The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline

5

"I'm going to the Museum of Natural History, Mom," said Caroline after she had talked to Stacy.

Her mother was putting groceries away in the refrigerator. She looked startled when Caroline came into the kitchen, and then guilty. She stood awkwardly in front of the table, as if she were trying to hide something. Caroline looked at her suspiciously for a moment.

"Did you buy another eggplant?" she asked.

"No, of course not," said her mother. She began to hum a little tune. A sure sign of some sort of guilt.

"What is it, then?" Caroline lunged forward suddenly and got past her mother, who tried a football blocking maneuver. But she moved to the right; Caroline moved to the left, past her, and took a good look at the kitchen table.

Eggs. It wasn't eggs. Caroline liked eggs. Bread. That was okay. Hamburger. Nothing wrong with hamburger.

Then she saw it. Them. Two lumpy, repulsive, no-color things lying on the table side by side. Like something you would look away from if you saw it lying in a gutter.

"All right, Mom," said Caroline. "What are they?"

"They're good," said her mother. "I have this recipe—"

"What are they?"

"Parsnips," said her mother.

"Parsnips! Mom! Nobody makes their kids eat parsnips! Listen, before you do another thing, Mom, call the Hot Line for Child Abuse. Confess to them that you were planning to feed parsnips to your children. They're there to help you, Mom."

"Look," said her mother hastily, picking up a cookbook. "This recipe says you cook them with orange juice and brown sugar. It's called Candied Parsnips."

"Mom," wailed Caroline.

"I know," her mother said dejectedly, sitting down in a kitchen chair. "But J.P. will like them. He eats anything."

"So does any Coelophysis," Caroline pointed out.

But her mother didn't pay any attention to that. "Caroline," she said, "they only cost forty-nine cents."

Caroline groaned. "Mom, you have to find a million aire to marry very soon. Otherwise we're all going to die of starvation or malnutrition or dysentery or something."

"Hey—" Her mother brightened. "You said Stacy wanted you to eat at her house some time this week."

"Right. What night are you planning Candied You-know?"

"Monday?"

"Okay. Monday night I'll eat at Baurichters'. You and J.P. can have a Parsnip Orgy without me."

"Agreed. They may not taste too bad, actually."

Caroline made a face. "You know, Mom, if you'd just go to some of the lectures at the Museum of Natural History, I know you'd meet a terrific man. Probably one who can afford pork chops and steak—"

But her mother sighed. "Caroline, I can't bear to hear about spiders and things. I get queasy."

It was true. Caroline's mother couldn't even look at a National Geographic, for fear there might be snakes or lizards or insects inside.

She had tried some other methods for meeting Mr. Right, even though she absolutely refused to go to singles bars. She said she was too old for that; she was already thirty-four. Also, she was afraid she might meet stranglers at singles bars, and Caroline thought she might be right about that.

First, she had joined the Gourmet Eating Club. But after six weeks it was a disaster. She had gained fifteen pounds, none of her clothes fit, and all of the men she had met at the Gourmet Eating Club had ended up dating each other.

Then—after a diet to lose the fifteen pounds—she had joined the New York Scrabble Players Society. Actually, Joanna Tate was pretty good at Scrabble. She always beat Caroline. And she had enjoyed the weekly Scrabble tournaments. More important, she had met a man. He seemed to have an okay job—he was a stockbroker or something—and he wasn't bad-looking, although he wore glasses so thick that his eyes always looked huge, as if you were seeing them through a magnifying glass.

He knew eighty-two two-letter words. That was the problem. He took Scrabble very seriously. He took Caroline's mother out for dinner one night, after taking her for coffee several evenings after Scrabble tournaments. Caroline waited up until her mother got home at eleven-thirty, just to find out how the evening had gone.

"Boorring," said Caroline's mother.

"Why? What did you talk about?"

"Ut," said her mother, kicking off her shoes. "Ai. Jo. Re. Ti. Li."

"Mom, why are you talking so weird?" Caroline had asked.

"I'm not. That's what we talked about. Two-letter Scrabble words. He wants me to memorize this list. He wrote it up especially for me." She groaned and handed Caroline a neatly typed list on a piece of yellow paper.

"And that's all?"

"Of course not. There are seventy-six others. Xi. Pi. Eh. Ah. Fa..."

And she groaned again, picked up her shoes, and went off to her bedroom, muttering two-letter words. Caroline didn't blame her for never going out with him again.

