Rose Sees Red (12 page)

The Mazzerettis’ house was not too far from the ferry dock.

Their living room was filled with instruments. There were guitars everywhere on stands. A piano in the corner. Violin cases and flute cases and trumpet cases. A snare drum. Some bongos. There was hardly room for the television, the couch, and the La-Z-Boy.

As soon as we got inside, Caleb, Caitlin, and Callisto headed straight for the instruments.

“Start in C,” Callisto said once her violin was at the ready. Caitlin was at the piano and Caleb was on the acoustic guitar.

Yrena, Maurice, and I sat down on the couch. They weren’t putting on a show. It was more like a nighttime ritual, like warm milk or hot Sleepytime Tea. The Mazzerettis played music to unwind from a long day.

First they jammed. Then they started playing standards and singing together, with Caitlin taking the lead vocals and Caleb and Callisto throwing in an occasional harmony.

“Switch,” Caitlin said to Caleb, reaching for the guitar.

“No, I want to play guitar,” he protested.

“Don’t be such a greedy guts,” Callisto snapped back.

“Fine.” He sat down at the piano, and Caitlin picked up the acoustic guitar and started strumming. “But let’s play something that our guests can sing, too.”

“Oh, I can’t sing,” I said.

“
Anyone
can sing,” Callisto said.

We agreed on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Maurice and I joined in, but Yrena was silent. She didn’t know the words. When the song was done and we were trying to figure out another song to play, Yrena began to sing a Russian song a cappella. We sat there, transfixed—her voice was shaky, but that made it even more moving.

“Spi, mladenec moj prekrasnyj…”

The triplets listened and then figured out how to play some notes along with her. When she was done, she translated:

“Sleep, my lovely baby, sleep.

The clear moon quietly watches over you.

I will tell you fairy tales

And I will sing you songs.

Close your eyes and drift to sleep.

Sleep, my lovely baby, sleep.”

We were there and we were safe and we were happy and we were singing. Everything in that room seemed right. As though the very molecules in the air had lined up correctly.

“Time for sleep,” Callisto said as she put away her violin. Then she went over to Maurice and led him down the hall into her bedroom.

The rest of us looked at each other, not knowing what we should do.

“We three girls can bunk down in my parents’ room,” Caitlin said. “We can’t go into my bedroom—it looks like it’s now a love nest.”

“Mom and Dad’s room is the one room we can’t make a mess of,” Caleb said. “So I’m not sure it’s the best place for a sleepover.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do?” Caitlin asked.

I didn’t care how they figured it out. I was still on the couch, so I lay down and I pulled the quilt that covered the back of it over me.

“I’m fine here,” I said, closing my eyes.

As I drifted off, I heard Caitlin and Caleb arguing about who was going to sleep where. I didn’t hear what was decided until a bit later when the couch moved and a hand slid under the small of my back.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to touch you or anything,” Caleb was whispering.

“You
are
touching me,” I said.

His hand was actually now on my butt. I knew he didn’t mean it in a coming-on-to-me way, but it was still weird.

He looked embarrassed. Like he knew that he was touching my butt and there was not too much he could do about it.

“You’re just sleeping on the guitar strap,” he said. “And I kind of want to play some more.”

I lifted my back up and he pulled his guitar and strap away.

“Where are Yrena and Caitlin?” I asked. I was sort of asleep and sort of awake.

“They’re sleeping in my room, on my bed.” His fingers pressed on the strings, which made a muted sound.

“In the same bed?” I asked. “I feel bad. Should I offer to switch?”

“I think they became instant friends.”

“She’s cool like that, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, if they can do it, then maybe there’s hope for the world after all,” he said with a smile. He was really cute when he smiled.

He sat down on the La-Z-Boy chair, released the handle, and lay back. His guitar was on his chest and he held it as though it were a lady. He flicked off the lamp next to him and turned on the TV, which was broadcasting snow.

