When Life Gives You O.J. (5 page)

“I know,” said my dad. “Your mom and I have been talking about it, and we feel like we should go anyway.”

“Go?” I asked.

“Go,” repeated my dad. There was something about the way he said it. That plus the boxes.

“You mean
move
?” I asked.

My dad nodded.

“Permanently?”

“Well, we’ll see,” said my dad. “Maybe, if we like it there.”

“I like it
here
,” I told him. I had lived in Brooklyn my whole life. So had my dad, for that matter.

“Me too,” he admitted. “But not to worry, Zelly. It’s going to be an adventure.” Which is the kind of thing he always says if he wants to get me to go to the grocery store with him when he knows perfectly well I’d rather stay home and watch TV.

“How do you figure?” I asked him.

My dad grinned. “Well, if living with Ace isn’t an adventure, I don’t know what is.”

“We’re moving to The Farm?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” said my dad. He went on to explain that Ace was selling The Farm. My dad and mom had put an offer in on a house in Vermont and invited Ace to move in with
us. “Ace is all alone,” explained my dad. “He really needs our help right now.”

“Now? Like
now
now? But what about school?” I asked.

“Well, as luck would have it, they have schools there too,” said my dad.

“Seriously, Dad,” I said.

“I know this might sound kind of zany, Zellybean,” said my dad, who likes to dust off my old baby nicknames whenever he gets a chance, “but I think this could be a good thing for all of us. And since Ace really needs us right now, this just makes more sense than running up and back all the time and making ourselves crazy.”

“Why can’t Ace just move back to Brooklyn?” I asked.

My dad gave me a look. “Have you ever tried to make Ace do something he didn’t want to do?” he said.

So, just like that, the plan went from moving to Vermont for a little while to help Bubbles and Ace until Bubbles got better to moving there forever and having Ace move in with us. With no Bubbles. Which sounded to me like if the cafeteria at school was serving pizza with Brussels sprouts, but then when you got to the front of the line, they said, “Sorry. We’re out of pizza.” So all you got was the Brussels sprouts, a big, overflowing pile of them.

Bubbles was no Brussels sprout. And if she was pizza, she would have been the best pizza in the world. Bubbles always fussed over me. She’d grab my hands and cup hers around them, telling me “Your hands are so cold!” And calling me
shayna
, which means “beautiful”: “Come in,
shayna velt
, take your coat off,” or “Give me a kiss,
shayna punim
!” And even though I know I’m not beautiful—with my bushy hair, my glasses, and my way-too-many freckles—when she called me “beautiful face,” she made me feel that way. Bubbles is my biggest fan.

I mean
was
.

I always forget.

I looked over at Sam and Ace—Ace still bragging about catching fish and Sam hanging on his every word.

Ace is a pile of Brussels sprouts and then some.

And that was even before he came up with the whole “practice dog” business.

I didn’t remember putting the Dumb Old Jug into the car, but when we got out at the orchard, there he was in the way back of our station wagon.

“Please don’t tell me I have to drag the Dumb Old Jug around while we pick,” I whispered to my mom as she hoisted our cooler out of the car.

“This is between you and your grandfather” came her whispered reply. Then, in her regular voice, she said, “Here, carry this.” She handed me a shopping bag filled with empty Tupperware containers and lids.

“O.J.’s not allowed! O.J.’s not allowed!” chanted Sam in a singsong voice.

“What do you mean?” I asked, catching up with him. Sam
pointed to a big wooden sign next to the farm stand. The sign said:

OUR DOGS, JESSE AND ROXIE, ASK THAT ALL OTHER DOGS REMAIN AT HOME OR TIED TO THE HITCHING POST. SORRY, THEY’RE THE BOSSES!

I smiled. “Oh well,” I said happily. O.J. would have to remain in the car.

Ace joined us and read the sign. “HMMMPH!” he said. “WELL, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? HITCH HIM UP.”

“Grandpa, O.J. is fine in the car.”

“YOU CAN’T LEAVE A DOG IN A CAR ON A HOT DAY!”

“Well, okay, we’ll leave the windows down.”

“NOPE. DOGS JUMP OUT. SIGN SAYS TO TIE HIM UP. SO, NU? YOU TIE HIM UP.”

“Zelly,” said my dad, picking up the cooler, “whatever you do, will you hurry, please? Your mother has informed me that cherry season is exactly one and a half minutes long, and I for one would not like to miss it.”

“Oh, all right,” I grumbled. I grabbed the Dumb Old Jug by the handle, trailing the leash. I walked over to the hitching post, tied the leash to it, and caught up with my dad.

“Happy?” I asked him.

