Animal, the Vegetable, and John D Jones Read online

  The Animal, the Vegetable, and John D Jones

  Betsy Byars

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  A Biography of Betsy Byars

  For Kristie Harby

  CLARA SAT IN THE backseat of the Mercedes, staring out the window. In the front seat her father and sister had been having a discussion about television for twenty miles.

  “Actors are such fools,” her sister, Deanie, was saying. “They get in a TV series and then they get the idea that they’re big superstars and go off the show, and you never hear of them again.”

  “Like who, Deanie?” her father said.

  “Well … like …” Deanie paused, then laughed. “See how forgotten they are? I can’t remember a single name!”

  Her father laughed too.

  Clara leaned forward, stuck her head between the bucket seats, and said, “I’m planning a television show.”

  Deanie glanced around as if she were surprised to find Clara was still there.

  “Are you, Clara?” her father said. “What’s it about?”

  Clara watched his face in the rearview mirror to see if he was interested. His eyes were on the road.

  “It’s a game show,” she said abruptly.

  “Just what the world needs,” Deanie sighed. “Another game show.”

  “It’ll be called …” Clara paused to think up a name and Deanie said, “Oh, I just thought of one—that doctor on M*A*S*H—McLean Stevenson.”

  Clara slapped her sister on the shoulder. “I was talking. You’re not supposed to interrupt when other people are talking!”

  “You were not talking. You were pausing to make something up. In pauses like that people are allowed to speak. Aren’t they, Dad?”

  “If they don’t mind being hit. Go on about your TV show, Clara.”

  “If she’s through making it up,” Deanie said.

  Clara drew back angrily. “It’s called Take Your Pick,” she said, “and on this show parents would have to pick their favorite child, and children would have to pick their favorite parent.”

  “That’s a game show? Sounds like mass murder to me,” her father said.

  “Oh, I thought of another one,” Deanie said. “Hoss on Bonanza.”

  “He died,” her father said.

  “Hoss is dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that is depressing. I liked Hoss. I’m going to stop talking about this.”

  “Good,” Clara said through her teeth.

  The trips with their father, since the divorce, were always like this, with both of them trying to get his attention. And it wasn’t fair, Clara thought. Deanie was two years older, two years smarter, two years funnier, and always managed to sit in the front seat.

  Her eyes narrowed. She leaned forward. “Dad, if you had to go on a show like that—like Take Your Pick—which one of us would you say you liked best—me or Deanie?”

  “Clara!” Deanie said in a shocked voice.

  “I could never go on a game show,” her father said calmly. He was a radio announcer, announced all the Chicago Bears games, and his voice was always under control.

  “Why not? You’d be good,” Deanie said.

  “I could never look really happy about winning a microwave oven.”

  “I’m serious,” Clara said. “I—”

  “You’re always serious—Oh, this is my favorite song,” Deanie said, turning up the volume on the radio. “Don’t you love the Bee Gees, Dad?”

  “Not that much.”

  Deanie laughed. In the backseat Clara silently imitated the three notes of her sister’s laugh.

  “You know,” Deanie went on, “everybody says we’re all going to end up deaf—all the kids my age—from listening to loud music. Do you believe that?”

  “What did you say?”

  Deanie laughed again, the same three notes. Clara leaned back in her seat and snorted. If her mother had heard her, she would have said, “Don’t make horse noises, Clara.”

  She stared out the window. When we get to the beach, Clara told herself, things will be different. At least I can swim better than Deanie. She imagined swimming with her father. “Come on, Clara,” he’d call, and they’d dive through the breakers and swim for hours, while Deanie sulked alone on the beach.

  Actually, she admitted, I don’t swim that much better. She sighed.

  Deanie was adjusting the volume on the radio. “Now is that quiet enough? It sounds like we’re listening to somebody’s radio two miles away.”

  “That’s the way I like to listen to music.”

  Clara wished she had stayed at home. At least that way she would have gotten a moment of attention. She thought of herself at the front door, face set, while her father begged, “Please, Clara, please. We won’t have any fun without you.”

  He wouldn’t have begged, she thought. She closed her eyes. He would have said, “Well, if you really don’t want to come …” But her mother—now, her mother might have begged. Her mother was going on a two-week vacation of her own—“a business and pleasure trip” she called it—but Clara had seen the clothes she was taking, and they looked more like pleasure.

  Idly she began poking the back of her sister’s seat, something she knew Deanie could not stand. Deanie glanced around. “Clarrra!”

  “What?”

  “Quit it!”

  “Quit what? That?” She got in one final poke.

  “Oh, Dad,” Deanie said, turning to her father. “Did I tell you Marcia and I went to a wax museum? It was so boring.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “The figures didn’t do anything. Everybody just stood around saying, ‘Don’t they look real? Don’t they look real?’”

  “Well, did they look real?”

  “No! Even the real people—the ticket lady and the attendants—didn’t look real!” Deanie laughed.

