The Art of Keeping Cool Read online

  “Oh, various complications,” Aunt Nan said, lightly. I saw her eyes meet my mothers over my head. Something about the word “complications” made me think of my fathers lameness, and I wondered if travel used to be harder for him than it was now.

  “It’s about time these children met the rest of their family. We’re glad to be here, having dinner with you at last,” my mother said, too gladly, I thought, considering all we’d left behind.

  “I feel sick!” Carolyn announced then. “We just ate on the train and I’m going to throw up all over the place if I have to eat again.”

  Mom and I looked at each other because Carolyn always felt sick whenever she got to someplace she wasn’t sure about. If you didn’t watch out, she could make herself sick, too.

  “You come with me, young lady,” Mom said, and snatched her off to one side. They went to find the room we’d be staying in that night, until we moved to our own cottage down the road the next morning.

  I followed everyone into a small dining room where a long wooden table was set for dinner and sat down across from . . . Elliot, was it? We glanced at each other under cover of the conversation. He was sitting very straight, his spine jammed back against the chair, which was itself set back from the table a bit. I had the strange impression he was trying to disappear.

  Grandpa Saunders took up a position at the head of the table, carving fork in one hand, carving knife in the other, a glistening brown roast chicken on a platter in front. Plates were passed down to him, one by one, for slices of meat, then sent over to Grandma, who served up peas, mashed potatoes, and hot rolls.

  “Everything’s homegrown,” she said proudly when my mother came back with Carolyn. “Except the rolls, of course. They’re plain home-baked.”

  Everyone laughed politely, except Elliot. He was staring up again, at the ceiling this time.

  “I put up a whole larder of vegetables at the farm last fall, but they’re going to have to wait till we get back,” my mother said. “To tell the truth, I’m not missing them much.”

  “Would you like dark meat or light, sonny?” Grandpa called when my turn came to pass up a plate.

  “Dark, I guess,” I said. I like white meat better but didn’t want to sound puny.

  “You can’t guess about what you like or don’t like, sonny. You’ve got to know!” Grandpa shouted, waving his knife in the air. “Is it light or dark?”

  “Dark!” I shouted back.

  Grandpa forked a huge chicken leg onto my plate.

  “I understand you and your mother didn’t have too much luck trying to run that hog farm out there by yourselves,” he said, passing the plate over to Grandma. “Bit off a little more than you could chew, is that right?”

  “Not really,” I said. “We were doing okay. We just couldn’t get hired help because of everybody going into the service like Dad, otherwise we would have—”

  “That’s what I said!” Grandpa roared. He cut me off so fast I was embarrassed and felt the blood come up in my face.

  Across the table, Elliot was having white meat and watching me from under his lids. He was still in that ridiculous straight-backed position. When Aunt Nan asked if he wanted more milk, he said:

  “Yes please, Mother, if I could,” in a voice that would have been about right for a fancy dinner party in New York.

  Then he did something even stranger. He reached across the space between him and the table, took up his knife and fork and, at arm’s length, began to cut up his chicken. It looked almost impossible to do, but finally he had a little mound of pieces and started to eat. He’d spear a chicken piece with the tip of his fork and whip it back to his mouth as if he were a bullfrog snapping up a fly.

  “What sports do you play?” I asked him after a while.

  “I don’t play sports,” Elliot said. “My knees go out.”

  “I played football at school this year,” I told him. “And a bunch of us play ice hockey in the winter. There’s a pond on our farm.”

  “Ohio has ice in the winter?” Elliot asked. “I thought it was too far south. Doesn’t the Mississippi River run through there?”

  This was so amazingly stupid I didn’t know what to say. Any map could tell you where Ohio was, and that the Mississippi wasn’t just a southern river. It flowed through the north, too. It started in the north, for God’s sake! I dug into my mashed potatoes and didn’t look over at Elliot again.

