The Manny Files book1 (15 page)

We spend most of the summer swimming at the pool at the golf and tennis club. Scotty’s dad is the manager, so we always get free chips and drinks. Scotty takes swimming lessons every morning so that he won’t have to wear his floaties anymore. I took swimming lessons last summer from a high school girl named Robin. She was really tan and her hair was the same color yellow as Dolly Parton’s. During regular swimming hours she did fancy dives off the high dive. Every time she came up from underneath the water, she’d squeal, “My top came off. My top came off.” The high school boys sat around her when she sunbathed.

One time Sarah and I were judging each other’s dives off of the low board. I’m still too scared to go off of the high dive.

Sarah did a front flip.

I did a can opener.

Sarah did a perfect straddle jump.

I did a belly flop.

I thought it would be funny, and maybe even raise my score, if I came up out of the water squealing, “My top came off. My top came off.” Sarah thought it was hilarious. She laughed so hard that she fell on the ground and rolled around. Robin, who was sunbathing on the cement by the high dive, didn’t think it was as funny as Sarah did, especially when all the boys around her started to laugh. The next time she taught me swimming lessons, I had to tread water for five minutes.

It’s hard to tread water when you’re trying not to cry.

The manny takes us to the swimming pool when it’s warm and sunny. We fill the Volkswagen Eurovan with blow-up toys, towels, and other kids from around the neighborhood. On the way to the swimming pool the manny sings, “‘Summer lovin’, had me a blast.’”

India always answers back, “‘Summer lovin’, happened so fast.’”

Lulu covers her ears and goes, “La, la, la,” really loudly.

“Summer Nights” is a song from the movie
Grease.
We used to watch it all the time. India
knew all the words to every song and would listen to the soundtrack in her room. She would shut her door, but we could still hear her wailing, “‘Sandy, can’t you see? I’m in misery.’”

We watched it so much that Mom sings one of the songs to Belly when she washes her hair in the kitchen sink. Belly cries when Mom washes her hair. I think that she’s scared of the garbage disposal. I turned it on once when Mom was washing Belly’s hair. Belly screeched and Mom got mad at me. I told her I had accidentally hit the switch with my elbow.

But I didn’t.

Mom sings, “There are worse things I could do, than give Belly a shampoo.”

Belly tries not to, but she always interrupts her sobs with giggles.

It sounds like this: “Whaaaaa-hee-hee-heee. Whaaaaa.”

When we get to the swimming pool, the manny coats us all with sunscreen. He always says, “Protect your skin now, so you won’t look like Uncle Max’s leather briefcase when you grow up.”

There’s a lady at the pool who looks like
Uncle Max’s leather briefcase. She lies by the pool every day. I saw some Dolce and Gabbana leather boots in Mom’s
Vogue
magazine that would match her arms perfectly.

The manny wears blue zinc oxide on his nose and looks like an old-fashioned lifeguard in his red swimsuit. He calls them swim trunks. India wears a big sun hat tied to her head with a big navy blue ribbon. She sits on the side most of the time and reads a book.
Alice in Blunderland,
by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,
by Judy Blume, which the boys aren’t allowed to check out of the school library for some reason.
D.V.,
Diana Vreeland’s autobiography.

India swims whenever the manny swims. She wears a swim cap. She says that chlorine makes your hair “unmanageably dry and brittle.” The manny doesn’t use the stairs in the shallow end to get into the pool. He climbs the ladder to the high dive and then yells, “Geronimo,” and does a huge cannonball that always gets the lifeguard wet.

Sometimes she blows her whistle at him.

I’m too scared to go off of the high dive. I wrote it down in my journal as one of my summer goals, right next to “Grow six inches.”
The manny said that I should also put “Eat candy” and “Tease Lulu” on the list.

Grandma had to go back into the hospital because she has an “affection.” Dad told me that the blood isn’t pumping through her heart properly. The doctors at the hospital are going to do tests on her.

“Like the scoliosis and head lice tests at school?” I asked Lulu.

“No, dodo, like blood pressure and X-rays,” Lulu snarled, barely looking up from “The Manny Files.”

The manny asked the nurse at the front desk if he could get a quick collagen injection in his lips while he was there. Lulu didn’t think that was funny. She added comments in her notebook and then scolded him, “You really should be thinking about Grandma at a time like this.”

The manny turned to the nurse again and said, “Could Grandma get injections too?”

Lulu growled.

The manny and I stay in Grandma’s room when the nurses come to take her blood pressure and heartbeat. We make sure that they are doing it correctly. I learned what nurses are supposed do by watching Grandma’s soap operas with her. On
General Hospital
all of the secrets come out when somebody is confined to a hospital bed. I keep waiting for a young woman to burst through Grandma’s hospital door and announce that she is the baby that Grandma gave up for adoption thirty years before. I imagine that she introduces Grandma to her grandchildren, who have never met her and are much better looking than us.

