One of my favorite things for lunch used to be spaghetti that comes in a can. My older brother Gary also loved it. Gary also had an appetite that caused him to grab for thirds before anyone else reached for seconds. Never any food left on our table. Except peas.
(Pee-U, peas!)
Anyway, one day Gary looks at the spaghetti and says to me, “It looks like white worms in blood!” And makes a gruesome face. Worked—even though I knew it was a trick, the image stayed with me. Gary could eat the whole can.
So Gary and I were spending a week with the Martins.
Stranger and stranger, Mom and Dad went to Florida while the Martins have a Florida room. Not very big, through an archway at one end of their living room, and a high-up, long window. I thought Florida was a state. And something told me Mom and Dad wouldn’t be gone a week to a room, but nobody was explaining.
And I pretended I didn’t care where they went since they didn’t take me.
Mrs. Martin’s day to bake was Saturday, when Ellen and Brenda could help, I guess. And also help eat whatever came out of the oven. And also help wash the dishes.
“Wouldn’t you like to help wash the dishes?”
“No!”
“No? But you might like it. Ellen says it gets her fingernails so clean.”
“No!” I repeated. The fingernail business might work on Ellen, and next on Brenda, but it wouldn’t work on me.
“Where’s your brother?”
I didn’t say boo. Gary was with Randy, Mrs. Martin’s son. Maybe they were out in the garage or hanging out behind Cliff’s Party Store; they wouldn’t take me, why should I care?
“Well, the rule of thumb in our house, if you want some of the cookies you have to help with the pots and pans.”
I shrugged. I didn’t care. I hadn’t seen what was in the oven yet. It didn’t smell bad but it looked pretty weird.
Finally, Mom and Dad came home. I got a ring with a glossy orange picture attached, sunset behind a palm tree, and a dazzling line of blue (must be the ocean). A week went by and the pictures came back, slides, that Dad put in the projector and CLICK-CLICK, one at a time we got to see. Sometimes—ha! Upside down.
Florida, like I figured, wasn’t a room, it must be a big place. And hot, even though we had snow on the ground here.
Pictures of—mostly—older girls like Ellen with short hair but amazing skirts. Hoop skirts. They looked bottom-heavy, and scattered out, one here and there, standing on a golf course or something.
“Cypress Gardens,” Mom said. But it looked like a golf course. Green, and no snow, but I couldn’t see any reason why they were spread out and standing around and posing under saggy-looking trees.
“How do they get through the doors?” Gary asked.
Dad laughed. “I never did see them indoors,” Mom admitted.
Then, WOW! More young women—but these were underwater! Way underwater. Like a deep, dark lake with rock walls, so far down they had rubber tubes nearby or holding them in their hands. “That’s how they can breathe.”
Oh. But how could they open their eyes and smile? In the lake where we go I tried opening my eyes. It was too murky, too full of muck to see anything. And instantly the water went up my nose and I remember coughing and choking. It wasn’t pleasant. I would never be able to smile underwater.
“They’re mermaids!” Mom explained.
“Where’s the tail?”
“What?”
“How come they have legs? They’re just wearing bathing suits.”
“Well, they dance—like synchronized swimming only it’s all below the surface.”
“Oh.”
“It was very beautiful.”
But I didn’t think so. I couldn’t help feeling sneezy, looking at them, and my eyes started to itch.
Another week went by, and a lot of blab-blab on the phone, my mother and Mrs. Martin talking. “Mrs. Martin says you loved her cookies!”
“Yeah.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“She’s going to bake some more and send them down for you.”
“For me?” I was glad, but I also thought it was a trick, perhaps another way to get me to wash dishes.
The cookies arrived, Randy brought them down. And they looked just like I remembered, chocolate and coconut bars about the size of a grown person’s fingers. Mmmm!
On a white plate with cellophane to protect them, not hot, not on a cookie sheet, not cooling on a paper towel on Mrs. Martin’s countertop. Same cookie, only slightly different in looks.
And then Gary did it again.
You know we have a dog. And that the Martins have a dog, too. And that in the summer more than once in our backyard, not watching where I was running, I stepped—
“You know what that looks like?!?” Gary smirked in my ear.
I couldn’t eat a single one.
I’ll probably be skinny until Gary leaves home.
—