by Paul Zindel
Now that she had two pedigreed collies, she encouraged them to be romantic night and day. She’d put Queenie and Prince in our side room, give them great room service like it was a bridal suite, sing for them, dance for them, and pump “Let’s Make Love” on the Pianola. She’d never mentioned anything to Betty or me about love and sex, but she taught those dogs everything. And she still had a cold fish-eye toward Connie’s using eyebrow tweezers and wearing tight dresses to further entice Chops, her butcher boyfriend.
But Nonno Frankie seemed to already have a meaning to his life. He had some secret about life that I very much wanted to know; and whatever that secret was, I suspected it was something he had learned over many, many years like the fermenting of a fine wine. I was sure he once had been a bumbling teenager like myself, but he had probably been through the mill and learned the hard way. Yet I felt that I was bringing meaning to his life. I mean, I knew he loved his tomatoes, and deep-frying breaded killies, and squeezing grapes, and walking across a field of grass and watching a wide channel flow. I knew his heart was filled with many joys, but it was big enough to fit me in, too. I think he very much wanted to help me be brave about life, or at least hopeful. Maybe he wanted me to be part of a new meaning to his life, too, a meaning other than his family and sauteed eels. The twins were too young to know they needed him yet, but I knew he’d be there for them when they stopped being so wild. And Connie was more interested in Chops Tarinski than in him. Nonna Mamie was short as a dwarf but strong and solid as an ox, so she didn’t need much from him. In his own jolly and simple way, I think, Nonno Frankie needed to share his secrets with me.
The first morning of school I should have known there would soon be trouble because there were three ominous headlines in the local newspaper:
1) Voodoo Curse Turns Scottish Woman into a Cow!
2) Peanut Butter and Jelly Great for Kids’ Halloween Makeup!
3) Reading Comic Books Discovered to Be Major Factor in Teenage Suicides!
I went to school anyway.
Mom had registered Betty and me the week before, so we just had to report to our different homerooms. On the plus side, the school was not too big and not too small. It had had a fresh paint job inside and out. And there was a lot of yard around the whole building for lunch breaks and things like that. It had a fence around it, but not the kind of fence used at reformatories where they have very high, electrified ones covered with rolls of barbed wire. This school had a low fence with lots of open gates. It was just enough to define the boundaries of the place and yet let everybody rush out into the street in case it caught on fire or blew up.
I was in Jennifer’s homeroom which meant we had Miss Haines for our homeroom teacher. When I first met Miss Haines, she frightened me because she was very large and looked like a prison matron in a big silk dress.
“So, you’re the new boy,” Miss Haines said to me, her face lighting up with a wicked smile. She was a very animated person, with a very high feminine voice and a laugh like an ambulance siren. She insisted I stand up and introduce myself to the class. I thought I would die. That’s the kind of teacher Miss Haines turned out to be. A little bit fun, a little bit dangerous, and at least once a week she’d make everybody do something in front of the class that would make them want to die.
All the characters Jennifer had warned me about were in our homeroom. The worst boys sat in the back as a group: Moose Kaminski, Leon and Mike Bronski, Denny “Conehead” Kravitz, and Little Frankfurter. CBRH and “Bobby who still wets his pants” sat in the front, and in the middle there were a lot of the nice boys and girls including Doris “Woodchuck” Laski.
