Bingo Brown's Guide to Romance (6 page)

“Oh, Mom.”

“Wait, Bingo, there's more. It gets funnier.”

But Bingo had had all the humor he could stand. He started for his room.

“Oh, by the by,” his mother called after him. “Did you see Melissa?”

“Yes.”

“What did she have to say?”

“Not much.”

“When you grow up, Gummy,” she said, dismissing Bingo, “I hope you're going to have a better sense of humor than your big brother!”

Bingo went into his room and lay down on his bed. He closed his eyes.

He was asleep in seconds, and he was in luck. His favorite dream began at once.

In the dream Bingo was on a stage. It was obviously him onstage, and yet it was a more mature, handsome version of himself. It was Bingo Brown at, oh, age twenty, and Bingo was very pleased at the way his form and features had shaped up.

He needed a dream like this.

He was a famous singer, and his backup group was the Brownettes. Bingo Brown and the Brownettes. The dream was so pleasant and full of promise that Bingo came partially awake, but he forced himself to go back to sleep.

The audience was calling for him. “Bin-go! Bin-go! Bin-go!-Bin-go!”

It made him love his name and everything else about himself.

Then, without warning, the dream fast-forwarded and became a nightmare. He was onstage, but the Brownettes had turned against him.

Me-lissa's back and Bingo doesn't have her.

Nyah nyah, nyah nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah, nyah.

Bingo groaned in his sleep. A hand gripped his shoulder. Now his mother was in the dream, saying, “Can I ask a big favor?”

“Get off the stage, Mom, before the audience sees you. It's—”

“Bingo!”

“What? What?”

He struggled back to consciousness.

“Bingo, your dad and I want to get out of the house. Will you watch Jamie, please?”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“I don't know—two or three minutes. Will you watch Jamie?”

“Mom, I've got to read
The Red Badge of Courage
for English. I haven't even gotten to the war yet.”

She made a worried face and turned her eyes back toward the bedroom where his father still lay. “Your dad is really depressed,” she whispered. “I've got to get him out of the house. So will you watch Jamie?”

She lowered her voice again; Bingo could barely hear her himself now.

“Please, Bingo, I'm worried about your father.” She sank down on the edge of Bingo's bed. “You know what the rejection letter said?”

Bingo shook his head. “No.”

“It was just one sentence, Bingo. One sentence! ‘We have read your manuscript and regret that it does not meet the needs of our list.' What does that mean, Bingo—‘meet the needs of our list'?”

“I don't know.”

“All those hours and hours of work and it doesn't meet the needs of their list.”

Her shoulders sagged.

Bingo cleared his throat. She looked at him with quick hope, so Bingo said, “Maybe he should send it off again. There are other—lists.”

“I couldn't suggest it.”

“Mom, if you bomb out, you have to try again quickly or you'll go bonkers.” Now Bingo was quoting Wentworth.

“Bingo, he just lies there like he's in his coffin, with his hands folded like this.”

She folded her hands pitifully at her waist.

Bingo sighed. “How long will you be gone?” he said because it seemed to him his mother was sinking into depression, too. Then the whole family would be depressed—except for Jamie.

“Two hours. Is that too long? Can you watch him for two hours?”

“I guess.”

“Now I've got to convince your dad to go out—and that's not going to be easy. Where can we go? Bingo, I can't even think of anywhere we can go!”

“I can't help you there.”

“It's got to be somewhere vital. I can't just say the store or the movies or the laundromat. Well, I'll think of something.”

B
INGO WAS WALKING SLOWLY
down the hall toward English class when he heard someone call his name.

“Bingo, wait up!”

Bingo glanced over his shoulder.

“Wait!”

It was Mamie Lou, and Bingo did not like to talk to Mamie Lou even when he was feeling his best—which he definitely was not.

He tried to slip into class, but in one quick move she was in front of him, blocking the way. Since Mamie Lou had him by twenty pounds, he had no choice but to stop.

“Yes, Mamie Lou?”

