one at church ever talked about the war—for one thing, no one but Danny was the right age to be drafted, and for another, all the older sisters and brothers disagreed. Brother Abner said what was going on over there was none of our business, and Sister Larkin said that the Lord worked in mysterious ways, and Mr. Hollingsworth said that stopping communism was the work of the Lord, and Sister Nicks and Sister Brooks had gone without speaking for four months after they disagreed about a passage Brother Brooks read that went “For though we live in the world, we are not carrying on a worldly war, for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds.” Brother and Sister Brooks said that as long as the Lord himself had brought up this passage by directing Brother Brooks to it, then they would express their view that it was not our job to fight the wars of the world, those of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Our battles were different. Sister Nicks had asked whether we were citizens of this country or not, and that had started it. It was now almost three years since that argument, and no one had ever said another word about the war. I knew that the teachers at school disagreed, too, but they did not talk about it in class.

Danny sat down beside Mom on the couch and put his arm around her, but he didn’t say anything.

Dad said, “The future will unfold as it is meant to do.”

Mom sighed.

Danny sat there for a while, and then kissed Mom on the cheek and left. I went up to my room and turned the stereo on pretty loud and read something.

* * *

It was my turn to get up in the morning to feed the horses. My alarm was set for six, a little later than usual, because there was no school and I didn’t have to catch the bus. It was pretty dark at six. We’d talked about the winter solstice in seventh-grade science, and traced the apparent path of the sun. What it looked like that last week before the solstice was that it just made a little oval from the southeast to the southwest. The rays started out really long and cold and didn’t get much shorter and warmer. I knew we were lucky compared to lots of places, but just because you are lucky doesn’t mean that you feel lucky. Anyway, it seemed like it took me forever to pull on my socks and my jeans and my five shirts and sweaters and my hat and my gloves, and I was yawning the whole time, but I woke up when I opened the back door and stepped out on the porch. Right there in the yard, standing and looking at me, maybe ten feet from the back porch, was Gee Whiz. When I stopped with the back door in my hand, staring at him in surprise, he nickered, just like he was saying, “We’re hungry.”

I turned and looked at the kitchen clock. It was six-thirty. Other than Gee Whiz standing there, everything in the yard seemed normal—quiet, the sky pale the way it got just before sunrise. I put on my boots, and went down the steps. He stood still as I approached him. I petted him down the neck and took hold of his forelock, to get him to turn with me and go back to the barn, which was closer than the gelding pasture, but he didn’t need pulling—he just pivoted and followed me, arching his neck, flaring his nostrils, and snorting slightly, as
if he wanted a good whiff of me. He truly was the most curious horse I’d ever known.

We walked to the barn. From there, I could see that the gate of the gelding pasture was open, but not wide open—Gee Whiz had pushed it far enough to get through. Blue, Marcus, Lincoln, and Beebop were standing just inside, but they hadn’t come out because, yes, Rusty was sitting in the opening, perfectly straight and alert. When Blue looked at me and stepped forward, she barked one short, sharp bark that said, “Stay!” in every language, including Horse. I led Gee Whiz toward them, but when I took a halter off the gate and turned to put it on him, just to make sure that I got him through without problems, he twisted his head away and trotted to the mare pasture. The mares, of course, were all eyes and ears—nothing more exciting than a loose horse—and they snorted and whinnied when he approached. I closed the gelding gate. Rusty gave a sigh, as if she were glad that her job was done, and she received several pats from me. There was no telling how long she’d been guarding the gate.

Gee Whiz would not allow me to catch him. He had to sniff noses with each mare in turn decide—like everyone, I suppose—that Oh My was the best-looking, since he snorted and arched his neck when he came to her.

For once in my life, I didn’t have a single carrot in my pockets, so I ran to the barn and got a small bucket with a few handfuls of oats. This I shook as I came back to him, and he did prick his ears, and he did take a bite while I was opening the gate again, and he did allow me to lure him inside the pasture (waving off the other geldings, of course). I then stood
with him while he ate the rest of the oats, because even though he had been naughty, he had been good to follow me and needed to be rewarded. All the horses were staring at me now, and the reason was that I was late with breakfast.

