Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting (23 page)

This necessitated a lot of intensive surveillance, watching TV with the sound off in order to detect the rotary dialing of the phone, and quietly lifting the receiver every few minutes to ensure that there was nothing more than a dial tone. But it was worth it, since she had little else to occupy herself in there, and was, I was certain, getting stir-crazy.

The bedroom door flew open. Val marched down the hall.

“Hey,” I said from the family room, “I need your advice.”

“Leave me alone.” The bathroom door slammed shut.

“Peanut Butter’s getting fat!” I hollered, referring to my athletic little stair-jumper.

Val had lost interest in our longtime pets some time ago, and she visited them in their basement box infrequently now, so she was unaware that Peanut Butter was turning into a rodent Dom DeLuise.

“So what?” she yelled from the bathroom.

“It’s not healthy! What do I do?”

“Make him do laps around the pool table,” she snapped. “What do I care?”

I crept up to the bathroom door. “I’m sorry,” I said hesitantly, “for getting you in trouble.”

“You should be. Nobody likes a snitch. And you wonder why you don’t have any friends.”

“I have friends,” I said defensively. “Mitch down the street.” The door flew open. “Yeah, that’s something to be proud of. He’s a bigger freak than you are.” She pushed past me and walked into the kitchen.

“I could have other friends,” I retorted. “There just aren’t very many people on my level.”

“Well, maybe,” she replied as she grabbed a glass bottle of Coke from the refrigerator, “you should consider lowering your standards. You wanna be stuck in the house for the rest of your life?”

“It’s not so bad. I mean, you and I could do something.”

“Like what?”

“We could play Monopoly.”

She snorted. “Oh, please.”

“I’ll let you steal money from the bank.”

“Eric,” she said patiently as she poured a glass of soda, “I’m going on seventeen. You’re thirteen. We don’t like to do the same things.”

“Well then, what do
you
want to do?” I said, anxiety coloring my voice. I could feel my control of the situation slipping away.

“I wanna go see Tommy.”

“Well, I could go, too. We could hang out together.”

“Tommy likes you,” she said, chuckling, “but not
that
much.”

I felt my face grow red. I turned away.

Val replaced the bottle in the refrigerator. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not you. I’m just older now. I like different things.”

She turned to walk back to her bedroom.

“I could let you go see him,” I blurted out.

She stopped. “You’d do that for me?”

“Sure,” I said hesitantly, feeling alternately grown-up and deceitful. “What’s the big deal?”

 

 

VAL MADE ME promise that I wouldn’t rat her out. In exchange, she brought me back a 45 I’d been wanting, Paul Anka’s “You’re Havin’ My Baby.”

I had won some measure of respect and gratitude from my sister. But it was a hollow victory. There seemed to be no going back to the way we once were.

“Okay,” I said to God as I set Peanut Butter down next to the pool table and nudged him forward to begin his laps. “You win.”

 

 

THE NEXT DAY, as I was practicing my trumpet, Val clomped downstairs.

“Would you turn that thing down a little?!” she said. “I can’t even hear myself think.”

“I can hear you thinking from all the way over here,” I replied. “Those gears need some oil.”

Val started to reply. Fighting wasn’t much, but at least it was engagement.

Suddenly, I held my finger to my lips to shush her.

For all the years we had had our guinea pigs, the mere opening of the door to the basement triggered a chorus of squeals. It had suddenly hit me that Val had just thrown open the door and pounded down the stairs with nary a sound from them.

I ran across the basement to the laundry room.

Oh God, oh God, I thought, terror filling my body, you already won. Please let that be enough.

I dashed into the corner and looked into the guinea pigs’ box. Peanut Butter was writhing, obviously in pain. Mickey, his companion, was sitting there watching quietly.

It was the laps, I thought. The torture I had inflicted on him. The strain on his portly little body did him in. Tears filled my eyes.

Val walked in.

“What’s the problem?”

I pointed. She leaned over and gasped.

“Gross!”

Her insensitivity to the suffering of my beloved pet infuriated me.

