Outside In Read online

  “It means breaking the rules,” Aunt Bonnie always said.

  “Not exactly,” said Mom, who got all As in French all the way through college. “It’s being impolite by mistake—like using the wrong fork or saying something you shouldn’t.”

  “Like telling a secret?” I’d suggested.

  “Like burping?” Aimée said, doing it.

  “Faux means ‘fake,’” said Aunt Bonnie. “Like faux fur.”

  “No, false,” said Mom. “And pas is a move, an action, like something in a dance.” She bumped her hip against Aunt Bonnie’s.

  “One false move,” Dad had said to Faux Pas. “One false move, and you’re dead!” Faux Pas ignored him as she ignored all males.

  Uncle Joe had looked up from the Time magazine he was reading, head down and nose hidden, in the corner of our living room. “It means a mistake.” He was right, I thought, because what else could you call adopting a dog that liked only girls when all you had in the house was boys?

  We all went to the Ascontis’ to watch Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. Their house was bigger than ours.

  I got plenty of news from the Bridgefield Bell and Life magazine. I didn’t need to see it all in real-live action on the TV screen. It was bad enough to see it lying around the bathroom floor after Dad had been in there for one of his extended stays.

  Soldiers in Vietnam carrying their wounded buddies through the jungle. Helicopters that were probably made in Dad’s factory dropping off new soldiers to take the hurt ones’ places. Little kids waiting in line for food in Africa. People pointing across the hotel balconies to the room on the other side of the parking lot where the shot that had killed Dr. King had come from. The news showed the riots that happened after Dr. King was shot, in Chicago or Memphis or Washington, DC, and once, in nearby Hartford, Connecticut, while Uncle Joe swore and Dad said softly, “Not so much of that, Joe,” although I thought Dad really didn’t blame him.

  Aunt Bonnie sat in silence, playing with her big hoop earrings.

  Mom sat wiping tears away with her fingertips, then rested the back of her hand against her cheekbone, across her mouth. “So brave,” she told me as we all were watching Mrs. King, elegant and still, in her black veil.

  Dad said, “You’d be as brave if anything happened to me, Michelle. At least I hope you would.”

  “If anything happened to you—well, it’d better happen to me, too, Patrick.” She ran her fingers through Dad’s rust-colored hair, looked into his very brown eyes.

  My stomach dropped as if I were on a roller coaster. “Can’t we watch The Dating Game instead?” I asked desperately. They all gave me pitying looks. I stood up and brushed off my jeans as though they were full of crumbs, not knowing what to do with my hands.

  “Chérie, why don’t you and Dave and Aimée go upstairs and make something?” Aunt Bonnie said. “David, get out those new Magic Markers.” Make something, draw something. But Aimée just sat behind Dad’s chair, the way she did at home, rocking her elf dolls in the little stick chairs I’d made. She didn’t seem to notice the TV.

  Dave wasn’t bothered by the news, either. We weren’t even all the way up the stairs before he asked, “What did the paper say?”

  “Today’s?”

  “No, yesterday’s, stupid. Of course today’s!”

  “Helicopters kill fifty Vietcong,” I said. I could still say a headline like that without wanting to throw up.

  I’d read the helicopter headline twenty-nine times because it was printed on the part of the front page that showed along the fold, under the rubber band, of the twenty-nine papers I’d delivered.

  Dave always wanted to know the numbers killed or wounded, because Uncle Joe did. It was Dave’s way of predicting what things would be like around his house.

  Dave got out his markers in a bored sort of way and started looking for paper. His bookcases were full of books, and he couldn’t find any paper right away. I didn’t help, just watched.

  Dave’s house was newer than ours, so while my room had old dark wallpaper with red things on it, his had shiny tan paneling. He had a painting that Aunt Bonnie had done of a baseball floating, or maybe it was flying. You couldn’t see any signs of movement, just the background of sky. No hand or glove or anything. He had a red rug, a Red Sox bedspread, and all those books. Nothing to make anything with except for Magic Markers and—

  On top of the bookcase was a Mousetrap. Not a real mousetrap, but the game Mousetrap, a plastic set-up game of causes and effects. On the TV commercials the players changed how it went together every time, but Dave had set it up just once and left it.

