Wish You Were Here Read online

  It was funny, but I actually felt older. I wondered—if someone saw me now who’d never seen me before—would they think I was fifteen? Sixteen? A mature teenager?

  I noticed how quiet the house was. It would be more than an hour before anyone came home. I tried to remember the exact arrangement of Celia’s makeup and perfume. She’d go berserk if she knew I’d touched her things. I covered the eyebrow pencil and put it where I thought it had been, and straightened my grandfather’s picture. With a last glance in the mirror, smiling this time to see if the mustache stretched, I left the room and went downstairs.

  If I rode my bike, I could get to the Norwood Mall and back in plenty of time. The interview couldn’t take very long. I decided to say I was sixteen. If anybody asked for proof, I’d say I left it home, and hope they’d never ask me about it again. You could get to see plenty of free movies through those little glass windows in the doors between the lobby and the auditorium. Business at the candy counter would be slow when the movie was on. If I couldn’t hear very well with the doors closed, I’d learn to read lips. And the pay was probably pretty good—they charged so much for the popcorn and candy. I pictured myself carrying the sign in to the manager, saying, “I think you’ve found your man.”

  I wrapped a scarf around the lower part of my face, and got my bike out of the garage. As I pedaled toward the mall, I remembered that the year before, when I was twelve and a half, I was still able to get into the movies for half price, because I looked younger. And now, changed like this, I might be working there! Life was full of these amazing little twists.

  The sign for the candy-counter job was still on the cashier’s booth. But it was behind glass, so I couldn’t take it down and bring it inside. Maybe that wasn’t such a hot idea, anyway. The cashier stared at the scarf, which had moved up to cover my nose, too. “What is this, a stickup?” she said, and she snorted a few times, like a horse. I pointed to the sign and asked to see the manager. She said he was upstairs in his office, next to the projection room. Then she signaled the ticket taker to let me in. I went right past him without a ticket. Working was great already!

  It was even better upstairs, where I’d never been before. Regular customers weren’t allowed above the main level. The door to the projection room was open, and there was all this wild, complicated equipment inside. I thought of the projector we had at home, an ancient gizmo you have to prop on the dictionary. The projectionist was leaning back in a tilted chair, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback. The sound track of the movie was loud, though it seemed far away.

  I knocked on the door to the manager’s office, lightly at first, and then harder. “Come in,” a voice growled, and I cleared my throat and opened the door. It was a pretty small room, crowded by an old desk that was messy with papers. The manager was a fat man with an unlit cigar like a cork in his mouth. “Yeah?” he asked, and the cigar moved halfway around and stopped.

  What happened to the little speech I’d planned? I’d forgotten it, and when I started to speak, saying, “I...uh, heard?...uh, I mean...,” the scarf smothered my words. I pulled it out of the way and cleared my throat again. “The job,” I croaked.

  “The job!” the manager shouted. How did he do that without dropping the cigar?

  “At the candy counter,” I said, getting my courage and my memory back at the same time. “I think you’ve found your man.”

  “My what!” he yelled. They could probably hear him down in the theater, out on the street.

  “Your man?” I said.

  The manager began to laugh. At least, that’s what I thought he was doing. He could also have been choking to death. “What are you—twelve?” he asked, between convulsions. “And what have you been eating? Your face is dirty! Right there, over your lip!”

  My hand went up on its own to my penciled mustache, hiding it the way Celia used to hide her smile when she wore braces.

  The manager took the cigar from his mouth. “Listen, buster,” he said, booming a little less. “Come back in a couple of years, okay? If I’m still here, if cable TV hasn’t wiped me out. I like your style, anyway. Want to stay and see the show?”

  I could only shake my head, pulling the scarf up around my face as I backed out of his office. After I unlocked my bike, I spit on my handkerchief and rubbed hard at my upper lip.

  Ma was home when I got there. “Bernie!” she said. “Where have you been? And why is your jacket unzipped? Do you want to catch pneumonia?”

  “Sure,” I answered. “Do you want to throw it?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, young man,” she said. “I had a very hard day at the store.”

