Libby on Wednesday (14 page)

Mizzo was just starting to ask for comments when the bell rang for the end of class.

   13

A few minutes later that same afternoon Libby was at her locker getting the books she needed to take home when right behind her a startlingly loud voice said, “Hey, Mighty Mouse. You going home now?” Of course it was Tierney.

Since the last class of the day had just ended, the answer to Tierney’s question was pretty obvious. It did occur to Libby to say that, no, she was actually just arriving early for Thursday morning. She didn’t say it, but she was pleased she’d thought of it. What she did say was, “Yes, I guess so. Aren’t you?”

“Sure,” Tierney said. “At three-twenty I’m outta here. Come on. Let’s split. I want to talk to you.”

Libby knew what was coming, or at least she thought she did. Tierney was about to make another pitch for a visit to the McCall House. This time, however, it turned out to be something different, or perhaps a slightly less direct approach to the same thing. What Tierney had in mind was
that Libby should come home with her to see the stuff she’d collected and just to “hang out for a while.”

At first Libby tried to think of a good excuse not to go. But then, while she was still trying to decide which excuse sounded most convincing, she suddenly realized that she didn’t particularly want to get out of going. She was, in fact, a little bit intrigued, not only with the idea of seeing what kind of a collection Tierney had but even more so with finding out where she lived and perhaps some information about the home environment of a person with pink hair.

“Okay,” she said. “But I can’t stay very long unless I call home and let them know where I am.”

“Sure,” Tierney said, and then, in a high, squeaky alien-type voice, “Mighty Mouse call home. If E.T. can call home, why not Mighty Mouse. What planet are you from, anyway? If it’s the same one as E.T., all we need is a few clothes hangers and an old record player. Right?”

And Libby said, “Right!” even though she had never seen
E.T
. and didn’t really know what Tierney was talking about.

Tierney lived on Balsam Avenue, only a few blocks from the school but on the other side of Main Street. On the way through the downtown section they stopped once or twice to look in shop windows—a pet shop first and then a Gap outlet that had some new baggy-looking denim jackets in the window.

While they were looking in the pet shop window at some guinea pigs and white mice, Libby started grinning, and she noticed that Tierney was doing the same thing.

“Yeah,” Tierney said. “The gopher thing. I was thinking about the same thing. That was really rad. I mean that
Lockwood character is really a rad writer. Too bad he’s such a nerd.”

“Nerd?” Libby asked.

“Yeah. Squirmy. Jumpy. You know. The square root of uncool.” She hitched up one shoulder and did a nervous tic thing with one side of her face.

“Yes,” Libby said. “Well, he has cerebral palsy, for one thing.”

Tierney stopped grinning. “Yeah? Is he going to die, or what?”

Libby shook her head. “You don’t die of cerebral palsy. It doesn’t get worse or anything. It’s just something you’re born with and it doesn’t go away.”

Tierney went back to looking in the window. After a while she said, “Hey. Look at that guinea pig. The Blob—with fur.”

They’d walked on down the street for about half a block before she said, “Hey, I didn’t know that—about Lockwood, I mean. You should have told me before.”

The next time they stopped, to look at the denims in The Gap, they were standing in the sunshine, and the shop window was almost like a mirror. They looked at their reflections for a minute, and then they looked at each other and grinned.

“Hey, Mighty Mouse,” Tierney said. “Would you mind walking on the other side of the street? People are going to think I play with kindergartners.”

“Yes,” Libby said. “Or else they’ll think I’m with my mother.”

Tierney pretended to hit her and then they both convulsed with laughter. What made it so funny was that,
no matter how big she was, Tierney—with her spiky pink hair and safety-pin earrings—certainly didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a mother. They laughed, and stopped, and looked at each other in the window and laughed again. It took several minutes for them to sober up enough to start off again down the sidewalk.

