Help Wanted (3 page)

"It's mine now," he claimed with a laugh that resembled a bark. He smacked his lips and burped. "But if you want some, you can have some." He pushed the bottle toward her.

"That ... is ... dirty," she said as she set her fork on the edge of her dinner plate. "Dad, did you see what David did?"

Her father's face was hidden behind the sports page. "The Dodgers lost three in a row," he mumbled.

"Dad, David spit in the Dr Pepper."

"David, don't do that no more." He showed his stubbly face from behind the newspaper, wagged a finger at David, and returned to the newspaper.

Carolina fumed at her father and her little brother.
We have no manners,
she concluded. She had intended to pour herself a glassful of Dr Pepper, but now she could only get herself a glass of water. She sighed. She lowered her head and surveyed her dinner of enchiladas, beans, rice, and salad. The salad, she saw, was scooted to the side of the plate. She had learned that salads required their own plate and recalled hinting at her mother that salads were served that way. Her mother, a bank teller who plied out money all day, had responded in a surly voice, "Not in this house. I'm not going to wash extra dishes."

Carolina stabbed at a wedge of tomato and fit it into her mouth as her mother returned from the kitchen, licking her fingers—a no-no in Carolina's book. It was a no-no in Miss Manners's book as well.

"Who was that on the phone?" her father asked.

"A telemarketer—how they bother." Her mother plopped down in a chair. She sized up Carolina's unhappy face. "What's the matter?"

Carolina had also learned that it was impolite to bring up complaints at dinner. It was better, she had read, to discuss the matter in private. "I'll bring it up later, if that's okay."

"No, it's not okay." Her mother balanced a weighty forkful of beans inches from her mouth. "Spill it, girl."

Carolina sighed. She could feel her mouth fall open at the sight of the beans being shoveled onto her mother's outstretched tongue, but her mouth reshaped itself into a gasp as her mother reached for the Dr Pepper. "Mom, I wouldn't drink that."

Her mother finished smacking the food in her mouth. She rolled her tongue over her back molars for a quick brushing. "I'm thirsty and I'm not on a diet. I can drink what I want."

"I just wouldn't, Mom." She eyed her little brother, who was kicking his legs and smiling a toothless smile—at age six he had lost his front baby teeth in an unnatural way. He had lost them when he bailed out from a tall swing and landed face-first in the dirt. "Because David drank from the bottle." She didn't bother to explain that he had spit some of the soda back into the bottle.

"Did you do that?" his mother asked.

David nodded. He chuckled.

"You precious rascal," she scolded lightly. "You're not supposed to do that."

When her mother uncapped the bottle, Carolina had to look away. Her eyes fluttered closed momentarily but reopened when she heard a burp.

"David, that's not polite," Carolina caught herself saying. She hoped that her new tactic, a caring, grown
up tone in her voice, might be a way of reaching her brother. True, David was only six and a brat. Still, he might learn.

David tried to kick her under the table. "That wasn't me, stupid." He stabbed an arm in the direction of their mother. His fingers were splayed like a pitchfork. "It was Mom."

"Mom!" Carolina scolded.

"What?" her mother nearly screamed.

"Burping?"

Her mother crushed her napkin in her fist. "You think you're high and mighty, don't you?" Anger swirled in her eyes as she bared her teeth. "High and mighty, Miss Too-Good-for-the-Rest-of-Us!"

Carolina picked up her dinner fork and parted the enchilada. She wondered what Miss Manners would do at such a moment. She could feel the heat of her mother's wrath. Before taking a bite, she opted for an apology and said, "I'm sorry."

"That's right, you're sorry." Her mother tore a tortilla and slapped one half down on the pile of beans. She snorted and said, "Sorry, sorry, sorry."

"But I said if we could talk about it later."

"Sorry, sorry—"

"Knock it off!" her father bellowed.

The three of them froze.

He set the newspaper down. "Can't we have a nice family dinner?" he asked. His jowls hung like pears on
his face. His large Adam's apple rode up and down his stubbly throat, but he issued no more words.

"I made the enchiladas for you," Carolina's mother said. "Your favorite."

The squiggly line of his mouth moved around before it finally settled into a smile. "That's right, you did. Come on, let's chow down." He reached for the ketchup bottle. He squeezed the nearly empty bottle over his enchiladas. He pounded the bottle and then squeezed it one more time until it produced a rude sound that made David laugh.

