The Seventeenth Swap (10 page)

Eric's spirits made an instant recovery, leaping like Superman from despair to hope in a single bound. He knocked on the panel—then, as Maggie reappeared, sweeping in the other direction, her mouth wide open and a dramatic scowl on her face, he realized she was singing. He knocked harder. She halted, eyes toward the door but mouth still open, obviously finishing her
note, which must have been a high one because he could hear it, like a siren in the distance, from clear outside. She finished a slow, grand gesture, too, then cut off both together with a regal toss of her head, leaned her broom prosaically against the door jamb and crossed the second room to let him in.

“You came to hear my Carmen, now admit it,” she said as she unlocked the door. “What I can't understand is how you knew that was on the program this morning. I didn't know myself until I started sweeping out that place back there. The Habanera is perfect sweeping music—especially for getting in corners. What's on your mind, Cholly's friend and mine?”

Cholly is, Eric wanted to say, but there was lots more on his mind than that—so much and so muddled that it was impossible to tell anybody about it, really, and he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to. So he said, “I was just—passing. I forgot it was Sunday.”

“Doesn't quite answer my question, but that's okay. Want to help me sweep? I promise not to sing to you.”

Eric was glad to oblige, so Maggie relocked the door behind them, led the way into the back room and handed him the broom. “I'd got to about there,” she told him, pointing. “You finish, and I'll arrange the dollbabies. How d'you like this room, now it's all fresh painted? It'll be all dolls and toys.”

Eric looked around and nodded approval. The apple-green walls looked fresh and springy; apple-red trimmed the window frame, display case, and one straight chair. All the furniture for sale was child-sized or doll-sized; the dolls themselves, plus a jumble of chipped lead soldiers, cast-iron horses and wagons, monkeys on sticks and threadbare teddy bears, were heaped
here and there in boxes waiting for Maggie's magic wand.

She dragged one of the boxes over to the case and got busy arranging them on the shelves, while Eric applied himself to the broom. He was glad he'd come—it made him feel better to
do
something. Noticing that Maggie was absently beginning to hum, he said, “I don't mind if you sing at me. Go right ahead.”

“Got your ear plugs? It's loud, close up like this. And probably not your kind of thing,” Maggie warned him.

Eric didn't think he actually had a kind of thing, and said so. He was sure Maggie's couldn't be louder than Marvin's rock music turned up full blast. And it did start soft and a little bit plaintive, almost like somebody explaining something—with a few stirring
TA-DA, DA, DA
's between, when Maggie was being the orchestra—but before long the sound was filling the high ceiling and both the other rooms, and maybe the whole outdoors as well, thought Eric, who by this time was standing as if paralyzed, clutching his broom. You really couldn't do anything but listen. When the last notes echoed themselves away and Maggie tossed aside an empty box and dragged up a full one, he said, “I never heard anybody sing like that.”

“Never went to the opera then. Not surprising. They're not very thick on the ground around here. Never watched one on TV either?”

“I don't think so,” Eric said cautiously. “I'm not
exactly
certain what one is.”

“A mellerdrammer with music,” Maggie told him. “They put in the music because you'd go out of your mind trying to figure out the plot, and this way you
don't have to try. You just sit and listen, and the music's so good you don't care what the story's all about.”

Eric absorbed this doubtfully. He was pretty sure he was a story man, himself. Still, Maggie obviously knew a lot about music, and he did not. “Do you sing in operas?” he asked her.

She laughed, but shook her head. “Only on Sunday mornings, in this shop.” Her hands slowed on the teddy bear whose furry legs she was arranging. “Oh, but I wanted to, once upon a time!” she added in a voice quite unlike her usual brisk tones. “Studied five years and sang ten thousand scales and spent all my college money chasing that rainbow. Idiotic. I wasn't half good enough and I knew it, really.”

Eric watched her apprehensively, braced for the news that it was no use trying to smash stone walls, or climb Mount Everest without equipment, and thinking that if one more person told him that this morning—or anything like that—he'd just . . . well, he'd just simply . . .

