I'm Not Your Other Half (6 page)

Michael, frantic for something to do, began leafing through the photographs in my wallet. Between movements of the string concerto, he whispered to Price, “I am now intimately acquainted with Fraser's nephew Jake at age four weeks, eight weeks and twelve weeks.”

“Let me see those next,” said Price.

We had brought them to Annie's chamber concert. After all, Annie had gone to their ice hockey, and I was learning their cross-country skiing. Usually I like snow. It's pretty and white and makes me feel all sorts of Christmasy emotions, like hope and love and charity. Now I was extremely grateful that all snows so far this winter had been paltry and had quickly melted.

We should have started them on something easy to listen to, I thought. A pops concert, say. But not Bartok. Not Webern.

“Music sounds mutilated,” muttered Price.

“Let's stick to ice hockey,” said Michael.

“Be quiet,” I said, before the lady in front of me did. I thought, if they tell Annie how bored they are, when she's been practicing so many months for this concert, I'll kill them.

But I had underestimated them. They were so glad when the concert finally ended they jumped to their feet and participated loudly in the standing ovation. “I didn't think you liked it that much” I said to Michael. “I hated it,” he said cheerfully. “I never want to do this again. I cannot believe you've suffered through this kind of thing before and actually willingly agreed to repeat it.”

“Then why are you clapping so much?” I said.

“Because it's over,” said Price, and the boys laughed. “Don't worry,” said Price. “We won't tell Annie anything except how terrific she looked. How many more concerts does she have?”

The rest of her life, I thought. “Several each year.”

“None that I'm attending,” said Michael.

Annie emerged, carrying her violin in its case. She was wearing a silvery-white blouse with a black velvet ribbon, and a black satiny concert skirt. Her cheeks were flushed with pride and she was absolutely beautiful. “What a concert!” she said. “Wasn't it wonderful, Price?”

“Yes,” said Price immediately, bending over and kissing her. “Absolutely wonderful. You are fantastic. Let's go celebrate. How about Le Fine Bouche for dessert?”

“Phone call for you, Fraser,” said Miss Herschel, peering around the corner, her hair in her eyes. I longed to take scissors and remove the offending hair.

I took the call at her children's book desk. It was Annie. “I wondered where you were,” I said. “Are you coming to Toybrary late?”

“Oh, Fray, forgive me. Promise you'll forgive me?”

I knew that voice. That was the voice she used with all her old friends who wrote to her and she never wrote back to. They'd telephone after six months to find out if she was dead. “For what?” I said.

“I can't come. I have to practice the violin. We have that big dress rehearsal coming up with the visiting string quartet and now Price wants me to go with him this afternoon to look at racing bicycles. He's decided it's never going to snow this year and we should take up another sport. Oh, Fraser, it's so hard to practice now. Price can't stand the music I'm doing.”

“Racing bicycles?” I repeated. It was beyond imagination, putting Annie on a racing bike.

“The things we do for them,” Annie agreed morosely. “Oh, well. Anyway, I can't make Toybrary. Can you carry it alone today?”

“I guess so. It's pretty slow.”

Annie hung up so fast I still had the phone to my ear. There is no sound on earth more empty, more alien, than the buzz of a disconnected telephone. If snow makes me feel hopeful and loving, an empty phone makes me feel alien and abandoned. I set my phone down quickly.

“Hullo, Fraser!” cried Kit Lipton, bouncing into Toybrary and hugging me enthusiastically. “Guess what I want this time!”

I grinned at her. “Let's see. This pretty new doll-house furniture we just got in? See the tiny blue wing chair? It's even got two tiny-teeny pillows and an
eensy
lace decoration for the back of the chair.”

“It's called an antimacassar,” Kit told me. “I know, because my grandmother inherited some from her grandmother. No. I have something to tell you, Fraser.”

“What's that, Kit?”

“I've outgrown dolls.”

She stood there so seriously. I wanted to hug her eleven times and tell her she was my favorite little girl in the whole world. That she could play with dolls all her life as far as I was concerned, and grow up to design them, too.

“I'm going to be a scientist, like you,” she informed me.

