Waiting for Bojangles Read online

  “Well, not exactly,” I answered, caught completely off guard.

  “You’re an autist and a prince! You’re from Hungary and the USA! You’re nuts! Why did you lie to us?” she screamed as I started backing away from her fuss, feeling unredeemed.

  “This guy’s a sicko, he should be tarred and feathered!” a man in the crowd shouted in a voice that was weathered.

  “It’s not incompatible,” I muttered, stuck in the cul-de-sac of my falsehoods, like a deer caught in the woods. Then, knowing that my back was to the wall, I burst out in liberating laughter, no longer caring at all.

  “He really is nuts, he’s still laughing at us!” my accuser pointed out correctly, as she kept stalking toward me.

  “All right, I went off the rails, but you didn’t have to believe my tales; I took a gamble, we had fun; the upshot is, you lost, and I won!” I replied, backing dangerously close to the pool, looking like a fool, with a glass of whiskey in each hand.

  I was teetering at the edge when my accuser abruptly lifted off, took flight, then—crash! She fell into the glittering water, making a huge splash.

  “I beg you NOT to excuse me: I simply couldn’t resist! This man is my grandfather, Josephine Baker’s lover, a Prussian horseman and my future husband, all rolled into one, and I adore him. That was no passing whim—I’d do anything for him!”

  In the blink of a cocktail, the whirl of a dance, she twirled me in her veil, I didn’t stand a chance. That flighty woman filled my whole soul with gladness by inviting me to share her madness.

  3.

  At school, nothing went as planned, and I mean nothing, especially not for me. When I described what went on at home, the teacher didn’t believe me, and my classmates didn’t either. So I started lying backward. It served the general interest, and especially my own. At school, I had a normal mother; “Mr. Bojangles” was just some record that spun like any other; Mom’s name was always the same; Mademoiselle Superfluous had never heard of us; the Creep wasn’t a famous senator, just an obscure inventor, and I had dinner at dinnertime, like everybody else. It was better that way. I lied forward at home and backward at school; it was complicated for me, but simpler for everybody else.

  Lies weren’t the only thing I did backward. My writing went that way, too. I wrote “like a mirror,” the teacher said, even though I knew perfectly well that mirrors couldn’t write. The teacher lied sometimes, too, but it seems that she was allowed to. Everybody could tell little white lies, because in terms of tranquility, they were better than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. My mother loved my mirror writing though, so when I got home from school, she would ask me to write whatever popped into my head: prose, shopping lists, mushy love poems. “That’s wonderful, write my name of the day in mirror writing so I can see it!” she’d say, urging me on, her eyes bright with admiration beyond measure. She kept the slips of paper in a jewelry box, because, she said, “writing like that is worth its weight in gold, a real treasure!”

  To make me write right, the teacher sent me to a lady who could straighten letters out without even touching them. She could fix them without any tools, and make them go the right way. So, to Mom’s misfortune, I was almost cured. I say “almost,” because on top of everything else, I was left-handed, but the teacher couldn’t do anything about that. She said that fate really had it in for me, but that’s just how it was. Before I was born, she added, they used to strap kids’ wrong arms to their chests to cure them, but that kind of treatment was over now. Sometimes her lies made me furrow my brow.

  The teacher had a lovely, sandy-colored permanent, as though a desert storm were always blowing on her head. I thought it was beautiful. She also had a bump in her sleeve. At first I thought it was a disease, but one fine day when the weather was bad and she had a cold, I saw her take the bump out and blow her nose in it. I thought that was quite impulsive, and more than a little repulsive.

  Mother didn’t get along with Desert Storm in the least, because of my writing, of course, but also because my teacher never wanted to let me go to heaven when my parents had decided to. She wanted us to wait until school vacation, like everybody else. She said that what with my writing issue, I was already behind, and if I kept missing school, I was going to miss a lot of boats, too.

