by Wally Lamb
Out in the front hall, I hear Frances’s whiny voice. I go to the doorway so’s I can listen better. “But Ma, can’t you come back here before you go grocery shopping? We’ve been stuck with him all morning. And anyway, he’d get bored watching that movie. Then he’d start being pesty and bothering us.”
“Let me talk to her,” Simone says. Ma must be saying a bunch of stuff on the other end, cause Simone just keeps going, “Yeah, but . . . I know, but . . . But Ma, that movie’s just for little kids.”
After she hangs up, Simone tells Frances they can go downtown to the show, but it has to be Pinocchio cause they have to take me. “But she says we can take the money that’s in the coffee can and, after the movie, use what’s left over for spending money.”
I ask Simone do I get spending money, too, but Frances butts in and goes, “Why should you get any when it’s us who get stuck babysitting you all the time? And anyways, you get to see your stupid movie and we can’t see ours.”
And I go, “So?”
And she goes, “So why do you always have to wreck everything? The baby! The boy! Mommy and Poppy’s little pet!”
Simone tells Frances to cut it out. Then she says she’s going upstairs to change cause if we’re going downtown, she might see some kids she knows. When it’s just Frances and me, she keeps staring at me with her mad face and her nose holes going in and out. And I get a little bit scared cause sometimes when she gets this mad at me, she gives me zammo punches on the arm with her knuckles. That’s what she calls them, and they hurt and give me black-and-blue marks. Only right now, Frances isn’t punching me. She’s just saying mean stuff to hurt my feelings. “You know something, Felix? Everything used to be good around here until you came along. Why don’t you just go back where you came from?”
And I go, “How could I do that when I’m way too big to fit in Ma’s tummy?”
And she says, “Ha! You’re so stupid you don’t even know you’re adopted.”
“No I’m not!”
“You are so. Simone and I are Poppy and Mommy’s real kids, but you aren’t. You were so ugly and pathetic, your real parents didn’t want you. So we took you because we felt sorry for you.”
I tell her she’s lying.
“No I’m not.” She raises her hand. “I swear on a stack of Bibles.”
“Shut up, you liar!”
“Okay, don’t believe me. What do I care? Oh, by the way. Poppy and Mommy can still give you back to your real parents if they want to. They’re thinking about it.”
“They are not!”
“No? Then how come I heard them talking about it last night? And you know who your real parents are? Lush Magoon and Roxy Rotten Crotch.”
“No sir!”
“Yes sir. Aw, look. Tiny Tears is crying now.”
“I’m not Tiny Tears!”
“Oh, that’s right. You’re Betsy Wetsy.” She laughs this shrieky laugh and starts upstairs. I pull off my shoe and throw it at her, but it misses. After she reaches the top and goes out of sight, I yell up after her, “I don’t care what you say! I did not get adopted. Poppy’s my real father and my real mother is Ma!”
And I’m pretty sure they are.
Aren’t they?
FIVE
Felix?”
Lois is seated on a canvas director’s chair, left aisle, by the rear orchestra seats.
“Yes?”
“Be careful up there. You look a bit dazed, and you’re awfully close to the front of the stage. I don’t want you to fall and hurt yourself.”
“Oh.” I take a step backward.
“That’s better. Why did you exit the scene just now?”
“I . . . needed to take a time-out.”
“Because?”
“I don’t know. It’s just so strange to be back there—to be both of that long-gone childhood and apart from it, too. Temporally apart from it, I mean—not emotionally. I didn’t expect that it would be so . . .”
“Revealing?”
I shake my head. “Painful.”
“Well, good heavens, she was attacking you at a very primal level. Trying to convince you that you didn’t belong? That you were pitied rather than wanted?”
“But that was over fifty years ago. Shouldn’t the statute of limitations have run out by now?”
“Temporally, perhaps. But as you’ve noted, not emotionally.”
It’s odd having a personal conversation with a ghost who’s starting to sound more like a therapist. And where’s her sidekick? Billie Dove seems to have flown the coop. Why has this whole weird experience come down to “the directress” and me?
