“You want to see my collection?” Toby asked her. He took her hand and led her into his room. A minute later she heard music. He was playing his violin for her—the twelve measures of the Wieniawski Polonaise he’d mastered.
“One more thing,” Eleanor heard her son telling Phyllis. “Did you know I have a webbed foot?”
38.
Old Wonderful Life
If only we could just stop the world,” Ursula said. “If it just could always be the way it is right now forever.”
It was a Sunday the week after school got out. For three days they’d been experiencing a heat wave—unusual for that time of year, with the temperature never going below ninety and spiking over a hundred at midday. All that week, Ursula kept making trays of juice Popsicles—the only food besides watermelon that anyone felt like eating.
That week, Cam and Eleanor slept naked, no longer for the touch of each other’s skin, but only for the purpose of receiving as much relief as possible against the heat—and when they got up, they took long showers and rubbed ice cubes over their faces, squirted themselves from spray bottles. Jumped in the pond. It occurred to Eleanor that no babies would be born nine months from this. Nobody would be crazy enough to make love in this heat.
That day, Darla and Kimmie had made plans to take Alison and Ursula to a water park up north, Magic Waves—a place Ursula had been dreaming of going to since she spotted a brochure for the place at Friendly’s one night. But they had a strict minimum height requirement at the park, and Toby was too short. The morning Darla came to pick the girls up for the water park adventure, he’d sat at the window, watching them pile into the car, and for the next hour he wandered around like a man without a country, asking Eleanor when his sisters would get home.
The girls were back right after lunchtime. There’d been an electrical storm at the park and everyone had to get out of the water.
When his sisters burst in the door, he leapt into Ursula’s arms.
“I found you,” he called out.
“They gave us passes to come back another day with an extra for a friend,” she told him. “I bet by then you’ll be big enough to go.”
“It wasn’t really so great anyway,” Alison offered. “I have a feeling people had been peeing in the water.”
“You came back,” Toby said, stroking their hair—Ursula’s first, then Alison’s, his favorite people in the world. To Toby that day, it probably seemed as if he had conjured his sisters back home by the sheer force of his yearning for them.
Cam came in from the woodshop and cut up a watermelon for them, and after, they built a fort out of the box from a refrigerator delivered that week—the old Coldspot having finally given up the ghost—with a pulley leading to a second structure Alison called the Kasbah, made by draping a couple of old bedspreads over the rose arbor. All afternoon they sent messages back and forth on pulleys between the fort and the Kasbah, until everyone was too hot and too tired. Ursula ran into the house and came out with a pile of pillows and library books and smell markers and a giant bag of Goldfish.
They spread a blanket under Old Ashworthy and Alison read out loud to them for a while—Charlotte’s Web,their favorite. Then they made Toby a sword decorated with foil that Ursula had been saving from some chocolates, and Alison read them another chapter, and then Ursula and Toby took off all their clothes and raced into the pond together, holding hands, even though the water was still very cold.
When they came out, they wrapped themselves in towels and Ursula painted Toby’s toenails and her own, but not Alison’s, naturally.
Toby climbed up onto the picnic table then, naked except for an old straw hat of Cam’s, with his purple toes, and performed his current favorite song, “Shipoopi.” He’d learned the song from a soundtrack record ofThe Music Manthey’d found on one of their recent dump-picking missions. He alternated this performance with his other beloved song, “Thriller.” Though theThrilleralbum had come out some time before, he particularly loved the video with Vincent Price and Michael Jackson turning into a werewolf. Toby knew all the moves, and performed them with amazing accuracy and, more than that, style.
They could smell dinner cooking—fried chicken with corn bread—and they knew there would be apple crisp later, too, with vanilla ice cream, and that afterward, the family might snuggle up on the couch with Sally to watch a movie on the VCR, with a fan going on account of the heat. The weekend before, they’d picked out a movie about a scientist who goes up to the Alaskan tundra to study wolf behavior, and because they hadn’t returned the tape to the video store yet, there was a good chance they could persuade their parents to let them watch it again, since it was one of those movies their mother believed instilled good values, like kindness, as well as courage.
That was the afternoon when Ursula had made her observation about wishing she could stop the world.
It was true. This may have been the best day ever. (And the funny thing was, they never even got to ride the giant slide at the water park.)
Later, the girls would remember exactly where they were when Ursula said this: lying on the plaid TV blanket in the sideways refrigerator-box fort, munching the last of the watermelon, juice dripping down their chins. “Let’s all hold hands and close our eyes,” Ursula said. “So we remember.”
Alison had been the one who suggested making the time capsule. Some time back, she had dug an old metal safe out of a pile of trash at the dump, and though it wasn’t easy getting this thing up the hill to the station wagon, she had persuaded her mother the safe was a treasure worth salvaging.
It had been sitting in the garage for at least a year. That afternoon, they hauled it out. The three of them spent the better part of an hour scrubbing off the dirt.
The plan was for each of them to put something in the safe. “It shouldn’t just be some dumb piece of junk or some prize you got with a Happy Meal,” Alison said. “It has to be something that really matters to you. It might be something you have a hard time giving up, but that just goes to show it belongs in our box.”
Nobody was supposed to tell the others what they were putting in the time capsule. They wrapped their items in toilet paper. Eachof the girls composed a letter to their future selves—or whoever it might be who one day discovered the box. These, too, remained secret.
Toby wanted to write a letter also, not that he knew how to write. Alison suggested she’d help him with this but he said no, he’d do it by himself. Reaching for a purple smell marker (grape), he spent a surprisingly long time—five minutes, at least—composing his note.
When they were done, and each of them had placed their time capsule treasures in the box, along with their letters, they located a shovel in the garage. They considered carefully where the best spot might be to bury the time capsule.
It was almost dinnertime; their mother was calling them in. “Five minutes!” they called back to her.
The sun was hitting the leaves on Old Ashworthy just right, so they seemed almost to glow, and the sky was cloudless.
