Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life Read online

  Edward smiled. “Nope,” he said. “No prizes, no judging. This is just for fun. You can sign up by yourself or with a friend or you can put together a group.”

  Jill pouted. She likes winners and losers. Even so, I saw her heading toward JBIII and I knew what she was going to ask him, so before she could snare my best friend I grabbed his arm and said, “Let’s sing a duet in the show.” (The important word in that sentence is “duet”—as in two people.)

  JBIII looked a little surprised. “I don’t think I’m a very good si—”

  “Great!” I said. “We’ll work on it over the weekend.”

  Jill swished up to us then, all breathy like a movie star. “Jamie!” she cried. “Let’s put together an act for the talent show.”

  “Oh, he can’t,” I told her. “We’re going to sing a duet. We just decided. Maybe you could do a solo act,” I added brightly.

  “Oh,” said Jill. “Well, maybe.”

  * * *

  JBIII and I got busy that weekend.

  “We don’t have much time to rehearse,” I said to him. It was Saturday morning and JBIII and I were sitting on my bedroom floor.

  “We don’t even know what we’re going to sing,” JBIII replied, edging away from Bitey and looking a little nervous. But I couldn’t tell if he was nervous about singing in front of two hundred kids or nervous about being bitten.

  “Yes, we do. I mean, I do. I thought of the perfect song. It’s called ‘Friendship’—since we’re such good friends.”

  It was a song I knew all too well. Lexie has decided that one day she’s going to play her violin in a Broadway orchestra, so she listens to musicals endlessly in her room and tries to play her violin along with the songs. One show she has listened to about ten bazillion times is called Anything Goes and that’s where I’d heard the friendship song.

  “Now there are a lot of verses in the song,” I said.

  “Long verses?” asked JBIII, looking even more nervous.

  “Sort of. That’s why I think we should only sing two of them.”

  JBIII let out his breath. “Okay. Good. Two verses. Write down the words so I can practice at home.”

  “Write them down?” I said, and a little whine came into my voice. “Let me sing them for you first.” I stood up, grabbed the stapler from my desk, and held it to my mouth. “If you’re ever up a tree, phone to me,” I sang loudly. “If you’re ever down a well, ring my bell.” I stopped. “Hey, I just had a great idea. When I say ‘phone to me’ you should pick up a phone. And when I say ‘ring my bell’ you should ring a bell.”

  “You mean I don’t have to sing?” asked JBIII hopefully.

  “No, we both have to sing.”

  “Then please write down the words.”

  As you can see, we disagreed a little about our song, and eventually we got tired of rehearsing so we decided to practice tripping instead. “You have to make it look real,” I told JBIII. “Like this.” I walked into the family room, caught my foot on the edge of the rug, and crashed into Dad’s fax machine. JBIII laughed. Then he pretended to fall over Bitey. He landed on the couch, boinged into an armchair, and almost accidentally landed on Bitey for real.

  “What are you doing?” asked Lexie from behind us. She looked horrified, like she had discovered us eating caterpillars.

  “Practicing,” I told her.

  “That’s what you’re going to do in the talent show?”

  “No, for the show we’re going to sing ‘Friendship.’”

  Lexie perked up. “From Anything Goes?”

  JBIII nodded.

  “Want me to help you?”

  * * *

  That was how Lexie appointed herself our talent coach and JBIII and I wound up rehearsing way more than we had meant to, even after Lexie politely mentioned that neither of us could carry a tune.

  “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” she asked us on the following Thursday, the afternoon before the show. Camp was over for the day and Lexie had insisted that JBIII and I have one more rehearsal. Dad was our audience, sitting on the couch in the office/family room and looking at us fondly, since fathers always have to think everything their children do is wonderful even when the children can’t carry a tune.

  “Yes,” I said.

  And JBIII whispered to me, “Do we have to sing in front of your father?” He may have forgotten that the next day he would be singing in front of the entire camp.

  “Yes,” I said again.

