The Mutual Admiration Society(10)
Now, I’d love to disagree with her, but I can’t. This morning and every morning, noon, and even when she’s sleeping, our mother really is one very scrumptious-looking broad.
Birdie sniffs the air—she’s also got an excellent sense of smell—and adds on to the compliment that she already flung Louise’s way, “And you smell so yummy, too. Like . . . like pears in the night!”
I have to try very hard not to laugh, because I get a big kick out of it when she gets mixed up like that, so did Daddy, but our mother, who must’ve gone to the little girls’ room to stare at herself in the mirror when God was handing out funny bones, does not find Birdie telling her that she smells like pears in the night hilarious. So before Louise can get her pert nose pushed outta joint even further, I jump in and explain, “What Robin meant to say is that you smell very nice, too. Like your Evening in Paris.”
Louise sighs strong enough in my sister’s direction to fluff her too-long bangs, then does a sudden about-face and asks me, “You two weren’t thinking about paying a visit to the cemetery, were you?”
She always had a conniption fit when someone tattled to her after they spotted Birdie and me visiting Holy Cross, but now that she’s running for treasurer of the Pagan Baby Society she almost froths at the mouth when she gets wind of any gossip about the Finley ghouls, which is what some people around here call us instead of the Finley girls, on account of our never-ending love for the dead.
“I don’t have all day, Theresa.” Louise rat-a-tats her pointy fingernails on the porch railing. “Were you or were you not thinking about going over to the cemetery?”
“Mea culpa,” I shout. “I see your lips moving, but . . .” I stick my finger in my right ear and wiggle it back and forth. “Did I mention to you that the school nurse told me that Micks can get something called potato ears and the only way to cure it is if you buy me some hearing aids soon as you can so—”
“Knock it off and answer my question,” our mother tells me even more fired up.
Because I am always BE PREPARED, I tell her, “A course, we weren’t thinkin’ about going to the cemetery,” with the wide-eyed look I practice every morning in front of the bathroom mirror that is a combination of Karen from the Mickey Mouse Club with a dash of Thumper thrown in. “We only came out here because . . .” I steal a peek over the porch railing to make sure what I’m looking for hasn’t completely keeled over yet. “Because we wanted to surprise you with some flowers.” I tilt my head toward them so Birdie understands which flowers I’m talking about and doesn’t try to go running off to Bloomers florist shop to pick out a bunch. “We wanted to thank you for working your fingers to the bone for us, isn’t that right, Bir—Robin?”
My forgetful sister, who believes that’s the truth and not the snow job that it is, says, “That’s right, Theresa Finley,” and then she sticks her spindly arms through the rails, plucks the half-dead white flowers growing next to the porch, and offers them with one of her smiles that’s so irresistible that even our chilly mother thaws a little.
Louise pats Birdie on the head when she takes the droopy twosome from her, and even says to me in a slightly less mean way, “Breakfast should be on the table, Theresa. What’s the holdup?”
“Not a holdup, Mommy!” Birdie claps her hands and yells with her big opera lungs. “In the middle of the night, Tessie heard yelling and a bloody scream and then she saw a tall, skinny person who wasn’t Mister Howard Howard ’cause he’s short and eats too many jelly donuts with his Jim carry a limp body behind the Gilgood mausoleum so she is ninety-five percent positive that somebody got great-good-luck murdered in the cemetery last night!”
4
THE BUTTINSKY
“Goddamnit all, Theresa!” our hot-blooded mother says in a voice that I’d bet even money would set my hair on fire if she was standing a foot closer. “How many times have I warned you about filling your sister’s head up with your . . . your foolishness? Doesn’t she have enough problems as it is?”
How dare she?!
I spend a lot more time with Birdie than she ever has and I know a lot more about her “problems” than Louise ever will. The Finley sisters share everything. Missing Daddy, the cemetery, snooping, blackmailing, detecting, the Schwinn bike and Radio Flyer, a bed, head lice, and both of us go nuts for my fiancé, Charlie.
Feeling steamed about Louise’s crack about Birdie, I’m about to turn the tables and read her the riot act, when who, of all people, should save me from going toe-to-toe in another losing battle with the Queen of Sheba, but our next-door neighbor, buttinsky, and #1 person on another one of my important lists, when she appears on the other side of the three-foot hedge that separates our backyard from hers to call out, “Good morning, Louise, dear.” She looks down her nose at us. “Girls.”
SHIT LIST
Gert Klement.
Butch Seeback.
Sister Margaret Mary.
The grease monkey who fixes cars at the Clark station and tries to peek in the little girls’ room window when you got to stop to tinkle because your sister can’t make it home from the Tosa Theatre after she drinks a large root beer.