Eyes in the Fishbowl (8 page)

We didn’t talk much at first while we drank our sodas, but I did get a chance to really look at Sara. Of course, I couldn’t see her eyes because of the dark glasses, but I could see enough to tell that I had been right about her face, it was really fantastic. Every time she looked up and caught me looking at her she smiled—not a come-on smile or a wise one, at least not as far as I could tell. Just a quick straight unconditional sort of smile, like you might get from a friendly four-year-old. I couldn’t begin to figure her out.

After a while I got around to asking some of the questions that I’d been thinking about. For instance, I started out by asking how old she was.

“By the way,” I said. “I’ve been wondering how old you are. It’s sort of hard to tell. Sometimes you look lots older than others.”

She gave a little laugh. “How old are you?” she asked.

“Almost fifteen,” I said.

She just nodded, so I said, “Well?”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m—almost the same.”

“You mean you’re fourteen?”

She puckered her forehead for a minute, and then she smiled and said, “Almost?” But it sounded more like a question than an answer. It wasn’t until later that I realized I still wouldn’t want to bet on how old she was. That’s the way most of the things I asked her seemed to turn out. Like, I mentioned that I’d seen her at Alcott-Simpson’s three times lately and asked how come she spent so much time there.

“Oh, it’s all right,” she said. “I’m supposed to be here.”

That made me think maybe I was right when I’d guessed that she was the daughter of some store big shot. That would explain a lot of things. “Do you have relatives here in the store?” I asked.

Sara just looked at me for a minute and then she nodded and said, “Yes. You’re here a lot, too. Do you have relatives here, too?”

So I got started trying to explain why I hung around the store so much. It took quite a bit of explaining. I even went into how I had plans to maybe work there someday, after I’d had business training of course, so I could be something besides just a clerk. Then I asked her if she knew anything about the mysterious stuff that had been going on lately, the dogs and special detectives and everything.

Right away she bit her lip and looked away. I couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark glasses, but I had the feeling that she didn’t want to answer. She poked at her soda with her straw, and then she sighed and shook her head. “Things have happened—accidents. Most of the time it was just an accident.”

“What kind of things?”

“Oh, things get broken. And noises. There have been noises.”

“What do you mean noises?”

“Oh, just laughing and talking. Some of the clerks say they’ve heard laughing and talking.” Sara shook her head and pulled her lips down as if she were disapproving.

“Laughing and talking?” I said. “Why would that bother anyone? I’m talking about whatever it is that made them hire all the extra detectives and dogs. That scream for instance, the other day. Do you know what the screaming was about?”

Sara started playing with her straw again, and I could tell she didn’t want to answer, but after I’d asked her again about the scream she finally said, “Yes, I know. There was a lizard in the dressing room. Just a lizard from the Pet Shop. A big green one.”

I started to laugh. It hit me all of a sudden—the picture of some old dame suddenly noticing she was sharing her dressing room with a big green iguana. That would explain the scream all right. “But how did it get there?” I asked. “The Pet Shop is clear down on the first floor.”

“Someone forgot to put it away. I don’t think they meant to frighten anyone.” Sara was leaning towards me and she sounded very serious and kind of apologetic, as if she were worried about what I would think. I wished I could see her eyes. I couldn’t help wondering if the whole thing was some kind of a put-on. She sounded so sincere and on the level, but the whole thing didn’t quite make sense. The whole conversation seemed to have holes in it, like when you tune in late to a mystery program and miss a bunch of important clues.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not sure I know what we’re talking about. It doesn’t matter to me who put the iguana in the dressing room, and I really don’t care whether it was done on purpose or not. But what I would like to know is exactly who you are and what you have to do with the whole thing—and where you get your information. I’m around this store pretty much myself, and usually I hear a lot about what’s going on but—”

Just about then Sara stood up suddenly and looked around. “I have to go now,” she said; and without even waiting for me to answer, she walked out of the Tea Shop. By the time I’d paid for the sodas, she had disappeared. I looked all over the store but I couldn’t find her anywhere.

