The Full Cleveland (9 page)

She looked at me wide-eyed, as if I'd frightened her.

“Don't be scared. Just yes or no.”

She hugged her knees to her chin, forming a white mountain out of her eiderdown. “I'm not sure, but maybe. But I don't think so. Not completely. No.”

“Okay. So if you knew that in your heart, you'd never mention it, right?”

“Uh, I guess so.”

“See. That's like Dad.”

Her face tightened up with the effort of concentration. “But I don't get it, though.”

“People who don't talk much … maybe they do it because of injustices or something. Because you really can't do anything about injustices. A smart person like Dad knows it's better just to keep your mouth shut.”

“Really?” She started thinking about it, rocking back and forth.

“Yes. In his heart, he knows it doesn't make a difference what anyone says. Remember? Every
picture
tells a story. Maybe the story doesn't tell the story.”

Cabot asked uncertainly, “But what's that got to do with poverty? And Andrew John bringing that envelope back?”

I said, “
See?”
But the truth is, I didn't have a clue anymore. I was tired, I was injured, I had thought all day long beyond my abilities and I now I couldn't remember any of it anymore. What I might have said was that there are some things that were never intended to be expressed. Certain visions, dreams, flashes of understanding, the fleeting hold we sometimes have on knowledge or compassion, are simply not transferable. But I didn't know how to say that, and realized now it was useless to try.

Cabot fell back on her pillows, staring sadly up at her huge canopy, which Dad liked to call the other roof over her head. I reached for my crutch, feeling sorry that all day long, I had more or less promised something I hadn't been able to deliver. Cabot watched me get to my feet. “So you think that explains everything? Dad included?”

She was really trying to understand it, you could tell. But for sure, neither of us knew what we were talking about anymore. “Definitely.”

“Does
she
have anything to do with this?”

“Who?” I asked innocently.

“Your old friend.”

“Of course not.”

“In that case, I'll think about it.”

“No. Don't.”

Her head rose from the pillow. “
Don't?
What is this?”

“It'll only hurt you in the end. It's hopeless.”

She sat full up, in protest. “Hey, it's not hopeless. It's just hard.” Then she fell back down.

Hard. It was just a kind word, but I was awfully happy to hear it anyway.

I started for the door. “Well, good night, sis.” I liked calling her “sis,” don't ask me why. “I have to go finish a letter now.”

I turned and stood in her door a second. She looked so nice lying there, I heard myself saying, “You know, you look a lot like the princess and the pea.”

“Oh. Thank you, if that's good.”

“It's good. It's very good.”

“I guess it depends whether it's the princess, or the pea.”

“The princess wouldn't have been anything without the pea. But you look more like the princess.” I left her little suite of rooms and limped sleepily down the hall. Then I heard her call “Zu!” and turned around.

I leaned against her doorway.

She was sitting up again, all awake again. “Just so you know. Now that I'm a princess, I think I've changed my mind. I think you could end it, if you really were a princess, and were really rich, and very kind.”

Knowing what I had only briefly known of hope, and would never again attempt to convey, a congenial silence like Dad's seemed the only generous response. So in keeping with that, I murmured, but strictly to myself, “Good night, sweet princess.”

I never really asked her
if she lost her job or resigned it, but on Fridays by now, Cabot too was always early for school. So we often ran across each other in the empty halls. Cabot also went to the Academy, but she was one year behind.

Anyway, one Friday, “Hi, sis,” I said.

“Hi, Zuzu.”

Nothing to write home about. We both walked on. But a moment later, the girl who had been sitting ahead of me in Assembly since we were four-year-olds in preschool came up behind me at my locker. “Boyce?” she said, very softly, as if being careful not to make me shy like a horse would if you came up too quick from behind.

I still shied anyway. I knew who it was, and I whirled around. “Yes, Mary Parker?”

There were several reasons to fear this girl. She was brilliant, and her father was a bus driver. She was the smartest, the poorest, and probably the coolest girl in school. Actually, she was too cool for school. Except she didn't get credit for it, because her father was this bus driver.

“Oh,” she said, “nothing.”

“Oh,” I said, “okay. Cool.”

She was going to go now. Then her famous curiosity got the better of her. “But why did your sister just call you that name?”

She quickly looked both ways down the empty hall, as if she were already sorry she'd brought the whole thing up, and was going to go now. We had sometimes talked in class, but we had never, in ten whole years, talked like this in the hall. “But if you don't want to tell me, I'll just … leave.”

