The Anybodies, Page 2

  There was a bird that liked to watch Fern from a branch outside her window. It was an ordinary robin, nothing special about it except the way it observed her so intently. That afternoon Fern had seen it sitting there, and she’d clapped her hands out the window to see if it would fly off. It did, flapping low over the street. A car was coming, and the bird slapped into the windshield, flipping up over the roof. Fern felt suddenly flooded with guilt for having shooed the bird. She watched with a rising panic. The car went on, and the bird was still alive. Its wing was crumpled, but it quickly hobbled up and danced crookedly before walking on down the sidewalk. This in itself wasn’t so strange except at just that moment the neighbor’s cat, Jinx, rounded the corner. Fern stuck her head all the way out the window to yell at Jinx, to distract him—even though yelling was strictly barred in the Drudger household. But then the bird shook its head and ballooned into the shape of a large spotted dog. This took all of Fern’s breath. The cat darted off and the dog strutted on with only a slight limp, not bothering with the hydrant at the corner as most dogs do. Fern, speechless, watched it go.

  Fern told herself that all of this was her imagination. She tried to believe that the Drudgers were right about her—they were so undeniably sensible. But there were certain things that were hard to deny. For example, Mrs. Lilliopole had seen the small bat turn into a marble, too.

  After the marble rolled into the men’s locker room, Mrs. Lilliopole, stunned and breathless, turned to Fern. “Did you see that?” she asked.

  But by now Fern was used to denying the oddities she saw. “See what?” she asked.

  “The bat and the…the…the marble!” Her voice echoed across the water.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, ma’am,” Fern said as politely as she could. Adults liked politeness, although they aren’t always polite themselves.

  “Oh, it was nothing, I guess,” Mrs. Lilliopole said, glancing around at the empty ceiling.

  Fern tried to believe the sensible Drudgers. She tried. But there was some part of Fern’s mind that was glowing, singing, rowdy, brassy as a marching band with characters so big and cartoonish they seemed to be careening down a parade route like giant helium balloons. Her only solace was books, and Fern loved books. She read as many books as she could get her hands on. She had an overused library card, now tattered, and she also bought books at garage sales for ten cents a copy. She used her allowance, even though the Drudgers had made it clear that they expected her to use the money on extra school supplies like paste and pencils. Now she had a little library growing in one corner of her room. One day she wanted books to be stacked all the way up to the ceiling along every wall. This, to her, seemed like a heavenly, comforting notion.

  Being a Drudger made Fern feel stifled, clamped down, like a whistling kettle building up steam. (Fern had read about whistling kettles; the Drudgers preferred the mute, nonwhistling kind.) When Fern kept asking about the story of her birth while her mother cooked nondescript food items and her father awaited the arrival of the all-too-important Beige family, it was like letting off just a little bit of steam, just a little.

  “Can’t you make up a more interesting story about my name?” Fern now asked. “Something about a jungle or something?” This, too, was letting off just a little steam, just a little.

  Mr. and Mrs. Drudger glanced at each other. “No,” Mrs. Drudger said, her face shining metal in the flat reflection of the toaster. “That would be a lie.”

  “And we’ve talked to you about lying,” Mr. Drudger added, his doughy skin pinking ever so slightly with frustration.

  Mrs. Drudger covered the toaster with a cozy the way some cover birdcages at night. (They didn’t have pets, birds or otherwise. The toasters were perhaps the closest the Drudgers would ever come to having pets.) She walked to the oven and opened its squeakless door. A scentless steam rose up. Mrs. Drudger turned, catching Fern in a vacant, wide-eyed gaze, and said sternly, “Now narrow your eyes, please.”

  Fern often stared at Mr. and Mrs. Drudger with her big eyes. In keeping with the label “overactive dysfunction,” Mr. and Mrs. Drudger referred to Fern’s eyes as “the unpleasant deformity.” They didn’t like her eyes. They asked her to narrow them so often that Fern felt like she was constantly pulling down the blinds on her own face. Sometimes when Fern looked at Mrs. Drudger, the woman would fiddle with her blouse to make sure it was buttoned to the top button. She’d say, “Fern, stop looking through me like that!” And there was a pinch to her voice that Fern enjoyed. Sometimes Fern would flare her eyes on purpose to make Mrs. Drudger’s voice pinch just so.

