Tremendous Things Page 6

  Laid out on the coffee table was a familiar-looking, bulging scrapbook.

  No. Please, no.

  Mup caught my eye and gave me an apologetic look. “Charlie saw it and pulled it off the shelf.” Mum, however, was completely absorbed, clearly enjoying this opportunity to take a trip down memory lane.

  “Wilbur, you were such an adorable little boy!” said Charlie. “You are naked in almost all of these photos.”

  Kill me now.

  “He loved being unencumbered.” Mum smiled fondly. “He’d rip off all his clothes the moment he walked through the front door, no matter the season.”

  Mup mouthed, Sorry. I bent down to peel off Templeton’s booties, hoping to hide my tomato-red face.

  “We used to joke that his favorite suit was his birthday suit, didn’t we, Carmen?”

  Mup, bless her heart, leaned over and turned the page.

  “Here he is screaming blue murder at his first-ever haircut,” said Mum. “And again on the back of one of those automated supermarket horses…oh, and again at the Raffi concert. ‘Bananaphone’ gave him conniptions for some reason. Such a sweet, sensitive little boy.”

  “Maybe it’s time for dessert,” said Mup—but Charlie had turned the page again.

  “What are these?” She pointed at some letters that had been glued into the album.

  Mum made a face. “We don’t need to talk about those—”

  “Oh yes, let’s,” said Mup, suddenly enjoying herself. “Let’s talk about those.”

  Mum sighed. “They are my shame. But Carmen says you can’t erase history, so they’ve been included.”

  “Have you read Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White?” asked Mup.

  “Non.”

  “It’s a famous children’s story on this side of the pond. And it was Wil’s absolute favorite book. It’s about a friendship that forms between a pig and a spider. Norah first read it to him when he was six.”

  “Oh, how he loved the story, and especially the spider, Charlotte!” said Mum. “She was your first crush, wasn’t she, Wil?”

  “Mum—”

  “He would lean against me with his thumb in his mouth while I read, and one day he said, ‘I love Charlotte. I’m going to marry her.’ It was the sweetest thing. But, in the story, Charlotte dies. And the closer I got to the end, the more I thought, there is no way Wil can handle this, not yet—”

  “So she engaged in blatant censorship,” Mup interjected. “We have an expression in English: helicopter parent—”

  “As I’ve pointed out many times, Carmen, it wasn’t censorship. It was creative editing.”

  “You say potato,” said Mup. “She gave the story a different ending. In her version, the spider and the pig get married and live happily ever after in the barn.”

  Charlie’s furry eyebrows shot up in surprise. “In France, we would never shield children from the realities of life or change an author’s work.”

  Mum tried to explain. “I know how it sounds. But you have to understand, Wil was an emotionally fragile little boy. He felt things in a big way.”

  Mup opened her mouth, and for one optimistic moment I thought she might come to my rescue. “He’d cry if we killed a mosquito.”

  My optimism was unfounded.

  “One day, Wil handed Norah a sheet of paper,” Mup continued. She picked up the scrapbook and showed it to Charlie. “He’d written a letter to the author, E. B. White.”

  “Deer Mr. E. B. White, I hop you are well. You are my favorite wrighter. I love Charlotte’s Web it is the best book in all the univers and my mum has red it to me five times. I wuz scared in parts like what wood happen to Wilbur the pig but then I wuz happy becuz the spider helped him she wuz such a good frend. And then they got merried! Do you have frends? Or bruthers and sisters? I am an only child and I sumtimes wish I had a bruther or sister becuz I dunt have a lot of frends. Anyway thanks for wrighting such a beetiful story.

  Please wright back I wood luv to here from you Mr. E. B. White my favorite wrighter.

  Luv, William”

  “That is a very sweet letter,” Charlie said when Mup was done. “But why is it signed William?”

  Mum cleared her throat. “Maybe we’ll let Wil explain that one.”

  Charlie looked at me. I sighed. “William is the name on my birth certificate.” I felt the heat rise in my face again. “But when I was ten, I decided I wanted to be called Wilbur.”

  “After,” Charlie began—

  “A pig,” Mup said.

  “You both called me Wil anyway,” I said defensively. “I didn’t think it would be a big deal.”

  But it was a big deal. The Mumps kept trying to convince me to change it back; I kept refusing. I heard Mup one night, talking to Mum: “He changed his name to a barnyard animal! A pig, no less. A pig who isn’t even the hero of the story. It’s Charlotte’s Web, not…Wilbur’s Sty. He’s making himself a secondary character in his own life.” I couldn’t believe how thoroughly they’d missed the point. Charlotte had written really nice things about Wilbur in her web to help keep him from the slaughterhouse. Things like, “Some pig!” and “Terrific!” and “Radiant!”

  I wanted to be all of those things, too.

  “What happened with the letter?” asked Charlie. “Did you mail it?”

  “I couldn’t,” said Mum. “E. B. White died in 1985.”

  “And Norah didn’t want to tell him that, either,” said Mup. “So she pretended to mail the letter.”

  “You’re making it sound worse than it was,” Mum protested.

