Brothers!
I have to share a room with Gary so Lewis can do his homework in the small bedroom because Gary and I don’t have homework because we’re not in high school.
Anyway, when we come home from school we have to watch Victory At Sea. The music is nice but mostly it’s pictures of water and smoke and soldiers and old men, you can’t see the people in the boats or in the smoke or in the crowds of soldiers really, just the old men.
Anyway, so my brother got to get a destroyer, as long as my arm about, to put together with smelly “cement” that I can smell for days at night in the bedroom when he works on it. I sort of like the smell. Not like gasoline. Though I sort of like gasoline too.
So then we were getting ready to go to church and Gary says, “Why is there water on top of the dresser?”
And, “Why are the decals on my destroyer crooked?”
And then he picks it up and says, “Why is there water inside my destroyer?”
I don’t have to tell him, he’s got all the clues.
What comes of being old enough to take my bath by myself.
“WHY?!?”
“It’s a boat.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not supposed to sink.”
So he slugs me in the arm and won’t help me put on my tie.
We go to the Methdist Church. My father used to be a Episcopale and he grew up walking down the railroad tracks to the Goodfellows dances on Saturday night.
My mother can’t dance.
She says they couldn’t play games or anything besides go to church on Sundays when she was a kid the Methdists were so strict she and her sister could only walk through the cemetery on Sundays, that there was a booklet in the entry hall of her church that was called From The Ballroom To Hell. But they could sing. My grandmother was “the leak soprano” for years and years in Oxford.
Maybe why Grandma’s voice is so wobbly now.
My mother says she can’t sing, either.
Going to church, to a White Elephant but it turned out to be a sign that said Fish Pond stuck to a white sheet that was taller than my dad, a whole bunch of sheets blocking one side of the hall, and poles with big rubber hooks on short strings on the ends. For a quarter we could fish. By holding the pole and getting the hook on the string over the tops of the sheets.
Nothing that looked like a elephant to me.
That was it. Only coffee and ice cream in small squares and three colors—
“Neapolitan,” Mom said.
I just wanted chocolate and none of the pink touching the chocolate.
—And donuts and cider and the grownups talking.
Then we were driving home and I was looking at my prize and thinking mine didn’t come in a box wrapped in white paper, why did Gary’s? “Don’t open it ‘til we get home,” Mother said.
Gary gave his prize, the box, a shake.
“Don’t shake it, either—you don’t know what it is.”
“What’s mine?” I held my prize forward for my mother to look at.
She looked at it and looked at it. “I think it’s a puzzle.” She handed it back.
“A puzzle? What’s this say?”
She glanced at the other side. “Plas-Trix.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That it’s made of plastic and I guess it’s tricky.”
“And this?”
“Hong Kong—where it was made.”
It had little squares like the keys of Mom’s typewriter. They moved sort of. But, numbers, not letters. “What’s it do?”
“Gary, don’t shake your present!”
Because Gary had gone from feeling the insides of his box slide up and down to shaking it again. The more shake he gave it, the more it tinkled.
“What does it do?” I repeated.
My mom studied it a minute. “See, you’re supposed to put the numbers in order, one to fifteen.”
“Why?”
“To work the puzzle.”
I took it back and shoved some of the tiles left and right, not as easy to do as I expected.
“I think it’s broken,” I decided. “I think one of ‘em’s missing.”
“No, that’s a space so you have room to move them.”
My brother’s little white box made a loud noise now, muffled but like glass breaking.
“Gary!”
And by the time we got home I had all the numbers out on the floor of the car (“Maybe Daddy can fix it”) and Gary’s mysterious box sounded like pieces of glass rolling back and forth, back and forth—
“What NINNY would do that?!?” my mother was angry. Not at Gary though, at whoever put six little blown-glass figures in a box without wrapping them each in tissue paper first. “Toilet paper—they could have used toilet paper!” Mad because some unthinking “little old NINNY” would do this to a child.
“It was set up for children, didn’t they know any better?”
So, I ended up with a handful of numbered tiles and Gary with only a three-legged horse that had been a unicorn and who could guess what all the others had been.
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