Eyes in the Fishbowl (3 page)

Actually, a lot of kids make scrapbooks—particularly a certain type of kid, like I was, who gets a kick out of saving and organizing stuff. The only difference is that most kids make books about airplanes or sports heroes or that kind of thing; I just happened to make one about a store. It’s not as if Alcott-Simpson’s was just any big city department store. I’ve been around quite a bit in the last few years and I’ve seen a lot more than I had when I was eight years old; and there just wasn’t anything anywhere quite like it. It seems the original Alcott and Simpson were a couple of old millionaires who decided to build the world’s most beautiful and luxurious commercial palace. The ground floor was divided into a lot of fancy little shops connected by a walk called The Mall. Then in the center there was a kind of indoor garden with a fountain and statues. The building covered an entire block and I used to think there wasn’t anything in the world, worth having, that you couldn’t buy there. After I’d been around for a while and looked at everything, I think that impressed me even more than the building itself—how many things you could buy there. Just about anything you could possibly want from diamond rings to motorcycles. Everybody who saw it for the first time was kind of overwhelmed, so you can imagine what it did for a kid who’d never had anything that cost more than five bucks—except for operations. As a matter of fact, I even used to dream about it.

It wasn’t a dream, exactly. That is, I wasn’t exactly asleep. It was that half-awake kind of dream—awake enough to start it on purpose, but near enough asleep not to know where it’s going. It usually started out about how eight-year-old Dion James, shoeshine boy, had inherited the fabulous Alcott-Simpson department store from some kind old gentleman. Sometimes I thought it all out, how I’d done this old gentleman a favor, like pushing him out from in front of a bus, so he put it all down in his will about the whole store and everything in it going to me when he died. In my dream I never operated the store. I mean, I never sold anything. I just owned it and sort of lived in it. Sometimes, I brought in all my special friends and gave them stuff, like a new seven-foot Steinway grand for my father; but other times I was just there in the store all by myself, looking around and playing with the toys and stuff like that.

Of course, that was all in the past. I’d pretty much outgrown the daydreams along with scrapbooks. But I couldn’t help being interested in the article that Madame Stregovitch had been saving for me. It really belonged in my scrapbook—it was so—kind of typical of Alcott-Simpson’s. It was a feature article on some special luxury gifts that the store had been selling for the Christmas season.

The article started off humorously about how Alcott-Simpson’s had opened a special department for people who wanted to buy a gift for the “Friend Who Has Everything” or even for the “Friend You Want to Flatter by Pretending to Think He Has Everything.” There was a list of very expensive, very kookie gifts, and colored photographs of a few of the most spectacular. There were things like a diamond studded thimble, a solid gold toothbrush and a silver-mink bathmat. The last page had a big picture of the craziest of all, a mink-lined fishbowl.

That’s what they called it, but of course, it wasn’t meant for real fish. Some little golden fish and some imitation water plants were imbedded right in the glass walls of the bowl, and because the glass was thick and wavy, they were supposed to seem to be moving. You couldn’t tell it from the outside at all; but if you looked in the top, you could see that the inside of the bowl really was lined with fur. The blurb under the picture called it a conversation piece and said that it cost seventy-five dollars.

I was starting to cut out the picture and thinking you’d have to be pretty desperate for something to talk about to buy a thing like that, when suddenly I saw this weird thing. Right in the center of the fishbowl there was a pair of eyes. The eyes were shadowy—but clear enough so I knew I couldn’t be imagining them. I stared for a minute, and the eyes seemed to stare right back, vague and dim and sad-looking. And then suddenly I realized what I was seeing. The eyes were part of something on the other side of the paper.

I turned the page over and, sure enough, right on the back was a picture of a girl with great big eyes and stringy dark hair. When I had started to cut out the picture, I’d held it up so that the light from my lamp was right behind it and it made the eyes seem to come right through. I’d just had time to notice that it was a part of an article about some foreign country, when I heard Phil yelling at me that the spaghetti was ready. I taped it into the scrapbook in a hurry—and that was that.