The way our programs turned out, Jennifer and I had homeroom with Miss Haines, and first period we had her for mathematics. Also, we both had Mr. Milton for history, Mr. Lahr for art, and Miss Rock for science. In addition, in fourth period we had lunch, which was like a visit to the bowels of the earth. The cafeteria was in the cellar, and you had to get a tray, get on line, and pass by a lot of steam tables where ladies who looked like escaped electric-shock nurses gave you plates of weird-looking food. The hamburgers tasted like filets of kangaroo meat. The spaghetti looked like skinny white worms in red mud. The beef stew was so congealed, you had to smack it with a soup spoon to get it to break up. But that whole first week I didn’t feel like eating, so the cuisine didn’t bother me that much. Besides, they had good fresh milk, tasty butter, and great vanilla ice cream cups, and the staff tried hard to please. Also, there was a nice “slow” old man named Pops who used to sweep up the cafeteria while all the kids ate. Moose Kaminski and the Bronskis always made fun of him by secretly taping signs like “I’M A HALF-WIT” to his back, and sometimes they’d sneak up behind him with an empty milk container and stamp on it so it’d explode. Pops would be so startled, he’d drop his broom, but then he’d laugh and lope off shaking his finger at them like the good-natured Hunchback of Notre Dame he was.
When trouble came to me, it didn’t involve anybody I thought it would. It involved the nice, normal, smart boy by the name of John Quinn. Life does that to us a lot. Just when we think something awful’s going to happen one way, it throws you a curve and the something awful happens another way. This happened on the first Friday, during gym period, when we were allowed to play games in the school yard. A boy by the name of Richard Cahill, who lived near an old linoleum factory, asked me if I’d like to play paddle ball with him, and I said, “Yes.” Some of the kids played softball, some played warball, and there were a few other games where you could sign out equipment and do what you wanted. What I didn’t know was that you were allowed to sign out the paddles for only fifteen minutes per period so more kids could get a chance to use them. I just didn’t happen to know that little rule, and Richard Cahill didn’t think to tell me about it. Richard was getting a drink from the water fountain when John Quinn came up to me and told me I had to give him my paddle.
“No,” I said, being a little paranoid about being the new kid and thinking everyone was going to try to take advantage of me.
“Look, you have to give it to me,” John Quinn insisted.
That was when I did something berserk. I was so wound up and frightened that I didn’t think, and I struck out at him with my right fist. I had forgotten I was holding the paddle, and it smacked into his face, giving him an instant black eye. John was shocked. I was shocked. Richard Cahill came running back and he was shocked.
“What’s going on here?” Mr. Trellis, the gym teacher, growled.
“He hit me with the paddle,” John moaned, holding his eye. He was red as a beet, as little Frankfurter, Conehead, Moose, and lots of the others gathered around.
“He tried to take the paddle away from me!” I complained.
“His time was up,” John said.
Mr. Trellis set me wise to the rules as he took John over to a supply locker and pulled out a first-aid kit.
“I’m sorry,” I said, over and over again.
Then the bell rang, and all John Quinn whispered to me was that he was going to get even. He didn’t say it like a nasty rotten kid, just more like an all-American boy who knew he’d have to regain his dignity about having to walk around school with a black eye. Before the end of school, Jennifer came running up to me in the halls and told me John Quinn had announced to everyone he was going to exact revenge on me after school on Monday. That was the note of disaster my first week at school ended on, and I was terrified because I didn’t know how to fight. I had never even been in a fight. What had happened was all an accident. It really was.
CHAPTER TEN
My Second
Fistfight
When Nonno Frankie arrived on Saturday morning, he found me sitting in the apple tree alone. Mom had told him it was O.K. to walk around the whole yard now, as long as he didn’t do any diggings or mutilations other than weed-pulling on her side. I was expecting him to notice right off the bat that I was white with fear, but instead he stood looking at the carvings Jennifer and I
had made in the trunk of the tree. I thought he was just intensely curious about what “ESCAPE! PAUL & JENNIFER!” meant. Of course, the twins, being such copycats, had already added their names so the full carving away of the bark now read “ESCAPE! PAUL & JENNIFER! & NICKY & JOEY!” And the letters circled halfway around the tree.
You’re killing it,” Nonno Frankie said sadly.
“What?” I jumped down to his side.
“The tree will die if you cut any more.”
I thought he was kidding, because all we had done was carve off the outer pieces of bark. We hadn’t carved deep into the tree, not into the heart of the tree. The tree was too important to us. It was the most crucial place to me and Jennifer, and the last thing we’d want to do was hurt it.
