The Way to Schenectady (12 page)

We were nearing Amsterdam. The road signs mentioned Schenectady coming up. No one in the car commented on it.

Grandma and Marty were sitting together on the backseat. Not arm in arm or anything, but they were clearly getting along pretty well. I must say, I never thought I’d be doing Grandma a good turn when I smuggled Marty aboard. At the time – was it only yesterday? – I didn’t much care about Grandma. But I was glad she was with us now. She was growing on me.

“You know,” Bernie said, “Dad told Bill not to climb over the fence.”

“So?” I said. I was sitting next to him.

“Well, Bill didn’t climb
over
the fence.”

“Hey,” said Bill. “That’s right. Not until you told me to climb over the fence.”

Dad laughed.

I grabbed Bernie’s hand and shook it. “You’re quite the lawyer, aren’t you?” I said.

From behind me, Marty said, surprisingly, “My attorney, Bernie.”

“Exactly right,” said Dad. “That’s where he got his name. Do you know that song?”

Marty smiled. “There are many songs about the name Bernard. How about this one?” Without even clearing his throat, he sang about a wonderful guy who could do anything anyone else could do – only better:

Marty had a high, clear voice. Much better than Dad’s. For all the silliness of the song, the music hung
in the air like a shimmering curtain. Marty wiped his eyes very theatrically, as if he was about to cry again, only he sang instead, drawing out the poignancy of the last verse:

When he finished, we all applauded. Bernie’s eyes were wide and round as soup ladles. Grandma’s face was lighter than I had ever seen it. She liked hearing Marty sing. She liked the sound of his voice.

“Marty,” said Dad, “I’m glad you shared that with us.”

I felt myself relax. I hadn’t really known how unrelaxed I was. Funny how you can be a certain way and not know it until you stop being that way. I remember really liking this boy, Armand, in my class. We’d write notes to each other and walk each other home – actually, he walked me home because he lived farther away from school than I did – and I thought it was too bad that my friend Bridget didn’t like Armand as much as I did, and started playing with a different group of girls instead of with me. I was happy, but I didn’t know it until Armand stopped writing notes to me and started writing them to Bridget instead. She wrote him back, and it turned out that she’d liked him all along. I was miserable for days and days. Then Armand put a cut-in-half worm into one
of Bridget’s notes, and laughed when she screamed. And I realized the kind of boy he was.

Anyway, the point was that Marty was part of the trip now. Dad accepted him. And that made us all feel better.

“Marty, where do you want to go in Schenectady?”

“To the Episcopalian church on the square,” said Marty. “It is easy to find.”

“And when does the service start?”

Marty didn’t answer.

“Two o’clock,” I said. In an hour and a half.

“Marty,” said Bill, “are you older than Dad?”

“Oh, yes. I am older than everyone.”

“You’re not older than I am,” said Grandma. “We both remember a lot of the same things.”

“But you look so young, Helen,” he said.

And Helen – I mean Grandma – looked away with a shy smile.

There was a lot I wanted to ask Marty, but I didn’t know how to go about it. Did he have a wife, or children? Why didn’t he have enough money for bus fare? I decided the questions were too personal. I didn’t want to upset him, or Dad.

Bernie had questions, too. “Are you a monster?” he asked Marty.

“A monster?” Maybe Marty thought he had heard wrong.

“You have claws, you know.”

“Bernard!” said Grandma.

But Marty laughed and held up his hands. “Notice, Bernie, how one hand has long nails, but the other does not.” I must say, all his nails looked pretty long to me – long for a man anyway. But they were really hanging off of one hand.

“When you play the guitar, you need long nails to pluck the strings,” he explained.

“You play the guitar?” I said.

He smiled. His gums had worn away like the morning, and his teeth stuck a long way out. They looked as long as his nails, and there were about the same number of them. “I have been all around with my guitar. I used to have my own band. One year I drove a broken-down bus full of musicians all over North America. That’s where I learned how to fix engines.”

“What happened to your guitar?” Bill asked.

“I lost it.”

“And you’re not a monster?” said Bernie.

“No,” he said.

“Good,” said Bernie.

Amsterdam, New York is great city to have lunch in. I know, because we had a great lunch there. The van was in a gas station getting the radiator put right, and we were in a restaurant that served everything with a huge plate of chunky french fries. Some of the fries were bigger than Bernie’s hand.

“Let’s pretend to be food,” said Bill. “I’m a huge strong french fry,” he said, waving one around.

“Child,” I said. Dad was in the bathroom and I was the oldest one at the table.

I checked my watch: one fifteen. The van was going to be ready at one thirty.

“I’m another french fry,” said Bernie.

“No, you have to pick something different,” Bill protested. “I’m a french fry – you can be a chicken nugget. Or a corned beef sandwich.” That’s what Dad was having.

“Ugh!” we all said.

“Okay. I’m Mona the milkshake,” I said. We were all drinking them. The menu said they were famous, and I
could believe it. I was almost finished mine. “Mmm,” I said.

“Can I be another milkshake?” Bernie asked me.

“Sure,” I said. “You can be chocolate and I’ll be vanilla.”

“I am walking across the plate to see what I can conquer,” said Bill. “And what is this I see? A chocolate milkshake, all unprepared for my attack!” He held a french fry in his hand like an action figure, and jumped it across the table.

Dad came back then. “I called Mom to tell her we’d be a bit late,” he said, sitting down. “She’s made a dinner reservation for the two of you for five thirty.”

“Great,” I said.

Grandma and Marty weren’t with us. Neither of them had wanted lunch. They were off somewhere in the city, doing some shopping. That’s what Grandma said anyway, as she dragged Marty away. He wasn’t up to saying much.