While I was looking around, it occurred to me that Madame Stregovitch might know something about Sara. In the past I’d found that if there was any interesting gossip going around the store, Madame would be sure to know all about it. I was almost back to Cosmetics before I remembered that it was Madame’s day off. There wasn’t much else I could do right then, so I started down the Mall towards the west entrance. But somewhere along the way, I drifted into the indoor garden. There was still a quarter of an hour until closing time, and I guess I was thinking that if I waited around there was a chance I might see Sara again.

The indoor garden, or the Garden Court as it was called, was one of the most unusual things about Alcott-Simpson’s. It was a large area in the middle of the street floor that looked so much like a real garden you could almost believe it was, unless you looked up and saw the ceiling instead of the sky. The walks were made of something that looked like stone. There were stretches of green carpeting that looked a lot like grass, and dozens of potted shrubs and bushes and even small trees. Here and there there were singing birds in cages and hanging baskets full of fancy flowers like orchids and begonias. The smaller plantings were always being changed to fit the seasons, and at Christmas time it was always made into a winter garden with artificial ice and snow. All through the garden there were little alcoves with benches for shoppers to sit down for a few minutes and catch their breath. Right in the middle of the garden there was a big fountain.

The center part of the fountain was a pyramid of stone cupids and dolphins. The water came out of the dolphins’ mouths and arched down into a large pool. Around the pool was a stone wall about two feet high and wide enough to make a comfortable place to sit. It was always a good place to kill a few extra minutes.

I sat down on the stone wall and wiggled my fingers in the water to make the goldfish curious. I hadn’t seen anyone near the fountain as I came up, but I’d only been sitting there for a few minutes when a toy ship came bobbing into sight from the other side of the pyramid. It was a typical Alcott-Simpson toy, a beautiful scale model of an old Spanish galleon, with three masts full of tiny sails, and ropes and rigging in all the right places. For a second I wondered if someone had left it there, but then I realized that it was moving too fast to be only drifting. Someone on the other side of the stone pyramid had given it a push or else blown into its sails, probably some little kid whose mother had just bought it for him on the fourth floor and who couldn’t wait until he got home to try it out. I started listening then, and sure enough, in a minute I heard something—little kids’ voices whispering right on the other side of the fountain. Because of the noise of the splashing water, I couldn’t make out what they were saying; but I thought I could tell that they were giggling a little, as if they thought they were playing a trick on me—maybe making me think the ship was sailing around under its own power. I decided to go along with the gag, so when the ship got clear around to my side I leaned way out, caught it, turned it around and blew it back the way it had come. It went bobbing back around the fountain, and in a minute I heard giggling again, and in another minute it came sailing back. I was waiting for it to come alongside, and thinking that this time I’d pick it up and carry it back to them just to keep the game from getting monotonous, when I heard the closing bell begin to ring. So I left the game unfinished and hurried off to take a last look through the homeward bound crowds. I didn’t even think much more about it at the time.

T
HAT NIGHT WHILE
I was trying to translate some French sentences, I kept thinking about Sara. I’d translate a few words and then just sit there for several minutes staring into space. After a while I began to realize that I was thinking about Sara all the time, even when I was looking up words and practicing pronunciations. I could be right in the middle of some word, with all the old brain cells clicking away normally, but in some strange sort of way, Sara was there, too, like a shadow hovering right there in the back of my mind. I remember that once, right out loud, I said, “Dion, old pal, you’ve got it bad. You are really
haunted.”

That is the exact word I used—
haunted:
I had a feeling even then that it wasn’t just the ordinary boy-girl thing. Of course I wasn’t any great authority on the subject, but I’d spent some time thinking about girls before. Who hasn’t? I mean, nobody gets to be almost 15 without giving quite a bit of thought to people of the opposite sex. And even though I hadn’t had much experience with girls, because or being out of things all those years, I’d had plenty of chances to make observations and get a lot of general information. Among the people who hung around the Val James Combination Music School—Group Therapy Center—and Soup Kitchen, there had always been a certain percentage of females: friends of Dad’s, or of our renters, or just friends of friends. And I’d had lots of opportunities to observe the kind of hang-ups that people can get into over a person of the opposite sex. But this was different. I didn’t know how or in what way, but I knew this was not the ordinary kind of thing.

