A few days later, we were in my kitchen slapping together some potato-chip sandwiches: take two pieces of Wonder Bread, slather them with Miracle Whip, place a fistful of Wise potato chips on one slice, put the other on top, and mash down firmly. Estelle frowned upon this, so we sneaked them up to my room. After dispatching the sandwiches, we were lying on my twin bed in front of the fan, depressed because we still hadn’t found a poisonous spider. We had a crablike spiny orb weaver, and Max had thought he’d seen a scorpion, but it had skittered away under his porch. We knew Wiesie was too smart to mess with it.
“And we haven’t done anything about the Beaver Plan yet,” Ivan said.
“You mean the plan to get invited to the De Haans’ swimming pool,” Max said sarcastically. My bedroom window was open, and we were tortured by the sounds of the Dutch boys enjoying a refreshing swim.
“Anybody got an idea?” Ivan said.
“Nope,” Max said. “The only idea in my head is to pee in that pool if I ever get in.”
“What about presents for everybody to make them like us?” I asked. “Like maybe mounted butterflies?” I’d mounted a handsome zebra swallowtail and sent it to my mother. “We’re through with them, right?”
“No! I don’t want to give any of mine away!” Max complained.
“Plants?” I said. “We can pick Brickie’s peace roses and put them in Dixie cups? Peace, get it?”
Ivan said to Max, “Or maybe your dad will give us some of his watermatoes to give out?”
“He’s not going to do that,” Max said. “Plus, there wouldn’t be enough to go around.”
“What if we did drawings for everybody?” Ivan offered. “Like maybe”—he paused—“what if we drew maps of our street? With everybody’s houses looking nice?” This excited him—he was good at drawing.
“Nah,” said Max. “John and I are bad drawers and nobody will want ours.”
I said, “Is Elena home yet, Ivan?” She’d been visiting “friends” in Miami for one of her projects; I wondered if they were unsavory refugees.
“She just got home this morning, but she might be asleep. She was tired.”
We spilled out of my house, but not before stealing some Twinkies from the kitchen, which we stopped to eat, hiding in the porte cochere behind Dimma’s Cadillac. Crossing the street, we were delighted to see that Elena had taken up her usual spot on the long swing on Ivan’s front porch.
Elena spied us and lifted a long arm to wave. “Come see me!” she called. We ran up the lichen-covered concrete steps to where Elena reclined on her side, so exotically regal—an earthy Madame Récamier. Her shiny hair was tied back with a blue scarf, a long cascade falling down the back of the silky flowered kimono she wore all day because she didn’t have to go anywhere. “My job is going to parties!” she’d say—and that’s what she did many nights. Her brilliant red toes and fingernails—Sports Car, she said the color was called—always gave me a thrill, a new color every few days. I felt a kind of wiggliness about Elena, too, and was confused about it.
Ivan leaned over, kissed his aunt, and asked, “Is he back yet?”
“His flight doesn’t get in until tonight,” she said. She was somehow able to hold her usual rum and Coke, a cigarette, and Carteles, an arty magazine, in one hand and rub Ivan’s back with the other.
“Cuba libre, darlings? It’s sooo hot today!” She offered her glass. We always took a swig to refresh ourselves. She handed over her cigarette, a glamorous Vogue, rose with a gilt filter, and we each had a puff. We were, of course, sworn to secrecy. We kept Elena’s secrets and she kept ours.
We collapsed worshipfully on the floor in front of her swing. “Elena, we hunted spiders all morning, and we got eaten alive by bugs, and it’s about a million degrees!” I whined, thinking about kissing those feet.
“Can we go to the Hiser for a movie?” Max asked. “We’re about to have heatstroke!”
Movie theaters were some of the only air-conditioned places in town then, and luckily for us, Elena was crazy about movies. We had seen Rodan and Go, Johnny, Go!, but Max complained about some of her choices, like Auntie Mame, which she, Ivan, and I had loved. My grandmother also complained about Mame because it was “too sophisticated” for us, and was full of “sexual innuendo,” but all that went right by me. All I knew was that this handsome orphan, Patrick, lived with his gorgeous, party-girl aunt, who spoiled the hell out of him. Since my own parents were gone, I liked to imagine myself as Patrick and Elena as Mame, living the charmed life in a swanky New York apartment. I suppose both Ivan and I thought of her as a surrogate mother, only more fabulous than any mother we knew of.
