The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper (6 page)

“They're not such a waste. They're a form of theater. If you watch them good, and I'm a good watcher for the same reason that I'm a good listener, you can find the people who have dragons. They're the people to seek out.”

Andy hardly noticed that she had mentioned dragons again; he was wondering if the Yakotses were on the invitation list. All the invitations had been addressed, ready to be mailed on Monday. He decided that it would be interesting to check when he got home. It would be nice (and also not nice) if they were invited. If they were, they were. And if they were not, they were not. He, Andy, certainly wouldn't do anything to help one way or another. If Edie came, she would probably wave like a windmill all during the ceremony and talk to everyone all out of sync and embarrass him. To death. In front of all the rest of Foxmeadow plus two families' worth of relatives.

Sister Henderson returned to the car, still shaking her head. “Brother say he supprized at you, too. He say that if you hit, you'll break up the ole Banks.” She continued mumbling all the way home. Andy paid no attention.

Construction activity, on the hospital, had picked up, and some of the side streets were temporarily blocked by concrete mixers and sand trucks moving across them. They did not get lost again, but they did get slowed down
jogging in and out of side streets; it was past five when they pulled into Edie's driveway.

Andy popped out of the car, “See ya, Yakots,” he yelled.

“Wait a minute,” Edie said. “I made you pysanky.”

“Are you being vulgar again?”

“Come see,” Edie insisted.

She led Andy through the house to the kitchen where an old wicker basket, a small one, was sitting on the counter top. Inside the basket were the three most beautifully decorated eggs that Andy had ever seen in his life. No green fake straw. Just the eggs.

Stay cool, Andy thought to himself. Stay cool. “They're neat,” he said. He cleared his throat and added, “They're very neat. You might even say that they're extremely neat.” Edie watched him, eyes bright, nodding. He looked up and caught her eye. “Oh, well, Yakots, these are absolutely the most gorgeous Easter eggs I have ever
seen in my entire life. How in the world do you do them?”

“They're Ukrainian. My grandmother taught me. They're called
pysanky.
Someone has to make them at Easter. The fate of the world depends on it. If no one makes pysanky, the chained monster will break out and devour us all.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“It's an old Ukrainian belief. The Ukraine is part of the USSR.”

“I didn't realize that they had dragons in communism.”

“Dragons are everywhere. Even on the other side of the world in China. You have to hunt for them in Foxmeadow. The dragon is a necessary creature. You've got to know your dragon, but you've also got to keep him under control. That's why I make pysanky every Easter.”

“May I take my eggs home? My pysanky?”

“They're for you and your dragon,” Edie said.

Andy started out the door, carrying the basket. He turned and said, “Don't taper any more toward normal, please. When your sentences improve, you become very hard to understand.”

“You'll understand me better when you understand your dragon.”

Andy opened his mouth to say something but said, “Well, Happy Easter,” instead. After he closed the door he leaned against the jamb and whispered, “I think she's nuts, for God's sake.
‘The dragon is a necessary creature'!
I just draw them. She really believes in them, for God's sake!”

His house was still empty when he arrived home. He
carried the basket to his room and put it on the highest bookshelf so that it would be safe. The eggs were safe there, but he couldn't see them. He moved them to his desk. He lay across his bed and couldn't see them while lying down, so he tenderly moved them over to the edge where he could. He lay back down on his bed and smiled at his pysanky. He realized that that was not a cool, tough thing to do. But it was perfectly all right to do it. He was alone, and no one was there for him to be cool for.

He wandered around upstairs, into Mary Jane's room. Presents, boxes of new clothes and honeymoon underwear and travel folders were heaped on the extra twin bed, on her dresser, on the floor. He wandered back into his room to allow the pysanky to catch his eye as he walked past his desk. Then he went into his parents' room and walked around. The pysanky would never fit on his mother's desk. Hers was covered with two big boxes of invitations, standing on edge like files in a drawer. They were all addressed and stamped. Ready to go. Lying on top of the boxes was a list of those who were invited. His mother would check them off as they accepted by return mail. Seven pages of legal-sized lined yellow paper, stapled together. Andy looked for the Y's.
Yakots
was not there. That settled that. No worry about Edie's acting foolish at the wedding.

He walked back into his room to let the basket catch his eye again. It did. He took it from the desk and lifted the eggs, one by one. What a lot of work went into each.

He wouldn't mind if his mother had invited Edie. She
had invited practically everyone else in Foxmeadow. She could have invited the Yakotses—even if they were only renting.

He examined the eggs again. He wished he had a grandmother who could teach him skills of the Ukrainian tribe. Or any tribe. The only tribal skill his mother could pass down was her tennis forehand. He wished he were Ukrainian. Of course, he didn't believe that about the dragon and the fate of the world. He didn't believe in dragons. He believed in being cool and tough and famous. Now, if Edie were cool, he wouldn't mind if his mother had invited her.

He wandered back into his mother's room. There were stacks of extra invitations and there was a stack of small squares of tissue paper. There were envelopes in three sizes, two with stickum and one without. Invitations to weddings were very complicated. Maybe that was the tribal skill that his mother would pass down to him—invitation assemblage.