“Look, I should be able to let it go because I know things now. Things I couldn’t have known back then.”
“Because you were so young?”
“That, and because things were being withheld from me. Withheld from Frances, too. The bottom line is that she zeroed in on me because she was so insecure.”
“About what?”
“Who she was, who she wasn’t. She was afraid that our parents didn’t love her as much as they loved Simone and me. So she passed her fear to me like we were playing a game of hot potato. That’s what was at the heart of it. Looks-wise, she was never going to compete with Simone. She was just the chubby, mouthy younger sister. Then I come along, and as Frances said, I was the boy, the baby. I mean, I get that. So why doesn’t that give me the wherewithal to let it go?”
Lois smiles but says nothing.
“Look, let me ask you something. Before? When you said I was educable? What did you mean by that?” Okay, that smile of hers is getting annoying. She’s a spook, not a sphinx. “Hey! Answer me!”
Her smile fades. “It’s not for me to reckon with the film of your life, Felix. That’s your job. Are you ready to go back again?”
I shake my head. “I’ll watch, but I’m not reentering it.”
“Very well,” she says. “Come down off the stage then and take a seat.” She turns and looks up at the empty projection booth, raises her hand and snaps her fingers. The film resumes and, from my seat in the second row, I watch my oversized past play out up there on the big screen. . . .
Looks like my sisters and I are getting ready to leave the house now. I’m the first one outside, and from the way I’m dancing around, I’d say I’m pretty excited about seeing Pinocchio. Frances lets the cat out and, true to form, Winky heads right for Pop’s garden on the side of the house. It’s her favorite napping spot, possibly because she enjoys flopping down on the cucumbers and chewing the vines in case Pop hasn’t yet gotten the message about her contempt for him. Of course, if she’s still there when Pop gets home, he’ll engage equally in their pas de deux by aiming the garden hose at her. Funny thing is, when Winky gets hit by a car a few years from now, it’s Pop who will stay up all night with her, attending to her slow and laborious dying. I’ll wake up the next morning to the sound of spade hitting earth and stone. When I look out my bedroom window, I will see my father tenderly placing his feline nemesis, shrouded in one of our checkered dish towels, into the ground.
“Hurry up, Simone!” I yell through the screen door. “We’re gonna be late.”
“Since when can you tell time?”
“Shut up, Frances. Who’s talking to you?”
“I’m telling Mommy you said shut up.”
“Then I’m telling Poppy you smoked one of his cigarettes.”
Ha! That shut her up. When Simone comes out, she locks the front door. Hides the key beneath the metal milk box, one of the first places a burglar would look. My sisters and I start down the front sidewalk.
For some reason, I remember those clothes Frances and Simone have changed into: outfits they made at that Saturday morning sewing school they attended. The more talented seamstress, Simone is wearing her señorita blouse and toreador pants. In her tent-like sack dress, Frances looks like a life-size orange Popsicle. I used to moan and groan about having to go with them to those sewing classes. Pop was working and Ma, a mem
ber of the St. Aloysius Gonzaga Rosary Society, had to spend Saturday mornings helping to decorate the altar for Sunday Mass. Ah, the injustice of having to spend Saturday mornings among sewing machines and juvenile seamstresses when all the good cartoons were on, plus the live-action kids’ western Fury. The titular character of that show was a kind of equine Lassie—an unbroken stallion who somehow always managed to assist young Joey and his adoptive father, Jim, in prevailing over that week’s villains. Unlike Fury, my sisters’ sewing school was devoid of drama, except for the time when one of their contemporaries became distracted and accidentally stuck her finger under a jabbing machine needle. It went through her cuticle and out the other side, causing her to scream, jump up, and pass out cold. I had never seen anyone faint before, and until Mrs. McCune resurrected her by calling her name and slapping her cheeks, I’d assumed the sewing machine had killed her.
