Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [76]
I got a new vocabulary word I have been waiting to use on them. “You look ravishing this morning, Ethel. Simply ravishing. You, too, Ray Buck.”
Ethel’s lemony grin doesn’t cheer me up like it normally does because even though I told them not to, my eyes have moved down to where the zoo used to be. The bulldozers and the men that run them have this special day off, too. The only things I still recognize in the mess of broken-up white concrete and black iron bars is the moat around Monkey Island and our favorite climbing tree that hasn’t gotten knocked down yet. Daddy’s and my bench should be sitting below the tree, but it’s not. I should’ve rescued it. Now it’s gone forever, too.
I ask Ethel, “Remember how last Fourth of July everybody went over to visit Sampson?” He was the best part of the zoo, not only for me and Daddy. Everybody thought he was the cat’s meow.
Ethel takes a frilly hankie from between her bosoms, dabs at her broad face and says to Ray Buck, “I swear this humidity’s thick enough to slice and serve. Would ya mind fetchin’ us something cool to drink, sugar?” She waits until her beau heads down the hill toward the booths and then she says to me, “I hiked up here thinkin’ you might show up thinkin’ about that gorilla.”
“Oh, Ethel.” Could there be a better best friend than you? For a woman with bunions, it is no easy feat getting up this steep hill.
“Just ’cause they moved him, it’s not the end of the line,” Ethel says. “You can always go visit him at the new place.”
“That’s what everybody keeps tellin’ me, but . . . I don’t think it’ll be the same. Do you?”
“Hardly nuthin’ is, honey.”
“He’s gonna forget about me,” I say.
“Oh, ya couldn’t be more wrong ’bout that.” She’s fanning herself with one of the newspapers that she almost always has in her hand. She thinks it’s important to know the goings-on not just in the neighborhood, but in the whole world. “I read in the Reader’s Digest just last month how gorillas got longer memories than elephants.”
I hope she is not making that up. She mostly tells me the truth, but she’ll stretch it to keep my feelings from getting hurt.
“Ya know what I been thinkin’ we could do?” Ethel says. “We could ask Ray Buck what buses to take and we could go see Sampson on a pretty Sunday. Ya know, to put your mind at ease.”
“That would be very nice,” I say, thinking I’m not sure that anything, not even seeing Sampson, could put my running-at-full-throttle mind at ease and I’m pretty sure she knows that. Her brain hasn’t exactly been just cruising along lately either.
Yesterday I was kneelin’ in our room, saying my rosary, begging the Virgin for help in taming Troo. Even though I don’t hardly believe in God anymore, I will always have a special place in my heart for His mother and a rosary is almost nothing but Hail Marys. Through my window, I heard Ethel telling Mother over the fence that Mrs. Galecki won’t stop accusing her of stealing and no matter how much Pepto she gives her, her stomach won’t stop bothering her. “I tell ya, Miss Helen, don’t know whether to wind a watch or bark at the moon,” is what my good friend said.
Dave, who is the chief cook and bottle washer when it comes to the Fourth of July party, cuts the music off from somewhere down below, and says out of the loudspeaker, “Welcome, one and all! Father Mickey will open up today’s festivities with a prayer.”
There is a screeching sound like there always is, and then, “Bless us, o Lord, on this day that brings us all together to celebrate the birth of this fine nation.” Father pauses the way Willie