They couldn't be that hard to assemble, he thought. Just put smaller parts into bigger parts and put a piece of tissue between each part. That's hardly anything at all to learn, for God's sake. Who did his mother think she was?—passing down a silly bit of a skill like that and not inviting Edie besides. After Edie had gone to all that trouble to make him pysanky.

He returned to his room, carrying the assembled invitation. He took his first and second grade report cards from his desk drawer. Before he had learned to write, his
mother had signed all of his school reports.
Vivian J. Chronister.
(He got the J. in his name from her, from
Jackson,
his mother's maiden name.) He addressed an invitation to Mr. and Mrs. Harry Yakots in his mother's handwriting, then he walked back to his mother's desk and placed the Yakotses between the Wylies and the Yeagers. His forgery was fine. Quite neat. Ball point pens helped. They made handwriting look loopy and undistinguished.

When he finally sat back down at his own desk, he placed the basket of pysanky in full view. He began to doodle, and pretty soon it became a dragon. The dragon was in a cage, and the cage was hung with pysanky; the dragon was smiling. And so was Andy.

And so was Edie when she met Andy at the door the following Tuesday. “Oh, Andy, the most marvelous thing has happened. Harry—he's my husband—and I got invited to your sister's wedding. Will you come with me this afternoon to pick out a wedding present? What do you think she would like?”

“A ninety-day flea collar.”

“She doesn't need that. Even if Mary Jane had a dog, it would never have fleas.”

“She really needs a good, swift …”

“Sh, sh, sh,” Edie said. “Don't say it. We'll find it together.”

Edie was not difficult to shop with. She looked fast and decided fast. But nothing seemed right until they reached the second floor of Dalton's. There they came upon a display of art needlework and a sign saying:

BE CREATIVE

Design Your Own Pillow

Mr. Morgan LaFay

will be in this department

on May 12

to help you design

your own needlepoint art

“Andy, Andy, that's it,” Edie exclaimed. “That is absolutely it.” She pointed to the sign, and Andy read it. “We don't have time to wait for Mr. Morgan LaFay, but we don't need him. I'll buy the blank canvas now, and you'll draw on it, and I'll do the needlepoint. I'll give Mary Jane a needlepoint pillow for her wedding present.”

“I only do dragons.”

“Of course that's all you do. And that is just what Mary Jane needs. She should have a dragon to start her marriage off right, don't you think?” Andy shrugged. “Well, look at how she's such a nerd without one.”

“Did you call Mary Jane a nerd?” Andy wasn't sure what a nerd was, but it sounded as if it fit Mary Jane.

“A nerd is a nonperson. A person without dragons. We'll just have to give her a dragon, Andy.”

So they bought a blank canvas and chose yarns in the colors of their garden, plus black, because you can't think “dragons” without some black.

* * * *

Andy had not finished drawing the dragon by

Thursday, but they didn't want to disappoint Sister Henderson, so they drove to her house from Emerson.

She came skipping and bouncing to the car, the least dignified Andy had ever seen her look.

“You seem cheerful today,” Edie said.

“Ah got good news fo' me. Fo' me an' Brother Banks. We be delighted that you dint box that sixty-three. Thirty-six hit.” She chuckled. “‘Magine hitting that fo' five dollahs.”

“Oh, well,” Edie said, “as long as Brother Banks was pleased.”

Andy was confused. He didn't know why Sister Henderson referred to boxing sixty-three. The gift had only been for five dollars. But he didn't want to ask. It wasn't cool to show too much curiosity. And sometimes it was not considered polite.

Edie had finished with Sister as quickly as possible so that Andy could complete the drawing of the dragon. She zigged and zagged, in and out of the detour around St. Vincent's. The needlework would take a lot of time, and she wanted to get it started. Edie was almost as enthusiastic about the dragon pillow as she was about their garden. Andy leaned back in the car. Besides being a neat driver, Edie was an interesting sidekick/person. In private.

T
he following Thursday they zoomed over to Sister Henderson's again. In and out of the detour and straight up to her porch. They again wanted her to finish as quickly as possible. There was still much work to do on Mary Jane's pillow. But Sister was not ready. She was usually on the front stoop waiting for them, but today she was not. They waited in the car for a few minutes and discussed whether or not they ought to honk the horn. They thought that doing so would not set the good example they wanted to set for manners in the ghetto. Andy decided that he would walk to the front door and knock. Or he would ring the bell if they had them in the ghetto.

The screen door was closed. (No one in Foxmeadow had screen doors. Some homes had windows that couldn't open. In Foxmeadow everything was air-conditioned except the jock things: the golf course, the tennis courts and the swimming pool.) Andy pressed his face against the screen (it left graph paper on his nose) and saw the whole inside of Sister Henderson's house. She was sitting in the living room. He guessed that it was the living room
even though there was a dining room table in it, right across from the sofa. She was watching out of a side window. She was so intent on looking at whatever she was seeing that she answered his hello without taking her eyes from the window. “Hey, Andy, how ‘bout you an' Miz Yakots comin' on in for a cup a Coke ‘fore we start?”

So, thought Andy, they drink Coke from a cup in the ghetto. “But, Sister Henderson,” he said, “we'd like to finish before three if that's at all possible.”