The Manny Files book1 (7 page)

Now Mom likes to scare us the way Uncle Max used to scare her. Sometimes she pretends to be a zombie, with her arms straight out in front of her and her eyes wide open but not blinking.

“Slowly I turn. Inch by inch. Step by step,” she groans slowly, never turning her head or making sudden movements. When she does this, we squeal and laugh until eventually one of us hits our meltdown limit. That’s what Mom calls it when laughter and fun are so overwhelming that they turn into terror and tears. I am usually the one to hit my meltdown limit first, even before Belly. It’s embarrassing. I usually try to pretend that I’m having an allergy attack, but everybody knows that I’m crying.

With the house clean and the manny gone for the weekend (he said he wouldn’t be back from the queen of England’s country house until Monday), Mom decided it was a good day to stir all of us into a frenzy. When we asked her questions or spoke to her, she didn’t respond. She just sat there like she was in a coma, only her eyes were open and she stared straight ahead with a blank expression.

She bugged out her eyes and taped her nose back like a pig nose with Scotch tape and chased us all over the house. Belly was slower, so Lulu and India took turns carrying her through the house and screaming. Up and down the steps. In and out of rooms. We screamed and screamed, but we were smiling. “Moooom,” I whined with a little laugh, “stooop.”

She cackled, “If I catch you, I’m going to put you in the attic.” The attic has a big, old-fashioned door on it that creaks open to reveal steps that are much too steep to carry anything up. I went
up there once with Dad. There are little board walkways that you have to stay on because if you step off of them and onto the pink insulation, you’ll fall through the ceiling and into the room below. It happened to Grandma once at her house. She was putting away the Christmas lights and lost her balance and stepped into the insulation. Her legs went flying through the floor of the attic, which was the ceiling of the living room. Grandpa Pete was taking a nap in his easy chair when he was suddenly covered with white flakes of ceiling. He looked straight above him and saw Grandma’s legs hanging and kicking from the ceiling. Mom says that Grandpa Pete didn’t mind because Grandma had nice legs. Grandpa Pete died before I was born.

Anyway, Lulu, India, Belly, and I hid, perfectly quiet, underneath the bed.

I held my hand over Belly’s mouth so that she wouldn’t reveal our hiding spot. She slobbered all over my fingers. I wiped it on the carpet.

Lulu whispered, “India, stop tickling my feet with your toes.”

“I’m not touching you, sweetie,” said India.

India calls people sweetie when she has attitude. She says it like this: “sa-WHEAT-eeeee.”

We looked down toward our feet and saw Mom tickling Lulu’s toes. We screamed louder
than before and barely escaped from underneath the bed. Mom even got one of Belly’s socks off of her feet when she was grabbing at our legs.

Belly peed in her big-girl pants. Belly has just started to wear big-girl pants. Lulu claims that
she
was wearing big-girl pants when Mom and Dad brought her home from the hospital.

We ran down the hall, Belly with one sock on and a wet spot on the front of her sweatpants. We let out our breath and locked ourselves into the bathroom.

“Whew!” We all collapsed into the empty bathtub, which was cool and still had a few crunchy drying bubbles near the drain from the night before, when I’d washed my hair. I like washing my hair because afterward Mom dries it with the blow-dryer. She calls it styling.

Lulu said, “You know that she would never actually lock us in the attic if she caught us, because that would be child abuse and we’d sue her.”

I got out of the tub and laid my head flat on the bathroom floor so that I could see through the thin slat underneath the door. There was a line of light with two dancing, shadowy socks.

India turned on the water to wash her hands, and I lifted my head up and said, “Shhh! She’s on the other side of the door.”

I put my head back down on the floor to take another look, shoving my eye as close to the door as I could to get a better view. There was Mom’s eye staring right into mine.

“Ahhhhhhhh!” I screamed, very close to my meltdown limit.

“Ahhhhhhhh!” Belly screamed too.

We were all too scared to move. The only sound in the tiny porcelain room was our quick, thumping heartbeats trying to escape from our excited chests. We were prisoners trapped in our own bathroom, but instead of having striped uniforms and handcuffs, we had terry-cloth bathrobes and scented potpourri. Belly changed out of her sweatpants and into her tiny bathrobe with the hood that had mouse ears on it.

As we were lying there on the bathroom floor devising our escape plan, the telephone rang. Mom answered, and we could hear her talking. She didn’t laugh like Woody Woodpecker and say, “You’re kidding,” like she usually does when she’s on the telephone. We exploded out of the bathroom and quietly stood around her.

Mom said things like “Is she okay?” and “How bad is it?”

Lulu whispered, “Who is it?” and Mom shooed her away with her hand.

Mom hung up the telephone and sat down on
the couch. Belly, who still wanted to play, tugged at her pant legs. Mom sat just as she had before, like she was in a coma, but this time her face didn’t seem blank.

I knew she wasn’t playing.

India said, “Come on, I’ll chase you.” She started chasing Belly.

Mom called Dad at work and cried into the telephone.

She had hit her meltdown limit.

That night, after we were all supposed to be asleep, I could hear Dad’s muffled voice on the other side of the wall. Usually Mom and Dad talk and laugh at night. Tonight they didn’t laugh. They just talked.

I couldn’t sleep, so I sneaked out of bed and tiptoed down the hall to India’s room. The floor creaked, so I stopped in the hallway and looked at Mom and Dad’s closed bedroom door. The light was shining from underneath it. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. They always stand up when I’m afraid of getting caught out of bed after lights-out. Sometimes, after eleven thirty, I sneak through the dark house and down to the kitchen and have a glass of cranberry juice. Mom and Dad don’t know.

I tiptoed faster when I reached India’s room,
and finally ran for her bed. She was awake too.