Her mother put the parsnips into the refrigerator, sighed, and poured herself a cup of coffee.

"Better wear your raincoat if you're going to the museum," she said. "It looks like rain. Your brother said his barometer is falling or rising or something."

Caroline made a face and got her raincoat out of the hall closet. She loaded her bookbag with paper and pencils for her museum research and left the apartment. Much as she hated to admit it, J.P. was right: the sky was dark with storm clouds, and a wind had come up, scattering litter across the streets and sidewalks in puffy gusts.

The museum wasn't a long walk. Caroline headed east to Central Park, and then south to 79th Street, where the enormous building covered the entire block.

In front of the museum, next to the huge statue of Theodore Roosevelt, a boy was unwrapping a candy bar. He dropped the wrapper on the museum steps.

"Excuse me," Caroline said to him politely and pointed to the nearby sign: LITTERING IS FILTHY AND SELFISH. SO DON'T DO IT.

The boy looked at her for a moment. Then very carefully he reached into his pocket, removed a wadded-up tissue, and dropped it ostentatiously next to his candy wrapper. He grinned nastily and sauntered off.

Caroline looked around for a policeman. But there were only two nuns, a taxi driver leaning against his parked cab, and a couple of mothers with a troop of Brownies.

She thought about making a citizen's arrest. But the boy was bigger than she—he looked at least fifteen—and besides, he was already down at the corner of 78th Street.

She sighed and picked up his trash with two fingers. It was almost as bad as touching parsnips. She dropped it into a trash can angrily and headed up the steps into the museum.

"Hello, Mr. Erwitt," she called into the office inside the front door. Mr. Erwitt looked up from his desk and waved.

"Hello there, Caroline," he called back. "Great exhibit in Meteorites, Minerals, and Gems this afternoon!"

"Thanks anyway, Mr. Erwitt," she said. "I have work to do on the fourth floor."

She showed her membership card to the woman at the admissions booth, took the little blue button that indicated she hadn't sneaked in, and attached it to her raincoat. Then she walked past the postcard counter and the gift shop, down the hall to the elevator.

The fourth floor was absolutely her favorite place in the entire museum. No question. Biology of Invertebrates, on the first floor, was okay; and so was Small Mammals. On the second floor, African Mammals was kind of interesting because of the stuffed elephants and the gorilla who looked like King Kong and had a leaf sticking out of his mouth to indicate that he was a harmless plant-eater. Primates, on the third floor, wasn't too bad.

But the fourth floor was heaven. The Hall of Early Dinosaurs even had blue walls, which was what Caroline had always supposed heaven had.

She went into the blue-walled Early Dinosaur room and stood there, awed, as she always was. There, in the center, were the Stegosaurus, the Allosaurus, and the gigantic Brontosaurus—only their bones, of course—standing in their huge, awkward poses.

"Hi, you guys," said Caroline. She thought of them as old buddies. She always came in to say "Hi," even when she was going to the Late Dinosaur exhibit, as she was today.

They all smiled their toothy smiles at her. Even Allosaurus, a fierce flesh-eater, looked sweet and happy and a little embarrassed, standing there without his skin, quite helpless.

Then she went over to say "Hi" to the mummified Anatosaurus in his glass case. They had found him in Wyoming, of all places, with his skin still on. Sometimes Caroline wished her father had moved to Wyoming instead of Des Moines; she would be tempted to visit him more often if he had. There might be a mummified Anatosaurus buried in his back yard.

Finally, she walked to the end of the huge room and said, "Greetings, Jaws," to the jaws of the giant extinct shark that hung at the entrance to the room of Fossil Fishes.

The jaws just hung there, wide open, as if they were waiting for a dentist to say "Spit."

Caroline wasn't all that crazy about the shark jaws. They gave her the creeps. But she always said "Greetings" to them, politely, before she left the Hall of Early Dinosaurs. She did it for the same reason that she was always very nice to Marcia-Anne Hennessy, the worst bully in her class at school.

She didn't want the giant shark jaws, or Marcia-Anne Hennessy, ever to take a dislike to her.

