The basement was modeled after a bar. With a piano, a shiny black “baby grand.”
“You can watch me practice,” Sally said.
Why would I want to watch Sally practice? I stood at the doorway looking.
“We’re never supposed to go behind the bar, though.”
“Okay.”
“But you can sit on one of the stools.”
Could I?
This was the first bar I’d ever been inside of but barstools are designed for adults; when your legs don’t reach the footrest, when you have to climb on that, turn around and hop to sit, when you feel your feet flopping around under and have to wrap your toes around the front legs to keep from toppling forward—imagine if you were tipsy.
The slow-rising bubbles in the lava lamp didn’t help, either.
I watched Sally sit at the piano and start practicing Claire de Lune. “I have to play Debussy once a day.”
It went on and on; it almost picked up speed—where Sally started making mistakes, stopping and starting again.
“What else did Debbie C. write?”
Sally stared at me. She wanted to give me a sneer but her face was too round and pleasant to sneer, mostly the usual blank. In frustration, she picked up the sheet music to show me and her thick pink glasses flashed in the little clip-on light.
“DEBUSSEY!”
“Oh, yeah.”
Then she went back to concentrating, she started over.
Of course I didn’t care about the row of liquor bottles (I’d tasted wine), but seeing me fidget and almost fall off, Sally stopped and said, “Because there’s two naughty extras.”
“Huh? Oh—that’s why we’re not supposed to go behind?”
“But if you promise to keep a secret, I’ll show you. When I finish.”
A false window in a wall beyond the piano, latticework like a real window but without glass, and three feet outside the window, a huge poster of the Eiffel Tower. Brightly lit.
“Have you ever been to Paris?”
“No.”
“Have your folks been there?”
“No.”
My fault, I got her confused again; again she started over.
Why did she invite me over to “play”? Why didn’t she invite a girl, the girl across the street or one of the girls down the block? Why did her mother call my mother and set this up? Something suspiciously formal about it.
Sally Moon, the pudgy blonde girl who lives next door to the house next door. She’s almost eleven so she’s almost as old as I am.
“Sally?” her mother called her.
“WHAT?” she yelled back.
“Come upstairs—”
End of recital.
Oh boy, I was struggling to get down from the barstool. Sally went upstairs without me though, leaving me to climb back up and wait. Barstools are bad news.
Upstairs and returning now with two “icebox cookies.” Two. One apiece.
On little party plates.
And trying to take a bite I discover a new meaning to icebox cookie. Ouch!
“—Keeps them in the freezer.”
I’ve seen my mother refrigerate cookie dough, slice pieces off and bake a batch of these—but they always go in the cookie jar. The freezer? Store-bought cookies hard as chomping down on an ice cube?
Sally Moon, always there under my nose and wanting to be friends without having to say so.
Why wasn’t she friends with the girl across the street? They went to the same school. Why was she friends with me? For some reason I don’t understand, Sally’s mother arranged it.
How come? Yeah, I guess I was impressed with a bar but I don’t want to sit in a basement on a barstool.
Arranged. Mrs. Moon called my mother and asked if I was available to come over and “play”! This was playing?
But, desperate, now Sally promised to show me the secrets behind the bar, making these BIG SECRETS she wasn’t supposed to show anyone. As if bribing me to stay in the basement when she knew I was bored with her clunk-clunk-clunk on the piano.
When is a secret not a secret? When you know what it is. In a similar way, when is adulthood no big deal anymore? When you’re an adult.
Finally, very quietly, Sally went behind the bar, hunted in a drawer and brought up: A plastic little man, naked, both hands covering his crotch, an expression of surprise, inside a miniature outhouse with a spring that makes the door fly open. And then, something that looks like an oven mitt, labeled Too Hot To Handle which, flipped inside out, exposes a pink cloth version of a man’s dick.
I think that’s what it’s supposed to be. Looks more like a popsicle to me. Come on, somebody probably had to tell Sally what it was.
“Sally, do you know what it is?”
“Yes,” she said.
I bet she doesn’t.
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ID: 274721576