My Most Excellent Year (20 page)

Naturally, I laughed it off as though this were the most implausible scenario I’d ever heard—then I thanked her, picked up my bag, and left the store. Besides, the café has its own entrance on Babcock Street.

Anthony was seated in the rear booth seemingly by himself, but that was only because Hucky is so short, it takes a while to notice his little blond head sticking up over the table. Judging by the foam on the end of his nose, I took it that Anthony was introducing him to that most unsavory of diets, hot cocoa and chocolate chip cookies. (Why he and Augie haven’t come down with rickets is an enigma
far beyond me.) Since late afternoon is the café’s busiest crunch time, it took me ten minutes to work my way through the crowd and find an empty stool at the counter—but once seated, it was easy to keep an eye on them through the mirror on the wall behind the cappuccino machines.
Perfect. I might as well be invisible.

“Are you Alejandra?” asked a harried café manager, tapping me on the shoulder.

“Uh—yes,” I replied, startled. “Why?”

“Gentleman in the back booth wants to know if he can buy you a drink,” he said impatiently. “And I could really use the stool.” I turned around to glower at Anthony. His chin was in his palm and he was shaking his head as if to say, “You know, it
really
doesn’t have to be this difficult.” Why was everybody ganging up on me??

“The only thing T.C. doesn’t have is a sword and a battleship named after him. Everything else is Royal Family.”

So I gave up the stool. I figured I could handle a walk on the wild side. And I wasn’t wrong:

• When I sit down next to Anthony, he teaches Hucky how to spell “Alejandra” and “Alé,” and he teaches me how to say “I live near the park” and “I sing and I dance.” I learn that when I speak, I have to do it slowly so he can read my lips. I say “square” and Hucky draws one on a napkin. Then I make Anthony say it too. “Sqway-ah.” Hucky draws another square.
      “He can read accents,” says Anthony proudly. Maybe, maybe not. But he can definitely read Anthony.
  
• Hucky wants another cocoa. Anthony says no. Hucky sticks out his bottom lip and looks sad. Anthony says no again.
  Hucky draws a picture of a cup of cocoa with Anthony’s head popping out of it, then glances up disarmingly with a calculated smile. It’s so obviously manipulative, I can barely keep a straight face. But Anthony still says no. Hucky figures out who’s boss. He also figures out that there’s a weak link in the chain of command, because he turns to me with an angelic twinkle and twists his fingers into a pair of gestures that Anthony translates as “Please?” and “Pretty please?” I had no idea I was such a pushover.
      “Why can’t he have another one?” I demand of Anthony, charmed off my feet.
      “Because it’ll ruin his dinner,” he grumbles, like it’s the dumbest question on earth. “I’m surprised at you.” I decide it’s time to bring in the heavy artillery.
      “You know you’re talking like a parent, don’t you?” I retort accusingly. That does the trick.
      “EWWW! GROSS!!” Hucky gets his cocoa. Then he makes me come around to his side of the booth and sit next to him. I’m his new best friend.
  
• We leave the café and turn down Harvard Street toward Amory Park. Anthony and Hucky are both carrying their gloves, but Hucky is also holding Anthony’s hand as well. Since Anthony is preoccupied with walk signs, green lights, and crosswalks, he doesn’t notice that Hucky is staring up at his face, oblivious to anything else in his world. I’m ashamed of myself for once thinking he was using Hucky to catch my attention. Get over yourself, girl!
  
• As it’s 31 degrees outside by the time we reach Amory Park, we have the diamond all to ourselves. I deliberately sit in the bottom row of bleachers, where Anthony was sobbing in my dream, because an exorcism is definitely in order. Meanwhile, the team has taken the field. Anthony lobs a couple of easy tosses to Hucky, who only drops one of them. But when he does, he puts his hands on his hips and glares.
      “That’s his mad face, Alé,” calls out Anthony. “You’re getting it for free. He usually charges admission.”
      “Dish it back!” I shout. “Kids love it when you do that!” So Anthony puts his hands on his own hips and glares at Hucky, who promptly turns around so Anthony can’t see him losing the battle not to smile. He also shoots me a six-year-old wince that needs no translation at all.
  Did you tell him to do that?
  Did
  you? I thought you were on
  my
  side!
      But Hucky gets even. When it’s his turn to throw, he pitches the ball straight up in the air as though it were a pop foul. In all honesty, it’s the kind of catch that Augie’s grandma Lily could probably make with her eyes closed, but Anthony frantically races back and forth underneath it as though it had been hit by Willie Mays. Finally he takes a belly dive by third base and goes skidding on his stomach toward the outfield with his gloved hand outstretched—while the ball drops harmlessly to the grass ten feet behind him. He pounds the ground in mock anguish as Hucky raises a triumphant fist. He’s invincible.
      We detour by Toy Mart on the way home to find Hucky
  his Gold Glove present. (Requirement: under $2.00.) He heads directly for the rabbit’s foot bin, but once there he can’t decide whether he wants a blue one or an orange one.
      “He’s playing us,” warns Anthony. “He thinks that if he can’t make up his mind, we’ll buy him both.”
      “He’s right,” I reply. “I’ll get the blue one.”
      “I’ll get the orange.”
      We take Hucky back to the Children’s Residence, but since it’s still early, we go up to his room to watch
  Mary Poppins
  . His roommate Mateo hastily turns down our invitation to join us, though his eyes light up when Anthony hands him a blue rabbit’s foot. Then he hesitates nervously.
      “
  Was this a real rabbit?
  ” he signs.
      “No,” says Anthony, shaking his head for emphasis. “Just pretend.” Relieved, Mateo races downstairs to show off his brand-new present, while Anthony and I sit on the bed with Hucky in the middle, as he scrutinizes Mary Poppins powdering her nose on a cloud. A good forty minutes passes in silence, but somewhere during “It’s a Jolly Holiday With Mary,” Anthony reaches out to hold Hucky’s right hand—checking on me out of the corner of his eye to see if I’ve noticed. I have. So I grab on to Hucky’s left one. According to certain principles of algebra and math, this means that Anthony and I are holding hands as well.
  

