The Manny Files book1 (5 page)

On the car ride home Lulu scolded, “I can’t believe you let her eat that pea. Why did you do that, Mirabelle?” She calls her Mirabelle when she pretends to be Mom.

“Because I’m crazy.”

The manny started singing, “All we are saying … is give peas a chance.”

After several days of finding unusual useless objects in our lunches and returning from school to find a spectacle awaiting us at the curb, Mom and Dad came back from Mexico. Lulu’s “The Manny Files” was nearly ready for a second notebook. I caught her smiling once while she was writing in it. I told her that I could tell by her smile that she liked the nutty things the manny did. She said that she was smiling because she was fantasizing about Mom and Dad’s horrified faces when they learned that the manny had worn a tutu over his jeans one day when he met the bus. Or that he’d juggled eggs in the kitchen and dropped one on the floor. Or that he called our bus driver “sweet potato” to her face. I grabbed the notebook and tried to take it from her, but she pulled it back out of my hands. It left a paper cut on my thumb. She ran to her room and hid “The Manny Files.”

We spent the entire Saturday morning preparing for Mom and Dad’s evening arrival at the airport. The manny woke us up early, except for Belly. He said that we could watch an hour of cartoons, but then we would have to start our chores. We were going to make the house spotless before Mom and Dad got home. That’s why we let Belly sleep. The last time she tried to help us clean the house, we had to spend an hour trying to free Housman’s tail from the vacuum cleaner.

Lulu, India, the manny, and I sat and watched cartoons while we ate bowl after crunchy bowl of Frosted Flakes.

“
They’re grrrrreat,
” said the manny with milk dripping from his lower lip.

“
You’re dissgusting!
” mimicked Lulu.

The manny likes cartoons. I think his favorite is Tweety Bird. He laughs so hard that he snorts whenever Tweety says, “I did! I did! I did taw a puddy tat.” The manny’s head is sort of shaped like Tweety Bird’s. He said, “Thufferin’ thuckatash,” when I pointed it out to him.

Lulu was in charge of bathrooms and floors.

India was in charge of dusting and dishes.

I was in charge of aesthetics, which meant that I had to make the rooms beautiful. I would have to choose the most perfect flower arrangement for the dining-room table and the most interesting
art books for the coffee table. The manny told me that aesthetics were very important because they could make our living room—which was usually filled with stuffed animals, plastic groceries from Belly’s toy shopping cart, and scattered puzzle pieces—seem a little more elegant.

He said, “The person who is in charge of aesthetics needs to be sensitive to both art and beauty.”

I was born for this role.

I ran to my room and changed into my T-shirt from the Museum of Modern Art for inspiration, the one that Uncle Max had given me. He calls the Museum of Modern Art “MoMA.” Uncle Max is an oil painter and dreams of having his work hang in MoMA. Right now he hangs his paintings in his basement. They are mostly of naked people reading books. Lulu thinks that he should paint more puppies and horses and things that match people’s couches. She hates naked people.

India told me that Lulu probably wears her swimsuit in the shower.

While we each began our assigned jobs, the manny began putting away all the toys that didn’t find their way back into the toy closet while Mom was away. Mom makes us pick up our own toys. We hardly ever get the fun jobs like bathrooms and dishes.

Belly woke up and walked into the living room wearing nothing but a diaper and carrying her dolly, Tina, which had no head. A few months earlier Belly and Tina were riding in the back of Mom’s Volvo. Belly likes to play with the automatic windows.

Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down.

She lifted Tina’s head up to the window so that Tina could see an airplane that was flying overhead. She decided to let Tina hang in the window for a little bit. She rolled the window up almost all the way, so that Tina hung there with her head on the outside of the car and her body on the inside. Then Belly laughed and pressed the window button up until the window was completely closed and Tina’s head popped off. Mom didn’t even notice until she looked in her rearview mirror and saw Tina’s head bouncing down the road behind the car. Mom spun around and looked into the backseat.

Belly said, “I’m crazy,” and shrugged her shoulders as if to say,
I can’t help it.

