Two-Thousand-Pound Goldfish (8 page)

“I
DON’T KNOW HOW
you stand it without a telephone,” Aunt Pepper said. She was pacing up and down the living room like an athlete ready for a race. “It just drives me crazy to think that someone might be trying to call me and because there’s no phone—Aiiiiiiiii!” She shook her head in mock craziness. “Who in their right mind would be without a phone?”

For the two weeks that Warren’s grandmother had been in the hospital, Aunt Pepper had been staying with Warren and Weezie.

Warren said, “You can use the Oglesbys’ phone in an emergency.”

“I have used the Oglesbys’ phone so much that she has put up a sign—‘Local Calls, Ten Cents’—with a little ashtray for me to put coins in. Anyway, I want my own phone. It’s probably ringing right this minute.” She broke off and said, “Doesn’t Weezie have boyfriends? How does she get dates?”

“I don’t think she has any.”

“Of course she has boyfriends. Weezie’s very pretty.”

“She’s too big. Some kids call her Hercules.”

“She is very pretty. Doesn’t she ever go out and you don’t know where she’s going?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that is dating. ‘Where have you been?’ ‘Nowhere.’ ‘Who are you going with?’ ‘Why do you want to know?’ That person,” Aunt Pepper said with a smile, “is dating!”

“When Weezie goes out like that—I mean secretly—well, I always think it has something to do with Mom.”

Aunt Pepper turned and regarded him seriously. Warren was tired of being looked at like that.

He said, “I know what you’re getting ready to say. I know!” He slumped. He began kicking his heels against the sofa.

“How do you know what I’m going to say when
I
don’t know what I’m going to say?”

“It’s just,” he went on, “that there is so much I don’t understand. Weezie’s always saying things like, well, she says things like maybe I wouldn’t want to find Mom, maybe I wouldn’t like what I found. She tries to make me think there’s something terribly wrong, that Mom’s turned into some sort of monster!”

Aunt Pepper sighed. She sat down on the arm of the chair. “I think I know what’s bothering Weezie.”

“What?”

“Well, Weezie found out from her father—she went to see him a couple of Sundays ago—and she found out that your mother was here for three months last spring.”

“Here? In this city?”

Pepper nodded. “She lived with some people in an apartment on the east side, and Weezie’s dad saw her a couple of times and—”

“I don’t believe it!”

“Honey, it’s true. I wouldn’t make up something like that. She—”

“If Mom had been here for even one day, she would have come to see me. I know she would.”

“She did see you once or twice. She went to your school and watched you come out.”

“What? Watched me come out of school? How would she know which one I was? How would she know when my room gets out? The third graders get out a half hour before us—did she think one of them was me?” He got to his feet and began walking around in circles. “How did she even know what school to go to? Why didn’t she speak to me? There’s a boy in my room that looks like me and people get us mixed up—maybe that was who she saw, maybe she spoke to him.”

“Oh honey, stop it. Honey!”

He turned. “Did you see her?”

“Once.”

“Where?”

“Well, she was waiting when I got off work. She was standing across the street by the newsstand, and we walked down the street and went into Albert’s and had a beer. We talked and—”

“Why didn’t she talk to
me?
Why didn’t she take
me
somewhere?” He felt he had so many questions he would spend the rest of his life getting answers. “What did you talk about?”

“She wanted to know about you. She said she’d seen you. And, honey, she knew exactly which one you were. She knew immediately. She said you had on a navy jacket and dark glasses.”

“A lot of kids wear dark glasses.”

“And I told her you wanted to be a movie director and that—”

“Why did you tell her
that?
I didn’t want her to know that.”

“I told her because I knew she would be interested. And I told her about how you and Grandma come over every Sunday and how you and I talk. I told her you were original and funny and that she was missing out on a lot.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said, ‘I know that.’ ”

He sat down heavily. It was a rocking chair, his grandmother’s, and he sat on the edge. He had thought when he was little that this was a magic rocking chair because it would never turn over. No matter how hard he rocked, and sometimes he would rock hard enough for the chair to balance for one scary moment on the tips of the rockers. Still, it never turned over.

