The Schwa Was Here

22. My Anonymous Contribution to Popular Culture and to My Parents’ Phone Bill

“Hello, is this Margaret Taylor?”

“Yes, this is she.”

“Are you selling a house in Brooklyn?”

“Brooklyn? No, I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Thanks anyway.”

The Schwa didn’t show up the next week, or the next, or the next. I wasn’t surprised. I went to the attendance office to check if his school records had been transferred, but someone had misplaced his entire file. That didn’t surprise me either. What surprised me was the Schwa face I saw drawn in the Wendell Tiggor Reading Room. It looked like the faces I had drawn around town, but I hadn’t drawn one in this bathroom. Plus, The Schwa Was Here was written in a handwriting that didn’t look like mine at all.

“Hello, I’m calling for Margaret Taylor.”

“You found her. What can I do for you?”

“I hear you’re selling a house in Brooklyn.”

“Honey, if I owned a house anywhere, I wouldn’t be selling it.”

I dreamed about the Schwa one night. In the dream I was standing in the middle of Times Square. A bus goes by, and on the side of the bus, instead of an advertisement for a Broadway show, it’s a picture of the Schwa. I look at a bus stop—there he is again. I look up in the sky, he’s on the Goodyear Blimp—and finally the giant electronic billboard overlooking Times Square has him on a live video feed.

“Antsy!” the Schwa yells down from the giant screen. “Antsy—tell them to look! Make them look at me, Antsy!” I glance around, and even though there’s like fourteen thousand people hurrying by, not one of them is looking at the bill­boards. “Make them look, Antsy! Make them look!”

Then suddenly I’m standing inside the gondola of the Goodyear Blimp, and the New York Jets are there. So’s Darth Vader. You know how dreams are.

I rode the bus to school that day, thinking about the dream. There were no advertisements featuring the Schwa on the bus to school, or on the bus home. But on the way home, I caught sight of something strange. It was snowing. Just a dusting, really. The kind of stuff that sticks, but doesn’t hang around till morning. You might be able to scrape a snowball or two off a cold car hood, but it’s not worth the effort.

So I’m looking out of the window of the bus, thinking about Lexie, and how her parents were due home any day, and won­dering if they might send her to some private school on an un­charted island to get her away from me, when all of a sudden I see a schwa drawn in the thin layer of snow on the back win­dow of a parked Chevy. I get out at the next stop and go back to find it, but by the time I get there, the car’s gone.

“Hello, I’d like to speak to M. Taylor.”

“Speaking. Who’s this?”

“Sorry, sir. Wrong number.”

My mother thought I was nuts, the way I spent an hour every evening making these calls. She thought I must have been driven temporarily insane by puberty, or something. In addi­tion to giving me zits and body odor, it made me a phone freak. The way I saw it, though, it was a kind of a penance. My per­sonal punishment for taking advantage of the Schwa the way I did when we first discovered the Schwa Effect, and for pushing him away because I wanted to be the one dating Lexie. And for not taking him to the Night Butcher before he blew all that money on the billboard. Picking up that phone and calmly dial­ing one stranger after another was like some weird badge of honor. It became a part of my daily routine—something I did without thinking—like the way I would look for schwas drawn in new places each time I went out. I was finding a lot of them. Christina must have seen them, too, because she drew one on her lunch box. I couldn’t explain it any more than I could ex­plain why I felt compelled to make those calls every day.

“Hi, is this M. Taylor?”

“Yes.”

“The ’M’ doesn’t stand for Margaret, does it?”

“Well, yes, it does. Can I help you?”

“Probably not. You’re not selling a house in Brooklyn are you?”

“Why? Are you interested? It’s in excellent condition!”

I nearly had a coronary on the spot. I had never gotten this far before. I was so used to hanging up, I didn’t even know what to say next.

“Hello?” she said. “Are you there?”

“Yeah, yeah. Listen, I’m looking for someone who lived there. A kid named Calvin Schwa.”

“Oh, are you one of his friends?”

Again nothing but dead air on my end of the line. It then oc­curred to me that this was the infamous Aunt Peggy. Don’t ask me what imbecile decided Peggy was short for Margaret. I was feeling kind of rubber-brained. It’s like when you call the radio station when they ask for the ninth caller, but you’re never the ninth caller, so when they actually pick up and talk to you, you figure it must be some mistake. Then they put you on the radio, you sound like a complete fool, and then you hang up before you can give them your address, so they can’t mail you your concert tickets. Don’t laugh—it happened.

“Yeah, I’m a friend,” I told Aunt Peggy. “Is he there? Can I talk to him?”

“I’m afraid he isn’t here. I could take a message, though.”