“No, Max!” corrected Ivan. “Elena, we need you to help us with our Beaver Plan to make the neighbors nicer!”
She laughed. “Beaver Plan? How’d you come up with that?”
“You know, a friendly neighborhood like in Leave It to Beaver. Like the Marshall Plan helps countries in Europe be nice to each other,” I explained.
“Hmm…I see. But you know that some people think that the Marshall Plan is actually more about the United States getting what it wants,” Elena said. “Could your Beaver Plan really be about wanting to get in the De Haans’ swimming pool again?”
“No, we didn’t think about that,” I said innocently.
Elena hid the slightest smirk behind her drink, sipping it. “Well, do you have any ideas?”
Max said, “We thought of some dumb stuff, like giving people flowers or drawings, but nothing good.”
“What about baking some cookies?”
Ivan said sadly, “We don’t know how to cook.”
Elena thought for a second, and then said, “How about throwing a neighborhood party? A potluck party, so everybody brings something?”
We looked at one another in amazement. “Yeah! A party!” I shouted. It immediately came to me that maybe my mother, even my dad, might come.
“That’s a great idea!” Ivan said. “Like with music and dancing?”
“Sure,” said Elena. “Why not? Everybody likes parties, right?”
Max turned serious for a second. “And with good snacks? Like, no vegetables? And we don’t have to dance, do we?”
“Well, you have to dance with me,” Elena said, red lips spreading with her easy laugh.
“Okay!” I loved the dreamy prospect of dancing with her. “Let’s do it!”
Ivan asked, “What should we do? Make invitations? I wish Beatriz was here.” Beatriz was very creative.
“Well, you have to let everybody know about it. Maybe it would be easier if you just made a few posters and put them up around the neighborhood? But first you have to decide what day and time the party will be, and where. And you might have a name for the party.”
I said, “But like what?”
“What about ‘Great Big Cool Party’?” Max suggested.
Ivan said, “I think we should have ‘Festival’ or ‘Fiesta’ in the name because that sounds more fancy and, umm…international.”
“What about ‘Big Fun Fiesta’?” I said.
“It needs more…oomph,” Elena said. “And maybe something about families, so people won’t think it’s just for kids.” She pulled out a green pill bottle and her smokes from her kimono sleeve, where she carried important things, popped a Miltown, and lit another Vogue, a lovely turquoise.
“How about ‘Fabulous Family Fiesta’?” Ivan looked up hopefully at Elena, who said, “Mmmh!” and enthusiastically blew a plume of smoke into Ivan’s upturned face. “That’s perfect! I’m sorry, darling—I didn’t mean to blow on you.” She fanned the smoke away with her hand. Ivan beamed.
I was ready to make the posters right then, but Elena said she had too much to do, and she’d be out the rest of the afternoon and into the evening.
“Rats,” said Max. “You go out too much.”
“Who are you going out with this time?” Ivan asked, not bothering to hide his disappointment.
We knew it could be any number of men. Cars pulled up to the Goncharoffs’ at all hours and whisked Elena away to parties at the Fairfax hotel or the Rive Gauche, ritzy spots in town, or a palatial town house in Kalorama or an embassy on Mass. Ave. She often told us about them later—the food, the dancing, the political celebrities, the money they raised for Latin American or European refugees. My grandfather said, “There’s nothing more boring than Washington parties,” but I don’t think he went to the parties Elena went to. When we slept over at each other’s houses and sneaked out to ride bikes in the middle of the night, we’d sometimes see Elena return with a gentleman friend. They’d stagger up to the porch and smoke. Sometimes she didn’t come home until daylight, riding in a Diamond Cab, and then there would be a loud argument in Russian with Josef. Air-conditioning and privacy were luxuries few people had in those days, so windows and doors were open, and conversations, especially those that involved shouting, flew around the neighborhood like flies. Unlike flies, you couldn’t swat secrets—they buzzed around forever on Connors Lane. From the Andersens we’d heard, “Oh, why don’t you go back to Provincetown with your precious little boyfriend,” and, “You are the most vile harridan I’ve ever known!” Which sent me straight to my grandmother’s crossword puzzle dictionary. Or it might be the Shreves, laying into Beau and D.L. on a regular basis, and Dawn Allgood was known for screaming at her boyfriend. And, of course, before their divorce, there had been my parents.