The manny said that I would be an excellent soap opera writer when I grow up.

Grandma’s hospital room is decorated with lots of Polaroid pictures that Uncle Max has taken. There’s a picture of the manny and me jumping on the trampoline. We’re laughing because I had just drooled. There’s a picture of India looking like a Moroccan princess, watering Grandma’s hydrangea bush. The big purplish blue flowers match India’s turban. There’s one of Lulu sitting at her lemonade stand. Lulu’s lemonade stand didn’t have much business. She charged people by the size of the house that they lived in. The bigger the house, the higher the price for a cup of lemonade. She had a big
sign that said
ICE-COLD LEMONADE: COST BASED ON A SLIDING SCALE.
The manny bought ten cups. She didn’t know what to charge him because she’s never seen his house.

There’s also a picture of Belly and Grandma taking a nap, with the afternoon sun shining into the living room onto their faces.

The manny said, “Since Grandma’s in the hospital and can’t be out in the world, we have to bring the world to her.”

The world that we bring to Grandma is mostly cut flowers from her garden, soap opera magazines, and my Egyptian cotton sheets. Grandma needs them more than I do right now.

Sometimes I pretend to be Grandma’s concierge. She’ll ask where she can get a glass of water.

I say, “Oh, the tap water from the bathroom is fabulous.”

When I bring Grandma her water, she slips tissues to me with a handshake, just like she did when she tipped the concierge at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City.

The manny still dresses her up in different costumes to watch her soap operas. One day she was dressed up as an emergency room doctor. The manny had borrowed the uniform from the nurses’ station. The nurses give the
manny anything he wants. They like him because he calls them things like “beauty boat” and “heartbreaker” whenever they leave the room.

“Thanks for the extra pillow, dream girl,” I heard him call after the big nurse that calls Grandma “honey.”

When the doctor came into Grandma’s room, she was lying in her bed wearing a pair of light blue hospital scrubs. She had a butter knife and fork in her hands and a surgeon’s mask over her mouth. I had a shower cap on my head and looked like a nurse. The manny was sprawled out on the floor, pretending to be dead.

Grandma said, “I did all I could, but I am afraid that I just couldn’t save him. All I could do was butter him with this cholesterol-free spread.”

She waved the butter knife in the air.

The doctor laughed and said, “I see that it might be time to move you to the psychiatric ward. You could all share a room.”

“It could be like
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
” said the manny, “and Grandma could throw a drinking fountain through the window and we could escape.”

I’ve never seen
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
but now I want to.

After two weeks in the hospital Grandma came back to live in our living room.

She didn’t have surgery. Grandma told me she didn’t want to be in the hospital anymore because the lighting was bad and made her wrinkles appear bigger than they actually were.

This morning I gave Grandma a foot rub before the manny took us to the swimming pool. Her feet were colder than usual and she was asleep. I kissed her on the cheek and she smiled in her sleep. Then I ran upstairs to get my swimming suit. I wanted something very athletic looking because I was planning on jumping off of the high dive. I dug through my swimming-suit drawer and pulled out a red-white-and-blue one. I thought that if I wore it, I’d look like a firework exploding in the sky and plummeting into the pool.

On the way to the pool Lulu was complaining about the manny’s Duran Duran CD that was playing. She says that they’re completely out of style. She hates it when I point at her and sing, “‘I’m on the hunt, I’m after you.’”

“Hungry Like the Wolf” is my favorite song of all time. My favorite song used to be “Hakuna Matata,” from
The Lion King,
but that was when I was little.

India likes “The Reflex.”

Whenever we’re too loud in the van or Lulu is complaining, the manny yells, “
MUSHPOT!
” He usually does it when Lulu is in the middle of a sentence.

I bet that there’s a whole page in “The Manny Files” about mushpot.

Whenever he yells this, the Eurovan goes completely silent. Mushpot means that nobody’s allowed to make a noise. If somebody does make a noise, the rest of the van yells at the top of their lungs, “So-and-so’s in the mushpot.”

The longest we’ve ever lasted is three minutes and forty-eight seconds. Belly usually can’t stand it and has to break the silence.

We were getting close to the swimming pool when Lulu said, “Please change the music before my friends he—”

“
MUSHPOT!
” yelled the manny.

India and I stopped talking about her sarong. Belly put both hands over her mouth and kicked her legs wildly with excitement. I could tell that she wanted to squeal. Lulu rolled her eyes and clenched her top lip with her teeth. She didn’t like the game, but she didn’t like to lose, either.

We sat in silence while “Wild Boys” blasted out of the van speakers.

I wanted to sing along, but didn’t want to lose. I just pretended to drum along with the drum solo.