  But now Fern felt guilty for having brought up her birth, for having asked the Drudgers to invent a better story when she knew they couldn’t possibly. She needed to be on her best behavior again. The Beiges were coming and she couldn’t afford to go off like a whistling kettle. Fern dutifully squinted.

  (Here you should take a sip of water or stretch or look around you to make sure that everything is intact. Hopefully the house isn’t on fire or being invaded by a horde of some sort. Sometimes I’ve gotten caught up in a book, and I would have appreciated a quick reminder from the author concerning the outside world; and I swore that if I ever wrote a book, I would include one. So, here it is. Is everything in order? Okay then. Go on.)

  Maybe it goes without saying that the Beiges were on time and that they were, in fact, beige-colored.

  Mrs. Drudger said, “Hello, come in. So good to see you.”

  Mr. Drudger said, “So glad you could make it.” He hung up their beige overcoats.

  Fern watched the Beiges as they were ushered through the living room by Mr. Drudger. They were short and duck-footed. Milton was a pale sausage of a boy. The skin of his neck chubbed up around the tight buttoning of his collar. He had a runny nose, which he rubbed in a small circle. His nose had developed a small ball on the end of it. Because he rubbed it in a circle like Play-Doh? Fern wasn’t sure. His mother had a circular, flat-topped hairdo, much like a beige cake, and his father was imbalanced by a heavy paunch.

  Mr. Beige and Milton seemed naturally beige. Their skin, like their pants and blazers, were the exact coloring of Mrs. Drudger’s puddings. Mrs. Beige may have once been another color, but she wore beige makeup, so it was impossible to say. (In my tireless research, I did try to get baby pictures of Mrs. Beige, but her mother, who was definitely a pinkish old woman, refused to hand them over. “Go away,” she said. “My daughter is beige now. Isn’t that enough for you?”) Fern was watching the Beige family carefully, but they became so deeply camouflaged they seemed to disappear into the beige furniture and wall-to-wall carpeting, even into the painting that hung in the living room (the only painting in the house, it depicted the Drudgers’ beige living room, which only further illustrates the Drudgers’ dogged lack of imagination). Like camels against a backdrop of sand, the Beiges melted into the living room (and the painting of the living room) so seamlessly that Fern could only see the motion of their beige shoes.

  They walked to the dining room and sat down around the table. Mr. Drudger did, too. The Beiges were here to eat dinner, and the Drudgers prided themselves on the efficiency of their dinner parties. Mrs. Drudger had already whisked herself out of the room and back in, carrying a casserole dish.

  Fern took her seat, her eyes tightened to small slits out of politeness. She said, “Hi, I’m Fern.”

  “Yes, our daughter,” said Mrs. Drudger.

  “She doesn’t look much like either of you,” said Mr. Beige.

  And here Fern tightened her eyes harder and patted down her hair. Fern’s hair was another source of embarrassment for the Drudgers. It stood up curly right on the top of her head. She’d forced it into three barrettes earlier, but it was no use. The hair had broken loose and now puffed like a plume.

  When Fern was nervous, she often thought of all the things that she would say if she were the type to say what was on her mind. Fern was now thinking that the Beiges must have been wonder
ing how she got her hair to look like this. The narration in her head went something like: You might think, Beige family, Does she curl it especially? You might think, Is she really trying to look like an orphan from Oliver Twist who can’t afford a comb? You might say to yourselves, Did she wake up this morning and say to herself, “Perfect. I look just like a rooster.” You may also want to ask if I’ve been recently electrocuted. But you’re stopping yourselves from saying any of this, because you might think I’m self-conscious about the incident—a fork in the toaster or something. But, no. None of the above. I just look like this. It’s completely natural. Often when Fern went into one of the nervous narrations in her head, there seemed to be a buildup of the unsaid that would create such a pressure inside her that she would find herself blurting one final statement that made no sense to anyone. Sometimes it barely even made sense to herself. In this case Fern busted out with, “I didn’t jam a fork into a toaster!”

  Mr. and Mrs. Drudger were aghast, of course, horrified by the inappropriate, unrelated statement. Mr. Drudger tried to gloss over it by making a measured comment about sod, and Mrs. Drudger said, “Dinner’s ready,” but with that pinch in her voice.

