Donovan, Patricia Perry

Little Fools

Patricia Perry Donovan

“Don’t let Angela get to you.” My father pressed a butterscotch into my palm like a good-luck charm, then stowed my Strawberry Shortcake duffel alongside Nan’s yellowed valise in the rack overhead. When we said goodbye, I hugged him tight.

“Relax, kiddo. It’s only a week.” Prying my fingers from his neck, he jumped off the bus and waved.

Easy for him to say. My cousin Angela taunted me like it was her job.

Sundays at Angela’s were bad enough. Upstairs, while adults sipped amber drinks and snacked on onion dip that grew a slimy skin by dinner, I was trapped below in Angela’s paneled rumpus room, dancing a forlorn Bert to her Mary Poppins while the other cousins paired up companionably.

Worse was the endless summer week I suffered with her at my grandmother’s Bronx apartment. Last summer had been wretched—Angela turning cartwheels around Nan’s courtyard, snapping her training bra strap back into place after each rotation, gold glinting in newly pierced ears.

“Come on. Try one.” Angela was breathless. “Don’t be a scaredy-cat.”

“Maybe later.” Pressing hexagon frames up my nose, I turned away, bouncing Nan’s Spaldeen, aiming for one hundred without a miss. 41, 42, 43...Angela swiped the handball in mid-bounce, hurling it high and long over a chain-link fence.

My face flamed. “Why’d you do that?”

“Felt like it.”

She resumed her cartwheeling, and I shuffled to the swings, fitting my backside into a black rubber sling, watching her from afar. Things went better when I kept my distance.

When fall came, our weekly family get-togethers resumed. Then, just when our Christmas tree started to smell a little off, Sundays at Angela’s abruptly ceased. My aunt and uncle were divorcing. I prayed this turn of events might also release me from my summer obligations, but this was not the case. According to my mother, our cousins needed us more than ever.

“Be nice to Angela,” she said. “It’s tough on the kids when parents split up.”

Tougher on me, I thought.

Summer again. I popped Dad’s butterscotch into my mouth and watched him pull away. The bus was hot, smelling of gasoline and baloney. Nan sat beside me in her traveling dress, short-sleeved navy with the neck ruffle that rippled like a clown’s, pearl clusters clipped to her ears. Her rouged lips tsk-tsked at a Daily News item.

The bus dropped us at Nan’s corner. The dry closed-up apartment air hurt my throat. Nan threw open wire-laced windows, flooding the shadowy living room with the city’s soundtrack of sirens and shouts.

Nan dragged my duffel to her bedroom. “Angela won’t be here until tomorrow. You pick first, Mary Kate.”

I chose the twin bed furthest from the window. Nan filled an empty drawer with my belongings, down to the pads and belt my mother packed over my protests. I buried the supplies under my pedal pushers.

After, Nan and I ate spaghetti from blue plates. She lit a cigarette, smoke curling around her head like a halo. It seemed a good time to ask.

“Nan, could I ever visit you by myself?”

“Why would you want to do that?” Nan tipped ashes into a beanbag ashtray. “You’d be bored without Angela.”

The last bite of spaghetti stuck in my throat. “I guess.”

Nan stubbed out her cigarette and stood. I followed her to the pink and black bathroom, where her freshly rinsed stockings dangled from the shower rod like trapeze artists at Madison Square Garden. When we’d gone to the circus as a family in the spring, I held my breath until they all dropped to safety. I washed up, Nan yawning on the tub’s edge.

Alone in the dark bedroom, car lights rose up on the walls like phantoms, then retreated. I fell asleep counting off the remaining nights of my visit on a rosary hanging from her bedpost.

Angela arrived early the next morning, making straight for the bedroom. She tossed her suitcase onto my bed.

“Move everything, including your stupid bear.” She scooped my beloved Bear from under the bed and held him high. I stared: wisps of hair sprouted from the armhole of her tank top.

Abruptly, Angela’s arm fell. “If you tell Nan about the bed, he goes down the incinerator.”

The incinerator was outside Nan’s door. It took two hands to manage its leaden drawer. I imagined the inferno blazing in the building’s belly, ready to consume Bear.

“Fine. Sleep wherever.” I grabbed Bear off the floor where Angela abandoned him.

Nan padded into the bedroom, the gummed soles of her summer white oxfords tacky on the emerald linoleum.

“Don’t worry about unpacking right now, Angela. Get your swimsuits, girls. We’re going to Orchard Beach today.”

Angela and I looked at each other. In three summers here, we’d never ventured much farther than Nan’s courtyard.

“Pal and Jack are driving out, and they’ve invited us along.”

The McDonalds lived across the hall. I only ever saw their backs as their red metal door clanged shut behind them. Nan had lived here for a long time without Grandpa. He was out of the picture, my mother said.

My grandmother left us to pack a picnic.

“Do you think Nan will ever have a boyfriend?” I asked.

“Probably. I mean, she’s pretty old. But lots of grownups have boyfriends. And girlfriends. My dad does.”

“He does?”

“Her name’s Rita. My mom hates her.” Angela flopped onto the bed, palming the cups of her paisley bikini top. “She gave me five dollars.”

“Your mom?”

“No, dummy. Rita. I can buy you something at the beach. Frozen custard. Or we can play one of those wheels.”

I frowned, suspicious of this unaccustomed display of generosity. “Maybe.”