“Do you mind if I leave the TV on?” he asked. “I like waking up to morning cartoons.”

“Me, too,” I said. “I like to watch
Super Friends
on Saturday mornings.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Who’s your favorite superhero?” he asked.

“Well, on
Super Friends,
obviously it’s Wonder Woman.”

“The girl.”

“She’s called Wonder
Woman
.”

“I like Aquaman,” he said. “He can talk to fish and stuff.”

“I wish I could talk to fish,” I said. I was drifting off. I was dreaming. Then there was nothing, until someone was shaking me awake.

“Hey,” Caleb said as he was leaning over me. “Yrena’s on TV.”

“What? No,” I said. I was wide awake now because I heard the anchorperson say Yrena’s name.

“…
Yrena Yusim, a Soviet teenager, has been missing from her Riverdale apartment since last night. The Soviet government is asking for help in bringing her back home. So far there is no evidence that this is a defection or a kidnapping, but authorities are not ruling out that possibility. The girl is scheduled to return to Russia next week.”

“Oh my God,” I said. I sat up. I stood up. I sat back down. I put my hands over my face.

“Hey, you’re not going to cry, are you?” Caleb asked. I could sense him backing away a little bit because I was now the girl who was in his living room crying. It was like I had the plague or something.

“What am I going to do?”

“I dunno,” Caleb said. “Go home now?”

“Maybe I should call my brother again,” I said. “See if he knows what’s going on.”

“Sounds good to me.” Caleb pointed me to the phone.

My fingers were shaking. They felt like they would get stuck in the rotary phone holes as I dialed.

I knew it was early. 7:15, according to the wall clock.

“You’ve reached Todd. Rhymes with
Zod.
Land of Nod. And alien pod. Leave your transmission at the tone. May the Force be with you.”

“Todd. Are you there? Pick up.”

I sat on the telephone stool and leaned my head against the glass of the door.

“Todd. It’s Ro—”

The phone clicked as he picked up.

“Yo,” Todd said. He had that groggy I-want-to-sleep-all-day tone. I couldn’t tell whether it was because of Dungeons and Dragons or what was going on with Yrena.

Silence.

Then the phone clicked again.

“Did you hear that?” Todd asked.

“Do you hear me?” I asked back.

“Yeah. Yeah. Uh. Everyone is freaking out about that movie. Man, I am going to go see it again today for sure.”

“What?” I asked. Why was he so weird? I didn’t have time for his games. I opened my mouth to start reaming him out but he wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise.

“Uh, yeah,
Danielle,
I’m so happy you called me, and we’re totally on. Hey, I was thinking of seeing
E.T.
again for sure.”

“What? Todd?”

“I sure do like Steven Spielberg. I’d like to bring him roses. Hey, that’s my sister’s name, Danielle,
Rose.
”

Then he hung up on me.

I started to tremble because I realized that it must be really bad over at the house. People must really be listening in to the telephone calls. Oh my God. My phone was being tapped. Or someone was in the room with him.

“What happened?” Caleb asked.

“My brother is freaking out. I think it must be bad over at the house.”

“Bad like how?” Caleb asked.

“I don’t know! KGB! CIA!”

“Okay, don’t freak out on me. ’Cause if you freak out then I don’t want to help you.”

“Right.” I took a breath.

“What did your brother say?”

“He talked about E.T.”

“Good movie.”

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Let’s just not tell Yrena that she’s a top story on the news. We’ll just go to the march for a little while, and meanwhile I’ll figure out how to get us home.”

“You’re a little radical, aren’t you?” Caleb said. “Who knew?”

I shrugged. Maybe that
was
what I was now. A radical. I let that sit on me like a 1920s flapper’s skullcap. It was snug and it fit okay for that moment. I was feeling pretty radical.

We woke the others up and we all ate cereal together.

Caleb kept quiet about the news, but I noticed that he kept glancing at me and giving me a look. I didn’t know what the look meant. Was he giving me the eye? Did he want to say something to me? Was it a signal?

