Gee Whiz (11 page)

“He caught a fly yesterday. But it was a very slow-moving fly.”

The doorbell rang and she went to answer it. Another girl I didn’t know came in, followed by Lucia. Barbie must have said something funny, because they started laughing, and then smiled at us and said, “Hi!”

Mrs. Goldman came down the stairs, smiling, and said, “Oh, how nice to see all of you girls! How are you? You look so grown-up!” She gave everyone a kiss on the cheek and went into the kitchen.

As we drifted out onto the deck, Lucia said, “I was wondering who would be here!” I suspected not Stella and Gloria, and by the time everyone had arrived, I saw that I was right. One surprise was that Leah did come, and why not? She was their cousin even if she was four years older and in college. She gave me a hug that said all sorts of things from “I think I
love your brother” to “What is going to happen now?” But Leah was quiet—at Goldman parties, she never said much, though she drew funny pictures on napkins and showed them to you sometimes. It was a sign of how much fun the Goldman twins were that Leah had decided to show up.

On the deck, there were five artichokes set on two tables, ready for the leaves to be plucked and dipped in five sauces. I could tell that one was melted butter. The others were white, green, red, and brown. There were two cheeses, neither of which looked like anything I’d seen before (they were white), and there was a long loaf of bread. I must have been staring at the food, because Leslie came up behind me and said, “I recognize the olives and the almonds.” She took one of each.

Leslie had on her favorite sweater, which was blue-green and had a boatneck. She was wearing it with very dark blue wool pants that I had never seen before—buttons came up one side, crossed under the waist, and went down the other side. I said, “Where did you get those pants?”

“They’re navy surplus. They’re what sailors wear.”

She stepped back. The bell-bottom legs were so big it looked like she could trip on the hems. She turned around. A string like a shoestring was threaded through holes that ran up the back. And they did fit her nicely. She said, “If I fell off my ship, I could get these off over my shoes, and then tie the legs, throw them upward to capture some air, and use them as sort of a life raft. Then I would take off my shoes.” I was sure that she would survive. She did look good—willowy and “understated,” as Stella would say.

Alexis made introductions. Other than Sophia, Leslie,
Lucia, Leah, and me, there was Diana (Alexis’s roommate from school); Ingrid, a cousin of Diana’s from Norway; and another girl from school who hadn’t gone home for vacation, Marie. Marie was French. I did not dare say
bonjour
, even though I’d been taking French for three years. Marie was staying for a couple of days, until she left to meet her parents in Aspen, Colorado, to go skiing. Sophia said, “I went to Paris once, with my mom and dad. I can’t remember it very well, though.”

Marie smiled, and said, “I am from the South. From Toulouse. My father teaches in the university there.”

None of us had maybe ever heard of anywhere in France except Paris, and wherever it was Joan of Arc was from. Alexis said, “Marie is a great skier.” Marie shrugged slightly, then helped herself to a piece of the white cheese. Ingrid, as it turned out, spoke German, French, and Norwegian but not English, so she chatted with Marie in French. Neither of them sounded at all like our French teacher, Madame Desmond—or Madame Defarge, as she was called behind her back. Sometimes, when she was being very strict, a couple of the boys would pretend to be knitting.

Diana and Ingrid had come down from San Francisco just for the party because, as Diana said, “Every time I tell my folks about Alexis and Barbie, they roll their eyes as if I’m making it up. I had to bring an independent witness.” I started liking her right then. Diana’s talent was math. The Jackson School had already given up on teaching her, and she went three times a week to UCLA for classes. She said, “There was a school I could have gone to in SF that had high-level math
classes, but my folks also wanted me to learn how to tie my shoes and put the cap back on the toothpaste.”

Alexis said, “We’ve been working on that. If I were your mom, I would settle for you not sitting on your glasses every other day.”

Diana laughed.

Mrs. Goldman came out carrying another dish—this one was a metal frame with a pot sitting on it. Under the pot was a flame. In the pot was something thick and liquidy. Marie said,
“Ah, très bon! Fondue au fromage!”
A moment later, Mrs. Goldman came out with another plate, this one of pieces of carrots and broccoli and green beans. Marie and Ingrid sat down at once and started tearing apart the loaf of bread, sticking pieces onto the prongs of long forks, and dipping them into the cheese (I did know what
fromage
was). The rest of us sat down with them. Surprisingly, Sophia, who hardly ever ate anything, dipped three pieces of bread and ate them, then tried a carrot and a green bean. Leslie and I looked at each other—we spent a lot of lunch hours watching Sophia eat and offering her things we thought she might (should) like.

