Underdog (3 page)

Aunt Alice knocked on my door and waited until I said “Come in” before she opened it.

“Oh, my,” she said, “you really are an early bird. Do you always get up early on weekends or are you just still on Eastern time?”

“I guess I’m used to getting up early,” I said. “But I can be very quiet.”

She was wearing a shimmering white bathrobe and her hair looked combed. “We’re kind of lazy,” she explained, “over the weekends. Especially on Sundays. Roger
—your Uncle Roger—likes to loaf and just read the paper.”

“I can stay in this room,” I said. “I don’t want to bother you.”

Aunt Alice shook her head. “No, Izzy, I don’t want you to feel that way ... I ...” She didn’t finish what she was going to say. Instead she walked over to the closet and looked inside.

“Is this everything?” she asked.

“I put all the rest in the chest and my shoes are on that rack. That’s meant for shoes, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes,” my aunt said, looking at my two pairs of shoes. “Don’t you have any more shoes than these?”

“I left a few pairs back in Washington. These are all I need except for my zoris.”

“Well, we’ll go shopping tomorrow. I’ll take the day off and we can have lunch. Would you like that, Izzy?”

“Sure,” I said, a big smile on my face. “I’d like that.”

“Well, is there anything else you need now?” she asked me.

“I was thinking I’d put my books on one of the shelves,” I told her. “Is that okay?”

“Of course it is. Here, let me take away this big box of pictures.”

“Are they family pictures?” I asked her.

“Uh-huh.” She was carrying them out of the room but she stopped. “Would you like to see them?”

“Well, sure,” I said. “Sure.”

“I’ll bring them into the living room. It might be fun for all of us to look at them. I know you and your parents are in some of the old ones. Finish your unpacking, Izzy, and I’ll make breakfast and then we can look at the photos. Oh
—and what do you generally eat for breakfast, by the way?”

“Anything is fine,” I told her.

“But what do you like?”

“I eat everything.”

She shook her head. “How about some eggs?”

“Well, if you and Uncle Roger eat eggs
...
”

“Izzy, I’m asking you if you like eggs. Never mind what we like,” she said kind of quickly. Then she took a breath, smiled, and said much more slowly, “We generally have a croissant or an English muffin but if you like
eggs,
Izzy,
I’ll be happy to make some.”

“I like croissants and English muffins,” I told her,

“Orange juice? Milk?”

“Well sure if you have them.”

She walked out of the room and I finished putting all my things away. I put Sandy’s two candles on the chest right below the pigeon-dropping painting but they didn’t look right there so I stuck them on one of the shelves in the closet. I put my two suitcases into the closet and after I’d made the bed, the room looked just the way it had before I arrived.

My uncle was sitting on the couch, still in his bathrobe, with the Sunday paper in front of him. My father always got dressed in the mornings which is why I always got dressed too. But if my aunt and uncle sat around in their bathrobes on the weekends I supposed I’d better learn to do the same.

“Good morning, Izzy,” my uncle said, looking up.

“Good morning, Uncle Roger.”

Both of us smiled and waited.

“How did you sleep?” my uncle asked.

“Oh, just fine.”

“Was the bed comfortable?”

“Oh yes.”

“Do you have everything you need?”

“Oh yes.”

We continued smiling and I could see he was thinking of what to say next. So was I. Luckily, Aunt Alice came into the room then to say that breakfast was ready.

We ate in the kitchen, a white-and-black-tiled room with a glass table and white metal chairs. It was tough going. They asked me a lot of questions and I tried to answer the way I thought they would want me to answer.

“Do you have a lot of friends in Washington?” my aunt asked.

“Oh no,” I told her, “I hardly ever brought friends over to my house. Mrs. Evans always said I was the quietest child she knew and the least messy.”

“But didn’t you have any friends at all?” They both were looking at me, not even chewing their croissants or sipping their coffee. I guess that hadn’t been the right answer so I said cheerfully, “Oh, I had friends in school but I never brought them home. Sometimes Linda Altman
—she lived downstairs—sometimes she came upstairs and we watched TV together. But we never made a mess.”