I’d have to get him alone and ask him. In the meantime, I made my face unreadable.

We returned to the Staten Island Ferry—this time in daylight—and headed back to the city. And as the skyline got larger, it looked gray and menacing, not as magical as it had under the cover of the dark night.

I had no idea what was waiting for us there.

The sound was like a roar in the air when we emerged from underground.

“What is that noise?” I asked.

“It’s the march!” Callisto said.

There were thousands of people all walking in the same direction, streaming up the streets. They were everywhere. Their voices singing, talking, humming, praying, their hearts beating, their feet walking, all together made the air buzz. And, amazingly, all of them had come together for one purpose: peace.

I ask you, how could you feel helpless against the bigness of the world with that kind of gathering?

I ask you, how could you not be swept away?

You couldn’t.

We stepped into the stream of people heading toward the park, and I was glad that our voices made the crowd that much louder. I could almost hear the change in volume that our voices added.

I was glad of it.

“I thought that it would just be old hippies,” Caleb said, looking around.

“Me, too,” I told him.

“I am pleasantly surprised,” he said.

It was an ocean of every kind of person you could possibly imagine. Everyone who made up New York City. Everyone who made up the world. Professionals, parents, children, punks, physicists, yuppies, artists, actors, firemen, dock workers, cabbies, teachers. Everyone. It was a people-watching paradise.

They all had signs.

P
ROFESSIONALS FOR A
N
UKE
-F
REE
W
ORLD
!

P
ARENTS FOR
N
O
N
UKES
! N
O
W
ARS
!

T
EACH
T
OLERANCE
! T
EACH
P
EACE
! T
EACHERS
S
AY
N
O
N
UKES
!

P
UNKS FOR
P
EACE
!

P
HYSICISTS FOR
A
TOMS
! N
OT
B
OMBS
!

G
ET
A
CTIVE
! N
OT
R
ADIOACTIVE
!

“Who is Ron?” Yrena asked, pointing to a sign that said T
HIS
I
S
N
OT A
M
OVIE
, R
ON
!

“Our president,” Maurice said. “Ronald Reagan.”

“He was a movie actor,” I explained.

“Oh, I see—this is real life and not a movie, Ronald Reagan,” she said, and then she laughed.

A huge blue whale balloon went by. It had a thought bubble over its head that said S
AVE THE
H
UMANS
.

“Ha!” I said, pointing it out to everyone.

“It’s probably true that if whales could talk they would tell us to stop having nuclear bombs,” Callisto said.

We all nodded.

“Those whales would definitely have something to say about it,” I said.

“Too bad that’s not in my skit,” Caleb said. “Let’s go, or I’ll be late.”

We pushed deeper into the thick of the crowd.

I felt as though I was a part of something bigger than myself. I looked around at the other people—some walked at our pace, some moved faster, and some took their time, but they were all like us. We smiled at them and they smiled at us, and embraced us as part of them. We shook our heads in approval back at them, and as we did, they welcomed us.

People even handed us signs to hold up.

L
OVING
A
RMS
, N
OT
N
UCLEAR
A
RMS

F
REEZE THE
A
RMS
R
ACE

I
T’S A
W
ORLD
E
MERGENCY

The crowd thickened the closer we got to Central Park. We had our free arms linked together so that we didn’t lose one another, and with our free hands we held up the signs. There were more people there than I’d ever seen in one place. More people on the streets than what I’d seen at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. There were people with bullhorns. There were people with banners that said No N
UKES
NOW!

As we walked toward the park, I noticed that there were many people just watching us marchers walk by.

“How can they stand there?” I said. “We’re not a parade!”

“Calm down there, radical,” Caleb said. “They have the right to watch. Maybe they won’t join us this time, but maybe next time.”

“But we are walking for
them.
How can they not be moved by the message? The message that we all want to live?”

