The Mutual Admiration Society(16)
I hate for any opponent of mine to know what I’m feeling, so I’m very good at playing my cards close to my chest—Daddy taught me. But I must be accidentally smiling at the pictures I got in my head of Birdie spinning around in the flying teacups at Disneyland with Dopey, and Kookie Kookson the Third from 77 Sunset Strip lending me his comb, because when Louise lowers herself down on the chair where our father used to sit at the head of the yellow Formica kitchen table, she doesn’t guess that I’m thinking about the place where you can wish upon a star and make your dreams come true, but she does guess what’s going on in the other part of my mind, which is how we’re going to earn enough money to get us there.
“Wipe that smirk off your face, Theresa. Sister Margaret Mary’s disappearance is none of your business,” she says. “You hear me?”
I snap to and tell her, “Loud and clear,” but when I pull my chair in next to Birdie and shovel a helping of eggs and Spam into my mouth, what I’m thinking is, Oh, Louise, little do you know. Sister M and M’s disappearance is exactly my business!
My sister smiles, points next to our mother’s plate, and says, so excited, “I got you a present. I got you a present. I got you a present. I got you a present.”
Louise looks down, picks up the trinket with her napkin, and says, “How . . . how . . . mmmm.”
The gal might be mean most of the time, but thanks to Miss Emily Post, she has excellent manners, so she’s trying to think up something nice-ish to say about the doodad my sister left for her this morning. Birdie does this from time to time. Because she’s not a thief like me, she doesn’t steal the presents. She’s more like a crow, ya know? Finders keepers, losers weepers and all that. When my sister comes across something shiny or fluffy, she puts it in her pocket and finds a time to sweetly surprise Louise or me with it. Like the 1958 nickel she left under my pillow this morning. Birdie used to leave feathers in Daddy’s pants pockets, but now she lays them around his tombstone, and to Louise, she almost always gives a piece of fake jewelry that she might find in a sidewalk crack or under a kneeler at church or in a Cracker Jack box. But I’m not sure where she found the pink plastic heart-shaped ring with a red stone that’s doing a terrible job of looking like a real ruby that our mother is holding in her fingers. (It will eventually end up in the garbage, which is fine, I guess. Birdie’s memory is so bad that she won’t remember giving it to her in the first place.)
Louise slips the crummy ring on her finger that used to hold her beautiful golden wedding ring that Daddy won in a poker pot, looks across the table at my sister, and says, “Thank you for the token of your affection, Robin. Now please stop kicking your leg against the table. I’m already on pins and needles about starting this new job at the Clark station and you’re making it worse.”
“She’s not doing it on purpose,” I swallow and tell our mother. “I told you her toes are going numb.”
Louise was supposed to pick up a new pair of sneakers and saddle shoes for Birdie the day summer vacation ended, but she either forgot ’cause she’s thinking all the time about what’s-his-name or how short she is on money. Either way, I’m not going to make a federal case out of it this morning, because for now, my sister doesn’t really need new school shoes from Shuster’s anymore.
I know that most of the fathers around here work at foundries like Northland or factories like Feelin’ Good Cookie, Pabst Brewery, and American Motors—you can smell where they do their shifts if you sit next to them at church—but one dad is a carpenter and my fiancé Charlie “Cue Ball” Garfield’s old man dyes tools for a living and after Daddy died, Becky Winner’s father was charitable enough to give Birdie and me lifetime passes to the Tosa Theatre that he owns. But I never heard of Molly Hopkins’s father’s job before last week. He gets a paycheck for sniffing around for trouble in old buildings. (With her excellent sense of smell, Birdie would be good at this job if she grows up, so further research at the Finney is required.)
Mr. Hopkins got called to our school on the afternoon Sister Prudence sent Tommy “Two-Ton” Thomkins to the basement to tell our janitor, Wayne “Creeper” Carlson, to wheel his bucket and mop up to the gymnasium so he could clean up the cookies that Davey O’Meara tossed on the floor during dodgeball. Fortunately, Two-Ton never made it down to that spooky room with the incinerator, the furnace, a calendar of Betty Grable loving a tractor too much hanging on the wall, a floor polisher, sawdust, and whatnot, where the janitor spends most of his time. Two-Ton fell straight through the basement steps and Creeper had to jerry-rig a hoist to pull him out!
After Mr. Hopkins got done inspecting the damage, he hung a CONDEMNED sign on the basement stairs railing and then, according to my confidential informant Kitten Jablonski, he also reported that he smelled an “unusual” odor drifting around the basement, which was such great news. “The school needs to be closed down immediately as a safety precaution. It could be gas,” he told Sister Margaret Mary, who at that time was still present and accounted for. (I could’ve stepped in and told Mr. Hopkins that it definitely was gas he was smelling because he showed up on Beans and Wienies Wednesday to do his inspection, but no one except #5 on my SHIT LIST, brownnoser Jenny Radtke, would do something that repulsive.)
Louise, who’s admiring herself in the oleo knife, says, “Since you’re out of school until the repairs can be made, I expect the two of you to make yourselves useful. Dust and vacuum before I get home tonight, take out the garbage, and Theresa”—she gives me her evil eye—“go to confession today.” The reason she didn’t tell Birdie that she had to do the same is because she doesn’t have to go into the wooden box to tell her sins once a week to Father Ted like me and all the other kids in the parish do. My sister got declared an “innocent” by the church two years ago on account of the fact that she would kneel down in front of the black confessional curtain every Thursday and start clapping her hands and laughing her heinie off because she thought she was about to see a puppet show.