Eyes in the Fishbowl Read Free Page A

fact, when I was younger, I used to wonder sometimes if that was how he got me. I couldn’t remember my mother and I’d never heard much about her, so it occurred to me that maybe somebody with kids to spare got a little behind on his lesson payments and talked my dad into a trade. It wouldn’t be the first time he got the worst of a deal.
    Anyway, Dad and I live on only the second floor of the old house, now. The downstairs is rented to this family with three noisy little kids, and three university students live in the attic. The Grovers pay their rent most of the time, but the college guys only paid for four months last year; and so far this year they’re still working on November—on the installment plan. Anybody but my dad would have kicked them all out a long time ago.
    And besides not paying their rent, the whole bunch of them, at least the students and the kids, spend half their time in our apartment. The students come down to get away from the cold—there’s not much heat in the attic; and the kids come up to get away from their mother who is the nervous type.
    That day, the first day I saw Sara, was typical. When I got home, there were seven people, two cats and a dog cluttering up our apartment. My dad and Matt, the sociology student, were playing chess on the kitchen table. Phil and Duncan, the other two so-called collegians, were sitting in front of the fireplace playing a banjo and a guitar; two of the Grover kids were tearing around shooting each other with cap pistols; and in the studio somebody was trying to play a march on the piano. Tiger, the Grover’s mutt, was leaning against the kitchen door and whining because somebody had just fed our cats, Prudence and Charity, and they wouldn’t let him have any. Everybody was suspiciously glad to see me.
    “Dion! Welcome home.”
    “Here’s Dion.”
    “It’s Dion.”
    “Hey look. It’s the teen-age tycoon of Palm Street.”
    I looked around and just as I thought—even though it was almost six o’clock, there wasn’t a sign of anything to eat around the place; unless you wanted to count the cat food. That probably meant it was up to me if there was going to be any dinner.
    “Look Dad,” I said, “I thought you were going to collect from the Clements for sure, today.”
    “I tried, Dion. I went over there. But they’ve had a lot of illness—”
    I slammed out of the room without waiting to hear the rest. It was a very old story. Every now and then towards the end of the month, I had to chip in with some of my money to buy stuff for dinner—or else go hungry. I didn’t mind so much for Dad and me, but when it included everybody in the neighborhood who happened to be broke, it burned me up. Strictly speaking, it was usually just one or more of the guys from upstairs—but not always. My Dad would invite a perfect stranger with six inch fangs and three eyes up for dinner if he found him on the corner looking like he needed a square meal.
    Out in the hall I let off a little steam by chasing the Grover kids and Tiger downstairs. The noise level went down several decibels right away. The kid in the studio kept forgetting to flat the same note. It was enough to drive you out of your skull, so I went in and chased him home, too. He wasn’t there for a lesson anyway. My dad lets several neighborhood kids who don’t have their own pianos at home come over to practice whenever they feel like it. Prudence and Charity weren’t making any noise, but they’d finished their cat food so I threw them out, too—just for a finishing touch. By then I was feeling better so I went back into the kitchen.
    “Look, Di,” Matt said. (If you can picture Abraham Lincoln with a curly blond beard, you’ve got Matt to a T.) “We have some spaghetti and a fairly youthful head of lettuce upstairs. If you could chip in enough for some odds and ends for a meat sauce, etcetera, we’d be in business. And I’ll finance a real feast next week when my check