Taking Care of Terrific (11 page)

Ms. Cameron had called to confirm that I was to arrive at six Saturday evening because she was to leave for her, ha-ha, business meeting at six-thirty.

I had worried a bit about getting to the Garden with Tom Terrific at midnight. I'm not a nervous sort of person, but for a fourteen-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy to walk the streets of Boston in the middle of a Saturday night, there has to be some death wish involved. At first Seth said he'd come and walk with us. But, much as I was beginning to like Seth, I wasn't sure he would be all that much protection, not at midnight. He was almost six feet tall; but somehow his body had forgotten to add any flesh to those six feet. He looked a little like a gross picture I had seen once in one of my mother's medical books. Its caption was: Failure to Thrive.

Hawk announced that he would pick all of us up in his car. Now it became "Synchronize your watches, men" time. He would pick Seth up at the corner of Commonwealth and Clarendon, a few doors from his apartment building, at eleven-forty. Ten minutes later, at eleven-fifty, they would collect Tom Terrific and me from the house on West Cedar Street. We were to be waiting just inside the door. As Hawk pointed out to Seth, and Seth repeated to me, if the residents of West Cedar Street noticed a black man idling his beat-up car there in the middle of the night, every telephone around would be dialing 911, the emergency police number.

And the bag ladies would get to the duck pond on their own. I worried for a minute about that. But Seth pointed out that they were used to it. Most of them probably slept in subways and parks anyway. They were a little subculture of survivors.

Frankly, I was beginning to hope that we would all survive this.

***

I arrived at Ms. Cameron's at six with my backpack on my back. She took it from me politely and set it on a tufted Victorian sofa in the front hall. I wondered if she was puzzled by its bulkiness, but she didn't say anything. Probably she assumed that it contained a toothbrush, a frilly Lanz nightgown, and a matching quilted robe. Maybe a pair of fuzzy slippers.

Actually it contained a black turtleneck sweater, my newest jeans, which hadn't faded much yet so they were still dark blue, and a pair of dark brown hiking boots. That was as close as I could come to an all-black ensemble. Also in the pack was a navy blue knitted ski cap. You could feel a little silly wearing a ski cap on a warm August night. But my hair is light; I figured I could reduce my visibility by stuffing it into the cap.

I wonder if full-time burglars ever get over feeling silly as they select their burglaring outfits.

It was not raining. Thank you, Howie Friendly.

Now, as for Ms. Cameron and her bogus business trip. For this alleged business trip, she was dressed in a blue silk dress, low necked with lots of cleavage, high-heeled sandals, and dangling silver earrings. She was wearing make-up, which
she never wore in the daytime, and White Shoulders perfume.

(Whenever I'm wandering through the first floor of Jordan Marsh, I squirt myself with one of the sample perfumes. Then I rush home so Mrs. Kolodny can guess what it is. If there is ever a TV quiz program where perfume identification is the competition, Mrs. Kolodny can be a contestant and win thousands of dollars. White Shoulders is a pretty easy one. The one Mrs. Kolodny hasn't mastered yet is Lagerfeld's Chloe. I can always stump her on Chloe.)

It made me feel (a) stupid, that Ms. Cameron thought I would
believe
that she had a business engagement, and (b) sordid, that I was dressed in last summer's too-small sundress when she was decked out in silk. Both adjectives, of course, go nicely with the name Enid.

Her "business partner" arrived in a Mercedes; he was handsome in a Marlboro-ad sort of way (though he was dressed up in a dark suit and tie) and his name was Dave Guthrie. She introduced us. Tom Terrific knew him already; obviously he'd been around before. He said "Hi, sport" to old Tom and tousled his hair. There was an awful lot of hair tousling going on lately, if you ask me. When Dave Guthrie was looking in another direction, Ms. Cameron smoothed old Tom's hair back into its neatly barbered little arrangement.

Ms. Cameron gave the number where she would be, I tucked it into the pocket of my backpack, and off they went after she had planted a lot of teeny-weeny tasteful kisses around her son's head and shoulders. She had already given me lots of not kisses but instructions: nourishing supper, dutiful bath, no TV, two bedtime stories (nonviolent), diligent brushing of teeth, lighting of nightlight, and tucking in at eight
P.M.
sharp.