  “I am making it sound exactly the way it was. Norah realized he’d be crushed if he didn’t get a response. So she wrote back.” Mup flipped to the next page of the album and read aloud.

  “Dear William, thank you so much for writing to me. I am delighted to hear that Charlotte’s Web is your favorite book. I had a lot of fun writing it. I don’t have a lot of friends either because I am quite shy, and I prefer to spend my time in the countryside with my family and my dachshund. I am happy to be your pen pal and long-distance friend. I can help you with your spelling too because it looks like you need it, ha-ha!

  Sincerely,

  Mr. E. B. White.”

  Mup flipped through page after page of letters in the album. “Their correspondence went on for two years, until Wil decided to read the book on his own when he was nine.”

  “He was just gutted when he got to the part where Charlotte dies,” said Mum.

  “And equally gutted that my own mother had lied to me for two long years,” I added pointedly.

  “I don’t see how it’s all that different from, say, Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny—”

  “What is this drawing?” asked Charlie. She’d flipped to the final page of the album.

  “Nothing—” I began.

  But Mup was already laughing at the memory. “Wil drew that. He’d been asking us who his daddy was. We told him we’d got a sperm donor for Mum.”

  Mum started laughing, too. “The next day he handed us this drawing. We asked what it was.”

  “And he said”—Mup had to stop, she was laughing so hard—“it’s a picture of Mummy—eating a sperm doughnut.” They both lost it.

  It took Charlie a moment to translate from English to French in her head—then she too burst out laughing. They were all doubled over, snorting with pleasure at my expense.

  I stood up. “Goodnight!” I said it louder than I meant to.

  Mum stopped laughing long enough to say, “But, pickle, it’s only nine o’clock—”

  “I agree with you both that we need to tear down the patriarchy,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice level, “but right now, I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with the matriarchy.” I strode stoically out of the room and up the stairs. Charlie’s
furry eyebrows shot up again in surprise. Templeton, bless his heart, barked angrily at the Mumps before he scrambled after me. But his legs are short, and his body is low, and he can’t get up the stairs on his own. So I had to come back down, lift him into my arms, and stride stoically back up again.

  It didn’t feel quite as impactful the second time around.

  * * *

  —

  Charlie came in a while later, dressed for bed in her blue-and-white-striped pajamas. I could hear her moving around from my alcove.

  Neither of us said a word as she settled in. She was quiet for so long, I assumed she’d fallen asleep. Then she said into the darkness, “I think it is crazy that Norah changed the ending to that story and wrote letters to you from a dead man. My father believes that children should always be told the truth, even if it is upsetting.”

  “Your dad sounds like a smart man.” I paused. “Which makes sense. Since he’s an intellectual.”

  “Those letters you wrote…they were so wonderful. What a sweet little boy you were. You loved animals even then. That is a very good quality in a man.”

  “I guess.”

  “I could tell that you were angry with your mothers tonight. But, Wilbur. Those stories they told…they did it out of love. And I know they were laughing, but only in the way that people can laugh when they love someone so deeply.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I am very envious of your relationship with your mothers. They adore you.”

  That was a fact I could not deny.

  It was quiet again.

  Then I heard a strange sniffling sound.

  “Charlie? Are you crying?”

  There was a pause. “Oui.”

  I poked my head around the alcove. She wasn’t in bed; she was sitting in the window seat, looking out at the night. I got up and sat down at the other end. We both had our knees up close to our chins; our toes were almost touching. “What’s making you sad?”

  “I lied when I said I didn’t miss my mother. I feel much anger at her a lot of the time. And her boyfriend is much younger than her, and he is such a terrible little—how do you say? Turd. I can’t believe she left me and my father for him. Especially me, her only child.”

  “It’s hard to understand. Particularly because you must have been the most amazing kid.”

  “Oh, Wilbur. Merci.”

  “Would you like Templeton to sleep with you tonight?”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.” I put Templeton on the end of her bed. “Stay,” I said to him. Then I crawled back onto my air mattress in the alcove. A few moments passed.

  “Pew. He has very bad gas,” said Charlie.

  “Would you like me to take him back?”

  “Non. Please don’t. I like having him here.” Then another “Pew!”

  I didn’t tell her that it wasn’t Templeton. I do a lot for him; it’s only fair that, once in a while, he can be my fall guy.

  Birds sing, hope springs

  Skies are blue above

  Everything is beautiful

  When you realize you’re in love

  From “Love,” by Wilbur Nuñez-Knopf

  We got to be tourists in our own city for the entire week, all paid for by our school’s Parent Action Committee. I saw places I’d never been to before because the Mumps could never afford them, like Casa Loma, the zoo, Fort York, the Aga Khan Museum, and even the Bata Shoe Museum.

  I also found out a lot about Charlie. (1) She was born in January, making her almost a full year older than me—an older woman! (2) She did not currently have a boyfriend and hadn’t for a while. (3) She once performed in an all-female production of Glengarry Glen Ross, in French, and a total of thirteen people came over three nights. (4) She yawned with her mouth wide open, showing off her fillings. And (5) she ran with her limbs akimbo, flailing in all directions when we were trying to make a light—it was graceless and graceful all at once.