I didn’t ask them any questions at breakfast because I knew that most grown-ups don’t like kids to ask questions. But later, when Aunt Alice and I were sitting around the table looking at pictures, I did ask questions like “Who was that?” and “How old were you when this was taken?”

There were lots of pictures and she seemed to enjoy looking at them as much as I did. I always liked looking at photographs. We didn’t have very many at home. My father never took pictures and the ones I took weren’t always clear.

Photographs made me happy. Seeing people in bathing suits on the beach or standing, all dressed up, in front of some famous building on a trip, I liked to make believe I was there too, making donkey fingers behind some kid’s head or singing in a chorus with a whole bunch of girls all dressed in white dresses.

“Is that you?” I asked Aunt Alice, picking one out from about thirty faces.

“No, no, Izzy, I’m over here. The little fat one. Would you believe I could have been such a blimp?” She pushed the picture away and picked up another. “Here, Izzy, look at this one. Here’s your father and your Uncle Roger.”

Two boys, leaning against each other and grinning at the camera. The smaller one, my father, in a striped tee shirt and shorts. He had a bandaid on one knee and a bunch of teeth missing in his mouth. My father
—a little boy just grinning at the camera.

“Who took it?” I asked.

“What? Oh
—the picture? Roger,” my aunt called. “Who took this picture of you and Mark?”

“Hmm?” My uncle tore himself away from his newspaper and came over to the table and picked up the picture. He smiled and shook his head over it. “My father took it, Izzy. Your grandfather.”

He laughed. “We were supposed to go and visit my Aunt Margaret
—my father’s sister—your great aunt, Izzy,
and my mother said we had to change our clothes but I guess my father must have liked the way we looked because he took the picture.” Uncle Roger laughed a little, soft laugh. Then he looked at me. “Do you remember him, Izzy? He was still alive before you left?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t remember.”

He seemed disappointed. “He was so happy when you were born. I remember he waited at the hospital with Mark and he took lots and lots of pictures of you when you were little.”

“Where are they?” I asked, really excited. “Where are my pictures?”

Some of them were in the box. Pictures of me as a baby by myself, with my Uncle Roger and Aunt Alice, with my father and mother. There was a big one of just me and my mother
—me, a tiny baby, and my mother with a big smile on her face. A pretty face. I didn’t look anything like her.

“She was so pretty,” my Aunt Alice murmured, “and she had such a happy laugh. Do you remember her, Izzy?”

“No,” I said, looking hard at the picture.

My aunt let out her breath the way grown-ups do when they’re thinking of something sad. “She was so proud of you. She spent a lot of money on all sorts of little dresses and your father
—well, they were just starting out and he used to make believe he didn’t approve but he was really just as bad. They were like two kids with a doll. Here, look at this one, Izzy. Here they both are with you.”

Another photograph with both of them sitting on a couch and me, a little older, on my father’s lap, laughing and reaching out like I wanted to grab the camera. My father was holding me and he wasn’t looking at the camera. He was smiling at me and looking at me. Just at me. I didn’t feel good when I saw his smile and I put the picture down and took some others out of the box.

“You don’t remember your mother at all?” my uncle asked.

“No,” I told him. “Who’s this, Uncle Roger?”

“Oh
—that’s Aunt Alice and her brother when they were little.”

“Well, she was only four when Sally died,” said my aunt. “No wonder she doesn’t remember.”

“Who’s this, Aunt Alice?”

I was beginning to feel bad, looking at all those family pictures, especially the ones of me with my parents. I couldn’t remember my mother. Sometimes, when I tried, I could almost hear somebody laughing in another room but when I ran into that room, in my mind, it was always Sandy sitting there.

“My parents when they were little. And here’s one of me in kindergarten.”

I didn’t want to look at pictures anymore but by now both of them were sitting with me at the table, kind of happy and excited at seeing all those old faces and remembering them.

“Here’s my friend, Joey Carlson, Alice. Remember, I told you all about him. He was my buddy in high school and he always copied off me, especially in chemistry. And you know what, Izzy?”

“No, what?” I asked brightly.

“Today he’s a famous astrophysicist down at Stanford and I like to think it’s thanks to me.”

He laughed and Aunt Alice laughed and so I laughed. Without thinking, I picked a picture out of the box, looked at it, and, suddenly, I felt happier than I had felt in a long, long time.