I planned to ignore all of her instructions.

With great chortles of glee we dumped the little meat loaf and the little baked potatoes and the little salads down the little garbage disposal, which ate them up with little crunching sounds. Then we had a grossly loaded pizza delivered. It cost me nine dollars, but what the heck; this was a special night, and I'd already banked almost ninety dollars of babysitting money this summer.

By the time we had both pigged out on pizza, it was after seven. Four and a half hours to go.

"Tickling time!" said Tom Terrific, and he lunged at my armpits.

We rolled around on the living room floor for a while, tickling and giggling, until we were afraid we'd barf up nine dollars' worth of pizza.

I tried to think of dopey things that I liked to do when I was younger.

"Hey, Terrific," I said. "You want to make some phone calls?"

He shook his head solemnly. "I'm not allowed to touch the telephone," he said.

"You watch then," I told him. "And listen." I picked up the telephone book, turned to a page at random, and dialed a stranger's number.

"Is your refrigerator running?" I asked in a serious voice when someone answered the phone. "You'd better run after it before it gets away!" I said next, then hung up quickly.

Tom Terrific looked at me in absolute amazement and delight. "Did they say yes?" he asked. "Did they say their refrigerator was running?"

I nodded.

He began to laugh. "And then you said, 'You'd better run after it!' Do it again!"

I did it again, twice more, to unsuspecting people, and Tom threw himself on the couch, roaring with laughter. "You tricked them!" he cried. "Let me do it!"

I picked out another number and reached toward the telephone. "No, let me!" said Tom. "I can read numbers. Tell me the numbers and let me do them!"

So he dialed carefully, and in a scared, awed voice he said, "Is your refrigerator running?"

Then, with more confidence, in a deeper voice he said, "Better run after it before it gets away!" He put the receiver down and stood there, holding his hands over his mouth, astonished and pleased that he had done a forbidden thing, that he had played a trick.

He did it again and again until the novelty wore off. By then it was eight o'clock. Less than four hours to go.

"Eight o'clock," I said without thinking, looking at my watch.

Tom Terrific's face fell. "Bedtime," he said sadly. "I was spozed to have my bath at seven-thirty."

At some point I was going to have to tell my little buddy that he wasn't going to bed tonight. I looked at him. There were pizza remains on his chin and nose. Well, a bath would kill a little more time.

"Come on," I said. "Upstairs for your bath. Want to make it a bubble bath?"

"What's that?" asked Tom Terrific.

What's
that?
What's a bubble bath? Can you imagine a four-year-old kid who never in his life
has had a bubble bath? Talk about underprivileged!

I tried to explain about the fun of being surrounded by bubbles.

"I don't think I'm allowed to do that," he said apprehensively.

"Tonight you are," I told him, and I went to the kitchen and got a bottle of dishwashing liquid. Great for bubbles.

Watching Tom Terrific's face as the bubbles appeared in the bathtub was just as good as watching the kid in the movie when E.T. appeared in his back yard. Tom's eyes grew big and then bigger, and his grin spread across his face until dimples appeared on either side. I dropped his clothes into the hamper and lifted him, wiggling in delight, into his bubble bath. He squealed with happiness.

For forty-five minutes we played: Tom in the bath, me sitting on the floor beside the tub. I made him a beard of bubbles and lifted him up to see himself in the mirror. Then I soaped his hair—promising a cross-your-heart oath that I wouldn't get soap in his eyes—and shaped it into a pair of devil horns, which I then had to show him in the mirror as well. We threw bubbles all over the bathroom. We drove matchbox cars along the rim of the tub and plunged them into the water again and again, with sound effects.

Finally, when his fingertips had turned into absolute prunes, I lifted him out of the tub, rubbed him with a thick towel until he was bright pink, and dried his hair. He scampered naked across the hall to his bedroom to get his pajamas, and I cleaned the bathroom until it looked fairly normal.

"What time is it?" Tom Terrific called.

I looked at my watch. "Almost nine," I called back. "Why?"

He trudged from his bedroom back to where I was. He was wearing seersucker pajamas, wrong side out, and funny little blue slippers on the wrong feet.

"No stories tonight," he announced with a shake of his head. "I have to go right smack to sleep imm-meed-i-ut-ly!"

