by Wally Lamb
Rosalie’s mouth dropped open like a glove compartment door with a busted latch. November, I figured, had just gotten more interesting.
4
Zhenya
My classmates and I were standoffish with Evgeniya “Zhenya” Kabakova at first. It probably didn’t help that she arrived at school each morning arm-in-arm with either her mother, her father, or both. And that half the time, as they entered the schoolyard, they were singing what I guessed were Russian songs. Zhenya’s mother was a short, squat woman with a limp and a missing tooth. “Mrs. Khrushchev,” we nicknamed her. Zhenya’s father, with his wooly black hat, long coat, and droopy mustache, reminded me of those guards at the Wicked Witch’s castle in The Wizard of Oz. Mr. Kabakov had a strange little ritual that he performed each time he brought his daughter to school. First he’d bend and kiss Zhenya on the forehead. Then, as she turned away from him, he would lift his foot and give her a playful little kick in the rear end. After a while, the gesture became pretty predictable, but Zhenya never failed to giggle with astonished delight whenever her father booted her.
Zhenya was nice enough—friendly and cheerful, exuberant, even. (In vocabulary, we’d had to use the word “exuberant” in a sentence, and I’d written, “Our new classmate is very exuberant.) But each morning she smelled kind of like mayonnaise and, after lunch, definitely like fish. (Madame had assigned her to a desk one row over, so she was my right-side neighbor.) We watched her like hawks, boys and girls, in those first days. In the cafeteria at lunchtime, she didn’t take hot lunch; she brought her own. Surrounded by empty chairs, Zhenya would remove from a brown paper bag (a grocery bag, not a lunch bag) some weird-looking crackers and a square-shaped tin of herring. She’d pull the key from the bottom of the can and open it, then scoop out chunks of the oily fish with her crackers and eat contentedly, unaware of, or unbothered by, the fact that she was being shunned. Whenever she looked over at us, smiling and waving, we’d quickly look away and then, a few seconds later, resume our staring.
One day during class discussion—I forgot how it came up—Zhenya revealed that she was thirteen years old, not ten like the rest of us, except for Lonny who, because he’d stayed back twice, was twelve and a half. She also divulged that the reason she smelled like mayonnaise was because her mother conditioned her hair with it, as did the mothers of “minny, minny geuhls in Soviet Union.” We all looked at each other, shocked, and Madame Frechette said something in québecois that, she explained, meant, “To each his own taste.” Speaking of which, Ma had left the day before to compete in the Pillsbury Bake-Off.
Writing absentee excuses to the powers-that-be at St. Aloysius Gonzaga was usually my mother’s domain, and so a look of panic crossed Pop’s face that morning when I told him he’d have to write the note to get me sprung early. A maestro of the lunch counter, Pop was not exactly zippity-doo-da when it came to writing. (Like Chino, he was a high school dropout. But unlike Chino, who’d quit school because he suspected the lunch ladies were serving their students Gravy Train, Pop, the eldest of six kids, had had to quit to help his widowed mother support her family.)
Dear Whoever Is Suppose to get this Note,
Please excuse Felix Funicello at 1 o’clock today so he can walk downtown to the Bus Station, we’re having a little shindig down at our Lunch Counter and he will get to see his mother on TV. Which will be very educational. Your all invited, anyone who wants to come down there.
Your’s Truly,
Salvatore P. Funicello
Pop had been fixing me breakfast when I hit him up for that note, and he concentrated so hard while composing it that he burned the bottoms of my pancakes. When I complained about them, he threw the spatula into the sink real hard and told me to quit my goddamned belly-aching. “Just eat from the top down and leave the rest!” It was weird, and a little scary, to witness my father blowing his top like that; he was usually the most even-tempered of men. Reading over his note as I attempted to surgically remove the burnt parts of my pancakes, I was pretty sure that Mother Filomina would be horrified by my father’s fragments and run-on sentences, not to mention his spelling, capitalization, and punctuation mistakes. Still, I decided not to suggest that he do it over. For one thing, I didn’t want to make him even madder. And for another, I figured Mother Fil might marvel at the giant leap forward I represented, grammar-and usage-wise. Given Pop’s note, how could she miss that evolutionary miracle?
But poor Pop. He was overwhelmed by Ma’s five-day absence and real nervous about that afternoon’s “shindig.” He was planning to lug our nineteen-inch black-and-white TV down to the depot, jury-rig a temporary antenna in hopes of pulling in the Bake-Off finals, and serve the assembled free coffee and pie à la mode. He’d ordered nine pies from the Mama Mia Bakery, five apple and four blueberry. “I just hope to hell that’ll be enough,” I overheard him telling Simone. Her and Frances were getting out of school early, too.
Everybody at my school that day kept telling me they thought Ma was going to win. And hey, hadn’t they all been right, two days earlier, about the President? In St. Aloysius’s mock election, LBJ had beaten AuH20 in every single grade. (And then beaten him for real, too—a “landslide” the newspaper had called it.) During morning P.A. announcements, Sister Fabian, the vice-principal, said that everyone at St. Aloysius Gonzaga was hoping my mother won. After lunch, our whole class said a prayer for her. And when it was time for me to get excused, Madame Frechette hugged me—as usual, her lily-of-the-valley perfume gave me a sneezing attack—and said she wished my mother bonne chance, heh heh heh. Out in the corridor, even our janitor, Mr. Dombrowski, stopped mopping and gave me the V-for-victory sign. Jeezum, I thought as I trudged down to the bus station: Ma was practically as famous as Annette.
