Leo the Lioness (2 page)

“We have to start thinking about the party and the presents,” he would say around the middle of October.

“Good heavens,” my mother said, “it's not for months yet. It seems as if we just had a birthday. Don't make me age so fast. We still have Christmas to get through.”

“It's not too early to start thinking about my birthday,” John said. He can be very stubborn at times. This is an outstanding characteristic of people born under the sign of Taurus. The Bull, you know.

“I would like a bird's nest and an aquarium and a flashlight. That is all.”

“Make a list,” my mother said.

I helped him with the spelling and he made a list. My mother put it somewhere and then she couldn't remember where, which was all right because John changed his mind several times before he settled on what he really wanted.

Which was an ant farm and a Kennedy half dollar.

He got both.

4.

My father said, “What's in the stars today, Lioness?” He calls me that because, as I said, I am a Leo. I do not let him leave for work in the morning without reading him his horoscope which comes in the morning paper. We also get an evening paper which has another horoscope for the following day, so that way we have the whole twenty-four-hour period covered.

“Just a minute, Dad,” I said. I have to read my own first. “Look away from your own problems,” it said, “and listen to those of your friends.”

Well. My own problems are so many and so varied that I do not know if it is possible for me to look away from them. Most of my friends have similar problems, which in itself proves to be a problem. I can't see the forest for the trees, as the old saying goes. I think it was Shakespeare but I'm not absolutely certain.

Most of my friends are worried because they are too tall or too short or too fat or too thin or they have bad breath or perspiration odor or one of those. There is that to be said for television; when you watch those commercials over and over it makes you much more conscious of all the things that could go wrong. I never realized getting yourself to smell sweet and be reasonably presentable was such an enormous undertaking until those commercials pointed out to me all the things that could go wrong. It is a very depressing thing to see those commercials one after another. You would have to have an enormous amount of self-confidence not to get depressed.

O.K. So I press on to my father's horoscope.

“Your ideas should be kept for a better time and place,” I read to him. “Turn to young people for a lift.”

“For a lift?” my father said. “Good gravy! Young people are going to drive me either to the loony bin or to the poorhouse. One way or the other, they're going to get me. I'm going to write to that horoscope expert and demand my money back.”

My father is a Scorpio. He is musical and plays the harmonica very well. He also sings, but only old songs like “Deep Purple” or “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” And he says
our
songs are dumb.

He is very clever with his hands and has wallpapered the hall and the dining room. He does a better job than a professional, which he will tell you himself. My mother is the painter in the family. She paints the woodwork and the window sashes, only she is not as careful as he is and he goes around and inspects her work after she is finished and points out spots she missed. All of which drives her crazy.

He also built a bookcase in the hall and we almost never have to have a plumber in because he is a first-class operator with the plunger and stuff like that. When John was small he used to throw quite a few articles down the toilet. It saves a lot of money to have someone in the house who knows how to put in new washers and fix stoves, which he also does.

John is very proud of using my father's tools and is constantly making off with hammers and screwdrivers so that when Dad wants to use them, they are gone. Then my father hollers and tells John to go and find them, which he usually does, only by that time they are so rusty, due to the fact they have been rained on quite a lot, that they are no longer any good.

John has his own set of tools, small ones, but he likes my father's big ones better.

That figures.

5.

“Tibb, really!” my mother said. “I've asked you three times to get the groceries out of the car.”

“I didn't hear you the last two,” I said. “How come Nina-concertina can't manage it?”

“I asked you.”

I really like my mother, although she and I aren't hitting it off too well lately. We used to get on very well together and once in a while would have a conversation that, if anyone overheard it, they would probably think we were friends and not relatives at all. But recently we seem to snap at each other quite a bit. I have heard about the change of life but I don't think she is going through that because she is only thirty-eight. A well-preserved thirty-eight, as she would be only too glad to tell you.

So I decided I would go and get the groceries out of the car and not say anything more about Nina, who goofs off every time she hears the car come into the driveway. She runs into the bathroom and locks the door and turns the shower on. My mother, whom I consider a reasonably bright person, falls for it every time.

I took the watermelon out of the back seat and also the sack of potatoes. I tried balancing the potatoes on my head but they were too lumpy so they smashed to the pavement.

My mother watched from the front door.

“They're only potatoes,” I said. “I wouldn't have tried it if they'd been eggs.”

“I'd hate to put any money on it,” my mother said.

“Tibb,” she said while we were putting the groceries away, “you're getting awfully leggy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm getting pretty army, too.”

That is true. My arms seem to be getting longer and longer. I am really a little worried about them. Suppose they keep on growing until they hit the ground? What then? If I were friends with Nina and Jen, I would ask them if they thought my arms were getting unnaturally long. But I am not friends with them and my other good friends have gone away for the summer. I have this friend — Susan Friend is her name (would you believe it?) — and her father and mother took her to Europe this summer. She does not speak a foreign language. She has taken French for about a billion years but she can hardly ask for a pencil or say
Bonjour
, so you just know she won't be able to communicate. Anyway, she was practically in a catatonic state about the whole thing. Catatonic is one of the words I have just discovered and use with some frequency, mostly because it drives Nina up the wall. She pretends that she knows what it means and that it is not worthy of her attention, but I know when I say somebody is in a catatonic state, she grits her teeth and wants to smack me. For some reason, this gives me a great deal of pleasure.

I got a post card from Susan the other day from Rome. She wrote: “There are a lot of cathedrals here. Also there seem to be a great many Italians. See ya, Sue.”