When I finally finished my homework, I went into the kitchen for a bedtime snack. Dad was out at one of his musical evenings somewhere, but the college crowd was there as usual. Matt was reading, or trying to, and Phil and Dunc and a friend of theirs named Josh were practicing on their guitars.

Josh was one of the characters who hung around our place a lot, and he and I had never particularly appreciated each other. We get some far-out types around our place, and Josh is one of the farthest. He’s supposed to be some sort of expert on the guitar, and that night he was teaching Phil and Dunc some new picks and strums.

Nobody paid any attention to me, which was fine as far as I was concerned, even if it was my kitchen. I looked around for something to eat, but I couldn’t find much except dirty dishes. Finally I put some butter and brown sugar on a piece of stale bread and poured myself a glass of milk. I sat down to listen to the guitar lesson while I ate.

Josh was trying to show Phil how to do something that looked a lot like the Travis pick, but it seemed to me that neither one of them really knew what he was doing.

I was thinking of saying something about it when Matt, who had quit trying to read and was listening too said, “Di used to do a pick something like that. Didn’t you, Di?”

I nodded. “Something,” I said.

Josh rolled his eyes up at me from under his wad of hair without uncurling from around the guitar. “Yeah?” he said. “Like what?”

“Oh, I just had a melody and a rhythm beat going at the same time. But it wasn’t quite like that.”

“So show us,” Josh said, unwrapping himself and sticking his guitar out in my direction, like he thought I was going to drop my bread and leap across the room to take it.

“No thanks,” I said. “I gave it up.”

“Gave what up?” he said, still holding the guitar out sort of limply.

“The guitar habit. I quit. It takes too much time.”

Josh went on looking at me, and then he looked at Phil and Dunc, and then he shrugged and pulled in his arm. He hunched over and began to strum. “Man,” he muttered into his beard, “this kid has a problem. What is he—about twelve? And already he’s running out of time.”

Phil laughed. “Oh, Di’s all right. It’s just that he’s a throwback. A typical member of the younger generation of 1910.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what he was driving at, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking; so I went back to my bread and sugar, and in a little while Phil and Dunc and their crummy friend straggled out to go to some coffee shop where a lot of their other friends hung out. So Matt and I were left alone in the kitchen.

It was getting cold and Matt got up and rummaged through the wood box for some more stuff to throw on the fire. There wasn’t much left but he managed to stir up a little heat and we both moved closer.

“Is that the straight scoop?” Matt asked. “Have you really quit playing the guitar for good?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I think so.”

“Why?”

“Why not? As far as I can see, this whole music thing is for suckers. There’s almost nothing you can do that takes so much time and work, and what do you get out of it? Maybe one guy in a couple of million gets to where he can make any real money with it. Besides, I’ve got my future all planned and there just isn’t going to be much time for music.”

“I see,” Matt said. Then he just sat there for a long time fooling with his beard and looking at me in a funny way, like he was half amused and half disgusted. I was already beginning to get mad when he started out. “Well, there’s just one thought I’d like to offer. You might very well get to be the one in a couple of million who makes it with music. I’ll bet the odds against being born with the kind of musical talent you have are almost that extreme.”

I laughed. “Thanks,” I said. “But I’ve been through that stage. Daydreaming about being some big star or concert artist. Fat chance. And besides, I don’t have the personality for it. To be a big star, more than half of it is personality—the way you come on. And I just don’t have it.”

“How do you know you don’t?”

“I know. When I went to Lincoln, I used to have to play violin solos with the orchestra.” All of a sudden I was remembering those solos—in the bottom of my stomach. Me limping on stage in my outgrown suit and frozen smile, and the guys from my class giggling in the front row. “It made me sick,” I said. “I mean sick!”