Carolina's mother laughed, and her father laughed but stopped when he remembered that the Dodgers, a team he had grown up with, had lost three in a row.

Sorry.
The word prompted Carolina to drag her sadness to her bedroom, where she opened her diary. She wrote:
I didn't like dinner. David spit into the Dr Pepper and Mom still drank it.
She told her diary about her day at school: Elena, her best friend, had scored a Perfect in spelling, and a first grader she didn't know came to school with his head shaved because of lice. She then returned to the dinner scene—her mother calling her sorry and her father jumping all over them because he wanted a nice family dinner, even though he was reading the newspaper at the table. She reread her entry in the light of her Hello Kitty lamp.

"A million years from now, people will read my
feelings," she lamented. "They will discover my hurt." Who would side with parents who were careless in what they said and lax in their manners?

Carolina brought out her fancy stationery. It was Miss Manners who should hear about her family and their breaches of etiquette. She had written Miss Manners two weeks before and would write her again, though Carolina suspected that the sage of etiquette had no time for girls her age. Still, Carolina had made Miss Manners her heroine. She pictured Miss Manners behind a desk reading tearstained letters from those seeking solace from an uncivil world. Miss Manners's posture was perfect, her hair in place despite the temptation to pull it out after reading her daily correspondence. Carolina pictured Miss Manners sniffing the flowers on her desk as she prepared herself for witty replies.

Carolina suddenly sniffed the air about her. It wasn't flowers scenting her bedroom. Her nostrils flared like a horse's and her eyes shifted in their sockets. She turned. "David, you know it's not polite to come in my room without knocking."

David was munching something.

"Didn't you eat enough at dinner? What are you eating?" His food-stained T-shirt, which read
RAIDERS NATION
, billowed out as if he was hiding something there.

"Nothing," he mumbled.

"You are, too!"

"No, I'm not."

When he opened his mouth in a smile, Carolina could make out the head of one of his miniature army men. He clamped his mouth shut so that the head stuck out from his lips. The army man appeared to be suffering a new kind of death.

"That is ugly and dirty."

David giggled and ran from the room. Carolina heard him trip in the carpeted hallway. He returned seconds later, a buildup of tears in his eyes.

"What now?"

"I swallowed him."

Carolina stood up. "The army man?"

When he nodded, tears rolled down his cheeks. A new flush of tears filled the space in the corners of his eyes.

"Can you breathe?"

His nod made a tear slip from his face and spill on the floor.

She grabbed his hand, which she discovered was sticky and disgusting—she could only imagine where it had been—and hauled him into the kitchen, where her mother was painting her fingernails. "David swallowed an army man," she said breathlessly. She had to repeat herself over the noise of the dishwasher.

Her mother stood up. "What?" She grabbed David's mouth, pried it open roughly, and looked in.

"Do you see anything?" Carolina wanted to ask.
But she remained quiet, though she did risk leaning toward David's open mouth and taking a peek herself.

"You kids!" her mother scolded. She bent him over her lap and started pounding him on the back in an attempt to dislodge the army man.

"But I didn't do anything," Carolina wanted to say. Instead, she dared to say, "Mom, I think the army man is in his stomach."

"Carlos!" Her mother called Carolina's father. "Carrrrrlooooos." She continued to pat David on the back. She stopped. "Look at my nails. You kids!
¡Cómo friegan!
"

Carolina judged that it was time to leave the kitchen. She returned to her bedroom and covered her ears when her parents began to argue—her mother yelled that it was her father's fault for buying army men in the first place. He argued, "My fault? My fault? You're the one always going shopping." Carolina couldn't understand either one's logic and reacted with a disgusted look when the two finally calmed down and her mother suggested they check David's stools for the army man. It would have to come out soon.

Sorry.
Her mother said that she was a sorry person, and Carolina didn't know how to respond in a dignified manner. With her little brother in tow, she hurried to school, but not before depositing her letter to Miss Manners in the corner mailbox.

"What did you put in there?" David asked. He was already eating part of his lunch. His fingers and his teeth were orange from Cheetos.

"None of your business."

"I'm going to tell."

"Tell what?" she snapped.

"Tell you put a bomb in there."

