Cobwebs Read online

  “Please,” her mother said. She sounded weary and embarrassed. “Go find Grandpa Joke, Nancy. We have to make sure he eats, at least.”

  “I was going to show Granny my knitting, Mamba,” said Nancy. This thing they were asking her to do was her least favorite chore. Chore! It felt downright dangerous.

  “Hey, girl!”

  Nancy’s head snapped back down. Again! It was the strange boy from the Promenade, hanging out at the geodesic dome.

  He worried her, but he wasn’t her only worry now. She kept walking. From the corner of her eyes she watched him. His coat billowed in the wind. Was he plumpish? Or just strong? It looked as though he just took everything and chucked it into the same load of wash. All his clothes were so gray they were almost blue. Where did he get it all, from somebody’s laundry line? She didn’t think he’d ever been anywhere near Alta, Utah.

  “Hey, girl!”

  Don’t speak to me. It was what Annette would say, or one of the homeroom girls: Shamiqua, the queen. He was blue now in the sunshine, but how gray did he get at night? Nancy thought he didn’t go anywhere warm and good. No nest high or low. Railings. Playgrounds. And where else? She could just hear Annette. “Boy, you can pick ’em!”

  But. But. But. “It’s wrong not to say hello,” Granny Tina told Nancy all the time. Granny had tried to teach Nancy what she had taught Rachel: “Say hi to people on the street, in stores. Let them get to know your face.”

  “Why? Why, when nobody knows Mama’s face?”

  “They used to.”

  “They don’t now.”

  “Some still do.”

  “You hope.”

  “I hope! Then if you’re in trouble you have someplace to go, someone to call to for help. Then you’re not among strangers. It’s country advice for the city.”

  Advice! Sometimes it seemed that what Granny wanted to do was open up the top of her head and pour everything in there right into Nancy. And maybe she already had, because Nancy looked up and said, “Hi.”

  That blue-gray boy with his no-hair head and his rainy-day eyes spoke to Nancy on this sunny day.

  “Oh, girl,” he said. “You so skinny.”

  Was he going to insult her now, the way he had Annette, after she’d tried to be friendly? “What do you think you look like?” she called back. She scuttled into the subway, caught the train to Flatbush. Skinny! He made her stand outside herself, looking back at a skinny bug in purple tights. Horrific!

  9

  Grandpa Joke leaned against a counter by the window in the Flatbush Avenue Off-Track Betting, his Racing Form in his hand. “Looky there,” Nancy told him, imitating Granny’s West Virginia accent. “Dancing Nancy, third race.” She handed him a dollar from her skirt pocket.

  “Only a dollar?” he asked.

  “All I can spare, Grandpa Joke.”

  He crunched it back up in his fist, dropped it into her palm. “I’m flush today, Miss Nancy. I’ll put down five, in your name.”

  Granny wouldn’t like it. He never used to bet so much that five seemed like nothing to him. Flush today meant broke tomorrow, and where was the money going? Even when he won, he never seemed to have enough anymore. “Who’s your money on?”

  “Far Rockaway in the second.” The odds were good: 5 to 2. Grandpa Joke never did bet on the first race, a superstition of his. “Grasshopper in the fourth.”

  Hmm. Maybe he wasn’t going for broke today. Grasshopper’s odds were 9 to 1. A nice return, if he won.

  “Two races only,” Nancy said. “Then we’ll eat.”

  He shook his head. “Winged Victory in the seventh…” The odds, 26 to 1, made Nancy raise her eyebrows.

  “Okay, stop,” she snapped. “Don’t tell me any more.” She pointed to the big sign hanging over the betting windows: BET WITH YOUR HEAD, NOT OVER IT.

  He turned away from the sign. He did a little pantomime of putting an ax over his shoulder and marching in place. He sang, “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go,” like the seven dwarfs in the old movie.

  “Who do you owe?” she demanded.

  “Huh?” He looked startled for a second, then waved her off. “It’s just a song.”

  “Give me the five dollars,” Nancy ordered him. “I’ll place my own bet.”

  “You’re not of age,” he protested, pulling out the five.

  She snatched it, stashed it deep in her pocket. But what good would one five do? “You’re going to get in trouble.”

