Beatriz left; she didn’t have her bathing suit and said it was time for her to go home, and anyway, she added, it was “too icky,” and we would probably get sick from being in it and miss the Fabulous Family Fiesta.
I dragged the hose over and threw it into the pool, and we jumped in in our shorts. The three of us thrashed and splashed, hollering even louder than usual, hoping Kees and Piet would hear us. Once the water became deeper, we made a whirlpool by running around and around as fast as we could. I pulled off the remaining petunias from the Lady of the Lake and tossed them into the water. Then we drifted around with the flowers in the current of the whirlpool, looking up at the softening sky, where swifts were circling with us, birds and boys thinking about food and roosting for the evening. Ivan said the swifts would be heading to South America for the winter. “They’ve probably been stuffing themselves with spiders for the trip.”
Pretty soon, grown-up voices sounded around the neighborhood, gathering their flocks for dinner and the night. Max and Ivan went home, and I went inside, calling out, “I’m ready for dinner!” as I let the back screen door slam behind me for emphasis, just in case anybody had forgotten I existed.
4
The next day we called a meeting—we liked to call our loitering “meetings”—on Ivan’s front porch. Elena was finally available, but she hadn’t emerged from her bedroom yet, so we went to the end of the walk and sat on the lowest step to wait. There were new spiderwebs on the old gate, and a few spiders in the corners of the steps, but we’d already examined those and knew them to be ordinary specimens—nothing we hadn’t already caught.
We’d tried to get Beatriz to come out for the meeting, but she had ballet lessons. Too often it was either that, or piano, or confession or catechism, or she couldn’t play because she had to help her mom with the cooking and cleaning, or with her poor sister, Zariya. We thought it was a drag that girls had so many dumb things they had to do all the time, and thank goodness we weren’t girls.
We sat and waited, taking a few minutes for some thoughtful scratching. Then we pulled up pieces of the walk to see what we could find. Max and I set fire to some ants—the kind that often stung us. We didn’t believe in burning ants who were on the job, although Ivan protested, saying, “Ants are always on the job.”
Suddenly Max cried out, “Oh, no! Not the Advice Lady!” An old lady in a ratty hat struggled up the lane with a tiny dog. We called her the Advice Lady because she came around and gave out unsolicited advice and predictions: Don’t play in puddles because you’ll get polio; don’t go without shoes because you could cut your feet and get lockjaw; don’t fool with dead animals. She cowed us a bit; she was imposingly large at a time when most people were skinny. We’d been told to be nice to her because she was pitiful and mentally ill. When she reached us, she said, “I see you boys playing with fire! You’ll burn yourselves to cinders! We have enough to worry about what with the spiders, and newcular war coming any day now!”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. She teetered on.
Max and I started in busting the tar-pops welling up on the hot street, exploding the liquid inside. Ivan seemed more quiet than usual and didn’t join in.
“Brickie says he used to chew tar when he was a kid,” I mused. “He said it was kind of like bubblegum, but not sweet.”
“That’s a big lie,” Max said. “Why would you chew it, then?”
“I don’t know.” I wished I hadn’t brought it up.
“Well, if it’s true, why don’t you try it?” Max said, swatting at me. With his big head and wide lips, he looked like Howdy Doody, and I said so, hoping to derail his challenge.
Ivan looked pensive. “In Mexico people chewed pieces of cactus.”
Max grinned fiendishly. “Okay, so John can try some tar, and you can eat a piece of that cactus in your backyard?”
“Not that kind of cactus, I don’t think,” said Ivan.
“You’re both chicken.” Max flicked us with tar-pop juice. I pulled up a soft, warm blob of tar, rolled it into a ball, and popped it into my mouth. “It’s like Turkish Taffy,” I lied, trying to hold it in my cheek without actually chewing.
“Oh, sure,” Max said. Then, alarmed, he yelled, “You’ll probably get lockjaw now. Or yaws. Spit it out!” We were horrified by yaws, a disease that caused big, open sores that we’d seen on people in Brickie’s National Geographic. Almost as horrified as we were by the photos of floppy native bosoms and incomprehensible penis sheaths.
I spit out my tar cud, simultaneously throwing up some of the morning’s Frosted Flakes.
Ivan shook his head. “The stuff they chewed in Mexico made everybody happy.” He looked both wise and sad as he spoke.
The Goncharoffs’ screen door slammed. There was Elena, resplendent in her kimono, holding up her hands with her Cuba libre and a sheaf of paper. “Darlings!” she called. “Here I am. Sorry to be late.”
Checking the porch swing for bird shit and spiders, she reclined on her side as usual, but seemed a little stiff. We ran up the walk to her. “I have the paper for your posters right here. Ivan, I couldn’t find your box of crayons. So you can use my fingernail polish, I guess.” From her kimono sleeve she pulled some bottles of Revlon polish in brilliant colors and passed around the sheets of paper.
We accepted the paper and polish silently, not wanting to admit that when I’d gotten my new box of sixty-four Crayolas, we’d melted down Ivan’s old box of forty-eight on his backyard grill, hoping to make one giant rainbow crayon, a waxen disaster that mercifully had not yet been discovered.
Elena took a sip from her drink, popped a Miltown, and settled the cocktail on the floor. She shrieked a little when a daddy longlegs ran up her hand, and I noticed a dark bruise on her wrist.
Max said, “Don’t worry—they don’t bite,” and reached for her glass.
She slapped his arm. “No Cuba libre for you boys today. You have a serious job to do.”
“Aww, rats,” said Max.
“Well, what do we want to say on these posters? What was the name you came up with for your party?” I thought Elena was being unusually businesslike, not her typical cheerful self, and she wasn’t bestowing her usual radiant smiles on us.
She handed each of us a couple sheets of paper and we spread ourselves out on the porch. We each picked out a fingernail polish color—I picked Sports Car, of course, and Max snatched a vivid orange called Tropical Punch. Ivan, our creative one, started right away making big pink letters in Cotton Candy: FABULOUS FAMILY FIESTA. “Fingernail polish is good because if it rains, the writing won’t run,” he opined. Max and I looked at his poster and copied him, although more sloppily.
“Okay, what’s the rest of the information?” said Elena. “Like what day and what time will it be?”
We didn’t know. “How about early evening? With a beautiful sunset, and it will be cooler?” Elena suggested.
Naturally we agreed. Everything became so simple with Elena in the picture.
“We have to have it before school starts,” Ivan said. “And that’s soon.”
I added, “And I have to go to the beach with my dad before then.”
Elena said, “So maybe Labor Day weekend would be good? That gives us a week or so to plan.” She thought for a minute. “Let’s do it Monday, September seventh. And that’s extra nice because Labor Day is to celebrate all the working people.”
We bent back to our posters and painted that in. “What time?” Ivan asked.
Elena said, “Oh, how about five o’clock? Cocktail hour.” We added that. “And whose house will it be at?”