  Behind her Clara silently imitated the laugh, stuck out her tongue at her sister’s bucket seat, and settled back for a long afternoon.

  JOHN D JONES, JR., was packing his suitcase. The bottom layer was a thick slab of paperback books, comic books, paper, pencils, notebooks, electronic games—all the things he would take if he were going into solitary confinement.

  “John D,” his mother said from the doorway. She had been standing there watching him pack. “Don’t take all those games and books. I told you, Sam’s daughters will be there. We’ll be doing things. We’ll—”

  “I do not intend to do anything with Sam’s daughters.” John D did not bother to look up.

  “They are very nice girls.”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “John D—”

  “I am going on this trip,” he said calmly, staring down at his folded clothes, “for one reason.” He looked up at her. “Because I have to.”

  Through his thick glasses his pale eyes were blurred, enormous. He held up one hand. “However, I will be my usual perfect self. I will do nothing crude. I will cause you no embarrassment. My p
erfect behavior will quite possibly make Sam’s daughters look like the Wicked Stepsisters.” He smiled slightly. “Although obviously I hope it will never come to that—stepsisters, I mean.”

  “John D, Sam and I are friends, and that friendship means a great deal to me. If you would just give him a chance, give the girls a chance. Clara is going into the seventh grade too. You could—”

  John D closed his suitcase. “Mom, I am not going to participate in this two-family vacation, and that’s final.”

  “John D—”

  “No.”

  In the past year John D had discovered his power over his mother. All he had to do was speak firmly and quietly and he got his way. He was amazed at how simple it was. All those years he had spent falling on the floor and kicking and screaming. All those humiliating, tiring temper tantrums had been wasted. His whining alone, he figured, had taken up countless hours of his valuable life.

  He was planning to have a chapter in the book he was writing about his discovery. “Simple Ways to Get What You Want” he would call it. It would be written in his usual clear, distinctive style and would point out such things as how much more powerful you appear when you aren’t whining, bawling, or blubbering. “A runny nose is particularly ineffective,” he would tell his readers.

  John D’s mother stood in the doorway, watching him. Her look was regretful, as if she were a potter whose clay had hardened before she got it the way she wanted it. She closed her eyes, then opened them to the same scene.

  John D relented somewhat. “However,” he added, “if Sam’s daughters speak to me or ask me questions, I’ll answer.”

  “I’m sure they will be very grateful,” his mother said. The sarcastic tone of her voice made John D glance at her sharply. She turned to go.

  “However,” he added quickly, already sorry he had yielded. His pale eyes were suddenly sharp, vengeful behind the thick glasses. “I will answer in sentences containing exactly five words.”

  John D was pleased with his decision. He liked to set difficult goals for himself. He had once answered all the questions on a science test in exactly ten words and gotten his usual A.

  “I … better … get … in … practice,” he said, carefully counting out his five words.

  His mother drew in her breath. This was the kind of thing she found particularly irritating. “Could you just once in your life try to be nice,” she asked, “as a special favor to me?”

  “I cannot understand anyone trying to be nice,” he said. “I pride myself on the fact that I have never tried to be nice in my whole life.”

  “I believe that.”

  “When people tell me to have a nice day, I look at them like this.” He glanced at her with distaste. “I read about a woman in Chicago who attacked someone who told her to have a nice day. I understand that woman.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Mom, what if it were a plot? Did you ever think of that?”

  “I have not got time to listen to—”

  “What if some outer-space creatures …” He warmed to the idea. He swallowed. His words came quicker. “What if some outer-space creatures took human form in order to make us all nice, to brainwash us into being nice! They would go around saying, ‘Have a nice day. Have a nice day.’ They’d take jobs at checkout counters and pizza parlors. ‘Have a nice day. Have a nice day.’ Until finally we’d all become these nice people having these nice days, and then they’d step in and take us over, round us up like cows.”

  John D loved ideas like this. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “When that happens, Mom, you’ll be glad that there’s one un-nice person left in the world to rescue mankind—your son.”

  “Oh, I imagine there’ll be more than just you.”

  “Maybe not.”

  He stared beyond his mother, seeing himself as absolutely unique. He would be part of future history tests in schools.

  34) Who was the last un-nice person on earth?

  The thought of millions of children carefully writing in “John D Jones” pleased him. “Well, I know I got number thirty-four right,” they would say later at recess, “because that is John D Jones!” He felt a flush of pride in his refusal to conform.

  His mother was watching him. She said, “I never know when you’re being serious.”

  “I’m always serious.” He looked up at her with his pale eyes.

  “No, you aren’t, but you are very good at not letting people know when you are and when you aren’t.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That wasn’t a compliment, John D. You—” She sighed suddenly, as if she were letting off steam. “Well, I’d better finish packing.” She pulled away from the doorway where she had been leaning. “We’ll have to leave for the airport in a half hour.”