“Do you think Marty misses his brother?” I asked Dad. “I wonder how it feels when your brother dies?”

“Hey!” said Bernie, clutching at his container and, of course, knocking it over. Bernie’s a slow drinker, and there was still a fair amount of milkshake left. Only now, of course, there wasn’t. There was, however, a fair amount of milkshake on the table, and on his french fries, and on Dad’s corned beef sandwich.

Dad shouted. For a moment I was afraid I’d find out how it felt when your brother dies.

Dad used up all our napkins and some from the empty table next to us, and Bernie cried over the spilt milkshake, and Bill smirked until Dad told him to share his lunch with Bernie, and I sat very still in my chair, thankful that, for once, I had eaten quickly.

Lunch continued. I checked my wrist – one twenty-five.

I saw Grandma and Marty first. My first thought was,
He’s changed his clothes.
Then I remembered he didn’t bring any. He was wearing a neat dark suit and a shirt and tie. He’d had a haircut and his face was shaved, all except for a little mustache I hadn’t noticed on his unshaven face. And his shoes were different.

Grandma looked the same. No, that’s not quite true. She looked the same, but different from inside. I don’t know how to explain it. It was as if a process of transformation, begun back when she first saw Marty, had gone forward another step. She was another degree less like the Grandma I used to know, and more like some other, better person. She looked happier. Maybe that’s what I mean.

Anyway, she and Marty came over to our sticky, napkin-covered table, and she smiled at us. “Had an accident?”

“It was Bernie,” Bill began.

“Bill started it,” Bernie said.

And Grandma kept smiling. Pretty good smile, too.

“You look like you’re going to a wedding,” I told Marty.

He didn’t look happy, like Grandma. He looked nervous. And he didn’t smell musty anymore. He smelled funny, though. “Not a wedding,” he said.

No, of course; it was a memorial service.

“What is that smell?” asked Bernie. Not often he gets to ask that one. Usually someone else asks it about him.

Grandma smiled. “Mothballs,” she said.

“What are mothballs?” Bill asked. “I’ve never smelled them before.”

Grandma smiled. “Imagine never having heard of mothballs.”

“Imagine,” I said, just to make Bill mad.

“I remember a trunk in my uncle’s room, growing up,” said Marty. “He used to live with us, my mother’s brother. He kept his best clothes in that trunk, and on
special Friday nights he would get dressed up and go out. I remember the smell on his clothes as he walked down the hall. When I got my first suit, I hung it up with mothballs in the pockets, and when I put it on, I smelled just like my uncle. I felt so grown-up.”

Grandma listened with a “me, too” expression on her face. “I wore my grandmother’s fur wrap to my senior year dance,” she said. “And the smell of the mothballs was so strong that the whole cloakroom simply reeked for days. Oh, my, what a fuss!” She sniffed, thinking back.

The waitress had cleared everything away. Now she came back to stand beside the table wearing a very waitressly expression: not “me, too,” more like “so what?”

Dad gestured to Grandma and Marty. “Do you want some lunch? You ought to have something to eat, apart from jelly beans. What about you, Mother-in-law?”

“We had a hot dog in the street,” she said. “On our way to the used-clothing store.”

“Do you want anything else? Something to drink? Dessert? Coffee?”

“I’m not thirsty,” said Marty quickly. “Or hungry.”

“We should be on our way,” said Grandma.

I checked my watch – one thirty. “The van will be ready now,” I said.

Dad nodded. “Okay, then. Just the check, please.”

“Sure,” said the waitress.

Grandma and Marty sat next to each other again. The mothball smell was noticeable. Not really horrible, but kind of sharp. We decided to keep the windows open. The wind racketed around, so it was hard to hear what everyone else was saying. Bernie and Bill were sitting beside each other in the middle seat, pretending to be supersonic jets. Every now and then I could hear Grandma saying, “And remember …” and Marty saying, “In New York, we already had …” whatever it was. Ice trucks, I think, which didn’t make any sense.

“Why have a truck for ice when you can make it in the freezer?” I asked Dad. I was in the front.

“When Marty and Grandma were little, there weren’t any freezers.”

“Oh.”

“It’s old-people talk,” he said.

“The way you and Mom go on about having to walk all the way across the living room just to change channels on the
TV
?”

“Yes. Like that. Your grandmother doesn’t have too many people her age to talk to.”

“Dad,” I whispered, “what’s a mothball?”

He smiled sideways at me. “I thought you knew.”

We were on a real highway now. Big trucks all around us. By the side of the road, I could see factories and, every now and again, the river. It was wide here – a stretch of flat, brown water, crossed by metal bridges that lifted in the middle so that boats could go through.

The big green sign wiggled in the wind.

“Schenectady!” cried Bill, as we drove underneath it. “Attention, aliens of Schenectady, we have landed!”

“Take the first turnoff,” called Marty from the backseat. His voice wavered.

Dad angled the van across the road without slowing down. Someone behind us honked. Dad waved.

Schenectady needs someone to pave its roads. I thought it was the drivers who were weird, skewing all over the road and bumping up and down, but it’s the potholes. We were doing it, too – bumping across potholes, steering around potholes, just missing other cars doing the same thing. “Whizz! Bang! Boom!” shouted Bill.

“Turn … let me see … turn right at the next light,” said Marty. “Then follow the signs for downtown.”

“Don’t worry,” said Grandma, patting his arm. “It’ll be okay.”

“What’ll I say?” asked Marty. “What’ll I tell them?”

“Don’t worry,” said Grandma again.

“I don’t know if I can do it.”