Simone gives me permission to walk on other people’s walls on our way down to the movies as long as I’m careful. I loved wall-walking, which made me taller than both my sisters. “Hello down there, you midgets,” my younger self says, but they just ignore me. Frances informs Simone that she forgot to take the Scotch tape off her bangs before we left. Simone says no she didn’t—that it’s so humid out, she’s keeping them taped until we get closer to downtown so they won’t frizz up before we’re inside with the air-conditioning. Simone hated frizzy hair so much that one time during this era she knelt down on the kitchen floor in front of the ironing board and scorched her hair trying to press away the frizz. “PU,” I kept saying until she chased me outside. The only other time I can recall Simone getting that mad at me was when she and I went to the corner store to buy bread and Jerome Spears, a classmate of Simone’s for whom she’d been harboring a secret crush, was at the store, too. When the three of us arrived simultaneously at the front counter, I disclosed to Jerome the reason why the hair on Simone’s arms was orange: because she bleached it with peroxide so that she would look less hairy. When we got home, Simone told Ma how I’d humiliated her. That made Ma mad, too. “I don’t care if it’s the truth, Felix. Some things are private. Now you go to your room until I tell you you can come out. And after your time is up, I want you to apologize to your poor sister.” When I did so, Simone said, “That’s okay. From now on, I’ll just wear a bag over my head in public.”
Walking along those walls, I keep picking dead dandelions from people’s lawns. Hiding them behind my back, I come down from a wall. Looks like I’m about to make Frances my victim. “Here’s a beautiful bouquet for you, my darling girl,” I tell her, holding the dandelion puffs up to her face and blowing hard. But a breeze foils my plan and most of the fuzz comes back at me. Frances starts snort-laughing. “You’ve got fluff stuck to your eyebrows, you stupid idiot,” she says. Try as I might, I could never quite get the best of my tormenting sister.
“When we get to the show, can I buy some popcorn?” I ask Simone.
“No!” Frances says. Ever the mediator, Simone tells us we’ll get one box and share it. No, I can’t hold the box, she says. She’ll sit in the middle and hold it. When I ask if I can get a soda, Frances nixes that idea, too, but Simone says we’ll see. It will depend on my behavior. “Guess you’re gonna be thirsty then,” Frances says. When I stick my tongue out at her, she sticks hers out at me, curling it for an extra taunt. Frances could curl her tongue, a skill which, try as I might, I never could master.
Frances turns around and looks behind us. “Oh no,” she groans. “Look who’s coming.” The camera follows her gaze and there he is, in a long shot: our pesty neighbor, Stanley Wierzbicki.
“Hey!” he calls.
“Hay is for horses!” I call back. Simone says to just ignore him and keep walking. Frances says she wishes she brought her cootie spray.
“Where you goin’?” Stanley wants to know.
Frances calls back, “Crazy. Wanna come?”
“Go home, Stanley,” Simone tells him. She reminds me not to look back at him because that will just encourage him. But as I recall, Stanley was not easily discouraged.
“Guess what?” he calls. When we don’t answer, he says, “You know that dog food that makes its own gravy?”
“Yeah, genius. It’s called Gravy Train.” Frances says it sotto voce so that we can hear her but Stanley can’t.
“My mom got a bag of it for Taffy. And guess what. I ate some of it.”
Forgetting my instructions to pay him no attention, I stop short and look back at him, wide-eyed. “You did? What did it taste like?”
“Kinda like caca. The gravy was good, though, after I put salt on it.”
That’s enough for Simone. She turns and faces him, points, and orders him to go home. Stanley reminds her that she’s not the boss of him.
“You better stop bothering us, or we’re gonna tell the cops!” Frances shouts.
“Go ahead, Fat Chunks,” he shouts back. “I want you to.”
“Or the guys in the white coats! So they can take you to the loony bin!”
“You’re so fat you should be the fat lady at the carnival!”
“And you’re so dumb you probably still don’t know your times tables!”
“I do so!”
“Okay then. What’s eight times seven?”
A close-up of Stanley reveals that he has no idea. “Who doesn’t know that?”
“Okay, what is it then?”
“You’re fatter than a hippopotamus!”