Then Caroline took out her notebook and headed to her destination: Late Dinosaurs. That room was just as big, though the walls were green. And in the center, dominating the Triceratops and the two Trach-odonts next to him, stood the hideous, monstrous Tyrannosaurus Rex. Even without his skin, quite naked and with all his bones exposed, he was horrifying. It made Caroline shiver just to look at him. It also gave her a stiff neck, because he was so tall that she almost had to do a backbend to see his face towering above her, looking down, with his sharp teeth exposed. If ever, by magic, he should come to life, Caroline thought a little nervously, he would only have to bend his mammoth neck, snap his jaws, and in one bite he could consume a whole Scout troop.

"Boo!"

Caroline jumped and dropped her pencil.

"Sorry, Caroline," said the man behind her. "I didn't mean to scare you, really."

Caroline smiled sheepishly. "That's okay, Mr. Keretsky. You just startled me. How are you?"

Gregor Keretsky was Caroline's hero. Stacy had two heroes: Woodward and Bernstein, the journalists who had broken the Watergate story in the Washington Post. And J.P.'s hero was Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian electrical engineer who had invented the wireless receiver. Caroline could drive her brother into a screaming rage whenever she wanted to just by referring to Goo-goo Macaroni.

But she did that only when she was driven to desperation, because she knew how sacred people's heroes were. She was lucky that her hero was right here, in the Museum of Natural History, and that he was one of her best friends. Gregor Keretsky was a vertebrate paleontologist, one of the world's experts on dinosaurs. His office was on the fourth floor of the museum, and sometimes he invited Caroline to have a cup of tea with him. She loved his office; it had bookcases filled with every book that had ever been written about dinosaurs, and some of them had been written by Gregor Keretsky himself.

"I'm fine"—her hero grinned—"and I've been looking for you. I knew my little paleontologist friend would be here, because it is Saturday. And I need your help once again, Caroline."

Caroline sighed. Poor Mr. Keretsky. He had this problem that she helped him with from time to time.

"Neckties?" she asked.

He nodded, embarrassed. "Tomorrow I fly to London. There is a conference there on Monday morning."

"Let's take a look," said Caroline, and she followed him to his office.

He closed the door, because this was a very private consultation. Then he took a bag marked "Brooks Brothers" out of a desk drawer. He took three neckties out of the bag and laid them on the top of the desk.

"What do you think?" he asked helplessly.

Poor Mr. Keretsky was colorblind. No one knew, not even his secretary. And he had no wife. Caroline was the only person in the world to whom he had confided his secret problem since 1946. In 1946, when he had left Europe and come to live in the United States, the Department of Motor Vehicles had refused him a driver's license because he couldn't tell a red light from a green.

His suits were all gray, and his shirts were all white. So those were not a problem. But neckties, he said, made him crazy. He desperately needed help with neckties.

"These two," said Caroline decisively after looking them over. "Keep these two. But take this one back." She wrinkled her nose and handed him the third tie. "It's purple and brown. Really ugly, Mr. Keretsky. Very severely ugly."

"Are you sure?" he asked sadly. "I do like the pattern on this one. It has a—what would you say?—a pleasant geometric order to it."

"Nope," said Caroline firmly. "Take it back."

"The woman at the store said that it was very, very attractive," Mr. Keretsky pointed out.

"What did it cost?"

He turned it over and looked at the price tag. "$22.50," he said.

Caroline groaned. "No wonder she said it was very, very attractive. She conned you, Mr. Keretsky. She sold you the ugliest necktie in New York City, for a ridiculously high price. Don't trust her again, under any circumstances."

"All right," he said, sighing, and put the tie back into the bag. "But the others, they are not ugly? You are certain?"

"The others are fine. The striped one's gray and dark green, with a little yellow. And the paisley's some nice shades of blue. They'll look nice on you."

"Caroline," said Gregor Keretsky, "you have once again preserved my dignity. Come to the cafeteria with me and I will buy you a big ice cream."

Caroline fingered her notebook. She really didn't want to miss a chance to talk to one of the world's most famous vertebrate paleontologists. But she had planned to work on a drawing of Tyrannosaurus Rex to keep in her file on Frederick Fiske.

She compromised. "Okay," she said. "I'll go to the cafeteria. But would you do me a favor? Would you tell me everything you know about Tyrannosaurus Rex?"

Gregor Keretsky began to laugh. "Caroline," he said, "that would take me days, I think!"

She laughed, too. She knew he was right. "Well," she said, "tell me a little about him, then, over some ice cream."