“I can’t sleep,” I told her.

She said, “Maybe there’s another jar of earwax underneath your bed.”

“That’s so funny I forgot to laugh,” I said. Uncle Max slept over once, and I stayed up late with him. We watched old episodes of his favorite show,
Saturday Night Live.
There was a lady with frizzy hair who said, “That’s so funny I forgot to laugh.” I said it to Ms. Grant once, and she said I shouldn’t be staying up so late.

She said it again when there was a knock at our classroom door.

“Who is it?” she said.

“Land shark,” I said.

She glared at me.

She has no sense of humor.

I climbed into bed with India and felt her icy-cold toes touch mine.

“Who’s sick?” I asked India. India always knows what’s going on in our family. Mom and Dad talk to her like she’s all grown up. Everyone talks to India like she’s all grown up. At school one time India and I were walking down the hall together to catch the bus. Mr. Allen, our school principal, walked by going the other way and said, “Hey, India, thanks for your advice.”

I looked at India, but she didn’t look back at me. I still don’t know what she advised him about, but it obviously wasn’t about his toupee. He still wears that.

“Grandma fell and broke her hip,” India said.

“Is she going to die?” I asked.

India said, “You don’t die from a broken hip, silly.”

But I think Sarah’s grandma did.

“How did she break it?”

India leaned up on her elbow and adjusted her Snoopy pillow. I don’t think that Mr. Allen would ask for her advice if he knew that she still slept on Snoopy sheets.

She began the story, “Grandma has been saving the money that she wins at canasta so that she can buy a water bed.”

Canasta is a card game that Grandma plays every Tuesday with five other women as old as she is. Thelma, Wanda, Violet, Virginia, and June. I know their names because when Grandma hosts, I sometimes pretend to be their waiter and serve them cookies and lemonade. I decrumb the table between snacks. Thelma and Wanda are sisters who say mean things to each other and then laugh and hug. Violet always brings pie. Virginia talks like her throat hurts and has to go to
the porch in between games to smoke cigarettes. She smells like the little glass room at the airport where people stand and smoke before they rush out to catch a plane with all the healthy people. June is my favorite. She is very fat, and her cheeks are pink. She always tips me.

India went on with the story.

“Grandma and June went to the Mattress King store to try out beds. Grandma lay down on one side of the bed and told June to lie on the other side. When June got on, the bed moved like a tidal wave. Grandma flew off of the bed and onto the floor. The store clerk said he tried to catch Grandma, but June says he really jumped out of the way of her flying body.”

I felt badly because I wanted to giggle at the story.

India said, “Grandma’s coming to live with us until her hip is better.”

I crawled out of India’s bed and tiptoed to the kitchen for a glass of cranberry juice and then back toward my bedroom. The door to Mom and Dad’s room was open and the lights were off. I walked into their room and stood next to the bed. I stared at Mom’s face without blinking until she finally startled awake. I always wake Mom up this way. Instead of
shaking her or saying her name, I
will
her awake.

It always frightens her.

I said, “Grandma can sleep in my room when she comes to live with us.”

She scooted over and let me crawl into the bed.

That night I slept in between Mom and Dad.

Grandma came to live with us the same day that my class took a field trip to the public swimming pool. That morning a shiny metal hospital bed was delivered into our living room. It definitely threw off the feng shui energy of the room. The same people who delivered the bed would be delivering Grandma later in the afternoon. The manny was helping Mom set up the living room like a bedroom for Grandma. That way she could watch television from her tall mechanical bed.

I kissed Mom and gave the manny a high five.

“Dude,” said the manny, “don’t forget your lunch.”

I was going to be swimming all day, so the manny packed an aquatic-themed lunch: tuna sandwich, Swedish fish, Goldfish crackers. And a bag of sand.

I grabbed my lunch, backpack, swimsuit, and towel and ran for the bus.

The day before Ms. Grant had sat us all in a circle and explained the rules of the swimming pool to us.

We already knew them.

No running.

No diving from the sides.

Swimsuits must be worn at all times.

That’s the rule that Belly always breaks.

Ms. Grant looked at the boys and said, “Hey y’all, you need to be really organized tomorrow and keep your stuff together. I can’t come into the boys’ locker room to look for lost clothes.” All the boys giggled at the thought of Ms. Grant in the boys’ locker room.

The girls rolled their eyes at the boys.

We walked from the school over to the swimming pool in a single-file line from shortest to tallest. I was first in line. I’m always first in line. There were eight girls behind me before there was another boy.

It was Craig.

When I looked back at him, he said in a fake Texas accent, “Hey, Romeo, how you like all them girls?”

I could feel my cheeks go a dark shade of pink, and I turned around just in time to see that Ms. Grant had already started to walk toward the swimming pool. I ran to catch up. The person behind me ran to catch up with me.
And so on. We looked like an undulating caterpillar shimmying down the sidewalk.

The pool was only a few blocks away, but the walk seemed endless. All the way there Ms. Grant asked me questions about how Lulu was doing. Soon Ms. Grant’s questions about Lulu turned into Ms. Grant’s stories about Lulu. The time Lulu brought the most canned goods for the food drive. The time Lulu made a model of a plant cell out of a cake mix and frosting. The time Lulu dressed up as Hillary Clinton for Halloween.

I wanted to tell Ms. Grant about the time Lulu cried when Mom told her that milk came from a cow’s udder, but I didn’t.

I was so relieved when we finally arrived at the swimming pool. We entered through the chain-link fence, and the girls went to the locker room on the left, and the boys to the right. The locker room smelled like Uncle Max’s socks and chlorine. I opened up my bag and found my red swimsuit with a note from the manny pinned to it.

“Make a big splash,” it said.