Oddballs (2 page)

Baby-sitting was another good opportunity for games with our little brothers. As adolescents, Vicky and I enjoyed having the run of the house without parental supervision. But Danny and Tycho would sometimes get worried when Mom and Dad went out at night. We got so tired of answering their repeated questions about where Mommy and Daddy were, and when they were coming home, that we were inspired to invent a new game.

“Would you like to hear a little song?” we would ask them. They nodded innocently. We'd go to the piano; I'd play a mournful and heartrending tune, and Vicky would sing:

Once there were two little boys
,

And one night their mommy

And daddy went out
.

They kissed the little boys good-bye

And drove away in the car.…

Now I added melodramatic tremolo, like the music in old-time movies. Danny and Tycho began to sniffle. Vicky's voice grew gentler:

And their mommy and daddy

Never came home again
.

The little boys cried and cried
,

But nobody ever came
.

Nobody came to say good-night;

Nobody came to give them their bottles
.

They never saw their mommy and daddy again
.

By this time, Danny and Tycho would be sobbing uncontrollably, tears rolling down their cheeks. Even after they knew the song by heart, it still invariably made them cry. And when it was over, they'd always wipe their eyes and beg us, “Play it again.
Please
play it again!”

Baby-sitting was also our chance to teach them every obscene word we knew. Our parents were not upset when Danny and Tycho repeated these words to them. But Danny and Tycho also taught these words to their friends in the neighborhood, and
their
parents were not charmed when they heard their toddlers cursing like teenage gang members. Still, Vicky and I persisted. We spent hours and hours coaching Danny to memorize all the verses of a song called “Canal Street,” which was full of nasty words and lewd situations.

Then our grandmother came to visit. Grandma and I were playing Scrabble, pondering silently over the board, when Danny strolled into the room. In his sweet, childish, soprano voice, he began to sing. “Walking down Canal Street, knocking on every door—”

“Wait, Danny!” I said, horrified. “Don't bother us now. We're concentrating.”

“But I'd love to hear his little song,” Grandma said. “Go on, Danny.”

And so he sang “Canal Street,” one verse after another, not forgetting a single gross syllable. Grandma and I sat there, our eyes on the Scrabble board, until finally Danny wandered away.

Something had to be done. But we couldn't just tell Danny and Tycho never to say those words; that would only guarantee that they'd use them at every possible opportunity. So we took the opposite tack. We invented the word
drang
.

“All those other words we taught you, it doesn't matter if you say them,” we told Danny and Tycho. “Just go around and say them to everybody.”

“You mean that?” Danny said, narrowing his eyes.

“Sure.” Vicky shrugged nonchalantly.

“I mean, at least they're not saying”—my voice dropped—“that other word.”

“What other word?” Danny wanted to know.

Vicky and I looked at each other. I started to speak. “No, don't tell them!” Vicky said quickly.

“Tell us!” Danny insisted.

We pressed our lips together and shook our heads.

“If you don't, we'll tell Mommy and Daddy what you and your friends did the other night when they went out and you thought we were asleep,” Danny threatened. “Won't we, Tycho?”

Tycho nodded obediently.

“You wouldn't!” Vicky snapped at them, though of course she knew Danny would.

“Maybe we better tell them,” I said grimly.

Vicky sighed. She looked around the room to be sure no one else was there. “The other word is …
drang
,” she reluctantly whispered.

“It's the worst word in the world,” I added.

Danny's eyes lit up. “Drang?” he said experimentally, testing the sound on his tongue.

Vicky and I shuddered and closed our eyes. “Don't! If anybody ever hears you say that, they will never forgive you, and they'll hate us because they'll know we taught it to you.”

For about one day, Danny and Tycho ran around saying “drang” to Mom and Dad and Grandma. They taught it to their friends, who repeated it to their parents. It was sweet to see our two little brothers getting along so well.

But saying “drang” produced no satisfying response; nobody was shocked and horrified. Soon they knew we had tricked them. It was their first scientific experiment. Our credibility was destroyed.

Danny and Tycho were very clever. They went right back to saying all the other words, and there was nothing we could do about it.

Frank's Mother

When I was in sixth grade, my best friend was a kid named Frank. We hung out at my house a lot more than his. One reason for this was that both my parents worked—Mom was a pediatrician and Dad was a physiology professor at the university—and after school there would always be several hours at my house when no adults would be around. Frank, knowing his mother was watching the clock for his return, would dutifully call her as soon as we got to my place and tell her where he was (without, of course, mentioning that my mother wasn't there). Then we could do what we wanted.

We stood on the back porch railing and peed out into the yard. We studied the color photographs in my mother's medical books. Some of the pictures, of hideous skin diseases, for instance, were thrillingly gross, giving us weird pangs in our stomachs. Other pictures were fascinating for different reasons.

We played catch with eggs. There was a lot of tension to this game because we were both lousy athletes, and we knew that it would not be long before an egg would smash on the floor or on the kitchen counter. Then we would scrape the egg into a big bowl and make fake vomit. We'd dump in oatmeal, brown sugar, vinegar, syrup, raspberry jam (for bloodiness), and whatever else seemed disgustingly realistic. When we were satisfied with our artistry, we would splash the mixture onto the sidewalk in front of the house. Then, hiding on the front porch, we'd watch the reactions of passersby, praying that someone would step in it.

Even when Mom did come home, it was still fun at my house because she was very relaxed and did not fuss over her kids. She had her own things to do and would leave us alone. Frank and I would go up to my room, which was a refinished attic—we lived in a big old house, and I had the whole top floor to myself—where we could read comics and use bad language and have private conversations about anything we wanted.

