THE NEXT DAY I came out of school and saw Theodore waiting, as usual, to walk home with me. His feet shuffled in my outgrown galoshes and his nose was running. My heart swelled with love for him, and I squeezed his mittened hand when we crossed the street until he shrieked with pain.
Poor Theodore, he had so many problems. Right from the beginning, people said terrible things about him. “I never saw such a sour baby,” Aunt Lena said. “His face could stop an eight-day clock,” the rich great-uncle added, rattling the change in his pockets.
It was true that Theodore was different from other kids. Everything he did seemed to be a little harder for him than for anyone else. When he cut his first tooth, he screamed all night. When he had the chicken pox, he was sicker than any other kid in the neighborhood. When he first learned to walk, his feet turned in and he fell all the time. Once he fell against a glass-topped coffee table and he had to have stitches in three different places. I remember best the sound of his crying, a sort of whoop, whoop, whoop, like the noise of the air-raid siren.
When Theodore began to speak, he stuttered, and when he was six years old he broke his first permanent tooth by falling off his chair during supper. Poor Theodore. He seemed to be visited by the meanest fairy in the kingdom, just like Sleeping Beauty. I decided to be Theodore’s good witch. Somehow I would help him to change. I would help him with his schoolwork and he would become a real scholar. His name would be on the Honor Roll and he would be the teacher’s pet. I made a secret vow that he would live at least until his Bar Mitzvah, and since he had already suffered two concussions and a case of double pneumonia, his chances didn’t look that good. To protect him, I had to be his close companion. Being close, I fell in love with him.
I didn’t even waste the time we spent walking home from school. Instead, I drilled him in spelling and arithmetic. “Two and two?” I asked. “How much is two and two?”
His fingers moved inside the mitten. “F-four?” he answered, and I kissed the sleeve of his plaid jacket.
“Four and four?”
Just then two nuns turned the corner and came toward us. The wind came gustily at the same moment and I think to Theodore they were the wind, or some terrible swooping black birds, their robes whipping out like wings.
Theodore pinched my finger. “D-do they like people?” he whispered.
“Of course,” I told him. “Of course. Can’t you see? They’re people themselves!”
But when they passed us he shuddered, and when they reached the corner behind us he turned, dragging his feet to watch until they were out of sight. “D-do they l-like boys?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes!” I cried. “Don’t tell me you’re going to be a little sissy!” As soon as I said it, I was sorry. Without thinking, I had joined the enemy. It was true that Theodore was scared of just about everything. But if I didn’t pretend he was a strong brave boy, nobody else ever would. I was his last chance.
When we got home—after running past the basement entrance, of course—I tried to make it up to him. I unbuttoned his jacket and pulled off his mittens although he was certainly old enough to do all that himself. I rolled my eyes and sang crazy instant songs for him in a very high-pitched voice. “Oh Theodore, leave your galoshes on the floor, you are the one that I adore, forever mo-ore!” I tap-danced wildly on the little space of wooden floor at the edge of the living-room rug.
Velma kept turning around at the desk where she was doing her homework. She shook her head and gave us dirty looks, but I didn’t pay any attention to her.
During supper I tickled his leg under the table and he choked on his mashed potatoes. Mother had to pound him on the back. “Enough!” she said. “Stop it right now!” as if he was choking on purpose.
“Infants,” Velma said, sniffing. She’s three years older than me and she was going to the big high school. It seemed that Velma and I hardly talked to one another except to say “Don’t touch my things” or “Lower that radio,” or something else that would start an argument.
Daddy just smiled at us, his eyeglasses all steamed up from the hot food. It was hard to make him angry, unless you did something to harm the war effort. He always tried to help Theodore too, by being very patient with him and by calling him Ted and Sport and other manly names. He called me Shirley-girl.
After dinner Velma and my mother washed the dishes and my father went inside to lie down on the sofa and read the evening paper. We could hear him clucking his tongue and sighing over the war news. Then he fell asleep and I took the opened newspaper right out of his hands without waking him up. My father worked in a factory where ladies’ dresses were made. He was a cutter, which meant that he had to cut pieces of fabric with a very sharp-bladed machine, in exact sizes and shapes, following a paper pattern. Later, sewing-machine operators put the pieces together and they became dresses that were sold in big department stores. My father’s trousers always had a rainbow of colored threads all over them. That night, while he slept on the sofa, Theodore and I pulled the threads off, very carefully one at a time, and rolled them into a beautiful thread ball. At eight o’clock Mother called, “Theodore! Bedtime!” and he followed me into the room the two of us shared. Velma had the other, very tiny bedroom all to herself, and our parents slept on a high-riser bed in the living room. Every night it had to be opened before they went to sleep, and every morning my father closed it again before he went to work. My mother said that someday Theodore would have the little bedroom and Velma and I would share the bigger one. As soon as Theodore was a little older. As soon as he was a little less afraid of everything.
Now he took his pajamas from the bureau drawer and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, while I got the room ready for him. I plumped his pillow and turned down the covers. Then I took the rubber plant off the top of the bureau because at night its shadow looked exactly like an octopus. Of course I couldn’t take away his memory of the octopus. He shivered under the quilt. I looked under his bed and in the closet. “Nobody here and nobody here,” I said. “All clear. Safe and sound. Good night. Sweet dreams.” I patted the nervous lump that was Theodore and tiptoed out of the room.