The Class Menagerie jj-4 Page 4

  "May I get you ladies something to drink?" Jane asked.

  Mimi shook herTvead and gently took the paper from Avalon. "Jane, look at this lovely sketch Avalon brought along."

  It was an incredibly busy pencil drawing. "It's the carriage house here, isn't it?" Jane said. "How love-

  ly."

  "Look at the detail," Mimi instructed.

  As Jane studied the picture, she started to smile. It was full of quiet little jokes. The bush beside the coach house wasn't just squiggly lines as it first appeared, it was a seething mass of tiny rabbits. Bricks had faces hidden in them. So did tree trunks. A few random rocks along the drive were actually a chorus line of raccoons. There was a peddler with his pack in a cloud and a witch hidden in the branches of a tree.

  "This is delightful!" Jane, exclaimed. "You must show it to Edgar. He'll love it!"

  "Do you think so?" Avalon whispered.

  Pooky came over to take a look and went hysterical with enthusiasm. "Why, this is wonderful. I love it! Oh, Avalon, would you consider giving it to me? I have just the perfect place to hang it in my apartment. It would change the whole room and mean all the more because an old friend made it."

  Kathy slouched by, her mouth full of ham and egg roll. "Hey, Avalon, that's cute," she said, spitting a few crumbs as she spoke. "Have you ever used this talent of yours for anything worthwhile?"

  "Worthwhile?" Mimi asked with a dangerous smile.

  "Socially worthwhile. We all owe it to society to use our gifts to benefit mankind," Kathy said.

  "Oh, put a sock in it," Crispy said cheerfully from across the room. Several others laughed. "Avalon doesn't owe anybody anything, Kathy. And if she did go crusading, she might not crusade for your

  causes. Have you thought about that? Just what are your causes these days, anyway?"

  She'd said it in a light, joking way, but Kathy, though not the least offended, took it to be a serious question. "The same as always, Crispy. Peace, love, the protection of the environment…."

  The individual groups fell silent as Crispy snapped, "Oh, come on! That's all so easy and trendy to say. What are you doing about any of it?"

  "As much as we can," Kathy said smugly. She took a deep breath and several people decently averted their eyes from the expanding T-shirt. "My husband and children and I drive into Tulsa and volunteer every Saturday at the local recycling center. I make my own soap—"

  "All it takes is piss and ashes," someone muttered. Jane glanced around but nobody looked guilty.

  "No, it takes time and love and dedication," Kathy said. Her voice suddenly caught in something between a hiccup and a snort.

  Pooky had ignored the whole controversy and was still begging for the picture. Avalon didn't seem to know how to say no to her, but hadn't turned loose of it yet.

  "It's a lovely drawing, Avalon," Jane said, getting the conversation back on what she hoped was a less dangerous course. Avalon's next words dispelled this happy notion.

  "I did it the night of the prom," Avalon said.

  A sort of collective shudder went around the room.

  "The night Ted died?" Crispy asked softly, although they all knew the answer.

  Avalon looked as if she were remembering a dream that was both wonderful and horrible. "Yes, there was moonlight almost as bright as day. I'd just finished it

  when I heard the~car engine start and I thought he would back out any minute and catch me drawing the house, so I ran away."

  The words hung in the air. They all knew Ted hadn't backed his car out, but had gone back upstairs to die.

  Pooky hadn't given up trying to acquire the drawing. "It's so wonderful!"

  Jane was casting wildly about for something to say to change the subject when someone else did it for her. Lila came into the room, looking around for something. She had changed from her antique traveling suit into a brown tweed skirt, hand-knitted sweater, and Old Maine Trotters that had probably been her mother's shoes. Her Grace Kelly hair was still up in a roll. "Has anyone seen my red notebook?" she asked. "I set it on that table in the front hall with my bag when I came in—"

  She'd broken the Dead Ted mood and everybody was grateful. "What did it look like?" Pooky asked.

  "About so—" Lila said, indicating a 5 by 7 size with her hands. "It has a bright red cover. It's very important that I find it."

  "Like this?" Crispy said, fishing a like object out of her purse.

  "Yes, that's it. I should have known you'd take it," Lila said.

