THE GOLD FISH: I'm a Believer (1.11)

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Joan burst through the door of Barbie and Karen’s bedroom, a fully loaded laundry basket in her hands, a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth. With one eye squinted against the smoke engulfing her head, she yanked open dresser drawers, shoved clothes inside, and slammed them shut. Poetry in motion, if poetry was an obstreperous, chain-smoking, clean freak that is.

The girls, although still unconscious, stirred uncomfortably, instinctively burrowing themselves deeper into the multitude of pink polyester ruffles that topped their beds. Gigi, however, was awake and adept at reading a room. She made a run for it.

Joan headed next to the girls’ closet and the set of aluminum bi-fold doors that barred its entrance. These doors had long ago lost their rollers and skipped their tracks, and were therefore, capable of emitting unholy metal-upon-metal SCREECHES whenever moved. (Yes, it has to be said, the Ward home suffered greatly from door issues).

Joan wrenched one side open. As anticipated, an inhuman SCREECH split the air. That woke the girls.

From the depths of Karen’s bed came a muffled voice. “Mooooooom. Do you have to do this nowwwww?”

Apparently, Joan did. After hanging a few items, she rattled one side of the closet closed and moved on to the next. Another SCREECH.

“Ma, please,” pleaded Barbie. “Let us sleep.”

“For godssake,” Joan huffed. “It’s 9am already. Time to get up.”

“But it’s a Saturday!” howled Karen.

Joan plucked the cigarette out of her mouth, blew out a stream of smoke, and turned to the girls. “Tough toenails.”

She moved to Barbie’s bed and poked the lump within. “Besides, Pop called. He needs you and Joey to help him on the boat. Uncle Joe is picking you up in...” She checked her watch, “half an hour.”

And with that, Joan picked up her laundry basket and sailed out of the room.

“What?!” Barbie squealed with delight. Even though her grandfather, Pop, was a bit of a taskmaster -- he was the man who raised Joan after all -- she loved going to his boatyard. And she loved hanging out with her cousin, Joey.

Don was an only child, but Joan had one sister, Betty, who together with Uncle Joe, had five kids. Four older girls and Joey, the lone boy in the sea of Pop’s eight grandchildren. A veritable cousin bonanza for Barbie and Karen. Even though Joey was three years younger and there was another girl, Mary Carol, much closer to her age, Barbie liked Joey best. She didn’t mind that he was younger. For one, if she had acted otherwise, he would have punched her in the face and two, what difference did age make? If you liked someone, you liked someone. And she didn’t just like Joey, she absolutely LOVED him. Not only was he good at doing stuff -- any kind of stuff -- he loved the water, like she herself did. But perhaps the best thing about Joey was that he was what Pop liked to call “ornery.” Barbie didn’t know exactly what ornery meant, but it must have meant doing whatever the hell you wanted and stuff the consequences because that’s exactly what Joey did and there never were any. In Barbie’s book, that was a quality to look up to, not down on. She didn’t have the guts to be ornery herself, especially around grown-ups, so being around Joey, and other ornery friends, like Bridge she supposed, was the next best thing.

So with an ebullient “Yes!” Barbie bolted out of bed, changed out of her pajamas, and began her own routine of drawer slamming.

From Karen’s bed came a muffled, “kill me now.”

Thirty minutes later, Uncle Joe’s white station wagon idled at the curb. Uncle Joe, the sweetest, kindest man alive, shouted “Barbara-shop” as Barbie approached and gave her a jaunty salute between his Buddy Holly type glasses and his faded red pompadour.

For the life of her, Barbie didn’t understand why Uncle Joe called her Barbara-shop, but he did it every time he saw her. Did Uncle Joe think she’d opened a store named Barbara? Or that she was a particularly enthusiastic shopper? She didn’t get it.

