The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  I was at the lunch counter that evening because Pop had driven to the wholesaler’s in Brooklyn and then was staying overnight at his friend Tootsie Cammarato’s house in Queens. (Tootsie was my godfather—a cheapskate compared to Simone’s and Frances’s. My sisters both got money for Christmas and all’s I ever got from Tootsie was a crappy box of ribbon candy that wasn’t even mine; it was the whole family’s, and plus I didn’t even like ribbon candy.) My mother and sisters weren’t around that night either; the three of them had taken the bus to Hartford to shop for outfits for Ma. The Pillsbury Bake-Off finals were fast approaching and Simone was insistent that no mother of hers was going to fly out to Hollywood and appear on national television wearing “old lady clothes.” Frances, who was more interested in field hockey than fashion, had gone along for the ride and, most likely, to remind Simone how superficial she was. Having lost the argument with my parents about whether or not I was old enough to babysit myself, I’d been ordered to walk down to the bus depot after school so that Chino could watch me. “Chino?” I’d gasped. “Why don’t you just hire Odd Job to babysit me!” Pop, Ma, and I had seen Goldfinger at the drive-in that summer and Ma had later reported that she’d had a dream in which Odd Job was chasing her, so I thought mine was a clever argument. My parents sure didn’t. Ma just laughed and Pop said he was pretty sure that the closest thing Chino got to deadly jujitsu moves was slapping on Hai Karate aftershave.

  “Hey, you want fries with your torpedo?” Chino asked. “They’re French.”

  I got off my stool and went behind the counter. “I’ll make them.”

  “Yeah? Does your father let you use the fryolator now?” I lied and said he did. “Okay, then. But first, why don’t you go play us some tunes? Here, catch.” He tossed me a quarter. “And while you’re at it, ask those two if they want anything else, will ya?” He pointed his chin at the sailors at stools fifteen and sixteen. This was cool, at least. My parents insisted I was too young to wait on customers, which I wasn’t. And luckily, I was still wearing my St. Aloysius uniform—navy blue pants, powder blue shirt (minus the “fruit loop” that Geraldine Balchunas had pulled off of it, even though girls pulling fruit loops off the boy’s uniform shirts is forbidden), and red clip-on tie—outfitted, as far as I was concerned, like a waiter at a fancy restaurant. But first things first.

  The records in the lunch counter’s jukebox got changed every other week by this guy named Manny. Mostly, our customers wanted to hear Motown or British Invasion. My sister Frances had grown particularly fond of the British pop star Dusty Springfield, and Manny accommodated her with Dusty’s 45s—“I Only Want to Be with You,” “Wishin’ and Hopin’”—which Frances played over and over when she was down at the lunch counter helping Pop. But Manny knew better than to pull any of the 45s that featured our cousin’s three biggest hits, “Tall Paul,” “O Dio Mio,” and “Pineapple Princess,” which, everyone in our family knew, thanks to Simone, had reached as high as numbers 7, 10, and 11, respectively, on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. I dropped the coin into the slot and pushed the buttons I knew by heart: A-5, C-11, and E-8.

  chalk on the sidewalk

  Writin’ on the wall

  Everyone know it

  I love Paul

  I went behind the counter again and walked jauntily toward the sailors. “Can I get you anchor clankers anything else?” I’d heard Simone say that sailors were the best tippers, especially when you teased them a little, but these guys looked more bugged than amused.

  “Geeze, I don’t know, Short Stuff,” the not-pimply one said. “What do you got for dessert?” I told him I recommended the Annette sundae.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” the other one said. “They got her on the walls, on the jukebox. They even got a goddamned sundae named after her. This place has fuckin’ Funicello fever.”

  I pursed my lips. “She happens to be our cousin,” I said.

  Neither seemed to register the significance of what I’d just told them. “Gimme a slice of banana cream pie,” Pimple Puss said. His friend said all’s he wanted was a glass of water and a toothpick.

  I got their stuff and placed it on the counter in front of them. “Oh, by the way,” I said. “Just in case you didn’t know, I’m in Junior Midshipmen and we’re gonna be on this TV show called Ranger Andy. And this coming spring, we’re going on a field trip to New Bedford and sleeping overnight. On a ship.”