I think it’s creepy that Belly still carries Tina’s headless body around.

The manny calls the doll DecapiTina.

Belly and DecapiTina planted themselves on the couch, snuggled under a blanket, and watched cartoons.

Whenever we would finish a job, the manny would inspect. He’d cross his arms and say, “Hmmm,” running his finger along surfaces to see if they had been cleaned properly. He thought Lulu did a beautiful job on the bathroom. Everything gleamed like capped teeth. Shiny faucets. Shiny toilet. Shiny floor.

The manny said, “This bathroom is so clean we could eat right on the floor.”

We did.

We had a picnic lunch, complete with fried chicken and lemonade, right on the bathroom floor. Normally Lulu would never eat in the bathroom, but she did because she was pleased with herself. She grinned the same way that she had when she was named Typist of the Year at last year’s awards assembly at school. Fifty-seven words per minute.

India also got rave reviews for her spotless dishes and thorough dusting. In Dad’s office she dusted each of the little knickknacks that he’d collected from around the world: Buddha, Venetian blown glass, Mardi Gras beads.

When it was time for my evaluation, I requested that everyone sit on the couch with the coffee table in front of it. They had already seen the arrangement that I made for the dining-room table—willow sticks and lavender lilacs
from the backyard. India had hovered over it like a butterfly, smelling the lilacs.

Now it was time to show them my masterpiece. I had spent half an hour looking through our library and choosing which books to place stacked on the coffee table. I had chosen seven books.

I began to explain.

“The books on a family’s coffee table say a lot about who they are and what they think. This was a very stressful job for me because I needed to represent every member of the family and not just myself.”

Lulu rolled her eyes and breathed too loudly, like a scuba diver on the Discovery Channel.

I picked up the first book.

I went on, “The book that represents me is
A Feng Shui Life.
”

Mom had taken a feng shui class last summer at the community art center. Her teacher wore too many necklaces and smelled like an Indian restaurant. Mom explained to me that the way a room is arranged and decorated affects the energy fields of the people who live in the room. Every night when she returned from class, she would move our furniture around.

Our beds away from windows. Candles in every room. Mirrors everywhere.

Lulu loved the mirrors.

I told Mom that I could feel the energy opening up in the room, but I’m not sure if that’s what I really felt. Earlier that morning I had used Q-tips to clean my ears and pulled out the biggest piece of wax I’d ever seen. I think that I could just hear better.

I kept the earwax in a jar under my bed for two days. I had trouble sleeping when it was under my bed. I think it closed my feng shui energy fields. I ended up throwing it out.

“I chose this coffee table book about Oscar de la Renta to represent India. He has great style and taste and knows how to dress women.”

I had read that quote from a lady named Diana Vreeland on page 43 of the book. I don’t know who Diana Vreeland is, but in her picture she is sitting in a room where everything is “the perfect red.” India smiled and adjusted her blue-and-yellow sarong that she was wearing. Mom and Dad had brought it to her from Bali.

Lulu leaned forward and said, “Which book represents me?”

I picked up a book called
Your Moody Preteen
and began to smile when I saw the horrified look on Lulu’s face.

“I’m just kidding,” I said.

Everyone, except for Lulu, began to laugh.

“The real book that I chose for you is this one. It’s called
Great Pianists of Our Time.
”

“Am I in it?” asked Lulu.

I showed them all of the books that I had carefully chosen.
The New Yorker Book of Dog Cartoons
for Dad.
Moroccan Gardens
for Mom.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
for Belly I couldn’t find a book about headless dolls.

“Who is the last book for?” asked India, pointing to a tattered old children’s book that was lying next to the six glossy tabletop books that I had just presented.

I reached for the last book on the table and said, “This book represents the manny.”

I held it up.

Mary Poppins.

