Ann Martin - Baby-Sitters Club 090

On Long Island I used to have to wear one of those masks sometimes when I played sports in the spring when the pollen count or the pollution index was high.

I was wishing I had a mask as Anna and I unpacked boxes after school one day. I was doing a fair amount of sneezing.

"You okay?" asked Anna, stopping in mid-box.

"Yup," I said. "It's not getting any worse." "Look at this!" exclaimed Anna. "It's that teapot shaped like a piano that Corley gave me in fifth grade." "A kitchen box," I said, "Let's take it into the kitchen to unpack it." I began dragging the box down the hall. Anna followed, holding the teapot as if it were made of gold.

"Thanks for the help," I said, plopping down in a kitchen chair and pulling the box to me. Anna sat in the chair across from me. She didn't even notice I was being cranky.

"I wonder what Corley and Roxanne are doing. I wrote letters to both of them, but I guess they haven't gotten them yet." She sighed.

"They will. They'll write you back," I assured her. I am not much of a letter writer myself, but Anna's best friend since the beginning of time (or at least since kindergarten), Corley, was the queen of the note passers. She started sending notes to people in class the moment she learned to write.

As if she were reading my thoughts, Anna said, "I still have some of the notes she wrote me in first grade - big block letters on lined paper that say things like The teacher is a big meanie!' " Anna laughed, but she sounded a little wistful, too.

Roxanne, who was Anna's new best friend, (new compared to Corley - Roxanne and Anna have only known each other since third grade), was a music maven just like Anna. But her instrument of choice was the trumpet. She could really jam on that thing. She brought out the fast fiddle side of my sister, the classical violinist. Sometimes they would get together and make amazing (and amazingly loud) music.

"You should invite them up to visit sometime," I suggested. "Have them meet your new friends in the orchestra." "Well," said Anna. She stood up and carefully wiped the teapot with a kitchen towel, then put it on the shelf. "I don't know anybody all that well." "Yet," I said. "The key word here is 'yet.' You will. And think of all the people you do know - an entire orchestra. A baby-sitting club." My sister smiled. It was a smile that said, "It's nice. But it's not the same." I thought of feeling on the outside of all'the BFs in the BSC. I knew how Anna felt.

I reached into the box and pulled out a handful of silverware. "Ha," I said. "No wonder we have to keep washing the forks. This is where most of them have been hiding!" We unpacked for another hundred hours, shelving books, and being amazed at the stuff. A million tons of cookware - really bizarre things, too, such as cherry pitters and olive staffers and all these copper dishes shaped like fish and fruit.

"Molds," said Anna, holding a copper dish shaped like a cake-sized donut.

"Achoo." I sneezed.

"Don't you remember? Mom used to make molds in these things." "Like Jell-O molds," I said, suddenly remembering.

"Some of them might be for cakes, too. I don't know. But they're kind of pretty," said Anna. "Let's put them up on top of the cabinets as a decoration." We arranged the molds around the tops of the kitchen cabinets and admired the effect.

"Very artistic," I said. That's when I had my own Kristy-style inspiration. "Art food!" I cried.

Anna said, "What are you talking about, Abby?" "For the carnival. Don't you see? It's a carnival to raise money for the arts program, right?" Anna shrugged.

Undeterred, I went on. "So we bake up some cakes shaped like, oh, a violin and a paintbrush, and we sell pieces of it." "Sounds hard," said Anna. "Mom has a lot of molds, but none of them are shaped like a violin." "But I bet you she could do it. She's got a million old cookbooks, too. And there's the library." My twin did not share my enthusiasm. "You don't know how to cook," she pointed out.

"But Mom does. We can do the research and then she can just help us in a - a supervisory capacity. And, we can also make plain cupcakes and let the kids decorate them with frosting. You know, fingerpaint food." "Little kids will love it. But it's going to make a world-class mess," said Anna.

"We can supply them with old aprons. Let's see. We'll need some of those tubes that you use for decorating cakes and ..." "Can we get to that later?" asked Anna. "Let's finish up here, first." "Fingerpaint food," I said. "It's got franchise written all over it." But I didn't gloat over my ingenuity. I joined, Anna in unpacking nine million more boxes. Then we took a break from unpacking to take some of the best empty boxes to the basement to save for whatever. We decided to mash the others flat for the recycling bin.

"So we've done enough, right?" I said, doing the "I-Love-Lucy" stomping grapes dance on the last of the boxes. Anna, who had just run upstairs from the basement, laughed.

"You bet," she said. "But we forgot one." She pointed to a small box in the corner of the kitchen.

"Sneak it into the guest bedroom with the other boxes. We can get to it later," I suggested.

"Let's just do it and be done with it," said Anna. She picked up the box and carried it to the table. Then she sat down and bent forward and cut the masking tape that held it together. "This is, like, an ancient box," she said. "The tape is practically crumbling. ..." Her voice trailed off.

"Anna? What is it?" I jumped up. Anna's face was contorted. "You didn't catch one of my allergies or something, did you?" Anna shook her head. She pointed down into the box.

I've seen too many horror movies, read too many of those books about things that jump out and get you. I bent over cautiously, expecting the worst.

It wasn't what I'd expected at all. It wasn't something from the dark side.

It was something from the past. Our past. I knew it, from the faint, familiar smell that wafted up out of the box as I bent toward it. The smell of a particular cologne . . .

Isn't it funny how a smell can make you remember a whole world? I froze there for a moment, and saw Anna and me. We were sitting at a table, a beat-up old table, no fancy hardwood table with a butcher-block top like our new kitchen table now. A birthday cake was on the table and its candles were still sending up little trails of smoke after being blown out. Paper was being torn and our mother was laughing and Anna and I were saying, "Happy birthday, Daddy! It's a surprise!" and I said, "It smells good!" and Anna said, "Don't tell, Abby ! Don't tell!" Then Daddy held up the bottle of cologne. "My favorite," he declared. "Now and forever." The box contained our father's things. After all the cleaning out and throwing away and starting a new life that our Mom had been doing ever since he died, there it was.

Full of things she hadn't thrown away.

My eyes met Anna's. We both wondered if Mom had forgotten about the box.

Then Anna reached down and pulled out our father's ancient Dress Campbell plaid flannel bathrobe and the faint scent of his cologne came wafting up with it more strongly. She held the bathrobe to her nose for a moment, then mutely held it out to me.

I laid the soft, worn flannel against my cheek. Then I lowered it to the table and squatted next to the box. "What else is in there?" I asked, surprised at how steady my voice sounded. "Let's see." We found a pair of our father's glasses in a leather case with his initials stamped into the leather, and a big manila envelope with the words Woodstock 1969 written on it. Inside the envelope was a ticket stub and a grass-stained, mud-blotched, tie-dyed T-shirt.

"Wow," I whispered.

I reached in and pulled out our dad's wrist-watch, remembering how he was always losing it and then finding it again in weird places.