  But while the dishes were being washed in the kitchen and I was roaming around trying to keep clear of Grandpa Saunders, who was on a couch in the front parlor rattling through a newspaper, Elliot appeared suddenly at my side. He asked if I wanted to come up and see his room.

  “I could show you something,” he said, taking a large bite of his hand.

  “Well, all right,” I agreed, not very enthusiastically.

  The room was up a flight of stairs at the back of the house. It was an attic, really, with a bare light bulb hanging down from the rafters, old floor lamps, wicker chairs, and traveling trunks piled in dusty gloom at the far end. Elliot had one of those fold-up cots for a bed, and a chair, and a table which when I came in had nothing on it but a pad of paper.

  “I thought you might want to see this . . . um . . . picture,” he said, looking sideways at the pad.

  “Okay,” I said, and walked across to look.

  “It’s stupid, I know,” Elliot said, backing away and blinking fast. He was about the most nervous person I’d ever met.

  It was a drawing done with a plain lead pencil.

  “Did you do this?” I asked. It looked too good for a kid, like something a real artist might draw.

  There was Grandpa Saunders with the carving knife raised and his eyes pointy and dangerous behind his spectacles, exactly the way he’d looked bellowing down the dinner table at me. Everything from the angry bulge between his eyebrows to the pattern of white dots on his bow-tie was drawn in. The salt and pepper shakers were in front of him and the bowl of gravy. Grandma’s roast chicken was there, hunched down on the platter as if it were trying to take cover, too. It made me laugh a little.

  “Did you draw it, really?”

  “Yes.”

  “But when? We just finished dinner.”

  “A little while ago. Do you like it?”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “But how did you do it?”

  “I don’t know, I just did. Do you see what it says underneath?”

  Elliot pointed to a line of block lettering written in at the bottom of the drawing. It read, “Bit off more than you could chew, is that right, sonny?”

  I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. Elliot stood by with a cautious smile.

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  “I don’t know why it’s so funny, but it is.”

  “It’s because he made you feel so bad. You have to watch out. He does that.”

  “I was hoping no one had noticed.”

  “Don’t worry, no one did,” Elliot said. “Except me.”

  Right then was when I realized how I’d underestimated this strange cousin. I shook my head and laughed some more. And Elliot gave a somewhat brighter smile, but warily, as if he wasn’t sure he was allowed to.

  “I’m sorry I said that crazy thing about the Mississippi River,” he said. “I get kind of worried about stuff at the table. Tell me about your farm. It sounds like a pretty good place.”

  So I sat down and told him how I was going to miss the spring planting out there that year, but I guessed it would get done by somebody. I explained how we grew corn mostly, plus some other crops like wheat, and how hogs and corn sort of go together on a farm, because the hogs get fat eating the corn and then you can sell them for a good price and buy land to plant more corn.

  “My dad worked our farm up from nothing,” I boasted. “Well, my mother did a lot, too.”

  “Sounds like things were going great out there until your father had to leave,” Elliot said.

  “They were,” I said. “We were all real h
appy.”

  “Too bad my parents couldn’t’ve gone out to stay with you instead of your mother coming here. Then we all could’ve worked together and you probably could have stayed,” Elliot said. He wasn’t saying it just to be nice, I could tell. He really wished it had happened.

  After a while, neither of us felt like talking anymore. I said I ought to go help my mother carry in a few things from the truck for the night.

  “Can I have the drawing?” I asked. “I’ll keep it private, don’t worry.”

  “Oh, it’s for you,” Elliot said. “That’s why I drew it.”

  I folded up the sheet of paper and slid it into my back pocket, where just having it made the edges of my mouth twitch again when later that night, I saw Grandpa coming across the dim dining room on his way to bed.

  “Who is that?” he roared out rudely.

  “It’s Robert,” I said.

  In the shadows, I saw his mouth close up and tighten. We met and passed without another word.

  3

  NOT ALL AT once after this, but by slow degrees, I began to get to know Elliot and understand the different parts of him. He wasn’t a bad person overall, but he could be a real pain in the neck.