  “Wow! He’s gonna sleep on a ship!” Mr. Not Pimples said. “That sounds real thrilling. Don’t it, Marty?”

  “Yeah. Whoop-de-do. Wish we could sleep on a ship sometime.”

  I thought suddenly of Lonny Flood—how much better he’d be at conversing with these guys. Then I thought of Lonny’s tongue-twister. “Hey, can you say this five times fast?” I asked, then messed it up. “I slit a sheet, a sleet I shit, upon a shitted sleet I shlit.”

  The goons guffawed. “Hey, pal!” one of them called over to Chino. “Is your waiter here a kid or a fuckin’ midget?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Chino said, approaching. “He just moved here from Munchkinland.” The three of them cracked up.

  “That’s about as funny as crippled kids!” I said.

  Blinking back tears, I walked to the other side of the lunch counter, sat, and turned my back to them. But instead of feeling bad about having hurt my feelings, they started telling these jokes I didn’t even get. “Took my girl to a game at Fenway last week,” Chino said. “I kissed her between the strikes and she kissed me between the balls.” Yeah, like he had a girlfriend. That time he called our house and asked to speak to Simone, she’d pantomimed gagging and scrawled me a note: Tell him I have the flu. But I’d had a better idea and told Chino, instead, that if he was calling to ask my sister out on a date, he’d better not because it would make Ma so mad, she’d probably have my father fire him. Officially, Pop was Chino’s boss, but Ma was the one he was afraid of; I’d once overheard him refer to her as “a real gonad cruncher,” and whatever that meant, I was pretty sure it wasn’t a compliment.

  “How is a woman like an oven?” one of the squids asked.

  “Beats me,” Chino said. I could hear the grin in his voice. “How?”

  “Because you gotta heat it up before you stick the meatloaf in.”

  Man, they all loved that one! Their stupid laughing all but drowned out Annette’s double-track singing. Tall Paul, tall Paul, tall Paul, he’s my all.

  After the sailors left, I ate my torpedo and drank my Suicide Coke. “Hey, ’Lix,” Chino said. “Don’t let what those two squids said bother you. They’re just a coupla fuckheads, that’s all.”

  I closed my eyes, rotating on my stool and mumbling it so that he could barely hear me. “Takes one to know one.” Instead of getting mad like I kinda hoped he would, he just laughed.

  In the silence that followed, I watched him wipe the coffee mugs he’d just washed and stack them in a pyramid. Looked down at the mimeographed sheet of words we were supposed to practice. “What is French-kissing, anyways?” I said. Chino placed a mug at the apex of his pyramid. He said it was like regular kissing, only the guy stuck his tongue inside the girl’s mouth. And if he got lucky, she’d stick her tongue inside his mouth, too. “Yecch,” I said.

  “Well, Felix, don’t knock it until you try it. You know—years from now, I mean. And don’t tell your mother I told you.”

  I looked at the big clock out in the depot. Looked back at my stupid French. “Je m’appelle Felix. Comment vous appelez-vous?” Why had those big fat liars said they’d be home by seven o’clock if they didn’t mean it? All’s I wanted to do was go home.

  “Hey! Yoo hoo,” Chino said. “What do you say? Can you?”

  “Can I what?”

  “Hold down the fort here for a few minutes so’s I can go take a leak?” I nodded and he headed for the restrooms on the other side of the depot.

  While he was gone, I realized I’d forgotten to make my French fries. I grabbed the basket, walked over to the fridg
e, and took two fistfuls from the freezer. Back at the fryolator, I lowered the basket of icy potato strips into the molten lard. When I looked up from the sizzle, there was Annette in her white bathing suit, smiling at me, eye to eye. I looked over my left shoulder, my right. All the benches in the hall were empty. The ticket guy was dozing in his cage. Should I? Shouldn’t I? I climbed up onto the counter, leaned to my left, and poked my tongue out a little, touching it to Annette’s paper mouth. French-kissing my cousin’s poster felt kind of stupid but kind of exciting, too. I did it again.

  At which point, I heard a loud pop and felt hot grease hit my neck. “Ow!” I yelled, the way Rosalie Twerski had when Lonny’s BB hit her. Grabbing onto my throat, I dislodged my clip-on tie, and it fell into the fryolator. I stood there, watching it sizzle and sink.