“The heart of a tree isn’t deep inside of it. Its heart and blood are on the outside, just under the bark,” Nonno Frankie explained. “That’s the living part of a tree. If you carve in a circle all around the trunk, it’s like slitting its throat. The water and juices and life of the tree can’t move up from the roots!” I knew about the living layer of a tree, but I didn’t know exposing it would kill the whole tree. I just never thought about it, or I figured trees patched themselves up.
“Now it can feed itself from only half its trunk,” Nonno Frankie explained. “You must not cut any more.”
“I won’t,” I promised. Then I felt worse than ever. Not only was I scheduled to get beat up by John Quinn after school on Monday, I was also a near tree-killer. Nonno Frankie finally looked closely at me.
“Your first week at school wasn’t all juicy meatballs?” he asked.
That was all he had to say, and I spilled out each and every horrifying detail. Nonno Frankie let me babble on and on. He looked as if he understood exactly how I felt and wasn’t going to call me stupid or demented or a big yellow coward. When I didn’t have another word left in me, I just shut up and stared down at the ground.
“Stab nail at ill Italian bats!” Nonno Frankie finally said.
“What?”
He repeated the weird sentence and asked me what was special about it. I guessed, “It reads the same backward as forward?”
“Right! Ho! Ho! Ho! See, you learn! You remember things I teach you. So today I will teach you how to fight, and you will smack this John Quinn around like floured pizza dough.”
“But I can’t fight.”
“I’ll show you Sicilian combat tactics.”
“Like what?”
“Everything about Italian fighting. It has to do with your mind and body. Things you have to know so you don’t have to be afraid of bullies. Street smarts my father taught me. like ‘Never miss a good chance to shut up!’”
VAROOOOOOOOOOM!
A plane took off over our heads. We walked out beyond the yard to the great field overlooking the airport.
Nonno Frankie suddenly let out a yell “Aaeeeeeyaaaayeeeeeh!” It was so bloodcurdlingly weird, I decided to wait until he felt like explaining it.
“Aaeeeeeyaaaayeeeeeh!” he bellowed again. “It’s good to be able to yell like Tarzan!” he said. “This confuses your enemy, and you can also yell it if you have to retreat. You run away roaring and everyone thinks you at least have guts! It confuses everybody!”
“Is that all I need to know?” I asked, now more afraid than ever of facing John Quinn in front of all the kids.
“No. Tonight I will cut your hair.”
“Cut it?”
“Yes. It’s too long!”
“It is?”
“Ah,” Nonno Frankie said, “you’d be surprised how many kids lose fights because of their hair. Alexander the Great always ordered his entire army to shave their heads. Long hair makes it easy for an enemy to grab it and cut off your head.”
“John Quinn just wants to beat me up!”
“You can never be too sure. This boy might have the spirit of Genghis Khan!”
“Who was Genghis Khan?”
“Who? He once killed two million enemies in one hour. Some of them he killed with yo-yos.”
“Yo-yos?”
“See, these are the things you need to know. The yo-yo was first invented as a weapon. Of course, they were as heavy as steel pipes and had long rope cords, but they were still yo-yos!”
“I didn’t know that,” I admitted.
“That’s why I’m telling you. You should always ask about the rules when you go to a new place.”
“I didn’t think there’d be a time limit on hand-ball paddles.”
“That’s why you must ask.”
“I can’t ask everything,” I complained.
“Then you read. You need to know all the rules wherever you go. Did you know it’s illegal to hunt camels in Arizona?”
“No.”
“See? These are little facts you pick up from books and teachers and parents as you grow older. Some facts and rules come in handy, some don’t. You’ve got to be observant. Did you know that Mickey Mouse has only four fingers on each hand?”
“No.”
“All you have to do is look. And rules change! You’ve got to remember that. In ancient Rome, my ancestors worshipped a god who ruled over mildew. Nobody does anymore, but it’s an interesting thing to know. You have to be connected to the past and present and future. At NBC, when they put in a new cookie-cutting machine, I had to have an open mind. I had to prepare and draw upon everything I knew so that I didn’t get hurt.”