Now the world had gone so wrong that if he leaned back even the slightest bit, the old chair would tip him onto the floor. He held on with both hands.

“Oh honey, your mom’s gotten herself into such a mess. She’s gotten in with real violent people. They’re making bombs, and some of them have robbed banks, and—”

“Not my mom!”

“I think she wants to come home. She looks tired. She’s thin. She’s—”

“I don’t even want her to come home now.”

“You’re just hurt because your mom was in town and you didn’t get to see her, and I understand how you feel. It’s all right if your mom’s out in San Francisco and she really can’t get to see you, but if she’s
here,
well, it’s so much worse.”

“I used to go around when I was little, and I would want my mother so much that I would say it to myself over and over. ‘I want my mom—I want my mom,’ like that. And sometimes I would forget and say it out loud on the bus or at school. ‘I want my mom!’ like that. And kids would look at me like I was crazy. ‘He wants his mommie. Warren wants his mommie. Warren wants his mommie,’ and I would sit there with tears in—”

“What are you two sitting in the dark for?” Weezie opened the door to the apartment with a bang and snapped on the overhead light. “There.”

“We were talking about your mom,” Aunt Pepper said. She spoke as carefully as she used to say her lines on television. “About how she was in the city for a few months last spring.”

Weezie let her books drop onto the end table. “And did not bother to see us.”

“She saw you, Weezie, she—”

“Oh yes, she stood on the school steps—or she
says
she stood on the school steps—and watched for our faces in the crowd. There are, may I point out, thirty-four hundred students in my high school, so she would have to be very quick.”

“She saw you,” Pepper said. “She described you perfectly—your hair, your clothes …”

“Oh, all right, maybe she saw us. But that makes me even madder. She saw us, probably for about thirty seconds, and then she went away feeling all wonderful and satisfied, probably motherly. ‘I have seen my children. They looked so happy. They looked so healthy.’ That’s what she said about us, isn’t it?”

Aunt Pepper didn’t answer, just watched her with sharp eyes.

“Isn’t it?”

“She felt better after she saw you, yes.”

“And so off she goes feeling better, without a backward glance. Without once thinking that Warren and me might want to feel better too. We could use a little satisfaction ourselves. I wanted to see my mother! Warren wanted to see her! And yet the only thing that mattered to her was
her
satisfaction,
her
feelings.”

There was a knock at the door. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Mrs. Oglesby said, sticking her head inside, “but there’s a call from the hospital.”

“I’m coming,” Aunt Pepper said. She got up and started for the door in one motion. “We’ll finish this later, Weezie,” she said over her shoulder.

Weezie and Warren remained where they were—Weezie beside the end table, Warren holding tightly to the arms of the rocker.

“Something’s wrong,” Weezie said in the sudden silence. “I know it.”

Warren did not answer. There had never been a moment this filled with dread even in his movies. Often actors had said, “Something is wrong,” and it always sent a chill of pleasure up his spine. And it was always followed by something even more chilling. “There generally is when the cattle are found with two holes in the sides of their necks.”

Waiting for something bad to happen was one of the pleasantest parts of a movie, like waiting to go over the top of a roller coaster was the best part of the ride.

There was no excitement in this, sitting on a rocking chair that had begun to tremble because he himself was trembling.

He glanced over at Weezie. She was looking down at her school books, lifting the cover of her English book, letting it fall.

They heard Aunt Pepper coming back from the Oglesby apartment. Warren got up from his chair so suddenly that it rocked back and forth like a chair taken over by an invisible spirit.

Aunt Pepper came in and leaned against the wall. “Grandma’s dead,” she said.

“It looks human, Professor, but underneath that human exterior, there is something not quite …”

“Not quite what? Human, perhaps?”

“Exactly.”

T
HERE WERE TWENTY PEOPLE
at Warren’s grandmother’s funeral, and they all sat on folding chairs under the green mortuary awning.

It was unlike any movie funeral Warren had ever attended because the day was beautiful, there was not a cloud in the sky, nobody had on black, and nobody was weeping.