“Look, Zellybelly,” said my dad, “if you have a problem with this whole O.J. thing, you should talk to Ace. Don’t drag the rest of us into it.”

“Drag, ha-ha,” I said.

“What?”

“That’s what Ace said you do with a dog with no legs. You take him out for a drag.”

My dad laughed. “You know, your grandfather can be pretty funny when he wants to be.”

“He can be pretty annoying when he wants to be.”

“That too,” admitted my dad. “But you might want to cut him some slack, Zell. Remember, he’s still grieving.”

“Coulda fooled me,” I said, thinking about Ace laughing with Sam and giving him noogies during the car ride.

“He is, Zell,” my dad said quietly. “We all are.”

As irritated as I was with Ace, it was hard to stay mad while cherry picking. The orchard was really beautiful, with trees that looked like pictures in a book. Bright red cherries were everywhere, shining like Bubbles had painted them onto the trees with her magic paintbrush. And many of them were doubles, which I hung over my ears and pretended were pierced earrings.

When I found the most perfect, brightest red cherry of all, I polished it on my shirt, then popped it in my mouth.

“Ewww!” I winced and spit it out. “Mom, these aren’t ripe.”

“Yes, they are,” said my mom. “They’re just sour cherries.”

“Why are we picking sour cherries? Don’t they have any sweet ones?”

My mom pointed to the next row, which had cherries so
dark they were almost black. “You can pick them too. The sour ones are for making pie.”

“Oh,” I said, and wandered over to the next tree. I picked a dark burgundy cherry and ate it. Mmmm, much better.

We stayed and picked until we had several full containers of both kinds of cherries. Then we lugged our cooler up a hill and ate sandwiches looking down at other people picking what was left of the cherries. My mom even packed some potato chips, which she never does.

After we ate, Sam and I climbed the trees at the top of the hill, and for once he didn’t insist that we pretend we were in Batman’s Bat Cave or something dumb like that. Down the hill from us, two big yellow Labs, which I guessed were Jesse and Roxie, ran around with a girl in pigtails. She threw a stick, and the dogs chased after it. Even though she didn’t look like me, I could almost imagine that she was me and that Jesse and Roxie were my dogs.

My dad sat on the picnic blanket with his back against the tree, reading the newspaper with my mom curled up next to him. Ace sat in a folding beach chair, his lucky fishing hat tipped forward over his eyes, which meant he was probably asleep. Bubbles always said that one of Ace’s great talents was that he could fall asleep anywhere. I pictured Bubbles sitting in a chair beside Ace and using her paints to capture the afternoon light filtering through the trees. Bubbles’ paint set is like a smaller version of the box Ace uses for his fishing gear, but it has paint tubes and brushes packed inside it instead of hooks and lures. It’s one of the only things of hers that I got to
keep, but I don’t like to open it. Seeing all the colors that she’ll never use again makes me sad.

Walking back down the hill, my mom and dad carried the cooler together, one at each end, walking side by side. Sam ran ahead, so I ended up dragging Ace’s folding chair. I remembered how my dad had said that Ace was sad about Bubbles. I tried to think of some way to let Ace know that I missed Bubbles a lot too. But I didn’t want to make him sadder. So instead, I said, “Today was fun.”

In response, Ace announced, “DID I EVER TELL YOU ABOUT THE TIME IT SNOWED IN CHELM?”

Chelm?
The made-up town that old Jewish people tell stories about? Chelm is supposed to be a village full of fools, or what Bubbles used to call “noodleheads,” so all the stories involve the townspeople acting like idiots. What did that have to do with anything? And why was Ace talking about snow in July?

Without waiting for an answer, Ace started up, “IT WAS WINTER IN THE VILLAGE OF CHELM, AND EVERY NIGHT SNOW WOULD FALL AND BLANKET THE VILLAGE IN WHITENESS. EVERY MORNING, IT WAS THE SHAMMES’S JOB TO RUN AROUND THE TOWN, WAKING EVERYONE UP. BUT WHEN THE VILLAGERS GOT UP, THEY WERE DISAPPOINTED. ‘THE SHAMMES MADE ALL THESE FOOTPRINTS,’ THEY SAID. ‘HE RUINED THE PERFECT SNOWFALL.…’ ”

As Ace rattled on, it dawned on me that I had never heard Ace tell a Chelm story before. The person who used to
tell me stories about Chelm was Bubbles. In fact, she sometimes teased Ace by calling him “the wisest man in Chelm,” which was sort of like calling him the king of the fools. I wondered what Bubbles would have thought about Ace’s Dumb Old Jug plan. I had a feeling she would have laughed out loud with her big thunderclap of laughter. I was so busy thinking about Bubbles that I suddenly noticed that Ace had finished his story. He stared at me expectantly.

