My Brother Louis Measures Worms Read online

  Louis never changed his mind about being who he was, but I had to change my mind in a hurry when Aunt Rhoda joined the local Historical Society and began to trace the family’s background.

  Until then, no one even knew there was a local Historical Society, and my father said he would like to keep it that way. “You have enough family around right now,” he told Mother, “without Rhoda digging up all the ones who used to be around.”

  Louis’s eyes got wide. “She’s going to dig them up?” he said. “Can you do that?”

  “Not the actual people,” Mother told him. “She’s going to look up everyone’s records: births and deaths and marriages, things like that. I think it’s wonderful of Rhoda to do this. Now you and Mary Elizabeth will know who all your ancestors were, right back to the beginning.”

  Louis thought the beginning would be George Washington, but my father said not to count on it. He also said that Aunt Rhoda might get some surprises.

  The first surprise turned out to be the biggest.

  “Rhoda has found a whole new person in the family,” Mother reported. “Someone we never knew anything about.” She had no further details, because, she said, Rhoda was very mysterious about the whole thing and wanted to tell us in person. But when Aunt Rhoda arrived that evening she refused to tell anybody anything until Louis and I left the room.

  “But it’s their family too,” Mother said, and Aunt Rhoda raised her eyebrows and nodded her head up and down very fast.

  We left the room, but as soon as Aunt Rhoda passed on her news my father made so much noise about it that we heard everything anyway, so we went back in.

  “Our baby!?!” we heard him say, his voice rising. “What baby? We don’t have any more babies, you know that. What’s wrong with you, Rhoda?”

  Aunt Rhoda said there wasn’t anything wrong with her now, but she had nearly passed out from shock when she found this birth certificate. “‘Marcella Lawson,’” she read aloud. “‘Parents, Fred and Grace Lawson.’”

  Louis poked me. “That’s us,” he said, “but who’s Marcella? Do we have a sister? Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Where, indeed? Hidden away someplace? Given away to somebody?

  “It must be some other Fred and Grace Lawson,” Mother suggested, but Aunt Rhoda said that would be pretty unusual in such a small town; and, anyway, they weren’t in the phone book.

  “Maybe they moved away,” my father said. He looked at the birth certificate. “This was eleven years ago . . . eleven years next month. They had this baby, and then they moved away.”

  “What day next month?” Mother looked at the birth certificate too. “Well, what do you know about that? We must have been in the hospital together, because that’s Mary Elizabeth’s birthday, and she’ll be eleven.”

  Louis poked me again. “You’re twins,” he said.

  “And what’s more,” Mother went on, “we have a second cousin named Marcella—Marcella Potter.”

  “But it couldn’t be her,” Aunt Rhoda said. “She lives way out in Denver, Colorado.”

  My father stared at both of them. “Of course it’s not her! She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “I know she doesn’t,” Mother said, “but it is a coincidence, because she’s the only Marcella in the family. She told me that once, in a letter, and she said why didn’t I name a baby after her, and then there’d be another Marcella.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Well, I didn’t do it!” Mother said, but she didn’t sound too sure, and there was another long silence, while everybody looked at the birth certificate, and at Mother, and at me.

  “Apparently that’s just what you did,” my father said finally. “You must have been half asleep from the anesthetic, and they came and said, ‘What’s this baby’s name?’ and you said, ‘The baby’s name is Marcella.’”

  At first Mother refused to believe that she had done such a thing, and then she refused to believe that it made any difference anyway. . . . “Everybody knows who Mary Elizabeth is.”

  My father said that wasn’t the point. “Someday, somewhere, Mary Elizabeth is going to have to produce a birth certificate to prove that she is who she says she is, and this birth certificate”—he waved it in the air—“just proves that she isn’t.”

  I must have looked worried, because Louis said, “just tell them you don’t have one. Say it got burned up in a fire.”

  That sounded good to me, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t satisfy the authorities, and in the meantime . . . who was I?