Mrs. Goldman brought in another pot. This one had bubbling oil in it (we had to move out of the way when she set it on the table). Then she brought in a plate of beef cubes and two sauces, one that was orange and sweet and another that looked like barbecue sauce. She told us not to have more than six forks in either pot, or the fondue would cool off, so we took turns. I did like the cheese, and I did like the beef without sauce or with a little of the barbecue sauce. Leslie ate a
little bit of everything, and Sophia ate two pieces of beef and two more chunks of bread and cheese.

Dinner by fondue takes a while, and the whole time, we were talking. Marie told about skiing in the Alps and the Pyrenees. Ingrid talked about how wonderful it was to see ten hours of daylight so close to Christmas (Diana translated for her, and said that in Oslo, the sun was coming up at about nine-thirty and going down at about three). Leslie said that she was running three miles without stopping for a rest, and had heard about a thing called a marathon, and then it turned out that a marathon was twenty-six miles. Sophia told about Onyx and Pie in the Sky. Barbie told about Blue and Tooter, and Alexis said that there was a teacher at the high school who taught scuba diving, and explained what that was, and that was a reason she wanted to come back and go to our high school. Lucia said that she had taken that course in the summer, and that the bay, which we could walk to from school, was actually a deep canyon—two miles from the surface to the bottom in some spots, and even below the water, as deep as the Grand Canyon. I had been sitting at lunch with Lucia for ages, but she was so quiet that I didn’t know any of this. Leah asked if we remembered a show on TV called
Sea Hunt
, but no one did. Leah said that everyone in Berkeley was a vegetarian, and ate something called tofu, which was made of soybeans and came in various shapes, like chicken legs and liver and Mars bars. I told about Gee Whiz’s career at the racetrack, and about his getting out of the pasture and coming to stand by the porch while Rusty prevented the other horses from escaping.

The conversation went in fits and starts because we were also trying to dip our forks and not spill. There could have been some sort of bragging, since I had the sense that everyone there was quite good at something or other, but there wasn’t—bit by bit, everyone loosened up, so that by the time Mrs. Goldman brought the last pot, we were laughing most of the time. The last pot was chocolate, dark and thick, and incredibly wonderful-smelling. We got little cubes of angel food cake to dip into it. Marie said that her favorite
fondue au chocolat
was with strawberries and raspberries. I could only imagine it. We did make kind of a mess with the chocolate fondue.

When we went back into the living room and Alexis turned on the lights, I saw that they had set out a large white mat with rows of brightly colored spots on it. “Oh,” said Leslie, “Twister!” And indeed,
TWISTER
was written across one edge. There were ten of us, too many for one game, so we took numbers out of a bowl. Numbers 1 through 4 began the game while number 5 twirled the spinner and told each participant where to put each hand or foot. When an elbow or a knee touched the mat, or someone fell, she was out; the next number came in, and the first open number took over twirling the spinner. While we played the game, the stereo was on, a stack of records of all kinds, including the Rolling Stones and the Lovin’ Spoonful, but also Martha and the Vandellas, Ray Charles, and an old record of Marie’s by Edith Piaf. There was even one my dad might have liked, Patsy Cline. The music made it more fun, and pretty soon we were all dancing around and shouting if we weren’t playing.

Sophia got number 3, and of course she was good at the game—she could twist most of the way around but hold herself perfectly still. She outlasted numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6, and maybe she only buckled then because she was tired. I was number 7. My first turns were very easy, mostly like crawling across the mat, but then I had to reach my right hand under my body and put it way past my left foot, and I fell over, knocking over Ingrid. Leslie ended up completely upside down, her hands and feet spread wide, looking upward, and after she had been there for a while, Barbie started counting out seconds to see how long she was going to last—she made it to thirty-six seconds, which seemed like a lot, and then she started laughing when Alexis ran a feather up her right bell-bottom and tickled her on the leg. Even laughing, she lasted another eight seconds, which was, I said, as long as you were supposed to stay on a bucking bronco, and then Barbie had me tell them about Beebop, her “future mount.”