  “The almond trees are in bloom right now,” my mother would explain. “Surely you don’t mean for my son to miss the almond trees! It’s the loveliest way to mark the end of winter. If you make him miss it, you’re going to throw his aesthetic balance all off-kilter!” Manifestly, the teacher cared about neither almond trees nor their blooms, and she didn’t give a damn about my aesthetic balance either, but we used to go to heaven anyway. It would throw the teacher into a terrible rage, and sometimes her bad mood would last until I got back. So I tried not to be rude, and I sat at the back of the room when I could.

  I really didn’t know how to apologize to the teacher for my mirror writing, the almond trees and the heavenly vacations any time of year, so one day I decided to do her a favor. You see, all sorts of bad stuff used to happen in the classroom when she had her back turned to us and the rest of her facing the board. Since she didn’t have eyes in the back of her head, I decided I could be an extra pair of eyes for her. So I told on everyone, about everything, every day. The spitballers, the chatterers and cheaters, the glue-game players, funny-face makers and candy eaters.

  What a commotion it caused the first time! Absolutely no one was expecting it, so there was an embarrassing silence. The teacher gave the spitballers detention and completely forgot to thank me. The next few times, she just seemed uneasy, and ran her hands through her sandy, stormy hair to show she was displeased. Then, one day, I was the one who got detention.

  She wondered out loud why I had turned into such a stool pigeon. I said I wasn’t a bird, even if I was sitting on a stool. When she got upset, the teacher thought I was a birdbrain, so I thought the storm wasn’t only in her hair, but inside her head, too. Then she said not to do her any more favors, that that kind of favor wasn’t nice. She didn’t want to have eyes in the back of her head, and she had every right not to. And then she took the bump out of her sleeve and blew her nose in it, so I asked if it was always the same tissue. Her only answer was to squeeze it very tightly in her hand and scream at me to get out. In the hall I wondered why she’d made such an issue of a tissue, and decided that you really couldn’t get anything out of that teacher but mucus.

  When I told my mother the story about eyes in the back of the teacher’s head, she thought it was my imagination and crowed, “Informer, what a lovely occupation! It’s perfectly perfect, my boy! Thanks to you, all will be right with the world.” With all the lying backward and forward, sometimes I really didn’t know which way I was supposed to go.

  After writing, we had to learn how to read the time on a clock with hands on its face. That was a real calamity, because even though I already knew how to read the time on my father’s watch with numbers that glowed in the dark, I just couldn’t read it on the clock whose hands didn’t glow at all. Something to do with the light, I figured. Not being able to read the time was bad enough, but not being able to read it in front of the whole class was even worse. For weeks on end, there were clocks on all the chemical-smelling ditto sheets we got. And that whole time, boats were sailing by, as the teacher pointed out. “If you don’t learn to tell time soon, you’ll miss every last boat!” she said, giving the other children a laugh at my expense.

  She asked my mother to come in again to talk about my transportation problems and completely forgot to mention that I was turning into a bird. My mother, who had clock issues herself, got very angry and scolded her, “My son already knows how to read the time on his father’s watch, and that’s plenty good enough nowadays! Did farmers keep teaching their sons how to plow with horses after tractors were invented? I don’t think so!”

  It was a perfectly sensible remark, but the teacher never relented. Instead, she looked at my m
om like she was demented, and yelled that our whole family was one big bowl of nuts. She’d never seen anything like it, she lamented, then added that from then on, she would leave me alone and not worry about me anymore. Then she showed Mom the door.

  “At noon that same day, mere moments after the bell, with the ditto-paper clock ticking out its awful smell, staring outside while daydreaming, our stunned son took comfort in watching the playground morph into a moat with a wake left by that other life, sailing away in a boat.”

  After they had taken me out of school, my parents would often say that they had offered me early retirement. “You must be the youngest retiree in the world!” my father would say, chortling in that childlike way that grown-ups—or at least my parents—sometimes have.

  They seemed thrilled to have me by their side all day long, and I didn’t have to worry about missing all those boats anymore. I had no regrets whatsoever about leaving my class or my teacher with her turbulent hair and faux cancer of the sleeve.