  “Who says?”

  “I do! And Mama!”

  He looked startled. “Rachel knows I’m here?”

  “Of course! Why do you think I’m here? Let’s go to Curley’s, Grandpa. I’m hungry for lunch.”

  “Now? Baby, I can’t leave.”

  “I need you to, Grandpa.”

  She’d always been able to get him out of there, before. The fact that they knew her name at Curley’s diner on the corner showed just how often she’d been sent here. More lately.

  Maybe she wasn’t as cute as she used to be (skinny!) or as persuasive. She couldn’t get him to leave. Or maybe he was just more obsessed than he used to be.

  “Take your money home, Nancy,” he said. “Take it to Granny Tina and put it in that big piggy she’s got in the kitchen. For your future. And maybe this evening I’ll come home with Dancing Nancy’s jackpot.”

  She didn’t recognize the stubborn look in his cinnamon eyes. “Fine,” she said shortly. “Bye.”

  She found a stoop down a side street that gave her a good view of the OTB door. She climbed the steps and watched out over Flatbush Avenue, her knitting in her lap. She got through the ribbing of the back of the sweater she was making, and started on the flat stitch. When Grandpa Joke came out of OTB she sneaked down the street behind him, following him to a curving street in Cobble Hill, an old, old street from Brooklyn’s farm country days. The trees all grew toward the middle of the street from both sides, reaching into the sun. The angle of the trees made the houses seem to lean back, as if they were considering action.

  Grandpa Joke climbed a stoop under a sycamore tree and pressed the buzzer. He put his hands in his pockets and waited. Nancy scooted into the shelter of a stoop across the narrow street, not twenty feet from the front door. Grandpa buzzed again. A voice came out of the intercom, a polite man’s piped-in deep voice: “Yes?”

  Grandpa Joke took his hands out of his pockets and rubbed them on his thighs, as if they were wet, sticky with sweat. “It’s me,” he said.

  “Have you got the money?”

  “No,” Grandpa said.

  There was a pause. Grandpa Joke waited. He buzzed again, and got no answer. Then he turned and walked away, toward the subway. Nancy watched him go. How slack his pants hung from his rear (he was thinner). How slumped he walked (more than before). Older. Tireder.

  Nancy gave him time to get to the station, catch a train. Then she bundled up her knitting with clammy hands and went back home to tell her mother that her mission had failed.

  10

  Nancy was still in the shadowed kitchen when the voices reached her from the sunny courtyard. “She weaves,” Rachel said. “But that shawl she did the fringe on last week…I’m still shaking my head over that.”

  “Well, she’s been knitting like mad,” Ned said in his upbeat way.

  “Mad,” Rachel agreed. “But not like my mother. And that fringe! So many Granny knots, but not the Tina kind.”

  “She slipped, that’s all,” said Ned. He sounded hopeful.

  “But were you this un…this unclear, at this age?”

  They both said nothing for a few moments.

  “How’s the climbing going?” Rachel asked.

  Ned made a humming sound, not so optimistic now.

  “Well?”

  “I watched her the other night.”

  That night she’d gone outside alone, sound-asleep Ned had watched?

  “And?” asked Rachel.

  “She tries, Rache, she tries. She made it to the fir
st landing down, but only by crashing into it.”

  Nancy’s stomach rolled into a little ball.

  Rachel said, “She slipped, that’s all.”

  Nancy knew she ought to be glad that her parents came together over her. If only it wasn’t to despair. I’m going to be grounded, she thought. Me and Grandpa Joke.

  “Nancy?” her mother called. “Are you back?”

  Nancy ascended the courtyard stairs, stood in the doorway, and looked at her parents. The way they sat together moved her. It was chilly, but they seemed warm. They sat on the same side of the picnic table, but turned toward each other, facing, eyes into eyes. Their hands were entwined on top of the table, their different-colored fingers crisscrossing.

  “You guys?” she said. “Don’t push me.”

  Rachel put up a finger to stop Ned from saying anything. “Nance? Go on up,” she said. “Granny wants to see what you’ve been knitting. She’s on her own up there, right?”

  “Grandpa wouldn’t leave, Mama. I don’t know where he is. He should have been home by now. But he lost.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I stayed.”

