Taking Care of Terrific (8 page)

One of the bystanders, a young man in a yellow sweatsuit, had noticed the remaining signs stacked beside me in the grass. "You mind?" he asked, reaching down. I shook my head; he picked up a sign,
BRING BACK DADDY'S ROOT BEER
, and joined the shuffling bag ladies who
moved now in a wide circle around the Popsicle cart.

"Uh-oh," I said to myself when a mounted policeman trotted up on his horse to see what was going on. "Big trouble." But it wasn't. He frowned, leaned forward in his saddle to see what the signs said, and then smiled.

"My dad used to make root beer," he said to no one in particular as he patted the glistening neck of his horse.

An elderly, distinguished-looking man in a three-piece suit stood near me, with a pipe in his mouth. "It's not cricket to picket," he said in a British accent. Then, when he noticed me watching him, he explained, "That's Ogden Nash." He leaned over, picked up a sign, and joined the picket line.

People began to get their cameras out. Around me, I could hear wives say to their husbands, "Get a picture of the one with the cat in the sack!" "Quick, Harry! Get a shot of that lady in the orange wig before she goes past!"

In the background, I could see the Swan Boats slow from their graceful glide until they were almost motionless on the pond. Everyone in the boats was watching the commotion.

It was all over very quickly. The red-faced
man at the Popsicle cart began first to mutter, then to argue and complain; but finally, when the chant of the surrounding crowd—"Root beer, root beer, root beer"—grew louder and louder, he simply threw his hands into the air.

"You want root beer? So I'll give you root beer!" he shouted.

"When?" called the crowd; then that, too, became a chant. "When? When?"

"Tomorrow!" yelled the man, capitulating angrily.

The laughing policeman moved his horse through the crowd until he was in the midst of the circle of muttering, sign-wielding bag ladies and sympathizers.

"Let's break it up now, folks!" he called. "You've won your war!"

He turned to the Popsicle man. "Tomorrow," he said. "That was a promise."

The Popsicle man nodded grudgingly.

One by one the bag ladies and the others laid their signs in a stack on the grass. Gradually the crowd dispersed. The tourist trolley moved on; the Swan Boats began their silent glide across the pond again.

The bag ladies disappeared like shadows, moving singly away from the crowd and simply fading
from sight as they shuffled off. Even our own bag lady was gone.

Hawk drew out the last note like a sigh and put his saxophone down. "They didn't collect their pay," he said in amazement.

Tom Terrific jumped down from his bench and asked happily, knowing the answer, "Was I a good Head Honcho?" and I assured him that he was the best.

I left the signs for Hawk, who said he would take them to his car. Then I HUP-two-three-foured Tom Terrific home.

It was a great feeling to win a war. I was beginning to think that it might be fun to start another.

After something works out well, you want to talk about it to someone. During the school year, I spend half of every Saturday on the phone talking to Trina and Emily, my two best friends, about the school dances, plays, and concerts that are held on Friday nights. Or if nothing was held at school, we talk about whatever movie we went to the night before.

You just need to relive things, especially if they made you feel good. But there was no one I could talk to about the Great Root Beer Popsicle Strike.

The bag ladies had all dissolved like ghosts fading into the background of a late night movie.

Hawk? He had loped off, same as always, to his battered car, into which he loaded the signs and the saxophone. I had no idea where Hawk lived, where he went at night, who he went home to.

A statue of Edward Everett Hale stands there at the entrance to the Public Garden by the Popside cart, with his bronze overcoat draped around him in chiseled folds. He had watched the whole thing, but his mournful bronze eyes had never changed. Man of Letters he may have been—it says so at the base of his statue—but he sure wasn't much of a conversationalist.

Head Honcho Tom Terrific and I talked a bit on the way home; but let's face it, terrific though Tom was, he was only four. His main concern on the walk home was in getting his browns reorganized in the Crayola box and in bellowing out "HUP" every fourth step.

As for his mother, Ms. Cameron? By the time we reached the house on West Cedar Street, Tom Terrific had to change back to his Joshua self: sweet and cherubic, with his hair smoothed down. He affected great delight at the freshly squeezed orange juice his mother had ready, and I concocted a new set of reasons why we had not, again today, drawn pictures of trees.