I don’t think I thought much more about it then, but I do remember feeling more relieved than seemed to make sense under the circumstances. I mean, what other reason could there be for a pair of eyes in the midst of a mink-lined fish bowl?

I
STARTED OUT
dinner that night not speaking to my father. I was pretty burned up at him, not that there was anything particularly unusual about that. It seemed like I spent half the time not speaking to him, not that it ever did any good. As a matter of fact, I doubt if he even noticed most of the time. At least, if he did he was careful not to make an issue of it. That’s one of his peculiarities. I doubt if he has ever made an issue out of anything in his life.

My dad is tall and blond, and if he weren’t so unwarlike he’d look a lot like an old Viking warrior—and not a whole lot better groomed either. He’s been kind of a neighborhood landmark in the Cathedral Street district for years and years. As a matter of fact, he was born right here in this house way back when this was a fashionable part of town; and he’s always lived right here, except for some years he spent in Europe, studying music and drifting around, when he was young. His father was a professor at the university, and Dad still has some friends on the faculty. Actually, he has friends all over everywhere, but most of his students come from our neighborhood—and that’s part of the problem. Nobody in our neighborhood has much money.

Just that morning before I left for school Dad and I had had a talk about finances; and he’d absolutely promised that he was going to collect some of the money that his students owed him. It was obvious what had happened. As usual, he’d listened to some sob stories and let himself be talked out of collecting. There was almost nothing he did that frustrated me more.

So, for a while I just stared at my plate and shoveled up the spaghetti, but before too long I had to thaw a little. For one thing the spaghetti sauce was really good, and for another our kitchen is a great place to eat dinner on a cold January night. It used to be the master bedroom once, when the house was a one family affair, so it has a big fireplace and a nice comfortable atmosphere. Besides, Phil and Duncan were clowning around as usual, and keeping a straight face got to be too much of an effort. Those two could make a corpse laugh.

Phil and Dunc came from the same little town somewhere out in the boondocks, and I guess they’ve been friends since they were practically babies. Their families don’t have much money, so they’re working their way through college by scholarships and odd jobs, and scrounging—like they do off my father. They’re both nineteen years old and in their second year at the university; but they’re not studying the same things. Dunc is taking art courses, and I’m not sure what Phil is doing. I asked him once, and he said he was studying to be rich. But as far as I can see, they both spend most of their time thinking up things to laugh at. That night they were doing something they called nationalistic spaghetti eating.

The way it worked, they took turns acting out how someone from a particular country would eat spaghetti and the rest of us were supposed to guess what nationality. First, Phil was a super-polite Englishman, whose monocle kept falling out and getting lost in the spaghetti. Then Dunc did a Chinese trying to eat spaghetti with chopsticks. Next Phil chopped up some spaghetti, mashed it all to pieces and finally put his plate on the floor and pretended to march back and forth across it. That was supposed to be a German. Another one was the efficient American trying to tie all the pieces of spaghetti together end to end so he could suck up the whole plate without stopping. It was all pretty corny, but the way Phil and Dunc throw themselves into a thing like that—you just can’t help laughing. I had forgotten all about being mad, until Dad brought out the doughnuts.

When the spaghetti was all gone, my father got up and went over to this great big bread box we have and opened it up, and it was absolutely packed full of doughnuts. There must have been six or eight dozen—a lot more than we could possibly eat before they spoiled. All of a sudden I knew exactly where they came from.

Mr. Clements, who just happens to have two kids who take piano from Dad, and who just happens to owe us more money than anybody else, just happens to work at a big doughnut factory. And Joannie Clements just happened to tell me once that her father gets to take home any doughnuts that get a little old before anyone buys them.

Dad put about a dozen doughnuts on a plate and passed it around the table. I could tell that he was trying to keep from catching my eye, so at last I said, “How much did you knock off for this junk?”

Dad smiled in that vague way of his. “Just a little,” he said. “But I did tell Dan that we might be able to use a few more from time to time.”

