Even before the FBI guys showed up, our family wasn’t like other people’s families. My professor parents are called doctor, but they couldn’t set a busted leg or gouge out your appendix.
I always knew my dad was different from other fathers. For one thing, he doesn’t go nutso over sports like Connor’s dad.
It’s not that Dad has no sports sense. He’s an anthropologist, so he knows more than anybody on this planet about sports in a dozen countries you never heard of. Amazing what you can do with coconut shells and wooly mammoth spine bones.
Also, my mom’s not like other mothers. “Housewife?” She always huffs, “I am not married to a house. I’m married to a profound man, and I’m a superb English professor and poet in my own right. Housewife, indeed!”
Explains why you’d think our house has been ransacked by thieves.
Connor’s always here at lunch time, and he’s always hungry. Maybe he has a tapeworm swimming around in his gut, like some of the people in countries Dad studies. He drops into his usual seat at the kitchen table.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” I warn him. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Campbell’s Tomato Soup, but no such luck. Mom’s clunking a pan of something. Truth is, Mom dishes up her best stuff in moronic pentameter. I think that’s what her students call it when they come to our house for poetry readings and leave their teeth marks in half-eaten crackers with cream cheese and chopped olive smeared on them—stuff you’d use to grout bathroom tile.
She splats barefoot across the floor to the window sill, where her avocado pit is sitting in a mayo jar with its round bottom submerged in water. “I dare you to grow roots, you imbecile pit.” After she’s turned it to face the sun, she ladles thick white sauce with mysterious beige flecks onto soggy toast.
“This chipped beef?” Connor asks, his hungry eyes gleaming.
“Tuna. Chipped beef in cream sauce isn’t kosher,” Mom says. Not that we keep all those dietary laws, or that we’re super-religious, but Mom was brought up not mixing meat and dairy, and whatever meat we have comes from the kosher butcher in Kansas City so when Bubbie Sylvia comes to visit, she’s okay eating our stuff. Creamed tuna is second on my Hit Parade of worst meals. Pickled tongue tops the charts. The sight of a package of oatmeal-raisin cookies on the counter cheers me a little, even though I don’t like raisins or oatmeal.
Connor goes to work on the creamed tuna like a stevedore who’s been hauling at the docks all morning. Me, I stab at the wreck on my plate. “Don’t they put food in your cage?”
“I’m a growing boy.”
“Shows.”
Mom’s more distracted than usual. Probably composing some epic poem in her head with lots of words nobody gets. “Your father had a meeting at the College.”
I dig out a green foreign substance, while Connor flicks his tongue across his lips like a gecko. “One of Dad’s committees?” They meet at weird hours, like no one at the College gets hungry at normal times.
Mom shakes her head, and that simple tilt of her brownish-gray braid makes me feel itchy. Something’s up.
She scritches the bottom of the pan, emptying the gluey blob onto Connor’s plate. “Listen, when your father comes home, don’t ask him too many questions.”
“How many’s too many?”
Eyes closed, Mom sucks white sauce off the ladle. “Wash up the dishes when you’re done, will you, Marty? And Connor, you’d better be gone before Dr. Irwin comes home.”
Connor freezes with his fork half way to his mouth. A wedge of toast and white sauce defies gravity. “This about the Rosenbergs?”
“Indirectly.” Mom tosses the white-coated ladle into the sink.
I haven’t said a word to her about Connor’s hard line on the Rosenbergs, so it must be something else, something big and hairy, if it’s got my mother flinging spoons.
Connor spins his plate on the counter and sends the screen door banging behind him, just as Amy Lynn comes in, glaring at his back. She and Connor are sworn enemies.
Mom’s at the fridge with her back to us. Her thick braid ends in a little paint brush at her waist. “How’s your father doing, Amy Lynn?”
“Oh, he’s just peachy-keen,” she says dryly. “And my mother’s even worse.”
Water splashes in the gluey pot. “What’s going on?” Mom asks.
“Things are a little tense at my house.” Amy Lynn’s voice is wobbly. “My mother drifts around the house in an old herringbone sweater she found in the back of the closet, even though our house is steamy and dark as a cave, with every window shut and the blinds down so those men in the car across the street can’t see in.”
Mom sighs. “Privacy is dead in America.”
“I know!”
So do I. Last night I woke up and saw one of the night guys with binoculars hanging around his neck, trying to climb a tree outside my window. Not that Mom and Amy Lynn bother to include me in this conversation; I’m The Invisible Man.
“Would you believe it, Dr. Rosalie? Those FBI agents rummage through our trash. And they leap out of the car when poor Mr. Oberon arrives. They make him show every piece of mail before he can slide it through our slot.”
I clunk the giraffe salt and pepper shakers together to get their attention. “Dumb question. All this is happening because your father refuses to sign a loyalty oath at the College?”
“Outrageous, isn’t it?” Amy Lynn answers.
“He’s got to resist.” Mom pounds the table so hard that the salt shaker giraffe jumps and snorts salt out his nostrils.
“Oh, my father’s like a boulder. He can’t be moved an inch. He won’t sign, and he won’t tell why he won’t sign, except he says it’s a matter of conscience.”
“Absolutely!” Mom affirms. “It’s the only thing left after they strip all our rights away.”
“Except it’s making Mother furious. She yells, ‘Conscience! You’re a math teacher, not political science or philosophy. Sign the ridiculous oath and stop this right now!’ ” Amy Lynn turns to me, with her eyes blazing. “Just wait, Marty. It’ll happen at your house, too.”
No chance. We’ve got enough going on with the Rosenbergs. My parents know better than to go looking for even more trouble. Don’t they?