Sometimes Sheba relayed stories of addicted Jimmy right in front of Jimmy. When that happened, Jimmy just shrugged, apologized, and more than once looked at Dr. Cone and said, “I need you, Doc.”
When it was just me, Izzy, and Sheba, Sheba became quiet and curious and asked questions about us. It was like Izzy and I were foreigners from another country. Sheba had been a celebrity since she was five years old, so, really, we were foreign to her, people from the country of non-stars.
The Monday of Sheba and Jimmy’s second week, Sheba sat with Izzy at the banquette, coloring. I was at the stove making “birds in a nest” as my mother had taught me. Once I had flipped the pancakes, I would cut out a center hole （with a drinking glass, as the Cones didn’t have the circular cookie cutter my mother and I used at home）， into which I cracked open and fried an egg. The key to making it work was putting lots of butter in the pan and cooking at a super-high heat so that the egg would cook before the pancake burned. Also, I covered the bird in a nest with salt. When you added butter and syrup, it was the perfect salty-to-sweet ratio.
“Who colored this bloody penis?” Sheba asked.
My face burned. Izzy leaned over the coloring book, looked at the penis, and said, “Mary Jane.”
“Do you hate penises?” Sheba asked me.
“Uh . . .” I felt breathless. “Well, no. I don’t think so. I’ve never seen one.”
“I’ve seen lots.” Izzy focused on coloring the parrots from the nature coloring book.
“You have?” I slid the three birds in a nest onto three different plates. The syrup and butter were already on the table, as were three place settings and batik napkins I’d found when Izzy and I had cleaned out and organized the pantry.
“Yeah, I see my dad’s penis ALL THE TIME!” Izzy kept coloring. I knew enough about the Cones now to know that Izzy likely saw Dr. Cone’s penis as he walked out of the shower or downstairs to the laundry room to find clean clothes. No one in this house closed doors, except Izzy, who needed to keep the witch out of her bedroom. I had almost seen Dr. Cone’s penis once as he walked past his open bedroom door toward his bathroom when I was in the hall. I turned my head quickly, but I could barely speak for the next half hour, as I was fairly certain Dr. Cone had seen me, and I worried he thought I had deliberately been looking toward their room because I was, maybe, a sex addict.
Sheba laughed. “I never saw my dad’s penis, but I used to see my brothers’ penises all the time. Boys are ridiculous. Every single one of them thinks that every person in the world wants to see his penis.”
Of course I knew her brothers from their TV show. Sheba’s brothers were wholesomely clean-looking with giant white teeth and hair that was so thick, you could lose a thimble in there. How odd to think of them with their penises out.
I carried the three plates, waitress style, to the banquette and slid in next to Izzy.
“Does Jimmy want every person in the world to see his penis?” Izzy asked. She leaned closer to the parrot picture. Her face was three inches from it as she pressed hard with a purple crayon.
“Jimmy doesn’t even have time to think about that, because as soon as he walks into a room, women—” Sheba looked down at Izzy. She must have realized she was talking to a five-year-old kid, because she sat up straight and pulled her mouth tight.
I wondered what women did when Jimmy walked into a room. Did they ask to see his penis?
I stood and went to the fridge. Changing the placement of my body might change the subject. I opened the door and looked inside for inspiration. “Anyone want orange juice?” Izzy and I had been buying freshly squeezed juice at Eddie’s. The charge of pulpy taste had shocked me when I’d first tried it, and now I couldn’t imagine drinking anything else.
“Me.” Sheba raised her hand.
“Me.” Izzy raised her hand too. They both still stared at the coloring books.
“I guess since you don’t have brothers,” Sheba said as I handed her a glass of juice, “you never had to deal with boys the way I did.”
“No.” I scooted in next to Sheba on the banquette. “But I’d always thought it would be fun to have siblings.” In my fantasy, my brothers and sisters and I would sing together, like Sheba had with her brothers on TV.
“Me and Mary Jane are snuglets,” Izzy said.
“Singlets.”
“That the word for it?” Sheba dug into the bird in a nest.
“Well, it’s what the mother of my best friends, they’re twins, calls me.”