Chapter 8

It was another bad night. I woke up at the inky hour of 2:24 to the sounds of Gerri's head blamming against my wall. Going back to sleep was out, so I lay awake counting blams, hoping they'd stop of their own accord, and trying to work out ways we could keep a pillow tied around Gerri's head so we could all get a good night's sleep.

Pretty soon I heard my mother's bed creak and then her footstep heading for Gerri's room.

Then I heard the telephone.

It rang and rang, and finally I heard my father pick up the receiver. I couldn't hear everything he said, but I did hear a lot of "sorrys" and "We're doing our bests."

I heard him tell my mother that it was Mr. Rasmussen from downstairs and that he'd said he'd lived in this building for twenty-two years and in all that time he'd never heard this kind of commotion and if we were going to practice for the Olympics up there, would we do it while he was at work?

Finally I heard my mother rocking Gerri and humming, and pretty soon the place quieted down and I went to sleep thinking how funny it would be if we had to tie a pillow around Mr. Rasmussen's head too.

***

Being up half the night meant I had to make up for lost sleep sometime; unfortunately, I fell asleep during Miss Lynch's third-period history and was late for old lady Bowring's class, which meant my seat next to Joe/Jason was taken up by Beef Adams, who is called Beef because his arms look like something you'd see hanging in the window of a butcher's shop and he has the brains of a hamburger. I sure was not going to displace Beef, so I had to move into the last available seat, so close to old lady Bowring's desk I could be asphyxiated by her perfume, which smells like an explosion at the florist's.

"Neil, in last night's reading, you learned that the hero of the story 'October Saturday' by Lionel Wycks made a very important catch. Can you tell the class what that catch was?"

Old lady Bowring was probably zeroing in on me because she hadn't seen my face up this close since the beginning of the year. I though fast, remembering the spear-fishing in Canada assignment I hadn't read, and I crossed my fingers. "Blue mackerel?" I said. I did not say it loud because I wasn't sure it was right, but I said it loud enough for her to hear.

She screwed up her mouth and opened her eyes wide like I'd told her I'd just tied the principal to the flagpole. "Neil Oxley, did you say 'blue mackerel'?" she said in a voice that sounded like it was coming out over the public address system. "Blue mackerel?"

The class went wild. It turned out that "October Saturday" was not a story about Canadian spear-fishing, it was a football story and the catch in question was a forward pass, not a fish. Everybody laughed for about ten minutes while I felt the blood rushing up to my head and turning me the color of October leaves, and finally old lady Bowring held up her hand to shut everybody up and ordered me to do not one but two reports, one on last week's spear-fishing story and one on this week's football story and to have them in by tomorrow, or else.

As if that wasn't enough, as soon as English period was over, every kid in the class went out of his way to call me blue mackerel at least twice and to stop me in the hall later to ask me what kind of bait to use for a touchdown and did I keep worms in my helmet. Even Joe/Jason, supposed to be my friend, came over to ask me to tell him "about the quarterback that got away."

"Not funny," I said. I was really down now, because it might take me all afternoon and half the night to do those reports, which would hardly leave me time for sleeping, let alone practicing the Franklin Pierce Follies music. I had looked the music over, and what Joe/Jason had called Plink Plink Plink was six pieces, long enough to give even Beethoven piano-player's cramp.

Now Joe/Jason broke another piece of bad news. Wendy Wellington had decided to try out for the piano solos too. Wendy Wellington is no older than I am and she hasn't been playing any longer either, but when Wendy Wellington sits down at the piano it sounds like she has twenty-five fingers and an extra ten keys.

"Oh, no!" I groaned, when Joe/Jason broke his news.

"Tough break," Joe/Jason said.

It was a bad day for the blue mackerel.

***

The moment I walked through the door at home, Gerri came from out of nowhere and threw her arms around me and gave me one of her specialty hugs. I took a minute to show her how to shake hands instead of hug and she said, "Blixen blix." It was anybody's guess if she understood what I was trying to tell her.

I didn't stop for a snack or anything, just said hello to my mother and went straight to my bedroom. I had to get going on my reports if I didn't want to be up all night, but right away Gerri was in the doorway, wanting to keep me company and talk reindeer talk to me. "Buzz off," I said. "I'm busy. Go. Can't you see I'm doing something?"

"I have to go out for a short while to get some groceries, Neil," my mother called from the kitchen. "Will you keep an eye on Gerri for a half-hour or so?"

