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Out of the Box(14)

By:Michelle Mulder


Sarah jerks her head in their direction, and we wander closer to the school. Both kids are dark, with thick black hair. The older one is wearing a red ball-cap backward, low-slung jeans and very white running shoes. He looks like he’d be part of the school’s cool crowd, not someone who would sit in the dirt with a little boy, talking and laughing. If I were a different person, I would leave Sarah to her investigation of the school and go talk to them.

Sarah is peering in the school windows.

“What do you think?” I ask.

She shrugs. “This art room looks better than most. Come look at the mural.”

She stands back, and I press my face up against the glass. On one wall of the classroom, someone has painted life-size images of kids painting a wall of a classroom. I wonder if the kids did it themselves, and what kind of teacher might let them do that. All at once, I wish I were the one coming to this new school. I’d reinvent myself, be braver than I am at home. I picture myself wandering back to Jeanette’s place by myself or with friends, spreading out my homework on her sunny kitchen table and listening to music while she chats with friends in the living room or works in her garden. Sunshine and music instead of silence or shouting.

And suddenly I feel like the most ungrateful kid on the planet. Here I am imagining all this when I have a perfectly good home with two parents who need me. I shake my head and try to think of something else.

“Let’s go.” Sarah steps back from the window. “I’ve seen everything I need to see.”





EIGHT


“Care to come with me?” Jeanette asks. We’ve just hauled two big bags of postage stamps up from the basement, and she’s putting on her sandals and bike helmet. “Louise lives close to Chinatown. Maybe we could stop for red-bean cakes afterward.”

“Deal.” I slip on my shoes and hoist one of the bags. “Who knew postage stamps could be so heavy?”

“I don’t know where Louise plans to keep them,” Jeanette says. “Their condo is tiny, and both she and her husband collect all kinds of stuff. You’ll see. They’re quite the characters.”

Louise, from the soup kitchen, and her husband Frank live in a new condo near Chinatown. Louise beckons us in with a big smile and introduces us to Frank, who looks familiar, though I don’t know where I’d have met him before. He’s short, round, balding, and looks happy to see us.

Their place is incredible. The floors are polished concrete, and the high ceilings are covered in big pipes painted bright orange, red and yellow. A canoe sits in the middle of their living room. “No other space for it,” Louise says when she notices me staring.

The usual living-room furniture is squeezed tight around the canoe, and a potter’s wheel stands off to one side, leaving very little room to walk. The far wall is full of books—and I mean full: floor to ceiling, with a ladder that’s two stories tall to reach the top ones. What strikes me most, though, is an enormous poster of a couple dancing, the man in a tuxedo, and the woman in a bright red dress with heels high enough to make walking impossible for most people. I wonder if Frank and Louise were once mad dancing fiends, or if the poster’s here because the colors match the decor.

“Tango,” Frank says, coming up beside me.

“I know.” I ask if he dances and immediately feel my face flush. I can’t imagine him and Louise ever looking as glamorous as the dancers in the poster. Maybe he’ll think I’m mocking him.

“Used to dance,” Frank says. “The music itself has always been more my thing though.”

He smiles, and suddenly I know who he is: the bandoneón player at the tango festival Alison took me to last year. I turn to Jeanette, and she’s grinning at me. So are Louise and Frank.

“I suspect you two will have a lot to talk about,” my aunt says. “This is the fellow who was going to teach Alison to play the bandoneón.”

In three days, Jeanette has given me not only the instrument of my dreams but someone to teach me to play it as well. I stand there in stunned silence for a second or two before Louise claps her hands together.

“First we eat,” she says. “I’ve just made a strawberry pie that we can’t possibly finish ourselves.”

We sit down around the canoe and eat pie and ice cream while Frank tells me about growing up playing accordion in Germany and later studying music in Paris.

“Do you play Edith Piaf ’s stuff?” I ask, my dessert forgotten, the ice cream melting in front of me.

“Of course. What decent accordion player doesn’t play Piaf?” He gets up, goes to a kitchen cupboard, pulls out an accordion and starts to play.