We spent the rest of the afternoon making welcome-home signs for Mom and Dad. Lulu made a banner that was twelve feet long to hang in the front hallway so that it would be the first thing they saw when they walked into the house. She used a paintbrush to paint the words
THANK GOODNESS YOU’RE HOME
across the long white butcher paper. She isn’t very subtle. I learned the word
subtle
from Ms. Grant. She told me to be more subtle at the beginning of the school year when I grabbed the front of my jeans and started jumping up and down and said, “I have to pee like a racehorse.” I had heard Uncle Max say this at the movies once when he’d finished his extra-jumbo soda. Now I just raise my hand and Ms. Grant knows that I have to pee like a racehorse without my having to tell her.

While the manny added carrots to the stew that was brewing on the stove, India, Belly, and I made signs to hold up at the airport. We wanted Mom and Dad to be able to spot us in the crowd of people standing and waiting for the airplane to unload. Sometimes when I wait with the crowd at the airport, I like to pretend that I’m outside of the
Today Show
studios, hoping that I will be the one that Al Roker, the weatherman, notices and puts on television.

India made a sign that said
WE MISSED YOU, MOM AND DAD. WHAT’D YA BRING ME?
Then she wrote
J/K
at the bottom. She told me that
J/K
means “just kidding.”

My sign said
I LOVE YOU, MOM!!! I LOVE YOU, DAD!!! I LOVE YOU, STEWARDESS!!!

I wrote
J/K
after the word
stewardess.

The manny wrote
PLEASE DON’T HAVE ANY MORE CHILDREN!
on his sign, with a big
J/K
at the bottom.

Belly didn’t write anything. She stripped naked and painted herself blue and rolled across her sign. It looked like a big blue blob, but you could see the print of her bottom perfectly. She wrote
J/K
on hers, even though she didn’t understand what it meant.

Lulu finished hanging her sign in the entry-way and stepped back to congratulate herself. She was impressed, even though she had to spend twenty minutes painting red hearts over Belly’s blue footprints that she had left when she walked across it.

“It looks great, Lulu,” said the manny. I could tell she was annoyed that he didn’t take her sign personally. The manny was carrying Belly, who was dressed in her prettiest pink dress and sparkling ruby red slippers, just like Dorothy’s from The
Wizard of Oz.
She had been scrubbed clean, but there were still blue stains in the creases behind her knees.

The manny told me that I looked like a younger, shorter version of Ralph Lauren (India told me that Ralph Lauren was a polo player). I had used hair gel and was wearing my wedding blazer and my birthday bow tie with my blue jeans. India talked me out of wearing my sunglasses. She said it was overkill.

It was dark outside anyway.

We loaded into the Volkswagen Eurovan, and the manny drove us to the airport. The manny usually drives Belly to the Tomato Plant Preschool in the Volkswagen Eurovan. The door at her school says
THE TOMATO PLANT PRESCHOOL—WHERE YOUR KIDS SPROUT AND GROW LIKE VINES.
When I went to school there, we used to yell, “Where your kids shout and show their behinds.” The teacher told us that it wasn’t an appropriate thing to say. For three years after that I thought
behind
was a bad word. Whenever my dad would say, “Don’t lag behind,” I’d say, “Ummmm! You said a bad word.”

Because we were all in the Volkswagen Eurovan, Belly thought that she was going to the Tomato Plant Preschool. She began to sing her going-to-school song that the manny had taught her. She sings it to the manny every day when they drive to school.

Belly sang it once to her preschool teacher and classmates for show-and-tell. Her teacher. Miss Kim, didn’t think it was as funny as Dad did when she called to tell him about it.

Lulu told me that she had devoted a whole four pages in “The Manny Files” to inappropriate things the manny had taught Belly. The going-to-school song was listed between “Throwing wet marshmallows at the ceiling” and “Singing opera songs in the mall.”

We parked the car and raced down the long hallway of the airport. Inside the airport everybody was moving very quickly, the same way they do around someone who has a cold in the cold-medicine commercial. India read the blue monitor that looked like a television, and located the gate
where Mom and Dad’s plane would be arriving: B-7. Just as we found B-7, Lulu pointed at the plane that was pulling into the gate. I had the same feeling of excitement in my stomach that I get when
The Sound of Music
comes on television. Like I have to pee and throw up at the same time.