The Cybil War (3 page)

The letters made Simon hate the outdoors in the way he would hate a rival. And it seemed to Simon that nature had sensed his hate, just as a dog senses fear, and had sent poison ivy and wasps and pollen to retaliate.

He could imagine a Mother Nature who had thought up hurricanes and tornadoes pointing in his direction, instructing her plants and insects with a smile. “Sic 'im!”

Today there was no letter. I should stop hoping for letters, he told himself. It was as useless as trying to get kidnapped in second grade. He had finally learned to smile about that now.

It was the first awful winter without his father, and Simon had seen a TV special about a father who had left, just like his father, and then the father had come back and kidnapped his own son!

The idea had almost made Simon stop breathing. Maybe at this very moment—the possibility made him put his hand on his chest, right over his pounding heart—maybe at this very moment his father was planning to kidnap him.

It was like suddenly learning there's Christmas or television. There's kidnapping.

It was odd. He could remember how in first grade they had had long lessons on the dangers of being kidnapped. Mr. Repokis had given them an oral quiz about it.

“Now if someone offered you an ice cream sundae with marshmallows, nuts, bananas, and decorettes, would you get in the car with them?”

“Noooooooo.”

“And if someone offered to give you a Barbie doll with a majorette suit and a light-up baton, would you get in the car with them?”

“Nooooooooo.”

“And if someone offered to give you a matchbox car with real headlights and a real engine, would you get in the car with them?”

They were all collecting matchbox cars then, and Barry Hoffman, overcome, had cried, “
I
would!” and they had to start all over again, because kidnapping was such a terrible thing.

Now it became Simon's dream. Let my dad kidnap me, he prayed as he played dangerously near the road at recess. Let my dad kidnap me, he pleaded as he stood at the edge of the driveway. Let my dad kidnap me, he begged as he slowly passed a strange van parked down the street.

He was always at the edge of the street in those days, waiting for the feel of his father's arms as he was lifted into the waiting van and driven away.

It was December before he finally gave up. It was such a cold month that his mom would not let him sit outside without his Yogi Bear face mask. Even he, with all his dreams, had to admit that it was unlikely he would be kidnapped in that attire.

A voice at the door said, “I forgot. I can't go home till after the paaaaaarty.” It was Tony, speaking in his sister Annette's voice.

“I'll come out,” Simon said quickly, but before he could open the door, Tony was inside.

Tony came through a house like a pickpocket, opening drawers, picking up objects, glancing in envelopes, pulling out letters. He paused to glance through the Newtons' mail.

“Nothing from your old man?”

“No.”

Tony looked with interest at a
Reader's
Digest Sweepstakes Entry. “He must not have got his head together yet,” he commented.

“No.”

“Do you mind if I take this? I'd like to win some of this stuff—that boat, for instance.”

“There's no lake around here.”

“Well, do you mind if I take it?”

“No!” Simon paused, then said calmly, “Let's go outside.”

They went out and sat on the steps. Tony put his Sweepstakes Entry in his back pocket. “It's not fair,” he said. “Why am I—a member of the family—kept out of my own home so that strangers can come in and eat cake?”

“Because you imitate your sister and her friends and spy on them,” Simon answered with unusual bluntness.

“Come on. When did I spy?”

“Last week.”

“Name me two other times,” He broke off and sighed. “Oh, never mind.” Suddenly he straightened. “Hey, here comes Haywood. What's the Tub doing walking past your house?”

“Don't call her that. Maybe she's on her way somewhere. Lay off, will you?”

“Huh, she's walking past your house for one reason. She wants to see you.”

“After what you said this afternoon, I would be the last person she'd want to see.”

“Listen, I know about walking past people's houses. My sister Annette does it all the time. When she wants to see Rickie Wurts, she walks past his house, realllll slow, just like Haywood's doing. Sometimes she pretends to be looking for something she's lost. That way she can walk past ten, fifteen times until he comes out of the house.” He broke off to yell, “Haywood, where you going?”

Harriet turned her head and looked surprised to see them. Then she exhaled, giving the impression that the two of them were giving off an unpleasant odor.

“Come on,” Tony said. He grabbed Simon's shirt and pulled him down the sidewalk to where Harriet was waiting at the edge of the street.

“Well, I didn't expect to see
you,”
Harriet said. She lowered her eyes with the coldness of someone recently called a tub of blubber.

“It's his house,” Tony said. “Why wouldn't you expect to see him?”

“I just thought”—she was colder than ever now—“that after what you said today, the two of you would have the decency to stay out of my way.”

“We want to stay out of your way, Haywood,” Tony said, “only how are we going to do that when you come looking for us?”

“I was not looking for you!”

“She wasn't looking for us, Tony,” Simon said.

“Listen, I know what's happening here. I've got experience in these things.” Tony put up his hands. “Okay, Haywood, so while you weren't looking for us, what were you going to tell us when you found us?”

“Nothing, except that I told Cybil what you said about her legs.”

Harriet was glancing from Simon to Tony now, including them both in the responsibility for the insult.

“Well, I'm glad to hear that, Haywood,” Tony said. “You keep things like that to yourself, you'll end up in the funny farm.”

“And you know what she said about you?” She was looking right at Tony Angotti now, but Simon felt she was talking about him too.

“No, I don't know what Popsicle Legs said about us and I don't want to know.”

Simon said, “I do.”

Suddenly Harriet hesitated. She glanced from Tony to Simon. Simon could see that she wanted to tell them—indeed, she had walked all the way over here to tell them—but his eagerness made her change her mind.

“I'm not going to tell you,” she said and started walking away.