  Mr. Beige piped up about sod, too, relieved. Mrs. Beige added that there was a sale on lawn equipment. She’d saved the flier. It was in her pocketbook. She went digging for it.

  Meanwhile Milton pinched Fern’s arm. Rubbing his ball-tipped nose, he said, “My main question is, What’s wrong with your eyes? How do you see with them all squished like that?”

  Fern sighed. “I’m not sure I can explain.”

  “Oh,” Milton said.

  He seemed nice enough, although Fern doubted she could ever marry him.

  Mrs. Drudger’s meals were all about chewing and swallowing. Nothing more. The food wasn’t hot or cold. Just warm. The dining room was quiet, so very quiet that Fern had the peculiar desire to start singing. In fact, she could feel the restlessness of an entire choir harking and heralding in her chest, but she resisted. She pressed it down, kept it to herself. And finally dinner was over.

  They were about to clear the dishes when something unexpected happened. Fern could tell it was something important. She could sense it. There was a knock at the door, a loud, nervous, one could say flustered knock—as if the knocker wanted to show confidence but didn’t really want anyone to be home and so rushed it, hoping to get to shrug, turn, and go.

  3

  HOWARD AND THE BONE

  MRS. DRUDGER WENT TO ANSWER THE DOOR. “I don’t know who it could be,” she said. And she was right; she had no idea. The Drudgers had few friends, and the friends who did come by always called ahead so they could each write the appointment on their wall calendars and in their pocket organizers.

  It had started to rain. Mrs. Drudger opened the door to a woman in a plastic rain hat, the kind you can fold up to the size of a dime and put back in the small plastic envelope it came in. Fern was out of her seat, peeking from the dining room doorway.

  Mr. Drudger said, “Fern, we have company. Please sit down.” But, knowing her father wouldn’t want to repeat himself for fear of creating a stir, she pretended not to hear him and stayed where she was.

  The rain cap had bright red flowers on it, and the woman’s face was broad, her cheeks like blooms to match the cap. The woman said, “Sorry to interrupt. I’m not interrupting, am I? I hate to interrupt.”

  “What is it?” Mrs. Drudger asked. “Are you selling something? Do you have a flier? I’ll just take the flier.” She always wanted more for her collection.

  “No. I’m Mary Curtain. I was a nurse. I was your nurse.”

  “I’m not sick. I’ve never needed a nurse.”

  “I helped deliver your baby,” she said.

  Fern crept closer. She wanted to ask Mary Curtain questions, a hundred questions. She finally had another source of information, and maybe this woman, brightly flushed and now starting to cry on the wet stoop, would have more to say.

  Mary Curtain’s cry turned into a blubber. Her cheeks bobbed, blotting out her eyes. Her second chin jiggled then wobbled as she shook her head. “I’m so sorry. So sorry. I quit nursing. I was so terrible at it.”

  A car door slammed and Mrs. Drudger, startled, snapped her eyes toward a car parked in the street. She hadn’t noticed it before. “What’s this? Look. You have to go. You are interrupting, as a matter of fact. We have guests over. Important guests.”

  But now there was a man standing in the porch light too and a boy about Fern’s age. He was a gangly boy with small eyes and a flat head of hair. On one of his pale knobby knees there was a new scar, healed over, no longer scabby, but a fresh scar nonetheless, still angry. The man had fluffy blond hair, graying at his bushy sideburns. His lashes were blond, too, but full. His face was ruddy. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and his forearms were tan. He wore saggy blue jeans, but they were too short, revealing unmatched socks, two different shades of blue.

  Mary was hysterical. The man said ever-so-gently, “Mary, come now, Mary. You said you wouldn’t cry.”

  “I know! I know!” she bawled.

  The man looked up at Mrs. Drudger. “Sorry, ma’am. Mary was supposed to re-introduce herself and then introduce us.”

  There was a small breeze and from Fern’s spot a few feet away, she could smell the man. He smelled like sweet mint chewing gum and a fruity aftershave. He was wearing a white shirt, thin and wet now from the rain and from putting his arm around Mary, who was soaking. His shirt was see-through and revealed a thick white undershirt.