  JBIII and I hooked arms and began to take side steps across the family room. This was what Lexie called choreography, and she said a dance routine was especially important for JBIII and me so that the audience would focus on what we were doing instead of on the sound of our voices. Also, for some reason, she had recommended that we do away with the telephone and the bell.

  We began the song. “If you’re ever up a tree, phone to me!”

  We mixed up two lines, and JBIII lost track of the tune and just shouted the words instead, but all in all I thought we did a pretty good job. When we finished, Lexie shook her head and put her hand over her eyes, but my father jumped to his feet and shouted, “Bravo!” and I imagined that we would get another standing ovation the next day.

  * * *

  It turned out that an awful lot of kids had signed up for the talent show. Edward got things going at 1:30, hoping the show would be over by 4:00, which was a very long time to sit outside on log benches, especially for the youngest kids, and quite a few of them wandered away to use the bathroom or get trail mix, and one kid went after a squirrel and never came back to his bench, so the audience kept getting smaller and smaller. JBIII and I sat together with our talent coach, Lexie Littlefield. We watched kids sing solos and duets and recite poems and tap-dance and do hip-hop and put on skits. We watched kids play flutes and guitars and clarinets.

  “Hey,” JBIII whispered to Lexie, “how come you didn’t want to play your violin?”

  My sister shook her head. She has a problem with performance, which I certainly hope she gets over by the time she’s playing in a Broadway orchestra.

  Lena and Mary Grace presented a rap song they had written, which was pretty good until the end when they couldn’t find anything to rhyme with “Merrimac.”

  Then Jill walked onto the stage. She was in the middle of doing a cheerleading routine without pom-poms when I felt someone tap my back.

  I turned around.

  Dad was sitting behind us. He was the only parent who had shown up. This was because parents hadn’t been invited.

  I gasped and nudged Lexie. She turned around, too. “Dad!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing?”

  “I wanted to see the talent show,” he said.

  “How did you get here?” I asked.

  Dad held his finger to his lips. “I’ll tell you later. I didn’t miss your number, did I?”

  And at that very second I heard a thin little applause for Jill, and then Edward announced, “Next up are Pearl Littlefield and James Brubaker.”

  I don’t think you’ll be very surprised to find out that “Friendship” didn’t go much better at camp than it had in our family room the day before. JBIII forgot the words of the first verse entirely, and the dance steps, too, so for a while he just stood on the stage and watched me, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t have the tune right because when I looked out into the audience I saw Lexie with her head in her hands. Toward the end of our number I stepped on JBIII’s foot and he said “Yow” and limped through the rest of the routine.

  The applause for JBIII and me was even thinner than it had been for Jill—until I heard a familiar shout of “Bravo!” and saw that Dad had leaped up from his bench and was clapping hard, his hands held above his head. After his second “bravo” he cried, “Encore!” (which means you should do another verse), but luckily Lexie got him to sit down.

  JBIII and I plopped onto the first row of benches, which were now empty since all the six- and seven-year-olds had gone off to eat trai
l mix and play games. There were five numbers left in the show, and after each one I turned around to check on Dad. He was still sitting on his bench, Lexie red-faced in front of him. He stayed during Camp Merrimac Cheering, too, and I realized that he had memorized “Cumila, cumila, cumila vista,” and when we shouted “Yee-haw!” I could hear Dad’s voice over everyone else’s.

  Another thing that happened that afternoon was that all the Starlettes and all the Rock and Roll Girls kept staring at Dad and giggling.

  At last the buses got fired up, and it was time to leave. That was when my father ran to Lexie and JBIII and me (he was wearing sneakers) and said he was going to drive us home.

  “In what?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Mott’s car.”

  “You borrowed Mrs. Mott’s car?” said Lexie, just as I said, “Mrs. Mott knows how to drive?”

  Mrs. Mott’s car smelled like her and was the cleanest, neatest car I’ve ever seen. Our green Subaru used to have all sorts of things strewn around in it—water bottles and towels and maps and baseball hats and empty packages of cookies and a flashlight and a plastic shovel in case we ever got stuck in a snowbank, which seemed unlikely.