Nonno Frankie must have seen my mouth was open so wide a baseball could have flown into my throat and choked me to death. He stopped at the highest point in the rise of land above the airport. “I can see you want some meat and potatoes. You want to know exactly how to beat this vicious John Quinn.”
“He’s not vicious.”
“Make believe he is. It’ll give you more energy for the fight. When he comes at you, don’t underestimate the power of negative thinking! You must have only positive thoughts in your heart that you’re going to cripple this monster. Stick a piece of garlic in your pocket for good luck. A woman my mother knew in Palermo did this, and she was able to fight off a dozen three-foot-tall muscular Greeks who landed and tried to eat her. You think this is not true, but half her town saw it. The Greeks all had rough skin and wore backpacks and one-piece clothes. You have to go with what you feel in your heart. One of my teachers in Sicily believed the Portugese man-of-war jellyfish originally came from England. He felt that in his heart, and he eventually proved it. He later went on to be awarded a government grant to study tourist swooning sickness in Florence.”
“But how do I hold my hands to fight? How do I hold my fists?” I wanted to know.
“Like this!” Nonno Frankie demonstrated, taking a boxing stance with his left foot and fist forward.
“And then I just swing my right fist forward as hard as I can?”
“No. First you curse him.”
“Curse him?”
“Yes, you curse this John Quinn. You tell him, ‘May your left ear wither and fall into your right pocket!’ And you tell him he looks like a fugitive from a brain gang! And tell him he has a face like a mattress! And that an espresso coffee cup would fit on his head like a sombrero! And then you just give him the big Sicilian surprise!”
“What?”
“You kick him in the shins!”
By the time Monday morning came, I was a nervous wreck. Nonno Frankie had gone back to New York the night before, but had left me a special bowl of pasta and steamed octopus that he said I should eat for breakfast so I’d have “gusto” for combat. I had asked him not to discuss my upcoming bout with my mother or sister, and Betty didn’t say anything so I assumed she hadn’t heard about it.
Jennifer had offered to get one of her older brothers to protect me, and, if I wanted, she was willing to tell Miss Haines so she could stop anything from happening. I told her, “No.” I thought there was a chance John Quinn would have even forgotten the whole incident and wouldn’t make good on his revenge threat. Nevertheless, my
mind was numb with fear all day at school. In every class I went to, it seemed there were a dozen different kids coming over to me and telling me they heard John Quinn was going to beat me up after school.
At 3 p.m. sharp, the bell rang.
All the kids started to leave school.
I dawdled.
I cleaned my desk and took time packing up my books. Jennifer was at my side as we left the main exit of the building. There, across the street in a field behind Ronkewitz’s Candy Store, was a crowd of about 300 kids standing around like a big, undulating horseshoe, with John Quinn standing at the center bend glaring at me.
“You could run,” Jennifer suggested, tossing her hair all to the left side of her face. She looked much more than pretty now. She looked loyal to the bone.
“No,” I said. I just walked forward toward my fate, with the blood in my temples pounding so hard I thought I was going to pass out. Moose and Leon and Mike and Conehead and Little Frankfurter were sprinkled out in front of me like ushers from Hell, goading me forward. I didn’t even hear what they said. I saw only their faces distorted in ecstasy and expectation. They looked like the mob I had seen in a sixteenth-century etching where folks in London had bought tickets to watch bulldogs attack a water buffalo.
John stood with his black eye, and his fists up.
I stopped a few feet from him and put my fists up. A lot of kids in the crowd started to shout, “Kill him, Johnny!” but I may have imagined that part.
John came closer. He started to dance on his feet like all father-trained fighters do. I danced, too, as best I could. The crowd began to scream for blood. Jennifer kept shouting, “Hey, there’s no need to fight! You don’t have to fight, guys!”