“It’s not really a date,” Elena said. “It’s more of a meeting.” She stubbed out her Vogue in the heavy brass ashtray by her swing, looking with distaste at all of Josef’s smelly cigar butts. Josef supposedly had his bad heart and Elena had her asthma, but they both smoked incessantly. “I’m talking to some important people about some Hungarian families who are having trouble staying in the country,” she continued. “Your schoolmate Gellert’s family is one. So please be glad I’m doing something useful.”
We weren’t. We liked Gellert okay, a strange kid who was a head taller than Max but was in the same grade at Rosemary as Ivan and I were. He’d come to Washington recently and couldn’t speak English and did odd things, like sniff our heads to show appreciation. But he was a lot of fun on the playground at recess, and we always wanted him on our kickball team—he was fast and clobbered the ball, although occasionally he would neglect to round all the bases and would just run way off into the outfield, chasing the ball and laughing. Which didn’t matter because he always kicked homers. Even so, I wasn’t pleased that he was garnering more of Elena’s attention than we were.
“They won’t send him back,” I said. “This is America.”
Elena smiled sadly and said, “Things are not always what they seem, even in America. And sometimes life is terribly unfair.”
Just then Linda and Rudo, the Goncharoffs’ big poodles, and the naked twins, Katya and Alexander, tumbled out the door. All four of them were covered in spiderwebs and happy about it. Clumsy Rudo, looking like a brown bear, jumped up on the big chair we called The Throne, and Elena scolded him, “Rudo! Get off that chair! You know better!” Apricot-colored Linda, who did know better, flopped on the floor with the twins, looking alarmed. The Throne was Josef’s special seat—a handsome rattan thing with huge, poofy cushions covered in a verdant tropical print. Josef had decreed that nobody but he himself was allowed to sit on it. He wanted no dog hair, Popsicle drippings, cigarette holes, and certainly spiderwebs on his cushions when he came out in his robe to smoke his nightly cigar. But I’d seen Elena occasionally sitting on The Throne when a gentleman friend was sprawled on her swing. I wondered if this was ever the cause of their arguments. I wondered, too, if Elena did it just to spite him.
Elena ejected Rudo from The Throne and onto Linda and the twins. She fanned the overheated pile of curly fur and cherubic flesh with her magazine. “Why are you two not taking your nap?” she said to the toddlers, poking them with the Sports Car toes, and the swing swung, making me long to sit close to her. Calling out musically to Maria, “Ma-dee-a!” Elena gave each child a swig of her Cuba libre. Maria appeared and dragged the twins off into the house.
“Can we have another sip?” I asked as Elena rattled her glass.
“No, it’s just ice and slobber now.” She spilled the ice on the floor for the dogs, who scrambled to lick it up, crunching the melting cubes.
Elena said she had to go upstairs soon to get ready for her appointment. To appease us, she reached into her special sleeve and handed each of us a piece of Bazooka chewing gum, and we shoved the powdery squares into our mouths, chewing out the sugar as fast as we could to then see who could blow the biggest bubbles. Elena flipped through her magazine, then raised her head, listening. “Boys, don’t I hear Tim coming?”
Bells jingled far away. Tim was our Good Humor man. His square white truck appeared every summer afternoon but Sunday to deliver succor in the form of Creamsicles, Fudgsicles, Drumsticks, and Popsicles. Elena pulled a dollar bill from the silky sleeve. “My treat!”
Max took the folded bill from her hand and the three of us jumped off the porch and piled into the huge mildewed hammock close to the street to wait.
It had become really, really hot. Our striped T-shirts were soaked, and we took them off. Being crammed into the rough hammock against each other activated our various itchy spots. I had a patch of ringworm healing on my scalp from my rabbit, Zorro, who my grandmother had supposedly taken to live with “rabbit friends” at the National Zoo; Max had some scabby impetigo on his knee; and Ivan had poison ivy—he had peed in the weeds at Rock Creek and the end of his penis had swelled up like a doughnut. We always had something scrofulous going on. Ivan had his hand in his pocket so no one could see his furious wiener-scratching. In anticipation of ice cream, he and I spat our Bazooka out, but Max swallowed his. We’d all been told never to do that because gum was indigestible and became a big tumor in your gut. Max considered every piece he swallowed an act of defiance and bravery.