  In Mrs. Mott’s car were just the seats. I wanted to know if she kept gum in the glove compartment, but Dad wouldn’t let Lexie open it.

  I sighed. From my spot in the back, where I sat stiffly, trying not to do anything that would get Mrs. Mott’s car dirty, I peered at Dad. He had seemed very happy when he’d surprised us at camp, but now I thought he looked tired, and a little sad.

  “Dad?” I said.

  He glanced at me in the rearview mirror and put a smile on his face. “Yes?”

  I hesitated. “Nothing.”

  9

  III. My self-portrait (Pearl Littlefield at Ten) was in an art exhibit.

  Going on bug hunts and making sock animals and scaring Jill might not have been as much fun as riding the range or sleeping under the stars or eating baked beans around a campfire in the desert (which, I only like the idea of baked beans), but it was better than nothing. And when I looked back through my scrapbook I saw that so far my summer hadn’t been bad, considering I was the daughter of a fired person.

  I had devoted two entire pages to the day Jill lost her bathing-suit top in the lake, and there was another page about the water snake, and one about the counselors who kissed, and another about the talent show. On the talent-show page I even put in the part about Dad showing up and driving us home in Mrs. Mott’s clean car.

  Also, Mom and Dad had started talking about taking a staycation in August. In case you’re wondering what a staycation is, it’s something parents tell their kids they’ll be going on when they can’t fly them out to the Wild West after all.

  “I’m going to take a whole week off from writing,” said Mom at dinner one night as I sat hunched over my plate on the floor of the family room. I had started out eating at Dad’s desk and had immediately dripped tomato sauce down the paper feed of the fax machine, so had been banished to the floor with a stack of dish towels.

  “We’ll stay in New York and do all sorts of fun things,” said Dad as he swiped at the paper feed with his napkin. “We’ll go to the Statue of Liberty.”

  “And walk across the Brooklyn Bridge,” added my mother.

  “Oh!” said Dad. “And—”

  But luckily he was interrupted by the telephone, which Lexie jumped up to answer, even though she has her own phone, but I guess when you’re her age you like to answer all the phones.

  She listened for a couple of moments and then she said, “Okay, sure,” and handed the phone to me.

  It was Daddy Bo calling, and guess what, it turned out that there was something special coming up at The Towers—Grandparents’ Day. All the old people who lived at The Towers could invite a grandkid (or some other relative or a friend) for an afternoon of fun. And if you were older than twelve you weren’t invited, so for once there was an advantage to being younger than Lexie.

  “We’ll have lunch and play games and go out for ice cream and,” Daddy Bo went on, “this is the part that I thought you’d be most interested in, Pearl—there’s going to be an art exhibit for the kids. If you submit a piece of work, it’ll be framed and displayed in the gallery at The Towers. And there’ll be an opening reception in the gallery at the end of Grandparents’ Day.”

  An art show! My first real art show, with an exhibit and an opening. I imagined the blue first-prize ribbon that was certain to be awarded to my painting. I would be very modest when I saw it, just all like, “Oh, this is for me? Why, thank you. What a surprise. I never expected it.” And then I would look at the painting hanging next to mine and say, “There are so many worthwhile pieces of art here. They all deserve awards.” But I probably wouldn’t mean it. After that I would go home and pin the ribbon to my lampshade and leave it there until my mother decided it was a fire hazard, and then I would move it to my bulletin board.

  I thanked Daddy Bo and told him I would love to go to Grandparents’ Day and he told me how to submit my art and then he talked to Mom and Dad and Lexie for a while and I tried to figure out whether Lexie was disappointed that she was too old for lunch and games at the old people’s home.

  After dinner I got right to work on the painting for the contest. Before I had even gotten my art supplies out I knew what I was going to paint: me. I mean, a portrait of me. It would be titled Pearl Littlefield at Ten, and I would paint it in black and white and gray, like a photograph.

  I worked on the picture all evening until Lexie stuck her head in my room and said, “Mom wants you to go to bed.” Her eyes traveled to the painting. “Hey, that’s really good, Pearl.”