  If the others were shocked at this rudeness, Crispy seemed delighted. "But I didn't take it. This is mine."

  Lila strode across the room and snatched it from Crispy's hand. Crispy grinned as Lila opened the notebook and looked perplexed. "But — this isn't mine," she said.

  Crispy took it back with a victorious smile. "I believe I told you that, didn't I?"

  "So sorry," Lila said curtly. "I must find mine. I have some very important business numbers in it. Would you all check your things to see if you accidentally picked it up?"

  While she was trying, with limited success, to get them to go to their rooms and rummage through their belongings, Jane took the snack tray to the kitchen to refill it. Gordon, the co-owner of the bed and breakfast, had just come in the back door. Edgar introduced him to Jane. Jane gushed about his magnificent decorating while studying him. He was as gorgeous as his creations. He was fortyish, with a thick shock of dark blond hair and Peter Lawford eyes along with a marvelous physique. He seemed genuinely pleased with Jane's remarks, but weary.

  "Long day at the factory?" Edgar asked, rolling out some pastry dough.

  "The longest. Management's decided to start a new card line with kitten photos. Kitten photos! Little kitty turds all over the studio. Cats don't much like having their pictures taken. Just think, if I hadn't taken this job, I'd have never known that. And then I have to come home to this… beast!" he said, pointing an accusatory finger at Hector, who yawned magnificently.

  "It won't be for long," Edgar assured him. "And Hector caught a chipmunk today. Or at least he found a dead one. It's a step in the right direction. Blood lust is next."

  "Excuse me, Jane. I've got to go shower off Eau de Chat," Gordon said. He lightly punched Edgar's shoulder as he passed him and Edgar smiled sympathetically.

  "Poor Gordon," Jane said. "He doesn't like Hector?"'

  "He adores him, "but won't admit it," Edgar said.

  Mimi Soong pushed the door from the dining room open. "Jane, can I help with anything? Oh, what a wonderful kitchen!"

  Edgar wiped the flour off his hands and gave her a tour. They were joined by Pooky a few minutes later— another refugee from Lila's determination to form a search party to hunt for her notebook. Pooky tried to be polite, but it was obvious that a kitchen was a kitchen as far as she was concerned and she wasn't bright enough to pretend real enthusiasm. Mimi, however, knew kitchens and, like an Oriental queen, drifted around asking exactly the right questions. Edgar was delighted.

  Jane finally remembered her original errand and put another layer of tiny, crustless sandwiches on the tray, artfully scattered a few olives and carrot curls among them, and took the tray back to the big living room. It was nearly empty. Crispy was fiddling with the television, trying to find the shopping channel, and Kathy was inflicting some tirade on Shelley. Kathy's broad, enthusiastic gestures set her breasts jiggling and swaying in her T-shirt in a way that Jane found both fascinating and horrifying.

  "… and if we then use our right to vote in a way that satisfies our deeper conscience and sends a message to the politicians that—"

  "Excuse me, Shelley, Edgar wants to know something about your dinner plans," Jane interrupted brutally.

  Shelley leaped to her feet like a jack-in-the-box. "Of course!"

  "Where are the Johns around here?" Kathy asked.

  "There's a bathroom with each bedroom," Jane said.

  "Oh, all right! We'll finish this discussion later, Shelley," she threatene
d, heading off toward the stairs.

  Shelley sank back into her chair. "That was a lie, wasn't it? About Edgar wanting to talk to me?"

  "Sure. So, how's it going?" Jane asked quietly.

  "No firearms have been discharged — yet. That's about the best you can say for it. I must be getting credit in heaven for this, mustn't I?"

  "I wouldn't count on it," Crispy said from across the room. She had miraculous hearing. She flipped off the television and came to sit with them. "Sorry I didn't rescue you myself," she told Shelley. "And I'm sorry about Kathy. I was really looking forward to seeing her. All that social consciousness was endearing in high school, but so tiresome now."

  As she sat down, carefully adjusting her short skirt and silk-clad legs, Avalon drifted into the room carrying a small leather purse with a long, woven strap. She held it awkwardly, as if it weren't hers.

