Me and Fat Glenda (2 page)

It sure had made a mess of Toby's education, and if he wasn't a natural-born genius he'd have been in fourth grade at age 16-going-on-17 instead of in his junior year in high school.

During most of the Mayberry travels I either wasn't born yet or got left behind with Pop's Aunt Minna in Crestview, Ohio. Now that was a nice normal place, Crestview. In some ways Aunt Minna was a more pleasant version of Mrs. Hinkle and with a much nicer house. All sunshiny smiles, starched white curtains, milk and fresh doughnuts every afternoon after school, and roast chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy on Sunday—that was Aunt Minna.

Inez didn't exactly approve of Aunt Minna. “A narrow-minded old fuddy-duddy,” Inez called her, “who'll hand the child creature comforts while lulling her mind to sleep and instilling all sorts of prejudices.”

Aunt Minna
was
pretty straight I guess. Just a nice older lady who watched television a lot and went to church suppers and had never traveled farther than Columbus (Ohio—not Christopher). But sometimes I got homesick for her and for Crestview after Inez and Drew and Toby came back from that last trip (to a Greek island called Astypalaia where Pop was making a survey of life styles among the sponge fishermen) and we set up house in California.

“So when will I ever see you again?” I said to Toby,
leaning forward with both elbows on the table and my woebegone face between my palms. “I mean after we leave here, which is like two weeks from now.”

Toby grinned that crooked little grin of his that makes you love him and hate him at the exact same moment. “Oh, don't worry,” he said, getting up from the table and hitching up his Levi's. “I'll see ya around.” He gave me a sort of mock punch on the chin—for love, I guess.

Just at that moment Mom exclaimed from the living room, “They're here!”

I got up and ran to the kitchen windows, which like all the windows in our house had no curtains or shades or blinds on them because Inez said windows were to SEE through. But all I saw out in the yard was a big, old open truck painted dirty yellow and filthy white that belonged to the Pine Ridge Township sanitation department.

“Hey, what do you know,” I remarked to Toby who was already out of the room, “Pop's giving up his junk after all.”

But the two figures that jumped down from the cab of the truck weren't garbage men at all. They were friends of Drew—beards, sandals, Levi's, the usual bit. In no time at all, Pop was out there with them and they were all three heaving the disassembled junk into the back of the truck.

Inez was standing at the living-room window, gazing
out at the scene with complete rapture and murmuring over and over again, “Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous.”

“He's getting rid of it after all, huh?” I said, going over to watch alongside her.

“Rid?” she said absently, “rid? Oh no, baby, no, that stuffs all going with us.” And she seemed so happy she crouched down and put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me.

“
With
us?”

“Uh huh.”

“In
that
?”

“Uh huh.”

“In a garbage truck?”

“Uh huh.”

“We're going to drive across the United States, to New York, in a garbage truck?”

“Uh huh. Got it cheap as dirt from the township. They're putting in a whole new fleet. With enclosed bodies and interior grinding apparatus—oh, you know the kind. But isn't this one just splendid! Big and sturdy and tough, with a roomy cab for the three of us to sit in. And enough space to carry everything. Can you honestly think of anything better?”

And to tell you the truth, considering my family and all, I honestly couldn't.

But even so, as I watched through the window, angry tears spurted from my eyes. And through the blur, bigger
than life, I could just see us all—Drew and Inez and me, Sara—riding all the way from California to New York in a grimy yellow and white garbage truck with the words D
EPARTMENT OF
S
ANITATION
, P
INE
R
IDGE
T
OWNSHIP, COLONNA
C
OUNTY
, C
ALIFORNIA
, printed in big black letters on both sides of it.

P.S. I guess I never did say what the D in D-burger stood for
.

The answer is dog. Not for dog food (although I thought of that; some of it is real tasty). D is for dog like in hotdog. Sliced crosswise into circles, fried, and sprinkled on top of the hamburgers. And let me tell you, dog-burgers are GOOD
.

S..M
.

2

Well, I won't even tell you about the ride across the U.S. in the P
INE
R
IDGE
T
OWNSHIP
garbage truck except to say that it took six weeks and people kept giving us odder and odder looks the farther we got from California.

The reason it took six weeks wasn't only because a garbage truck is about as fast-moving as a sea turtle in the Arabian desert, or because we had to use a lot of back roads because of different state turnpike regulations. It also took six weeks because we kept hopping from the house of one friend or relative of Drew or Inez to another.

And each place we stayed we spent a couple of days getting cleaned up, rinsing out our jeans and leotards and waiting for them to dry, and most of all waiting for the vibrations in our bone marrow to stop. Then back in the truck we'd climb and the whole thing would start all over again.

You have to understand that Drew had a lot of friends who seemed to be sprinkled across the United States like stepping stones across a river. And whenever there was a little too much space between the stones for a convenient
jump, there was always a relative of Inez to fill in the gap.

This was easy because Mom is one of the most mixed-blooded persons you're ever likely to meet. She's part Irish, part German, part French-Canadian, and part American Indian—just for a start. The first night out from home we stayed with one of her third cousins on an Indian reservation in Arizona. We also made stops with Mom's relations in Nebraska and Wisconsin and we even looped up into Canada to see some of the French great-aunts and uncles. But the one place we didn't go was Crestview, Ohio.

“It's completely out of the way,” Inez declared when I suggested it and Drew said why didn't we at least give it a “maybe.”

“No,” Inez said with finality. “We'll
never
get to New York at this rate.”

Well, if I ever showed you a diagram of our route from California to New York, you'd think a giant serpent had been wriggling its way across the U. S. Out of our way? What way? A bunch of crazy curlicues that inched along in the general direction known as east.

