by Wally Lamb
“Lay teacher,” Lonny mused as we walked home together. “I guess that means all us boys are gonna get laid.” I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but I could tell from the sound of Lonny’s snicker that it was dirty.
“Yeah,” I snickered back. “That’ll be cool. Right?”
“Yeah. Hey, knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Marmalade.”
“Marmalade who?”
“Marmalade me. Who laid you?”
I dirty-snickered some more. “You’re a pig,” I said, hypothesizing that he’d just said something piggish.
Not long before this conversation, I had accompanied my pop during the morning doughnut run—we had a standing order for six dozen assorted from the Mama Mia Bakery, which we picked up every day at 5:00 A.M. before opening the lunch counter. “Hey, Pop, what’s all this stuff about ‘the birds and the bees?’” I’d asked, as nonchalantly as possible. He’d swallowed hard and taken a long time to respond, and when he finally did, he said, “Well, Felix, let’s see now. I guess the first thing you oughta know is that, whenever you get a drink of water from a drinking fountain, you should never let your lip touch the metal. Because there are these diseases you can get, see?”
I didn’t see, but by then we had pulled up to the bakery. “Be right back,” Pop said and popped out of the car faster than a jack-in-the-box. Five minutes later, he was back with the six boxes, a chocolate doughnut for me, and a cruller for himself. “Here you go,” he said. “Let’s you and me stuff our faces.” Halfway back to the bus depot, I figured out that stuffed faces couldn’t ask or answer any more embarrassing questions. Pop’s warning about drinking fountains would be both the beginning and the end of his sex education tutorial.
“A pig? Yeah?” Lonny said. “I know you are, but what am I?”
“A fuckhead,” I said. Down at the lunch counter, Chino Molinaro was always calling someone a fuckhead when my mother wasn’t around.
Lonny laughed. “I know you are, but what am I? Hey, by the way, Ding Dong, I bet you can’t say this five times fast: I slit a sheet, a sheet I slit; upon a slitted sheet I sit.”
“I can so.”
“Yeah? Okay, let’s hear you.”
Had my mother heard my attempt, she would have whacked me a good one, the way she had when she overheard me, in imitation of Chino Molinaro, refer to Giants’ quarterback Y.A. Tittle as “Y.A. Tittie.”
On Monday, I smelled our new teacher before I saw her—and began immediately to sneeze. As she would do each day thereafter, she had doused herself with lily-of-the-valley perfume, a scent to which I discovered I was highly allergic. “Bonjour, mes enfants,” she began. “Je m’appelle Madame Marguerite Irène DuBois Frechette, but you may call me, simply, Madame Marguerite. Je suis enchantée to make your acquaintance!” She had the kind of face that you’d expect to see gray hair on top of, but hers was a fiery red frizz. She was wearing a tight red sweater with a bow on one shoulder and high heels that you could see her painted toenails in and a straight black skirt—the kind my sisters, for some reason, called “pully skirts.” She wore lots of big jewelry that made noise when she moved. Madame Marguerite was pretty exotic for St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parochial School.
“Je suis from Québec, Canada,” she announced. (She pronounced it Cana-DA, not CAN-ada, and I remember thinking, sheesh, she comes from someplace that she doesn’t even know how to pronounce?) I was busy holding a finger beneath my nose, trying to stifle another sneeze, when she asked who would like to go up to the world map and point to where Québec was located. I certainly could have done so; the year before, I’d placed second in the fourth grade geography bee. But of course, Rosalie Turdski had placed first, and now her hand shot up as I let go an explosive achoo.
“Très bien, très bien,” Madame Marguerite said when Rosalie lifted the pointer off the chalk tray and pointed correctly to Québec. “And what, mademoiselle, might your name be?”
“Je suis Mademoiselle Rosalie,” Twerski said, as if she, too, were French-Canadian, even though her mother had brought our class a pan of pierogi every single St. Joseph’s Day since second grade.
“A-ah-ah-choo!” I said, with a force that probably could have registered on the Richter scale.
“God bless you, mon petit chou,” Madame Marguerite said, turning to me. “Comment vous appelez-vous?”
I said the only thing I could think of. “Huh?”
“Heh heh heh heh,” Madame said. “I asked you what your name is.”
“Oh,” I said. “Felix…. Funicello.”
“Ah, mais oui” she said. “But you remind me of another garçon Italien—a nice little boy I read about in the newspaper every Sunday. And so I shall call you Monsieur Dondi!”
The whole class erupted in laughter: Rosalie, Arthur Coté, the Kubiak twins, even Lonny Fuckhead Flood. That was when I realized I’d been wrong before. Sister Mary Agrippina had not been my penance after all. Madame Marguerite was or, by Christmastime, would be.
2
French
I was seated at the far left end of the lunch counter, doing 360-degree spins on my stool and studying, kind of. “La plume est sur la table…. La pluie est fine et persistante…. Mon parapluie est noir.” The week after her arrival at St. Aloysius, Madame Marguerite had reshuffled the seating chart; no longer were my classmates and I seated according to our academic rankings. Madame also reconfigured the fifth grade curriculum: less religion and long division to make room for the addition of conversational French.