  My parents had no shortage of ideas for how to educate me. For math lessons, they draped me in bracelets, necklaces and rings, and had me count them for addition. Then they’d strip me down to my long johns for subtraction. They called that my “arithme-tease,” and it left us doubled over with laughter. For more complicated math, Dad would give me an “immersion course,” as he put it. He’d fill the bathtub, with me in it, and scoop out pints, quarts and gallons, asking me a multitude of technical questions. Whenever I got the answer wrong, he would pour a quart of water over my head. My math lessons were more like pool parties, I have to admit. The two of them composed an entire repertory of songs to teach me conjugation, with hand gestures for personal pronouns. I learned those lessons by heart, and was perfectly happy to dance to the past-tense song all day long. At night, I read them stories that I had written myself, or summaries of stories that had already been written by the classics.

  The best thing about my early retirement was that we could go to Spain without having to wait for everyone else. Sometimes the need to go came over us like having to pee, although it did take a little longer to deal with. In the morning, Dad would say, “Pauline, let’s get packing. I want to have cocktails by the lake tonight!” So we’d toss tons of things into our suitcases. There’d be stuff flying all over the place. Dad would shout at the top of his voice, “Jill, where are my espadrilles?”

  Mom would answer, “In the garbage, George! That’s where they look best!” Or she would toss out, “George, don’t forget your foolishness, we always need it!”

  And my father would shoot back, “Don’t worry, Connie, I always keep a copy on me!” We always forgot all sorts of things, but then we were usually knocking ourselves out to get to Spain in a New York minute.

  Down there, everything was different, but the mountain was in a hurry, too. With its wintry, snow-capped peak, the autumnal reds and browns of the sunbaked earth and rocks just below it, the juicy spring colors of the terraced orchards, and the summery heat and smells reverberating off the lake in the valley, Dad used to say that with a mountain like that, you could dash through a year in less than a day.

  Since we went whenever we felt like it, we usually felt like arriving when the almond trees were in bloom, and leaving after the orange blossoms had fallen. In between, we’d paddle around the lake, tan grease-free without fouling our towels, have huge barbecues and invite lots of people over for drinks. In the morning, I’d fish the chunks of fruit out of the glasses and make myself a fruit salad so big that the bowl would be overflowing. The guests would be amazed that it was always fiesta time, and Dad would say good, that was how life should be.

  When Parliament was on vacation, the Creep would come to visit. He said that senators were like children, they needed to get their rest. To show that he was workless, he’d wear a straw hat and go shirtless all day long, which was pretty impressive, considering how plump and hairy his stomach was. He’d spend the whole day on the terrace enjoying the view, eating, and drinking fruit. In the evening, he’d call for his girlfriend, and you could hear “Caipiroska-aa-aaaa-aa!” echoing down the valley.

  He used to say that he would feel that he had succeeded in life when he could balance a place setting on his stomach. So he ate and drank all the time, to give himself every chance for success.

  When he first got to Spain, the sun would turn him redder than usual. Papa said that it was “beyond reason,” which I figured was the name of a very deep, powerful red, hard to get past on a color chart. As the vacation wore on, the Senator would go totally brown. When he was snoozing, I loved to watch his hairy belly sweat. There were always minuscule rivers running through the hair and pooling in his belly button.

  The Creep and I would play “Russian Droolette,” a game he had invented just for me. We would sit facing each other and open our mouths as wide as we could. The idea was to toss anchovy-stuffed olives or salted almonds at each other. Our faces were the targets, and our mouths, the bulls’-eyes. You had to aim really carefully, because the anchovies stung our eyes (though not the bulls’), and so did the salt from the almonds. Since the games lasted a long time, we always wound up drooling all over ourselves.

