Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

wrong with Ella’s mental projector. It freezes on one frame, and the projector lamp begins to melt a hole in it.

CUT TO:

THE DINING ROOM.

ELLA (CONT’D.)

. . . and I snapped out of it.

Patti gives Peter a disapproving look, as if he had deliberately turned his mother’s dreams to dust. Peter shrugs his shoulders and returns a look that says “Gee whiz, Patti, it wasn’t my fault.”

ELLA (CONT’D.)

(brightly)

But it doesn’t matter, because I know how to make the dream come true.

PATTI

(hopefully)

You do?

Instead of responding, Ella simply smiles, her eyes twinkling, and produces the papers with a flourish. She spreads them out on the table. They are drawings of a boat and sketches for advertisements, and one advertisement is nearly complete. It is clearly inspired by art deco advertising for transatlantic steamship lines. The headline is “Ella’s Elegant Excursions.”

PATTI

(dreamily running her finger over the words)

Ella’s Elegant Excursions.

ELLA

So, my idea is that maybe you can’t go on an ocean voyage, but we can take you on a bay voyage . . .

PETER

(warily)

“We”?

PATTI

(impatiently)

Shush.

ELLA

. . . and you can have champagne and moonlight and dancing and romance . . . and little sandwiches.

She has finished. A silence falls over them. Patti sighs, lost in Ella’s romantic dream. Peter looks doubtful. Ella looks from one to the other. At last she speaks:

ELLA

(tentatively)

Well, what do you think?

PATTI

(in the deferential, awestruck manner of a sidekick)

I think that is really inflated, blown up big and round.

ELLA (puzzled)

Inflated?

PATTI

(as one who knows)

It means it’s good. Very good.

ELLA

(hopefully)

Peter?

PETER

(a pause, and then, to please her)

Blown up like a blimp. Lighter than air.

ELLA

(delighted)

Isn’t it just amazing the way so many things come together to make an idea?

PATTI

It’s more than amazing. It’s a gas!

Chapter 16

To-Do, Undone

FOR A MOMENT THERE, while we were sitting at the dining room table, right after my mother turned to me to find out what I thought of the plan, in that moment when I paused before telling her that I thought that her idea was blown up like a blimp, lighter than air, we were, the three of us, at a point somewhere on the metaphorical bay voyage of our lives from which we might follow either of two courses, leading toward alternative versions of the next few months of our collective future. I had understood what my mother had meant by “Peter?” though the terms in which I had understood what she had meant would not have been the terms in which she would have expressed herself, since they were technical terms, shibboleths of teenage Babbington that she neither knew nor understood. In those terms, she had meant, “Peter, are you going to join me and my delectable new sidekick Patti in an attempt to inflate the particular dog I have chosen to inflate, or are you going to stick a pin in the poor pup before we even get started, so that our dream dog will lie limp and ugly at our feet like a deflated gas bag, brought to earth before it ever had a chance to rise and float?”

Knowing what she meant by “Peter?” what should I have done? I might have . . .

•prepared a profit-and-loss analysis for the enterprise;

•calculated the investment that would be required to get it under way;

•stopped looking over at Patti to see what she wanted me to do;

•conducted a telephone survey to find out how many Babbingtonians were out there longing for moonlight cruises to East Hargrove and back;

•held a taste test to find out whether people enjoyed eating little pastel cream cheese sandwiches;

•stood up suddenly and enacted a scene in which I played the part of my mother trying to explain this project to my father, a performance that, had I had the nerve to embark on it, would almost certainly have put the kibosh on the whole thing then and there;

•sought the advice of knowledgeable experts, such as businessmen, heads of steamship lines, restaurateurs, tuxedo-rental agents, and food colorists;

•avoided visualizing the business as if it were a movie, a romantic comedy in which I played the male lead, saved all hands when heavy weather hit, sang quite well, and got the girl;

•avoided trying to convince myself that the sandwiches were pretty tasty;

•found out how much champagne cost;

•avoided picturing myself feeding little sandwiches to Patti;

•avoided picturing Patti in a slinky white satin dress, illuminated by the pale light of a summer moon, woo-hoo, woo-hoo-hoo;

•looked at the entire undertaking from my father’s point of view, considering whether it was likely to succeed as a way of making money and not just as a way of making my mother’s dream come true;

•estimated the cash flow;

•calculated the return on investment;

•listed potential investors;

•prepared a good story for the investors, a story that would blind them to all the venture’s obvious faults, a narrative of possibility that would convince them that they had better than a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing a return on their investment, in real money;

•visited those potential investors and taken a shot at pulling the wool over their eyes to see if it could be done, to see if we could do it;

•persuaded my mother to at least consider alternatives to pastel cream cheese on pastel bread;

•not allowed myself to give in to the desire to do whatever it took to see that my mother got what she wanted from Ella’s Elegant Excursions, got whatever she needed to make her the captain of her fate, got this chance to chart her own course, to become Elegant Ella;

•avoided picturing Patti in tiny shorts and a halter top, polishing the brass and cooing over the masterly way I manned the wheel;

•based my decision on hard facts, cold hard facts;

•found out how much we would have to spend on a boat;

•run ads in the Babbington Reporter to find out how many excursionists we were likely to attract before spending a dime on anything else;

•found out what we were going to have to pay in fees for licenses or permits;

•found out which town officials would