  When Ma, Simone, and Frances got off the bus from Hartford, they were carrying boxes and garment bags and talking a blue streak. It was closer to eight o’clock than seven. “How come you’re so late?” I demanded.

  “It took longer because Ma got her hair styled,” Frances said.

  “At a salon!” Simone added. “And she got four new outfits. Doesn’t her hair look cool? Look how much younger she looks!”

  At which point I really noticed my mother. Her regular hair had been poufed up into a tall beehive style with a big swirling curl on one side and a French twist in back. Her head looked like a giant Dairy Queen.

  “Hey, Mrs. F,” Chino called over. “Va-va-voom.” Ma waved him away with her hand and said okay, okay, that was enough of that. But for once, she was smiling at Chino instead of frowning at him.

  “Felix, check out her skort,” Simone said.

  “Her what?”

  “Her skort. They’re real popular now. Real modern. Ma, turn around.”

  My mother did as she was told, as if the trip to Hartford had turned her into a zombie or something. She was wearing a skirt in front and Bermuda shorts in back and you could see her veiny legs either way.

  “Well, Felix, what do you think of my new look?” Ma asked timidly.

  I shrugged and looked away. “How should I know?”

  Her smile twitched a little. “Do you think Daddy will like it?”

  “Don’t ask me. Ask him.” What did she have to keep looking at me for? I was my same self. She was the one who was different. I was wishing she hadn’t even entered her stupid Pillsbury Bake-Off.

  “How did you make out today, sweetie?” she asked. “How was school?”

  Instead of answering her, I asked a question of my own. “How come your legs look like blue cheese?”

  Ma turned immediately to Simone. “See! I told you this was too short.” Simone said it wasn’t—that I was just being a little jerk.

  “As usual,” Frances added.

  Ma turned back to me. “What did you have for supper, honey?”

  Nothing, I told her. Just a Suicide Coke. “And by the way, I hope you know you have to buy me a new uniform.”

  “A new—”

  “I could have gotten killed, you know. While you were out doing all your shopping.”

  “Gotten killed? What do you mean?”

  “Boiled in oil!” Ma and Simone exchanged confused looks, but Frances made some smart remark about Kentucky Fried Felix. “Oh yeah, Frances the Talking Mule, real funny!” I stuck my tongue out at her, too. Ma hated it when I did that, same as she did when I blew bubbles in my milk with a straw.

  “Cool it there, Dondi,” Chino said, approaching us. And to Ma, “He just had a little accident, Mrs. F. That’s all.”

  “A little accident?” I countered. Like Perry Mason, I walked behind the counter and pointed to Exhibit A: my ruined red clip-on tie, resting atop a bed of greasy paper towels. I looked from my alarmed mother to Annette on the wall above the fryolator, smiling her placid paper smile, listening to her transistor radio. Then I turned back to Ma. I had intended to glare at her but, instead, began to cry.

  “I fried my tie,” I said.

  My sisters burst into peals of laughter.

  3

  Confession

  Tons of stuff was already happening that week. Saturday was Halloween. (Lonny and I were trick-or-treating in my neighborhood, and then he was sleeping over.) On Tuesday, our school was having our mock election, plus it was the day of the real election and either we’d have our same president still (LBJ) or else Barry Goldwater (AuH20), who was from Arizona. On Thursday, Ma was leaving for California, which, on the map, was right next to Arizona, which, if you drove from there through New Mexico, you’d be in Texas where President Johnson was from. And now, sheesh, on top of everything else, Madame had just told us that our class was getting a new student—a girl who had moved here, not just from some place close like Rhode Island but from a foreign country!

  Evgeniya (Zhenya) Vladimirovna Kabakova

  Madame turned away from the name she’d just written on the board and smiled. Could anyone guess from her name which country Zhenya came from?

  Rosalie’s hand went up. “Poland?” Madame shook her head.

  I put my hand up next. Figuring “Kabakova” sounded kind of like “capicola,” I guessed Italy. Madame said, “No, heh heh heh, Zhenya is not une jeune fille italienne.”

  MaryAnn Haywood guessed Ireland, Arthur Coté Japan. Eugene Bowen thought either Africa or South America. “Non, non, et non,” Madame said. “Zhenya is une jeune fille russe—a Russian girl. She and her family have moved here from the Soviet Union.” My classmates and I looked at each other, aghast. Rosalie’s hand shot back up and Madame nodded.