“I think some people just don’t feel for the whole world,” Caleb said.

“It’s hard to feel for the whole world,” Yrena observed.

“It’s hard to even feel for your friends and family sometimes,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to.”

Yrena seemed to be a bit overwhelmed by everything that was going on.

Some of the bystanders were not just watching us passively. They were yelling at us all as we walked by. There were people protesting the peace march. There were people screaming that
we
were the dangerously naive ones.

They yelled:
Peace is a Soviet weapon.

They yelled:
The devil’s headquarters is in Moscow.

They yelled:
You cannot trust those who are evil. They have bullhorns.

What they were yelling hurt us all, but Yrena was the hardest hit.

I looked at Yrena and I could see how upset she was. She
was holding on to her sign as though it were going to hold her upright. I could tell that she wanted to cry.

We all touched her nicely so that she knew that we felt terrible and that we did not feel as though she was evil at all.

“But who is a devil? Me? You? Them?” she asked.

The people lined up thought anyone who didn’t think like them was the devil, and that was surely evil. But they were just scared, like we were.

“Those people yelling at us for marching are just as angry and upset as we are about nuclear bombs,” I said.

“They feel that we are against real peace and that we are messing up their safety in this world,” Caleb said.

“Isn’t that weird?” Callisto said. “That two groups of people can feel so much like the other side is dangerous and naively misguided.”

“That’s why we’re at war,” Maurice said.

“Just keep walking,” I said. “Don’t listen to them.”

“Propaganda,” Yrena said. “It is just to make us seem like, what do you call it?”

“The Red Menace,” I said.

“Yes. The Red Menace. We were not the only ones with bombs pointed. We were not the only ones who propagated this idea. Only you covered it up and call it being
free.
”

“They’re free to protest,” Caleb said. “Just like we are.”

“I’m not afraid to observe your protest rituals,” Yrena said. “I don’t hate you people. I like you.”

“We don’t hate you, either,” Callisto said. “Obviously.”

“Glad that’s out of the way,” Caleb said.

“Is it really hate?” I asked. “Is that what it is?”

“No,” Yrena said. “It’s not hate. It’s not the
mes
and
yous.
When it is
me
and
you,
it is always fine.”

“It’s the
uses
and
thems,
” I said.

“Why can’t our countries get along?” Callisto asked. “I mean, why can’t they see that having bombs pointed at each other is stupid? I can see it’s stupid.”

“I can see it’s stupid, too,” Yrena said.

“Even Reagan and Brezhnev can see that it’s stupid,” Maurice said.

“But they don’t do anything about it,” I said. “They just keep at it.”

“Maybe they think that keeps it balanced?” Caleb said.

“But don’t we ever figure it out?” Caitlin asked. “I mean, is there ever a point where we realize that we are all human beings and that life is precious?”

“No,” I said. “No matter how many people speak up, people always hate.”

“I hate haters,” Callisto said.

“Me, too,” Yrena said.

“I can’t wait until I’m eighteen,” I said, “so I can vote for change.”

That’s when Caleb punched me in the arm.

“You’re so cool,” he said.

And then he put his arm around my waist and squeezed
like he
liked
me. I felt a thrill and it was more than just from being in a crowd a half a million people strong.

The truth was, we were always in a sort of tentative balance with someone. Friends, even the best of friends, were always in danger of destroying each other. Alliances shifted and changed. People came together and fell apart.

It was all politics, except that in friendship we were held in balance by the heart and in the real world we were held in balance by the fact that there was a thing called MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. So if one side attacked the other, the bombs from the other side were launched automatically, to assure that both sides were completely annihilated. It didn’t surprise me that the acronym was MAD. That was mad. Pure. Crazy. Madness.

It made me look up at the sky. It made me see the world in a much more focused way.

“Do you really think there will be a nuclear war?” I asked Yrena. “I mean, it seems so hard to believe that we or you would do that.”