After I passed out the hay, I inspected the gate latch. It was a simple one—just a piece of wood that slid through a space in the frame of the gate, and then lodged itself into a carved-out slot in the gatepost. The latch was old and un-painted, not that easy to move. I fiddled with it while the horses ate, and I decided that in the excitement of the night before, someone hadn’t closed it properly (maybe me). I made sure the latch was very firmly in its slot, and even jiggled it. I decided that the episode had been a little scary, but easy to understand, so I also decided to just put it out of my mind—lots of times there are near misses with horses. If you didn’t put them out of your mind, your mind would fill up and overflow.

W
HEN
I
GOT INSIDE
, M
OM WAS UP
,
MAKING OATMEAL
. S
HE
still didn’t look very happy, but I took the cowardly way out and decided that this wasn’t my business. She set my oatmeal on the table, and I reached for the milk. I said, “You remember the slumber party tomorrow night, don’t you?”

She nodded, and said, “Oh yes.”

“Did you talk to Dad about it?”

“I did. It’s okay for you to go, but he wants to pick you up before breakfast Thursday morning so that you can get your riding done.”

“Did you explain to him what a slumber party is? People stay up late.”

“I mentioned that, but he didn’t seem to notice.”

She stared at me. I could see that her mind was working. Finally, she said, “I think we need to do some Christmas shopping. I think it absolutely has to be done Thursday morning. I think it’s an emergency.”

We smiled at one another. I said, “What time do you think you’ll be finished with that?”

“Oh, about noon.”

When you went to the Goldmans’, you never knew what was going to happen. Once, we’d put on an amateur (very amateur) performance of
Julius Caesar
; once, we had played a game where you had to act out an adverb, like “crazily,” and your team had to guess what it was; and of course, at the end of the summer, we’d had a scavenger hunt through the neighborhood. You also never knew why a particular person might have been invited to a Goldman party (and actually, I wondered why they had originally invited me—Barbie said it was because I was mysterious, which I suppose meant that I spent years trying to keep out of everyone’s way as best I could). Now, of course, we were friends, and I loved having Barbie come and ride Blue. She was easy to give lessons to—she always did what she was told, and she was
able
to do what she was told, which is a separate thing.

Sophia was arriving as Mom and I turned into the Goldmans’ street. The Cougar that her mom drove was inching along, no doubt because they were looking at street numbers. Mom eased around them and went into the Goldmans’ driveway, and I jumped out and waved. Mrs. Rosebury pulled in behind us. Maybe I expected Sophia to be nervous—she
didn’t know the Goldmans, though she had seen them a long time ago in a play—but if she was, I couldn’t tell. She was her usual self—she might as well have been walking into geology as into the Goldmans’ house. Barbie met us at the door before we rang the bell, as if she’d been watching through the window. She hugged me, and shook Sophia’s hand, then said, “I’m so happy to meet you! Abby says that your equestrian style is perfect! She gives me lessons, you know, but I have a long way to go.”

Sophia smiled. Good beginning. Another interesting thing was that Sophia’s hair was loose rather than in her usual thick braids. It was blond and smooth and rippled down her back as she walked. It fell to her waist. Stella would have been full of compliments.

Being in the Goldmans’ house was almost like not being inside a house at all. The living room had a huge window that looked out over a big valley—now the valley was utterly dark, and the sky above and beyond the edge of the hills was brilliant red-orange. We set down our overnight bags next to three others. Sophia had brought a sleeping bag, and I had brought what Mom called a bedroll, which was really just a blanket and a sheet folded together and rolled up. Doors at either end of the window opened out onto a deck. I could see Leslie, Alexis, and a girl I didn’t know out there. Leslie waved to us and Sophia waved back.

To the left of the living room was a big kitchen, and to the right was Mr. Goldman’s study. I saw that the furniture had been pushed aside, so this would be where the slumber party would take place, not upstairs in Barbie and Alexis’s
rooms. (There were two—they slept in one of them in bunk beds, and had their musical instruments and a table of art supplies in the other one. They were the only kids I’d ever known who had been allowed to decorate their own rooms, by painting pictures on the walls—I hoped Sophia would get to have a look.) Staccato was curled up on a pillow on the couch. He’d put on weight in the last few months, and looked like a grown-up cat. When we’d found him in the spring, Mom thought he was less than a month old, so he was still only about nine months. But he was relaxed. When I tickled the top of his head, he rolled over and displayed his belly. He started purring immediately. I said to Barbie, “Does Staccato ever do anything? Every time I see him, he’s relaxing.”