  “I think you have to be Marcella,” Louis said. “I think it’s the law.”

  I thought so too. We were both scared of the law and anxious not to break it, and we were both impressed by the birth certificate, which looked too important to ignore.

  I didn’t get much chance to be Marcella, though, because Mother was right about one thing—everybody already knew who I was. What I needed was a lot of perfect strangers who would ask, “What is your name, little girl?” so I could say “Marcella Lawson” over and over again, till it sounded natural.

  “You should ride the bus to Chillicothe and get lost,” Louis said. “When you’re lost, everyone wants to know who you are, and you have to say your name about a million times.”

  This was a good idea, but I didn’t have any money to ride the bus to Chillicothe. Mother had promised us a nickel apiece for every Japanese beetle we picked off her rosebushes; but I couldn’t bear to touch them and Louis couldn’t bear to drop them into the can of kerosene, so between us we only captured four and only collected twenty cents. Chillicothe was out.

  Whenever Louis thought about it, he would call me Marcella; but he didn’t think about it very often, and when he did, I never remembered who he was talking to.

  Neither did anyone else. My father never said, “Good for you, Louis. She’d better get used to Marcella, because that’s going to be her name forever.” My mother didn’t call up all her friends and relations to tell them who I was now, and when the new Avon lady said, “Is this your daughter, Mrs. Lawson?” Mother said, “Yes, this is my daughter, Mary Elizabeth.”

  This was very puzzling to Louis and me, but, as we eventually learned, my father had taken the birth certificate back to the Town Clerk right away, explained the situation, had it corrected and put the whole thing out of his mind—while Mother had managed to convince herself that it was all somebody’s else foolish mistake—the hospital, the town clerk, maybe even Aunt Rhoda—and put the whole thing out of her mind, too. Consequently, there was no one to help me remember who I was except Louis, who was willing but unreliable.

  “Listen, Louis,” I said finally, “this is too complicated. I’m just going to be Mary Elizabeth.”

  Louis frowned and began to shake his head, and I knew he was thinking about the birth certificate, with its big official seal and all the signatures that said WITNESS in fancy writing, so I said, “I know my real name is Marcella, and I have to be Marcella if I do anything that’s legal. But I won’t have to do anything legal till I’m all grown up . . . except say the pledge of allegiance, and you don’t have to say your name for that.” I knew that Louis did say his name: “I, Louis, pledge allegiance . . .”; but that was just his own idea.

  Like Mother, I put the whole thing out of my mind, too; and when, a few days later, a package arrived for my father—“Have to sign for it,” the delivery man said. “Insured freight, special delivery—sign right there”—I signed the only name I’d lived with for eleven years.

  “Okay, that makes it legal,” the man said. “It’s your responsibility.” He looked at my signature. “‘Mary Elizabeth Lawson’—right?” And he was gone before I could do anything.

  “But what could I do?” I asked Louis. “I couldn’t say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not my real name.’ He would have taken away the package . . . and, Louis, look at the package.”

  It was a big, long, heavy package, plastered all over with SPECIAL DELIVERY
stickers, and THIS END UP stickers. It looked important and expensive—and most of all, legal.

  My father was delighted. He had been waiting for it, he said, and he turned to my mother with a big smile on his face. “It’s for you,” he said. “It’s just what you want.”

  Mother looked puzzled. “It can’t be. It isn’t big enough.”

  “It’s the biggest size they make.”

  “The biggest refrigerator?”

  My father stared. “It isn’t a refrigerator! I didn’t know you wanted a refrigerator.”

  Actually, Mother had not yet mentioned that she wanted a refrigerator, and she had been briefly (very briefly) surprised and pleased that he would have guessed this. She was also sorry to have spoiled his pleasure about the unexpected present, and she prepared herself to be crazy about it, whatever it was.

  It was a big, round, ugly lamp on top of a long straight pole, and Mother said immediately, “Oh, you’re right. I just love it. Where will we put it?”