Finally, the Good Humor truck, with its sacred cargo, rounded the corner. The three of us and the dogs ran to the street, busting through new webs that had appeared on the iron front gate during the night, and clustered around Tim, who was swatting gnats. “I have the money, and I got here first, punks,” said Max, as he and Linda and Rudo pushed in front of me and Ivan.
“We know you are but what are we,” Ivan and I said in unison. We loved our snappy comebacks.
“Hey, guys, take it easy!” Tim took off his cap and wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve. He was cute in a clean-cut, military way with his Butch-waxed blond crewcut and white uniform. “What does everybody want?” He glanced up at the Goncharoffs’ porch, grinning and waving when he saw Elena. She rose imperially from her swing and was gliding down the walk like she was on wheels.
As Tim gave us our usual Creamsicles and Rainbow Push-Ups, Elena declared that she wanted to try a new feature displayed in a colorful photo on the side of the truck—the Toasted Almond Bar.
“Yours is on me, beautiful,” Tim said, handing it to her. Like the rest of us, Tim was chronically infatuated with Elena, and I’d never seen him let her pay for her ice cream.
“Hey, why aren’t ours ever on you, too?” Max said, handing over Elena’s dollar.
“Because you guys are far from beautiful.” He gave Elena a hopeful look. “It’s thrilling your mouth, right?”
Elena smiled around a bite of the Toasted Almond Bar. “It is delicious!” she purred.
Tim grinned proudly. “I’m glad you like it.” Linda and Rudo danced around expectantly. Tim threw them a damaged lime Popsicle and they devoured it, sticks, wrapper, and all.
Max said coyly, watching Tim, “Elena has a date.”
Tim smiled. “Damn right she does! I wish she’d give me a try. Can’t you put in a good word for me, Ivan?”
“No,” Ivan said flatly. “She mostly likes guys from other countries.”
“And rich guys,” Max added.
“I’m rich!” Tim jangled the silver money-changer on his belt. “And I always have good humor.”
He and Elena chuckled, but Max said, a little sourly, “So funny I forgot to laugh. Maybe you should invent a Cuba libre Popsicle if you want her to love you.”
“Maybe I will!” He tipped his cap to her.
“We’re going to have a neighborhood party,” Ivan announced. “A Fabulous Family Fiesta! Elena’s going to help us plan it!”
“Maybe you can come and bring a bunch of Popsicles?” I said. “It’s for a good cause…It’s for…uh…neighborhood unity!”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m always happy to help a pretty lady, even if she hangs around with shrimpy hoods.” He and Elena smiled at each other. Elena delicately licked the ice cream off her lips.
Refreshed, we threw our sticks in the road rubble next to the Goncharoffs’ rusty front gate.
Elena thanked Tim and said, “We’ll let you know more about the party.” Looking sternly at us, she added, “And you boys have a lot to figure out—whose parents will host the Fiesta, who’ll bring what refreshments, decorations—all that. The party won’t just happen on its own. Ivan’s right—you need Beatriz helping you.” She blew Tim a kiss as she drifted back to the house. Elena didn’t exactly sashay; she je ne sais quoi–ed in a certain way that later in life I’d try to approximate.
Tim watched her go and sighed. “I’ll see you squirts tomorrow. I gotta finish my route and mow some lawns.” Tim had several jobs, trying to save money for a car and junior college. His family lived in the apartments down Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda. “You guys don’t know how lucky you are.” He cruised off down the street, bells ringing in what I thought was a more melancholy way.
“His bells sound sad now,” I said.
“His balls are sad, too, I bet,” crowed Max. Ivan and I laughed, but I knew he and I didn’t really get it, so I quit laughing and said, “Why?”
“Aww, forget it, you dumbheads. Don’t you guys get anything?” Max said.
Often we’d wait for a mob of ants to carry a whole Popsicle stick away while we sang “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” but the dogs had ruined that. Then Max said, “Hey, that reminds me! Look what I got!” Out of Max’s pocket came a Pep Boys matchbook. “Ivan, gimme your knife.” Ivan always carried his little pocketknife. Max quickly poked holes in the matchbook cover and pushed some matches through, making it look like the three Pep Boys had giant dicks sticking out of their pants.