  Oh, and (6) she snored.

  She woke me up every night because of it. When I told her—on day three when I felt comfortable enough—she denied it. “That is a lie.”

  “Do I strike you as a liar?”

  “Non. But in this instance, you lie.”

  The next night I recorded it on my phone from the alcove and played it back to her over breakfast.

  “That is you,” she said.

  “How could it be me if I’m the one recording it?” I asked.

  “You are playing a joke. That is you, pretending to be me.”

  The next night I talked softly over my recording so she would see it couldn’t possibly be me. “See?” I said.

  “It is Templeton. Bad Templeton.” She shook her finger at him, then picked him up and rubbed his tummy while he purr-growled happily and grinned at her with his crooked teeth. “He does smile!” she exclaimed.

  “Only with people he really likes.”

  Templeton adored Charlie. He loved to sit on her lap and stay there until his farts got too wicked and she put him back on the floor. If it weren’t for his loyalty to me, I’m quite certain he’d have happily started a new life in France with her. (He would make a great French dog, because he walks with confidence and swagger. Plus he’d look spectacular in a dog-sized beret.)

  We’d all fallen for Charlie. The Mumps took turns saying, “I wish we could adopt you!” Sal said she was “the bee’s knees,” which was his ultimate old-fashioned compliment.

  He came to our house for dinner on Wednesday, like he always did. He’d brought a variety of patties from Lloyd’s shop to “round out” the meal (code for making sure we had something edible if Mum was cooking).

  “Where did you meet your wife?” Charlie asked him as we ate.

  “At the Palais Royale. Beautiful old building on the Lake Shore. They held dances back then, and I literally swept her off her feet.”

  “When did she die? And how?” I marveled at her directness. I never asked Sal these questions; death-talk made me queasy.

  “It’s been three years, four months, and five days,” he said. “Pancreatic cancer.”

  “I am very sorry for your loss. It sounds like you had a genuine romance.”

  “Oh, we did. We surely did.”

  After dinner the three of us went into the living room while the Mumps cleaned up. I took out a deck of cards and tried to teach Charlie how to play gin rummy—Sal and I played a lot of cards—but we didn’t get very far, because Charlie and Sal were engrossed in conversation, this time all in French. I half listened, not understanding a word.

  Till I heard aquacise.

  “What are you guys talking about?”

  “He is telling me about your Saturday mornings,” said Charlie. “It sounds so fun!”

  “I told her she should come,” said Sal. “The ladies would love her.”

  “No!” I blurted. “I mean—sorry, but the class is full.” The thought of Charlie seeing me in my red Speedo, with all of my six feet two inches worth of blindingly white flesh on display, made me want to pass out on the spot.

  “I’m sure Carmen—” Sal began.

  “Nope. It’s out of her control. Fire regulations and all that. Darn. What a shame.” I was eternally grateful that Mup was in the other room.

  Sal gave me a penetrating look. But he let it drop. They went back to conversing in French, and I laid out a game of solitaire.

  Bullet, dodged.

  * * *

  —

  But I could not dodge Tyler Kertz.

  He flirted with Charlie every chance he got.

  On Thursday we went to the CN Tower. To get to the top, you have to ride in a glass elevator on the exterior of the tower. Who came up with that design? A cruel, heartless monster, that’s who.

  I tried. I really did. I got into the elev
ator. I faced the inner wall. I squeezed my eyes shut. Alex told me later that I made whimpering sounds even though we hadn’t started moving yet. The elevator operator must have heard those sounds because he asked if I wanted off. I blurted, “Yes, oh please, yes!”

  I scrambled out. The doors closed. Just before the elevator started its rapid ascent, I saw Tyler squeeze in beside Charlie, right at the front. He whispered something into her ear that made her laugh as they shot up fearlessly into the sky.

  “That was a fail,” Alex said afterward. “Tyler had her all to himself at the top of the world.”

  Fabrizio sidled up beside Alex. Under his jacket he was wearing a shirt with penguins all over it, and bright green pants. “What are you guys talking about?” Did I detect just a hint of uneasiness in his tone? Was it possible that my jealousy of his closeness with Alex worked both ways? “Is this about Wil’s crush on Charlie?”

  My eyebrows shot up. I looked at Alex. “You promised you wouldn’t tell.”

  “I didn’t, I swear.”

  “He didn’t have to. I’m not blind.”

  Great. “Please don’t say anything.”

  Fab pretended to zip his lips. “I won’t. Besides, I think it’s sweet. And not necessarily a fool’s game.”

  “That’s what I said.” Alex smiled at Fab and grabbed his hand.

  “What’s on our agenda tomorrow?” asked Fab.

  “The Royal Ontario Museum.”

  “That’s your turf, Wil,” said Alex. “You know that place inside out.”

  “There you go,” said Fab. “Tomorrow, you don’t leave her side. Be Charlie’s personal tour guide.”

  But the next morning at the museum, Tyler clung to her like a leech.

  I didn’t know what to do. So I followed them. At one point I tried to steer Charlie toward the mummies, but he just moved right along with us.