And with all due respect to Augie,
that
was the first move.

Fondly,

Alejandra

Dear Jacqueline,

At breakfast this morning, my parents asked me if I’d thought about how I intended to spend my summer vacation. This is usually a prelude to announcing the plans they’ve already made for me, but they like to pretend that the whole thing was my idea—as if a ten-year-old is really going to choose eight weeks in the Ukraine with the Peace Corps on her own. Mamita suggested that I intern at the French embassy (translation: Mme. Alphand promised her that the charm-challenged Philippe would be visiting from Hell for the season and probably dangled a Newport wedding as bait); Papa recommended an assignment with the Harvard history department (translation: Their filing has been backlogged since 1968 and they can’t even get a temp to say yes); and Carlos glanced up from
The New York Times
long enough to utter the ten most astonishing words I’ve ever heard him speak.

“Why don’t you ask Alejandra what
she
wants to do?” he asked casually before going back to the Arts & Leisure section. I nearly
dropped a soft-boiled egg into my lap.
Carlos??
Papa and Mamita were evidently as flustered as I was, because they immediately changed the subject to Yugoslavia. They always do that when they’re in conversational denial.

Twelve minutes later I was halfway up Ivy Street on my way to school, still so bewildered that I hadn’t even noticed the season’s first real snowfall already beginning to swirl through Brookline.
When was the last time Carlos stood up for me? Uh, October 15, 2000. I’d just mistaken President Chirac for a waiter and asked him for another Diet Coke. But before France could secede from the U.N., Carlos cut in front of me and congratulated His Excellency on delivering such a stirring address at the Earth Summit, which gave me just enough time to sneak away and hide in a closet until it was time to go home. Papa and Mamita never found out about it.

“Hey, Alé! Slow down!” I turned around just as Carlos caught up with me and pulled a familiar-looking flyer out of his chocolate brown Armani coat pocket. “Here,” he said brusquely, handing it over. “You dropped this in the hallway outside your room.” As soon as I recognized the logo, my face drained of color.

THEATRE-BY-THE-SEA

Matunuck, Rhode Island

S
UMMER
A
PPRENTICE
P
ROGRAM

“Are you crazy, sis?” he demanded, brushing half a dozen snowflakes out of his eyes. “
Never
leave anything like this lying out in the open. If you want to work in summer stock, just tell me. I’ll
only need about four weeks to get the parents with the program. But
talk
to me first, would you?” He looked so worried, and we were both so snowy, and his usually perfect curly black hair was so uncharacteristically asymmetrical, none of it made any sense.
This simply can’t be happening. The pod people got ahold of my brother.

“It wasn’t—I mean—It’s just a thought,” I stammered.

“Yeah?” he retorted. “Like the dance classes and voice lessons at the Lycée? You’re lucky I check the bills first. Papa’d have a coronary if he ever saw that.” Then he pointed me toward the school and gave me a small push in the right direction. “Now go learn something,” he said firmly. “And break a leg at the audition.”

He left me standing on Longwood Street with my mouth hanging open.

Since you were in Paris in 1948 and may have missed the original run,
Kiss Me, Kate
is about a touring theatrical company that’s putting on a production of
The Taming of the Shrew.
The two leads are Fred and Lilli, who play Petruchio and Katharine in
Shrew
and who used to be married but aren’t anymore. (Obviously, you don’t have to hear
much more than one verse of their “Wunderbar” duet to know they’re going to wind up together again before the show’s over.) Meanwhile, Bill and Lois are a couple of chorus gypsies who fall in love too—he plays Lucentio, she plays Bianca, he gambles, and she flirts. (They have all of the comedy numbers.) So if I was going to get my feet wet in show business, this was definitely the musical to do it with.

The auditorium was jammed with more kids than Mrs. Packer could handle, so she had to keep the auditions moving pretty quickly. Inside of the first three minutes, Lee Meyerhoff and Andy Wexler had earned applause for “Soak Up the Sun” and “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” (which Andy actually delivered without looking at Augie even once), Stu Merliss had been thrown out on his ear after five syllables of the lyrically restored “I Feel Like a Dick,” and Augie—in Lee’s tights, a shirt borrowed from Carlos, and Mamita’s tablecloth—stopped the show cold with Cole Porter’s “Too Darn Hot.” Mr. Disharoon was only supposed to play the first sixteen bars of each song, but everybody so thoroughly enjoyed the swinging-tapping-finger-snapping combination of Hwong and Porter that Mrs. Packer let him finish—and then asked him if he knew “Make ’Em Laugh” from
Singin’ in the Rain
(!!). He did, and he proved it.

“What a ham,” I whispered to Anthony as we stood at the back of the house together watching the Augie Hwong Show.

“That’s nothing,” he whispered back. “You ought to see what he does with ‘You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun.’”

By the time my name was called and I’d walked up the steps toward the footlights, the stage fright I’d been expecting for two days still hadn’t materialized. And it wasn’t difficult to figure out why. True to his word, Anthony had taken a seat smack in the center
of the front row next to Augie, Lee, and Andy—who were smirking, leering, and grinning, respectively. I wondered if this was what Carlos had meant when he told me to “go learn something.” Not only did I have each one of my friends in my corner, but it also turned out that I had a big brother who was taking care of me after all.
“If you want to work in summer stock, just tell me. I’ll only need about four weeks to get the parents with the program.”
So what on earth was there to be nervous about?!