“Well, could you tell me why he moved like that? And why you’re selling his house?”

I heard Aunt Peggy sigh. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I suppose it’s common knowledge by now. They were having trouble with finances,” she told me. “And Calvin’s father, well, he doesn’t handle this sort of thing well. I put the house up for sale for him, and he moved in with me.”

“Will Calvin be back later tonight? I really need to talk to him.”

“Oh, he didn’t come here with his father,” Aunt Peggy said. “He stayed with a friend in Brooklyn so he could finish out the school year.”

“Great—could you give me the number?”

“Of course. His name is Anthony Bonano. If you hold on, I’ll get the number.”

I pulled the phone away from my ear, and looked at it like it had suddenly turned into a banana.

“Hello?” said Aunt Peggy. “Are you still there? Do you want that number?”

“Uh . . . That’s okay,” I said. “Never mind.” I hung up and stared at the phone for a full minute. It was then that I finally decided to just let this be. So, the Schwa had disappeared, but like his mother, it was completely of his own doing. It might have been misguided like so many things he did, but I had to respect his decision, and although I had a sneaking suspicion what he was up to, I wasn’t about to hunt him down. I had al­ready done my penance.

The Schwa never came back to Brooklyn, and life went on with­out him. Lexie’s parents returned from their European spree, and just as Crawley said, they hated my guts, which really wasn’t a problem, since I’m fairly used to people hating my guts.

“They’re convinced anyone with the last name Bonano has to have Mafia ties,” Lexie told me, which is like saying anyone named Simpson is either related to Homer or O.J.

“Let ’em think that,” I told her. “They’ll be afraid to piss me off.” Which I think is why they don’t say boo when I’m around. It turns out that fake-dating Lexie felt a lot like the real thing, without all that boyfriend-girlfriend pressure.

As for Crawley, he did find himself another pair of dog walk­ers: Howie and Ira—who I think keep hoping another couple of granddaughters will turn up.

“You’ll like Howie,” I told Crawley. “He’s like a Rubik’s Cube with every side the same color.”

When they first showed up, Howie begins this discussion with Crawley about the dog’s names. “They’re named after the seven deadly sins and seven virtues,” Crawley tells him.

Howie considers this deeply, then says, “Why not the four freedoms?”

“That,” says Crawley, “would leave ten dogs unnamed.”

Howie raises his eyebrows. “Not if you named the rest after the Bill of Rights.”

Crawley goes red in the face with anger, Ira gets it on film, and their relationship is off to a flying start.

My father was too proud to call Crawley right away. He looked for work for about six weeks, then finally made the phone call and took a meeting with Old Man Crawley. He re­turned from Crawley’s in shell shock, but with a job. Well, more than just a job. The old hermit crab made my father a partner in his new restaurant. He let my dad turn it into whatever he wanted, and in true Crawley fashion, he threatened my father with everything short of eternal damnation if the restaurant ever failed. Dad, in his wisdom, decided to get Mom into it, too, turning it into a combination Italian-French place. They named it Paris, capisce? and so far, so good.

There are schwas drawn in the restaurant’s bathrooms that I didn’t put there.

In fact, there are schwas everywhere now. I got a call from Ira during spring break. He was on vacation in Hawaii, and he called to tell me he saw one scribbled across a DANGER, HOT LAVA sign. They’ve got them clear across the country—maybe clear around the world. There’s got to be hundreds of people doing it. No one knows who draws them, or why, but now they’re a they’re a permanent part of the landscape. Howie has a theory that involves aliens and cosmic string theory, but trust me, you don’t want to hear it.

The Schwa Was Here. Just a few of us know what it really means, and nobody believes me when I tell them that I started it. But that’s okay. I can handle being anonymous.

As for the Schwa himself, I never saw him again—but I did get a letter. It came in August, more than six months after he pulled his disappearing act.

Dear Antsy,

I guess you thought I vanished into thin air, huh? Did you freak? You’re smart, though, you probably figured out where I went—and guess what? I found her! My mom was in Florida after all. I got to Key West just as she was getting ready to move on. I told her she owed me big, and she agreed, so she took me along with her. She’s not what I expected. She knows lots of stuff. She even taught me to scuba dive—and I can get really close to the fish because—get this— they don’t notice I’m there.

Say hello to everyone for me. I won’t forget you if you promise not to forget me!

Your friend, Calvin

Clipped to the letter was a photo of the Schwa and his mom on a tropical beach. She didn’t look like the unhappy woman the Night Butcher had described. The Schwa almost had a tan in the picture, if you can believe that, and he had a smile on his face as wide as the one on his billboard.

I had to smile, too. The postmark was from Puerto Rico, but the paper clip had been to the moon.