Due to her dawdling, I’m sure that’s gonna take her a while, so just as I’m about to take the garbage out the way Louise told me to, I’m surprised to hear the running of little feet over my head and my sister hollering back, “I’m ready, Frank!”
When Louise is gone for the night, I like to pop some corn and curl up on the sofa and watch TV shows like 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye so I can get some free detecting pointers, but those whodunnits? They’re way too hard for Birdie to keep straight in her brain. Besides Walt Disney Presents, what tickles her fancy are game shows. She’s not smart enough to shout out any of the answers to the questions the way I do, she just loves the shiny prizes, and when the duck comes down on one of her favorite shows of all, that’s always good for one of her great belly laughs that can give even the saddest person a little hope.
Because she loves all my impressions, to reward her for doing what I told her to, after she hops off the last stair and makes the turn into the kitchen, I reach around and grab my ponytail, hold it over my lip, and tell her like Groucho Marx, “Close, but no cigar, little lady.” She laughs so hard that her pelican tummy jiggles out of the top of her shorts and I have to stop walking around with my knees bent and stick it back in. “By the way, honey, the famous saying is, I’m ready, Freddy, not I’m ready, Frank, and . . .” I point down. “You got the right sneakers, but they’re on the wrong feet.” I bend over to switch them up. “This is a big, big day that could change our whole lives, so ya gotta keep trying your hardest to listen to me and do whatever I tell ya to, okay? Try to keep your drifting to a minimum, and especially”—I make bunny ears in the sneaker laces and change my voice to my most serious one, the one Perry White of the Daily Planet uses when he’s talking to Jimmy Olsen, who can get flighty, too—“you can’t do any wild-streaking, okay?”
Wild-streaking is the bottom of Birdie’s barrel. Out of nowhere, she’ll take off to parts unknown without me, and it can be hours before I finally find her at Daddy’s pretend grave or the Finney Library or the candy aisle at Dalinsky’s Drugstore or the flower shop with her nose in a bouquet of pink roses or etc. You name a place in the neighborhood and I’ve found my wild-streaking sister there. Even the last place nobody wants to find themselves in. Up a tree in the cemetery’s Phantom Woods. And maybe the worst part of all is that I can’t even BE PREPARED for one of her streaks. They’re like the weather in the month of March. They blow in like a lion and go out like a lamb, and as far as I can tell, I don’t think she’s in charge of them, any more than she’s the boss of when she drifts off to parts unknown or any of the other weird stuff she does. But over the years, I have noticed that if Birdie gets too starved or too bored, a wild streak is much more likely to rain on our parade.
I’ve lectured her about listening to me, and I’ve already taken care of keeping her tummy happy when I made her the P B and M, so after I get the sneakers laces double knotted, I slip off the rubber bands I got around my wrist, and tell her, “Time for your beautification routine.” This is one of her favorite parts of the morning, so I don’t even have to tell her to turn around. I finger comb her hair into two blah-brown pigtails, then I come back to the front of her, lick my pointer finger, and wet her eyebrows down so they all go in the same direction, pinch off a booger that’s hanging from the bottom of her upturned nose, and rub off most of Louise’s red lipstick she smeared way outside the lines of her lips when she was upstairs messing around with our mother’s things. But there’s nothing I can do about the Evening in Paris perfume she dabbed behind her ears except hook her too-long bangs behind them to hide the smell. That’s the best I can do until we catch up with Charlie and he raises Birdie’s bangs with his sharp whittling knife. I could it do with a scissors, but she thinks I make her look like Moe from the Three Stooges and she’s right.
When I’m done straightening her out, she bats her eyes and asks me the same thing she asks me every morning. “How do I look, Tessie?”