Authors: Lila Perl
P.S. I guess you're dying to know what L-burgers are
.
Well, even if you're not, I'll tell you anyway, because right now I need all the friends I can get. Limburger-burgers. Honest. Once you get past the smell, the taste isn't bad at all
.
S.M
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Two days later, we moved in. Glenda was there all right, watching the unloading of the garbage truck. Her eyes were ordinarily kind of narrow and slitlike because her cheeks were so chubby. But that day they were really popping.
“Is that your Mom?” she asked, when Inez got down from the truck and started lugging her zithers and harps and lyres into the house. I just nodded casually.
“I guess she's dressed like that on account of it's moving day.”
“No,” I said, just as coolly as before, “she always dresses like that.”
I had been trying to cut the grass in the front yard with a squeaky old lawn mower that Drew and I found in the shed the day before. But it was no good at all. So now I was cutting it, practically blade by blade, with a hand clipper that was like a scissors held sideways, also very rusty and squeaky. Glenda was just sitting there on a big rock watching me and chewing on a 16-inch blade of grass.
“
My
Mom's too fat to wear tight pants and leotards and things like that. Although once, believe it or not, she tried to.” Glenda spluttered into an explosion of laughter at the memory. “She went to this exercise class, see. And she bought a pair of black tights and a top. Only she didn't get them big enough because she was on a crash diet at the time and she figured she'd be losing weight real fast. And you know what? She split 'em! Right in the class, right in the middle of the exercise lesson. Oh boy, was she ever mad. She came home and ate a whole pint of cherry-cheesecake ice cream, just for spite. Say, ever try that? There's a place around here that has all those great flavors. Mmmm, they're yummy. I could go for a supercone right now. This grass tastes rotten.”
Since Glenda herself had brought up the subject of weight, I figured it was okay to say something about it. “You ought to exercise more yourself, Glenda. Even this grass-cutting, crawling around on all foursâit bums up calories, you know. Better than sitting.”
Glenda looked doubtful. “We have a gardener who comes around to take care of our place,” she said. “My Mom gets palpitations if she works out in the garden, and my father has to watch his back or it goes out of whack. You ought to get one, too. A gardener, I mean.”
“Drew's going to get a scythe and chop all this down. Then it'll be much easier to mow,” I said.
“Yeah, but it's still going to look all scraggly. No one's
lived here for over a year, and the people who lived here before never took care of the yard. It's terribly neglected.
“What were they like?”
“Who?”
“The spiritualists. That Madame Cecilia.”
“Oh, then you know about them?”
“Of course. Mr. Creasey told us all about it. How come they got run out of the neighborhood? Were they really so awful?”
“Well sure. You should have seen what they looked like. Well, Madame Cecilia wasn't so bad except she dressed kind of funny and had this crazy way of talking. But some of the othersâwow. One of them was an Indian. Supposed to be a swami or something. From India. Black hair, real dark skin. You know. He moved in after Madame Cecilia had been here awhile. He used to help her with her spook sessions. And then there were a couple of gypsies who moved in with her, both of them dirty-looking. They could hardly speak English. Don't know where they came from.”
“I don't know,” I said slowly, “it sounds kind of fun to me.” Glenda was still sitting on her rock and I was crawling around her in a widening circle, snipping away to make a flat place in the grass. “In the town where we lived in California there were all kinds of peopleâMexican, Chinese, Japanese. . . .”
Glenda sniffed. “My mother says California is for
kooks. She says she wouldn't live there.”
“Do you believe everything your mother says? I mean you never really saw California, did you? And even if she was right, what's so bad about kooks? Does everybody have to be the same?”
Glenda tossed away the blade of grass she was chewing on. She looked out past the front yard and past the picket fence, squinting hard, as though maybe she'd find the answer to my question out there. I followed her glance but there was nothing out in the street except three little girls, about eight or nine years old, wheeling fancy doll carriages and wearing their mothers' high-heeled shoes.
“Listen,” Glenda said, suddenly leaning forward on her rock so that her legs just about came bursting through the husky-size light-blue denim jeans she was wearing, “you ask too many questions. I gotta think about all that stuff. All I know is, my Mom was real good to Madame Cecilia when she first moved in. My Mom used to come over here and chat with her. Sometimes she brought a pot of soup. Madame Cecilia was awfully skinny. She didn't do much food-shopping or cooking. She used to say her spirits brought her food.”
“I thought your Mom and the other neighbors didn't like Madame Cecilia because she was running a business in the neighborhood.”
Glenda looked confused. “Well, they didn't. But it
wasn't so bad in the beginning. It was only after those weirdos began moving in with her.”
“You mean if somebody was running a business like a dressmaker's or an undertaker's or something like that in the neighborhood it would be okay just as long as they didn't have any dirty-looking people who couldn't speak English working for them?”
“Oh crumb,” Glenda shrilled, pulling her fingers through her crinkly yellow hair in exasperation. “How should I know? There's probably some law against that, too.”
I got up on my knees and pushed the hair out of my eyes. Between the grass clippings and trying to talk some kind of sense to Glenda, I was getting pretty tired.
“Well,” I said, “I think it was kind of mean to kick the poor old lady out. I like gypsies and all that stuff.”
Glenda grunted. “Well, you wouldn't like 'em living next door to you.”
She got up from the rock and pulled the bottoms of her jeans down to her ankles. They had crept up and caught around her calves while she was sitting. Then she smoothed her shirt down over her stomach. She was always arranging her clothes like that. What a mountain of jelly! In spite of all the stupid things she'd been saying, I couldn't help feeling sorry for her. Anyhow, you could see she didn't really know any better. She was just rebroadcasting everything she'd heard her mother say.
