The Good, the Bad & the Beagle (20 page)

“Hello, ladies, what I can do you for?” a small old man in a gray smock said. His thinning hair was slicked back. He leaned to one side and Veronica wagered if she looked, she would find that he had a hump on his back. His resemblance to the laboratory assistant of Dr. Frankenstein was uncanny.

“We would like to buy two plants, please,” Sylvie said. “Two of the same of any type of plant, as long as they are similar in size and health and appearance.”

“One for you and one for your sister. Is that the idea?” the man asked.

“No,” Sylvie said.

“No?” said the man.

“No, we aren’t sisters. Although we do need two plants. We’re using them for a science experiment so it is important that the two plants resemble each other as much as possible.”

“Come on,” he said, “you’re pulling my leg. She’s pulling my leg, right? You look exactly the same. You’re not identical twins?”

He stepped back and gave Veronica and Sylvie the once-over. Then, as though an amazing thought occurred to him, he declared, “You’re even wearing the same clothes!”

Obviously he had never heard of school uniforms before.

“I can assure you,” Sylvie said in a very adult manner, which Veronica couldn’t help but be impressed by, “we are not sisters.”

Veronica paid for her African violet with a sweaty twenty-dollar bill her parents had given her that morning as recompense for the lousy mess they’d made of her life while Mary was away. She stuffed the change in the front pocket of her backpack.

Latchkey Kid

Sylvie Samuels had her own keys and her own life after school that did not involve any grown-ups.

Veronica would be so sad without Mary. Wonderful, kind, loving Mary, Mary who was alone in the Hospital for Special Surgery. Sylvie did not have a Mary. Or maybe they were alone in the Samuels apartment because they were supposed to complete their science projects without any help from parents or other outside sources. Veronica had concluded that Randolf students had gotten a lot of help on their projects in the past and this year the teachers were cracking down.

But from the way Sylvie flipped on the lights, put her book bag down, and seemed so at ease, Veronica could tell Sylvie came home to an empty apartment every day.

“Oh. Do you mind taking your shoes off?” Sylvie asked. “And just hang your coat in the closet.” She hung up her coat and disappeared into some other part of the apartment.

Veronica stood in the front hall, dismayed. What did she expect? A tour of the house? She took her coat off and opened the closet. Maybe no one else would find a coat closet with space for coats unusual, but Veronica did. The Morgan coat closet was like a gag from a Marx Brothers movie. Everything from tennis rackets to boxes of holiday cards—fully addressed and stamped but never sent—to art projects Veronica had made in kindergarten was stuffed in there. You opened that door at your own risk. Mr. Morgan had opened it about a year ago and was promptly hit on the nose by a sand wedge from an old set of golf clubs. No one even knew who those golf clubs belonged to. The Morgans had hung their coats on hooks outside the closet ever since.

Veronica took off her shoes, not knowing where to go. Sylvie wasn’t a very good hostess. She took her backpack, wandered into the living room, and plopped down on a long beige couch amid the craziest assortment of pillows. She loved all the patterns, stripes, and tribal designs mixed with paisleys and so many colors. Some living rooms looked like rooms people were supposed to get out of before getting comfortable in, but not this one. She nestled into the pillows and pulled a paisley cashmere throw that hung over the back of the couch around her. She wished her house could be like this, filled with nice things, but not cluttered. Marion Morgan collected everything.

Sylvie made a lot of clanging noises. She must be in the kitchen. Veronica missed Mary desperately and wanted her Oreos. At lunch, she hadn’t had much of an appetite and now she was sitting in a stranger’s living room with a stomach roaring like a lion. She covered her tummy with a striped pillow.

There was a table to her right with a few photographs of Sylvie and her parents. They weren’t recent. It was the same in Veronica’s house. Parents seemed to lose interest in documenting their lives as their children got older. Like the novelty of having a family just wore off or something. Sylvie’s mother was much younger than Veronica’s mother. She was also very pretty.

Sylvie called. Veronica followed her voice into a breakfast nook off the kitchen. It had a window that faced an airshaft. From Sylvie’s window, you could see into the apartments on the other two sides of the airshaft. It was like having rows of television sets that played the stories of real people’s lives.