“Did you see Melissa?” she asked excitedly.

“Yes, I saw her Saturday—and briefly Sunday, but I didn't get to really talk to her.”

“No, I mean now,” Mamie Lou said. She pointed down the hall as if she were thumbing a ride. “Did you just see her in the hall?”

“No, no, I didn't. She's here? At school?”

“Yes, but there were about two hundred people around her. You'd think she'd been to the moon instead of Bixby, Oklahoma. I barely got to say hi.”

“I didn't get much past that myself.” Bingo turned. “Where exactly was she? Maybe if I—”

“Mamie Lou, you and—who's that behind you?” Mr. Rodrigo called from his desk.

Bingo peered around her.

“Ah, El Bingo, the Gringo,” Mr. Rodrigo said. “You two come on in, we'd like to get started.”

“Mr. Rodrigo.” Bingo paused in the doorway. “I have a compelling errand. I wouldn't use the word
compelling,
which means to drive or urge irresistibly, if I weren't being driven and urged irresistibly.”

“
No comprendo,
Bingo.”

When Mr. Rodrigo switched to what he called his “native tongue,” even the correct use of a word wouldn't divert him.

Bingo proceeded reluctantly into the room. He sat at his desk. He wanted to put his head on his desk, because the wood would be cooler than his flushed face, but Mr. Rodrigo didn't allow siestas.

Bingo was ashamed of himself. Only yesterday he had sworn that he would never, ever care about Melissa again, that he would not so much as go to the door if she rang the doorbell, and here he was with his heart leaping out of his chest because she was in the same building with him.

This decision that he would never care again had come yesterday. He and Wentworth had returned to Weezie's only to find the house locked.

“Maybe Weezie and Melissa are hiding inside,” Bingo had said.

“Maybe Melissa's hiding from you. She did that yesterday. But there's no way the Weez would hide from me.”

Wentworth had continued to punch the doorbell for some time, even after Bingo had begged him to stop. Finally Wentworth had said, “Okay, okay, I give up.”

They had turned and started down the steps. At that moment a car had pulled into the driveway. Bingo and Wentworth stopped to watch.

The backseat of the car had been so filled with girls of assorted ages and sizes that Bingo couldn't be sure Melissa was one of them. She was. She was the third girl out of the car. Weezie was the fourth. The rest of the girls kept coming, like clowns piling out of a circus car.

Weezie had seen them and at once threw up her hands for protection. “Don't look at my hair. It looks awful. Melissa, don't let them look at my hair. Don't look!”

Melissa had gotten between Weezie and the boys on the steps, and they ran into the house.

It had been so sudden that Bingo and Wentworth continued to stand there, stunned, while the rest of the girls passed by.

Finally, Bingo had called, “Melissa!”

And Wentworth had helped with, “Come on out, Melissa, or Bingo's going to leave.”

Silence.

“And he's not coming back either.”

Silence.

“And bring the Weez with you, or I'm leaving with him.”

In a lower voice, Wentworth had said, “Do you think they're coming out?”

“I don't know, what do you think?”

“I don't know.”

“You've got a sister,” Bingo said finally. “Would she come out?”

“My sister would never have gone in. Her hair looks like that all the time.”

Still they had waited. And as Bingo stood there, trapped by desire and confusion, he had made a firm, mature decision. He would never attempt to see Melissa again—ever!

“I'm leaving,” Bingo had said then.

“I'm right behind you.”

And now, twenty-four hours later, he was ready to skip class and rush through the empty halls in the hope of catching a glimpse of her.

The class had begun to discuss
The Red Badge of Courage.
Bingo got out his book.

Mamie Lou was saying, “You know what I don't understand, Mr. Rodrigo? You know how everyone is always telling us to write about what we know? Well, Stephen Crane wasn't writing about what he knew. He never even went to war!”

Usually Bingo liked to jump in with an opinion, but he had only read chapter one, and it had taken him all evening to read that.