Mom was unconventional in many ways. She let my sister and brothers and me read anything we wanted and never objected to any of our friends or quizzed us about where we were when we weren't at home. She thought it was great that I loved puppets and loathed baseball. She never tried to make us finish our food at meals, which was probably why none of us ever had any eating problems. Though Mom was proud of her Jewish heritage—her mother and father were poor immigrants from the Warsaw ghetto—neither of our parents was religious. Many kids we knew went to synagogue or Sunday school; we never attended any religious services. On Sunday mornings (Dad worked on Saturdays), the whole family had a large, leisurely breakfast together, while Dad played chamber music on the phonograph.

Since Mom was a pediatrician, I never entered a doctor's office until I went away to college. Mom gave us all our shots, and none of us was the least bit afraid of the needle. In fact, a couple of times Mom took Vicky to her clinic. She gathered the kids around and gave Vicky a shot of some innocuous substance while Vicky stood there beaming, to try to prove to the other kids that it didn't hurt.

Mom did not wear high heels or makeup, which was very unusual in those days. “Why should you worry about what some stranger thinks about you?” she would ask us. But she wasn't obnoxiously rigid about this. When Vicky was a little girl, she would beg Mom to
please
wear lipstick whenever she came to school, and Mom would oblige, not wanting to embarrass her.

Sometimes Frank and I did have to go over to his house because his mother had this idea that it somehow wasn't fair for us to spend all our time at my house. We also didn't want her to get suspicious and start wondering exactly
why
we so preferred my house to his. His mother would be waiting for us at the door of their ranch house—in a dress and stockings and high heels, her hair in a permanent, her face perfectly made up—and she would always be holding a tray of donuts or jelly rolls or cookies. We would have to sit with her at the kitchen table and force down the sugary pastries and drink glass after glass of milk, while she questioned us in her ladylike way about what had happened at school.

She would also ask politely about my family—how my sister was doing, and my two little brothers. Frank was an only child, which might have accounted for his mother's relentless hovering. I suppose she was impressed that my father was a scientist at the university, but though she refrained from comment about my mother's profession, it was clear that she did not approve of a mother who worked. I did manage to imply, however, that Mom only worked part-time and of course was
always
there when I came home from school.

When the snack ordeal was over, we could not escape up to Frank's room—that was out of bounds because his mother couldn't keep an eye on us there. We would have to sit, squirming with boredom, in the formal, spotlessly clean living room. All the furniture was covered in transparent plastic, which was either slippery or sticky, depending on the weather, and always uncomfortable. Frank's mother bustled around, vacuuming, polishing, dusting the plastic flowers, frequently peeking in to see what we were doing. Not that there was anything interesting we
could
do. I would never stay very long. My visits there were the price we had to pay for the freedom we enjoyed at my house.

Things continued in this way without mishap for most of sixth grade. Then, toward the end of the school year, I made a fatal blunder: I invited Frank to sleep over.

It was going to be a great night, a Saturday. Two of our other friends were coming; there was plenty of space in my large attic room for sleeping bags. Vicky would be sleeping at someone else's house, so she wouldn't be in our hair. I knew my parents would leave us alone—and they had said I could bring the TV up to the top floor; we could watch the kind of late movies they showed when kids were usually asleep. I had also just discovered two very lavishly illustrated new books in Mom's medical library, which I knew everyone would find deeply fascinating. And since the attic was pretty well soundproofed, we'd be able to stay up all night if we wanted.

Frank was torn. He desperately wanted to come. But it was a certainty that his mother would not allow him to spend the night without first checking all the details with my mother. So far, our mothers had never met or even spoken on the phone, and we wanted to keep it that way.

“If I ask her, she'll call your mother up,” Frank told me miserably after school on Friday. “She'll ask her all sorts of questions, like if they're going to keep an eye on us and make us go to bed early and stuff like that. And what if she finds out your mother isn't there after school? I'll never be able to come over again.”

“Maybe I can get my mother to say they'll make us go to bed early. And maybe she just won't tell her how late she works,” I said, not too sure about this. But it was worth a try. The party wouldn't be the same without Frank and his crazy sense of humor. And he was my best friend. “She wouldn't be lying, exactly. I'll ask her first, then call you.”

But as loose as Mom was, she had her limits. “Poor Frank,” she said. “His mother sounds like a pill. I guess I can
imply
that you'll be supervised. But I can't lie to her about how late I work. She's his mother; she has a right to know the situation. Anyway, what would someone like that do if she found
out
I lied to her? I dread to think.”

“I'm not asking you to lie. Just don't tell her. And if she asks, be vague.”

I called Frank, and then we put our mothers on the phone. I listened nervously to our end of the conversation. “I can assure you, the boys won't get into any mischief,” Mom said in her most businesslike voice. “Billy's had friends over before; it's always been fine. And we'll certainly see to it that they don't stay up late—we'll want our sleep, too.” There was a pause. I held my breath, wondering what Frank's mother was asking now. “Yes, there'll be plenty of healthy food for them to eat; I know what growing boys are like.” Another pause. Mom rolled her eyes at me. “I
did
study nutrition in medical school,” she said, a slight edge to her voice. “You know Billy's not underfed. And he hasn't missed a day of school all year.”

She hung up with an expression of disgust. “That poor kid,” she said again. “But I think I convinced her. She's dropping him off at five-thirty. A little early, but that's okay.”

I was excited and happy all day on Saturday, setting up my room, eager for the time to pass quickly. At four-thirty the doorbell rang, I pulled open the front door—and my heart sank. Frank's mother had
not
just dropped him off. She was standing there beside him, dressed as though she were going to tea with the queen, obviously expecting to be invited in. Frank did not look very happy.

“Hello, Billy,” his mother said, with her tight, artificial smile—I wondered how she could smile even
that
much, with all the makeup she had on. “I just wanted to come in for a minute and have a little chat with your mom.”