“Oh, man!” I said. We cackled like idiots.
“I learned it from this cool guy Frank at Hebrew school,” Max said proudly. Then he pulled out another matchbook—he always had matches—and lit the dicks on fire. “This part I figured out myself!” We loved anything involving fire, and there was nothing funnier than jokes involving private parts or bodily functions. Max threw the matchbook on the street, and we were happily watching it burn, when a kid on a shiny new bike turned in to the lane, coming our way.
“Oh, crap!” Max moaned. “Slutcheon!”
“Oh, no,” I said. “He better not stop.”
Slutcheon had a real name, but we called him Slutcheon because he had loose, rubbery lips, drooled a little when he spoke, and had curly hair like Sal Mineo, but not cute—more like a mug shot I’d seen of Lucky Luciano in one of Brickie’s books. He was ugly in every sense of the word, and “Slutcheon” just seemed to fit him. It was rumored that Slutcheon had been caught stealing a jar of Peter Pan peanut butter from the DGS, taking it home, pooping in it, and replacing it on the store’s shelves. He was rich. We hated him.
“Let’s get outta here!” Ivan turned to scramble back to his house, but it was too late, and Slutcheon was upon us, yelling, “Hey, dimwits! How’s life on the other side of the tracks?” He zoomed as close as he could, his bike wheels scattering gravel on us. Luckily he kept going, and after he was out of earshot, Max shouted, “Go to hell, you big jerk!”
I said, “Are we on the other side of the tracks? What tracks?”
Ivan said, “He means we’re on the poor side of town.” I thought “poor” referred to colored people downtown, and Chevy Chase seemed the opposite of that.
“Will he come to the Fiesta?” Ivan asked fearfully.
“Hell, no!” Max barked. Then he spat, adding ominously, “A spider is in that guy’s future. If we can just find a good one.”
The next afternoon, to our disappointment, Elena was still not around to help us with the Fabulous Family Fiesta posters, and we couldn’t find Beatriz. In Max’s Big Chief tablet, we had made a perfunctory list of things we needed to be doing—1. CHAIRS 2. TABLES 3. DECORASHONS 4. PUNCH—but had not actually done anything else beyond asking for permission to throw the party in someone’s backyard. Mrs. Friedmann declined, citing the likelihood of her husband’s garden being trampled, and Ivan didn’t want to do it at his house—and we knew Josef wasn’t likely to agree anyway. That left Brickie and Dimma, who were less than enthusiastic but said they’d allow it if we couldn’t do it anywhere else. Brickie had said, “What do you think you boys are? The United Nations?” and “Talk to your grandmother.” Dimma had said, grudgingly, “It’s a nice idea, but I expect you boys to plan it and see it through, including cleaning up. Don’t forget that next week both your sister and your mother are coming for a visit, and that won’t be a convenient time. And then there’s your trip to Rehoboth with your father right before Labor Day, so plan accordingly.”
I knew exactly when my mother was coming home and had been thinking how wonderful it would be if she came for the party. “But, Dimma, don’t you think that it would be fun for Mama to be at the Fiesta? She loves parties!”
Dimma looked sad. “I don’t think she’s up to attending parties yet, John. She’s still very…tired. I think she only wants to spend time with you and Liz. Not with all the neighbors.”
Without Elena, and with nothing else to do, we decided to mount our bikes and ride to our empty school to hunt for spiders there. This late in summer, they’d be cleaning and readying the building for the new year, and it was always weird and fun to sneak in when only the old deaf janitor, Mr. Offutt, was around. We’d sneaked in the year before, and on our teacher Mr. Sullivan’s desk, we saw a list of students and their IQs. We didn’t know what IQs were, but we were shocked to see that our refugee friend Gellert had an IQ of 135, when everybody else’s scores were just over 100. We’d decided that IQs must have something to do with a student’s height or athletic abilities.
We were pedaling down the lane when Beau and D.L. came out of their house and summoned us to play war. We didn’t want to, but it was best not to rile the Shreve boys up. They carried their guns—we weren’t sure if they were toys or actual pellet guns, but the Shreves were very realistic and could shoot dried black-eyed peas. They aimed them at us.
“Our mom just made cookies,” said Beau. “We can have some after.”