  For one thing, he was slower than midnight and took forever to get places. I always had to stand around and wait for him to leave or come or get ready to do something. Sometimes, he wouldn’t show up at all. He’d never apologize either. Usually I’d find him back in his room. He’d look up from whatever he’d gotten sidetracked on and say: “Oh, I guess I forgot,” as if it wasn’t his fault but just how things had naturally worked out.

  Elliot didn’t mean to be annoying. It turned out he had another sense of order. He’d worry frantically over tiny things that made no difference to anyone else: cups with cracks in them, lost buttons, little dead things like birds or squirrels that were hit on the road. He’d have to stop and bury them, no matter what. He’d rescue worms, too, if they were crawling into the road after a rainstorm, and put them back in the ditch they came out of. Whoever was with him had to stand around and wait. It didn’t matter how mad you got.

  In Elliot’s mind, everyone and everything had to be where they were supposed to be, act the way they were supposed to act. If they didn’t, he’d have to stop and put them right, which was pretty strange considering that Elliot himself wasn’t exactly dependable.

  He would promise to do a thing and then, when it was found out he hadn’t done it, tell the biggest lies to cover up. Anyone would know he was lying, too, because he was so bad at it.

  “Why don’t you just say you forgot?” I asked him one time. “People wouldn’t mind that much and it would make things more, you know, honest.”

  “Because I don’t forget,” Elliot said. In this case, he’d promised to stop on his way home from school and mail a letter my mother had given me for my father. I had to stay late to see a teacher. A couple of days afterwards, I found the letter sticking out of a book in his room.

  “The post office was closed when I went,” Elliot told me. “I was going to go back.”

  “Well, you could have put it in the post box out front. The post box is always open.”

  “It was locked,” Elliot lied. “Don’t ask me why, it’s never happened before, but it was locked up tight.”

  Another maddening thing was his fake manners with grown-ups. I couldn’t stand all the ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’ he was always pouring on with them, or the way he’d get out of doing chores by making Grandma feel guilty. He’d pretend he wasn’t feeling well, or that his knees were bothering him, some little thing. Then she’d ask me if I minded doing his jobs for him, which I did but what could I say?

  Nothing was ever really wrong with Elliot that I could see. He acted strange, that was all. He had a way of squinting, then opening his eyes wide, then squinting again that made people stare at him.

  “Were you sick before I came?” I asked him once. His skin was so pale. Sometimes it looked green, as if it was growing mold.

  “I don’t think so,” Elliot said.

  “You would know if you were sick,” I said, feeling a little like Grandpa Saunders on an attack.

  “You wouldn’t know if you were too sick to know you were.”

  “Are you saying you were too sick to know it?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Well, did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “You know!”

  A few more conversations like this and you were ready to strangle him.

  No one in his house seemed to worry about Elliot, though. Or, if they worried, they’d long ago given up trying to do anything about it. Grandma hugged him and shook her head. Uncle Jake looked the other way, as if Elliot were some sort of riddle he couldn’t guess the answer to. Aunt Nan cared about him a lot, but she was mostly away at work by the time I knew him, and didn’t have time to keep up with him. You could see how money was a trouble to her and Uncle Jake. They were both working like mad to hold up their end.

  Grandpa, of course, would hardly look at Elliot. He thought he was an idiot and a weakling, I’d seen that the first day. There wasn’t much that Grandpa hated more than idiots and weaklings.

  Sometimes it seemed as if Elliot was a sort of ghost in his own family, he went so quietly and unnoticeably around the house. Even his amazing talent had to be a secret, though why anyone who could draw that well would be hiding it, instead of getting up honestly and making something of it, I couldn’t understand. But no one ever talked about it, and:

  “Don’t show them! Don’t tell. They don’t want to know!” Elliot would say whenever he showed me some new picture he’d done. This was pretty often because, as I began to realize in the weeks after our move to Sachem’s Head, Elliot drew all the time. He couldn’t stop.

