The Shreves’ back door opened and Mrs. Shreve shouted, “Good heavens, boweez! What were those explosions? What’s that smoke?”
“Aww, Mama, it’s just cherry bombs,” said D.L., proudly surveying our tableau of destruction.
“I wish y’all would quit playin’ with those annoyin’ farcrackuhs! And please put all that stuff back where it came from. Deeyayall, put out that far. Your daddy will not ’preciate a burnt place on the lawn. And y’all have practice in thutty minutes.” She smiled graciously at me and Max and Ivan, and held out a plate of cookies. “Would y’all boweez like some cookies? Theyuh peanut buttah.”
We took some cookies and Ivan stepped up and told Mrs. Shreve, “We’re going to have a Fabulous Family Fiesta for the neighborhood soon! It’s a potluck. We’ll let you know the details. We hope your whole family will attend.” Max and I looked at each other, marveling that shy Ivan had become quite the Beaver Plan ambassador.
“Whah, how loveleh, boweez! And all the adults are invahted?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Ivan said. “It’ll be in John’s yard, and his grandparents and Elena and Max’s mom and dad and everybody is coming!” I wondered how Ivan was so certain about everybody.
“Well, we will suhttenly be theah and will bring some refrayushments. We ’preciate the invitation.”
We helped the Shreves put back the bridge junk, leaving them to deal with the fire and cinder blocks. The boat was obviously going to fall off its dry dock, and we didn’t want to be blamed.
It seemed too late now to ride to Rosemary, and we were really hot after the campfire and warfare, so we went next door to Ivan’s, hoping Elena had returned and we could make the posters. I was wondering about what D.L. had said about Brickie having a secret pen name, but it made no sense to me. Maybe I’d ask him.
Ivan’s house was quiet, and Ivan said, “Good—nobody’s home. We can watch TV.” We yanked off our sweaty T-shirts and threw them on the floor, grateful for the dark coolness of Ivan’s living room and the bananas Maria brought us, saying, “You eat—es good for you.” Looking back, I’ve often thought that if not for Estelle and Maria, we boys might have been seriously undernourished. Except for Brickie at breakfast, nobody but those two ladies paid much attention to what we did or didn’t eat.
Then Beatriz showed up, wearing sporty orange clam diggers and a matching top I’d never seen, saying, “Hi, guys!” and sat down with us to watch TV. I handed her half of my banana, and we told her about the Fiesta. She jumped right in enthusiastically. “We should have dancing and entertainment! We could put on a skit!” Looking like a raven-haired Pippi Longstocking, she stretched out both braids excitedly and was full of ideas, most of which sounded lousy to Max because they involved dancing, singing, or costumes, but they sounded fun to me.
Ivan turned on the cartoon show Clutch Cargo, which Max thought was lousy, too. “You guys are such babies sometimes.”
Beatriz said, “Max, Ivan is your host. Why are you so crabby?”
“He’s not my host, he’s my friend. I’m crabby because I don’t want to talk about stupid skits and we had to play war with Beau and D.L. instead of hunting spiders.”
Beatriz said sympathetically, “Okay, I get it. I thought I heard those dopey boys setting off cherry bombs.”
She sat back, and we settled in, eating our bananas and enjoying the big oscillating fan and the way the cooling blue velvet of the sofa soaked up our sweat. Soon all of us, even Max, were absorbed with Clutch, flying around the world heroically.
Halfway through the episode, we heard flip-flopped feet coming down the stairs. I hoped it was Elena, but when Ivan stiffened, sat up, and left, saying he had to go to the bathroom, I knew Josef must be home. The flip-flopping continued down the hall to the kitchen. In a minute Ivan’s dad came into the living room, wearing his bathrobe and carrying the newspaper.
He greeted us, smiling pleasantly, but a little creepily. “Hello, kids. You don’t mind if I read the afternoon paper in here, do you? This is the coolest room in the house.” Without waiting for an answer, he sat down, crossing one leg over the other, and opened his paper. “This spider business must be keeping you boys busy.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Then, from the depths of his robe, I spied a rat’s nest that looked more like fur than hair, with a bulbous purple thing peeking out from it. I giggled nervously, looking at Beatriz and Max, who only stared intently at the TV, Max red-faced. I pretended to be examining my banana.
Suddenly Ivan appeared outside the window, waving furiously for us to come outside. Max jabbed me with his elbow, and we rose, Max casually grabbing our shirts, while I signaled to Beatriz. “We’ve got to go now,” Max said, and Beatriz said, “Bye!” as the three of us scooted for the front door.
On the porch I whispered, “Did you see that? He didn’t know we could see his wiener!”
Max said, “Don’t tell Ivan. He’ll just be embarrassed.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Beatriz added. “I see my brother’s all the time. Once my cousin in Brazil tried to make me touch his.”
I couldn’t imagine this, although I tried to, and said, “Did you?”
“I just slapped it and said, ‘Put that silly thing away!’ ”
Ivan waited in the hammock. His pale burr head was already sweaty again. “Did…did he bother you guys?” Ivan asked, looking worried. “I didn’t think he was home.”
“Nah,” Max answered nonchalantly. “He was just reading in the paper about the spiders, trying to cool off.” He smiled and Ivan relaxed.
From the De Haans’ across the street came the annoying noise of fun in the pool. “I’m roasting,” I complained. “I sure wish we were in that pool.”
“Pfft! Nazi soup!” Max spat. I thought about Chevy Chase Lake, a gigantic pool close by, but we couldn’t go there because they didn’t let Jews in.
“There’s always your pool,” Ivan said to me.
Earlier in the summer, after she thought we’d suffered enough following the Airstream incident with the De Haans, Dimma had gone to People’s Hardware and gotten a blue plastic pool about two feet high and eight feet wide. We’d set it up in my backyard on the grass where a concrete pond had once been. The pond was filled in, but the fountain featuring a woman with a pitcher remained. Supposedly a woman had drowned herself in the concrete pond a long time ago. My mother loved the statue, and Sir Walter Scott’s poem, and called her the Lady of the Lake. Stevenson, our old yardman, who ironically bore the same name as the 1956 presidential candidate, which hugely amused Estelle and Brickie, planted trailing petunias in the pitcher every spring. A few flowers still hung down, pink-and-purple-striped, but they were spent and ragged now. At first we boys had been happy enough with the pool, but we were bored with it by July. Now the water was low and greenish, leaves and grass mowings floating on the surface, and its sides were slick with algae. “It looks pretty bad. Do you think there’s any polio in there?” Ivan asked.
“Nah,” I said. “We’ll fill it up with new water and it will be okay.”
We could see spider bodies on the bottom—none of the poisonous ones we were looking for—and mosquito larvae, wriggling like minuscule shrimp, but we didn’t care. “Aw, what the hell?” I said, echoing every adult I’d ever heard in my entire life.