Not at all. Mary Parker, school genius, had just asked me a question I knew I could answer. “It's my name. I mean, my nickname, I guess.”

She brightened up a little. “Z-u-z-u, right? I can't think of an alternate spelling.”

The truth of it is, I didn't know. But I wasn't about to tell the school genius I couldn't spell my own name. “I guess my father thought the whole thing up.”

“Did he say where he got it, though? I just want to make sure.”

“Uh, I think from some movie?”

Her face broke into a smile, which didn't happen to this particular girl all that often. “I had a feeling when I heard it.”

Then she kind of packed up, moving her books from one arm to the other like she was getting all packed and ready to go. Instead of good-bye or see ya, or actually just going though, she added, “Not a bad namesake for you.”

It was kind of understood, once I agreed this was so, she would go. All I had to do was just nod confidently and it was over. But I couldn't, see, because I had no idea who this Zuzu person my father nicknamed me after even was. Now I felt really dumb for never asking my father. Like I had the intellectual curiosity of a dormouse, whatever that was.

Mary Parker said, “Zuzu was Jimmy Stewart's little girl in
It's a Wonderful Life.
I mean, that's the reference, right?” But she already knew I had no idea what she was talking about.

I nodded confidently. I thought she would go.

“I sure hope what happened to her father doesn't happen to yours.”

“What happened to hers again?” But I was thinking, Come on, what so tragic could have happened to a man in a movie called
It's a Wonderful Life.

Mary Parker studied me, her eyes like arches within arches, her thin brown brows raised, an expression that gave you the feeling she had just made a rather earthshaking scientific discovery about you, but was taking it all in stride. When we were little girls in lower school, she'd once turned around and asked me if I didn't find the size of our desks “somewhat ironic.” And didn't I agree that the school should have either smaller desks or bigger teachers? With the same detached concern, she now asked, “You mean you've never seen the movie?”

“I must have missed it.”

Mary Parker blinked. “But it's a classic. It's on every Christmas. Like ten times every Christmas. You missed it a lot. But you know the story, right?”

“Is Santa Claus in it?”

“Okay, the protagonist, George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart? The actor?”

It was a little annoying, her having to point that out, that the guy playing the part was an actor. “Yeah?”

“Well, he gives up on his dream of leaving this small town he lives in and he gets married and has a lot of kids and takes over the building-and-loan association but then he loses everybody's money and then he tries to kill himself.”

“That's a wonderful
life?”

She shrugged. “It has a happy ending.”

“Like, how happy?”

Mary Parker looked up the hallway. “You know. All happy endings are alike. Just like happy families.”

No, I didn't know that. I looked up the hallway with her, but in the opposite way. People were arriving for school. Mickey Knight was coming in the door with the club; Jo came right behind with another. Jo was so beautiful, she got her own club. I glanced sideways at Mary Parker. “So the guy doesn't die?”

“George Bailey? No way.”

I didn't tell her that “George” was my father's name too. But I was already planning on telling Cabot. This was a new development.

“Anyway, your father must know movies, to nickname you after Zuzu. Zuzu was quite a character.”

“Was she smart?”

Mary Parker winced. “Well, she was young.”

“I see”

“Actually, she wasn't that bright at all, for a three-year-old. She had this single red rose she got, and when the bloom drooped on the stem, she wanted her father to Scotch tape it back together. Like then it would live. Pretty pathetic, actually.”

“She got a single red rose?”

“The point is, Zuzu was sort of a moron. But let's just call her a little loser.”

All right already. I started moving books around on the shelf of my locker. The two clubs passed by, but they didn't pick me up today because I was busy talking to Mary Parker. I was kind of ticked off at my father, to nickname me after some three-year-old moron in a movie. I was beginning to wish I had Mary Parker's father. He sounded like a smart guy, just naming her “Mary.” Then she turns out to be this genius and all.

The clubs turned and went into class. Mary Parker was still there at my locker. I was still moving my books around, like it was rather important that they be moved around today, and not only today, but right now, immediately, and without further delay. I kept wishing I could ask Mary Parker a few things about her father. But I couldn't even think of asking Mary Parker about her father, seeing as her father was this bus driver. “You going in?” I asked instead, real casual, clicking my locker shut.

“Well, I was thinking of having a smoke.”

A smoke? I looked around. “Here?”

She jerked her head, meaning, Outside, jerk. “Want to come? I'll teach you how to light them.”

“I know how to light matches,” I said, somewhat offended by now. I thought Mary Parker thought I was such a moron slash little loser I didn't know how to light matches. Here I had kind of done her this favor by asking her to walk into class with me, as probably no one in school had ever done before, and this was the thanks I got. I was somewhat offended.