"Wrong," I announced as I scooped him up into my arms. "Now we're going to watch
Love Boat
on TV." I carried him down the stairs.

Less than three hours left.

I turned on the TV set and we curled up together on the pale green couch in the study. Tom
watched the first few commercials intently, giggling when a dog said, "Yuck, I don't want that nutritional dog food." Then his head became heavier against my arm, and when I looked down, his eyes were closed.

"You asleep?" I whispered.

"Nope," he whispered back, his eyelids fluttering a little. Then he sighed and his head flopped into my lap. He was zonked. I stroked his damp hair while I watched the characters on the show, a rerun I'd seen before, fall in and out of love.

Love Boat
ended. Ricardo Montalban advertised a long, sleek car. A rerun of
Fantasy Island
began. Tom slept on. I reached over for a crocheted afghan that was folded on the arm of the couch and covered him. He snuggled closer to me. He smelled clean and fresh and young.

Fantasy Island
ended and I watched the news: a plane crash in Hong Kong, a fire in Dorchester, a drug bust in Gloucester. I watched Howie Friendly draw a tornado funnel in Nebraska and some small thunderclouds in Maine, all with his left hand. I watched the Red Sox lose on a third-baseman's error in the ninth. I looked at my watch. Eleven-thirty. I yawned. Tom Terrific slept.

Carefully I removed his head from my lap and lowered it to the soft couch. I found my backpack in the hall and changed my clothes in the small bathroom on the first floor. Hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door was a woman's dark blue cable-knit cardigan. I took it back to the study and gently directed Tom's little arms into the sleeves; he never stirred. I buttoned the sweater down the front; it fit him like a strange little coat. I switched his slippers to the correct feet and zipped them up again.

A sports special was on the TV now, and two tennis players were smashing serves at each other at about a hundred miles an hour. I turned the set off and looked at my watch. Eleven-forty-five.

I turned off most of the lights, put the house keys into my backpack, and pulled the leather straps over my shoulders. Then I picked up Tom Terrific, who draped one arm around my neck in his sleep, and went to the front door. I opened it a few inches just as Hawk's car came slowly down West Cedar Street. When the car stopped in front of the house, I opened the door completely, went outside, closed it behind me, and checked to be sure it had locked. I carried the sleeping four-year-old down the front steps, and Hawk reached one hand behind him to open the car's back door for us.

The street was dark and silent except for a few tree leaves, which whispered in the slight breeze.

I lifted Tom Terrific into the car, placed him on the back seat, and climbed in beside him. He sat bolt upright suddenly, and his eyes opened in fright.

"What are we doing?" he asked groggily.

Hawk checked to be certain the door was closed tightly. He pushed the lock button down. Seth turned in his seat and whispered "Hi."

"What are we
doing?
" asked Tom again, looking around in bewilderment as the car began to move down the street.

"An adventure," I told him. "We're going to meet the bag ladies at the Garden. And we're going to ride in the Swan Boats!" I realized I was sounding like somebody's grandmother, full of fake excitement, trying to prod a reluctant child into some dubious enthusiasm: "Won't that be
fun?
"

Tom climbed into my lap and clung to my neck. "I'm scared," he whimpered.

Hawk pulled his car into a parking place on the Arlington Street side of the Public Garden, almost across the street from the Ritz. Apprehensively I tried to remember how many hours it had been since Tom Terrific had gone to the john. But the Ritz didn't seem to evoke any memories or needs in him. He was still curled in my lap with his head on my shoulder, but he was becoming more alert, more awake now. He lifted his head when the car was parked, looked around, and smiled a little when he saw George Washington's statue looming palely through the darkness.

The night was clear, beginning to be chilly now that it was August, and there was a thin smile of a moon. An occasional car passed in the street. There were lights in the windows of hotels and in the tall office buildings where maintenance men and cleaning crews did their work on weekends and in the wee hours. On the other side of
the Garden, the brick houses of Beacon Hill were dark.

And the Garden itself was shadowed and dim, the statues and flowers luminous and ghostly, the huge trees silhouettes against the midnight sky.

Seth, on the sidewalk, opened the back door of the car, reached in, and lifted Tom Terrific from my lap.