  “You don’t even know what it is yet,” my father said, “but you will love it. It goes outside. It’s a Beetle Eater.”

  He set it in the yard beside Mother’s rosebushes and plugged it in, while we all watched and waited.

  Slowly the lamp began to revolve and to glow with a dark-orange light and to make a high, thin, screechy noise . . . and then, before our very eyes, Japanese beetles, by twos and threes, whirred away from the rosebushes and into the Beetle Eater and killed themselves.

  It worked perfectly—the next morning there were four inches of dead beetles piled up inside the lamp—but Mother said she couldn’t stand it.

  “You can’t stand the noise?” my father said. “The orange light bothers you? . . . What?”

  “It’s the beetles,” Mother said. “All those dead beetles.”

  “But you drop them into kerosene!”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Mother said. “If you’re a beetle, you have to expect that.”

  This must have sounded as crazy to Mother as it did to the rest of us, because she went on, “I just mean, that’s what happens to beetles. In a way, it’s natural. But it’s not natural to lure them into an orange lamp and burn them crispy.”

  She refused to change her mind, and my father said he wasn’t going to spend thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents for a Beetle Eater if we weren’t going to let it eat beetles. “I’ll send it back,” he said. “I still have the receipt.”

  Louis and I looked at each other. I had signed the receipt, with my illegal name.

  “You can’t let him send it back,” Louis said. “They’ll come after you. Like Dad said, you’ll have to prove who you are, and you can’t.”

  “Louis,” I said, “I’m only eleven years old. What can they do to me?”

  “They can make you pay for the Beetle Eater.”

  “But we’ve already got the Beetle Eater.”

  “Not if Dad sends it back,” he said.

  “Of course I’m going to send it back,” my father told me. “That’s a lot of money. Thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents is worth a fight.” I must have looked alarmed, because he went on. “Well, they won’t want to take it back. I can’t very well say it didn’t work, and I refuse to say that your mother feels sorry for the beetles. I’m just going to have to return it and say, here it is. And they won’t like that. So”—he picked up his newspaper—“there’ll be a fight about it.”

  This was the worst news yet. I pictured somebody pounding on a table and yelling, “Get hold of whoever signed for it!”; so I said the first thing that came to mind.

  “Please don’t send it back. Give it to me—for my birthday.”

  My father stared at me. “Why?”

  I couldn’t think of any reason why I would want a Beetle Eater: I didn’t like beetles, dead or alive; I didn’t like loud screechy noises; and I’d already said the orange light hurt my eyes. “I just want it. Please. You don’t have to give me anything else.”

  I suppose my father, however bewildered by my request, saw in this an opportunity to avoid both a fight with the Beetle Eater company and a struggle with packing crates and wrapping paper—and Mother, despite her objections to this contraption, understood that people do, often, simply want an unlikely thing for no good reason except that they want it. She had once wanted, had bought and then stuck away in the attic a very large framed picture of dogs playing poker—and whenever she cleaned the attic she would say, of this picture, “I don’t know why I wanted it so much. I just did.”

  Luckily, no one held me to my bargain, and I did get some other presents, including a package addressed, mysteriously, to Grace Lawson and Daughter.

  “I don’t know what it is,” Mother said, “and I can’t even read the postmark. But it does say daughter, and it’s your birthday, so you open it.”

  It was a baby bonnet and a pair of pink booties and the card said, For my namesake. It was signed Cousin Marcella.

  When confronted with this evidence, Aunt Rhoda admitted that she had, in fact, mentioned Mother’s mistake to Cousin Marcella Potter.

  “I wrote to her for some information about the family background, and then I just said, P.S. Did you know that Grace named a baby after you, by accident? I think I said, by accident.” She looked at the booties. “Obviously she got it all wrong.”

  I wondered whether I would have to write Cousin Marcella a thank-you letter, and what I would say in it. We weren’t supposed to just say, Thank you for the present. We were supposed to say something about the present, and I didn’t know what to say about the pink booties.

