CELIA DIDN’T CATCH MY cold, but Grace did. On Monday, the first day of our spring break, she stayed in bed, propped against two pillows, drawing.
Ma had taken the day off so she could shop and cook for our Passover seder that night. Celia was at Gary’s house, rehearsing, and I was elected to stay with Grace while Ma went to the market. I looked through the pile of drawings next to her bed. There were still no flowers in any of them, but you could see some changes for the better. There was a little less death and disaster, for one thing, and people were doing more everyday things, like driving buses and wheeling babies in carriages. In one picture, a cow was crossing a city street. In another, the sun was a yellow smudge at the corner of the page.
“How do you feel?” I asked Grace. She smelled from the Vicks Ma had rubbed on her chest, and from the cherry lollipop she’d started and then stuck to a Kleenex on her night table.
“I hab a code, Berdie,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “You poor little punk. But you’ll feel better soon. Look at me.” I sat down at the end of her bed, after moving a few crayons aside. “Can I get you something?” I asked. “Water, tea, applesauce, Jell-O?”
Grace shook her head. I asked her if she wanted me to read to her from Charlotte’s Web, but she said that Nat was going to do that, after the seder. She was pretty limp and bleary-eyed, and I couldn’t get her interested in anything. I wondered if it was the best moment to spring my latest plan. I decided to go for it, that this might be one of the last times we’d be alone together in the house. “Grace?” I said. “Do you want to look at my treasure box?” I held my breath, waiting for a spark of life, and it came. Her eyes lit up, and she nodded.
“Good!” I said. “You stay right here, all snuggy and warm, and I’ll bring it in to you.”
It was torture, watching her take all the things out, one by one, and examine them as if she’d never seen them before. The few times that I still looked at my collection, I just dumped it all out on my bed and pawed through it. I tried to amuse myself now while she handled each stone and shell, pinned the buttons to her pajamas, and sniffed at the baseball cards. How could she smell anything with that stuffed nose? I whistled and hummed, looked at the pictures in Charlotte’s Web, and moved a Tonka truck across the mountains and valleys of Grace’s quilt. Where did a kid her age get so much patience?
If she didn’t hurry up, someone was liable to come home before she was done.
If I was Grace and loved that World’s Fair ring so much, it would be the first thing I’d take out. I thought of how she saved the best food on her plate for last, too—the french fries, or spaghetti, or corn on the cob—and how I’d devour my favorites and just push the rest of it around, hoping it would disappear. At Grace’s age, Celia used to eat the inside of her baked potato, stuff the skin with the food she didn’t want, and neatly close it. I bet you could figure out a lot about people from the way they ate. And from the way they took things out of a treasure box.
Grace was surrounded by tidy little batches of junk now. The ring was the only thing left, shiny and lonesome at the bottom of the box. Before she reached in for it, she blew her nose a few times, fogging up her glasses, and drank some of the pineapple juice Ma had left for her on the night table.
Come on, come on, I thought, and at last Grace put her hand into the box again. She was breathing hard through her mouth. When she picked up the ring, she gave this hoarse little honk, and I knew I had it made.
Still, I couldn’t help pitching some sales talk. “Sterling silver,” I said. “See? It says so inside. And it’s from 1939, so it’s practically an antique. Grandpa said it was the best World’s Fair ever. Heinz gave out these little pickle pins to everybody, free, but he lost his. Of course, he had to buy the ring. That was an expensive souvenir.”
Grace didn’t say anything. She just breathed loudly and moved the ring from finger to finger.
“General Motors had a ride called Futurama you could go on, and there was a terrific swimming show called the Aquacade, like a ballet in water.”
Grace said, “Berdie?”
Here it comes, I told myself. “What?”
“Cad I borrow it? Please?”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “It’s too valuable. It’s liable to get lost.”
“I wode lose it, Berdie. I probise.”