“Like me? I'm not a scientist,” I protested.

“Yes, you are. Your photograph was in the paper last week. My mother showed me. You and seven other people at the high school are taking your science projects to the state science fair. I'm going to be a scientist too, so give me a science thing to check out.”

I nearly wept. I'm so emotional today, I thought. I wonder if it's true about premenstrual syndrome. “Well, let's see. We haven't much in right now. A microscope kit. A Sun Graphics kit. A project pamphlet on snow crystals and a metal detector.”

“What do you recommend?” said Kit. Her eyes were fixed on me as if I were God, about to redistribute brains and ability.

“Sun Graphics. You'll make prints of leaves using sunlight and shadow.”

“It's winter,” she objected. “There are no leaves.”

“Nobody said it would be easy being a scientist,” I told her, and she left laughing.

Two little boys exchanged video-game cartridges. An adult checked out Pente. A girl about twelve returned a detective kit that claimed to offer hours of fun and excitement. “It's boring,” she said accusingly. “Boring,
boring, boring.
You shouldn't have given it to me. I planned my whole weekend around it and I was
bored.
It wasn't even interesting for five
minutes.”

“Then how come it's a week overdue?” I snapped. The nerve of these kids, I thought. I kill myself laying in these toys and I'm
still
responsible. They have a boring weekend and it's my fault. “What do you want? A money-back guarantee?”

Naturally she left without checking out another toy, and Miss Herschel could not get her to take a book either. “Great work, Fraser,” called Miss Herschel. “Alienate a few more people, will you?”

“Sure,” I said.

Boredom and anger and pressure crawled over me like bugs. The Science Fair project isn't ready, I thought. And I'm the one who's behind, not the other girls. And we have that extra Madrigals Choir rehearsal coming up. And I have no doubt whatsoever that on Wednesday next week Mr. McGrath is going to assign the term papers. How am I supposed to see Michael with all this junk cluttering up my life?

I sat down and color-coded the play money in a newly returned Monopoly set. I was tempted to look up who had borrowed it, telephone them, and scream at them for not returning it in good condition, but I restrained myself. A terrible thought slithered into my mind, taking my words and inverting them.

How am I supposed to lead my life, with Michael cluttering it up?

I caught the thought and killed it, superstitiously, as if I could actually stomp it out, like a brush fire. And looked up to see wispy blond hair. Thin shy face. “Hello, Katurah,” I said.

Michael's here.
Something in me bent, and relaxed, and I sagged mentally the way I did physically—slumping with relief. All these crazy thoughts will vanish now. Michael's here. The moment I see him I won't feel this way.

“Look at my Christmas doll,” said Katurah. “She's why I haven't come in lately. I've been playing with her all the time, and she came with lots and lots of clothes.”

A Victorian doll. The kind that the woman who built Annie's mansion must have given her children. Large, beautiful, graceful, dressed in lace and velvet, with china hands and lovely leather-buttoned boots. A doll to sit on a window seat in a turret, and dream of gazebos and roses.

“I named her Viola Maude,” said Katurah. “Just like you told me.”

“I love her,” I told Katurah. “She's a perfect Viola Maude.”

“But now I'm bored with her,” said Katurah. “Now I want to check out Chinese Checkers or else Leverage.”

“They both take two players,” I warned her. All these bored kids, I thought. It's boring to have them tell me they're bored. I am so sick of Toybrary. I have to find someone else to do this for me. If I'm not going to have Annie to share these hours with, forget it.

“Michael will play with me,” said Katurah with absolute certainty.

“Oh, yeah?” said Michael, looming over us. I looked up the wide wales of his corduroy trousers, past his pullover sweater, into his laughing brown eyes and I loved him. He is perfect, I thought. I'm the one who's crazy. Imagining there's something wrong.

“Yeah,” said Katurah, in the voice of a gangster who will otherwise put cement on your ankles and drown you. Michael laughed. With his left hand he pulled her hair; with his right hand he found the nape of my neck and stroked it.

Miss Herschel agreed to watch Toybrary while I took a break. We drove to a Dairy Queen. I ate a chocolate sundae and gave Katurah my maraschino cherry. Michael told me about a computer program he was writing to keep track of his father's philately.