“
Shut up!
He can’t help it!”

“Well, of course he can’t,” Val said. “Look!”

She pointed and I hesitantly glanced into the box again.

Peanut Butter was having a baby.

“Ewww!” I yelled, both repulsed and overjoyed. Peanut Butter shuddered in pain and whimpered.

“Oh my God,” Val said, a look of disgust on her face, “I am
never
doing that!”

We gazed quietly at the scene playing out before us. We had never had baby
anythings
.

“Well,” Val said softly, “I guess those aerobics did the trick.”

“Well,” I said softly, “I guess he’s a she.”

Slowly, one, then two new guinea pigs took their places in the box. They looked like tiny, hairless lumps.

“Where’s their fur?” I asked.

“It grows in later, I guess.”

“Look at their feet,” I said. “They’re so little.”

“And their eyes,” Val whispered. “They’re closed. I wonder when they open?”

A third baby made its way onto the scene.

“How many has she got in there?” I asked. “It’s like a pastry tube.”

“I don’t know.” She pointed to Mickey, who I now realized was the father. “Look how quiet he is.”

“Guess he’s just glad it’s not him, huh?”

“Either that, or he’s goin’, ‘How am I gonna pay for all these kids?’ ”

We both laughed. I reached down. “Can we pick ’em up?” Val stopped my hand. “We probably shouldn’t. We don’t wanna get human stink on ’em so that she rejects them or eats them or something.”

“Would she do that?” I asked, horrified.

Val nodded knowingly. “We should probably go upstairs and let them sleep.”

“Will she be okay by herself?” I asked. I had to get used to this new pronoun thing.

“She got this far without our help,” Val replied. “I think she’ll be just fine.”

We tiptoed upstairs, the thrill of new life filling us with a civility we hadn’t shown each other in a very long time.

And I silently—albeit hesitantly—thanked God. I certainly wasn’t convinced that he was in my corner, but for at least this one moment, he had given me my sister back.

“Hey,” I said to Val, before she could head down the hall to her room, “you wanna watch
Bewitched
?”

There was a long pause. Too long. I steeled myself for the answer.

“Oh, jeez,” she said, rolling her eyes, her hands on her hips. She gazed at me for a moment, as if taking in my pained expression but more likely calculating the cost/benefit ratio. “Well . . .” she replied, “I guess.”

I beamed.

“But don’t be waving your arms around when Endora comes on,” she said as she plopped down on the family room shag and flipped on the Zenith. “That’s weird.”

F
ifth-period Social Studies was no place for mortals.

This class, held in one of the double-wide trailers situated behind Hazelwood Junior High, was a uniquely designed torture chamber where no one could hear you scream.

The trailers were intended to ease overcrowding, the result of a large Catholic population that seemed to believe that a family wasn’t really a family if it couldn’t staff an entire Sambo’s restaurant or a community theater production of
Hello, Dolly!
What these trailers bred instead was an enthusiastic strain of sadism. Separated from the main building, where the potential for the discovery of misconduct was much higher, the trailers were a spring training camp for budding Marquises de Sade. A place where only the magically inclined could survive.

Unfortunately, I was still not at all certain that God was in my corner. Any link between myself and the powerful Endora of my magical past was tenuous at best. And my eighth-grade classmates, many of whom were undergoing rigorous instruction in ruthlessness, had apparently been notified. Wholly aware of my inability to counteract their cruelty, they launched attacks that were impressive in both scope and nuance.

Black Kenny, for example—one of the school’s few kids of (any) color—felt that book removal should be scored on a point system: one point for knocking them out of my hands; two points for broadcasting the breaking news that I carried them like a girl; three points if he was subsequently able to heave them out the window into the mud. Six points was a slow week; eight points a respectable one; ten, worthy of commendation and a plaque.

In a rare show of unity, members of the school’s burnout contingent shared in the persecution duties. Willy Fleming, whose sex appeal was somewhat incongruous to his status as a burnout, favored a form of physical intimidation that violated all rules of personal space. Standing mere inches from my face, Willy would flip the ends of my hair, which, in the aquatic Missouri humidity, tended to curl up, thus giving me an uncanny resemblance to Marlo Thomas in
That Girl
.

