Gee Whiz (3 page)

The phone rang, and I went into the living room to get it. It was Jane, who was canceling my lessons for the day. She said, “Oh, Abby, I tried to call you last night to tell you that Melinda is down in LA for the weekend, staying with her father, and now Ellen’s mom just called and said that Ellen has a hundred-and-three-degree temperature, which she only knows because Ellen started sweating and panting at the breakfast table. She’s been sick for two days, but keeping it from her mother so that she could have her lesson. That girl! I’ve never seen anyone like her.”

“I’ll give her an extra one over Christmas vacation.”

“I’ll tell her that.”

I wasn’t terribly sorry not to be going to the stables. I could get my riding done and have the afternoon to myself.

Then we went out to the horses. They were hungry, since we were about half an hour late (horses always know what time it is where hay is concerned). This was part of the plan, because we wanted them to pay more attention to breakfast than to one another. Beebop knew what time it was, too—he was pawing the floor of his stall. When the four geldings were eating (and the mares, of course), Jerry got him out and took him through the gate of the gelding pasture, then led him to one of the open piles. He started to eat. Lincoln looked at him. Blue looked at him. Marcus looked at him. Jack looked at him. He did not look at them. After maybe fifteen minutes,
everyone shifted piles, Lincoln first. It was Blue who moved in on Beebop’s pile, but Beebop just walked over to another one and continued to eat. We watched them for half an hour, then checked on them several more times. Uneventful. When Jack came over after finishing his hay and pranced around, looking for a playmate, Beebop put his ears back. Jack paused, then trotted away, message received. Danny said, “I think they’ll be okay.”

Jerry said, “Beebop has no problem with other horses.”

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS RAINY AND COLD
,
AND ONLY A FEW PEOPLE
showed up for church—the Hollingsworths, of course, and the Brookses. Brother Abner did not show up—I couldn’t remember the last time he’d stayed away. Carlie Hollingsworth and I should have been best friends. We’d known each other our whole lives, we were the same age, and we had done things together at church like babysitting and setting out and clearing up the suppers, but either she thought I was too familiar to be interesting, or I thought that of her. We didn’t even try to be friends. Maybe Brother Abner was my best friend at church. He was like a grandfather or a great-uncle, but an unpredictable one, not a sour one. He sometimes told me stories of his boyhood, which had taken place in upstate New York,
and had been full of adventures. The Bible passages he chose to read were usually about forgiveness and mercy. And he had a twinkle in his eye. Not many grown-ups have that. After the service, when I was making my way around the table, putting food on my plate (Sister Larkin and Sister Brooks had brought pot roast, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and pumpkin pie—always good), I eavesdropped as the grown-ups whispered to one another.

“Did he call you?”

“Not me. Anyone heard from him?”

Head shaking.

“You ever been to that place he has? It’s only a room with a little corner for a kitchen. You can see the sky through the walls here and there. Must be freezing in this weather.”

“Someone should go over there.”

“He would hate that.”

“Well, yes, but …” Glances at me, then they moved away. I took my food to my seat and picked through it. I never knew Brother Abner lived in one room with thin walls. In fact, I didn’t know how most of them lived. We saw each other in church, and then it was like everyone vanished, only to reappear a few days later. I thought it was a little scary. When we were driving home, I said, “I don’t remember Brother Abner ever missing a service before.”

“That was worrisome,” said Mom. “But look at this rain.”

It was pouring, and the wipers were splashing in it.

Dad said, “I’m sure he just didn’t want to drive in this. That old Studebaker he has is a little iffy. Brother Abner has seen the world and survived. He’s the last one I worry about.”

I said, “How old is he?”

“Oh, goodness,” said Mom, “eighty-eight, maybe?”

My grandparents in Oklahoma were young enough to be his children.

“He’s got a lot on the ball,” said Dad. “That’s for sure.”

It was still raining the next day. We wore our raincoats and shuffled around the school grounds, cold and sort of miserable. It was the first real rain of the winter, and as much as we told ourselves that everywhere else in the world it was snowing, sleeting, or hailing, and the temperatures were way below zero, we were depressed. Even Stella could not use the rain to make a style statement—she wore boots and a hat and ran hunched over from class to class, just like everyone else. Sophia, however, was her usual self. We were pretty good friends now, because we always had something to talk about—horses. In history class, while Miss Cumberland was getting her slide show about Romulus and Remus organized, I told her about Vista del Canada.

She said, “They have that stallion, Encantado. There was a jumper by him, Incantation. He was nothing at the racetrack, but he could trot a five-foot jump.”

“Have you ever jumped five feet?”

She shook her head very seriously. “My mom won’t let me, so Jane and the colonel watch me like a hawk, but I think Onyx could do it, don’t you?”

I knew enough not to encourage her, but I did think either of her horses could do it—I knew Onyx because he had once been ours, and I knew Pie in the Sky because I’d ridden
him earlier in the fall. She went on, “Anyway, I would love to see Encantado.” She sighed. “
Encantado
means ‘delighted’ or ‘enchanted’ in Spanish.”