  Dave found paper and laid it across a book for me. But I dropped it on the bed and went on studying the Mousetrap.

  “Here’s the marble, Cher,” Dave said, and tossed it to me. Of course I missed it. I smiled and picked it up off the rug. He sat down on the floor with Kidnapped. It felt weird, how we were hiding out from the news up there in his room. It was a relief, too. He read, and I figured out how the Mousetrap worked.

  I dropped the marble into a little basket at one end of the game. It dropped down onto a seesaw, which sprang up and hit a lever, which rang a bell, which pulled a string, and so on until a clamp released and a plastic net dropped down to trap a mouse.

  “Set it up again if you want,” Dave said politely.

  “I don’t want to set it up,” I said. “I want to build it.”

  “How?” His dark eyebrows wrinkled.

  “Out of stuff,” I said.

  “What stuff?”

  Sticks and plastic gimp string and buttons and … How did they mold plastic anyway? Maybe Dad would know, or Aunt Bonnie. “I’m not sure.”

  Dave shook his head and went back to his book. I sat on the rug beside him and picked up a marker. I drew the mousetrap, so I could take it home and begin to make one of my own.

  Dave sat closer and rested his book partly on my knee. Once he leaned over and looked at my drawing. I smelled old book, grass, pineapple Life Savers. “Where are you going to get a mouse from?” he asked.

  “That’s the whole point,” I said. He grinned at me, went back to his reading.

  After a few moments he looked at my drawing again. “My grandpa in Massachusetts?” he said. “He sets mousetraps. They break the mouse’s neck, you know. When the little bar snaps down.”

  “Thanks for the gory details,” I said.

  “It’s reality, Chérie,” he said.

  “So’s this,” I said, and showed him my fist.

  He grabbed my wrist. “Anything to hold my hand,” I said. He pushed his feet against my knees, shoved himself away from me across the rug. But then he stopped, his feet still on my knees. We sat there like that—Dave read, I drew—and waited out Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral.

  CHAPTER 3

  SOMETIMES I JUST GOT THIS ITCH TO MAKE THINGS. I was sitting on the front porch, folding my newspapers a few days after I first started thinking about Dave’s Mousetrap, when suddenly I had an idea. I stood up and walked down the steps and stared up at my house, at the roof that sits under my bedroom window on the right and Mom and Dad’s on the left and hangs over the porch down below. Then I sat back down and started sketching out a little pulley elevator that I could rig so someone could send messages—or presents!—directly from the steps to my window.

  For a few minutes I sat drawing my plans, before I was rudely interrupted by Mom setting the radio in the living room window and blasting my eardrums out with “Walk Right In.”

  I covered my ears. My mother danced out onto the porch, Aimée bopping along behind her, in a mini conga line. Mom was wearing her tight raspberry capri pants and little pointy flat shoes. Her braid bounced all down her back, like Aimée’s.

  From across the road came Aunt Bonnie’s hyena laugh. She came out onto her stoop with her little red transistor radio in her hand, tuned to the same station.

  “They’re playing our song, Bon Bon,” said Mom.

  �
�You bet!” Aunt Bonnie danced down the steps and across the road in her heels. The music met in the middle, noisy with static.

  I put my head down and sketched, my braids dragging across the paper, my glasses slipping down my nose.

  When the song ended, Aunt Bonnie came laughing up the steps, looking for her newspaper, and picked it up. U.S. JETS FLY 155 RAIDS IN NORTH VIETNAM, the Bell said.

  “That’s one less to deliver,” she said. She plopped down next to me. “Whatcha drawing?” she asked.

  “An elevator,” I said. Across the road, Faux Pas yipped from her run alongside the Ascontis’ house. “Can I get her?” I asked.

  “If you must,” Aunt Bonnie said.

  I walked across to the Ascontis’ house, opened the gate of the run, held Faux Pas with my knee, took the leash, and snapped it on her collar.

  “Come on, sweetum,” I said.

  Aunt Bonnie and Dad were studying my sketch. I squeezed in next to Aunt Bonnie. “Where do you get pulleys?” I asked. I knew if I asked, Dad would take me to the hardware store, where new litters of kittens were sometimes tucked into dusty corners.