“Listen,” Glenda said, “I'm getting hungry. How about you coming over to my house for lunch? Think your Mom would let you?”
Let me? Glenda didn't know my Mom. I jumped inside the house, hoping Glenda wouldn't follow me.
Inez was setting up her harpsichord in the dining room. The living-room floor was full of those big pots she used for batiking and linen-dyeing and such. There was a den off the living room, and I could see Inez' and Drew's bedrolls and a couple of knapsacks dumped in there. I guess that's where they had decided they would sleep. My air mattress was probably upstairs in one of the bedrooms. At least, I hoped that was where it was. (My family never slept in beds because they were so heavy and clumsy to lug around.)
I kept looking behind me, just to make sure Glenda hadn't decided to trail me into the house after all, while I told Inez I was going over to Glenda's for lunch.
“Fine,” Inez said, wincing at the same time because of a sour twang from one of the keys she was fingering on the harpsichord. “Drew and I are having wheat germ and black grapes and Roquefort cheese for lunch. You probably wouldn't care for that. Have a good time.”
Glenda's house was just the way I'd expected it to be inside. It had rugs and lamps, tables and chairs, wallpaper and window drapes. The beds were in the bedrooms and
the food was in the kitchen. And what food! The kitchen table, set into a dining nook, had a great big shiny chocolate cake sitting on it. I thought I'd just about go out of my mind.
Meantime, Glenda was at the refrigerator bringing out bread and butter and mayonnaise and lettuce and sliced tomatoes and pickles and milk. From somewhere else, she got a big bowl of potato chips and a platter of crisp fried bacon.
“See, I thought we'd have bacon-and-tomato sandwiches. You like those?”
“Mmmm, do I.”
“My Mom's not home. She's at a luncheon. She goes to a luncheon just about every other day. That's why she has this weight problem. But she can't help it, see. Because she belongs to all these clubs and organizations, and she's on all these committees. She knows about a million people. Boy, you can never get us on the phone because she's always on it. Talk, talk, talk. My father says she talks enough for both of them. That's why he doesn't talk much.
“My Mom made the cake. We'll have some for dessert. It's from a mix but she adds things and fixes it up so it tastes like real homemade. She won't tell anyone the secret. Not anyone. She fried the bacon for my lunch before she left and said it was all right if I asked you over.”
I eyed the platter of bacon. It was enough for about
six sandwichesâand not the kind you get at the 5-and-10 lunch counter, either.
“Of course, my Mom'll be dropping in at your house to say hello and meet your folks, maybe in a day or two. She thought it would be better to let them get settled a little first. But she's real friendly. You'll see. I'll bet she'll be inviting your Mom over for cake and coffee first thing.”
All this time, Glenda was busy making toast and slicing pickles and tearing off chunks of lettuce. When it came to preparing something to eat, you couldn't accuse her of not getting plenty of exercise.
“How do you like our house?” she asked, crunching a mouthful of potato chips.
“It's great,” I said, peering into the dining room and beyond that to the living room. In many ways it reminded me of Aunt Minna's except that it was much bigger. And although Aunt Minna had a lot of old things, all very neat and clean of course, everything in Glenda's house seemed new and shiny and expensive.
“It's so . . . planned out,” I said. “Everything matches. I mean, it all goes together.”
“That's because my Mom had it done by an interior decorator. You know, one of those ladies who always keep their hats on. Of course, my Mom didn't follow
everything
she said. A lot of it was her own idea, too. That's so there'd be some . . . individuality.”
By this time, we were wolfing down the first of the sandwiches. Glenda made them so thick that slices of tomato came squooshing out from between the slices of toast and, while you were pushing them back in, strips of bacon came shooting out from the other side.
“These really are good,” I said. “They're even better than alphabet-burgers.”
Glenda actually stopped eating and looked at me in astonishment. “Than what?”
“Alphabet-burgers. Oh, you wouldn't know what they are. Nobody does. Because Toby and I invented them a couple of months ago. They never existed before that.”
“Who's Toby?” Glenda pounced.
“My brother Toby.”
“I didn't know you had a brother. Little or big?”
“Sixteen, going on seventeen.”
Glenda smiled slyly. “Well, what do you know about that! But, wait a minute. Where is he? Hey, he's not in reform school or something like that?”
“Of course not! What an idea.”
“Oh well, I'm just asking. I didn't mean anything bad. See, I know a kid from around here who nearly went to reform school. Same age. He goes to Havenhurst High. I bet you wouldn't believe that, from this kind of a neighborhood and all.”
I told Glenda about Toby staying in California with the Gonzaga family so he could finish school there, but
I could see she thought it was a peculiar arrangement.
“What's he like, anyway? Is he cute?”
“Very.” I could see Glenda was interested, so I rubbed it in good about how terrific-looking Toby was and how independent and how we always had a thousand girls hanging around our house in California just waiting to get a look at him and hoping he'd take notice of them.
“Hmmm. I hope I get to meet him one of these days.” Glenda was taking a breather between sandwiches, leaning forward with her elbows on the table and her knuckles curled up against her temples and a dreamy expression on her face. “So what about these alphabet-burgers that you two invented?”
I told her the whole story, but leaving out the stuff about Inez' and Drew's raw-food kick and all the other diets they'd been on. Then I told her what A-burgers and B-burgers stood for, and said she should try to guess the rest we had invented up to L. C was easy, of course, but she got stuck on D. I knew she would. So I told her I'd let her be a partner, starting with M-burgers, if she guessed five of the ten letters from C to L. She already had C, so she only needed four more. Without Toby around I sure could use another person to share alphabet-burgers with. And who was there to choose from, aside from Glenda?