At the moment, most of the rooms Veronica could see were dark and empty. But a few had life in them. A housekeeper vacuumed in one. An old man read the newspaper in another. Veronica was wondering about the other people and their lives when Sylvie set a platter of scrambled eggs and toast down on the table.

“Are you hungry?” Sylvie asked. She handed Veronica a fork and a napkin.

“Sort of,” Veronica said, praying the growling of her stomach wouldn’t betray her. She wanted to eat slowly, but honestly, scrambled eggs had never tasted so good. And the toast, for some strange reason, was the most satisfying food she had ever eaten. She should remember to tell Mary that this would be a good snack from now on. When they were finished eating, Veronica followed Sylvie and watched her put their dishes in the dishwasher.

“I guess we should start our project,” Sylvie said after everything was cleaned up. She opened a cabinet and took out a pile of neatly folded newspapers. She spread them out on one of the counters.

“What kind of chemicals do you want to put in?” Sylvie asked. She turned over one of the pots and dumped out a plant, separating the soil from the roots.

“I don’t know, ammonia and bleach?” Veronica said, immediately regretting it. Dr. Snope would call that kind of comment “provocative.”

Sylvie rummaged around the kitchen displaying no sign of provocation whatsoever. “I was thinking we could put in cleaning things that wouldn’t, like, gas us out of the house,” she said.

“Okay, I guess that’s the more sensible approach,” Veronica said. Sylvie examined rows upon rows of products: Ajax, Windex, silver polish, and Fantastik.

“Should we just use them all?” Sylvie asked.

“Sure,” Veronica said by default.

Sylvie piled everything on the counter and Veronica followed her lead, pouring and spraying and sprinkling the pile of soil. It reminded Veronica of potion making, an activity mothers detested because it was so messy, but there was no one at Sylvie’s house to object. After Veronica poured a pile of borax over the mixture, Sylvie squirted silver polish into the middle. The container made a noise like a fart. She did it again. Was she trying to be funny? Veronica didn’t want to laugh, just in case Sylvie had done it by accident. Instead she dumped a pile of Ajax in the middle and stirred it around with a wooden spoon. She threw all caution to the wind and unscrewed the spray nozzle from the Fantastik and poured a big stream into their soil. It was more fun than she had had in weeks. She and Sylvie were up to their elbows in soil. When it was thoroughly blended Sylvie showed Veronica how to put a few rocks at the bottom of the new pots for drainage and how to repot the plants. One plant got fresh and clean potting soil. The other one got the contaminated mixture.

Sylvie put the contaminated plant in the linen closet and turned off the light. Veronica suggested they put the other plant by a window. She hoped the window Sylvie chose would be in some other part of the apartment she hadn’t seen yet. But Sylvie thought it best to put it in the living room.

“This is the sunniest spot in the house,” she said. They went back to the kitchen and scrubbed their hands with a nailbrush. It took half a bottle of soap to get clean.

Mrs. Morgan picked up Veronica at six o’clock.

“Bye, Veronica. This was fun,” Sylvie said.

“It was,” Veronica said. “See you tomorrow.”

Recovery

What do you give a woman waking up from hip surgery? A whoopee cushion? A pile of rubber vomit? A Mylar balloon? The gift shop in the hospital where Mary’s hip had been replaced was filled with inappropriate gifts. Veronica would have liked to get Mary a stuffed animal but the selection seemed more appropriate for four-year-old girls than sturdy Mary. Plus she couldn’t look at anything that resembled a puppy. Mr. and Mrs. Morgan were patient while Veronica selected a gossip magazine, a book of crossword puzzles, and a box of chocolates. She brought them to the register, assigning each member of the family a gift, but her parents were nice and said all the presents could be from her.

The Morgans waited in the solarium until Mary woke up from her anesthesia. They took turns feeding dollar bills into the vending machines and devouring Doritos, Snickers, and stale granola bars.

“Is it taking too long?” Veronica asked. She was on her second bag of Doritos.

“Don’t worry, darling. Mary will be fine,” Mrs. Morgan said.

“She’d better be,” Mr. Morgan said, “or we will never eat a proper meal again.”

