Nobody's Family is Going to Change Read Free

doorman’s cape didn’t help.
    Willie barely heard him. Concentrating, he walked in, smiled absently at the doorman, pushed the elevator button, and walked through the opening doors.
    â€œEss,” said the doorman behind him, breathing through his teeth.
    Willie danced wildly, impatiently, by himself in the elevator as it was going up. He felt his feet were making angry sounds.
    Old Mrs. Goldstein was waiting for the elevator as he danced out. Tapping in place, he held the door for her. “A regular Fred Astaire,” she muttered as she went past him slowly.
    The door closed. Willie practiced dancing up the wall as he’d seen Donald O’Connor do in an old movie. It was hard. He went to his own door, fished around for his key, and let himself in. “I’m home!” he yelled.
    â€œTer- rif -ic,” he heard Emma say from her room in a deep, sour voice. She slammed her door.
    He went into the kitchen, started looking for cookies. “Well, if it isn’t Bill Robinson.” It was Martha, the maid. She was white and wildly freckled, but Willie liked her. Sometimes she had a sharp tongue that could make him feel like a worm, but she was there to come home to every day, and friendly most of the time.
    She gave him a toothy grin. Her teeth stuck out. Hejammed a cookie in his mouth and started tapping down the hall to his room. “Here, now, get this book satchel out of my kitchen.”
    He danced back and got it.
    â€œCan’t you even say hello?”
    He stopped. He usually said hello. I am going to do something, he thought. I don’t know what it is that I am going to do, but I am going to do something and I am going to do it soon.
    â€œHello.” He smiled, then danced out. “Helloooo,” he wailed like a ghost as he ran down the hall.
    â€œBetween you tappy-tapping and your sister the district attorney, a person could go starkers around here,” Martha called after him. Martha was always talking to herself. Martha talked all the time, whether there was anybody in the kitchen or not. He closed the door on her voice.
    He flung down his briefcase and ate his cookies to a slow soft shoe in front of the mirror. “If Nick were my father” raced through his head and was stopped like a car at a light. A vision of summer stock rose in his mind, as firm and as sweet as the cookies, pictures of him and Dipsey having dinner at four o’clock because they had to go on at eight and it didn’t do to be too full when you danced, pictures of backstage, pictures of footlights blinding and—suddenly he saw his father sitting in the audience, ashamed of him.

    Emma trudged home heavily, her books seeming to weigh more than the day before. She was having a running argument with herself about the consumption of a cream horn, an additional, unnecessary cream horn, at lunch that day. The argument went through her head like this:
    THE STATE OF NEW YORK AGAINST EMANCIPATION SHERIDAN
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Your name is Emancipation Sheridan, otherwise known to your friends and family as Emma Sheridan?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA: Yes.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  D.A.: Yes, sir.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA: Yes, sir.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  D.A.: Now, Emma, tell the jury what you had for lunch today.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA: Hot dogs and sauerkraut.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  D.A. (snidely): And what else, Emma?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA: Chocolate milk.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  D.A. (insinuating): And?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA (looking down and whispering): A roll.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  D.A.: Now, Emma, you’re evading the question. You realize that you’re under oath. Are you going to swear under oath to the honest, upstanding ladies and gentlemen of the jury that that’s all you had for lunch?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  EMMA (whispering even lower): A cream