Wish You Were Here

Wish You Were Here

Hilma Wolitzer

John Gardner, lovingly remembered

Contents

$99!

Double Trouble

Brainstorm

Lucky Ducky

A Mature Teenager

Bigfoot and the Mad Knitter

A Winning Number

The Fight

Mendel’s Pea Plants

Mary Ellen

The Invisible Hero

Nat the Gnat

Troo-Gloo

The World’s Fair Ring

Flight 17

The Dead-Horse Float

Grandpa

My Idea

The Play

Bernard Martin Segal

Money to Burn

Good Luck!

The Wedding

A Biography of Hilma Wolitzer

$99!

LIFE WITH MY SISTER Celia was never exactly easy, and on January 7 it got a lot worse. That morning, an announcement went up on the bulletin board at school. The Plainview High Players were presenting The Member of the Wedding as their spring production, and Celia had been picked for the lead.

I guess it affected her mind, because she started acting like Frankie Addams—sort of deranged—all of the time. She put on a fake Southern accent and made her voice come out in a froggy croak, as if she was imitating me having asthma. Whenever you looked at Celia, she was staring at a chewed-up script and talking to herself.

The really bad part, though, was when she tried to get the rest of the family to help her learn her lines. Ma would do it once in a while, but she goes to work and has plenty of other stuff to do when she gets home. Grace is only in second grade, and it takes her about a year to sound out words that aren’t in her reader. She was always busy anyway, drawing weird, scary pictures that Ma hung on the refrigerator door with fruit magnets.

So of course Celia started bugging me. She wanted me to make believe I was Frankie’s cousin, John Henry, and read his lines out loud. No way, I told her.

Ma said, Come on, Bernie dear, be a sport. Celia helps you with your math, doesn’t she?

Yeah, good old helpful Celia. If I didn’t get a concept in about two seconds, she’d say, What’s the matter, bonehead, did the cat eat your brains? And we didn’t even have a cat.

I grabbed the script and flipped through a few pages. I’m not doing it, I said. This kid’s a total wimp!

No, he isn’t, Ma said. He’s a sweet and tragic little boy. And besides, you don’t have to do very much. Just give Celia her cues, and let her use you as a sounding board.

Right, Celia said. It’s not such a big deal.

Forget it, I told her. That means NO, spelled capital N, capital O.

Any normal person would have taken the hint, but not Celia. I could stay clear of her at school, which is a junior-senior high, by sticking close to the junior side, where I belonged. And we had different schedules, and didn’t take the same bus. At home, though, she drove me nuts. She’d knock on the bathroom door the minute I got inside, and say, You comin’ out soon, John Henry, honey? Wanna go pick us some chitlins for supper? Or some other stupid thing that was supposed to sound Southern. I almost missed the old Celia, who used to shriek, Have you died in there, Segal? Should I call the paramedics?

After a while I realized the play was about this twelve-year-old girl with hair chopped off like a boy’s. She decides to change her name to F. Jasmine Addams and expects to be part of the marriage between her older brother and his girlfriend. Not just a member of the wedding, like the title says.

The amazing coincidence was that there was a wedding coming up in our family, too. In April, about a week after Celia’s play, Ma was going to marry Nat Greenberg, the guy she’d been going out with for over a year.

And my greatest wish was the opposite of Frankie Addams’s—I wanted to be a non-member of the wedding. I didn’t want to hear them say I do, or watch them kiss, or any of that other cornball stuff. Before Nat moved in, I’d be moving out. I was going to Miami, Florida, to live with my grandfather, Sam Segal. All I had to do was get the air fare.

I hadn’t told anybody about my plans, not even Pete Goldsmith, my best friend. What if he told someone else, by accident, and they told someone else, and Ma found out in the end? That would kill the whole thing. Anyway, it would have been hard to explain why I had to go. I didn’t have one of those hang-ups boys on TV always have after their dads die. I mean, I didn’t want to be the new man of the house, or anything like that. I had enough trouble being a kid, trying to get along with other kids, and pass algebra. And Nat wasn’t your typical cruel stepfather, with a whip and a portable torture rack. The worst you could say about him was that he was disgustingly cheerful. Maybe it was because he had no children of his own and didn’t know how to act around them. Somebody had to tell him it isn’t normal to be in a permanent good mood.

Well, it wasn’t going to be me. My grandfather needed me down in Miami. In one of his letters he said how much I reminded him of his own dear boy, Marty—my father—and he mentioned the loneliness of old age. I’d never even considered living with my other grandparents, in Queens. For one thing, they have each other. And though I love them, they really get on my nerves.

By February 2, I had only two dollars saved, all of it from my allowance, and mostly because I’d hardly bought any candy lately. On the way home in the school bus, I opened my algebra book and took another peek at the airlines ad I’d cut out of the newspaper the week before. The paper was starting to tear, because I’d folded and unfolded it so often. I had memorized the whole ad by then, but it made me feel good just to look at it again. In gigantic letters, it said: YOU COULD BE BASKING ON A SUNNY BEACH RIGHT NOW FOR ONLY $99! Then there was a tiny star, and another one at the bottom of the page, next to a lot of small, boring print about a special package deal. I didn’t care about that, or about basking on some sunny beach, even though it was freezing out and we were riding past piles of dirty snow. $99! was engraved on my brain. I could see why they didn’t charge a hundred dollars, just to round things off—two numbers looked like a lot less than three. But I still didn’t know where I was going to get the money.