That made the offer slightly more enticing. “Okay,” said Max. “But we can’t play too long because we’ve got something to do.”
“What? Looking for more bugs?” said D.L.
“Don’t you guys even care that Russian spies dropped a spider bomb on Washington?” I countered.
Beau and D.L. looked at each other, skeptically amazed. “How do you know that?” Beau said.
“My grandfather told me. He found a poisonous one in his office.”
“We’ll ask our dad. He’ll know if it’s true. The FBI knows everything,” D.L. said.
Then Beau addressed Ivan. “So your dad probably knows, too, since he’s a Russian spy.”
“He is not,” Ivan said. “He’s not even Russian.”
“Oh, sure,” Beau sneered.
“And your aunt is, too,” said D.L. It disturbed me to hear Elena dragged through the mud with Josef, and I knew it had to offend Ivan. “She’s definitely a Commie and hangs around with them.” They kept their guns trained on us—also disturbing.
“No she’s not and no she doesn’t,” Ivan said, as forcefully as he could, his face flushed. “They left Russia to get away from Commies.”
“That’s just propaganda,” I said to Beau, pretty sure Brickie’s word meant lies.
D.L. looked me in the eye through his gun sight and said, “And your grandfather has a secret pen name for the stuff he writes: ‘Guy Sims Fitch.’ ”
“What?” I sputtered. “No he doesn’t!” What was D.L. talking about—could Mr. Shreve know things about Brickie that I didn’t know?
“Are y’all gonna play, or not?” Beau demanded.
“Not if you keep saying stupid things to us,” Max said.
“Okay,” Beau said. They lowered the guns. “We take it back.” Beau put one hand behind his back, no doubt crossing his fingers.
I sighed. “Which war and which battle?” I asked.
D.L. said, “We haven’t played Bridge on the River Kwai in a while. Let’s play that.”
“Aww, rats,” said Max, who knew he was going to have to be the pompous collaborator, Colonel Nicholson. Beau and D.L. liked to humiliate all of us, but especially Max.
“We should get Kees and Piet to play,” Beau said. “Or we won’t have anybody to play the chickenshit guy.”
“Unh-unh!” I said. “The last time we played war with them we made Kees and Piet be Jews and we pretended their own Airstream was a gas chamber and locked them in. We were the American troops coming to liberate the camp, but the General caught us, and he went crazy and said if we did it again, he’d ‘spank us blue as a mulberry.’ ” This was the moronic event that had ended our swimming privileges at the De Haans’.
“Wow!” said D.L., impressed. “Where were we? I bet the General has some special Nazi spanking things.”
We dumped our bikes and began taking directions from D.L. and Beau. We made the infamous bridge with some planks and sawhorses hauled from the Shreves’ shed, which was chock-full of webs, but Beau and D.L. wouldn’t give us time to examine them. For the prison camp, we wrenched a few cinder blocks from under Mr. Shreve’s fishing boat, causing it to list dangerously. We set the cinder blocks around a campfire made with sticks and trash. Beau lit it. I had to put on Beau’s baseball cap with a washcloth hanging down the back of my neck because I was the evil Colonel Saito, which wasn’t all bad because I’d get to abuse the heroic Allies, Joyce and Warden, played, naturally, by the Shreves.
The Ally soldiers, Beau, D.L., and Ivan, gathered around the campfire, smoking their stick cigarettes, talking tough and complaining about being forced to build the bridge by a bunch of Japs. Max, as the traitor Colonel Nicholson, ranted at them about how crappy their bridge was and insisted they build one that would be a monument to British military genius. After he left, the Allies talked about what an asshole he is, and spit a lot. Then I came over with a willow switch, hollering in fake Japanese, and whipped the three of them, which I did harder than necessary to Beau and D.L. I made the Allies stack and unstack cinder blocks, over and over in the broiling sun, until Beau took out a Rich’s shoe box rattling with cherry bombs and put it under the bridge. The Allies pretended to go to sleep, whispering plans to kill Saito and blow up the bridge. Then I forced the Allies to march around in a circle. They began whistling the movie theme song and wouldn’t stop, even though I was screaming at them. Then Beau stabbed me with a rubber knife and ran to light the shoe box as Ivan and D.L. yelled, “Here come tons of Japs on a train!” This was the point where D.L. always began reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which had nothing to do with Bridge on the River Kwai, but D.L. loved the Little Rascals episode where Alfalfa did it: “ ‘Half a league, half a league / Half a league onward / All in the valley of death / Rode the six hundred.’ ” Then the cherry bombs caught and the train and bridge “blew up.” Beau and D.L. kicked my and Max’s dead bodies a few times, also harder than necessary. Ivan stood on top of the Shreves’ mulch pile, shaking his head sadly, saying, “Madness! Madness!” We were all still for a moment in the cherry-bomb smoke, as if the movie credits were rolling.