“Have you learned your one times table yet? Here’s a tough one for you. What’s one times one?” When he answers that it’s two, Frances’s laughter is raucous.
Simone tells her to stop it—that he’ll follow us all the way downtown if she keeps it up. So she stops. Clearly, however, Stanley has struck at Frances’s Achilles’ heel. She’s rubbing her wet eyes with her fists.
“I bet you a hundred dollars I know where you’re going,” Stanley says. “You’re walking down to Treat’s to get sundaes. Can I come? I got my own money.”
“No! Go home and eat more dog food!” Frances screams.
“Frances, would you stop?” Simone pleads.
Then, just like the night before during hide-and-seek, Stanley’s brother Brad saves the day. His souped-up purple Chevy Bel Air convertible with its whitewall tires and Hollywood muffler comes roaring around the corner and slows to a crawl. “Howdy, neighbors,” he says, speaking solely to Simone. She must have pulled the Scotch tape off her bangs when she heard him coming, because the film reveals a hairy ball of tape in the grasp of her right hand. “Is the nimrod bugging you?”
“Yes!” Frances declares.
“Plus, he ate Gravy Train,” I add. “And he called my sister Fat Chunks.” Frances reaches over and gives me one of her signature zammo punches.
Brad yells at Stanley to turn around and “get the fuck back home.” I can tell from the way my eyes bug out that I’m as shocked by Brad’s language as I was by his brother’s revelation that he’d eaten dog food.
“Psst,” I whisper to Frances. “Brad just said the F-word.”
“Oh really?” she whispers back. “Gee, I wish I had ears like you.”
When Stanley asks his brother if he can have a ride back, Brad tells him to beat it before he gets out of his car and pounds him to a bloody pulp. “Okay, okay,” Stanley says. My mouth drops open as I watch him cross the street. “You didn’t look both ways!” I call after him.
My sisters and I resume our trek toward the movie theater. A long shot reveals that Brad’s got his head out the window. He’s checking out Simone from the back. “Wish I had that swing in my backyard,” he calls. Simone smiles a little and touches the back of her neck. Her enjoyment of this attention from an older boy ends abruptly, however, courtesy of her little brother. “Uh-oh, Simone. Your bangs are frizzing up,” I tell her.
“Keep walking, Felix,” she says.
We pass the National Guard armory, the Civil Defense lady’s house, the local A.M.E. Zion—which, back then
, we called “the colored people’s church.” My sisters and I are silent; it looks like we’re lost in our own long-ago thoughts. Then Frances asks Simone if her sack dress makes her look fat. Simone says no, that that style is very flattering on her and Stanley Wierzbicki is just a little jerk who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Frances says, “But if you were a complete stranger and you walked by, would you think I was fat or regular. Be honest.”
“Regular,” Simone says.
“And anyways, Stanley shouldn’t talk,” I chime in. “When he runs, he has a jiggly stomach.” For a second or two, Frances seems to appreciate my observation. Then she remembers it’s me who said it.
The film captures Herbert Hoover Avenue as it once was, bringing back a flood of long-forgotten memories. We pass old Mrs. Popple’s house. We shared a party line with her back in the day. If the phone rang once, it was for her, two quick rings in a row signaled that someone was calling us. Aliza’s generation spends most of their waking hours phoning, texting, tweeting, and Snapchatting. If I mentioned party lines to a room full of millennials, they would draw a collective blank. And if I described what was available to consumers back when I was a kid, I’d come off like a cave-dwelling troglodyte. Well, so be it. Time marches on and technology gallops ahead. I suppose that’s a troglodyte’s viewpoint, too. I remember back in the late seventies, when microwaves started becoming standard kitchen equipment, my father boasting that he’d just ordered one of those new “microphone ovens” from Sears, Roebuck. “Delivery in seven business days or under,” he added. “Man oh man, that’s one company that’s got their act together.” Today, Amazon can get customers’ purchases to them within twenty-four hours, and from what I read, not long from now their stuff will arrive by drone an hour or two after you’ve placed your order. But back to 1959. . . .