  Oh, what did she know about hard days?

  “And,” she continued, “you were supposed to take the chicken out of the freezer and start the potatoes. Everyone has to do his share around here, you know.”

  She went on and on as I slowly climbed the stairs. “We all have to cooperate!” she called from the kitchen. Only closing the door to my room finally shut her out.

  I took the letter I’d written to my grandfather and tore the flap of the envelope open. I could reseal it later with Scotch tape. At the bottom of the page, I wrote, “P.S. Could you loan me a few bucks, Grandpa? It’s important, and I’ll pay you back. Thanks. So long again. Love, Bernie.”

  Bigfoot and the Mad Knitter

  ON SUNDAY, THE WHOLE family pitched in to clean the house before our Queens grandparents came to visit. Nat was coming over later, too. It was my turn to clean the bathroom, a job I hated so much I had to make up games to get me through it. I floated the sponge and nailbrush in a bathtub race, and made believe an archenemy was being tortured by the sound of the dripping faucet in the basin. Nat was supposed to fix it that afternoon. But now the enemy pleaded with me to stop the leak before it drove him insane. “I can’t take it anymore,” he said. “Please, please stop it and I’ll give you the microfilm.”

  Grace was vacuuming. It was her favorite job, though the vacuum probably weighed more than she did. She tore up a bunch of Kleenex and dropped them on the rug, just so she could watch them get sucked up. That kid’s a riot sometimes. When she got home from her class trip the week before, she was very excited. Celia and I were just as impressed by the Planetarium when we were Grace’s age. We smiled at each other when Grace described the big indoor sky, and how a voice came out of it and told about the stars.

  I decided to take advantage of her mellow mood and see if she’d lend me some money. Grace is the most tight-fisted person I’ve ever met. Next to her, Scrooge would look like Santa Claus. In addition to a regular savings account, she has three banks in her room. One is shaped like a mailbox; another is a miniature safe, with a combination only Grace knows; and the third is a ceramic Tinker Bell, with a chipped wing. They’re all loaded. When she can’t squeeze another dime into any of them, she makes a deposit to her account.

  If you asked Grace what she was saving for, she’d look surprised. There wasn’t anything in particular she wanted to buy. She wasn’t going to blow it all on one terrific toy, the way I would, or even on that deluxe crayon set we’d seen at F.A.O. Schwarz, with five hundred colors and a built-in sharpener. She was saving so she’d have lots of money, that’s all.

  I intended to talk her out of some of it. I went into her room after supper and sat in the pint-sized rocker, which made me feel like Gulliver visiting one of the Lilliputians. It creaked when I rocked, and my knees were right under my chin. “So,” I said, “you really liked the Planetarium, huh?”

  Grace was sitting cross-legged on her bed, counting some of her money and then dropping it with loud clinks into the mailbox bank. “Yes,” she said.

  “Maybe Celia and I will take you there again someday. Would you like that?”

  “Yes,” Grace said, pushing her glasses back, feeding silver into the little slot. “Seventy-five, eighty-five, ninety,” she said. She’s a good counter for a kid her age.

  “I wondered if you’d be interested in float
ing a little loan.”

  Grace stopped counting. “What’s that?”

  “You know, lend me some of that loot, Miss Moneybags. I’ll pay you back, of course, with interest, as soon as I have it.”

  “No,” she said. “Ninety-five, a hundred—”

  “Why not? I mean, it’s just sitting there. What if a crook showed up? Do you want all this money sitting around waiting to be stolen?” I felt a little ashamed of bullying her. Poor Grace was afraid of so many things already—flying saucers, the dark, a six-headed monster in some dumb TV movie that anybody could see was made of rubber.

  She frowned. “There aren’t any crooks in Plainview,” she said in a shaky voice. “Mommy said so.”

  “Right,” I said. “I was only kidding. But will you lend me some money anyway?”

  “Why should I?” Grace asked.