Miss Cumberland slapped her ruler on her desk, looked straight at us, and asked, “Do you girls have something to contribute?”

I zipped my lip, but Sophia said, “I guess that depends on the subject.” She was serious. Sophia never seemed to understand sarcasm.

Because of the rain, the school bus took a long time to get to our stop, and also because of the rain, dusk seemed to be oozing over everything very early. Mom already had all the lights on, which made the house look cheerful and Christmassy. I stomped and shook myself on the front porch, to get as much rain off me as possible, but I still felt soaked when I went through the door. Rusty stood up to greet me. That meant it was really wet—Dad didn’t like Rusty to come in the house, and he had said at least a hundred times that the barn was perfectly dry. Rusty of all animals knew exactly where the barn was, but sometimes Mom made up her mind, and Rusty came inside. The horses would still be out, though. Dad maintained that in spite of what we thought, they preferred it that way, and maybe they did. I planned to give them plenty of hay to help them through the night. The rain also meant no riding, though the arena had such good drainage that once the rain stopped, we could ride after about a day. The first good rain of the year disappeared especially quickly—it was as though the soil and the grass and the oaks just swallowed it down and breathed a sigh of pleasure that was the fragrance you always smelled when you opened a window
or a door. I didn’t mind the beginning of winter in California.

On the front table was a letter from Barbie Goldman, who was going to a very strange boarding school down near Los Angeles, where families with plenty of money paid a lot of tuition in order for their children to ride, hike, build fires, sweep, cook, argue about how the world works, and do a lot of homework. Once a week, Barbie and Alexis were driven in from “the wilds of Malibu,” as Barbie called them, to a conservatory in the city, where they continued their piano and violin lessons—“our one taste of civilization,” said Barbie. But the school was famous for one thing, other than roughing it, and that was art. Both twins spent a lot of time doing art. The front of this new envelope was plain white, though my name was in fancy letters, but the back had a seascape on it—a long, pale beach, a blue ocean, a few palm trees, and the white crest of a wave. I got the scissors out of Mom’s sewing basket and slit it open as carefully as I could, then I cut along the sides and the bottom. After I took the envelope upstairs and tacked it to my bulletin board next to the others I’d saved, I realized that I’d almost forgotten to read the letter.

That was something to look forward to—a meeting between the Goldman twins and Sophia. They were like creatures from different planets.

The next day, I followed Leslie out of the lunchroom after we’d eaten, making sure first that Gloria and Stella were already on their way to their next class, which was swimming (I didn’t have to take swimming until after Christmas vacation, but everyone had to pass a swimming test before the end of the year). I caught up to Leslie and we walked along for a step or two, then she glanced at me. I said, “Can I invite you to something?”

“Of course you can.”

“Alexis and Barbie are coming home for Christmas and they want you to come to their slumber party. It’s the twenty-first.”

“I haven’t been to their place since
Julius Caesar
.”

I’d forgotten she’d done that with us. I said, “Who did you play?”

“Messala. Man with a torch. Woman with a torch. I don’t remember saying any lines.”

“You must have said something.”

She smiled. “Maybe. But I don’t remember.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask what had happened to her, how she had gone from being the quiet, sort of sad and plump girl we thought we knew to this tall, self-confident, athletic girl in front of me, but I said, “I wish you’d been here for their party before they went to school. It was fun.”

“I was here. But I wasn’t ready to appear yet.”

“Will you appear at the slumber party?”

She didn’t say anything. I put my hand on her elbow. I
said, “Barbie asked me specifically to ask you and Sophia. I’m sure there will be great food and good games and … I don’t know. There’s no one like them around here now.”

“Okay. It might be fun.”

The next day in history, I asked Sophia. I half expected her to say, “What’s a slumber party?” but instead, she said, “I’ve heard of the Goldmans. They used to have parts in plays. I saw them in something years ago. They’re blond, right? One of them played the child in the play half the time and one of them played the child the other half. Maybe it was
Peter Pan
? Did they go to your school?”

“Yes. Now they go to the Jackson School.”

“I thought of going there.”

“You did?”

“Well, my dad thought of me going there. Let’s put it that way. Some client of his got him all excited about it, and it took several slammed doors to talk him out of it.”

I laughed.

Sophia laughed. Then she said, “Okay, I’ll go to the slumber party, but maybe only as an observer.”

I never knew what to make of Sophia.

A few days went by, and we didn’t hear anything more from Mr. Matthews, or from Roscoe Pelham. I thought it was funny that his name was the same as the name of a type of bit. It was as if my name were “Abby Snaffle” or “Ruth Abigail Eggbutt.”

On Thursday, though, the call came. Dad answered, and said, “Yes, yes. Oh, sure, that sounds fine. Let me get her,” and then he handed the phone to me.