  “Is she a Communist?”

  Madame frowned a little and shrugged, palms out. “Perhaps oui, perhaps non. Whatever she is, we shall show her what a friendly class we are when she arrives. N’est-ce pas? A few of us nodded cautiously; most remained noncommittal. “Et bien. Now please take out your copies of The Yearling and read the next chapter en silence until we are called over.”

  Called over to Final Friday confessions, Madame meant. On the last Friday of each month, St. Aloysius Gonzaga students in grades three through eight went next door, class by class, to come clean about their sins and receive penance and absolution.

  Final Fridays were kinda good and kinda bad. Yes, you got out of doing work for an hour or so, but only so you could go to church. It was a far cry from a field trip to the Peabody Museum, say, where there were dinosaurs, or to Channel 3 in Hartford, where we were going next month in Junior Midshipmen so’s we could be on Ranger Andy. Final Fridays could be good or bad, too, depending on who you got for a priest. It could either be Father Hanrahan, who gave cinchy penances (and who rode a motorcycle and could make outside shots on the basketball court, plus he liked the Beatles)—or Monsignor Muldoon, who was about 500 years old and kind of like Phineas T. Bluster, Crabby Appleton, and clueless Mister Magoo, all rolled into one.

  I opened my copy of The Yearling. In the chapter we’d read the day before, Jody’s father Penny had survived his rattlesnake bite. The problem—the “conflict,” it was called—was that the deer Jody’s father had had to kill to make the poultice that drew out the venom and saved his life had been a mother deer. A doe. So now her fawn was an orphan. I knew that Jody was going to adopt it for a pet and name it Flag because I’d peeked at some of the later chapters, even though we weren’t supposed to read ahead, and if we did anyways, we were supposed to keep what happened to ourselves and not tell our neighbors…. In my opinion, silent reading kinda stunk because, even though I was the second smartest kid in our class, everyone around me read faster than me, even Lonny, except he was probably skipping paragraphs or even whole pages….

  The wall clock’s minute hand reared back, then lunged forward with an audible ca-chunk….

  The thing I didn’t get was how, first we had to practice our duck-and-cover exercises all last year because the Soviet Union was our enemy and now we were going to have a girl from there right in our class, and we were going to have to be nice to her, and I didn’
t know if anyone else had thought about this, but maybe she was a spy….

  The P.A. box click-clicked. “The sixth graders may now pass,” Mother Filomina’s voice said. Click. That was the way they called us over to confession: they started with the eighth graders and counted backwards, which meant, if sixth grade was going, then our grade was getting called next. Soon, I hoped, because silent reading was so boring….

  You know what would be cool? If, the day God the Father came back to earth for Judgment Day, it was just his voice on every single P.A. in the whole wide world. Except then, how could poor people in places like China and Africa hear him, because there probably weren’t many P.A.s there, right?…

  Ca-chunk.

  Earlier that day? You know what Madame Marguerite told us? That from now on, we couldn’t call her Madame Marguerite anymore. Now we had to call her Madame Frechette, or simply Madame. All the other kids had looked at each other like huh? I was the only one who knew what was going on. Madame was working on her “needs improvement”s….

  I had a pet once, two Easters ago. Not a fawn like Flag or some big-shotty pet like Rosalie’s stupid Shetland pony, Ginger Gal, that she’s always bragging about. My pet was this little baby chick we got at Thompson’s Feed and Grain store. It was purple, on account of they dyed all the chicks for Easter. Popeye, I named him, because I liked Popeye cartoons and because he kind of had these poppy-outy black eyes. He got sick after about a week and started losing his balance and closing his eyes. (I hadn’t realized before that chickens had eyelids.) Then he kind of curled up in a corner of the shoebox I was keeping him in and, at night while I was sleeping, he croaked. Frances and I buried him in our backyard, near where Ma’s rose bushes are—or, as Pop called Ma’s rose bushes, her restaurant for Japanese beetles. I made a cross for Popeye out of two popsicle sticks and some glue and stuck it on top of his grave, and then Frances and I said the Our Father. I asked Fran if she thought there was a different Heaven for animals, and she said, how should she know because, first of all, she wasn’t an animal and second, she’d never been dead.