  “Because I’m your big brother. Listen, Gracie, do you remember when I read to you from that book—The Catcher in the Rye? Do you remember Holden’s little sister, Phoebe, and how he comes into her room in the middle of the night and she gives him every cent she has, over eight dollars? Wasn’t that a great scene? Boy, I love that scene!”

  “I like the part where he gets drunk,” Grace said.

  “Yeah, that was good, too. But didn’t you love that his sister was willing to give him all her money, just like that? Doesn’t it make you want to lend me some of yours?”

  “No,” Grace said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” she explained, “that’s only a book. It’s not real life. And get out of my room.”

  I could see there was no easy way to break her down. At least she didn’t ask me if I was on drugs. She didn’t seem to care why I wanted the money.

  As the foaming blue cleanser swirled down the toilet—the enemy saying, “Now you’ll never get the microfilm, heh, heh, heh!”—I went over my financial situation. With the money from working with Celia again and a dollar more saved from last week’s allowance, plus fifty cents I found under some junk in my closet—minus the dollar for the valentine—I had a grand total of fourteen bucks in my globe bank. It was pathetic! I was supposed to sit for the Wolfe boys again last Saturday, but they came down with twin colds. Their mother wanted me to sit today and I couldn’t because my grandparents were coming. And there was only one crummy day left in February—why did it have to be the shortest month of the year! March would go zooming by, and then it would be April. The wedding was April 17. Even if my grandfather sent me ten or fifteen dollars, I’d still need plenty more for the air fare. Maybe it would be cheaper to take a bus to Miami. Or I could hitchhike. But that wouldn’t work. It would take so long, they’d find me and drag me back before I was halfway there.

  My plan was to leave on a weekday morning, just as if I was going to school. But instead of taking the school bus, I’d head for the airport. It would be easy to hitchhike there. I’d put a note in my mother’s room before I left, so she wouldn’t think I was kidnapped or anything. By the time she got home from work and found the note, I’d be in Florida, with my grandfather. Nobody could make me come back then.

  I was on my hands and knees, scrubbing the tile floor. Slowly, I crawled through the sewer system. Alligator eyes gleamed in the darkness, and rats swam past. At last I found the microfilm, safely sealed in its plastic pouch. The enemy was right behind me, splashing closer, and closer...The only thing to do was swallow the pouch.

  Grandpa and Grandma Rosen, or Pop and Nana as we call them, arrived loaded with presents. Pop has owned the same shoe store on Queens Boulevard for thirty years. When Celia and I were little, we used to play shoe salesman there. We would take turns sitting on the slanted stool to measure each other’s feet.

  Now Pop took a bunch of slippers and socks and shoelaces from the trunk of his car. He also had a few helium balloons for Grace, stamped with the store’s slogan: Wear Rosen’s Shoes and Walk on Air!

  Nana is a full-time knitter. She brings handmade scarves and sweaters and hats every time she comes, and she makes you try things on right away. If something doesn’t fit, if the sleeves of a sweater are too long, or a hat falls over your eyes, she starts unraveling and reknitting it then and there. This happens a lot, because she expects you to change sizes every few minutes. Although I’m not allergic to wool, whatever my grandmother knits makes me itch.

  Today, as always, she also brought shopping bags stuffed with food. “Let’s get these unpacked before everything’s spoiled,” she told Ma, who peeked into the first bag and groaned. “Mother,” she said, “they sell oranges on Long Island. We don’t have to import them from Forest Hills. And I still have a whole freezer full of chickens. The kids are starting to grow feathers and cluck.”

  “They were on sale, Jenny,” Nana said.

  Ma was emptying the second bag. “Oh, no!” she cried. “We haven’t finished the last bag of potatoes you brought!”

  “No wonder these children are skin and bones,” Nana said. “You must be starving them. Look at this boy! I don’t think he’s grown an inch all year! Just look at the sleeves on this sweater.”

  The new red sweater I was trying on was especially itchy, and the sleeves were so long I couldn’t scratch. Maybe she could find some gorilla to give it to.