Veronica knew that was supposed to be funny, but her father’s jokes had never been easy to laugh at. That in itself used to make her laugh. Now it just made her sad. Since losing Cadbury nothing was particularly funny.

When Mary woke up, Veronica was so happy she had to stop herself from crawling into her bed. The hospital had washed Mary with some kind of antiseptic and she smelled different. But Veronica kissed her a dozen times because she was alive.

“I made it,” Mary said, still groggy from the anesthesia. She had tears in her eyes.

Veronica squeezed Mary’s hand and said, “See, Mary, you are tougher than you think.”

“So are you, my baby. So are you.” Mary smiled and told Mrs. Morgan to open the drawer of her nightstand. Inside was a menu from Grand Szechuan.

“It is supposed to be excellent. And I am hungry.”

“Hungry is good!” Mr. Morgan exclaimed. Veronica, who was sick to death of Chinese food, was so happy she thought she would burst. This was as good an end to a day as possible. Thank God for her family.

Silence Is Golden

Mary was recovering well and Veronica’s project with Sylvie was progressing. The changes in the plants were becoming visible. It had been Sylvie’s idea to rob one plant of light by putting it in a closet and rob it of nourishment by feeding it poison, but it had been Veronica’s idea to rob the plant emotionally. Every day while Sylvie cooked, Veronica opened the closet and sneered at her plant. She gave it dirty looks and said mean things to it. She told it it was weird. She told it it didn’t fit in. She told it she didn’t like it. She wished she was talking to some of her classmates. They made her feel bad just because she cared that her dog died. Well, the worst thing that had probably ever happened to any of them was having a stupid cashmere sweater cut in half.

Every day after they ate, Sylvie loaded the dishwasher while Veronica sponged up. Then they brought the closet plant out and put it next to the window plant. Veronica drew pictures of the plants, charting any changes in their appearance. And Sylvie made notations of the changes on a graph. Veronica was comfortable at Sylvie’s. When she used to go to Cricket’s house she talked all the time, about anything. She remembered once being so desperate for a topic she actually went on and on about fingernails because she was certain that if Cricket got bored, Cricket wouldn’t invite her over again. Veronica enjoyed that talking wasn’t required when she was with Sylvie.

Sylvie’s parents obviously worked a lot, because they were never home. Veronica hadn’t met either of them. It was strange how the absence of authority inspired such good habits. She and Sylvie could have goofed off all afternoon. But they never did. Mary always made Veronica sit up straight at her desk to do her homework but Sylvie insisted on working at the coffee table sitting on the floor. Veronica liked being on the floor too. The drawing part of science was fun. She had just invented a way of layering similar colors to create a kind of 3-D effect. Coloring used to frustrate Veronica because the colors that were in her pencil sets were so limited and nature never was. Yes, the leaves of plants were green and the bark of trees was brown but leaves were about twenty different greens and bark was so many colors. But as a reward for her hard work on the Carver family apologies, her parents had given her a new set of colored pencils with over one hundred colors.

When the doorman buzzed up saying that Mrs. Morgan was in the lobby, Veronica was startled. She had no idea it had gotten so late.

*   *   *

Fifth Avenue was noisy with the sounds of rush hour surging around them. Buses, cars, and bicycles seemed to be veering in and out of every empty space. It was always such a shock to reenter the world after Sylvie’s.

On the way home, Mrs. Morgan asked, “What do you do there? I’m dying to know if you’re beginning to get a sense of her.”

“She makes good snacks,” Veronica said.

“That’s interesting. Such as?” her mother asked, and smoothed Veronica’s hat down over her ears in a way Veronica hated.

“Today we had grilled cheese sandwiches and a salad with pears and walnuts.”

“That does sound good,” Mrs. Morgan said.

Veronica shifted her backpack and put her hand inside her mother’s. Sometimes holding hands made her mother stop asking so many questions. Veronica didn’t feel like talking.

Halfway

The closet plant was no longer just wilting and turning yellow. It was all but dead.

“You are so pretty,” Veronica said to the thriving plant. “No one likes you,” she said to the dying plant.

Sylvie set the table and Veronica wondered if she always made food like this for herself or if she was trying to make a good impression. If she was, it was working.

“Are you, like, really into food or something?” Veronica asked.