"By the way," she whispered, as they waited for the elevator. "I wouldn't wear those cuff links to London if I were you."

"These?" Mr. Keretsky held up one wrist. "Why not? These I just bought. There is something wrong with them?"

"Mr. Keretsky," Caroline said as tactfully as she could, "they're pink."

"So, Caroline, what would you like to know about old Tyrannosaurus Rex?" asked Gregor Keretsky, as he put sugar into his coffee. "And why? I think by now, from all the reading you do, that you must know a very great deal already."

Caroline smoothed the top of her ice cream with her spoon. "I'm just doing some general research," she said. "Maybe I'll write a report for school, for science class. So if there's anything I've forgotten, something I might leave out—well, just tell me anything that comes into your mind."

Mr. Keretsky sipped his coffee and wrinkled his forehead into furrows. Caroline was familiar with his way of thinking; she had watched him do it before, and she had watched her brother, J.P., think in the same way. Their brains were like computers.

She watched while Gregor Keretsky fed the topic "Tyrannosaurus Rex" into his brain, and the computer whirred, picking out bits of information, while his forehead crinkled into ridges. In a minute, she knew, he would open his mouth and the information would come out in an orderly list. She waited. She lapped at a spoonful of ice cream.

"Tyrannosaurus Rex," he said suddenly, and his brow smoothed, "lived seventy million years ago, in the western part of North America—"

"Des Moines?" asked Caroline, with her mouth full.

But Mr. Keretsky shook his head. "More farther west," he said. "But there was a slightly different form of Tyrannosaurus in Mongolia—"

"No," interrupted Caroline. "Today I'm only interested in the American version." She figured that Frederick Fiske had probably descended from Americans.

"He weighed about seven and a half tons," Mr.Keretsky went on.

"Not anymore," Caroline murmured. "He's thin, now."

Gregor Keretsky didn't hear her. He was still whirring information from his computer brain to his mouth.

"Twenty feet tall," he said. "That would be—" He looked around the cafeteria and up to the ceiling, measuring the distance with his eyes.

"—about three basketball players standing on top of each other," Caroline suggested.

Mr. Keretsky's computer shut down. He laughed and looked at her in surprise. "It would?" he asked. "Never before have I thought of that analogy. I do not know basketball well. I have seen games, of course, on television, but somehow they have no enjoyment for me." Suddenly he looked downcast. He sipped his coffee again.

"I know, Mr. Keretsky," said Caroline sympathetically. "I understand."

"I cannot tell who is winning, Caroline," he whispered across the table, "or which player belongs to which team. To me their uniforms are all gray."

Caroline tried very hard to think of something comforting to say to someone who could see only gray. "Mr. Keretsky," she said, "just think how much you're able to enjoy elephants!"

He nodded grudgingly. "That is true," he acknowledged. "I do enjoy elephants." But he continued to look mournful.

"Also, your hair is gray," Caroline pointed out. "It's really a very nice color."

Gregor Keretsky smoothed his hair with one hand. "Is it?" he asked, blushing. "Thank you, Caroline. You cheer me up always."

Caroline ate the last melted bits of ice cream in her bowl and leaned forward. "Mr. Keretsky," she asked in a serious voice, "do you think it's possible that there might still be some dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex around?"

"Caroline, my little paleontologist," Gregor Keretsky scolded her, "you should know the answer to that question. You have only to look at the alligator. The great Galápagos tortoise. The iguana. Even my friend the elephant—"

"I didn't mean them, exactly." Caroline stopped to think for a second. What she meant, actually, was a little hard to explain. "I mean something that has evolved so that it seems almost human. So that if it was wearing, say, a business suit, you wouldn't be able to tell it from a lawyer or a college professor."

Gregor Keretsky drained the last of his coffee, laughing. He hadn't taken her seriously. "Caroline," he said with a chuckle, "these lawyers, these professors. They all look alike in their—what did you call them?—business suits. But I think they are not dinosaurs, certainly."

"Right." She smiled, and decided to change the subject. It was too soon to introduce the Tate Theory to Gregor Keretsky. She would have to wait until she had more proof.

"I gotta go," she said, standing up and pushing back her chair. "Have a good time in London. I'll see you when you get back."

Gregor Keretsky smiled. "See you later, alligator," he said.

"After while, crocodile," Caroline responded.

It was a silly way to say goodbye. But it seemed very meaningful, between vertebrate paleontologists.