Children’s/YA fiction bookshelf:
Next book on the shelf is The Undertaker’s Gone Banana’s
All I remember about this book is that two kids – Bobby and Lauri – become convinced that a tenant in their building has murdered his wife. They begin to “investigate” the crime – and all kinds of crazy shit starts happening. It’s very much like Woody Allen’s awesome Manhattan Murder Mystery – but to be honest, I can’t really remember much about this one. Not like Zindel’s others. I do remember this: Bobby and Lauri are 16 years old and they are (naturally – since Zindel wrote it) kind of odd kids – they don’t really fit in in high school – and the two of them are best friends. Best. Friends. Like John and Lorraine in Pigman are best friends. Lauri, however, is secretly WILDLY in love with Bobby -(the book kind of goes back and forth from his perspective to hers … we get to see inside both their heads – Bobby appears to be oblivious to any romantic feelings, while that’s all Lauri can think about). Anyway, Lauri is just convinced that the two of them are meant to be together and she just wants him to make the first move … so whenever she’s doing anything mundane, washing dishes, vacuuming, she’s writing these WILDLY romantic letters to Bobby in her head, telling him how much she loves him, how she just wishes he would put his arm around her and kiss her, how they should be together … Meanwhile, though, the two of them are creeping around the apartment building in the middle of the night, investigating their neighbor, Mr. Hulka. Who also happens to be an undertaker!
So that’s what I remember. I also remember that – for some reason – Lauri is a nervous wreck. She has constant nightmares, and she has a morbid fear of death. She is pretty damaged – and her fears really impact her life. It’s some kind of psychological issue. Bobby helps her with that. He doesn’t judge her. But for Lauri – to suddenly be creeping around in an undertaker’s apartment … looking for the body of his dead missing wife … it makes her come right up against all her fears, of course!
Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the book – when Bobby and Lauri sit out on the terrace of Bobby’s family’s apartment – and talk about Mr. Hulka, and other things. It’s not a plot-heavy excerpt – I just love how Zindel writes. It’s soooooo specific.
Excerpt from The Undertaker’s Gone Bananas by Paul Zindel.
Then the rest of the afternoon they hardly spoke about Mr. Hulka at all. There were too many other important possibilities for the summer coming up. And before long they were into their favorite pastime – which was looking off the terrace and over the terrain of their past exploits. The things they had done on the Palisade Cliffs and the George Washington Bridge – and then across the way on the New York side of the river where The Cloisters was set on top of th ehills above the Henry Hudson Parkway. At least a couple of times a week they looked off the terrace and reminisced about the time they borrowed choir robes from Grace Methodist Church and got dressed as a monk and a nun. Lauri had spent three days making the hat which looked a little bit like a giant dove sitting on her head. And they had gone up to the grounds of The Cloisters which was a religious museum that housed the intricate Unicorn tapestries. Bobby h ad added a hood to his robe so he really looked monastic. And Lauri had also fashioned a stiff white bib, and they strolled The Cloisters grounds all day sipping Coca-Cola and speaking loudly so the tourists could hear them. They kept saying that they were appointed by the archdiocese to guard the Unicorn because of their chosen spiritual identification with all things mystical and magical. Another time, right on the edge of the Cliffs, they had held a marshmellow roast which the Fort Lee police had raided and made them extinguish. Bobby had told them he was the son of the Rockefellers who owned all the land but they had chased them away anyway. It seemed like Fort Lee had only about three or four policement who worked the Cliff areas and in less than a year Bobby and Lauri had gotten to know all of them through their high jinx. The one who usually caught them was Patrolman Petrie. Patrolman Petrie was also the one who came after them on the middle of the George Washington Bridge the day Lauri and Bobby decided to walk across wearing ape masks. Some of the cars did start to swerve and Lauri thought it might be a little bit dangerous but in the end she really did think the police made much too much fuss about the whole event. After all, there was no law against walking across a bridge with ape masks on.
“There’s no such specific law on the books,” Bobby had said. And the cops just sort of scratched their heads and drdove them off the bridge.
“You two just like to get everybody’s goat, don’t you?” Patrolman Petrie had observed.
Of course the worst thing Bobby and Lauri ever did they never really got caught at and that was throwing balloons filled with water off Bobby’s terrace. They did that almost all of April and it was a lot of fun watching the big rubber balls tumble twenty-four floors and then splash near Rucci sitting at the garage cage. One exploded right in front, splashing the glass in front of him. One time they threw a water balloon too far to the right and ti landed right in the middle of some people who were on their way home from a wedding. That was the same evening Bobby and Lauri had their very profound discussion about how Lauri thought that Bobby was really a reincarnation of Jack in “Jack and the Beanstalk”. And Bobby had decided after a lot of thought that he thought Lauri was the Sleeping Beauty. They both had no trouble finding out this information because all they had to do was ask each other what their favorite childhood story was. Bobby always thought of himself as Jack, the devilish kid who would trade the family cow any day for a pack of magical beans and when the vine grew he knew he’d be the first to climb it, especially knowing there was a giant waiting to do battle when he reached the top. The only thing was that Bobby didn’t plan on beiong knocked off; he figured he would knock off the giant. Bobby could just see the headline in the Fort Lee newspaper if he ever did that. BOBBY PERKINS DEFEATS BIG GUY IN THE SKY. Lauri had literally fallen out of her terrace chair when Bobby had come up with that line. He always loved to think of headlines but when they got around to her as Sleeping Beauty she becamse more pensive. She knew, like Sleeping Beauty, she didn’t really want to die at all. Inside her, part of her felt like a young princess, especially when she was with Bobby. Nevertheless, Lauri did feel an evil curse was put on her by a witch. The witch of Edison, New Jersey. And when she reached a certain age she would stick herself with some kind of needle and fall dead. There would be no commutation of her curse to sleep for a hundred years, though, she felt. Unless of course someone did come along and give her a last-minute gift of life. That was the way the story went. Sometimes in the middle of the night Lauri would actually wake up from a nightmare where she knew no one was going to save her. The real Sleeping Beauty had awoken only when a prince came along and gave her a kiss, and she just felt sure that Bobby was never really going to like her the way she wanted him to. She sort of accepted that and she’d make up these letters sometimes in daydreams. She’d say, Dear Bobby, I understand that we can only be buddies and I really feel terrible about that but I accept it all and so I’m going to die anyway but promise me, Bobby, that when I do die you won’t let them cremate me, okay? Because I don’t like fire.