  The gangly boy said, “Let me in. I want to go home.”

  Mrs. Drudger said, “What? What did you say?” She was staring at the boy, her own eyes wide for once. She recognized something in him. “You want to go home and you want to come in?”

  “There’s been a mix-up,” said the man. “I’m the Bone, ah, well, Mr. Bone. This is Howard. This is your son. And, well, you’ve got mine. A girl.”

  Fern rushed forward now and stood just behind Mrs. Drudger’s arm, and she saw the man who claimed to be her father. And he saw her. Their eyes locked. Their heads tilted softly.

  “Well, now, there she is,” he said.

  This would probably upset the average kid, but to Fern it seemed to be the beginning of something that might just make sense. She didn’t fit in here with the Drudgers. She never had, and maybe this could explain why. Fern’s heart was beating so loudly that the noise filled her ears. She felt an immediate tenderness. Her father? She stared at him. Really? Could it be true?

  Though hopeful, Fern was still a little suspicious. She wasn’t the only one who made things up. Grown-ups seemed to hate lies, but they told them all the time. They switcherooed things and told half-truths and called them “excuses” and “compliments,” and this word “euphemism,” she’d recently learned, which means you put a big happy bow on something that’s ugly and pretend it’s something else—like each summer when they drove into Lost Lake, there was a big sign that said WELCOME TO YOUR LUXURY VACATION RESORT! (Or as in the introduction of my highly regarded teacher’s most recent masterpiece…isn’t it stretching things just a little bit, just a teeny weeny bit, when he uses words like “genius” and “classic” over and over again, even though he’s humbly confessing how difficult and strenuous it is to be a genius who’s written so many classics?) Could Fern believe this sopping man in mismatched socks standing at the front door?

  “I…I…I have a dinner party with guests!” Mrs. Drudger said. She called her husband. “Dear! Dear!” She scurried to the kitchen. “The guests will want refills! Drinks!” Mr. Drudger appeared in the hall. The Beiges, all three of them, scurried in after him in a big beige blur. Mr. Drudger looked at Fern, the man, the woman, the gangly boy, all dripping in the open doorway. He said, “Oh, my!”

  Mrs. Drudger screamed out from the kitchen, “HE’S OURS! THAT’S WHAT THEY SAY!! NOT FERN!!!” Fern had never heard her like this. The pinch in her voice had risen to a shrill wh
istle, like that of Fern’s swim coach, Mrs. Lilliopole. From the entranceway, Fern could see Mrs. Drudger race around the kitchen. She watched her tear open the refrigerator door looking for drinks and then slam it. The magnets collected there, all two hundred twenty-six, flew off and skittered across the floor.

  Mary Curtain and the Bone and Howard inched into the hallway. They stood there awkwardly while Mrs. Drudger scrambled to pick up a handful of the magnets and rearrange them on the fridge. There was an uncomfortable silence. Mary Curtain filled it: “The Bone is such a good father,” she said to Fern warmly. “Howard and the Bone have been together for a long time, ever since the Bone got out of jail.”

  Mrs. Drudger tottered back to the entranceway. “Jail?” she gasped.

  The Bone made a correction. “I prefer not to say jail. I prefer to say that I was recharging my batteries. I was taking a rest between opportunities.” He tapped his head. “There is no jail that can imprison the creative mind!” He smiled, chewing his gum. Fern agreed with the Bone. Jail, yes, she felt she’d been in jail, too, here at the Drudgers’, trying to be Drudger-like, but her creative mind had roamed on freely. Whether he was her father or not, she liked him.

  At this, the Beiges got ready to leave.

  Mr. Beige said to Mr. Drudger, “What kind of a place are you running here? I’ve never seen so much drama.”

  Mr. Drudger blanched and sputtered. “Y-y-you know I don’t care for this kind of thing! I don’t even go to the theater! You know that!” “Drama,” “theater,” Fern knew these were bad words, things to disapprove of.

  The Beiges shrugged on their overcoats.

  Milton asked, “Are you a real live bad guy?” His nose rubbing now seemed like a nervous twitch.

  The Bone said, “I prefer to say—” but he didn’t have a chance to finish his answer. Milton was swooped out of the house, one parent grabbing either arm. The door was slammed shut.