It would be an embarrassingly long time -- many years later, in fact -- before Barbie finally understood that Barbara-shop was a play on barbershop. But there were a lot of things she didn’t grasp at that time. Like why a man who had five of his own to entertain would always make the extra effort to include his sister-in-law’s kids in whatever activities he organized for his children. Roller-skating. Horseback riding. Excursions to the local swimming quarry. Uncle Joe even took Barbie and Karen along with his own four teeny boppers to a screaming Bobby Sherman concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion. And if that wasn’t an act of love, an act of compassion for woefully unfathered nieces, what was?

So while Barbie didn’t yet get Barbara-shop, she was still grateful for her Uncle Joe’s affectionate peculiarities.

She hopped in the back seat. “Hey Uncle Joe! Hey Joey!”

Joey held up a finger to stop Barbie from speaking as he belted along to Micky Dolenz and The Monkees on the car’s radio. He bounced in musical ecstasy, his blue eyes squinting between nearly invisible red-blond eyelashes, his upper lip curling above his gap-tooth smile. “Oh, love was out to get me... Now that’s the way it seemed... Disappointment haunted all my dreeeeeeams...”

He shot a look to Barbie, who took the hint and joined in. “And then I saw her faaaaace... and I’m a believerrrr...”

It was like that with Joey. There was no resisting him. Whatever he did, you just wanted to join in. Even Uncle Joe’s head bobbed along. “Not a trace of doubt in my mind...I’m in looooove.” The cousins put their heads together. “Couldn’t leave her if I tried...”

And with that, everything was right in the world. Drunken fathers and angry mothers faded from Barbie’s mind. She was just a girl screaming down the highway with her sweet Uncle and favorite cousin without a care in the world. “I said I’m a believer...”

When the last notes of the song died out and were replaced by Harry Nilsson prattling on about putting the lime in the coconut, Uncle Joe uttered something about “repetitive nonsense” and snapped the radio off. Which was just as well. They had hit the beltway, and the sound of the wind howling through the open windows made it difficult to listen to anything anyway.

Joey nodded towards the way back of the station wagon where a fishing rod lay and raised his voice over the wind. “IN CASE POP LETS US FISH AFTERWARDS.” Barbie, her arms crossed overhead to prevent her long hair from whipping around her head like Medusa’s snakes, nodded in agreement. “RIGHT ON!” She cried.

Barbie loved fishing off Pop’s pier with Joey. She didn’t own her own rod, but even if Joey didn’t share his, she figured she could always use Pop’s old minnow net. It didn’t take as much skill but was still fun.  All you had to do was drop the net in the water with some bait tied to it and a few hours later, it would be filled with all manner of creatures. Minnows for sure, but also catfish, sunnies, blue crabs, and fat slippery eels.

In fact, she and Joey had once spent an entire weekend using the minnow net to catch eels for Pop, who had wanted live bait for an upcoming fishing trip. Pop had offered a penny per eel, and the two of them had baited, lowered, and brought up that net repeatedly until their bait box was bursting with eels. They must have caught 40 or 50 and were just cramming in the last few when Joey had dropped the heavy box on the pier and it smashed open, sending pitch-black wriggling eels across the feet of Karen and the older cousins who had gathered for the final count. Despite losing their earnings, Barbie and Joey had deemed the mission a great success because the screaming and hysterics of their collective sisters had been worth every penny lost. You just couldn’t put a price on that kind of pleasure, Barbie had reasoned.

She smiled at the memory, then thought about the likelihood of Pop letting them fish that day. The odds weren’t good, but as Mr. Charles liked to say, hope springs eternal, so she crossed her fingers and yelled back, “WE SHOULD PROBABLY LET HIM BRING IT UP.”

From the front seat, Uncle Joe warned, “HE SEES THAT ROD, HE’LL KNOW WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND. BEST BE PATIENT AND HELP HIM REAL GOOD FIRST.”

The cousins exchanged knowing glances. Joey dug down deep into his pocket and pulled out a tattered rabbit’s foot. He rubbed it between his own thumb and forefinger, then handed it to Barbie and screamed “FOR LUCK!”

Barbie let go of her hair, rubbed the rabbit’s foot, and handed it back to her cousin. “FOR LUCK!”

From the front seat, Uncle Joe muttered, “You’re gonna need it.”

Next → The Red Eye (1.12)