“Bet you can't with one hand.”

Oh. With one hand. That was different.

“You ride horses, don't you? I heard you're pretty good.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“Well, say you want a smoke while you're riding your horse. For your own safety, you should know how to light up with one hand. Like the cowboys do.”

I mean, this is not why I call Mary Parker a genius. But then she huddled close to my locker and showed me how, using a pencil and a pack of matches, saying if you do it right, you don't get badly burned.

I said, “Cool.”

The bell rang. Mary Parker glanced at the Assembly door. “Anyway. I'll go in with you. Sure.”

So for the first time ever, we walked into Assembly together. We took our seats alphabetically, me behind her as always, which was just one of those accidents of birth.

•   •   •

I guess it was because of that cowboy thing that, after ten whole years, decided to take a chance on Mary Parker. So later that day, during afternoon Assembly, I passed up a note asking if she wanted to do something together out of school.

This was taking a chance, because, if you didn't notice before, doing something with Mary Parker out of school just wasn't something that was ever done. The other girls claimed she was simply too smart for the rest of us, but probably the truth of it was she was simply too poor. Other kids took ski trips together, or met at the club in summer and signed out golf carts at the pro shop and rode across the back nine over to someone's house so we could hang out there until the pro shop would close. And sometimes we even golfed, or played tennis, or had swim meets at the pool. But Mary Parker went home every day at three, never was seen on a Saturday, and all summer, just disappeared.

She sent the note right back. I figured this meant, Return to Sender or, at best, Address Correction Requested, and so I thought that that was a pretty dumb chance I took, and I slipped the note into my book, planning to keep it for life, but only as a reminder not to take dumb chances anymore. But later that hour I opened my book and glanced at the note anyway. Mary Parker had scribbled,
A movie. Downtown.
I wasn't allowed to go downtown, but I still wrote back, Sure. She wrote back,
Then I'll teach you how to knock off a store.

I was to meet her on the last car of the Rapid Transit at around noon.

All that Saturday morning I lurked in my room. Cars began whizzing up and down the driveway. Mother left for golfing in her Buick. Clarine left for Getting and Spending in her Buick, but came home all too soon. Mr. Carter, Dad's friend who played the saxophone, arrived in his old Ford. Once they got started, once the music was filling the house up, I slipped down the back stairs and ran out the sunroom door, calling to anyone who could hear me over the music I'd be at the movies. You had to say where you were going. Nobody had ever said it had to be heard.

At the platform, I stood leaning out, watching for the white headlamps in the taxi-colored train.

The plan was that I would dial Mary Parker's number from the Shaker Boulevard stop as soon as I saw the Rapid, and by the time the train arrived at the edge of Cleveland near Mary's house, she'd be waiting by the tracks. I saw the first car poke through the mist, hurriedly dialed and hung up, and ran down the long wooden stairs.

Dropping my fare into the box, I remembered loving the Rapid, back when it cost less than fifty cents. To us, a ride on the Rapid was the only alternative to a ride on the roller coasters Mother had banned, and we used to beg Dad to let us do it. Even though he was partial to blue Buicks as his means of transportation, he'd sometimes take us on the train, take us off at Shaker Square, buy us toys at FAO Schwarz, call a car to take us home. But the train seemed newer then. Now it seemed clanking and slow, and seemed to labor under the weight of unfulfilled promise, like, say, if The Little Engine That Could never had.

Three boys sat ahead of me, blond kids in Cleveland Indians caps wearing baseball mitts. I felt like asking them if they were on their way to sit in the bleachers at a game. My brother Luke, who was always telling me things I didn't necessarily need to hear about professional sports, had assured me the thing to do was call the Cleveland Indians “The Tribe,” and now I felt like pretending I knew a lot about baseball, and asking the three kids if they were going to see The Tribe this afternoon, or what they thought of The Tribe this year, and what did they think about the old pitching on The Tribe. I just felt like letting them know I knew the Cleveland Indians were called The Tribe, don't ask me why. I bet because they were boys.

But I eavesdropped first, to see if they even knew the Cleveland Indians were called The Tribe. They weren't talking about baseball, though. One of the boys was telling about something he'd seen when riding in a car one evening with his dad. A green pickup truck with a big dog on its roof. But when his dad pulled alongside the pickup, it turned out that the dog wasn't a real dog, but a huge cardboard sign in the shape of dog. An advertising dog.