“Sorry, kiddo, no can do,” I said, feeling pretty cruel. I remembered when my missing mother—in the hospital for three days—came home carrying a blanket-wrapped baby. I was a big boy already, almost six, and for months I’d been told no, Ma wasn’t getting fat because she’d eaten too much, but that my new sister or brother was inside her belly, waiting to be born. Ma even put my hand against it, and I could feel something moving around in there.
I loved and hated Gracie on sight. She’d turned me into a middle child and an older brother with hardly any warning. And what a big fuss everybody made over somebody that small. She’d squawk and Ma would open her blouse to feed her. There were spit-up bibs and stinky diapers, and all that equipment! I heard Grandpa say how happy he was that his Grace’s name was being carried on. I knew he was talking about my other grandmother, the one who died when I was a baby. Our Grace was named for her. Jewish people did that, Daddy said, so the dead person wouldn’t be forgotten. I was named for Daddy’s grandfather, Celia for Ma’s aunt.
Little by little, my hatred and jealousy of the baby disappeared, and the love stayed. I loved her now, but that didn’t keep me from my mission. “It’s getting close to lunchtime,” I said. “We ought to start putting the treasures away.”
Sighing, still wearing the ring, Grace unpinned the buttons and dropped them one at a time into the box. She arranged the stones and shells next to them, the marbles next to the stones and shells. I waited until the last moment, when everything but the ring was put back, and then I said, “I can’t lend it, Gracie, but I’m thinking of selling it.”
“Dode!” she cried.
“Well, the thing is, I need some dough. I don’t want to sell the ring. It’s kind of like a family heirloom. But what can I do?”
Grace looked ready to cry. Her face scrunched up the way it used to when she was a baby, and I felt worse than cruel—I felt like a cold-blooded rat fink. I had to go through with it, though. “It would be better if I could keep it in the family,” I said. “If someone in our family was willing to buy it.”
“Mobby?” Grace asked.
“No,” I said. “Mommy has a ring—you know, the sapphire Nat gave her. And Celia doesn’t even like this one. But she has rotten taste, and she has that World’s Fair banner from Grandpa, anyway.”
Grace is a very smart kid, and she must have figured things out by then, but stinginess isn’t something you get over fast, like a cold. She closed her eyes, and I could almost see through her forehead, see the battle going on in there between Grace who wanted the World’s Fair ring more than anything and Grace who wanted to keep her money forever.
“A dibe?” she croaked, without much hope.
“Gracie, you’re just being silly,” I said. “I have to have ten dollars.”
She moaned and slid under the covers, so that only the top of her head showed.
I had to force myself to be tough. Look at all I’d gone through already—sitting for the Wolfe boys, giving up candy (most of the time), helping Celia, and Nat...And that night at the seder, Grace would find the afikomen, the special matzoh Pop would hide, and he’d buy it back from her. In our family, the youngest child is always allowed to find it and collect the reward. Last year she got five bucks.
Grace came out from under the covers, an inch at a time. “Okay,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
She was already out of bed, reaching for the Tinker Bell bank. She opened the latch behind the chipped wing. Poor Tinker Bell. Poor Grace. There was a ten-dollar bill in there, but she left it and counted out the whole thing in small change.
When I put the money in my jeans pocket, I felt as if I’d gained about ten pounds. “Listen,” I said. “I’ll fix the ring up for you, Gracie, so you can’t lose it. I’ll wrap adhesive tape around the back. And I’ll shine it up like new with Ma’s silver polish.”
She put the bank back on the shelf, and admired the ring on her thumb.
“One other thing,” I said. “This has to be a secret between us, that I sold it to you. You have to swear, Gracie, or the deal’s off.”
She put one pinky to her lips and then raised it, our sign for swearing something.
“You have to make believe I’m letting you borrow it for a while. And someday when I’m rich I’ll buy it back from you, if you don’t want it anymore. I swear.” And I touched my own pinky to my lips before raising it to heaven.