“Gus,” I yelled. “It’s Gus.”

My aunt and uncle looked at the picture with me but neither of them said anything. It was a picture of a picnic. A bunch of people were sitting on the grass with picnic baskets around them. Somebody was eating a sandwich and somebody was drinking from a can of beer. My mother and father were talking to Aunt Alice, and Uncle Roger was sitting near two other people. He had one of those sudden smiles, like when you know somebody’s trying to take a candid picture and you’ve caught him in the act. And there was a little girl, me, in shorts and a ruffly shirt, playing with a little black dog who was wagging his tail so furiously that the tail was blurred.

“Oh, it’s Gus! It’s Gus!” I said again.

“My God!” said my uncle. “I didn’t even know we had a picture of that.”

“Your father must have taken it,” my aunt said to him very quickly. “He was the only one who had a camera that day.”

I was so happy, I couldn’t stop talking. “That was my dog. Gus. I loved Gus. We used to have so much fun. He slept in a little dog bed with a plaid-colored mat in the kitchen and every morning I’d get up before everybody else and go and play with him. And one night I woke up and I took Gus into bed with me but he barked and barked and my father woke up ...”

They were both looking at me. Not saying anything.

Not smiling. Just watching me. Maybe they were disgusted the way I was jabbering on and on. So I stopped. But I was still feeling happy. I put the picture down but I didn’t want to let it out of my hands. So I picked it up again and said to my uncle, “Can I have this picture, Uncle Roger? Please? I mean not to keep but just to look at for a while.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “Sure. And Izzy, if you want any others
—with your parents—you can have them too.”

“No, just this one. I just want this one. Thanks, Uncle Roger. Thanks, Aunt Alice. I’ll be careful with it.”

That afternoon, they took me all over San Francisco to see the sights. It was a long, draggy day where I had to keep smiling and saying ooh and ah. They showed me the view from Golden Gate Bridge and from the top of Coit Tower. They took me for a walk in Golden Gate Park and we drank tea in the Japanese Tea Garden. Aunt Alice told me about her two nephews. One was ten and the other was thirteen and both of them liked to climb the moon bridge in the Japanese Tea Garden. So I said I’d like to climb it too and the two of them stood and watched me and asked if I enjoyed it when I came down.

Gus’s picture was waiting for me when we got home. I had put it in the top drawer of one of the chests in the guest room and I took it out and almost laughed out loud. Gus! It was Gus! He used to lick my face and once I licked his and it felt all wet and furry. I had forgotten about Gus but now it all came back to me and I could even remember the taste of his fur on my tongue. Gus!

Chapter 4

Aunt Alice took off the next day to go shopping with me.

We climbed into her beige-colored car with its spotless white-and-beige seats and I wondered if I was going to end up all in whites and beiges as well.

“Now, Izzy, I want you to tell me what you need,” she said as we drove downtown. “I’m a little out of practice. I only have Jeff and Danny, my nephews, so I don’t really know what girls wear nowadays.”

“Same kind of clothes,” I told her, “Jeans, sweaters, shirts.”

Which is what I was wearing that day.

She gave me a quick, worried look. “Well, for now, I suppose it won’t matter so much. I’m afraid, Izzy, you’ll have to go to the local public school to finish up the term. It’s too late to get you into boarding school but it will only be until June and it is within walking distance.”

“I went to a public school in Washington,” I told her.

“You did?” she cried. “In Washington?”

“I liked it,” I said, and then felt foolish. “I mean,” I continued, trying to think of something I didn’t like. “The lunches were yucky and Mr. Harrison, he was my teacher this term, he was always yelling at this boy, Freddie Bullock. Not at me, though. I’ve never had any trouble with my teachers. I always get along.”

She waited a few seconds and then she said, looking straight ahead, “Your uncle and I, Izzy, we really understand what you’re going through now. We know it can’t be easy for you, being uprooted this way from your home, your school, your friends.”

“It’s okay,” I told her.

“Please, Izzy,” my aunt said quickly, “just let me finish. We want you to be happy, Izzy. You haven’t had an easy time. We know that and we want you to think of us as your family and tell us what we can do to make you feel at home.”