“Hard to believe on a beautiful morning like this,” Caleb said.

“I don’t think that a bright day protects us from people whose hearts are immune to trust and filled with such darkness,” Yrena said. “And sadly, bombs are incapable of having anything, even a truly fine feeling, touch them.”

That made me have goose bumps. That made me want to fight harder for all that is good in the world. That made me
want to bring my friends in closer to me. That made me want to pump my fist harder into the air.

As we walked, the crowd separated and walked around a spot on the street. On the ground were chalk outlines of bodies painted black. The result was that it looked as though only people’s shadows had been left behind.

“They said that’s what happens,” Caleb said. “In seventh grade we read this book on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and there was a picture of someone’s shadow sitting on the steps of a bank. That’s all that was left of him.”

“Oh yeah,” Callisto said. “I remember wondering if when you melt, does it hurt?”

“It must hurt,” Caitlin said.

“It must be something terrible,” Yrena said.

“How could a society think that they are a better people?” I asked. “That they think a better way? That they live a better way? And that, because they are better, they are allowed to kill other people?” I asked.

“It’s the oldest story in the book,” Callisto said.

“As if we live any differently. As if we all aren’t just trying to put food on the table, and fall in love, and get through the day,” Maurice said.

“How long can we stay right on the brink of hating each other?” Caitlin said.

“They said that the Doomsday Clock is almost at midnight. We are hovering on the edge of destruction,” Caleb said.

“We do it because you do it,” Yrena said. “And you do it
because we do it. Everyone does it because everyone else does it. As you said, it’s the oldest story in the book.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s a good story,” I said.

Once we got inside of Central Park, there were a lot of policemen, on foot and on horses.

A march volunteer handed us two silver balloons and told us not to let them go until we were told to.

“How will we know when?” I asked the volunteer.

“You’ll know,” she said. Each balloon said G
OOD
-
BYE
, N
UCLEAR
W
EAPONS
.

There were vendors at the entrance to the park, hawking No Nukes stuff.

“I want one of those T-shirts,” Yrena said.

It was white with a pink-and-red stripe and a little sun on it, and said R
EVERSE THE
A
RMS
R
ACE
!

We all wanted one.

“Well, Yrena has to get a T-shirt,” I said. We pooled our money together to buy her one.

After what seemed like much longer than needed to be because of all the people, we got to the rock, where the party had been the night before. A bunch of people from Performing Arts were there.

“Hey!” Elliot Waldman said. “Glad you got here.”

“Hi,” Caitlin said. She was blushing.

Caleb left us and joined the others in the skit. After about fifteen minutes, Elliot stood up and gathered a crowd
around the base of the rock and announced the Performing Arts Revolutionary Players.

“Here is the truth,” Caleb said in his old-timey emcee voice. “We are always thirty minutes away from total destruction.”

And then they launched into their skit. I am Russia. I am America. Fisticuffs. Girls as bombs. Bomb noises. Everyone fell down and melted from a nuclear attack and while they lay there, they began to sing “America the Beautiful” and the whole crowd joined in.

We clapped. But some adults said that it was shameful that kids were being brought up to be so anti-American.

“Anti-American!” Caleb yelled back at some older guy. “What are you doing here then?”

“Relax,” I said. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, just because we had a moment before doesn’t mean anything,” he said, shaking me off.

He pushed by me and went to join the other actors behind the rock. Presumably to get stoned.

“Hey, sorry about that,” Caitlin said.

“He can be really sensitive about his art,” Callisto said. “I think he just got upset that people got upset.”

“Well, I liked it,” I said. “I thought it was great.”

“Yrena!”

Like a miracle, we had found Free. He was walking by the rock and saw us.

“Free!” Yrena said as she and the others emerged right behind us.

“Hey! Wicked! You guys made it!” Free said.

Yrena went straight up to Free and kissed him right on the lips. He looked a little surprised but also really happy.