Alex and I are going out tomorrow night and Thursday night before our Separation. Oh, sob.
The only good thing about Carl Ray going out with Beth Ann is that after dinner he splashes on about a gallon of besotted aftershave and runs (well, drives) over to Beth Ann’s (she lives a whole block away), and he doesn’t get back until about ten or eleven o’clock. Dad is happy because he finally gets his TV-watching chair back, and everybody else is happy because they can watch their own programs again.
I have a confession to make. I snooped around in Carl Ray’s room today. I don’t know what got into me, but I was vacuuming upstairs and I was looking at all these new bottles of aftershave (he has two bottles of Canoe; he must have heard how much Beth Ann loves it) on his dresser, and his top drawer was open a bit and I sort of peered in and then I guess I was wondering if he had all his money in there and I wanted to see if he had any left, so I opened the drawer.
He sure had a lot of sum and substance in there. Alpha and Omega! About twenty packs of gum, a bunch of pennies and nickels, three can openers, two pocketknives, some horse chestnuts (???), three pairs of ratty old socks, pens, pencils, packs of matches, glue, a can of tuna fish (unopened), and a can of sardines (also unopened), a DIARY (!!!!), and something wrapped up in tissue paper.
I stared at the diary and the thing wrapped up in tissue paper for a few minutes. I didn’t want anyone to catch me, but I sure wanted to open that diary and that little package. But I was starting to feel guilty. I decided to open only one thing. I figured that it would be worse to open the diary, so I opened up the tissue paper.
How peculiar.
Inside was a gold ring with a large black stone. There was also a card that said: “Carl Ray, I want you to have this. I’ll explain later. C.F.” I figured it must be from his father (Carl Joe Finney), but I never knew that Uncle Carl Joe could afford anything as fancy as that ring. If he could, why wouldn’t he put a bathroom in his house?
I was going to look inside the ring to see if it had an inscription, but Dennis came upstairs then and he caught me sticking it back and asked what I was snooping at and I told him I was just cleaning, for Deity’s sake.
Book Eleven of the Odyssey is deadly boring. Ha. That’s a pun, because this part is all about Odysseus’s visit to the dead. It wasn’t as exciting as I expected it to be. He meets some old friends who weren’t as lucky as he (they’re dead, after all) and also he meets a prophet who tells him what’s going to happen to him in the future. He warns him about all the dangers ahead and tells him that he will kill all of his wife’s suitors. I didn’t think Homer should give away the ending like that. Also, this prophet tells Odysseus how he will die!!! He’s going to die at sea, but a sort of peaceful death.
Imagine. Would you want someone to tell you what was going to happen to you and how you were going to die? What if you were told you were going to die at sea? Wouldn’t you stay about as far away from the sea as possible? But the way this prophet tells Odysseus, it’s as if there isn’t a darn thing he can do about it. It’s all planned out. Would you want to know what was on your path of life and all? I wouldn’t. No way. But I wouldn’t mind visiting dead people. I’d check on how Mr. Furtz was doing.
I’ve just been with Alexxxxxx. Sigh. But I’ll wait and tell about him at the end.
First, Beth Ann. She called today and jabbered on for hours about that wonnnnderful Carl Ray. That cabbageheaded ole Carl Ray sent her a dozen red roses!!! I asked her if she was absolutely sure they were from him, and she seemed a little offended. She said that there was a card with the flowers and it said, “To Cleo from Tony.”
“Huh?” I said. “Cleo? Tony?”
She giggled. “Our nicknames. I’m Cleopatra, he’s Antony.”
Oh, Alpha and Omega! It took me about ten minutes to quit gagging. I could not imagine Carl Ray standing in some florist shop writing out this card that says, “To Cleo from Tony.” I mean, what would the storekeeper think? King of Kings! Supreme Being! What happens to people?
But then I started wondering why Alex and I hadn’t given each other nicknames, and then I started wondering if maybe he didn’t like me as much as Carl Ray likes Beth Ann, and then I started wondering why Alex hadn’t sent me roses.
Anyway. Beth Ann still has not heard from “the jerk.” If you ask me, she’s too busy drooling over Carl Ray to care very much anymore. She sure forgot Derek-the-Divine quickly.
Oh, and Beth Ann, my devoted best friend, has definitely decided to go to the GGP pajama party on Saturday night when I am off in West Virginia suffering through a week of Carl Ray. Some friend.
So now Alex. Ah, Alex. Tonight I met him halfway between his house and my house, and then we walked back to his house. The Big Moment: I was going to meet his parents. All the way there, he told me about them. He said his dad would be very quiet and serious and that his mother would be a little weird. When I asked him what he meant by weird, he said she changes moods quickly and dresses strangely sometimes and never sits still, but that she was real nice anyway.
Mrs. Cheevey was standing in the driveway aiming a bow and arrow at the garage when we walked up. She was wearing a black cocktail dress, pearls, and a pair of tennis shoes. On her head was a baseball cap. She shot a bow and arrow at the garage door. It landed right between two of the windows. “Bull’s-eye!” she shouted.
Then she heard us coming and turned around. “Oh hi, hi, hi,” she said, walking up to us. She was real pretty, with curly blond hair and a sweet round face.
She put her hand out to me. “Mary Lou, Mary Lou, Mary Lou!” she said. “That’s right, isn’t it?” She was smiling all over the place. She held out the bow and arrow. “Just practicing,” she said. “Want to try?”
I said, “Maybe later,” but I smiled a lot too.
“Well, come in, come in, come in,” she said. So we followed her inside. Alex lives in this enormous house on Lindale Street. The living room is about as big as our whole downstairs, and it looks, at first, as if it should be a picture in a magazine. But then, if you look more closely, you notice some strange things. Each set of windows has a different color of curtains, for example: red, gold, purple, black, peach, blue. On one side of the room, the furniture is all antique-looking: a huge ornate couch in green velvety material, a gigantic wooden cupboard, four of those dainty little chairs that you would expect little princesses to be sitting on, and lots of those little round tables with curved legs. Then on the other side of the room, everything is modern: a long white couch, two leather-and-metal chairs that each look like an enormous S, and a long black coffee table with metal legs and a wavy top that looks like a great big noodle.
Then the walls. On the antique side is this orange-and-green-patterned wallpaper, and on the modern side the walls are shiny yellow. One side of the room (guess which side!) has six huge portraits of very stern-looking grandmothers and grandfathers (I guess).
The other side had all kinds of interesting things on it: one of those paintings that looks like someone just stood back and flicked paint off a spoon; a stuffed pig’s head; a white plaster sculpture of an arm and hand coming right straight out of a piece of tin; a pair of red cloth lips, about two feet in diameter, with a stick of gum emerging from the center; and a long shelf (maybe six feet long) with hundreds and hundreds of little pebbles on it.