  “What kind are you thinking of?” Dad said. I pointed to the circle I’d drawn at the top of a wall, with a cable that had a basket attached.

  “How big is the whole thing going to be, mademoiselle?” Aunt Bonnie asked. “What’s it going to lift?”

  “Elves,” I said.

  Mom stared over the real estate section of the Bell. “Elves?”

  “Like Aimée’s elves,” I said.

  “Oh!” They all smiled at each other in a way that made my nose prickle. Faux Pas rolled into my lap, licked my hand.

  “Keep working on it,” said Dad. I waited. “Ask downtown at the fishing supply. They ought to have some good little pulleys.”

  Aunt Bonnie added, “They have fishing weights, too. You’ll need something on the other end of your cable.”

  “A counterweight,” said Dad.

  I flipped my pad closed, stuck it between two porch railings. I packed my newspapers into my bike baskets and rode off.

  My nose was prickling as if bugs were up it. Good little pulleys. Nice little weights. A sweet little elevator. But it was just the start of my own little mousetrap.

  No, not a trap, I decided. A house. A masterpiece. And not for catching mice, but for giving them a place to live. No. Not mice. Elves. Maybe even a whole Elfland. I couldn’t wait to tell Aimée.

  None of the people who’d known Aimée since she was born—Dad, Mom, Aunt Bonnie, Uncle Joe, Pete, Dave, me—could put a finger on the moment when she’d started being scared of things. Scared of her own shadow, her kindergarten teacher said, but that was completely wrong. Aimée wasn’t scared of something in herself, but in everybody else.

  Say I got annoyed with her. It was easy to imagine. If I said, “I’m going to kill you!” to anybody else, they’d know I just meant I was mad. Not Aimée. She’d stare at me, study my face, then run to Mom, not sure if I meant I was actually going to kill her—with a knife or by strangling or drowning or just by looking at her too hard. If I said, “Calm down, I’m just mad at you,” she wasn’t sure: Would I let her live? Or were her moments numbered?

  You couldn’t reason with her. She wouldn’t believe you, even if you were just trying to give her information. Forget saying, “Just jump in, Aimée! It’s great in this pool!” She’d stand there looking at you, wondering if you were hiding the Loch Ness monster behind you, waiting to give it a chance to devour her. Forget saying, “You won’t sink, you’ll float.” It didn’t matter who said it, she wouldn’t trust anyone.

  Uncle Joe said she’d grow out of it; he alone seemed to lose no sleep over Aimée. Since he was a teacher, Mom and Dad put a lot of stock in what he said.

  One thing about Aimée’s fears: She didn’t want to miss anything. When the reptile lady came to St. John Vianney’s, Aimée was the one who put the boa constrictor around her neck. It was Aimée who went out the back door first in the summer, to shoo away the bees before I came out. But she wouldn’t go anywhere where there were prickers. And she wouldn’t even try to ride a bike.

  “Aimée?” I stood on our front porch, hands on my hips, and listened to the neighborhood. Then I walked down the Ascontis’ driveway and through their backyard, around the forsythia hedge and into the Rankins’ yard. My sister’s round face—and Pammy’s thinner, darker one—peeked out from the forsythia bushes.

  “Chérie, come under here. It’s the best hideout.”

  “Who are you hiding from?”

  “The Ascontis,” said Pammy. She had a naturally deep voice, and when she tried to sound spooky, it was funny, coming out of her delicate little face.

  I stuck my head right into the bush where Aimée was hiding. Aimée was curled like a ball inside the bush. She was sitting with her knees up under her chin and her long braid wrapped around her neck so it wouldn’t drag in the dirt. I would never be so particular, but Aimée always was.

  The outsides of those bushes were bright as limes, covered in new green leaves. The insides were stems and branches, yes, but they were also the beams and girders of a house, with places just right for my elevator, the dumbwaiter, the hammock, the playground, the bathroom, and anything else I might invent. I saw in my mind’s eye how it was all going to be.

  My derrière stuck out into the yard, but if I chose the right bush, I’d fit inside as easily as Aimée.

  “Em? Pam?” I said in a low voice. “I have news for you. These bushes are too good to be just hideouts. They’re going to be our elf houses. A whole elf village,” I added. “Elfland.”