All the local paper routes were taken. My mother probably wouldn’t have let me deliver papers anyway, because of my asthma. She was always reminding me that I wasn’t supposed to overexert myself, or be out in bad weather. I pictured her driving me from house to house every time it drizzled, or delivering the papers herself if I had the sniffles. Snow shoveling was out, too, and she’d spoil any chance I’d have at Zee’s Farms, where a couple of guys I knew helped unload the fruit and vegetables from the trucks. If I was a little older, fifteen or so, they might have hired me at one of the industrial plants, as a mailboy, or a messenger. Pete works after school, for full minimum wage, at Harwell’s Plastics on Jericho Turnpike. He says it’s a cinchy job and that there are great-looking chicks around, with great-looking boom-booms. He never talked that way about girls before he started working. I don’t think he even noticed them.

A rubber band got me on the back of the head. I turned around and saw Pete a few rows behind me, trying to look innocent. What are you doing there, Captain Marvel? he said. "Studying Playboy?"

I refolded the ad and stuck it back in my book, while a few of the other kids made stupid remarks and laughed. Then I picked the rubber band up from the floor and aimed a paper clip at Pete. It hit Mary Ellen Burns instead, right on her overdeveloped chest, breaking up the whole bus. Mary Ellen seemed upset, as if I’d hurt her, although she was wearing a down jacket and it was only a paper clip. Pete squealed, Oh, Bernard darling, I didn’t know you cared!

Pete’s thirteen and a half, like me, but he’s about six feet tall and sprouting hair all over the place. His regular voice is really deep, and only cracks into a funny soprano once in a while. He lied about his age when he applied for the job at Harwell’s. His older brother works there, and vouched for him. Easy for Pete, with an older brother and a rapid growth spurt. Little Rabbi Stein, who trained both of us for our bar mitzvahs, used to stand on a chair to yell at Pete when he screwed up on his portion of the haftorah. I was unlucky enough to be the rabbi’s pet—a half orphan who remembered everything, especially not to be taller than the rabbi.

As I walked from the bus stop on my corner, I decided to babysit the Wolfe boys on Saturday, although I couldn’t stand them. At the rate of two bucks an hour, I’d probably get to Florida in about twenty years. If those brats let me live that long. But any money toward my fare was better than nothing—April and the wedding were only two months away. I wished I’d made my decision about Florida before I spent my Hanukkah gelt playing Pac-Man and buying candy and baseball cards. And Ma had deposited all my bar-mitzvah checks in one of those savings accounts you can’t touch until you’re too decrepit to enjoy it. She said my money would grow in the bank and be there for my future, when I’d need it. I kicked at a mound of snow with my sneaker and thought that I was the one who’d better grow. And why did adults worry so much about the future? I needed ninety-nine dollars right away.

Double Trouble

THE WOLFE BOYS ARE identical eight-year-old twins, with mean little eyes and skinny, non-stop bodies. I don’t know why there have to be two of them when one would have been plenty. If I wasn’t so hard up for dough, I’d have gone to the park with my friends on Saturday, instead of babysitting.

Most of the sitting jobs in our neighborhood go to girls, or older boys, but Mr. and Mrs. Wolfe can’t be fussy. They have to pay fifty cents more than the going rate just to get anybody. If you ask me, they should pay double. When I got to their house, on Stephanie Drive, Ronnie and Randy were fighting over a comic book, ripping it into a million pieces. They had a whole closet filled with comics, and lots of toys they used mostly as weapons. They were usually too busy trying to murder each other to just play like ordinary kids.

Their parents were going to visit somebody in Hicksville, a couple of miles away, but Mrs. Wolfe acted as if they were going to the moon. She gave me a phone number where they could be reached, and she rattled off all these emergency numbers: police, fire department, doctor. She told me that today Randy was the twin in the green shirt and Ronnie was the one wearing red. Then she said, Now remember, boys, be good, and mind Bernie. What a laugh!

Mr. Wolfe had gone out to their car the minute I stepped in the door. I could hear him revving up the engine over Ronnie and Randy’s yelling. When the car pulled away, I shouted for their attention—they never listened if you just talked to them—and asked if they wanted to go outside and ride bikes, or run around the yard. I figured I’d keep them busy doing something harmless.

Nah, they answered together, and then Ronnie said, You’re supposed to play with us, Bernie. That’s what you’re getting paid for.

There isn’t enough money on Planet Earth to pay me for this, I said, but naturally nobody heard me. Hang in there, I told myself. Think about Florida, think about Grandpa.

I found a basketball with some life left in it and remembered there was a hoop behind the Wolfes’ garage. I dribbled the ball and called, Come on, you guys, let’s shoot a few! I challenge you—one on two!