The Shreves’ back door opened and Mrs. Shreve shouted, “Good heavens, boweez! What were those explosions? What’s that smoke?”
“Aww, Mama, it’s just cherry bombs,” said D.L., proudly surveying our tableau of destruction.
“I wish y’all would quit playin’ with those annoyin’ farcrackuhs! And please put all that stuff back where it came from. Deeyayall, put out that far. Your daddy will not ’preciate a burnt place on the lawn. And y’all have practice in thutty minutes.” She smiled graciously at me and Max and Ivan, and held out a plate of cookies. “Would y’all boweez like some cookies? Theyuh peanut buttah.”
We took some cookies and Ivan stepped up and told Mrs. Shreve, “We’re going to have a Fabulous Family Fiesta for the neighborhood soon! It’s a potluck. We’ll let you know the details. We hope your whole family will attend.” Max and I looked at each other, marveling that shy Ivan had become quite the Beaver Plan ambassador.
“Whah, how loveleh, boweez! And all the adults are invahted?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Ivan said. “It’ll be in John’s yard, and his grandparents and Elena and Max’s mom and dad and everybody is coming!” I wondered how Ivan was so certain about everybody.
“Well, we will suhttenly be theah and will bring some refrayushments. We ’preciate the invitation.”
We helped the Shreves put back the bridge junk, leaving them to deal with the fire and cinder blocks. The boat was obviously going to fall off its dry dock, and we didn’t want to be blamed.
It seemed too late now to ride to Rosemary, and we were really hot after the campfire and warfare, so we went next door to Ivan’s, hoping Elena had returned and we could make the posters. I was wondering about what D.L. had said about Brickie having a secret pen name, but it made no sense to me. Maybe I’d ask him.
Ivan’s house was quiet, and Ivan said, “Good—nobody’s home. We can watch TV.” We yanked off our sweaty T-shirts and threw them on the floor, grateful for the dark coolness of Ivan’s living room and the bananas Maria brought us, saying, “You eat—es good for you.” Looking back, I’ve often thought that if not for Estelle and Maria, we boys might have been seriously undernourished. Except for Brickie at breakfast, nobody but those two ladies paid much attention to what we did or didn’t eat.
Then Beatriz showed up, wearing sporty orange clam diggers and a matching top I’d never seen, saying, “Hi, guys!” and sat down with us to watch TV. I handed her half of my banana, and we told her about the Fiesta. She jumped right in enthusiastically. “We should have dancing and entertainment! We could put on a skit!” Looking like a raven-haired Pippi Longstocking, she stretched out both braids excitedly and was full of ideas, most of which sounded lousy to Max because they involved dancing, singing, or costumes, but they sounded fun to me.
Ivan turned on the cartoon show Clutch Cargo, which Max thought was lousy, too. “You guys are such babies sometimes.”
Beatriz said, “Max, Ivan is your host. Why are you so crabby?”
“He’s not my host, he’s my friend. I’m crabby because I don’t want to talk about stupid skits and we had to play war with Beau and D.L. instead of hunting spiders.”
Beatriz said sympathetically, “Okay, I get it. I thought I heard those dopey boys setting off cherry bombs.”
She sat back, and we settled in, eating our bananas and enjoying the big oscillating fan and the way the cooling blue velvet of the sofa soaked up our sweat. Soon all of us, even Max, were absorbed with Clutch, flying around the world heroically.
Halfway through the episode, we heard flip-flopped feet coming down the stairs. I hoped it was Elena, but when Ivan stiffened, sat up, and left, saying he had to go to the bathroom, I knew Josef must be home. The flip-flopping continued down the hall to the kitchen. In a minute Ivan’s dad came into the living room, wearing his bathrobe and carrying the newspaper.
