The Music of Your Life (18 page)

“This way for the seven o'clock show!” the ushers shout out, cupping their mouths with white-gloved hands. “Through these doors for
Mary Poppins
!”

Hunter and his mother find seats in the center. Seated next to him on his right is a teenage boy, who holds hands with a teenage girl seated on the boy's other side. They nuzzle each other a bit, the way cats do, Hunter thinks. He watches them, fascinated; he stares at their hands, their clutching, interlocking fingers. When the boy catches him staring, he whispers, “Whatcha lookin' at, little boy? Huh?” Hunter quickly turns his head away to face the screen, which is still draped with its massive gold and orange curtain. And in a moment, the lights go down and the curtain lifts, slowly rolling itself up into ornate folds and finally disappearing at the top. Hunter holds his breath as the gray screen suddenly begins to flicker with color and the music from the speakers surrounds the entire auditorium.

And he reaches over, takes his mother's hand, and holds it, interlocking their fingers, staring straight ahead as
Mary Poppins
, finally, begins.

“How was the movie?” his father asks, waking up on the couch at the jangle of keys in the door. The TV is tuned to
The Hollywood Palace
, where Van Johnson and Juliet Prowse are executing a lively song and dance.

Hunter stands in the doorway with a tear-stained face, hiccuping little sobs.

“It was good,” he chokes out.

“His record got warped in the car,” Mother says. “He left it by accident, and you know how warm it was tonight.”

Hunter holds the record up for his father to see; it is clearly misshapen, a curve now, instead of a plane.

“Oh, Hunter,” his father says. “I told you, didn't I? I told you to leave it here.”

“Ed,” his mother says.

“Let me see it,” he says. He examines the disc. “Oh … this is …”

“I know,” Hunter sob-hiccups.

“Let's play it and see what it sounds like,” says his father, taking it to the stereo console.

And when the needle bobs up and down on the record, what they hear is: “
Just a waaa … waaa … of suuuuugaaaaaa … helllps … theee … waaaaaa…. waaaaaa … go downnnnn … a waaaaaaa … waaaaaaaa … go downnnnnnnnnn
…”

“Well, maybe we can get him another one,” says his father. “What do you think, Grace?”

“Oh, well, I don't know,” says his mother, by which she means:
It's not in the budget
.

Hunter's father lifts the boy up onto his lap. Hunter buries his face in the big, rounded shoulder; his tears instantly dampen the sleeve. His father's lap is a warm, safe place; held tight against his father's chest, he can smell the strong, dark aroma of pipe tobacco. Even as he cries bitterly on his father's shoulder, he breathes in to get more and more of the Kentucky Club, suddenly craving the smell, the scent of his father.

“Why … why did it have to happen?” he sobs.

“Hunter,” says his father, pulling Hunter's chin off his shoulder with his thumb and forefinger, and smoothing his damp hair off his forehead. “Your mother and I have something to tell you that I think will make you feel better. And now seems like a good time, I guess.”

“I think so,” his mother says, sitting down next to them on the sofa.

“What? What is it?” Hunter says, still sob-hiccuping.

“Well, sweetie,” she says, glancing at his father. “We have a special surprise to tell you about. And what it is …” She glances at his father expectantly.

“Go ahead,” he whispers.

She smiles. “Well … in a few months, you're going to have a little brother or sister.”

“What do you think about that?” his father asks, beaming. “How do you feel about that, son?”

“Good, I guess,” Hunter says, brightening a little, but suddenly sleepy. He feels overwhelmed; first the movie, then the warped record, and now … a new brother or sister. Being responsible for so many things makes him tired.

“Let's get you to bed, little man,” says his father, and he carries him off to his room on his shoulder, lifted high, like a hero.

Under his Mighty Mouse sheets, Hunter lies awake in the dark room lit only by the tall streetlamp outside his window. There is so much to think about before going to sleep … Perhaps he is starting to see things more clearly. Maybe if he can persuade his parents to get him a
Mary Poppins
umbrella, like the one he saw the little girl holding at the theater, he won't mind so much not getting a new record. He knows all the songs by now anyway. He wonders if they make the umbrellas in other colors besides pink—pink, he knows, is for girls. Perhaps he can convince his parents to buy him a yellow one. Or maybe he could get it himself … The people in the neighborhood seemed to enjoy hearing him sing on their front porches today when he collected for the Heart Fund. He could walk up and down Mount Pisgah Avenue tomorrow with a can and collect money to buy his umbrella. A door-to-door entertainer: he could sing songs from the movie, he could tell them all about Julie Andrews. He will tell them he has to buy the
Mary Poppins
umbrella before the new baby comes, because he'll use it to shelter the baby from the rain, and the parrot-head handle will talk to the baby just as it talked to Mary Poppins, and will stop him, or her, from crying. The neighbors will smile down on him once again, and his can will clink with shiny fifty-cent pieces. They will recognize him as a smart and resourceful child, a loving, generous, talented child, and they will reward him for that.

Yes … they will give generously to the Hunter Fund.

II.

There are lots of things people can say about my best friend Lynette and me, and we know they do, but one thing they can't say is that we're not creative people. They cannot say: “Oh, that Lynette and Hunter …
they're just not creative
.” No one can utter that phrase and not be known among the entire eighth grade of Stafford Hills Junior High for a bald-faced liar. For instance: last week, our math teacher, Mrs. Wright, who also goes to our church, told our class to come up with our own word problems as a homework assignment. Now some of our friends said they thought that was a lazy thing for her to do, since teachers are the ones who usually give out the problems so students can come up with the answers, but Lynette and I chose to see it as a chance to be creative—the only creative thing, in fact, we can ever remember being told to do in a math class in all our eight years of school. So this is what I came up with: “If, in one month's time, Hunter goes to see four movies at the mall and watches forty-six television shows, and his friend Lynette goes to see two movies and watches twenty-nine television shows, between them, how many movie and TV stars will they have seen?” I calculated it and came up with 219, because you don't count the extras and people with small speaking parts, since they aren't famous.