  “Thanks,” I replied, and luckily stopped talking before I added, “I’ve never won a blue ribbon before.”

  * * *

  I decided that I should look nice for Grandparents’ Day. If I was going to win first prize in the art contest and have my picture in the paper, I didn’t want to be photographed wearing my jeans and my I’M THE LITTLE SISTER T-shirt, even if Daddy Bo had given it to me. I knew better than to wear the Christmas dress again, though, and after pawing through all my drawers I finally chose a pink flowered shirt that I absolutely hate but that has no holes in it and a short pink skirt that used to belong to Lexie and would be fine as long as I remembered to tug it around my knees when I sat down.

  At eleven o’clock on the morning of Grandparents’ Day, Dad and I walked to 14th Street and caught the subway uptown. It was enormously hot again, and sorry about this, but our subway car was not only un–air conditioned but smelled like an old egg-salad sandwich stirred up with sweat. I sat next to my father and held my nose until he turned and gave me a look that plainly said, “Please stop doing that. You’re embarrassing me.”

  I didn’t want him to feel bad about not having our green Subaru anymore, so I stopped holding my nose and just breathed through my mouth for the next fifty blocks instead.

  We got out at 79th Street and walked to The Towers, which even though it’s a retirement community, I sort of wish I could live there. Inside the building, besides all the apartments, are a gift shop, a beauty parlor, a barbershop, a library, a gym, a crafts room, and a coffee shop plus a dining room. You can sign up to go on field trips, too, so it’s sort of like day camp for old people.

  Daddy Bo was waiting for us in the lobby and he said, “Pearl, my gem of a granddaughter!” when he saw me. “You’re looking very fetching.”

  My father left then, although I think he might have wanted to stay, but since he’s over twelve he wasn’t allowed.

  Daddy Bo took my hand. “This way to the dining room,” he said.

  We joined a long line of grandparents and kids. Some of the older kids were pushing their grandparents in wheelchairs, and some of the grandparents were pushing little kids in strollers. Everyone was talking and laughing, and Daddy Bo looked very happy and I began to feel excited.

  The dining room was decorated with a big sign that s
aid WELCOME TO GRANDPARENTS’ DAY, and there were bunches of balloons floating around the ceiling and crayons at the tables so you could color on the paper mats.

  “Look at all the food,” I said.

  “It’s buffet style,” said Daddy Bo. “Grab a plate and take whatever you want.”

  “Really?” This was better than leftovers night, except that there wasn’t any Count Chocula.

  Daddy Bo and I walked up and down a long table, and I took a little helping from almost every dish there, even though I wound up with some things I didn’t recognize. Then we sat at a table with three of Daddy Bo’s friends and their grandchildren.

  “What an adventurous eater you are,” this one old lady said to me.

  And at that exact moment I opened my mouth and put something shiny into it, and the shiny thing turned out to be not only very salty but also very slimy.

  Daddy Bo turned to me. “I didn’t know you liked oysters, Pearl.”

  I choked on the oyster, which was so slippery that when I accidentally swallowed, it went all the way down in about one half of a second. I gagged and drank a lot of water, but I don’t think anybody noticed because the old lady said to Daddy Bo, “Her name is Pearl and she likes oysters?” and everyone laughed, including me, even though my eyes were watering.

  After that, I paid more attention to what was on my plate and stuck to things like banana slices and peanut butter and hot dogs.

  When lunch was over everyone went into another room for games. We played games that weren’t too hard on the old people—things like Pictionary and charades—and there weren’t any prizes involved, but it was still fun.

  After charades, Mrs. Means, who was the activities director at The Towers and not mean at all, said, “We have about fifteen minutes before we’ll leave for the ice-cream shop. Can anyone think of another game to play?”

  I raised my hand. “I could teach everyone a chant,” I said, and before I knew it, Daddy Bo and Mrs. Means and Daddy Bo’s friends and all the kids were shouting, “Cumila, cumila, cumila vista.”