The Mutual Admiration Society(21)
Because she loves all my impressions, to reward her for doing what I told her to, after she hops off the last stair and makes the turn into the kitchen, I reach around and grab my ponytail, hold it over my lip, and tell her like Groucho Marx, “Close, but no cigar, little lady.” She laughs so hard that her pelican tummy jiggles out of the top of her shorts and I have to stop walking around with my knees bent and stick it back in. “By the way, honey, the famous saying is, I’m ready, Freddy, not I’m ready, Frank, and . . .” I point down. “You got the right sneakers, but they’re on the wrong feet.” I bend over to switch them up. “This is a big, big day that could change our whole lives, so ya gotta keep trying your hardest to listen to me and do whatever I tell ya to, okay? Try to keep your drifting to a minimum, and especially”—I make bunny ears in the sneaker laces and change my voice to my most serious one, the one Perry White of the Daily Planet uses when he’s talking to Jimmy Olsen, who can get flighty, too—“you can’t do any wild-streaking, okay?”
Wild-streaking is the bottom of Birdie’s barrel. Out of nowhere, she’ll take off to parts unknown without me, and it can be hours before I finally find her at Daddy’s pretend grave or the Finney Library or the candy aisle at Dalinsky’s Drugstore or the flower shop with her nose in a bouquet of pink roses or etc. You name a place in the neighborhood and I’ve found my wild-streaking sister there. Even the last place nobody wants to find themselves in. Up a tree in the cemetery’s Phantom Woods. And maybe the worst part of all is that I can’t even BE PREPARED for one of her streaks. They’re like the weather in the month of March. They blow in like a lion and go out like a lamb, and as far as I can tell, I don’t think she’s in charge of them, any more than she’s the boss of when she drifts off to parts unknown or any of the other weird stuff she does. But over the years, I have noticed that if Birdie gets too starved or too bored, a wild streak is much more likely to rain on our parade.
I’ve lectured her about listening to me, and I’ve already taken care of keeping her tummy happy when I made her the P B and M, so after I get the sneakers laces double knotted, I slip off the rubber bands I got around my wrist, and tell her, “Time for your beautification routine.” This is one of her favorite parts of the morning, so I don’t even have to tell her to turn around. I finger comb her hair into two blah-brown pigtails, then I come back to the front of her, lick my pointer finger, and wet her eyebrows down so they all go in the same direction, pinch off a booger that’s hanging from the bottom of her upturned nose, and rub off most of Louise’s red lipstick she smeared way outside the lines of her lips when she was upstairs messing around with our mother’s things. But there’s nothing I can do about the Evening in Paris perfume she dabbed behind her ears except hook her too-long bangs behind them to hide the smell. That’s the best I can do until we catch up with Charlie and he raises Birdie’s bangs with his sharp whittling knife. I could it do with a scissors, but she thinks I make her look like Moe from the Three Stooges and she’s right.
When I’m done straightening her out, she bats her eyes and asks me the same thing she asks me every morning. “How do I look, Tessie?”
So I say back to her the same thing I say to her every morning. “You are so, so, so, so beautiful. You remind me of Ida Lupino.” Then I wink at her and then she winks back at me in her adorable slightly bulgy-eyed way and that can go on forever, so I put a halt to it by pointing down to her right shorts pocket to make sure she has what she needs to keep her tiny mind occupied when we’re over at the cemetery. Birdie cannot, I repeat, not do any bored wild-streaking on this life-changing day. We’re on a deadline. “You got your hobbies?”
“Yes, Tessie, I got my hobbies.” She slides her playing cards and a cat’s cradle string out of her pocket with a very proud smile and I don’t blame her. Dick and Jane might be too hard for her to read, and keeping track of what goes on in movies or television shows is too confusing, and our Mutual Admiration meetings might be above her head, but you hand this kid a deck of cards—I think she got her love of the “52” from Daddy—or give her a white string off a Meuer’s Bakery box that still smells like sugar? She turns into a regular Albert Einstein.
All set to hit the investigating trail now, I grab the Red Owl bag off the counter, point to the back door, and tell her the last thing I gotta tell her to get her going in the right direction in my voice that’s sure to fire her up. “Race ya to the cemetery fence! One for the money . . . two for the show . . . three to get ready, and . . .”
I wait for her to fill in the blank, but she doesn’t shout, Go, Bird, go! like she’s been doing.
She could be going stubborn on me again or . . . or maybe she just has to tinkle. Yes. She can forget if I don’t remind her. “You gotta go before we go, Bird, go?”
“No, I don’t gotta go before we go, Tessie.”
Hmmm.
“Did you just remember ya hung the wrong-colored towel out of the window?”
“No, I hung the white towel out the window just like you told me to, Tessie,” she says, sure-enough-sounding that I believe her.
Because I’m all gassed up and ready to go and she is doing an excellent impression of a roadblock, I lose my patience that I don’t got a lot of in the first place, because in this way, unfortunately, I resemble my mother by a bad-luck draw of the blood.