  He drew in the mornings before breakfast, at school during classes, at night while he was supposed to be doing his studies. He kept scraps of paper and a pencil in his pocket, ready to sketch whatever came along—the three-legged dog that hung around the playground, witchy old Miss Wilson teaching algebra.

  He didn’t keep the sketches or show them to anyone except me. He’d throw them away almost as soon as they were done.

  “Don’t you want this?” I’d ask. “It’s so good.”

  He’d shrug. “What for? I don’t need it anymore.”

  His memory was so sharp for the lines of what was around him that he could come home and draw a face, a room at school, whole trees, branch for branch, that he’d passed along the road. It was as if a little camera was inside his head, and everything he looked at was snapped and stored away. Later, he could choose the pictures he wanted to bring out and put down. Except, what he mostly chose wasn’t anything beautiful or wondrous, like what usually gets drawn. It would be something funny that we could laugh about, or that bothered him somehow, like the big guns coming down the road.

  Half an hour after we got home that March afternoon, Elliot had already finished a pencil drawing of them: the huge gray barrels, the crowd of people watching, toothpicks by comparison.

  I thought it was great. “Everything was just like that,” I told him, “only this is even a little better. I’m much scareder looking at this picture than I was on the road.”

  “That’s what happens,” Elliot answered with a nod. “If I do it right, that’s exactly what happens. The real thing gets caught.”

  “Caught?” I didn’t understand.

  “It cant get you,” Elliot explained. “You’ve got it, down on paper.”

  • • •

  The arrival of the big guns began to change things in Sachem’s Head. People became more anxious. They saw how the Germans really might be cooking up something, an espionage mission or an invasion. The fort had been quite relaxed about security up to then, and easygoing with folks in town. Now it stiffened up. A civilian couldn’t get in the gates without a written pass. Even Uncle Jake couldn’t get in without one. I knew it was hopeless to ask him to get me in
so I didn’t even try.

  Elliot and I began to see all kinds of high-ranking officers, captains and majors and such, riding around in military Jeeps. We had a book that we studied all the time which told how to recognize insignias and decorations on soldiers’ uniforms. We weren’t the only ones who had it. A lot of kids had this book. Everyone was always trying to outdo everyone else in spotting the highest rank. It was a big event of the whole day if you saw somebody important. Mike Parini said he saw a general once, but no one believed him. He wasn’t a liar or anything. If you knew Mike, you knew he had this kind of hopeful imagination that saw things it wanted to see.

  Meanwhile, news about the war was pouring in from all sides and we were all following the newspapers and the radio to find out what was happening. Things were heating up in the Pacific. After Pearl Harbor, the Japs thought they had us down and they invaded the Philippines, the island of Guam and some other South Sea islands. There wasn’t much we could do about it. Grandpa got disgusted with General MacArthur for getting trapped at Corregidor. Then he got disgusted with Roosevelt for not sending MacArthur enough troops to fight his way out. We’d hear about it every night at dinner, loud and clear.

  We already knew how the Germans had invaded all of Europe, and how they were bombing England to pieces, which was pretty frightening when I thought about my father being there. Sometime in April, reports began to come in of German U-boats, submarines that is, being sighted off our coast. Then a U. S. convoy ship was sunk up near Maine and people got worried. Mike Parini saw two more periscopes rise out of the ocean. This time he wasn’t the only one.

  Everyone started reporting them, and even Elliot and I couldn’t look out to sea without some flickery movement there making us jump. Mostly it wasn’t anything but a wave or a bunch of seagulls floating together, but sometimes we weren’t sure. That was the problem. Suddenly you couldn’t be sure. No one knew what the Germans were thinking or what they might be planning. If they were crazy enough to be invading everywhere else, why not here, too?

  Elliot and I were pretty much spending all our time together by then. May came. The days got milder and the cold winds that drove in off the sea began to let up. It was still cold, though. That year it seemed as if summer would never come.