Eyes in the Fishbowl Read Online Free Page A

at me that the spaghetti was ready. I taped it into the scrapbook in a hurry—and that was that.
    I don’t think I thought much more about it then, but I do remember feeling more relieved than seemed to make sense under the circumstances. I mean, what other reason could there be for a pair of eyes in the midst of a mink-lined fish bowl?

Chapter 3
    I STARTED OUT dinner that night not speaking to my father. I was pretty burned up at him, not that there was anything particularly unusual about that. It seemed like I spent half the time not speaking to him, not that it ever did any good. As a matter of fact, I doubt if he even noticed most of the time. At least, if he did he was careful not to make an issue of it. That’s one of his peculiarities. I doubt if he has ever made an issue out of anything in his life.
    My dad is tall and blond, and if he weren’t so unwarlike he’d look a lot like an old Viking warrior—and not a whole lot better groomed either. He’s been kind of a neighborhood landmark in the Cathedral Street district for years and years. As a matter of fact, he was born right here in this house way back when this was a fashionable part of town; and he’s always lived right here, except for some years he spent in Europe, studying music and drifting around, when he was young. His father was a professor at the university, and Dad still has some friends on the faculty. Actually, he has friends all over everywhere, but most of his students come from our neighborhood—and that’s part of the problem. Nobody in our neighborhood has much money.
    Just that morning before I left for school Dad and I had had a talk about finances; and he’d absolutely promised that he was going to collect some of the money that his students owed him. It was obvious what had happened. As usual, he’d listened to some sob stories and let himself be talked out of collecting. There was almost nothing he did that frustrated me more.
    So, for a while I just stared at my plate and shoveled up the spaghetti, but before too long I had to thaw a little. For one thing the spaghetti sauce was really good, and for another our kitchen is a great place to eat dinner on a cold January night. It used to be the master bedroom once, when the house was a one family affair, so it has a big fireplace and a nice comfortable atmosphere. Besides, Phil and Duncan were clowning around as usual, and keeping a straight face got to be too much of an effort. Those two could make a corpse laugh.
    Phil and Dunc came from the same little town somewhere out in the boondocks, and I guess they’ve been friends since they were practically babies. Their families don’t have much money, so they’re working their way through college by scholarships and odd jobs, and scrounging—like they do off my father. They’re both nineteen years old and in their second year at the university; but they’re not studying the same things. Dunc is taking art courses, and I’m not sure what Phil is doing. I asked him once, and he said he was studying to be rich. But as far as I can see, they both spend most of their time thinking up things to laugh at. That night they were doing something they called nationalistic spaghetti eating.
    The way it worked, they took turns acting out how someone from a particular country would eat spaghetti and the rest of us were supposed to guess what nationality. First, Phil was a super-polite Englishman, whose monocle kept falling out and getting lost in the spaghetti. Then Dunc did a Chinese trying to eat spaghetti with chopsticks. Next Phil chopped up some spaghetti, mashed it all to pieces and finally put his plate on the floor and pretended to march back and forth across it. That was supposed to be a German. Another one was the efficient American trying to tie all the pieces of spaghetti together end to end so he could suck up the whole plate without stopping. It was all pretty corny, but the way Phil and Dunc throw themselves into a thing like