“That's stamps,” said Katurah. “My stepfather loves stamps.” Clearly people who loved stamps were to be suspected of other sinister things too. “In fact, that's why Michael is baby-sitting me tonight. They've gone to a big stamp show.”

“How interesting,” I said, although it was not, and I fervently hoped Michael did not expect me to take up stamps. “Does Judith like stamps, too? Is that how they met?”

“No, that's Dad's consuming passion,” said Michael. “Judith took it up when they got married. Judith used to go to Audubon Society. She was always going off on owl prowls at four in the morning.”

“Owl prowls! Now that sounds exciting.” I was definitely going to be on Judith's team now.

“It's not,” Katurah informed me. “It's cold and dark and all the owls do is hoot and fly away.”

“Now if only we could figure out a way to get
you
to hoot and fly away,” Michael teased Katurah.

But she did not laugh. She took him literally. Her face grew pale and pinched and after a moment she stared back into the remains of her ice cream and shivered. “I'm sorry,” said Michael swiftly, and he scooped her up in his lap and kissed her hair. “Here. Want some of my Coke? Want to play tic-tac-toe with me on the napkin? Nobody's going to run out on you again, Katurah.”

I loved him even more. He could have ignored this new person in his life, this little girl who demanded a lot. But he had chosen to be her ally.

“Guess I'd better get you back to Toybrary,” said Michael, reluctantly, and his eyes, dipping down toward Katurah, told me he needed to talk to her a little alone.

We went outside into softly falling snow.

“Snow!” cried Michael, and he laughed exuberantly, and hugged both of us. “I thought we'd never get snow! All Christmas vacation without a half an inch; all January without anything but ice. Snow! Thank God.”

“I hate snow,” said Katurah. “It's cold.”

“We can cross-country ski Saturday,” said Michael excitedly. “There are terrific trails up at Spring Meadow. Fraser, don't forget to go to Action Sports and rent your equipment tomorrow. They might be out if you wait till Saturday morning.”

“Spring Meadow is a dumb name for a snow place,” observed Katurah. “Ugh. Michael, don't kiss her. I hate kissing.”

“And then afterward, we can go down to my basement,” added Michael, ignoring Katurah and kissing me again. “I've got a new computer game. You'll love it.”

“Michael, I've told you and told you. I don't love computer games. They're always war. You have to kill to survive. I don't like being pitted against you like that. Anyway, on Saturday I was going to go shopping with my mother.”

“You can shop any time,” said Michael. “Don't forget to rent the skis. Here we are. Say Hi to Toybrary for me.” He leaned over both of us to open the passenger door for me, and kissed me as he did so. Katurah, between us, said, “You're smothering me, Michael.”

“All in a good cause,” said Michael.

I love you, I thought. I love your lips and your hair. I love how nice you are to Katurah and to me. I have to learn to love the things you enjoy, too. Look on the bright side. It could be stamps.

I
DID NOT START
Toybrary on purpose. It began of its own accord because I happened to speak out of turn in front of Miss Herschel. I was not at the library by choice. There was a term-paper assignment, and I was bored, because it was a contemporary subject. I detest newspaper files, microfiche and microfilm. I just like books. Facts are so much more factual in books.

The topic was war. We had to list every single war now occurring on the globe and analyze its current status. I had had no idea how many people were working at killing one another off. Africa, the Near East, the Middle East, the Far East, islands in this ocean, islands in that ocean, all of Central America …

Needless to say, I tired of all this bloodshed. I began circling the library looking for something to break the monotony of brother gunning down brother. Actually, I was hoping to find a handsome youth with blond hair and broad shoulders who would be so struck by my brains and beauty that he'd carry me off into the sunset. Or at least as far as McDonald's. But I didn't know most of the boys at the library the day Toybrary was born. It's harder than you think to strike up a conversation in a library. Heads are bent over books. Faces are hidden by periodical indexes. Hands are closed around pencils, not other hands. Everybody has postponed his research till the last possible moment, and who has time for romance when there are six more sources to investigate?