Tanner's Twelve Swingers

Page 24

Oh, yes.

Minna.

When I got home from the Armenian meeting last night she was sitting in a chair reading Alice in Wonderland. She reads English almost as well as she speaks it, and she can get through almost anything now that I’ve taught her to use a dictionary. She would miss most of Lewis Carroll’s puns, of course, but so do all children.

“Hi,” she said. “Cómo está?”

“Bien, gracias,” I said. “Who’s teaching you Spanish?”

“Paulie.” Paulie, né Pablo, was the janitor’s little boy. “And also Estrella.” Estrella was the prostitute who lives on the second floor.

“Oh. Shouldn’t you be asleep by now?”

“I will make you some coffee,” she said. “And I will have a glass of milk.”

She went into my little kitchen and made a cup of coffee for me. She brought it out along with a large glass of milk for herself. We sat together, and I sipped my coffee, and she drank her milk.

I said, “It was very nice of you to make the coffee, but it is still very late. Later than before you made the coffee. Don’t you think you ought to go to sleep?”

“I will go to sleep when you go to sleep.”

“I don’t sleep. You know that.”

“Sometimes you sleep, Evan.”

“Never.”

“When Zenta was living here-”

“That wasn’t sleeping exactly.” Zenta had spent a few days and nights with us, and it had not been sleeping, not at all. “That was different.”

“I thought so.”

“You don’t miss a trick, do you?”

“Miss a trick?”

“You notice things, I mean.”

“Some things I notice,” she said.

“And on top of that you changed the subject. I don’t go to sleep, you know that. But you have to sleep regularly or you’ll be sick. You know that, too.”

“Yes, Evan.”

“So go put on your pajamas.”

“Put them on what?”

“Put them on you.” She was unsuccessfully repressing a giggle. “You knew precisely what I meant. You knew miss a trick, too.”

She quoted Humpty Dumpty: “‘When I use a word, it means precisely what I wish it to mean, neither more nor less.’”

“Maybe I shouldn’t let you read Alice. It’s making you far too clever.”

“I like it. Don’t you like it, Evan?”

“Yes, very much. Go put on your pajamas. Now.”

“Yes, Evan.”

When she returned, properly pajama-clad, hands and face washed and teeth brushed, I asked her if she was ready to go to sleep now. She said that she was.

“We’re going to have to find a home for you,” I said.

“This is my home, Evan.”

“A real home, I mean. You need a Mommy and a Daddy and-”

“Why? I like to live here. With you.”

“A regular house,” I said. “With a lawn out in front and a big back yard and grass and trees and flowers-”

“I love to go to Central Park,” she said. “Grass and trees and flowers.”

“And children to play with, and dogs and cats-”

“There are so many children here in this building for me to play with,” she said. “Paulie and Rafael and Willie and Susan and so many others. And Eduardo lets me play with Ginger in the cellar, and Susan has a big dog named Baron, he is a German shepherd, but they speak to him in English. And there are all the animals in the zoo. I had a wonderful time when you took me to the zoo.”

I went into the kitchen and made myself more coffee. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I wasn’t getting my point across. I came back and couldn’t find her. Then I went to the bedroom. She was sitting up in bed with the covers pulled up to her neck.

“You will have to start going to school,” I said. “How will you learn anything?”

“But I learn so many things. English, Spanish, reading, writing, numbers, everything.”

“Still, in a good school-”