It was a quiet evening down at the bus depot—a few travelers in the main hall waiting for the Short-line bus to Providence and a couple of sailors, just in on the Greyhound from New York, seated at the opposite end of the lunch counter eating cheeseburgers. None of our regulars were around: Spiro Sidoropolous, who ran the Elite Barbershop next door; or “Cowboy” Zupnik, the parking lot manager, with his fringed leather jacket, snakeskin boots, and yarmulke; or Cindy Creamcheese, the obese go-go girl who danced in a cage at the Hootenanny Hoot and always ordered the same thing: vanilla Coke, pepperoni omelet, and an Annette for dessert. (The Annette was my sister Simone’s creation: a hot fudge sundae topped with two upright Oreo cookies—edible Mouseketeer ears.) Reverend Peavey, another regular, had stopped in earlier but hadn’t stayed when there were no sailors for him to do his missionary work on. (I was well into my own adulthood when it finally dawned on me why all the adults back then made quotation marks with their fingers whenever they mentioned Reverend Peavey’s “missionary work” with the young men of the U.S. Navy.) This drunk guy, Mush Moriarty, had been there earlier, too, but Chino’d told him he had to leave because he was sitting at a stool with his pants so droopy that you could kinda see the crack in his culo. (Culo’s Italian for your rear end.) “Hey, Mush!” Chino had said to him, shaking his shoulder. “How am I supposed to sell ham sandwiches with your hams hanging out for all the world to see? You’ll take away everyone’s appetite.”
“Mmph?” Mush had said, lifting his face off the counter. “Wudja say?”
Chino said he’d just told him to am-scray. “Yeah, okay, boss,” Mush said, sliding off his stool and staggering away. One thing about Mush, Pop always said: When you told him to go, he went.
“Does Mush have a wife and live in a house and stuff?” I asked Chino.
“No wife as far as I know,” he said. “Used to have one, maybe. He’s got a room at that fleabag hotel on Bank Street, last I heard. But he lives mostly inside the bottle these days.” I thought I knew what Chino meant, but it made me think of that miniature U.S.S. Nautilus in the bottle that Pop made from a kit we got him last Christmas. (Pop used to be in the Navy, before there were nuclear submarines.) He keeps it on top of his dresser in his and Ma’s bedroom. And I pictured Pop’s same bottle, except instead of the Nautilus, a little shrunken Mush Moriarty in there going, “Help! I’m stuck! Get me out.”
“Madame Marguerite est Québecoise…. Je suis Américain.” Grabbing on
to the counter, I pushed off as hard as possible, closed my eyes, and began counting the number of rotations my stool would make before stopping: four, five, six, seven. The record I had to beat, set just minutes earlier, was nine…. Je suis getting very dizzy, I thought. Je hope I don’t puke sur la counter.
Chino Molinaro called over to me. “Hey, ’Lix, what’s that you’re speaking down there? Pig Latin?”
I brought my stool to an abrupt stop, opened my eyes, and rolled them at him. “It’s French,” I said, something any moron but him would know. “I’m doing my homework.” Chino had once tried to justify to my sister Frances why he’d quit high school the day he turned sixteen: having seen a Gravy Train truck back up to the cafeteria, he refused to attend any school that fed its students dog food.
“French? Yeah? Well listen, Pepé LePew. Your old lady left me a note that I’m supposed to feed you supper cause they ain’t getting back until around seven. So whataya want? French toast? Bottle of French dressing?”
“Hardy har har har,” I said. “That was so funny, I forgot to laugh.”
“Yeah, and maybe for dessert I can see if Ruthie Rottencrotch is around so’s she can give you a French-kiss.”
I wasn’t sure what distinguished French-kissing from regular kissing, but in response, I made a face and rubbed the back of my hand across my mouth. Ruthie was another of our regulars—a cross-eyed “chicky boom-boom” (another of my sisters’ terms) who’d recently been arrested for something called “lascivious carriage.” I’d looked up “lascivious” in the dictionary—with some difficulty. That letter “c” in the middle had thrown me. Exciting sexual desires, it said. The “carriage” part was what was confusing; I couldn’t imagine how a shopping cart from the First National could be used to do dirty stuff. Still, I wasn’t about to ask Chino to explain. Pop’s birds-and-the-bees tutorial might have come up short, but Chino’s might be too informative. Sex was a subject I wanted to know more about but also (kind of) didn’t.
“You know what?” I said. “In French, nouns are either male or female.” High school drop-out or not, Chino was probably still educable, I figured.
He shrugged and said the same was true of American.
“English, you mean? No, it’s not.”
“Sure it is. The word boobs is female, right? And jockstrap’s male.”
Or then again, maybe he wasn’t educable. Sighing with exasperated tolerance, I glanced up at the menu board and told him I’d have a Sal’s torpedo and a Suicide Coke.
“A Sal’s and a Suicide. You got it, Frenchie.”
My father’s signature sandwich—ground chuck sautéed with onions and green peppers, simmered in tomato sauce, scooped onto a torpedo-shaped grinder roll and topped with provolone—was a nod to the nearby submarine base and a favorite of the “squids” taking buses out of “Rotten Groton” or returning to it. The Suicide Coke was Chino’s invention: a fountain-drawn Coke mixed with squirts of lime, cherry, and strawberry syrups and topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup.
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.