Maggie laughed again, and sat the teddy bear in the case. “But I had a great time trying!” she finished cheerfully.

It was as if six bricks had been lifted abruptly from Eric's head—as if he were bouncing around, weightless, like an astronaut. “Honest? Did you?” he said, feeling his whole face spread in a grin that no doubt made him look idiotic himself. “You—you didn't mind not . . . not . . .”

“Well, of course I minded. But you can't have everything, can you? You always get
something.
Even if it's only a good strong hunch you'd do better at something else.”

“So you—wouldn't do that way again?” Eric said, feeling the glow fade a little.

“Oh, in a minute! I
am
doing that way again—if you mean holding my nose and jumping, to see whether I sink or swim. You didn't suppose for a minute I know the first thing about running a shop?”

Eric leaned his broom against the wall and his elbows on the display case. “But you
are
running it,” he said earnestly.

“So far I am. Beginner's luck.”

“Cholly—Cholly says you'll go broke. He says you're sure to.”

“Everybody said that at first. Not so many now.”

“But what if you
do?”

“Then I do, Eric Greene, my friend.” Maggie leaned on her elbows too, eye-to-eye with him over the display case, smiling a little. “And after that I pick up the pieces and stick Band-Aids on my sore spots and start thinking up something else to try. I won't fail at
everything,
you know. I'm strong and willing, and at least average-smart. I'll get there—wherever 'there' turns out to be.”

There was a silence. For Eric, it was full of a gathering excitement in his middle—and a gathering strength, as if he suddenly had more muscles than he used to. Feeling rather short of breath, he asked her, “Do you think
I'll
get there? Anywhere?”

“You? That's the easiest question I've heard today. I am absolutely, positively sure of it,” said Maggie.

Eric couldn't say a word. He and Maggie kept on looking at each other for a moment, very satisfyingly indeed, and then he seized the broom and finished his sweeping, and she finished arranging the case. When
they spoke again it was about where to store the cartons, and after half an hour or so Eric said good-bye and started home.

He was thinking hard as he crossed the Sunday-morning emptiness of Lake Street and headed up Market toward Fifth. That was quite a question he had asked Maggie. And it was quite an answer she had given him. Question and answer both were a little bit silly, he realized that. But they made him feel like somebody new and different, all the same. And he couldn't help wondering—apologetically, because he knew it wasn't exactly fair—what Dad would have said to that question. He was pretty sure he knew.

For the first time, he asked himself consciously if what Dad said could be wrong. Right for Dad, maybe. But wrong for
him. He
thought it was more fun trying for
something,
even something impossible, than just quietly giving up. The very idea made him mad. Yes, and getting mad was a help sometimes. Like for instance the first time he'd ever seen Willy Chung, back in about fifth grade. They'd blacked each other's eyes before deciding to become best friends. And he'd been losing that fight—as he remembered very well—until he suddenly got really mad.

Halfway along a daffodil-studded block he stopped in his tracks.
I'm really mad now,
he announced—in silence—to the world at large.
So just look out. Mount Everest, here I come.

Briskly he stalked the rest of the way to the apartment and up the stairs two at a time. His dad had finished the paper and was in the living room, watching the
Meet the Author
program he always watched on Sunday mornings.

“Eric?” he called. When Eric paused in the living room doorway he gave him one of his quick, thorough glances, then said casually, “Everything okay?”

“Just
fine,
” Eric told him. He went on to his own room, astonished at how full of bounce and strength and confidence he felt, when just a couple of hours ago he'd been dragging his tailfeathers in the dirt. Why hadn't he ever done all this before? he demanded of himself. Made up his own mind, thought it out? Why hadn't he
dared
himself to get A's in math, instead of just limply accepting C's? Why hadn't he made some sort of push to get
himself
a bike some way or other, whether Dad could get him one or not? If he'd done that—if he had a bike now—he could already have been earning lots of money, at better jobs, and there'd be no problem at all about the boots! Well. It wasn't too late! He could
still
get a bike somehow, someday, he'd
find
some way to get one.

