So there was our Whitman’s Sampler, and it was not without its problems. Even though World War II had been over for more than a decade, there was still a collective war hangover among the people on Connors Lane, maybe because so many of our neighbors had been affected by it in one way or another. Some had run away from Europe, some had fought, like Mr. Shreve, who had lost a leg—and Mr. Allgood’s brother had died at Utah Beach. Brickie had been in the army, too, though not in combat—he had specialized in linguistics and spent time in England and Latin America. There must have been a point in the early fifties, around the time we boys were born, when everyone was relieved that the war was over and optimistic about peace. But things had ratcheted up again with the Soviet Union humiliating us in the space race, having spy rings that cracked the Manhattan Project, and now they had the Bomb. Khrushchev had already vowed, “We will bury you!” and, earlier that summer, visiting Moscow, Nixon had angrily poked him in the chest. In retaliation, Khrushchev had said he was going to do everything he could to help defeat Nixon in the 1960 election, which infuriated Brickie: “The very goddamn idea of those bastards interfering in our elections!” And, of course, right after Christmas, there’d been the Cuban revolution, Castro bringing Communism within ninety miles of the U.S. There was a lot of fear in America. Everyone believed that there was a very good chance that the world would soon blow up. At school we practiced three scary civil-defense drills for different attack scenarios, but even we boys knew that Washington would be the first place annihilated, and nobody would survive. So the Cold War caused our neighbors to be nervous and suspicious of one another. Who you were, where you had been, and what you had done during World War II set boundaries, and for Ivan and Max and me, this meant things often got in the way of our having fun. On those broiling August days when we could hear Kees and Piet splashing and yelling happily in their pool, we wanted badly to be invited to swim again and for Max to be included. We wanted to get in the Wormy Chappaquas’ Messerschmitt without feeling like traitors. We wanted to be able to hang around with Elena as much as she’d let us, even if she did consort with unsavory refugees. And, though it had nothing to do with the war, we wanted to get a look at the Pond Lady’s iron lung. We wanted what we wanted first, but we also simply wanted everybody to get along. Why couldn’t our neighborhood be more like Beaver Cleaver’s, where people were nice to each other?
We hoped to fix things. Taking our cue from the Marshall Plan, which we vaguely knew from our Weekly Readers was a plan to help reunite Europe, we came up with our Beaver Plan. Of course, we had no idea of how we’d accomplish neighborhood reunification, but if we could enlist the help of our goddess, we knew we’d find a way. And it was a good excuse to spend more time with her.
2
Ivan and I started our summer mornings as if we had a job we had to do, and we would report to Max’s front porch and wait quietly for Max to get up. This particular morning, we’d intended to discuss the Beaver Plan, but Ivan and I had woken to find all the yards up and down the lane festooned with clouds of spiderwebs. Hedges were frosted with them, and in the trees overhanging the lane, the webs looked like strings of crystal beads lit with dewdrops that sparkled spectacularly in the early sun, connecting all the yards, as if the neighborhood were one big carnival. Ivan and I were beside ourselves, hollering like maniacs under Max’s window until he busted out of his house in nothing but his underpants.
“Can you believe this?” I shouted at him.
“Man, oh man!” he yelled. “How did this happen?”
Some webs stretched horizontally between trees that were a good thirty feet apart, and some soared way above our heads, like the gossamer riggings of a ghost ship.
“How do they do that?” Ivan said.
I was clutching the front of my shorts, an unfortunate habit when I was extremely excited. Ivan was spinning around, taking it all in. “There are thousands of them! Maybe millions!”
“Do you see any actual spiders?” Max called. “Let’s catch them!” He raced over to the privet hedges in front of the porch. “Here’s one! A big one with yellow stripes! His web has a sort of zipper thing right down the middle! Here’s another one!”
Mrs. Friedmann stepped out from behind the screen door in her robe. “Vaht’s all the commotion?” she demanded. “It’s only seven o’clock!”
“Mutter, spiders are everywhere!” Max shouted. “Look down the street!”
“Oy gevalt!” she exclaimed, shaking her head with a hand to her mouth. “Your fahzer is not going to like zis. Max, come inside and put some clothes on!”
“Rats!” He ran back inside.
Ivan and I continued around the yard, examining the wild profusion of spiders easily within our grasp. Like tiny nets of diamonds, the webs even covered the scrubby lawn.
“Here’s one with a huge butt!”
“There’s a big moth stuck in this web and he’s wrapped like a mummy! He’s still moving!”
Max emerged with shorts on, carrying some jars. “C’mon! We can have an instant collection before anybody else!”
“Boys! Zhey might be poison! Do not bring zhem into zhe house!” Mrs. Friedmann shuddered and went back inside.
“Look at this one, you guys!” Max cried. “He looks just like a tiny crab!” He fiddled with a jar, trapping it.
Just then, Beatriz came squealing up the lane, waving her arms. “Boys, boys! What is this? Look what happened to me!” She was alarmed but laughing, her head and shoulders veiled with webs.
But just as we all began twirling into the nearest webs, laughing and winding ourselves like spools of thread in the gluey, silken lines, Beatriz screamed, “Help! A spider went down my blouse!” She danced around frantically until something big and black fell out of her shirt, and the spider ran to a hole in the ground and disappeared. “Ick! The webs are fun, but I don’t want any spiders on my personal body.”
Max, still twirling, guffawed and said, “I guess that spider was a sex maniac and wanted to see your bosoms!” He was always saying stuff like that to Beatriz, to either get her attention or annoy her, I wasn’t sure.
Beatriz said back, “I don’t have any bosoms, Max, so shut up and stop talking about bosoms all the time.” Max just laughed.
Ivan had fallen to his knees to examine the hole. “Wow—do some spiders live in the ground?”
Mr. Friedmann shouted from inside the house, “Don’t go near zhe garden today, kids. I’m going to put poison on zhe wegetables to kill zhe spiders.”
“Not even a spider would want to eat his flabby eggplants,” Max said. Mr. Friedmann had so many eggplants in his garden that the family ate them every night, to Max’s disgust. “Yech. They taste like fried flip-flops.”
Ivan, abandoning the spider hole and wiping his hands on his shorts, said, “These webs are too itchy. Let’s wash off in the hose.” Ivan was often itchy. Max pulled a hose around from the side of the house, squirted himself, and Ivan and I stripped off our sticky, sweaty T-shirts and he hosed off the two of us.
Beatriz, still on the sidewalk, watched. “What about you, Beatriz?” Max said, grinning; his little wet nipples pinched up from the cold water.
She said, “As if! See you guys later.” She flounced off home. If one can flounce in polka-dot short-shorts.
We were in hog heaven. We liked spiders but didn’t know a lot about them, though, of course, we’d all read Charlotte’s Web and loved it. But Max and Ivan and I were rabid collectors, and this spider plague opened up new collecting opportunities. Past summers it had been rocks, fossils, and shark teeth from the Chesapeake Bay, and then snakes, although we gave that up because snakes presented too many problems: Ivan the Tenderhearted cried about the little pink-and-white mice we had to feed them, so he started to liberate his mice in the house, which hadn’t gone over well with Maria, and one of my garter snakes had gotten out and just about given Estelle a heart attack—the only time she’d ever threatened to quit. And there was an unsettling event at the Friedmanns’ involving Max’s sister and his queen snake.