  “Nothing,” my father said. “You’re off the hook. This woman thinks you’re a new baby. And anyway,” he added, “she sent the booties to her namesake, but she hasn’t got one, because I had your birth certificate changed.”

  I was very relieved to hear this, because it felt peculiar to be somebody else, even secretly. As far as I was concerned, Marcella was somebody else (maybe somebody who could recite all fifty states, and do long division without a mistake and tap dance) but even so, like Louis, I was satisfied to be me. I was sorry, though, that I had pleaded for the Beetle Eater instead of something equally expensive and more desirable, like my own telephone.

  I assumed that the Beetle Eater would end up in the attic, along with the bonnet and the booties and the dog picture, but Louis and his friend Albert plugged it in one night after beetle season was over; and in the still, clear night air, it caused a sensation in the neighborhood. Two people called the newspaper to report a strange orange light and a weird unearthly sound in our backyard, and the next day there was an article on the front page:

  outer space alien?

  visits local family

  For two or three days there was a steady stream of cars driving past our house, and a parade of kids perfectly willing to pay a dime to see the outer space alien perform . . . and Louis and I made $4.60 before the orange light burned out and the noise died down and the first snow fell on the Beetle Eater.

  Vergil, the Laid-back Dog

  Most of Mother’s relatives had animals of one kind or another, and most of the animals, according to my father, were as strange as the people they belonged to.

  “I don’t know,” he often said, “whether they actively seek out screwy dogs and cats, or whether the dogs and cats just turn screwy after a while.” He included our cat Leroy in this overall opinion, although by then Leroy was gone. He/she had produced four kittens and immediately took off for greener pastures, abandoning both us and the kittens, which my father said was completely unnatural behavior, and proved his point.

  Actually there were any number of perfectly ordinary pets in the family—faithful nondescript dogs, companionable cats—but, just as good news is less dramatic than bad news and therefore less publicized, these humdrum animals were never the ones my father heard about, and the ones he did hear about left him forever cool to the idea of having one of his own.

  Mother knew this; but, as she late
r said, having a dog was one thing, and having a dog come to visit for a few days was something else. So when her cousin Lloyd Otway deposited his dog Vergil on our doorstep, Mother didn’t think twice about offering to keep Vergil while Lloyd went off to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to acquire a wife.

  My father said he could understand that Lloyd might find the pickings slim and overfamiliar right here at home, “—but why take off for Milwaukee?”

  “Because that’s where Pauline lives,” Mother said. “Pauline Swavel. That’s where she went back to after she and Lloyd met and fell in love. Oh Fred, you remember Pauline!”

  Obviously he didn’t; but in view of the romantic circumstances involving Lloyd and Pauline Swavel, I did; and I remembered too, that my father had been out of town that day.

  “That’s right, he was,” Mother said. “He was in Columbus. You were in Columbus that day, at your state convention. I know I told you about it, but you probably didn’t hear me, or else you didn’t listen.”

  “That day?!?” My father stared at her. “Lloyd and this Pauline met and fell in love in one day?”

  “Yes,” Mother said—and this was, indeed, the case: a one-day, whirlwind, love-at-first-sight affair, attended by the usual monkey puzzle of mistakes and coincidences.

  Pauline Swavel, while driving through town on her way from West Virginia, was run into by Aunt Mildred, who had been distracted by the unexpected appearance in her car of Lloyd’s dog Vergil.

  “All of a sudden, there he was,” she said. “Don’t know where he came from. Just sat up in the backseat and yawned and stretched and groaned—scared me to death, and I hit the gas instead of the brake.”

  Vergil, equally alarmed, began to leap up and down in the car and to scramble from back to front, howling and barking. This behavior was so unnatural for Vergil—who had, at various times, slept through a fire, a burglary, and an explosion at the fertilizer plant—that Aunt Mildred lost all control, careened through a traffic light and bounced off a milk truck and into Pauline, who had pulled over to study her road map.