So I never did get to see Aunt Minna again. Pop tried to be consoling, especially when I cried a lot in Pittsburgh after I got hold of the road map and found out we were only about an inch and a quarter away from Crestview, Ohio.

Even with all the people we kept stopping off to see,
and lots of them with kids my age, the trip was awfully lonely. Then, too, all of my friends from California were left behind, probably forever, and I didn't know if I would find any new ones when we got to New York.

Most of all I missed Toby. Every time I ate a hamburger I thought of him, and you can imagine how often that was, since I practically lived on hamburgers the whole time. Toby and I had stopped our alphabet-burgers at the letter K (kraut-burgers), and I knew I just wouldn't have the heart to go on with the alphabet-burgers without him.

So, all in all, I was just as glad the day we rolled into Mill River, Long Island, New York, where the college was. All the buildings—if you can imagine this—were built in California Spanish-mission style and painted banana-yellow!

Inez took one look at them and laughed so hard she thought her leotards would split. “That architecture makes about as much sense as calling this place Mill River. It hasn't got a mill anywhere in sight, and there isn't a river within leagues of the place. Bays and oceans and sounds all around, but no river.”

Well,
we
looked pretty silly, too. The truck was by now the color of U. S. road dust that had been patty-caked by rain into an all-over coating of mud (which was a blessing because it covered the lettering on the sides). The college guard wouldn't let us on the campus
and made us drive around to the service entrance when Drew wanted to report to the administration office and find out about our housing.

Pop was gone a pretty long time, and when he came back he didn't say a word, just climbed into the truck and started shifting gears.

“Where is it?” I asked, looking around at the wide gravel drives and big empty lawns that surrounded the three-story banana buildings. “Is it near?” There were still three weeks to go before the college opened for fall classs and the place was almost deserted.

“I just hope it's spacious and roomy,” Inez remarked. “I don't care if it doesn't have a stick of furniture in it. As long as it's not one of those little boxes divided into compartments like an egg crate. Most of the houses I've seen here in the East looked pretty discouraging.”

Pop muttered something, and Mom said, “What?”

“I said,” Drew repeated rather louder than was necessary, “you won't like it.”

Inez got that wide-eyed expression that usually meant trouble.

We were still within sight of the campus, driving past a long, low two-story building that looked like an army barracks, when Drew began slowing down. Pretty soon he stopped altogether. From the way he was squinting through the window of the truck cab, you could tell he was trying to make out an address.

“Se-ven-tee
four
. That's it.”

“No!” Inez exploded after a short pause. “I won't. I won't live in a box. I'll live in a truck. I'll live in a field. I'll even live in a tent. But I won't live in a box!”

“It's not a box,” Drew said quietly. “It's a ‘garden apartment.' We've got the one on the upper-floor. Five rooms. A lot of the college faculty who are on short-term contracts live here.”

“Not me.”

“It's only for a year.”

“Never.”

“It gets cold in the winter in New York, I. This place has steam heat.”

“No.”

“It has a completely remodeled modern kitchen, with a wall oven.”

“What do I care? We don't need a kitchen. We eat raw food. Remember?”

“
I
don't,” I reminded Inez.

“Well, you should,” she snapped. “It's healthier.”

“Let's just look at it anyway,” Pop suggested. “Yes, let's,” I urged. It was a steamy-hot day and I was dying for a shower. Any place with a wall oven was sure to have a bathroom—and those
were
necessary. But Inez never seemed to think about things like that.

Besides, a few people had passed by and had looked up at the truck with curiosity. One lady was peering down
at us from an upstairs window in the apartment next to ours, and another woman who was weeding a flower bed on the Kleenex-sized lawn in front of her apartment kept looking up at us through a clump of dangling weeds.

“All right,” Inez said at last. “I'll look but I won't like—and I won't stay. They definitely wrote you they would provide housing. This is not a house. It's not even a box.”

“That's true,” Drew said. “It's not a house. It's housing. There's a difference. You should have looked that up, I, while we were still back in California, before you went jumping to conclusions.”

“I won't unpack,” Inez said after she'd made a quick tour of the five rooms furnished with colonial-style furniture that probably would have looked better somewhere else. (In a colonial-style house, I guess.) The rooms weren't really so little, though, and I myself thought the place could have been fixed up to be rather cozy for a normal family. But we Mayberrys weren't a normal family, so that put an end to that.

Drew kept staring out the rear windows of the apartment.

“That does it,” he said after awhile. “
We
won't unpack.”

“Oh, I'm glad to hear you say that,” Inez exclaimed.

Drew kept right on staring out the window and shaking his head in disbelief and disappointment. “I thought
there'd be a big expanse of ground back there, a place where a person could do a little construction. There's nothing. Just a roadway directly behind the buildings and then a string of garages.”

“We'll camp,” Inez said excitedly. “We won't unpack. We'll just camp, right here in the—ugh—apartment. And we'll go scouting every day. There must be real towns around here somewhere, with real houses in them. I thought I spotted a few rustic-looking places after we left the Expressway this morning. There are three weeks to go before classes begin and before school starts for Sara. I'm sure we'll find some place to live.”

And there was Mom consoling Pop as though he'd been the one to practically throw a temper tantrum at the start. Of course all this talk about to-unpack-or-not-to-unpack was silly. The apartment was already pretty full of furniture and there was no attic or basement or backyard shed, so how
could
we unload looms and zithers and iron spikes from the Union Pacific Railroad? We just brought in our clothes and got ready to spend a couple of nights there, just as though we were still traveling across the U.S. on our way to somewhere.