  "What's the matter, Avalon?" Crispy asked.

  "It's my purse. It's all full of someone else's stuff."

  "Whose?" ';

  "I don't know."

  She extended the bag to Crispy, who wasn't shy about snooping. She pulled out a billfold and flipped it open. "Pooky," she said. "God, if my driver's license looked like that, I'd give up driving for good. Poor old Pooky."

  Jane went to the kitchen door. Beth had joined the kitchen crowd, Mimi had disappeared, and Pooky was standing at the butcher block workstation flipping through a magazine. "Pooky, where's your purse?" Jane asked her.

  "Upstairs, I think."

  "Would you mind getting it?"

  In a few minutes Pooky came in looking spooked. "It's full of your things. Knitting stuff," she said to Avalon. "How did that happen? Where are my things?"

  Crispy upended Avalon's purse on the coffee table. Beads, fabric scraps, little wads of yarns, and tiny scissors fell out. "Recognize anything?"

  They sorted out their belongings while Jane and Shelley exchanged puzzled, and slightly alarmed looks. "One of your Ewe Lambs is a practical joker," Jane said quietly.

  "I don't like this, Jane."

  "What's not to like?" Jane said. "You're in a house, full of women on the brink of menopause, some of whom appear to have come here for the single purpose of tormenting each other, and there's a wolf in sheep's clothing in the bunch."

  "Will you stop the puns?"

  "I'll try, but they're pretty hard to avoid."

  As Jane was helping Edgar clear the table after dinner, he called for everybody's attention. "Ladies, I'll be locking the house up like Fort Knox on the dot of ten-thirty. If you're going out after that, let me know now, and I'll give you a key. Otherwise, you'll have to wake up the whole house to get back in. And I'm a pretty cranky housemother if I have to come down all those stairs after I've gone to bed."

  "How peculiar," Lila mused out loud. "To secure a house that doesn't even have locks on the bedroom doors."

  Edgar drew himself up, offended. "We were not due to open until next month. The locksmith couldn't get here in time for your visit."

  "What difference does it make?" Crispy demanded of Lila. "We were originally supposed to stay at

  Shelley's house and she probably doesn't have locks on the bedroom doors either."

  "Is anybody going out?" Kathy asked. She'd actually put on a bra under a shapeless tent of a dress for dinner. Her idea of dressing up, Jane supposed.

  They glanced around at each other, nobody admitting to having any plans to go out.

  Jane, picking up dessert plates, smiled to herself. She was the only one who would have the privilege of leaving tonight.

  Or so she thought.

  Shelley hit Jane with the bad news just before eight o'clock. "I have yet another favor to ask."

  "Hit me," Jane invited.

  "Somehow Paul's mother managed to track him down in Singapore — God knows how she does it! — and told him she was having chest pains. As if he could do anything about it from there."

  "Oh, no. Is she all right?"

  "Of course she's all right. They took her to the emergency room, she threw up some sardines or whatever ghastly thing she'd eaten, and they sent her home. But Paul's frantic. His sister Constanza is staying at my house and just called to say he's calling me" back at three in the morning to see how she is."

  "Can't Constanza just tell him she's okay?"

  "Yes, and I'm sure she has. But Constanza is well-known in the family as the kind of overbearing busybody who keeps things from people for what she considers Their Own Good. I know he's calling back because he doesn't know whether to believe her or not. I have to be at home when he calls, Jane, and I promised Edgar I'd stay here tonight to keep an eye on the Ewe Lambs."

  "Why? They're grown women."

  "But I'm the hostess. I think Edgar has horrific visions of somebody wanting a tampon in the middle

  of the night or something."

  "So you need me to stay in your place?"

  "Would you? Could you? I'll take your kids to my

  house… for the next couple of years if you'd like."

  "No, they can stay alone. Mike's there and respon-

  sible. But I'll have to go home first and put out any

  family forest fires that have broken out during the

  evening."

  Edgar insisted on walking Jane to her car and seeing that she was safely locked in before she left. She rolled the window down an inch and said, '"Dinner was wonderful, Edgar. I'll be back in twenty or thirty minutes. You'll survive this visitation."