  “How?” asked Aimée.

  “With elevators, and bathrooms, and everything,” I said. “Maybe we can even make lights that work.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll design it,” I said, trying out the word. “And your elves are going to love living here.”

  Aimée put her nose in the air and said, “I’ll consider it.”

  “You’ll do it, you dope.”

  “I will,” said Pammy.

  “Okay,” said Aimée.

  The Bell ran a front-page article about Columbia University students fighting police: 130 PROTESTERS SEIZED …ROCKS THROWN. The students were protesting the Vietnam War. Uncle Joe sat on our front porch ranting about how he’d like to join them. Not Pete, who thought they were boneheads. Fortunately he missed this discussion by being at spring football practice. There wouldn’t be a game until September, but Pete was going to be prepared.

  “Yeah, right, Joey, go protest. You could be the old grandpa,” Aunt Bonnie said, elbowing him in the ribs.

  Uncle Joe stood up and stalked away from the porch, his hands on his hips, his back to her. “Those kids have their heads screwed on right,” he said.

  “Throwing rocks?” my mother said. “I feel sorry for them.”

  “Sorry?” Uncle Joe’s eyes were wide.

  “I feel sorry for anybody who has to get violent.”

  “It was supposed to be nonviolent,” Dad said. “A sit-in. Martin Luther King style.”

  “Well, it didn’t work out that way,” said Aunt Bonnie.

  “It never does.” Uncle Joe’s voice was quiet. “And that boy of ours wants to get himself into it.”

  “Into the sit-in?” Mom asked.

  “No.” Aunt Bonnie plucked at one of her curls. She dropped a gray hair off the side of the porch.

  “The war,” Uncle Joe said. “Stupid fool would jump on a transport tomorrow if he were eighteen.”

  “Two more years and he will be,” I said.

  Dad stubbed out his cigarette, glaring at me. “It’s how old my dad was when he went,” he said.

  “Things were different,” said Uncle Joe. He didn’t say how.

  Mom suddenly got up and raced into the house. “Aw, Mitch,” Dad said, and got up to go after her.

  “Let me,” Aunt Bonnie said. Dad sank onto the step. I hoped the men wouldn’t notice me, so they would
keep talking. I wanted to know what was the matter with Mom. But I also wanted to know if Pete was going to go fight in the war. Maybe Mom was upset about that. But shouldn’t Aunt Bonnie be the one upset?

  Dad and Uncle Joe both sat chuckling and shaking their heads and didn’t say anything more. What was so funny anyway? They wouldn’t laugh at somebody who was upset, would they?

  Neither of them tried to stop me when I stood up and went inside. I expected to hear crying but instead heard water running. Aunt Bonnie was wringing out a washcloth at the kitchen sink. “Is Mom sick?” I asked.

  She gave me a little smile. “No,” she said.

  Mom came out of the bathroom, took the washcloth from Aunt Bonnie, and patted her face gently with it. “This isn’t how I meant to tell you, Chérie,” she said.

  I was in my room thinking about the baby. My room was like a nest. That’s what Aunt Bonnie said whenever she looked at it, nodding in satisfaction. “A nest for a builder bird,” she’d say. “I wish my mother had let me keep my room like this.” The last time she’d said it she’d smiled approval at Mom, but Mom had answered, “It’ll have to change if we’re going to get the house on the market.”

  “What market?” I said, but Mom just waved the question away with her hand.

  What I had in my room was a lot of shoeboxes. They filled the closet shelves and the bookcases. All the books were in Aimée’s room, where she and they were very happy together. Dave Asconti borrowed some and brought them back, and sometimes he’d hand me one and say, “You oughta read this one, Chérie.” I’d say okay and put the books on my bedside table, but what I mostly picked up when I got into bed was my sketchbook and a pencil with a decent eraser, so I could plan the next thing I’d make.

  I didn’t build big, ugly, weird things the way Sandy DeLuna did, not go-carts or trapdoor tree houses or furniture out of old bottles cut in half with a special bottle saw. And I didn’t paint beautifully and delicately the way Aunt Bonnie did, not oil paintings or watercolors of the Little River or the stone bridge or baseballs or houses.