But first he was going to get those boots. He had one week. Okay. He was starting now, today. He shoved the books off his ring binder, opened it upside down, and began ransacking his brain for new lists.

They were pretty good lists, Eric thought when he read them over half an hour later. Better than anything he could have thought up early that morning—lots better than after he'd been to Cholly's—and even a
little
better than when he'd left the Hobbyhorse Shop, probably because he'd then got mad.

New all-purpose rule for solving problems: Get mad, he thought. He'd have to tell Jimmy, just to hear him giggle.

But it was true—getting mad had made him
think
harder than before, remember harder, recollect things he'd seen but never really looked at. Like all those little empty bottles on Mrs. Panek's hall closet shelf. Like the box of old photographs in his own dad's bureau drawer. Like a lot of little items in Maggie's front display case that were now reminding him of things he'd noticed elsewhere. Like the notion that somebody besides Mr. Lee might be willing to swap
work
for
things
—and the idea that people might want things they didn't even know they wanted until he, Eric Greene, supersalesman, told them so.

He glanced through the lists again, with a satisfaction suddenly dimmed by the realization that the older items on it, the ones he'd already swapped yesterday, now had to be crossed off. Reluctantly, he did so, materially shortening the lists. Not counting Steve's broken Swiss Army knife and torn box kite and Mount St. Helen's T-shirt—none of which Eric could believe to be irresistible—it left only one item in the original list of THINGS PEOPLE MIGHT SWAP: Mr. Lee's reheeling job. However, he had now added several new items:

little bottles—probably antiques (Mrs. P.)

old photos (Dad—and maybe Mrs. P?)

sewing and alterations (Jimmy's mother)

Angel's Between the Acts cigar box (she's
got
to!)

old wind-up beetle (Maggie)

And the list of THINGS PEOPLE WANT, in addition to the old leftover “cocktail picks,” “cigar boxes,” and “smells?” now included some really creative ideas:

clothes alteration or repair (Maggie? Cholly)

little bottles and old photos (Maggie)

better birthday present (Angel, for mother)

wind-ups (Cholly's artist friend Robert Sparrow)

some other box to keep cocktail picks in (Angel)

china dogs (Angel's sister's best friend or whoever that was)

perfume bottles (Angel's sister)

something Mrs. P. can use to pull down her window blind instead of that little hook-thing which I think I saw one like this morning in Maggie's case.

He squinted, trying to visualize that case in the second room of the Hobbyhorse Shop. He had walked right past it at the time, his mind on sweeping and
Carmen,
but he'd got a distinct impression of some of those little hook-things on the glass shelf—maybe five or six of them, in a row. He was almost sure one had a pink handle. He had no idea what they were for. But if he hadn't just made them up out of his head (and he would never have invented a pink handle!) then Maggie might welcome another. Might she swap that beetle for it? Maybe. Provided Mrs. Panek would give up the hook-thing in the first place. And
that
was provided he could find her something to use instead, to pull down the blind. And if all that worked, and Robert Sparrow wanted the wind-up . . . and had something to swap for it . . .

Feeling that he was starting at the wrong end somehow, Eric brooded over his THINGS PEOPLE MIGHT SWAP list, which seemed to get shorter every time he looked at it. Nothing on either list appeared to match anything on the other—except, of course, Angel's Between the Acts cigar box and Mr. Lee's reheeling job, and there seemed no way to get them together. Moreover that great creative idea about Jimmy's mother performing magical improvements on Maggie's and Cholly's clothing seemed, on second thought, a little
too
creative to be polite. Eric spent an uncomfortable moment trying to imagine how he would mention the matter to either party, and hastily closed the ring binder and stood up. Never mind being creative; what he needed was some actual stuff to swap.