Tony yelled, “Haywood, you mean you come all the way over here to see us, walk fifteen, twenty blocks, and we take pity on you and come down from the porch, and then you won't tell us what Cybil said?”

“You got it,” Harriet said over her shoulder.

Simon and Tony watched her until she turned the corner. Then Tony said in a surprised voice, “I wonder what Cybil did say about us.”

“I don't know.”

“It had to be an insult of some kind.”

“Of course.”

“But there's nothing to insult!” He held out both hands to show he was hiding no flaws.

“Well, we're not perfect,” Simon said.

Tony was silent while he went over a mental checklist of his body. “Really, there's nothing to insult!”

“Maybe she said we're lousy baseball players.”

“What kind of insult is that? We call her legs Popsicle sticks and she comes up with, ‘Well, you play poor baseball.' Come on, if I know Cybil Ackerman, she said something a lot worse than that.”

“Yes, she could.”

Tony stood for a moment, looking up the street where Harriet had disappeared. Then he turned abruptly and said, “I'm going home.”

“It's not five o'clock yet. Annette's party isn't over. You—”

“Right. I've got”—he checked his watch—“exactly twenty minutes to spoil eeeeeeverything.” He started down the sidewalk for home, then he turned. “And I'll let you know tomorrow what Ackerman said about us.”

S
imon went back into the house and looked in the kitchen. His mother sometimes left notes for him. “Put the casserole in the oven. Clean the celery.” Today the message was, “Defrost the chicken.” He took the package from the freezer. He was like a robot kitchen helper, he sometimes thought, who performed acts without understanding what he was doing.

He went back to the living room. The television was broken, so he sat doing nothing, hands dangling at his sides.

Simon and Tony were known as best friends. Their friendship had been sealed in second grade when the entire class was asked to write essays on their fathers.

Simon refused to write one, and Tony could not because his father had died when he was one year old. Tony could not even remember his father. So they had sat at their desks, both miserable, both staring at their dirty fingernails, while other children went to the front of the room and read happily, “My father is a dentist. He plays golf. He plays tennis. He has a new car.”

When the voting was held on the best paper—Billy Bonfili won because his father was the high school football coach—only Simon and Tony did not vote.

“You don't have a father?” Tony asked after school. He had waited at the door to ask this, his long face intent.

“I have one,” Simon said carefully, “but he's gone.” “Where?”

“I don't know.”

“I had one but he's dead.”

“Oh.”

And thus sealed together by a mutual loss rather than mutual interest, their friendship had begun. They walked together to Tony's house.

“You like ravioli?” Tony asked at the edge of the walkway.

“I don't know.”

“You never had ravioli?”

“No.”

“Well, come
on
!
”

They went into Tony's house, and Simon sat at the kitchen table. He watched while Tony heated the ravioli. He was looking down at his steaming plate, at the strange, soft squares, when Tony's grandfather came in.

“You want some ravioli, Pap-pap?” Tony asked at the stove.

Pap-pap nodded, pulled out his chair, sat heavily. When the three of them were seated, plates full, Tony said, “He doesn't have a father either.”

Pap-pap looked over at Simon. His eyes, blue as a baby's, began to fill with tears. “You got no papa?”

“I have one but he's gone.”

Pap-pap pulled out his handkerchief. It was old and faded because it was used all the time. “Your papa left home?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“He comes to visit?”

“No.”

“He writes?”

“We got one letter.”

“One letter,” Pap-pap said sadly. He shook his head. Tears spilled onto his wrinkled cheeks. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose.

“He cries a lot,” Tony explained to Simon.

Simon nodded. He looked from Tony to the weeping Pap-pap. Simon had not seen his mother cry when his father left. He himself had not cried. And here, across the table, from an old man he had never seen before, were tears for his father. He felt the first stirring of tears in his own eyes.

“Sometimes he cries just because the moon's full, you know, because it's beautiful,” Tony explained, as he chewed. “And sometimes he cries because he sees a picture that reminds him of home, and sometimes—well, he just cries all the time. It doesn't mean anything.”

Simon nodded again.

“That's not true,” Pap-pap said. “It means something.” He peered at them over his handkerchief. “It means I get so full I spill over.” He made a gesture with his handkerchief as if it were water pouring over a dam. Then he wiped his cheeks again and, sniffling, began to eat.

Simon ducked his head, cut a piece of ravioli in half with his fork and put it in his mouth. The tears in his own eyes, the tightening of his throat made him unable to swallow, but there was something in the soft warm food, the weeping sympathetic man across the table that would make him feel sentimental every time he ate ravioli. Even in the school cafeteria, where ravioli came straight from a can, he would feel tears in his eyes when he ate.

Now Simon got up and went back into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator. His mother's taste ran to yogurt and natural foods and fresh vegetables and bran muffins. He selected a cup of yogurt and ate it slowly with a spoon, feeling nothing at all.

Then he went back into the living room, sat in his same seat, and turned his thoughts to Cybil Ackerman.

C
ybil Ackerman was practicing the piano. This was so that she could play trumpet in the band when she got to junior high. It was a deal she had made with her father. She was playing intently, eyes darting from the music to her hands. There was a carrot in her mouth. The doorbell rang.

“Cybil, get the door, please,” Mrs. Ackerman called.

Cybil removed the carrot from her mouth and stuck it in ajar of peanut butter beside her music. “I'm practicing,” she called back.

“Cynthia?”

“I'm studying.”

“Clara?”

“I'm in the bathroom.”

There was a rule in the Ackerman house that whoever was least busy had to answer the door and the phone. Mrs. Ackerman made the decision. “Cybil.”

“Oh, all right.” Cybil got up. “But I was just about to get that part.”