“It must be nine thousand degrees up here!” Max complained. “I quit!” He began descending the ladder.
“Yeah, me, too,” Ivan said, clambering behind him. “Too bad we’re not collecting horseflies.”
“I know,” I said, sighing. “The spiders in here sure aren’t doing much to kill all these stupid mosquitoes, either.”
“These butterfly jars are too big to carry around,” Max said. “And how are we going to keep the grown-ups from seeing the spiders, since we’re keeping them alive?”
We thought. Then Ivan said, “I know! Prescription bottles! We catch them in those, because nobody will notice them in our pockets. And we transfer them to jars to keep.” This seemed like a good idea to me and Max, although we said the grown-ups would kill us if they found them. It was decided that Ivan would keep them, because no one was paying much attention at his house.
There were plenty of pill bottles around all our houses; mostly for Miltown, the most popular of the new “Mother’s Little Helper” drugs, which I’d seen advertised for the “tense and nervous patient.” My mother had certainly been tense and nervous, and she’d had the pills for as long as I could remember, but it surprised me that Dimma, Mrs. Friedmann, and Elena took Miltown, too. But I’d also seen the drug recommended for a disease called menopause, so I thought that maybe Dimma and Mrs. Friedmann had that. Elena had even more Miltowns than my mother. She said they helped with her asthma, but she still suffered from attacks, and always carried her inhaler with the pills.
Feeling better about things, we gathered up all the Miltown bottles we could find, putting nail holes in the tops. Max and I had orangey pill bottles and Ivan had Elena’s green ones, from Mexico. We were set, but we knew that the spiders would die soon, and, unlike Charlotte, they wouldn’t be leaving babies behind because of all the DDT the newspapers said was being marshaled against them. We’d have to find our prize spiders fast. School would start in a couple weeks.
3
A few days later, we were in my kitchen slapping together some potato-chip sandwiches: take two pieces of Wonder Bread, slather them with Miracle Whip, place a fistful of Wise potato chips on one slice, put the other on top, and mash down firmly. Estelle frowned upon this, so we sneaked them up to my room. After dispatching the sandwiches, we were lying on my twin bed in front of the fan, depressed because we still hadn’t found a poisonous spider. We had a crablike spiny orb weaver, and Max had thought he’d seen a scorpion, but it had skittered away under his porch. We knew Wiesie was too smart to mess with it.
“And we haven’t done anything about the Beaver Plan yet,” Ivan said.
“You mean the plan to get invited to the De Haans’ swimming pool,” Max said sarcastically. My bedroom window was open, and we were tortured by the sounds of the Dutch boys enjoying a refreshing swim.
“Anybody got an idea?” Ivan said.
“Nope,” Max said. “The only idea in my head is to pee in that pool if I ever get in.”
“What about presents for everybody to make them like us?” I asked. “Like maybe mounted butterflies?” I’d mounted a handsome zebra swallowtail and sent it to my mother. “We’re through with them, right?”
“No! I don’t want to give any of mine away!” Max complained.
“Plants?” I said. “We can pick Brickie’s peace roses and put them in Dixie cups? Peace, get it?”
Ivan said to Max, “Or maybe your dad will give us some of his watermatoes to give out?”
“He’s not going to do that,” Max said. “Plus, there wouldn’t be enough to go around.”
“What if we did drawings for everybody?” Ivan offered. “Like maybe”—he paused—“what if we drew maps of our street? With everybody’s houses looking nice?” This excited him—he was good at drawing.
“Nah,” said Max. “John and I are bad drawers and nobody will want ours.”
I said, “Is Elena home yet, Ivan?” She’d been visiting “friends” in Miami for one of her projects; I wondered if they were unsavory refugees.
“She just got home this morning, but she might be asleep. She was tired.”
We spilled out of my house, but not before stealing some Twinkies from the kitchen, which we stopped to eat, hiding in the porte cochere behind Dimma’s Cadillac. Crossing the street, we were delighted to see that Elena had taken up her usual spot on the long swing on Ivan’s front porch.
Elena spied us and lifted a long arm to wave. “Come see me!” she called. We ran up the lichen-covered concrete steps to where Elena reclined on her side, so exotically regal—an earthy Madame Récamier. Her shiny hair was tied back with a blue scarf, a long cascade falling down the back of the silky flowered kimono she wore all day because she didn’t have to go anywhere. “My job is going to parties!” she’d say—and that’s what she did many nights. Her brilliant red toes and fingernails—Sports Car, she said the color was called—always gave me a thrill, a new color every few days. I felt a kind of wiggliness about Elena, too, and was confused about it.
Ivan leaned over, kissed his aunt, and asked, “Is he back yet?”
“His flight doesn’t get in until tonight,” she said. She was somehow able to hold her usual rum and Coke, a cigarette, and Carteles, an arty magazine, in one hand and rub Ivan’s back with the other.
“Cuba libre, darlings? It’s sooo hot today!” She offered her glass. We always took a swig to refresh ourselves. She handed over her cigarette, a glamorous Vogue, rose with a gilt filter, and we each had a puff. We were, of course, sworn to secrecy. We kept Elena’s secrets and she kept ours.
We collapsed worshipfully on the floor in front of her swing. “Elena, we hunted spiders all morning, and we got eaten alive by bugs, and it’s about a million degrees!” I whined, thinking about kissing those feet.
“Can we go to the Hiser for a movie?” Max asked. “We’re about to have heatstroke!”
Movie theaters were some of the only air-conditioned places in town then, and luckily for us, Elena was crazy about movies. We had seen Rodan and Go, Johnny, Go!, but Max complained about some of her choices, like Auntie Mame, which she, Ivan, and I had loved. My grandmother also complained about Mame because it was “too sophisticated” for us, and was full of “sexual innuendo,” but all that went right by me. All I knew was that this handsome orphan, Patrick, lived with his gorgeous, party-girl aunt, who spoiled the hell out of him. Since my own parents were gone, I liked to imagine myself as Patrick and Elena as Mame, living the charmed life in a swanky New York apartment. I suppose both Ivan and I thought of her as a surrogate mother, only more fabulous than any mother we knew of.
“No, Max!” corrected Ivan. “Elena, we need you to help us with our Beaver Plan to make the neighbors nicer!”
She laughed. “Beaver Plan? How’d you come up with that?”
“You know, a friendly neighborhood like in Leave It to Beaver. Like the Marshall Plan helps countries in Europe be nice to each other,” I explained.
“Hmm…I see. But you know that some people think that the Marshall Plan is actually more about the United States getting what it wants,” Elena said. “Could your Beaver Plan really be about wanting to get in the De Haans’ swimming pool again?”
“No, we didn’t think about that,” I said innocently.