Cobwebs (5 page)

“Mistakes!” sputtered Granny. “There aren’t going to be any mistakes. I’m not teaching you how to make mistakes.”

“Well, you’ll have to teach her how to take them out, Mother.”

“If that isn’t a Rachelish thing to say! If you pay attention to what you’re doing, you won’t make mistakes.”

“If that isn’t a Tinaish thing to say,” Rachel replied. “Nobody’s perfect.”

“No, but their weaving should be,” barked Granny. It was unusually harsh for her.

“You mean
knitting,”
corrected Grandpa Joke, making his first contribution to the conversation.

“Of course, knitting!” said Granny. “What did you think I was talking about?”

Nancy didn’t want to learn how to undo mistakes. She would have thrown the whole thing aside. And she knew what else would go on while the knitting lesson did: more tiresome stories about Granny’s childhood on that West Virginia farm. What was the point of hearing the same tired yarns over and over?

“You haven’t got the point, if you don’t know yet,” said Granny, as if she’d heard Nancy’s thoughts.

Nancy, turning her key to unlock Mama’s gate, noticed a stray thread on the cuff of her sweater. When she tugged at it, a hole appeared. Drat. She looked up at Granny’s windows, almost expecting to see Granny there.

The phone rang. Rachel picked it up. “Mother!” she said. It was Granny, calling from her apartment upstairs. “No, nobody called here for Pop.” She looked
at Nancy, and Nancy shook her head, confirming it. Dad had called, to give them the number for his new phone in the penthouse, but no one had called for Grandpa Giacomo—Grandpa Joke.

“Who do you think it was?” Rachel said into the phone, sounding anxious. “If he’s gotten himself tangled up with some…”

Knowing Grandpa Joke, Nancy thought, chances were good that he had. She pointed her knitting needles into her work, jammed it into her backpack, and crawled out from under her mother’s loom. Granny’s voice crackled on the other end of the phone.

“All right.” Rachel glanced at Nancy, and hung up the phone.

“What?” asked Nancy flatly. As if she didn’t know.

“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!

G
randpa 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.

N
ancy 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 first 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.