  Ned leaned in. “You watched?”

  “Sort of. I’ll tell Granny.” Nancy, never in one place long, hoisted her backpack to her shoulder, and set off up the stairs.

  Once, when Nancy was seven, she had stumbled close to the edge of the subway platform and dropped her stuffed poodle, Poochie, onto the tracks. Her scream must have reverberated through the entire tunnel.

  Ned fell into a deep squat beside her. “What is it?”

  She pointed. A glimmer of light lit the tracks from far off. The train was coming. Nancy froze in horror, but Ned dropped from the platform, snatched Poochie, and sprang back up again.

  The train roared in; the conductor hadn’t even tried to brake. Suddenly Ned was back beside her on the platform. Nancy grabbed Poochie, Ned grabbed Nancy, and he jumped into the train. Had anyone noticed? Nancy never knew. She only had eyes for Poochie. “Poochie’s dirty!” she said, pulling a long gray sticky strand from the black fur. Ned gathered the stringy thing into a ball, tossed it aside. But when he wiped the tears from her cheeks he left another sticky strand there. “What is that junk?” she asked.

  He told her what it was. Mostly protein, like hair or fingernails, but something more, too. Something to help him jump back up from the tracks.

  “Are we spiders?” she’d asked.

  “Well, I have spider silk,” Dad said. He hadn’t said no.

  “I’m telling Annette,” she exclaimed.

  He told her she couldn’t, because of the normal people and the other ones, the ones with spiderness.

  “Who? Where are they?” She looked around the subway car at the polyglot melting-pot people.

  “They could be anywhere.”

  Ned had wiped his hand across his eyes before he answered. “Lots of families have things they like to keep quiet, Nance,” he’d said. “You can’t tell.”

  “Why not? Is it something bad?”

  “Not bad.” He seemed stunned by the idea. “But it could be dangerous, and you have to trust me on that.”

  Dangerous!

  Nancy considered the heights of this city, where falling onto the third rail of the subway was the least of the falls you could take. She wasn’t the only one who boasted of a great-grandfather who built the top of the Empire State Building and a great-great-great-grandfather who had worked on the Brooklyn Bridge. Even today, when it seemed beside the point to go any higher, the horizon was still spiky with cranes and the steel skeletons of buildings-to-be. All along the webbing, people bustled up and down and side to side. Though they were certainly graceful, though they were possibly fearless, Nancy had seen them spit on their hands to gain traction, seen them buy gloves with rubber grippers on the palms.

  Were there any who had silk in their hands and dwelled on the rooftops at night? This was the thought that pulled Nancy out from under her bedcovers to drag her reluctant self up and down the side of Ned’s new building: Will I be the first completely silkless generation?

  Grandpa Joke entered the front door, a box from the bakery in his hand, just as Nancy reached the first floor. Rachel and Ned, picking up the uncomfortable vibration from the elder quarters, soon followed up to Granny and Grandpa’s apartment to make coffee and share the cannoli. Nancy hadn’t had the chance to tell Granny about Grandpa’s losses; she didn’t need to.

  “So black a sweater. Makes you look like a rat in the subway.” Was Granny scolding her instead of Grandpa? Nancy knew he’d get it later.

  “It helps me blend in,” she said. It had been a long afternoon, and it was getting longer.

  “Too true,” Granny said. “But well knit, Nancy.”

  Nancy’s face went hot with surprise and pleasure. She had carefully knotted a strand of yarn through the hole she’d found. Did it matter, since she’d fixed it? Granny didn’t let her feel proud for two minutes before starting in on the color again. “A pretty face like yours…You’ve got a face like a flower, but you keep it all boxed in. You ought to get that black hair off your face and wear some color.”

  “I’ve got color!” Nancy flipped up her skirt to show off the purple tights.

  “On your backside! Who needs color there, besides a baboon?”

  “Show her, Nance,” said Rachel. “See what she’s putting together now, Mother.” She closed the cannoli box and pushed the little plates away. Ned turned his back on the room and stirred the big pot of sauce on the stove, but Nancy knew he was listening as closely as the others. Grandpa Joke nibbled at his cannoli, not close to finishing it, and watched Nancy.