Carolina prodded him along. She muttered, "I wish I was from another family." She didn't feel guilty admitting that her loyalty lay elsewhere—who wanted to share a life with a mother who was angry all the time, and a father who spent his evenings tallying box scores of baseball? And she certainly deserved a better brother than one who gobbled army men like candy.

A sixth grader, Carolina still ventured out to the playground—though she had given up tetherball when she got smacked on the nose. Even her interest in kickball, her favorite noontime sport, waned that year when a boy tripped her rounding second base. Her recess was given over to playing catch with her friend Elena, the two of them openmouthed in semiterror as the Softball floated skyward and quickly descended. They would play awhile and then sit on the bench and talk, their knees pressed together in a polite grown-up manner.

But that morning their relationship changed.

"Elena!" Carolina called, but not too loudly. She raced to see her friend but slowed when she saw that Elena was sitting with a boy. The boy was the lout who
had tripped her the year before and called her clumsy, among other things, after she told her teacher on him. She wondered what Miss Manners would do at such a moment, which worsened when Carolina noticed that Elena had nudged herself closer to the boy.

Disgusting.
Carolina brooded. Still, she approached the two and greeted them brightly with, "Good morning." She stood in front of them and eyed Elena and then the boy as she waited for an introduction. When it didn't come, she volunteered, "My name is Carolina."

The boy laughed.

Carolina smiled.

The boy laughed harder.

Still, Carolina continued. "And what's your name?"

The boy laughed and said, "You're such a nerd."

Elena lowered her face and chuckled.

Carolina's face reddened and the machinery behind the eyes that produced tears began to start up. "That is not very polite." She was most hurt that her best friend would laugh at her. "Elena, why are you doing this to me?"

Elena hid her laughter in the sleeve of her sweater.

The boy hee-hawed like a donkey, and Carolina seized the notion that he had in fact a donkey's brain in what she felt was an unshapely skull. Thus, she reasoned, he should be pitied, because in the end, in adulthood, he would be working at a donkey's job.

But as for Elena, one of the smartest girls in class,
Carolina could find no excuse for such poor behavior, poor form. Then she realized their friendship had ended—gone were the times when they played in Elena's tree house, took swimming lessons together, dressed up for Halloween. She knew for sure when Elena took the boy's hand into hers.

"Excuse me," Carolina said before the tears surfaced. She picked up her backpack and left to write Miss Manners on the stationery she always carried to school. "What should you do when you discover a friend is no longer a friend?" she composed on her Hello Kitty stationery. She wrote in purple ink, though she felt the question she posed really required storm-cloud black. She wiped away tears and through the blur of a crushing hurt could see how people—even best friends—could be cruel. She finished her letter, unpeeled a stamp, lined it up correctly on the envelope, and gave the letter to the school secretary, who promised that it would go out in the afternoon mail.

That day Carolina ate alone, a napkin in her lap as she nibbled her sandwich—tuna with a pickle and sheet of lettuce. She wished her mother had cut it into halves. Sandwiches looked better when cut, more sophisticated and delicate.

"When I grow up, I'll cut all my sandwiches into quarters." She picked up the sandwich and ate carefully. She enjoyed the crunchy sound of her carrot
sticks and wiped the corners of her mouth when she was through. With nowhere to go, with no one to talk to, she sat on the bench. From there she watched two boys filling their mouths with water from the drinking fountain. They would fill up and then chase each other around, spurting water on each other. They laughed.

"You ugly frog!" one boy called. He was wiping water from his eyes.

Carolina bristled when she discovered the voice belonged to her little brother, David. "The brat," she muttered.

When David cupped a hand into his armpit and began to produce flatulent sounds, she was inclined to get up and make him stop. Instead she deposited her lunch bag in the garbage can and went into the library. There she did some of her work and thumbed through a
National Geographic
magazine, stopping to size up Shetland ponies.
They're so cute,
she thought, and ran a finger down their manes. How she wanted to pet that pony and whisper in its ears, "You're beautiful." She wanted to mount the pony and ride it through the green fields to a river. She could free herself from school and ... family. She turned the page of the magazine to discover Queen Elizabeth staring at her. The ponies, the article said, belonged to the queen and were pastured at Windsor Castle. Carolina appraised the photograph and noticed the queen's posture. It was straight, dignified, and—
That's it!
—royal.