  “Hold still, darling,” Nana said, “while I just take out these few rows. Then we’ll see what’s what. Would you like a nice orange while I work?”

  “No, thanks, Nana,” I said, wondering how I was supposed to eat an orange without using my hands.

  “You look like Dopey in Snow White,” Celia commented.

  “And you look like the witch,” I replied. Our business arrangement didn’t interfere one bit with our personal relationship.

  “Bernie, Bernie,” Nana said. “Be nice. Don’t talk to your sister like that. Such a beautiful girl. Look at those eyes. And that gorgeous hair!”

  Celia tossed her mane as she went by, purposely hitting my face with it, making me itch more. When I moved to swing at her, my grandmother caught my arm. “Can’t you hold still a minute?” she scolded.

  Right after I was let out of the sweater, Nat arrived and went up to the bathroom to change the washer. In a few minutes, he called down, “Jenny, where’s the wrench?”

  “Bernie,” Ma said. “Would you please bring the toolbox up to Nat?”

  Why didn’t he take it with him in the first place? I trudged up the stairs and down the hallway. Nat was sitting on the edge of the tub. “Hi, there!” he said, as if we hadn’t just seen each other at the front door. “How’re you doing, Bernie?”

  “Fine,” I said. I put the toolbox on the floor, next to the toilet, and turned to go.

  “Thanks a lot,” Nat said. “Say, do you want to toss the old pigskin around after lunch?”

  The old pigskin! It was too much. “I can’t,” I said. “There’s this stuff I gotta do.” Next thing I knew, he’d be asking me to go to the PTA Father and Son Dinner. I tried to get away again, and Nat said, “Hey, hold it a minute, will you? I want to ask you something.”

  “What?” I knew I sounded fresh again, and that it was partly because I wouldn’t call him by his name. Nat. Gnat. It was a pesty, buggy name. It buzzed in your ear.

  “I wondered if you’d want to help me out with something. I mean for payment, not as a favor,” he added. “I’m starting to pack up my things, you know. In a couple of months I’ll be living here. What I need is some help sorting out my junk—packing what I can use, throwing the rest out. You can accumulate an awful lot by the time you get to be my age.”

  I didn’t say anything. Here was another one of life’s amazing little twists. I was being offered a chance to earn some of the money I needed, but it would mean spending time with Nat, at his house in Syosset, handling his things, actually helping him move to our house. What do I care, I told myself. I’ll be gone. He can live all over the place for all I care. Yet I still didn’t answer him.

  Nat banged on the faucet a couple of times with the
wrench and then looked up. “There’s no hurry, Bernie,” he said. “Want to think it over?”

  “Yeah,” I told him, and went out of the room. When Pop saw me coming down the stairs, he said, “Are you still ruining your arches with those things?” He meant my favorite pair of broken-in, worn-out sneakers.

  Pop is really a sweet old guy, except for this thing he has about feet. Long ago, Celia and I made up secret names for him and Nana: Bigfoot and the Mad Knitter. One day we wrapped ourselves up like mummies in two of Nana’s long scarves, and we ran around the living room yelling, “The Mad Knitter strikes again! The Mad Knitter strikes again!” We were only kidding around, but Daddy heard us and made us stop. Trying not to smile, he said it was disrespectful, and that Ma’s feelings would be hurt if she knew—after all, they were her parents.

  It was hard for me to believe that my mother was once a child who lived with those parents and her older sister, Lillian, in the apartment house in Queens. But there were albums of photographs to prove it. Our Aunt Lillian, the chubby, dark-haired girl in the photos, had her own family now, too, and they lived in Denver.

  “Come and get it!” Nana called from the dining room. Lunch was on the table, and there seemed to be enough for a couple of families. Grace came in on tiptoe, with two of the balloons tied to her shoes. I think she was supposed to be walking on air. Nat came downstairs, unrolling his shirt sleeves. “All fixed!” he announced, and he put one arm around my mother’s waist. “My hero!” she said, as if he’d just built the Empire State Building by himself. And she kissed the end of his nose.