“That’s … funny,” I said slowly, not wanting to admit I hadn’t been listening.

Ace looked at me like I was from Chelm. “THEY PUT HIM ON A TABLE, SEE?” he repeated. “TO KEEP HIM FROM MAKING THE FOOTPRINTS. BUT MEANWHILE, IT TOOK FOUR PEOPLE TO CARRY HIM ON THE TABLE. FOUR PEOPLE? FOUR SETS OF FOOTPRINTS?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “That’s funny.”

Ace shrugged. He seemed disappointed somehow. Maybe because I hadn’t jumped up and down, like Sam would have. Or maybe talking about Chelm made him think about Bubbles too. If that was the case, though, maybe it was okay to mention her. I decided to give it a shot. I said, “Bubbles would have liked it here.”

Ace sort of snorted in response, but it sounded like he was agreeing with me. He looked down the hill at where my mom was now sitting on the cooler.

“IN ORDER TO BEGIN TO LIVE IN THE PRESENT, WE MUST FIRST REDEEM THE PAST, AND THAT
CAN ONLY BE DONE BY SUFFERING,” he said, adding “CHEKHOV.”

“Okay,” I said, more confused than ever. I was pretty sure he meant his favorite playwright, not the guy from
Star Trek
. But with Ace, you could never be too sure.

Ace reached out one gnarled, spotted hand and put it on my shoulder. Our shadows bled together so they looked like one big, dark shambling thing with a lot of legs. Or maybe like a bunch of villagers carrying a guy on a table.

When we got to the bottom of the hill, my dad had gone to get the car, and Sam looked like he was about to fall out of a tree. I put down Ace’s chair and joined my mom on the cooler. Ace immediately unfolded his chair, tipped down his hat, and fell asleep.

“It’s nice seeing you spend some time with your grandfather,” whispered my mom.

“I guess,” I said, unconvinced.

“It is,” she insisted, patting my knee. “Maybe this whole O.J. thing is a good idea after all.”

“A good idea like you might actually say yes to a dog?” I whispered back.

“Zelly, do you ever think about anything but that?”

“No,” I admitted.

“I didn’t say that,” warned my mom. But she sort of smiled while she said it.

Which gave me just the tiniest bit of hope. Maybe Ace, as weird as he was, was actually onto something. His O.J. plan
seemed terrible, but maybe it was the key to getting exactly what I wanted. Maybe Ace wasn’t the wisest man in Chelm. Maybe he was just plain wise.

So when we got back to the car, I was actually relieved to see that the jug was right where we left it, tied to the hitching post. Only now there were two other dogs tied up next to him. Real dogs, not practice dogs.

“Good boy, O.J.,” I whispered, trying the name out as I untied the leash. My mom was right—it did sound like a dog’s name. Just then, one of the real dogs started sniffing O.J. I leaned over and picked O.J. up before the dog could lift his leg.

“Don’t worry,” I added. “I won’t let anyone pee on you.”

It wasn’t until I got into the car and sat down with O.J. on my lap that I realized I had just started talking to an old orange juice jug.

Without a doubt, I was establishing myself as the wisest girl in Chelm.

When we got home, my mom and dad went to the kitchen to pit cherries, and Ace went to go watch golf on TV, which means take a nap. Sam went off to play LEGOs or something, and that left me. And O.J.

“Mom, can I borrow a permanent ink marker?” I asked. Because on the way home I had decided that Ace was right. If his crazy plan was going to work, I was going to have to convince myself that O.J. was like a real dog.

My mom fished one out of the junk drawer, and I took it, along with O.J., to my room.

Before taking the marker cap off, I studied O.J. His “body” was white, with a handle rising out of what I now decided was his “back” and some light green and orange markings on each of his two “sides” where labels had once been. That left his front, which was the side I saw when I turned the jug on its side, with the handle up.

I decided that the cap should be O.J.’s nose. With the pen, I carefully drew two eyes and a W-shaped mouth. I dotted in a couple of freckles for good measure on his cheeks. I turned the jug sideways and added a long, floppy ear, then turned it the other way and added another.

I turned the jug around again so the front faced me. A doggy face smiled back.

“Hi, O.J.,” I said.

But something still seemed to be missing. Finally, I took the pen and drew a line all the way around O.J.’s neck, turning him to various angles to connect it. I colored the line in darker and made it thicker. Then, under his mouth, I drew a short loop coming down and a larger circle connected to it. Inside the larger circle I wrote “O.J.” Now that he had a collar and tag, he seemed complete.