"Hey, guess what
we
did this afternoon," I murmured to a poodle tied outside DeLuca's as I walked home. But the poodle yawned, then turned to chew on his own curly hip.

All of this is an explanation of why, later that evening, I called up Seth Sandroff. My parents (if I had tried to tell
them
about it, they would have
begun immediately to fill out registration forms to send me to summer camp, boarding school, rafting trips on the Snake River, Outward Bound, a cloistered convent) had gone to the theater. Mrs. Kolodny was reading an old issue of
Good Housekeeping
in the kitchen while the dishwasher ran. She had forgotten to add the detergent, but I didn't tell her. I figured the high temperature would kill the germs.

I left her engrossed in an article, "How to Stay Cheerful During a Difficult Pregnancy," and curled up in the den with a Diet Pepsi and the telephone.

"You turkey," said Seth after I had described the afternoon, "why didn't you let me arrange for a camera crew? I could have had the whole spot shown on
Heartwarmers
tonight at seven-thirty."

Heartwarmers,
need I add, is a wretched fifteen-minute TV thing dreamed up by Seth's father, guaranteed to make the audience either weep or barf. A hundred-year-old man with no living relatives celebrates his birthday all alone except for a three-legged dog. Blind triplets are taken to the circus for the first time. All of this is sponsored by a very crunchy cereal with no nutritional value.

"The viewing audience couldn't have stood it,
Seth," I said. "It would have overwarmed their hearts."

"Don't underestimate the power of television. You could have been famous, Crowley."

"I don't care about being famous. It was neat, seeing bag ladies grab some power."

"My dad probably wouldn't have used it, anyway," Seth said. "It would have seemed communistic to him. He gets very uptight when people wrest power."

"Right. Today the Popsicle cart, tomorrow the Congress."

Seth laughed. His laugh is surprisingly infectious when he isn't working hard at making it sound sinister.

"You want to go over to the Florian again?" he asked.

I groaned. "I'm drinking Diet Pepsi," I said. "And I ate salad for dinner. If I drink another one of those million-calorie drinks at the Florian I'll have to go to Fat Camp."

He laughed again, unsinisterly. "Well, do you feel like just going out for a walk or something? It's really the pits, sitting around this apartment."

We agreed to meet down at the corner, and I went to tell Mrs. Kolodny I was going out for a little while. Now she was filling out a magazine
questionnaire titled "Is Your Home Decor Really You?" She was licking the pencil tip before marking each little box "Yes," "No," or "Maybe." I cringed. I wondered about lead poisoning. I wondered how many years Mrs. Kolodny had been licking pencil tips.

"Enid," she asked when I came into the kitchen, "would you call me—" She followed the print with her finger and found the place. "Would you call me Somber and Serious, Merry and Mischievous, or Calm and Complacent?"

Talk about tough decisions. "Calm and complacent," I said after giving it a little thought.

She turned a page to peek at the answers. "I knew it!" she said triumphantly. "My decor should be apple green with touches of some vibrant blues!"

It wasn't completely clear to me why that news delighted her so. Maybe it was because she was wearing vibrant blue sneakers.

Back she went to the questionnaire, pencil tip in her mouth. I snitched a few grapes out of a bowl on the kitchen table (very few calories, grapes), told her I'd be home by nine-thirty, and headed out.

Seth was sitting on the front steps of a brownstone house on the corner. I wondered what Seth
Sandroff's decor should be. There hadn't been a category for Depraved and Disgusting.

He had a ball-point pen tattoo of a dragon smoking a cigar on one forearm. His shoes—Seth's, not the dragons—should clearly have been condemned by the Board of Health. Wedged into the back pocket of his cut-off jeans was a paperback of a Robert Ludlum spy novel.

"I never knew you could read," I said. "You practically flunked English last year."

"All I flunked was the test on
The Scarlet Letter
," Seth pointed out. "And that was because I missed the third episode on TV. Would you care to match my English grade against your final mark in Geometry?"

