Tubby time in the city.
Tubby time in the town.
Tubby time for Jeremy, It's tubby time right now.
So Tubby-dub and scrubby-dub, It's time for your nightgown.
It's tubby time all over the world, So please don't frown.
As she explained to Step, the song didn't really help Zap at all. But it helped her,- it soothed her so she could endure his desperate sobbing and keep on bathing him without going to pieces inside.
Around the middle of October, Step and DeAnne both became aware that Stevie's behavior was changing just a little. He was no longer being quite as obedient as before. In fact, at times he seemed almost rebellious.
The rule in the house now was that no kid could go outside without one of the parents, and Stevie knew that-in fact, he had several times caught Betsy going out and brought her back in. But one day DeAnne came into the family room from the back of the house just as Stevie was coming inside through the back door.
"Stevie, what were you doing outside?"
"Looking," said Stevie.
"Good heavens, young man, you're filthy! Where have you been?"
"Under the house," he said.
She remembered the latticework skirt around the base of the house and immediately flashed back to her imagined picture of what it was like under there, all the bugs and webs and mud and filth. Having crickets come up through the closet last winter hadn't done anything to change that image in her mind, either. "That's just incredible!" she said. "You know what the rule is about going outside, and to think you pried open the latticework and went under the house, that's just unspeakable! I'm going to have Bappy come over and nail it all down. Now get into the laundry room and strip off your clothes while I get a bath running."
Later that night DeAnne and Step discussed what had happened, and they realized that because of Stevie's hard adjustment and their worry about these invisible friends of his, they had been slack with him. They may not have held him to a firm enough standard of discipline.
"But when you think about it, when would we have disciplined him?" asked Step. "I mean, till now he hasn't done anything wrong."
"Well, now he has, and I don't know what to do about it. I can't start deadbolting the back door and taking the key out because what if there was a fire? I can just see the headline: FAMILY HAD PLENTY OF TIME TO
ESCAPE BUT DEADBOLTS WERE ALL LOCKED AND KEYS COULD NOT BE FOUND IN TIME."
"They don't write headlines that long," said Step.
"Oh, good, so we'll die and no one will even know why."
"Less embarrassing that way."
"I think we need to show him that this is serious. I mean, there's a killer somewhere in Steuben, and Stevie's cutting out of the house without even telling us. Not to mention crawling under the house, I mean that's disgusting."
"Not really," said Step. "Not when you realize that my younger sister and my younger brothers used to eat dirt."
"Oh, gross!" cried DeAnne. "Did you have to tell me that?"
"They'd come into the house with flecks of mud all around their mouths and then try to act innocent when Mom said, 'Have you been eating dirt again?' And they'd open their mouths to say, 'No, Mom,' and the whole inside of their mouths was black with mud."
"I'm going to throw up, Step. I mean it."
"I'm just saying, kids like to mess in dirt. I always liked to dig in it, and maybe Stevie would like to, too, only there's just no place for it."
"It's a rental house. We can't just tear up a section of lawn for him."
"Oh," said Step. "That's what I was just about to suggest."
"And it's October, it's not going to get any warmer out there. And most important, that has nothing to do with him going out side in the first place without permission. He has to know we're serious."
"OK, so we confine him to the house."
"Step, that's not a normal life, being confined to the house. Besides, I want him outside."
"So we cut off his computer privileges. Tomorrow, no Atari."
"Oh, that really will hurt. He's always playing that Lode Runner game."
"Oh, he is? I've never seen him play it. I thought I was the only one who ever played it-I thought it had turned out to be a real lousy birthday gift for him."
"No, he plays it all the time. In fact, a couple of times I've thought that I'd really like it if you'd teach me how to run it."
"It's not hard. You just make sure there aren't any cartridges in the computer, put the disk into the drive, close the door, and turn the machine on."
"Right, that's easy for you and Stevie."
"Let's do it right now."
They went into the family room and Step showed her each thing to do and then he switched on the computer and the game came up and he said, "There it is. You just move the little guy with the joystick and try to get the treasures without the bad guys getting you."
"That's not Lode Runner," said DeAnne.
"Yes, it is," said Step.
"No, that's the little- man game that I saw you playing that time."
"Right, and the little-man game is called Lode Runner."
"No," she said.
Step popped open the disk drive and pulled out the disk and showed her. "Look! A miracle! The disk says Lode Runner, and yet what comes up is the little-man game!"
"No, I mean, of course you're right, I just thought that Lode Runner was a different game."
"What, then?"
"That one that Stevie always plays. The pirate ship game. It really looks beautiful sometimes, when they're just sailing along, the sails snapping in the wind. And the sailors climbing all over—I've never seen any other game like it. No offense, Step, but I kept thinking, If only Step could do a game that looked like that."
"Oh, no offense, right," said Step. He was a little miffed, but what mattered was that she, too, had seen the pirate ship game, only she saw it all the time, and she had watched it long enough to see different aspects of the game. "He must switch it off whenever I'm around," said Step. "I've never caught more than a glimpse of it."
"Oh, no, he plays it for hours," said DeAnne.
"In front of you?"
"Yes."
"Talking to his friends the whole time?"
"Well, yes," she said. "That's how I've picked up their names. Hearing what he says to them."
"Have you noticed what he does with the joystick when he's playing the game?"
"Oh, I think he moves it now and then, but it doesn't seem to be that kind of game."
"No, I'd say not," said Step. "Does he ever type anything? Ever use the keyboard? Or the paddle controllers?"
"Not that I remember," said DeAnne. "Why?"
"Only because if he's not doing anything with the joystick or the keyboard or anything, then how is it a game? What is he exactly doing?"
"Does he have to do anything?"
"DeAnne, if he causes things to happen onscreen, it's a game. If he doesn't, it's a movie."
"Well, people go to football games and watch them, and they never throw the ball or anything and it's still a game."
"Because there are human beings down on the field playing. But what human being is playing this pirate ship game? Not Stevie."
DeAnne frowned. "You know that I don't know anything about computers, really, except how to boot up your Altos and get Wordstar so I can do things for church."
"Take my word for it. The reason I've never programmed a game that had all that wonderful animation is because it can't be done."
"Well it can," said DeAnne. "I've seen it."
"There's only 48K of RAM in that machine, and the disk doesn't even have a hundred kilobytes on it. Three seconds of that ship sailing along with the sailors climbing all over the rigging would chew up every scrap of that memory. And yet the ship moves all over the screen, right?"
"Two ships, sometimes three," said DeAnne.
"And sometimes they're bigger or smaller?"