“My house!” I exclaimed.
“And that’s okay with your grandparents?” asked Elena, raising an eyebrow.
“Sure it is. They love parties,” I lied, remembering Dimma’s peeved face. We wrote my address, 3512 CONNORS LANE, on the posters.
“And it’s going to be potluck, right?”
“Yep,” said Max. “We’re bringing some kosher stuff from Hofberg’s, and I hope some watermatoes.”
I piped up. “Estelle and my grandmother will make some stuff, and I bet Maria will make those tiny tacos, right, Ivan?”
Ivan just said, “I guess so.”
I added, “And then Beatriz is making stuff, and Mrs. Shreve…”
“And Tim did say he’d help us. There should be plenty to eat,” Elena said.
We wrote POTLUCK across the posters.
“Beatriz wants to have entertainment,” Max said scornfully.
“Very nice! What kind of entertainment?” Elena appreciated Beatriz’s more sophisticated touches.
We looked at one another. “We don’t know yet. But we’ll think of something.” I knew Beatriz would come up with an idea.
“Nothing dumb, like singing,” Max added. “Just put ENTERTAINMENT.”
Ivan left out the first t in entertainment and, since we were copying him, we did, too.
“What if it rains?” Max said. Everyone looked at me.
I knew my grandparents would not be okay with having the party inside our house, and I mumbled, “Umm…”
Elena said, “Well, just put RAIN CANCELS. And we’ll cross our fingers.”
We each made two posters and lounged around until they dried. Elena wanted us to be sure that we invited Gellert, even though he didn’t live in our neighborhood. She thought it would cheer up him and his family, struggling with their immigration problems.
“Gellert always seems pretty cheerful to me,” I said.
“Well, you boys haven’t seen him since school let out,” Elena said reprovingly, “so how would you know? You’ve never had him over to play this summer.”
This was true. I tried to defend myself by saying “He’s great at kickball, but he eats paste at school.” This was a bizarre thing that some kids did, worse, in a way, than picking and eating buggers. “And he’s kind of…dumb.”
Elena said, “John, you know better than to say that! Gellert is actually very smart. He’s just different, and he can’t even speak English yet. I’m disappointed in you.” Elena rarely got mad at us, and she was the last person in the world I wanted mad at me. Her frown was a punch to my gut.
“I’m sorry, Elena!” I said. “We like Gellert, don’t we, Ivan?”
Ivan nodded slightly, looking away to make it clear that he didn’t want to be associated with my ignorant faux pas.
Max shook his head and said, “Boy, you really put your dirty moron feet in your mouth.”
Elena’s mouth twitched, resisting a smile. “So we’ll invite Gellert and his family and make sure he has a good time, right?”
“We will!” I vowed. Elena finally smiled, flooding me with relief.
The posters dried and did look wonderful.
We were ready to distribute them. Elena rose crookedly, as if something hurt, giving us each a light hug, not one of her robust ones, saying, “Good job, my darlings. I’m going to take a little nap.” We gave her a poster for Gellert and rolled the rest up, stuffing the paper tubes into our back pockets.
We didn’t want to post them too close to the Shepherd Street park, where the Bridge Hoods—teenaged boys a little older than Liz who lurked on the bridge with their transistor radios, smoking cigarettes and sniffing model-airplane glue—might notice a poster and think they could come to the Fiesta. We started down past the Friedmanns’ and worked back up the lane, putting the last poster on the streetlight at the corner of Brookville Road, where the Montebiancos’ house was. They looked grand, and we were proud of our work.
We collapsed on the ground to relax. We often loitered at this corner because it was great for spotting cars and license plates. A ’58 Ford Country Squire passed on Brookville, and an Edsel. Eventually we spotted a new Chevy Impala with its cat-eye rear, and a two-tone Pontiac wagon about twenty feet long, and a beautiful Thunderbird with little portal windows. Ivan called an Alaska license plate—a first for us, since it was a new state. We chewed some long stems of grass that grew around the stop sign, then we made grass whistles—Max excelled at this. Holding his blade of grass loosely between his thumbs, he could create a low, rumbling, and gigantic fart sound, and this usually made us laugh as if we hadn’t heard it ten thousand times. But Ivan didn’t laugh this time, and I wondered why he seemed so subdued, and then I thought how Elena had been out of sorts, too, and remembered the bruise on her wrist.
“Hey, Ivan, is anything wrong?” I asked.
“I’m just tired.” Then he said, “I couldn’t sleep last night because of Josef and Elena fighting.”
Max said, “But it’s like with the Andersens; they always argue, right? So it’s not a big deal?”
“I guess,” he said, listlessly pulling at grass.
“What were they fighting about?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. She came home really late, and it was about that, and having so many dates. But then I heard him say something about taking her passport away, and something about a ring that was their grandmother’s.”
We were quiet for a minute. Then, not knowing what else to say, I told him, “The best thing to do is don’t think about it. That’s what I used to do when my mom and dad had fights.”
“Grown-ups are always saying secret, scary things that kids have to listen to,” Max reasoned. “Do what I do: Pretend that it’s some stupid TV show, and in your mind change the channel and think about something else, like bosoms, or just turn it off. Sometimes I stick chewed Bazooka in my ears.” He put an arm around Ivan and shook him gently.
“We should be hunting right now,” I said to Ivan. “Finding some bad spiders would cheer you up.”
“Yeah. I wish I had a tarantula for Josef.” He smiled wanly. “I could put it in his cigar!”
“We need to look harder,” Max said. He pointed across the lane at the Pond Lady’s house. “That’s where we need to look.”
Just then two older ladies in a brown Frazer sedan rolled up the lane, the driver with her hand out signaling. They slowly pulled up at the stop sign and looked both ways about five times.
“Guys,” Max said, determined to get a laugh out of Ivan, “watch this!” Ivan and I rose to our knees, knowing we’d better be prepared to run. Max took a few steps to the open car window and said, very meaningfully, into the face of the lady riding shotgun, “Bosom.”
As we beat it down the lane we heard the driver lady shriek, “Did that boy say bosom to you?” We howled like wolves, even Ivan.
5
My mother and sister were scheduled to visit that weekend; my sister would stay until it was time for her to go to Holton-Arms for the new school year. As usual, on the rare occasions when my mother visited, I always hoped she would refuse to go back to the sanatorium, even though I’d been warned not to expect that; according to Brickie and Dimma, she was still sick.
Liz arrived first from Camp Furman, very tan, with dirt under her fingernails, which bore remnants of orange nail polish. I could see golden stubble on her legs, and her long red hair had been chopped off at the ears and stuck up in shocks and knots all over the top of her head. Kiss curls hooked on her cheeks stiffly, as if they’d been pasted there. Dimma was horrified.