I hated how much she was in Snyder’s power. His unhappiness made her worry over him. A few times she made us let him have the Wish Book even when it wasn’t his turn. Sometimes it’s like that with awful people. You give in resentfully because the largest person in the room says you have to, but then you don’t mind so much because you can see it kind of works. And really you don’t want them to be miserable. So even though it was my turn I’d watch him sit there with Jane on his lap, looking down at diamond rings with her because that was what she wanted to see and he loved her. Mean or not, Snyder loved Jane. He just couldn’t control himself when the impulse came over him to tell her that her plastic horse died. If I was trying to see it from inside his head I guess I’d think it caused him some torment, but I’m not so inclined to try that.
The only fly in the Wish Book ointment was the fact that everything in it cost money. Besides the previously mentioned pony, Janey the Hopeful had her eye on a sled that could be hers for $4.30—a pretty much impossible sum, we thought, but Jane didn’t. Snyder didn’t either, apparently. All along he was thinking very seriously about that $4.30 (plus shipping). In mid-November the Monsters in the Movies group started shuffling into our basement two or three times a week as well as the regular meeting time. And the shuffling thing got my attention. They actually looked a little shady, ducking their heads and keeping weirdly quiet until they got into the basement, and even there the chatter sounded muted. Gradually I saw that Snyder and Arnold Strato were the forces behind the extra meetings, and something involving cash was going on.
Though Arnold was fifteen, he could talk like a grown-up when he was with grown-ups and he could mix with everything and everybody down to the youngest Monsters member. He was tiny, barely more than five feet five and fine-boned, and even though he was the kind of guy who would go to a Monsters in the Movies meeting, he had never been bullied in his life. Bullies just pinged off him—they approached him if they were new to him, and then after a little conversation, they’d veer off.
I was pretty mesmerized by Arnold Strato. At first I thought he came to the Monsters in the Movies meetings just so he could be near Lilly. They said hello and she batted her eyes at him the first time or two he came over and I could see him heat up. Lilly did that just as a kind of reflex whenever she was near a boy who thought she was interesting, which was most boys. It didn’t mean anything and Arnold Strato figured that out quick, but miracle of miracles, he kept coming to meetings even after he stopped looking for her.
“Were you guys counting money just then?” I asked him one afternoon after a meeting had broken up. The other members had scattered, and I found him for a moment by himself adjusting a pack on the back of his bicycle. It was a gratuitous question. I’d been sitting on the stairs going down to the basement, peering around the wall in my usual position and I’d seen Snyder fold a little pile of bills and put them into a tin box.
“Yes.”
He swung onto his bike.
“Did the club get a job? Or something?”
“Sort of.” I just waited then. He wasn’t peddling away, which is what any other member of the Monsters in the Movies club would do. He was looking right at me as if I were as human as any of them, which I suddenly realized was not the way most boys looked at me, and he was cheerful and calm, which made me feel the same things. He had that kind of power. “We’re selling some of our collections,” he said.
“To who?” I thought every boy in school who would buy that stuff was already in the club.
“We took out an ad. Put up flyers in other schools. Mailed some stuff around.”
I shouldn’t have been shocked at this proof that Monsters boys were everywhere, but I was. “Whose idea was that?”
“Your brother’s.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Well, we needed some Christmas money so we came up with an idea. It’s just fun. What does it matter whose idea it was?” Arnold Strato pushed away. He was one of those boys who treated machines like extensions of their bodies, everything clean and smooth, the bike skimming along like an animal with wheels. I stood and stared as he made his way to the end of the block, tipped to the left, and vanished.
I went to find Snyder. “So Arnold helped you figure out how to make some money?”
“Well, I was the one who knew which ones were the most valuable,” he said.
Hah. So it was Arnold’s idea. He saw the look on my face and his chin stuck up—its defensive posture.
“Arnold just helped come up with ideas for finding guys who would pay for them. He was just helping me with a special project of mine. That’s all.”
Arnold, it turned out, had been the one who designed and distributed flyers (his older brother had a car). Arnold had fronted the money for the ad but been paid back in full. Arnold had, it looked like, done just about everything except make a lot of money. I brought the story to Lilly, who wanted to know what Snyder needed the money for. I didn’t know. I hadn’t even asked, which she said was just like me.
Christmas morning, all was revealed. There under the tree was a Sears sled with “To Janey from Snyder” on a tag tied to one running board. It took all of us by surprise but Janey, the girl who accepted it as the kind of thing the universe dropped at your doorstep whether General Electric had laid your dad off or not. She hugged Snyder and yanked on her snowsuit right then and there.
The person most affected by the present was my mom. The sled made her cry—actually need to leave the room and find a handkerchief. Snyder Terhune had bought Janey a sled with money that could have gone to any number of comic books—and hadn’t. We all knew that something about his unhappiness flowed into places inside Mom that none of the rest of us reached. The mystery was how once all that trouble got inside her head it turned to love.
That sled was magic. It looked like proof that the universe can come around and drop your heart’s desire right under a candle-lit tree. Snyder had been generous and kind. The world was better than I’d thought. We had oatmeal and hot chocolate for breakfast and then we all ran outside to follow Jane up and down the nearest hill. She got so much water in her ears from melted snow that she spent the next week in bed with an ear infection. She insisted that we bring the sled inside and prop it by her door so she could look at it from where she lay. All that week, evenings drew to a close with the murmuring from her room—Snyder reading her Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, or Lilly or Mom bringing her a cookie.
I loved that Christmas. Most of us only know we were happy when we look back, but that week I was there inside it.