Touché. We let the academic discussion go and headed down Marlborough Street toward the Public Garden.

It was beginning to get dark. Funny; I've lived in Boston all my life, but I had never been in the Public Garden at night before. Muggers, rapists, murderers, thieves, and nocturnal rodents: these were the specters I had been warned about, the things that were said to prowl the Garden after dark.

But now, at dusk, there were only a few romantic couples sitting on benches and a derelict or two curling up around a bottle of wine until a policeman told them to move along.

And I felt pretty safe with Seth. No one would want to mug someone who looked as seedy as he did. At the same time, despite his seediness and skinniness, he had a certain confidence about him, a don't-mess-with-me look. We sprawled on a bench beside the pond. Out in the middle of the water, the Swan Boats were chained together for the night.

"Marlene fell out of a Swan Boat once," Seth said, "when she was about three. Or maybe it was Arlene. I can't remember. We were with my grandmother, and the twins were goofing off, and one of them fell in. Everybody screamed."

"Did someone have to leap in and save her?"

"Nah. Some guy just reached over the side and fished her out. The water's not very deep. Muddy, though."

"I wonder how they get them out there to the middle when they put them away for the night. Does somebody have to swim back to shore?"

Seth shrugged. "I dunno. They must have some system. They wouldn't make somebody
swim,
not in this gunky water."

"Rats," I said suddenly. I'd been staring at the swans, floating there in the dusk, their eyes staring blankly into the trees, when I remembered how longingly Tom Terrific had looked at them, how wistful he'd been as they slid past filled with laughing children.

"Rats? Where?" Seth jumped like a panther on the prowl and looked around.

"Relax. I didn't mean real rats. I just meant,
rats.
"

"Why?" He sat back down and tossed a pebble back and forth between his hands.

"This little kid I babysit for," I told him. "He never in his whole life has ridden on the Swan Boats. His mother won't let him."

"It's only fifty cents for under twelve," Seth said, pointing to the sign.

"It's not the money. She's loaded. You should see their house on West Cedar Street. She just thinks the Swan Boats are—I don't know—
tacky,
I guess."

Seth shrugged. "They are. So what?"

I threw some pebbles out into the water,
plink plink plink,
and they made circles that expanded and expanded and expanded. Seth tossed his pebbles into the center of my circles. His aim was pretty good. He ought to try out for the Carstairs basketball team. They haven't won a game in
three years, though they tied Milton last spring and lost in overtime.

And now I was thinking about something else as the Swan Boats moved gently against each other at the center of the pond.

"The bag lady, too," I said. "I saw
her
looking at the boats the same way Tom Terrific did. I bet she'd give anything to have a ride."

"So?
She
doesn't have a mother who thinks they're tacky."

"I don't know." I sighed. "Probably she can't afford the seventy-five cents it costs for adults. But that's not really it. You know what it is, Seth?"

He waited.

"It's because the bag ladies all feel as though they're not real people. They know they're different. Everybody looks at them funny and moves away when they walk by. After everybody's treated you like filth for a few years, probably you start
feeling
like you're really out of it, and—"

Seth was looking at me a little oddly. Me, who had treated him as if he'd crawled out from under a rock for as long as I could remember. We both decided to ignore that thought.

"—so you're not going to go stand in a line
full of tourists wearing pink and green alligator shirts, not if you know everybody's going to nudge each other and move away from you, not even if you've got the seventy-five cents and want to sit in a Swan Boat feeling like Queen Elizabeth for twenty minutes.

"It's not fair," I concluded, and I hunched up with my chin resting on my knees. It was starting to get chilly. "I wish sometime when no one was here, all those bag ladies could come and ride around the pond like Cleopatra's handmaidens so they could feel proud, and important, and peaceful, and—"

Seth had stood up and walked away. I thought for a minute that I had started getting too sentimental and poetic for him, that maybe he was going to do a barfing imitation into the rhododendron bushes. Then I saw what he was doing. He was examining a padlock and chain on the dock. If I had been a comic book character at that moment, a light bulb would have appeared in a balloon above my head.

"Seth!" I called in a loud whisper. "Do you think—"