Warren sat between Weezie and Aunt Pepper. He did not bother to search the cemetery for his mother because the cemetery was flat, and there were no tombstones for her to hide behind, just modern flat markers that a lawn mower could ride over.

As Warren looked around, he felt he could see miles of graves, with only plastic flower arrangements sticking up to break the view.

It seemed to Warren that modern society was doing away with all the good movie settings. They flattened cemeteries and turned swamps into housing developments and built sewage disposal plants. Soon there would be nowhere mysterious for creatures like Bubbles to live.

He closed his eyes. The main reason he was not looking for his mother was because he knew she would not bother to come.

“Let us pray,” the minister said.

Warren bowed his head, but he did not close his eyes. There was a picture of his grandmother on the coffin, and he couldn’t stop looking at it. In the picture his grandmother was slim and had black wavy hair and dark lipstick. She was smiling into the camera.

To Warren, it was as strange as seeing a picture of a young Santa Claus; Santa Claus with a lean body and black hair and a little moustache. Both pictures would have been snapped so long ago Santa and his grandmother would not have had time to develop their characters.

Warren was ashamed that he did not feel sadder. He had felt terrible that first night. He could not sleep because death seemed to hang over the whole apartment like smog, keeping out all good feelings. He had twisted and shifted, but there had been no comfortable spot, even in his own familiar bed.

He had started feeling better the moment his aunt Ginger arrived from Las Vegas for the funeral. She and Pepper were like girls when they got together.

“Oh, I have got to tell you this,” Ginger would say, and Warren would draw close, like a dog to a fire. “I was singing in a little club in Frisco—very little, ten tables—and I look across the room, and there is Willie Leon Mantinelli who used to be in love with you in ninth grade.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess. He was still short and fat, and he had bad breath.”

“No, no, he was gorgeous, gorgeous, so gorgeous I didn’t recognize him.”

Warren would sit speechless, watching them, looking from one to the other. He could never remember there being laughter and stories in the apartment.

“He was tall—”

“He couldn’t be tall. He came up to there on me.” Aunt Pepper gave a light chop to her throat.

“Remember, men didn’t wear high heels back then. Straight white teeth—”

“Come on! His nickname used to be Beaver.”

“—curly hair, mustache, gorgeous! He comes over—his shirt is open, hairy chest, necklace—and he says his name is Bill. I say, ‘Hi, I’m Ginger.’ He is looking at me with interest, and I am looking at him the same way.”

“Did his pimples clear up?”

“Yes, I tell you the man is gorgeous! He is so good-looking that I start thinking he must be somebody famous, on TV or something, and finally I say, ‘Do you mind telling me your last name?’ And he says, ‘No, it’s Mantinelli.’

“I had just taken a sip of red wine, and I spit it out all over him. I said, ‘Aren’t you Willie Leon Mantinelli, and didn’t you go to Madison High, and weren’t you in love with my sister Pepper all through ninth grade?’ ”

“Ginger!”

“And the poor man, before my very eyes, suddenly becomes short, fat Willie Leon. All the gorgeousness was gone, and he got up and literally ran from the club. The last I saw of him was his high heels tottering through the swinging door.”

Sometimes Warren wanted to break into the stories and ask, “Did Mom know him too? Was Mom in on that?” but he didn’t want to take a chance on being sent out of the room.

He tried to imagine his mother sitting cross-legged on the bed, laughing with her sisters, talking about old times, and it seemed to him as he sat there that knowing you could never sit and laugh with your sisters would be one of the worst things about being a fugitive. He wondered if years from now he and Weezie would sit together and laugh at the past.

“Let us pray,” the minister said.

It must be a second prayer, Warren thought, because his head was still bowed from the first one. He looked up at the minister through his eyelashes.

Suddenly he noticed a figure in the distance, over by some trees. The figure hadn’t been there before. His head snapped up. He drew in a breath so loudly his aunt Pepper glanced at him.

He started to get to his feet. “Warren.” Aunt Pepper reached over and patted his leg. “Sit down, hon.” She tried to press him back into his seat.

He remained in a crouch. The figure had long red hair! The face was turned away, but the long hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was his mother’s hair.