  When Dad was working on a book, the Creep would come hiking in the mountains with Mom and me. It would always start out the same way, with him way ahead of us, saying that hiking brought back memories of his time in the army. But we’d catch up with him as his memories started wandering away, and we’d start to pull ahead when he’d used up his memories and was dripping with sweat. So we’d leave him sitting on a rock and go eat wild asparagus and prickly pears, and pick thyme and rosemary and pine nuts. By the time we found him on our way back down, he would have dried off completely.

  He did take things seriously occasionally, like when he would give me advice for my future. I was really struck by one thing that he’d said was, “just horse sense,” to emphasize how logical and important it was: “My boy, if you don’t want to get double-crossed, there are two categories of people to avoid at all costs: vegetarians and professional cyclists. The first, because anyone who refuses to eat a rib steak must have been a cannibal in another life. And the second, because a man who goes out with a suppository on his head and shoves his nuts into fluorescent tights to climb mountains on a bicycle can’t be all there. So if you ever meet a vegetarian cyclist, here’s a piece of advice, little man: give him a good shove to save time, then run far away, as fast as you can!” I thanked him for his wise counsel, declaring gratefully, “The most dangerous enemies are the ones you least suspect!” For all I knew, he had just saved my life, and even though I didn’t see how horse sense could teach you anything about cyclists, I decided to keep it in mind.

  For Mom’s birthday, my father and the Creep would row the boat out early in the morning to set fireworks up in the middle of the lake, while Mom and I would go to the market to buy bottles, fruit, ham, paella, chorizo, round bracelets of squid, cake and ice cream, and I don’t know how many more bottles. When we got back, Mom would ask me to use my powers to entertain her with stories while she looked for the perfect outfit, which always took hours. She would try clothes on; ask for my opinion, which was always approving; then ask for the mirror’s. The mirror always got the last word, because, she said, “your outlook is moving, but the mirror’s is more objective. It judges truthfully, if cruelly, and never gets affected by the affective.”

  Then she’d change again, swan around to see how the clothes moved, dance in her lingerie, decide it was perfectly perfect, but perhaps not right for today, and start over yet again, putting the same clothes on, but differently. Staccato sounds of setup—laughter, shouting and some shrieks—would rise from the lake.

  “Not like that, Cre-eee-eee-eep,” Dad’s voice would echo.

  “We’re sin-n-n-k-k-k-ing!” the Creep would respond.

  “Sit STIIIILLLLL!!!!” my father would beg him.

  “Cheeeeers!” they would chime in chorus.

  • • •


  As if by magic, Mom would find the right outfit just minutes before the guests arrived. Every time, it was totally amazing. Then she’d paint her lips, brush her long eyelashes on and be ready to welcome people with such natural grace that you’d think she’d rolled out of bed like that. Her perfect presentation was a lie, too, but what a splendid lie it was.

  Waiting for night to fall over the terrace all draped in white, people drank and complimented each other’s tans, their outfits and their wives, and congratulated themselves for the splendid weather, even though they didn’t have anything to do with it. Wearing a custom-made necklace of small change, Mademoiselle Superfluous strolled haughtily amongst the guests, never hesitating to peck at bits of grilled squid, splattering nearby pants legs with olive oil.

  Then, once the last wedge of the sun had disappeared into the valley below, “Bojangles” would ring out, floating into the atmosphere on Nina Simone’s warm, sweet voice and the echo of her piano. It was so beautiful that everyone stopped talking to watch Mom cry soundlessly. With one hand, I wiped away her tears, and with the other, I held hers. I usually saw the first fireworks in her eyes: the colorful bouquets scattering like confetti in the sky, moving in the opposite direction in their reflection in the lake. Those double fireworks would leave everyone dumbstruck and gaping, then little by little, you would start to hear clapping. As faint as water lapping the shore at first, it would grow louder and louder, blending in with the sounds from the bursts of gunpowder. It would rumble and growl, snap, crackle and pop, fade out and then roar up again even louder. After the grand finale, as the fiery spangles from the loudest, biggest and highest blast had started drifting gently down toward the starry blanket of the lake, Mom would whisper wistfully in my ear, “He jumped so high, he jumped so high, then he’d lightly touch down.”