Libby wasn’t familiar with the Balsam Avenue area where Tierney lived, since it was on the other side of town from the McCall House. The homes on Balsam were fairly new and quite large, and Tierney’s house was one of the largest. Low and rambling with diamond-paned windows and a steep shake roof, it would have looked like a country cottage if it hadn’t been so big—as if someone had been trying to build the largest country cottage in the whole world.

“Well, here we are in the land of Oz. Cute, isn’t it,” Tierney said as she took out a key and unlocked the front door. “You better brace yourself.”

“Brace myself?” Libby asked. “What for?”

“For my gorgeous family. For my totally overwhelmingly gorgeous family.” The sneer was suddenly back in Tierney’s voice, and when Libby checked, she could see it on her face too. What Tierney was saying about her family was obviously ironical and probably sarcastic too. As the two of them walked down the hallway toward the sound of voices at the rear of the house, Libby tried to brace herself. She didn’t have any idea what to expect, but the picture in her mind was of some other very large people with crazy hairdos and weird clothing.

They found Tierney’s family, at least two members of it, in the kitchen, and the amazing thing was—they really were
gorgeous. Tierney’s sister, whose name was Courtney and who was a senior in high school, was tall like Tierney, but very slender. She had sleek, heavy dark hair, a fashion-model figure, and a long, lovely face. Her mouth was as big as Tierney’s, but somehow in Courtney’s face it looked as if it were meant to be that way, instead of the result of an accident. And Mrs. Tierney looked very much like Courtney only slightly older. They really were fantastic-looking, both of them—and they were also polite and friendly, even though Tierney wasn’t.

In fact Tierney just stomped through the room without saying anything, and when her mother asked her to introduce her friend, she just said, “Mighty Mouse. Her name is Mighty Mouse,” without pulling her head out of the refrigerator.

Libby said hello and was starting to explain that Mighty Mouse was only a nickname, when Tierney came out of the refrigerator with two cans of 7-Up, shoved one of the cans into her hand, and started dragging her out of the room. They had already started down the hall when Mrs. Laurent called to ask if they’d like some cookies, and Tierney went back to get some, leaving Libby alone in the hallway. She couldn’t quite hear what Mrs. Laurent was saying to Tierney in the kitchen, but she heard Tierney’s answer clearly.

“Well, you didn’t have to stare at her,” she said. “And besides, she’s a lot bigger than she looks.”

Libby couldn’t help giggling—even though she was still feeling embarrassed over the way Tierney had acted in the kitchen. She wanted to know how on earth a person could be a lot bigger than she looked, but when Tierney came stomping, back down the hall, scowling fiercely and muttering
something under her breath, she decided not to ask. By the time they got to her room the frown was completely gone.

“Here we are,” she said as she threw the door open. “Step out of the time capsule, ladies and gentlemen, and into the past.”

It was a large room, and they were in it for several minutes before Libby realized that it was actually Tierney’s bedroom. For one thing there were so many other pieces of furniture in it—all kinds of tables, cabinets, shelves, and display cases. And for another the bed itself was almost invisible, buried under a huge pile of debris. Besides a general scattering of clothing, shoes, books, and magazines, there was the collection—Tierney’s “old stuff” collection that not only packed every cabinet and display case but also spread out over every other flat surface in the room.

There were dishes, and figurines and toys, including a Shirley Temple doll and a full set of Dionne-quintuplet dolls. There were early types of telephones and toasters and radios, and even a model of Amelia Earhart’s airplane. The walls were covered with posters of old movies and stage plays, and opposite the bed was a large TV set with a VCR and a whole shelf of videotapes of old movies—a lot of Marx brothers, Charlie Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy, and even
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
and
Gone With the Wind
.

“You want to borrow some of the videotapes?” Tierney asked.

“Well, I’m afraid it wouldn’t do me much good. We don’t have a VCR.”