“Hey, CessPoole,” he would whisper menacingly, reprising a nickname I had striven for years to lose, “where’s your boyfriend
Donald
?” He was alluding, of course, to Marlo’s on-screen beau from the 1960s TV series. I considered advising him that the show had gone off the air several years earlier, and if he wanted to be a successful comic, he might consider topicality, but thought better of it.

His fingers flicked my hair again, as a cadre of swooning girls began to play with their split ends.

“I know,” I would reply lamely. “My stupid hair. What’re ya gonna do?”

It was this sort of snappy comeback that ensured repeat performances, so each day I counted down the moments until the arrival of our teacher, Miss Plotnick, whose whereabouts prior to the beginning of class were a mystery, although she was apparently not in the bathroom dolling up.

Miss Plotnick was a short, slightly dumpy woman of perhaps thirty, whose wide, squat moonface made it appear as though her head had been smashed like Wile E. Coyote’s in a Roadrunner cartoon. This, at least, seemed to be the widely held belief of Willy and Black Kenny, who announced that no amount of makeup or JCPenney pantsuits could assuage the fact that she had been beaten senseless with an ugly stick.

I, on the other hand, thought she was beautiful—inside, where it counted. Because contrary to her students, Miss Plotnick liked me.

“Quiet, everyone,” she would announce, clapping her hands, her mousy brown hair flapping like a dead squirrel. “Today we’re going to role-play the branches of government!”

Everyone moaned. Miss Plotnick was a fan of lessons that encouraged some form of interactivity. Her valiant efforts to teach us stuff using games like Current Events Jeopardy usually failed miserably; but like Sisyphus, she continued to push that educational boulder up the trailer.

“Let’s see . . .” She glanced around the room with the breathless anticipation of Bob Barker announcing the Showcase Showdown winner. “I’d like
Eric
to play the Executive Branch.”

Black Kenny (who, oddly, seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about being called Black Kenny, although it was really just a means of differentiating him from the regular Kenny) immediately piped up. “What do you want
that
fairy for?”

Several kids tittered as Miss Plotnick whirled around to him.

“One more comment like that, Kenny, and you’re gonna be in detention until you’re forty.” She turned back to me. “I’m choosing Eric because he seems so presidential,” she announced with a conviction borne of no evidence.

Although pleased to be singled out for her affection, attention was really the last thing I wanted. As someone who was already a target, keeping my head down was a priority, since being teacher’s pet would bring me nothing so much as a season pass to an ass kicking.

Nonetheless, I quietly took a seat behind her desk, which served as the Oval Office, and, at her urging, began issuing executive orders, as the students performing the roles of the Judicial and Legislative branches argued that “Bring me my enemies list!” was not in their job description.

“Perhaps Richard Nixon isn’t the president you would most want to emulate,” Miss Plotnick said kindly, noting that impeachment wouldn’t be the sort of thing you highlight on a job résumé. “But,” she added as I dashed back to my desk, “you definitely have the potential to be a leader!”

Black Kenny made a face. Willy threw a spitball at me. Several girls fluffed their hair and crumpled up bits of paper—on which they’d been practicing writing “Mrs. Willy Fleming”—and offered them to him as subsequent missiles.

“The toad and the CessPoole,” Black Kenny whispered, nodding at Miss Plotnick and me. “Figures they’d like each other.”

At this point in my junior high career, popularity seemed out of the question, a goal as unattainable as understanding football. I longed simply to be accepted by my peers, to be afforded the same general disregard by the bullies as ninety-five percent of the student body.

There was, unfortunately, no way I could see to make that happen. Much as I longed to believe that magic was still possible, I had little evidence of it. Endora’s powers seemed to exist only in a make-believe world. And this world was all too real.

“For Friday,” Miss Plotnick said, pausing by my desk, “I’d like each of you to create a family ‘archaeology.’ ”