He greeted us, smiling pleasantly, but a little creepily. “Hello, kids. You don’t mind if I read the afternoon paper in here, do you? This is the coolest room in the house.” Without waiting for an answer, he sat down, crossing one leg over the other, and opened his paper. “This spider business must be keeping you boys busy.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Then, from the depths of his robe, I spied a rat’s nest that looked more like fur than hair, with a bulbous purple thing peeking out from it. I giggled nervously, looking at Beatriz and Max, who only stared intently at the TV, Max red-faced. I pretended to be examining my banana.
Suddenly Ivan appeared outside the window, waving furiously for us to come outside. Max jabbed me with his elbow, and we rose, Max casually grabbing our shirts, while I signaled to Beatriz. “We’ve got to go now,” Max said, and Beatriz said, “Bye!” as the three of us scooted for the front door.
On the porch I whispered, “Did you see that? He didn’t know we could see his wiener!”
Max said, “Don’t tell Ivan. He’ll just be embarrassed.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Beatriz added. “I see my brother’s all the time. Once my cousin in Brazil tried to make me touch his.”
I couldn’t imagine this, although I tried to, and said, “Did you?”
“I just slapped it and said, ‘Put that silly thing away!’ ”
Ivan waited in the hammock. His pale burr head was already sweaty again. “Did…did he bother you guys?” Ivan asked, looking worried. “I didn’t think he was home.”
“Nah,” Max answered nonchalantly. “He was just reading in the paper about the spiders, trying to cool off.” He smiled and Ivan relaxed.
From the De Haans’ across the street came the annoying noise of fun in the pool. “I’m roasting,” I complained. “I sure wish we were in that pool.”
“Pfft! Nazi soup!” Max spat. I thought about Chevy Chase Lake, a gigantic pool close by, but we couldn’t go there because they didn’t let Jews in.
“There’s always your pool,” Ivan said to me.
Earlier in the summer, after she thought we’d suffered enough following the Airstream incident with the De Haans, Dimma had gone to People’s Hardware and gotten a blue plastic pool about two feet high and eight feet wide. We’d set it up in my backyard on the grass where a concrete pond had once been. The pond was filled in, but the fountain featuring a woman with a pitcher remained. Supposedly a woman had drowned herself in the concrete pond a long time ago. My mother loved the statue, and Sir Walter Scott’s poem, and called her the Lady of the Lake. Stevenson, our old yardman, who ironically bore the same name as the 1956 presidential candidate, which hugely amused Estelle and Brickie, planted trailing petunias in the pitcher every spring. A few flowers still hung down, pink-and-purple-striped, but they were spent and ragged now. At first we boys had been happy enough with the pool, but we were bored with it by July. Now the water was low and greenish, leaves and grass mowings floating on the surface, and its sides were slick with algae. “It looks pretty bad. Do you think there’s any polio in there?” Ivan asked.
“Nah,” I said. “We’ll fill it up with new water and it will be okay.”
We could see spider bodies on the bottom—none of the poisonous ones we were looking for—and mosquito larvae, wriggling like minuscule shrimp, but we didn’t care. “Aw, what the hell?” I said, echoing every adult I’d ever heard in my entire life.
Beatriz left; she didn’t have her bathing suit and said it was time for her to go home, and anyway, she added, it was “too icky,” and we would probably get sick from being in it and miss the Fabulous Family Fiesta.
I dragged the hose over and threw it into the pool, and we jumped in in our shorts. The three of us thrashed and splashed, hollering even louder than usual, hoping Kees and Piet would hear us. Once the water became deeper, we made a whirlpool by running around and around as fast as we could. I pulled off the remaining petunias from the Lady of the Lake and tossed them into the water. Then we drifted around with the flowers in the current of the whirlpool, looking up at the softening sky, where swifts were circling with us, birds and boys thinking about food and roosting for the evening. Ivan said the swifts would be heading to South America for the winter. “They’ve probably been stuffing themselves with spiders for the trip.”
Pretty soon, grown-up voices sounded around the neighborhood, gathering their flocks for dinner and the night. Max and Ivan went home, and I went inside, calling out, “I’m ready for dinner!” as I let the back screen door slam behind me for emphasis, just in case anybody had forgotten I existed.