I read it a couple of times. Susan is the kind of person that, when she says something like that, you don't know whether she is putting you on or whether she actually finds it strange that there are a lot of Italians in Rome. We have been friends for ages but she is not all that bright. I find when you have friends for a long time, you find other qualities in them which make up for lack of brains. Susan is a Virgo, having been born the twenty-third of August, which means she just missed being a Leo. I would never say it to her, of course, but I secretly feel that this one day might have made all the difference.

“Mom,” I said when we finally finished our job and she was making up a list of all the things she'd forgotten at the store, “I think I'm finally there.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Where the brook and the river meet,” I said.

About two years ago, when Nina first became difficult, my mother said that Nina was where the brook and the river met and we would all have to be patient. At that time I was not sure what she meant but now I have figured it out. At that time, also, I hoped that I would never get to that spot because I might get washed away. I thought that was pretty good, but I kept it to myself. Sometimes it is best to keep your witticisms to yourself until the appropriate time comes.

This was the appropriate time.

“Oh, dear,” my mother said.

“Yes,” I said, “I fear that I am there. I just hope I don't get washed away.”

My mother looked at me.

“Is that original?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I thought of it just now.” I added that white lie because it made the story better.

“You won't,” she said, patting my cheek. “You won't. It may be quite a swim, but I have faith in you.”

“So do I,” John said from under his hat. He goes to this Y day camp where they teach him to make lanyards. He has so many lanyards around his neck he can hardly walk.

For some reason I felt quite happy.

6.

“How was your date?” I asked Jen. She had come over to return a lasagna pan her mother had borrowed from mine. It was the first time I'd seen her since she'd changed her name. I avoided calling her anything.

Jen flicked her eyelashes at me. She had forgotten that I know that when she flicks her eyelashes, she is getting ready to tell a lie. Not a white lie, a whopper.

“Gawd, he was something,” she said. Jen and Nina and others in their crowd have taken to saying “Gawd,” which for some reason they think is not as profane as saying “God.” It is all part of the pattern of self-deception I was talking about.

“How do you mean, ‘something'?”

“Well, he had a black beard and sideburns and everything,” Jen said. “My mother practically had a cow when she saw him. If he hadn't been a son of a friend, she would've never allowed me to go out with him.”

That is probably true. I have noticed that if your mother knows a boy's mother and they happen to be old school chums, she will let her daughter go out with him even if he should prove to be an incipient rapist. This is horribly strange but true.

“He's going to go out for the wrestling team when he gets to college and he has these fantastic muscles and all.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Don't be sarcastic,” Jen said.

“Who's being sarcastic? All I said was ‘Wow.'”

“It's the way you said it.”

“What'd you tell him your name was?” I couldn't resist asking.

“I told him my name was Jennifer but my friends call me Niffy. He thought it was cute.”

“He sounds like a winner,” I said. “Did he ask you to go out again?”

Jen flicked her eyelashes like mad. “He said when he gets up to college and gets settled and all, he'll write and arrange a date. Maybe a prom weekend.”

“Does he know how old you are?” I asked.

“I told him I was almost sixteen,” Jen said. “I hope he doesn't check with his mother.”

“Mothers never remember how old other people's kids are,” I said. It has been my experience that this is true. They always think other people's kids are a lot younger than they really are.

“I can just see your mother's face when you ask her if you can go to a college weekend,” I said. “What'll you do if he tries to make out with you?”

“I'll cross that bridge when I come to it,” Jen said airily. “I can handle boys. I just finished reading an article on how to stop boys who get fresh and still make them like you.”

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“You remain good-humored,” Jen said and I could see she had memorized the article. “You sort of slither away but always keep a smile on your face and toss off a little joke so he won't get angry at being rejected.”

“You better keep a stockpile of little jokes on hand,” I said. “I understand boys are out for just one thing. S-E-X.”

I had heard enough conversations among older girls, not to mention my contemporaries, to know that very few boys, and they have to be queer, are content just to hold hands any more. Or even with kissing. They are always pawing girls and sticking their tongues in their mouths and disgusting things like that. It occurred to me that boys my own age have to overcome quite a few inhibitions of their own. You can't tell me that all boys, regardless, want to leap on top of a girl and make out when they're just out for a movie or a soda or something. That's ridiculous. Anyway, not all boys know what to do. They don't know all that much about sex. And people say the sex urge is the strongest drive in man. Well, maybe. I know it's supposed to be practically overpowering. I still give boys credit for some kind of discrimination so that they don't want to have sex with everything in skirts. That doesn't sound likely. Most of my friends wear pants more frequently than they wear skirts, but you know what I mean. In any event, I get kind of hysterical thinking of the boys in my class, most of them quite a bit smaller than I am and infinitely less mature, taking a girl out and all of a sudden getting passionate and everything.

It cracks me up.

“When's his birthday?” I asked.

“Oh, you and your signs of the zodiac,” Jen sighed. “He was seventeen on April second.”

“Oh, oh,” I said. “Aries the Ram.” I know a lot about Aries males because last year I was in love with Marlon Brando and he is an Aries so I found out all about the Aries male. I hasten to add that I am no longer in love with Marlon Brando. It was just a fleeting thing that came about when I happened to see an early movie of his on “The Late Show.” I thought he was fantastic at the time.

“That means he is creative, a bad credit risk, and a natural rebel,” I ticked off. “Also the Ram is unlikely to commit himself physically to more than one woman at a time.”

“Well, gee, golly, that makes me feel better,” Jen said. “For Gawd's sake, I went out with the guy once, I'm not engaged to him.”