The trouble was that Bingo had kept coming to sentences so full of meaning that they would send him off on a personal detour. He would read, “The youth was in a little trance of astonishment.” And he would be taken back to Health Supplies, where he, himself, had suffered a little trance of astonishment. And he would relive the little trance in detail.

He would force himself to read on, but he would come to something like, “He departed feeling vague relief,” and he would be leaving Weezie's yesterday with his own vague relief.

He would read about the youth feeling gratitude for the words of his comrade, and he would again hear Wentworth saying, “I'm right behind you.”

He would read of the youth staring steadfastly at the dark girl while she stared up through the high tree branches at the sky, and he would be staring steadfastly at Melissa, who was staring steadfastly at her shoes.

“Well, El Bingo, the Gringo, is strangely silent today,” Mr. Rodrigo said.

Bingo glanced up from his book. “I haven't gotten as far in the book as the rest of the class,” he explained.

“You're my fastest reader, Bingo. You're always leading the pack.”

“I know.”

“So what? It didn't grab you?”

“It wasn't that. I kept … stopping to think.”

An amused murmur came from some of the gifted and talented who rarely did that themselves.

Mr. Rodrigo ignored them. “So you were
simpático
with the main character?”

Bingo thought about it. “I guess. I kept coming to these sentences that seemed to fit … me.”

“So, class—no, put your hand down, Mamie Lou, it's my turn. So while Stephen Crane had not been to war, he did know—and quite well—what it was like to be a young man facing a turning point in his life. He knew what it was like to have a mother who loved him but didn't understand him enough to say what he really needed to hear her say.

“He knew what it was to yearn for a girl he couldn't have. He knew what it was to worry about his abilities. That's what Bingo, in his own inimitable fashion, was trying to tell us. Eh, Gringo?”

Bingo was grateful to Mr. Rodrigo for turning him from the class idiot into the class intelligensio. A kind teacher could work miracles.

“Si,”
he said.

T
HE BROWN FAMILY WAS
having spaghetti for supper, and supper had been served. But the only sounds in the kitchen were the slaps of Jamie's hands against his high-chair tray.

Jamie did not know spaghetti was to be eaten. He thought you slapped at it in a violent way and, later, when tired of the violence, swept it off the tray onto the floor.

“Many writers,” Bingo said finally, “go unappreciated in their lifetimes.”

Bingo was not displeased with this opening statement. He felt it was rare that anyone under stress, as he himself was, could break a painful silence with a remark of intelligence and depth.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Bingo's father asked, looking up sharply. His long days in the house had given him a pallor that made his freckles seem darker than usual.

“Nothing. Nothing!” Bingo said, at once aware his remark had gone unappreciated.

He had spoken only as a favor—to break the terrible silence that hovered over the table. He still wasn't supposed to know that his father's manuscript had been rejected, but his father took any literary comment as a personal insult.

Bingo's mother gave him a warning look.

Bingo cleared his throat. “We're reading
The Red Badge of Courage,
that's all, and Stephen Crane died real young.”

The conversation also died young, and once again the only sounds were Jamie slapping his spaghetti. Bingo had with great patience taught Jamie to say bye-bye, but like a parrot, Jamie said it inappropriately. Now, as he karate-chopped the spaghetti, which refused to be chopped, he cried, “Bye-bye-bye-bye.”

“But I despair of finishing the book,” Bingo continued.

No one asked the reason for this despair.

Bingo had begun chapter two when he got home from school and had almost immediately come across the paragraph, “For days he made ceaseless calculations, but they were all wondrously unsatisfactory. He found that he could establish nothing.”

As soon as he had read that he realized that he, himself, had also established exactly nothing.

Problem
#7,
Establishing Exactly Nothing.

Suppose you have seen a person you love and no matter how hard you try, you have found no answers and established nothing. Should you then continue to pursue this person until your questions are answered?

Bingo's Answer:
Yes! Or until she is no longer in the area.

“Stephen Crane died young, but not unappreciated,” his father said.

Bingo said, “Oh?”