We met outside by the curb. Pal, tall and weedy in a sleeveless white shift and red lipstick, swung a wide-brimmed hat. In his checked shorts, yellowed wife beater, and black socks melting into brown plastic sandals, Jack about reached Pal’s shoulder.

“Great day for the beach, girls.” Tipping a stained Fedora, he loaded our gear into the trunk of the Chrysler and slid behind the wheel. Pal folded herself next to him, hat on her lap, with Nan behind her.

Angela claimed the other window, hugging her knees.

“Can I please have the window?” I pleaded carsickness.

Angela shook her head, brandishing the folded five between two fingers. I climbed over her, gasping when the overheated upholstery singed my thighs.

“Roll down those windows, would ya, girls?” Jack tuned the car radio to some Sinatra. Nan hummed along to “Under My Skin.”

“Did you know Orchard Beach is the Bronx’s only beach?” Jack asked. “More than a mile long. Engineering marvel.”

“And loaded with bathing beauties like you dolls.” Pal smiled at us over the seat, cats-eye sunglasses tucked into her black waves like a movie star.

Angela crossed her eyes at me. Ignoring her, I planned how I’d practice my front crawl today, a stroke I’d been perfecting at the pool every day since school let out.

The afternoon heat shimmered off the Bruckner Expressway, the highway’s shoulder dotted with overheated automobiles, front hoods gaping open like panting dogs. Families set up chairs on the grass, digging into picnics in defeat. A salt-scented breeze made me sit up.

“Hey, Angela. Let’s play ‘License Plates,’” I suggested. “I call Montreal.”

My cousin said nothing.

“Play with Mary Kate, Angela,” Nan prodded.

Angela’s head rested on the door. “I don’t want to.”

Nan patted my arm. “Never mind, Mary Kate. I’ll play.” Nan was up five states when we took the Orchard Beach exit. The Chrysler parked, Jack strode through scorching sand, staking out a patch of beach with an umbrella. Everyone followed but Angela.

Nan turned. “Whatever are you waiting for?”

“Can Mary Kate and I go to the arcade?”

“I want to go swimming,” I said.

“Two 11-year-olds will not wander around Orchard Beach unsupervised,” Nan said.

“I’m twelve.” Always, Angela lorded her six months over me.

“Makes no difference.” Nan told Angela to help with the blanket. Angela scuffed toward her, kicking sand, dumping bathroom towels onto the quilt.

I was itching to get in the water. “Race ya!” I challenged my cousin.

Angela pursed her lips, then sprinted with me toward the water, clotted with bathers. She stopped short at the shoreline.

“Stay by the guards until I get there.” Nan called.

Barely testing the water, I dove in, making my way out beyond the band of bathers. When I tired of swimming back and forth in front of the lifeguards, I turned over and floated. Overhead, seagulls crisscrossed wispy clouds stitched together like the lace doily on Nan’s coffee table. Behind me, Angela still lingered at the water’s edge. I yelled for her to come in, but she acted like she didn’t hear me. By now, Nan had buckled on a blue bathing cap and waded out toward me, hands on hips, a ballast in her plaid cotton swimsuit.

“What’s got her goat?” Nan asked when she reached me, angling her head at Angela. By then, my cousin had flopped onto the beach, legs wide, scooping handfuls of wet sand and dribbling it on herself like sand art.

“I don’t know. I’ll go see.” I swam toward Angela, washing up in front of her on my stomach, my hair slicked back like a seal. “You gotta come in, Angie. It’s great.”

“Do NOT call me Angie. Leave me alone. I’m fine here.” Sand packed her legs like twin casts. She traced a smiley face alongside them that the Sound promptly washed away. “Anyway, I can’t.”

“Why the heck not?” I remembered my premature pads. “Wait a sec. Is it your time...?”

“No, stupid. I’m not on the rag.” She flicked sand at me. “I can’t swim, okay?”

My mouth dropped open; a chink in the fabulous Angela’s armor. “You’re kidding. Everybody knows how to swim.”

“Well, I don’t. And don’t tell anybody, either,” she sniffed. “Dad said he’d teach me this summer. But he hardly ever comes around. Too busy with his stupid Rita.”

I tried to picture my father with a mystery woman, but I couldn’t. My mother’s face kept interfering.

“That stinks.” I flipped my sopping hair, accidentally spraying Angela. “It’s really not that hard, you know.”

“Don’t care.”

Nan’s voice floated to us over the sea of bathers. I turned to see our grandmother waving for us to come in. This day hadn’t turned out so badly. And after this week—only six days, really, if I didn’t count today, which was more than halfway done—an entire summer awaited me. Weeks of sun-soaked days and endless citronella lights when my father would swing by the pool after work, tie loosened, trunks rolled in a towel. Nights when we were the only two left in the community pool and I scrambled onto his back and then his shoulders, his firm grip steadying my ankles before I straightened up and dove into the floodlit waters.

I could count on that as much as I could rely on his endless supply of butterscotches.

By now, Angela had smeared sand on every inch of her bare stomach. She was going to have a heck of a time getting all that sand out of her suit later, I thought. I pulled myself out of the water and grabbed her hand, yanking her upright. Her sand casts cracked, dropping from her legs in mucky clumps.

“Come in with me,” I said. “I’ll show you some stuff.”

I led my cousin into the water. With Angela behind me, the Sound lapped at our hips, carrying us back to Nan.