“Oh, yeah? Well I guess you’ll just have to come back
here sometime for a thirties retrospective. A whole lot of my movies are from the thirties. Not all of them, but a lot. We can watch old movies and eat popcorn, and I’ll even give away a door prize like they used to do back in those days. Here, sit down. And that telephone works if you have to”—Tierney changed her voice to high-pitched Alienese—“call home.”

The phone did work, even though it was a real antique with the mouthpiece at the top of a long stem and a bell-shaped receiver hanging down just below it. Actually Libby knew it wouldn’t be necessary to phone home if she left fairly soon. By taking the bus instead of making her usual leisurely stroll, she could still be home before anyone would start worrying. But she called anyhow because she wanted to see what it would be like to use the old phone. Gillian answered, and after Libby told her she might be a little late, and put off her curious questions, she went back to exploring Tierney’s room.

The collection was really fantastic. Tierney had a great many rare things—all kinds of objects that Libby had seen in antique and collectors’ books and wished that she could buy.

“Where did you get these? Did they belong to your grandmother?” she asked when she was examining the Dionne-quintuplet dolls, with their frilly dresses in different shades of pastel and little golden name pins that told which doll represented which quintuplet. She was really feeling envious, because dolls were in short supply in Libby’s collection. They were one thing that Graham apparently never thought of collecting back in the thirties, when he was buying nearly everything else in sight.

“No,” Tierney said. “My dad bought them for me in an antique store in Boston when he was back there on business.” And as Libby went on asking, she found that most of the other things in the room had been purchased for Tierney by various members of her family. It was very obvious to Libby, who for years had been avidly scanning the collectors’ books and magazines in Elliott’s store, that a great deal of money had been spent. She decided to mention the fact to Tierney.

She had stopped circling the room by then and was sitting in a chair that Tierney had cleared for her by dumping a stack of towels and clothing off onto the floor. She was examining one of the Shirley Temple dolls. The doll still had its original dress and curly blond wig.

“These are very expensive now,” she told Tierney. “Your parents really have spent a lot of money on your collection, haven’t they?”

Tierney shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. They spend a lot of money on me. Trying to prove something, I guess.”

“What are they trying to prove?” Libby asked.

Tierney threw herself down across her bed, sending shoes and books and even a couple of dirty dishes bouncing off onto the floor. “Who knows?” she said. She lay on her back staring at the ceiling for a while before she said, “What are they trying to prove? Well, let’s see. Maybe it’s that they’re not sorry I was born.”

Libby got up and put the Shirley Temple doll back on the shelf and then slowly picked her way back across the floor. While she stepped carefully over and around shoes, wadded-up newspapers, books, clothing, and an occasional valuable collectors’ item, she was thinking about what Tierney
had said, and once back in the armchair, she went on thinking about it and dealing with a confusion of thoughts and feelings.

Part of it was something she never in the world would have expected to feel, and that was a little bit sorry for Tierney. But more than sorry—a great deal more—she was feeling curious, which she wasn’t exactly proud of under the circumstances, but maybe she couldn’t help herself. After all, she was a writer and, according to Gillian, all real writers, as well as some ballet dancers, have a God-given talent for curiosity.

The curiosity was winning out, and she was just trying to decide on the best question to start with, when Tierney began to answer without being asked.

Still lying on her back with one arm across her eyes, she began to talk in a tense, angry voice. “Like I said, they’re gorgeous. You saw my mom and Courtney. You didn’t see Heather, she’s away at college now, but she’s the most gorgeous of all. My dad isn’t, but then you don’t have to be if you’re a man. What my dad is, is gigantic, and kind of clunky-looking. But, like I say, that’s okay, for him. And see, they had these two beautiful daughters, but my dad still wanted a big clunky boy like him, so they decided to have another kid, and what did they get? Yours truly, a gigantic, clunky girl. See, my dad is a big important lawyer and my mom has her own business, and it’s like I’m their only failure. Soo—” Tierney waved her other arm in a gesture that included the whole room and everything in it. “Sooo—they have to work real hard at pretending they’re not sorry.”