That did it. I stood up and threw my half-eaten doughnut at Prudence, who was sitting in front of the fireplace washing her feet. I missed, but it was close enough to make her jump. She gave me a dirty look and then she sniffed at the doughnut, looked disgusted, and went back to washing her feet. Even the cat wouldn’t eat them. “Good Lord, Dad,” I said. “You don’t even
like
doughnuts!” And I stormed out of the kitchen and back to my room.

That was the way it had been between my father and me for a year or two. Before that we got along pretty well. As a matter of fact, when I was a real little kid I used to think he was just about perfect. Of course, he was as easygoing with me as he is with everybody, and at that age you don’t notice much else. He almost never got mad or ordered me around, but I wasn’t so awfully spoiled, either. I think I sort of had the feeling that he expected me to act like some kind of small-sized adult and I just couldn’t bear to let him down. He seems to have that effect on the little kids he teaches, too. It’s only older people who take advantage of people like him.

Anyway, when I was little we used to have a lot of good times. I was only four when I had polio, and after that there were three operations a year or two apart, so I never did go to elementary school very regularly. I was home in bed or in a wheel chair a lot, and having the house always full of people seemed like a great thing to me, then. There were my Dad’s students and his musician friends and his neighborhood friends and his chess friends and his political-enemy friends—not to mention the ones who showed up regularly just for a square meal or for someone to listen to their troubles. People were always drifting in for an hour or a day—or even a month or two if they happened to feel like it. Not many of them were kids, but in those days that didn’t matter very much. There was always a lot of music going on, and I was right in the middle of it all the time. Dad had started me on the violin when I was almost a baby, and I took up the guitar, too, a few years later. When I was about six, I started thinking up lyrics and tunes to go with them, and Dad would write them down. All his friends were always carrying on about what a lot of talent I had.

That part of my life was okay in those days—school was the bad part. During the spells, in between operations, when I was well enough to go to Lincoln Elementary, I began to realize that I didn’t exactly fit in. I couldn’t play any sports, which was terribly important at Lincoln, and I didn’t know how to make the right kind of conversation. And besides that I didn’t dress right. A lot of the time Dad wouldn’t even notice my clothes, and I’d go for days in outgrown, worn-out stuff. Then he’d decide to dress me all up in some out-of-date sissy suit that some old family friend had donated, and that was even worse. It got so I hated to go to school; and the more I hated it, the worse it got. But I never blamed anyone. Little kids are apt to be pretty fatalistic. You just take what comes, and it doesn’t even occur to you to wonder if things are the way they ought to be or if you could do anything to make them better. It was in between my second and third operation that I started shining shoes and hanging around Alcott-Simpson’s, and not too long after that I began to quit just accepting things and started making plans for the future—all sort of plans.

That night, after the doughnut episode, I shut myself in my room again and started in on my homework. I’d nearly finished my English assignment when there was a knock on the door. I didn’t even answer at first, but then I heard Matt’s voice saying, “Di, it’s Matt. Let me in.”

Matt is a graduate student and he’s older than Phil and Dunc—around twenty-three or four. He’s been staying with us off and on for years. But being around for a few years doesn’t really make him part of the family—even though he acts like he thinks he is at times. When I opened the door that night, he came on real casual-like, but I knew him too well to be fooled. I could tell he had something on his mind. He stretched out on my bed with his heels up on the footboard and started out like he’d just come to chat.

“How’s it going?” he asked, nodding at my homework.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s just English. I got my algebra done in study hall.” Sometimes Matt helped me out with my algebra when I hit a snag. I’m not too good at that sort of thing, and Dad’s not much better.

Matt asked some more questions about the English assignment and we kicked that around for a while, but I had the feeling that he was looking for an opening for something in particular. Finally he looked around my room and said, “Very cozy. Sure is a nice pad, you’ve got here.”

“Nothing special,” I said. “It just looks good in contrast to the rest of the house.”