Lynette wrote this one, which I love: “If Lynette buys
Tiger Beat, Fave, 16
, and
Teen Beat
once a month, how many times will she have kissed pictures of David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman, Donny Osmond, and all the Cowsill brothers over a six-month period?” And her answer was: 684, which I thought was just about right. That's probably as many times as I'd kiss them, too, but I wouldn't tell even Lynette that.

So as hard as this is to believe, Mrs. Wright didn't like our word problems! (Though I think it's important to note that the rest of the class did.) She said she thought that perhaps we'd “missed the point of the assignment.” We didn't agree, we believed we had brought something extra to the assignment, something to liven it up and make it “fun.” She told us to try it again, saying flat out that we were concentrating too much on having fun and not enough on the true meaning of the mathematical task at hand. Lynette and I made faces at each other as soon as Mrs. Wright turned her back. But since we're good Presbyterians, we took the high road, as our minister is always telling us to do, and did not say what everybody else was thinking too, which is that Mrs. Wright is, in fact, the laziest teacher at Stafford Hills Junior High. We also think, however, that Mrs. Wright missed
our
point, which was to turn eighth-grade math from drudgery to entertainment, sort of the way, I reminded Lynette, Mary Poppins turned medicine into candy. So about this, we are right, and Mrs. Wright is wrong.

It's so incredibly cool to have a best friend like Lynette who hates math as much as I do; we don't understand why anybody should have to do math homework in the first place when there are: a) so many cast albums and soundtracks to be played, and b) so many movies to see and TV shows to watch, and c) so many movie-star and teen magazines to buy and read. These are the topics we prefer to multiplication and long division.

Plus, it's the remedial math class! Lynette says we're like the Count of Monte Cristo, being unjustly punished with imprisonment—in this case, in the math class for dummies—even though we both freely admit we can't do math to save our lives. I said I thought this was God's way of holding us back for a couple of really mean things we did to my little brother and Lynette's little sister when we were in the fifth grade, even though I prayed for forgiveness soon afterwards. And I told my parents if I decide that's true, that if God is still punishing me for things I did a long time ago, and already asked forgiveness for, then it just might come to pass that I will have to stop attending Second Presbyterian Church because of it. They said you don't give up being a Presbyterian simply because you can't grasp integers and subsets, that God didn't create mathematics to personally torture me. Lynette said they were blind to the truth! They said she was being dramatic.

Nevertheless, Lynette and I have something much more important to concentrate on: the new movie
Cabaret
starts at the Park Point Mall Cinema 3 on Friday, and we, of course, plan to be there. We've been talking about this for three months, ever since we first saw the previews of the coming attractions. Lynette is even going to leave JV cheerleading practice early on Friday so we can go to the first evening show and then to Farrell's ice-cream parlor afterwards, just the two of us, like a date, although we know it's not since we're best friends. The only problem is that her mother, who at first was just going to drop us off and pick us up later, is now talking about taking us to the movie herself, and we are trying to figure our way out of that. Lynette and I go to movies by ourselves just about all of the time now, but unfortunately for us, Mrs. McKinney has recently started subscribing to
Modern Parent
magazine, which has some kind of a stupid movie guide for parents, and she read that
Cabaret
“contains some material not suitable for teens and preteens.” If Mrs. McKinney does actually take us to see
Cabaret
, I will die of embarrassment if she attempts to cover our eyes and ears should any unsuitable material suddenly appear on the screen. I may have to bite her.

On Tuesday afternoon, three days before our
Cabaret
night on Friday, Lynette and I are in my room, pretending to study.

“What is an integer, anyway, Hunt Boy?” she asks me. She's sitting on the floor of my room, on my cool new shag carpeting—checkerboard squares of light blue and orange—which I picked out myself at Sears. Our textbook,
Explorations in Mathematics
, is open in front of her, even though she has this month's
Tiger Beat
right next to it, opened to a full-color photo spread of the Osmonds riding the water slides at Disneyland. She twirls her shoulder-length, bleachy, strawy hair with a pencil, something she has done ever since I've known her, which has been since third grade; it's just a Lynette thing, as far as I'm concerned. But this little habit drives her parents crazy; they're sending her to a psychologist twenty miles away in a bigger town in search of a cure. I wanted to ask Lynette's mother why didn't she just look for the answer to the problem in
Modern Parent
and save all that money, but I don't think Mrs. McKinney likes me much anyway, so I kept that thought to myself.

Since Lynette came to my house directly from JV cheerleading practice, she is still wearing her blue and gold cheerleading uniform and black and white saddle oxfords; her crepe-paper blue and gold pom-poms are tossed onto my bed. It's so sad that we even have to have a conversation about integers; I'd much rather be helping Lynette write new cheers, or planning what we're gonna wear to the movie on Friday. Besides, what does it matter if we know what an integer is, anyway? This is the problem with the world, as I see it, because not only is Lynette a beautiful person on the outside, she is also beautiful inside, whether she can do eighth-grade math or not. What the world should know is that Lynette is a great humanitarian, and here's why: she is the only white person in our class who bought a Flip Wilson as Geraldine (“Shut up, Killa!”) lunchbox
and
a
Get Christie Love!
composition book and brought them with her to school, which I thought was the coolest thing I'd ever seen anyone do. She said: “Now that our school is integrated, Hunter, we have to show the black students that we care about them and their culture.”