I think we made it through the Twister lineup two and a half times before Alexis brought out the playing cards and started telling our fortunes with a dish towel wrapped around her head, and Barbie standing behind her mouthing the words “Don’t believe a thing she says!” Her predictions were that Marie was going to go skiing, I was going to go riding, Leslie was going to run three miles, and Sophia was going to go on a trail ride with Barbie and have to save her life by galloping alongside her and dragging her off her horse as they galloped toward a cliff while an earthquake was taking place.

“And a thunderstorm!” exclaimed Diana.

“And a tornado!” shouted Lucia.

“And a Martian attack!” exclaimed Leslie.

Barbie said, “I don’t see any problem, really.”

And then I fell asleep.

It may be that I was the only one at the party used to going to bed before ten and getting up before six, and it also may be that I was the only one who as a rule slept like a log. I hadn’t even unrolled my bedroll. I was lying on the couch watching the fortune-telling, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up and yawning, and the room was quiet and dark. Various mounds around me indicated that others were asleep, too, but one of these was not Barbie. I could see her with Sophia and Marie over in the corner, doing something. I yawned again, and Barbie turned around, put her finger to her lips, and waved me over. I crawled.

The corner was dim, but there was some light from the moon, which was big and bright outside the window. The three of them were sitting with their legs crossed about six or eight feet from Alexis, who was asleep in her sleeping bag. She was lying on her side, with one elbow bent, and her hand under her pillow. Her other arm was resting on her hip. The sleeve of her pajamas was kind of pulled up and twisted. As I looked at her, she made a little snore.

Barbie, Marie, and Sophia were kneeling around a pot of water, talking in very low voices. Barbie said, “It works. It worked at school. You stick the hand of the sleeping person in a pot of warm water, and it makes them say something. The thing they say is the truth. It’s like hypnosis. You ask them a question in a really low voice, so as not to wake them up, and they tell the truth, no matter what they’ve been saying when they’re awake.”

Sophia was shaking her head. She said, “They don’t tell
the truth. They wet their pants. The feeling of the water makes them wet their pants.”

“It didn’t do that at school.”

“Did you do it to someone?”

“I didn’t, but some other girls did, and four of the boys did it, too.”

Marie said, “I’m not sure whether boys care enough about wetting their pants to remember if they did it.”

We all laughed quietly. Apparently, Alexis was to be the victim.

I said, “What are you going to ask her? Didn’t you always tell me you could read her mind, anyway?”

“I can read the good thoughts.”

Marie said, “Alexis doesn’t think bad thoughts.”

Barbie said, “That’s what I want to find out.”

Sophia was still serious. She said, “If she wets her sleeping bag, it’s very hard to get it out.” She had put her hair into a loose braid that went down her back and looked comfortable. She was wearing a nightgown, yellow flannel with little teddy bears. I still had on my clothes, Marie had on shortie pajamas, and Barbie was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of long johns like my dad wore on very very cold days. She picked up the pot of water, which sloshed a little bit, and moved it closer to Alexis’s hand. She put her finger in it, to test it. I put my finger in it, to test it. It was about the temperature of bathwater. We all crept closer to Alexis, who snored once again, and heaved a sigh. Once we were next to her, Barbie made a motion with her hand that we were to sit very still and not say anything. We sat like that for what seemed a long time, then Barbie slid
her fingers underneath Alexis’s fingers and kept them there. I found myself holding my breath, as if something bad was going to happen. We all waited, and then bit by bit, Barbie eased Alexis’s hand toward the pot and slid it into the water. Alexis did not wake up. I glanced at Sophia. Her eyes were wide and blue in the moonlight.

Finally, Barbie leaned very close to Alexis. We all leaned in. Barbie whispered, “Where did you hide my cashmere sweater?”

I had to put my hand over my mouth not to laugh, and I saw Marie grin, too. But there was no answer from Alexis, just another snore. Barbie leaned in again and repeated the question. There was a moment of silence, and then Alexis muttered, “I sold it on the black market.” We all laughed, even Alexis, who opened her eyes. She had been awake the whole time.