  She dumped her new project out of her backpack onto the table: balls of Mama’s scrap yarn in every jewel tone. Red and purple, pale blue, turquoise, all the dark blues, emerald green, and one black. All she would need to buy was gold.

  Granny grabbed. She had to touch such colors, couldn’t resist. She rolled the balls into a row with her gnarled hands. “What pattern are you knitting?” she asked.

  A stand-out sweater, Nancy said to herself.

  “No particular pattern,” she told Granny.

  “Why, yes it is,” said Mama. “The stripes are all exactly two rows wide.”

  Grandpa Joke raised his eyebrows. “Ah, a nonesuch sweater.”

  Precisely. “Each time I start a new stripe I reach into the bag and pick whatever comes out.”

  “Every time? Whatever comes out?” Grandpa’s eyebrows bent down.

  “Yeah, unless it’s too much like the last color or it’s too ugly a combination.”

  “Oh, so your taste does come into play?” Ned asked.

  Triumphantly Nancy said, “No. Sometimes I use them anyway, because they’re so different from what I would normally choose.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Granny. Except in her West Virginia accent it sounded like “aha.” Maybe that was what she really was saying. She leaned back in her wheelchair, looked out the window at the courtyard where Mama’s greenhouse hovered over her loom. Everyone waited to hear what else she would say. “In the country,” Granny said, “it is very dark at night.”

  They all looked at her for a beat. Only Grandpa didn’t look away. Rachel, Ned, and Nancy caught one another’s eyes.

  “Yes, Tina?” Grandpa Joke said.

  Granny Tina laughed. She didn’t finish her thought. She didn’t have to. What she meant was that Nancy’s nonesuch sweater could be knitted in the dark, if it was as random as all that.

  Nancy was the only one who got it. “You think the pattern is choosing me,” she said quietly.

  Then the others understood, too. They all nodded. Then they burst out in hoots and hollers of laughter. What a family.

  The phone rang. Ned scooped it up. “Hello?” A tremor came into his voice. “Giacomo Greene? That’s what you said? Yes, this is his number, but Green Medicine—” Pause. “No, that’s not our listing. You’ll have to try the operator.” He hun
g up.

  Then three people said, “Nancy—” Her mother, her father, her grandmother. Not Grandpa Joke, but maybe he would have, too, if the others hadn’t been so quick.

  “What?” she said, staring. Why were they all trying to cover up the fact that Ned had been lying on the phone?

  Rachel pushed the sauce to the back of the stove and said, “We’re not going to have time to wait for macaroni tonight. I’ve got that big thing of minestrone in the fridge downstairs. Go get it, will you?”

  Nancy made a lot of noise jogging fast down the stairs, and then, just as quickly, she ran back up without making any. When the phone rang again, Grandpa Joke picked it up. Ned must have hit Speaker, which they had so Granny wouldn’t have to cross the room in her wheelchair to have a telephone conversation. On the landing, Nancy held her breath.

  “Tell me you’ll see my wife,” said a man’s quiet, forceful voice. “Or I’ll put it all over the papers what you do.”

  “What do you know about what I do?” There wasn’t any tremor in Grandpa Joke’s voice.

  “What I’ve heard,” said the man. He made it sound like he’d heard plenty; he knew how to do that with his voice.

  Nancy slipped into the kitchen with the pot of soup.

  They all stared at her in horror.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” Grandpa Joke said abruptly, and hung up the phone.

  “Who?” asked Nancy. Everyone was silent.

  “A patient,” said Grandpa Joke.

  “Some old guy, right, Joke?” Ned said.

  Rachel set the pot on the stove, turned on the gas, lit it with a match. Then she set about cutting the bread into thick slices, her back to her family.

  “I’ll go with you,” Nancy said. “As usual?”

  Nobody said anything. They weren’t about to tell her this visit wasn’t usual. They hadn’t ever admitted there was anything unusual about a doctor who still did house calls in these times, about his wife who went along with him. There wasn’t anything unusual, was there, about Granny Tina going in to say hello to the folks? She didn’t get out of the house much anymore, after all, and if Grandpa Joke was willing—with Nancy’s help, of course—to help Granny Tina up some steps, then why shouldn’t she go for a visit?