The next day both Altschuler and I have to run for the school bus in the morning, so there isn’t time to say more than hello until we are on the bus, and then nutty little Frankie Menlo insists that I sit with him and tell him about how I learned to be such a good lion.
“I went to a lot of zoos,” I say.
“What ones?”
“Zoos all over the place. Haven’t you ever been to a zoo?”
“Sure. But which zoos did you go to to learn lion behavior?”
“Actually I didn’t go to any zoos,” I tell him truthfully. “I remembered lion behavior from going to movies.”
“Which ones?”
“How do I know which ones! Any movie I ever saw with lions in it. I remembered those, and that’s how I knew how to be a lion in the play.”
“Did you see Born Free?” Menlo asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“Is that the movie which taught you most about lion behavior?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“It’s my favorite movie of all time. That’s why I asked you if that’s the one you learned from.”
“Sure. I guess I did.”
“That is my seventh movie.”
“What about the ones on television?”
“They don’t count.”
Menlo wants to know which parts of Born Free I liked the best, and I tell him I guess it’s the end when Elsa comes back to show off her cubs. Menlo likes that part too, but his favorite part is Elsa riding on top of the wagon. We both like when Elsa is a cub herself, running around knocking stuff over and having a hell of a time.
“I’d like to own a lion,” Menlo says.
I tell Menlo that he probably never will, not in New York anyway. He says that he will probably go to Africa to live. And then I tell him the truth about how I learned to be a lion.
“My dog taught me,” I say.
“Your dog! What kind of lion can a dog teach you to be?”
“He taught me animal behavior.”
“Animals aren’t all alike.”
“Enough alike.”
Menlo looks dubious, but we are at school now, and it is enough that Menlo has had a talk with me on the bus to keep him in the power position I know he now has in the third grade.
Altschuler shoots off the bus in a hurry. There’s no chance to talk during the day. He isn’t at the bus after school. I walk home alone. It’s Friday. I have to admit to myself that I want to talk to Altschuler about yesterday and all the goofy business on the floor. And then I don’t want to talk to him either. Just as well it is Friday, and the weekend.
My father calls on Friday night to tell me Stephanie has a terrible cold, so maybe we should wait until Sunday to get together, if that’s all right with me. I tell him to forget this weekend, and he tells me that he won’t forget it at all, and I tell him that I don’t mean what I said to sound unfriendly, that I understand about Stephanie’s cold, and there’s nothing wrong with missing one weekend every now and then. It’s really OK, I keep telling him. And he keeps saying that it’s awful. Then he tells me that with spring coming on he is going to take me and Stephanie and Fred to Montauk for a nice long weekend at the beach, and I’ll love it there, that it is wild and desolate and Fred will be able to run and be as close to heaven as any New York dog can be. He assures me that the beach will be covered with smelly fish, just like at home in Massachusetts except that New York fish will be twice as big and ten times as smelly as those at home, and that maybe in another year or so he and Stephanie will even buy a house on the beach at Montauk and Fred and I can come out every weekend. This sounds pretty great, I must say, so at the end of the telephone conversation after I have told him about my lion performance and Stephanie has got on the phone to insist that I roar for her, and I do, and she roars back (she tries to make me feel as though I’m an over-achiever all the time), I’m laughing a lot.