  “I’ll be ready,” he said. Then, remembering the five-word limitation he had put on his sentences, changed it to “I will be ready then.”

  His mother let out a muffled scream as she started down the hall. John D was, again, pleased. He liked the thought of himself as an antidote to the world’s new niceness. He saw the world as a great big bland glass of niceness, and he was an acid tablet, dropped in to start things fizzing.

  He snapped the latch on his suitcase and smiled.

  DEANIE, CLARA, AND THEIR father were having supper in Howard Johnson’s. Clara had ordered fried scallops, and her father was saying, “You ought to wait till we get to the island to order seafood.”

  “She likes tacky seafood,” Deanie said as she politely cut her steak into small pieces.

  “I do not.”

  “You do too. All you like is the fried batter. You don’t even care what’s inside.”

  “I do too!”

  Deanie turned in her chair. “Anyway, you know what I heard, Dad? I heard you don’t get real scallops anymore. It’s too hard to catch real scallops, so you know what they do? They catch stingrays and cut out little round pieces with a cookie cutter. Marcia’s father read that in a magazine.”

  “These are scallops,” Clara said. “I can tell.”

  “Maybe,” Deanie said, spearing a piece of steak with her fork. “Maybe not.”

  Clara stared down at her plate with sudden distaste. It was a known fact that she was bothered by food rumors. She had not bought a hamburger since the earthworm scare. She had stopped drinking bottled drinks the day a woman in Georgia found a mouse in one. She wouldn’t eat hot dogs for fear of choking on rat hairs.

  Suddenly it occurred to her that Deanie had probably tricked her into ordering the scallops in order to ruin her supper. She had really wanted a steak. It was Deanie who had said, “Oh, look, that woman’s having scallops. They look delish. That’s what I’m having.”

  Then, after Clara had ordered scallops too, Deanie had said, “Oh, I believe I’d rather have steak.”

  Clara looked up and caught her sister with a faint smile on her face. She strained to think of something that would ruin Deanie’s supper.

  Her eyes narrowed. She could cough on Deanie’s steak if she could get close enough or, better still, sneeze on it, or at least knock her tea over. Her hand was sliding snakelike across the tablecloth toward Deanie’s glass when her father spoke.

  “Oh, by the way, girls,” he said. His voice was casual, no hint of trouble. “Did I mention that a friend of mine, Delores Jones, and her son, John D, will be sharing the beach house with us?”

  Clara watched Deanie’s expression go from smirk to shock in two seconds.

  “What did you say?” Deanie’s eyes blinked rapidly. This was a habit. She blinked every time she didn’t understand something. Her teachers were always sending notes home suggesting she have her eyes checked.

  “A friend of mine and her son will be sharing the house. I’m sure you’ve heard me mention Delores Jones. She and I have been seeing a lot of each other and, well, she and John D will be sharing the house.”

  Deanie put her fork and knife down beside her plate. She folded her napkin. It was as if she w
ere trying to reverse the meal, to turn back the clock.

  “Why are we sharing our house?” she asked, blinking three times.

  Her father ran his hands through his hair. He was like a lot of radio announcers in that his looks did not match his deep voice. People who heard him announce the games were surprised to find he was tall and thin and didn’t have much hair.

  “Well,” he said, “Delores had a vacation and was planning a trip to the beach, and we were planning a trip to the beach, and it just seemed sensible to share expenses. The house has four bedrooms—it’s ridiculous to have them empty.”

  Deanie said, “Is it?” Her voice had the sharp click of a key in a lock.

  “And you’ll like Delores. She’s very good company, very bright, very funny. She writes a kind of Dear Abby column for the Chicago paper. It’s going into syndication soon.”

  “Dear Delores,” Deanie said in a flat voice.

  “Exactly!” Her father looked pleased. He began to cut his steak with renewed enjoyment.

  “Does Mom know?” Deanie asked.

  “What?”

  “Does Mom know that this woman and her son are going along on our vacation?”

  He looked thoughtful. “I don’t know whether I mentioned it to her or not. It all came up kind of suddenly.”

  “I see.”

  Clara had been watching Deanie, enjoying her distress. Then, suddenly, the realization hit. A strange woman and her son were going to be sharing their vacation, their beach house, their father.

  Her expression changed. Her lips tightened. Her cheeks puffed with distress—“frog cheeks,” her mom called them.

  “Clara, don’t blow up like a frog every time something goes wrong,” her mother would say.

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, you probably don’t realize it—we all have little habits and mannerisms that we aren’t aware of, little things—oh, what I would call animal behavior.”

  Now for the first time Clara was aware of her puffed cheeks. She drew in a breath, looked down.

  Abruptly she pushed her plate away. “These scallops do taste funny,” she said. “I don’t think they are real.”

  The scallops rolled around her plate. She looked at the quivering scallops as disappointed as a woman discovering fake pearls.