  He laughed. "I know I will. I once catered a convention of farm equipment salesmen. After that, life's easy."

  Jane went home and was astonished to discover that the kids had cleaned up the kitchen after dinner. Her sixth grade son Todd had even gone to bed without being told. A worrisome thing. She went into his room, scuffling her feet gingerly to avoid stepping on Legos in her bare feet, and felt his forehead. No fever.

  Katie was on the upstairs hall phone, which was strictly forbidden after ten, and quickly hung up when Jane glared at her. She flounced off to her room. Jane followed her and inquired if there had been any messages for her during the evening, even though she knew it would have been impossible for Mel to get through Katie's talkfest. Out of self-defense, Jane was going to have to get Katie her own phone line. She explained to Katie that she was going back to the bed and breakfast, but would return early to help get everybody off to school.

  Jane's son Mike was sitting in a nest of paperwork on the living room sofa with MTV blaring in the background. Jane turned the sound down. "What's all this, college stuff again?"

  "Geez, Mom, if you knew enough to fill in all these application forms and scholarship requests, you wouldn't need to go to college. How about I just go to plumbing school?"

  "College first. Then plumbing school for postgraduate work."

  "What am I going to do about letters of recommendation?"

  "What do you mean? You've got several good ones. Your band teacher, the manager of the grocery store where you worked last summer, your uncle—"

  "Yeah, but they aren't anybody important. Scott's got one from his uncle who's a state senator. My uncle's just a pharmacist. Don't we know anybody important? Maybe Grumps knows some big deal in the State Department?"

  "Your grandfather knows everybody in the State Department, but they don't know you."

  "So? All I need is their stationery," he said with a grin.

  Jane laughed. "You'll do fine with what you've got, honey. With your test scores and your grades, any college would be nuts to pass you up."

  "Aw, that's Mom Talk."

  "That's what I'm for," Jane said. She explained the revised plan for the night. "You better get to bed."

  Jane helped him get his papers straightened up, then let Willard the Cowardly Dog out one more time before she went up the steps with Willard panting at her heels and Max and Meow weaving around her feet. The cats loved it when Jane went up to bed, apparently

  because it meant the next thing she'd
do would be to get up in the morning and feed them, Willard always slept with Todd, but the cats slept in Jane's room so they were on hand when she woke up. "Sorry, guys, but I'm not staying," she told them.

  Jane dumped her clothes in the dry-cleaning heap in her closet, and put on jeans and a sweatshirt. Leaving the cats watching her in perplexity, she grabbed a few necessities, locked up the house, and went back to the bed and breakfast.

  "I've put you in the Gary Grant room," Edgar said when she got out of the car. He'd been waiting for her at the back door. "It's Hector's favorite place. And I've told the others where to find you if they need anything."

  Jane went upstairs and made herself comfortable in the room she was assigned. Hector did follow her, but didn't seem ready to settle down for the night any more than the Ewe Lambs did. Jane could hear them down the hall laughing and talking. She got into bed, turned out the lights, and smiled to herself. The house wasn't terribly well soundproofed and she could still hear them a little. Except that the voices were a little bit lower, a bit more restrained, it sounded just like her house did when Katie had friends for a sleepover.

  She had to be up early and tried to will herself to fall straight to sleep, but it was impossible. Not because of the voices, but because her mind kept replaying snippets of the evening.

  Some parts of it had been fun. Crispy had told some really funny stories about her various moneyed marriages. But between stories on herself, she managed to slip in quite a few uncomfortable ones about the others. "Remember that time you went around with the toilet paper stuck to your shoe all day, Pooky,

  and nobody told you?" she said as if it were hilarious. She also managed to remind Kathy of the time she'd planned the giant protest rally and it rained and nobody showed up except the newspaper reporters she'd invited.

  Lila was even worse. Where Crispy's taunts and digs were fairly harmless and most were delivered with apparent affectionate memory, Lila's were vaguely ominous. She reminisced at some length about a slumber party, the point of the story seeming to be that Avalon was into drug use then and probably still was. She suggested, without actually saying so, that this might have accounted for the switch in purse contents — that "somebody" expected to find suspicious substances in either Rooky's purse or Avalon's.