What could I say? Mom can't take Gerri to the market without climbing up and down six flights of stairs, and there's no telling what kind of commotion Gerri would cause hugging the fruit-and-vegetable man, the checkout ladies, and who knows how many customers, so I pulled up a chair and gave Gerri some of my photo albums to look at while I read. She sat in the chair and turned the pages and was very careful not to rip the pictures like I told her, but she kept making sounds and talking–"Dasha, dansa" and so on–making it very hard for me to concentrate on anything, let alone striped bass and halibut, which are not exactly the world's most interesting subjects anyway.

I don't think I'd read more than three pages when my father came home. He was early, and before he'd even taken off his jacket, he was in the doorway of my room asking me why I wasn't practicing for the tryouts. I told him I had this important English assignment to finish first, and he looked just like Gerri has looked when we tried to make her eat spaghetti–like he was being punished. He said he'd come home early to help me work on it since we only had three more days to get it perfect. "Neil, do you think you could work on your English assignment after dinner?" he said.

I couldn't let him down if he'd come home especially to help me. I put aside the reports, and he and I went into the living room and sat down together at the piano and he began to play the first piece through so I'd get an idea of how it should sound. Of course, Gerri came shuffling in right behind us.

My father stopped playing. "Gerri, please go play in your room for a while, honey," he said.

Gerri looked at me; she looked at Dad.

She was working her lips as if she was going to say something, but it was as if her mouth was temporarily out of order; nothing but a squeak came out. I wouldn't have minded her sitting on the floor listening, but I guess Dad was afraid she was going to try to climb the piano again.

"Go on, Geraldine, go to your room," he said.

Geraldine gave me a sort of sad, good-by look and turned and went step/stepping to her room. After being put away so long I guess Gerri now wanted to be in on everything. Dad said, "I think it'll be easier to concentrate now, don't you, Neil?" and he began to go through the first piece again, pointing out the tricky part right near the end where I'd be playing six complicated chords in a row.

Not a minute later, FROOM! A noise that sounded like a mid-air jet collision came from my sister's room and, no kidding. I almost jumped a foot off the piano bench. Dad and I went running, bumping into my mother in the hall. She had just come in and was still holding her bag of groceries and trying to catch her breath.

My sister had done it again–torn down the curtains and curtain rods, like she wanted a better view or–and I couldn't help thinking this–more attention.

Now my father looked really annoyed and he turned to my mother and said, "I think she needs a bit of discipline, don't you?" and my mother nodded her head yes, but didn't answer.

"If we don't get firm, it's going to get out of hand, Margery," my father said.

Gerri was sitting on the edge of her bed with Woodie in her lap. Her mouth was open and the corners were wet. Her eyes looked watery too. With Gerri it was always hard to tell what she was thinking, but I was beginning to be able to tell by the way she held her head and the way her eyebrows moved over her eyes how she was feeling. Now I thought she was feeling scared.

My mother sat down the groceries and went over and sat next to her and put her arm around Geraldine's shoulders. "Gerri, please don't do it again," she said, very quietly. Gerri's head turned very slowly on her neck, like there was a battery in it and it was wearing down. She just looked right straight at my mother and her tongue moved in her mouth like she was trying hard to same something but it wouldn't come out.

Then my father made a sound that was half cough and half snort and he said, "Margery, do you call that discipline?" and he turned, put his hand on my shoulder and headed me back in the direction of the piano.

It was really not easy to concentrate. Although I kept my eye on the music, I kept making mistakes, hitting the wrong key or hitting two keys with one finger, and I had to start the same piece about four times before I could get three bars played without a mistake.

"Ted! Is she in here with you? Where is Gerri? I can't find her!" My mother came running into the living room. She had a wild look in her eyes. "I just went into the bathroom for two minutes and when I came out, she'd disappeared."

"She must be in the apartment," my father said, jumping up from the piano bench. My father had put special locks on the windows so we knew she could never get out that way. Still, my parents looked worried, so I checked out all the closets and looked under the beds. There was no sign of Gerri anywhere in the apartment.

Dad found her out in the hall a few minutes later. It was funny, but not really funny.

She'd gone to empty the "bobbidge" all by herself, just the way I'd shown her. Only instead of the trash, she'd thrown my mother's unpacked bag of groceries down the chute.

How would I explain to old lady Bowring tomorrow that now I had to run down to the supermarket to buy the stuff that Gerri had thrown away while my mother started dinner and my father worked on trying to put back the rods in Gerri's room? How would I tell her that after dinner I'd have to help my mother clean up the mess Gerri would make with the pot roast and mashed potatoes and that I'd then fall asleep right in the middle of "October Saturday" before I'd written one word of the report? How would I explain that although I'd set my alarm to wake me an hour early in the morning, the midnight head-blamming kept me up for so long that I not only slept through the alarm but almost missed the school bus?

I couldn't tell her. Which is why fourth-period Wednesday turned into Black Sunday, and sent me to the principal's office for the first time in my life.