by Wally Lamb
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 fridge, 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 Har
tford, 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.
Ca-chunk.
When were they going to call us fifth graders over there? Next year? Not that I really wanted to go over, with what I had to confess. Oscar Landry’s already on page 42 and all’s I’m on is page 37. There’s an illustration on page 40 and Oscar’s way past that and I won’t even get to it until three more pages….
After Popeye died, I didn’t even want any other pets because I was sad. And I was kind of sad and kind of glad that Ma was going on her California trip. Sad because she had never gone away before and I was probably going to miss her, but glad because Pop said if Ma won the grand prize, we could buy a brand new car, either a Cadillac or a Buick Riviera, and it was going to have air-conditioning, no matter which one we got. I was hoping we’d get the Riviera because the ’65s had concealed headlights that you could only see when you put the headlights on, and when you turned them off again, these doors came down over them, kind of like eyelids. Me and Pop and Frances seen one in the showroom at Broadway Buick and the guy demonstrated the headlights for us. Royal Blue, the showroom Riviera was, which was the color I wanted. Fran wanted Country Club Red. Pop said Ma would be the one who got to pick the color out because—
Click, click. “The fifth graders may now pass.” Click.
Before any of us kids could stand up, Madame sprang from her seat, clapping her hands. “Dépêchez-vous, mes enfants! No dawdling, now. Hurry, hurry!” Everyone was looking at each other, wondering why she was having a nervous breakdown about us going over to the church, but once again, I knew that it was because of her “needs improvement”s.
And you know how I knew? Because the day before, out on the playground at recess, Ronald Kubiak had fired the dodge ball and hit me on the shoulder, tagging me out third to last. (In dodge ball, the Kubiak twins always started the game as “ends” and often kept those positions until recess was over.) As I waited on the sideline to see if Rosalie or Johnny Bartlett would survive or get nailed by a Kubiak, Madame had approached me. Would I please be un bon garçon and run up to our room and fetch her sunglasses, heh heh heh? (That was one of the weird things about Madame: she was always chuckling at things that weren’t funny.) “Oui, Madame,” I’d said, aware that Rosalie was watching us when she should have been watching out for the dodge ball, because Roland Kubiak fired it at her and got her in the small of her back, which threw Johnny into “sudden death.” Rosalie started crabbing that it wasn’t fair because she hadn’t been ready yet. But she would have been ready if she wasn’t always minding everyone else’s business.
Back in the building, I’d mounted the staircases and, at the water fountain on our floor, had treated myself to a long, relaxing drink. (With Pop’s warning whispering in my ears, I took care, of course, to avoid contact with the spout.) The opportunity to get an extra drink had been planned but the opportunity to snoop around Madame’s desk hadn’t been. I just did it without thinking about it first, so it was probably a venial, not a mortal, sin. (Sins that you plan out are worse than sins you just do without thinking about it first.)
Madame’s grade book lay open on her blotter. Since she’d discontinued Sister Dymphna’s practice of publicly ranking each of us on the left end of the blackboard, I decided to check out the current standings. Rosalie still had the longest string of check-plusses, big surprise, and I was still in second place. But from the look of it, both Oscar L. and MaryAnn H. were closing in on me. Lonny’s check-minuses had put him in dead last place.
Madame’s top left desk drawer held a collection of stuff that she, and Sister Dymphna before her, had confiscated: a kind of graveyard for squirt guns, wax lips, Lonny’s whoopee cushion, et cetera. There was a Beatles magazine in there, a Jughead comic book, a “Watermelon Pink” lipstick, some packs of Wacky Plaques. And tons of candy: Mounds, Milky Ways, a Sky Bar, a box of malted milk balls. All of the above, plus enough packs of gum to fill the rack down at the lunch counter. I reclaimed the Juicy Fruit I’d lost the week before. “Gum, monsieur?” Madame had asked, one eyebrow raised. “Or are you chewing your cud? Heh heh heh.” I grabbed the whoopee cushion, too, and hid it in my social studies book, figuring I’d give it back to Lonny once we were safely off school property. I was being a little like Robin Hood, I figured.
Peering into Madame’s open pocketbook (and shaking it a little), I’d spotted a pink wallet, a pack of bro
wn cigarettes called Gauloises, some keys on a key chain, and two bottles of perfume: that lily-of-the-valley stuff that made me sneeze whenever Madame roamed the aisles to check our seatwork, plus a second kind of perfume called “cognac.”
Recalling my official mission, I’d grabbed Madame’s sunglasses and turned to go back outside, but then had done an abrupt about-face, curious to check out something I’d seen out of the corner of my eye: a sheet of paper turned face down on Madame’s desk, on the back of which she’d scrawled, in red correcting pencil, Merde! On the bus the day before, a seventh grader named Jacques Lavoisseur had taught Lonny and me some French words that were never going to show up on any of Madame’s mimeographed sheets. I’d forgotten most of them, but for some reason remembered that merde meant shit. I flipped the paper over.
From what I could figure out, it was some kind of report card for teachers. It had three categories with typed comments under each. Mother Filomina’s signature was at the bottom.
SATISFACTORY
Rapport with students seems generally positive.
Bulletin boards are educational and neatly organized. I especially liked your display of the upcoming presidential election. You should note, however, that it is Electoral College, not Collage. Please correct.
NEEDS IMPROVEMENT
Students should refer to you by your surname, not your given name, as this more formal appellation is more respectful and will result in fewer discipline problems. Speaking of which, were you aware that several of the children were passing notes during your arithmetic lesson, and that Pauline Papelbon was surreptitiously sucking on a Sugar Daddy before I gave her a sharp look?
Fifth grade students should be assigned 60 to 90 minutes of homework per night. Playing outside so as to experience the joy of the natural world should not be considered homework. (I have received calls from parents.)
Please try to dress as demurely as possible. Open-toed high heels and seamed fishnet stockings, for example, are not appropriate for a parochial school environment.