Counting bus travelers and regular customers, 63 people gathered at the lunch counter to watch that afternoon’s special edition of Art Linkletter’s House Party, plus have their free pie and coffee. Pop had set up our TV at the end of the counter, and Joey Cigar from Joey’s Newsstand & Smoke Shoppe on the other side of the depot had helped him hook up this special Sputnik-looking antenna on top. The picture was snowy, but you could still see everything pretty good, especially when Joey had his brother-in-law, Frankie, hold on to the end of the long wire that trailed down from the Sputnik thing. “We finally found something that Frankie’s good for,” I overheard Joey telling Chino. “Pulling in television signal.”
We fed everybody first. Pop cut the pies, Frances scooped the ice cream, and me and Simone passed people their plates. Chino was in charge of the coffees. “Cowboy” Zupnik came with this lady, Noreen, and I was like, whoa, the Cowboy’s got a wife? But Noreen was his sister. She said we should start selling Shepherd’s Pie Italiano at the lunch counter, and everybody said, yeah, yeah, that was a great idea. Cindy Creamcheese said she’d even skip eating her pepperoni omelet to try a piece, and Chino said, maybe she’d better not, because if she actually ordered something different than her usual, it might give him and Sal a heart attack. (He was only kidding.) Cindy Creamcheese brought her son Christopher with her, which, I didn’t even know she had a kid. He was about my age, and real fat like his mother, and I thought, wow, that sure is a weird name: Christopher Creamcheese. He finished his free pie à la mode in about two seconds, licked his plate, and asked me if he could have seconds. I asked Pop and he said no, just one to a customer. Christopher was kind of a pest because he kept following me around wherever I went, like he was my shadow or something. Oh, and Reverend Peavey? He was there. He came with this sailor he was doing missionary work on, except they had to leave before the Bake-Off came on, because they had to go pray or something. And Mush Moriarty came, too, but when Pop asked him did he want any pie, he said no, but he’d take a Four Roses, neat, and Pop pointed at the door and he left.
Simone moved through the crowd, handing out the pie à la modes and bragging to everybody about how, the day after she flew to California, Ma went to visit Annette’s parents at their house on account of Pop was A
nnette’s father’s cousin, and he and Ma had gone to Annette’s parents’ wedding, and when Simone was a baby, she’d been in the same playpen with Annette—there was even a picture of it. And how, even though Ma hadn’t exactly seen Annette when she went over to her parents’ house—which was real beautiful, by the way—she had seen the room where they kept all of Annette’s souvenirs and stuff, including this huge framed color picture of her with Walt Disney in front of Cinderella’s castle at Disneyland that said, on the bottom, To America’s Sweetheart and her Wonderful Family! With my very fondest wishes, “Uncle” Walt.
Simone was in the middle of telling the eight billionth person about Ma’s going to Annette’s parents’ house when Frances, who could whistle the loudest out of anyone in our whole family, stuck two fingers in her mouth, let go a real loud one, and shouted, “Hey! Shush up, everybody! It’s coming on!” Everyone crowded in closer to the TV, all’s except Frankie, who grabbed onto the end of the wire and made the picture stop snowing. It was kinda cool, I thought, the way he was like this human antenna. “S’cuse me, s’cuse me,” I kept saying until I’d squeezed my way up to the front.
First, Art Linkletter said the Pillsbury Bake-Off was like the kitchen Olympics, except instead of athletes competing, the contestants were “the best bakers all across the U.S. of A.” Then he explained the categories and contest rules and reminded the audience that nothin’ said lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven, and that Pillsbury said it best. Then the camera went from him to this big, giant room at the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel where all these stoves—a hundred of them, one for both winners from each state—had been hooked up so’s that the ninety-eight women and two men who were trying for the $25,000 grand prize could cook their recipes. And every single state winner had the exact same Pillsbury Bake-Off apron on, even those two men.
“And now, let’s check in with my good friend, the handsome star of the silver screen and the genial host of General Electric Theater,” Art Linkletter said. “And by the way, here’s a scoop for you, folks. This coming season, he’ll replace The Old Ranger as your narrator on 20 Mule Team Borax’s Death Valley Days. That’s right, ladies and gents. You know who I mean: none other than Mr. Ronald Reagan. Take it away, Ronnie!”
“Heh heh heh,” Ronald Reagan said, kind of like Madame Frechette. At first, I closed my eyes and looked away because I thought it was the same guy whose chopped-off head had bounced down the stairs in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. But then I squinted and saw that it was a different guy. (Later on, I checked the movie ads in the newspaper, and it said the chopped-off-head guy was this other guy named Joseph Cotten.) Ronald Reagan’s job was to walk around the big room—the ballroom, he called it—with a microphone that had this long, long cord and talk to the state winners. Which, you could tell what states they were from by these cardboard flags sticking up on poles behind their General Electric stoves. A lady from Nebraska said she was making a dessert called “Nebraska Baked Alaska.” And another lady gave Ronald Reagan a taste of this appetizer she invented called “Zelda’s Zesty Welsh Rabbit,” and I went to Frances, who was standing next to me, I went, “Yuck! You wouldn’t catch me eating that. Rabbits are in the rodent family.”
And Fran said, “It’s rarebit, not rabbit, you idiot.” And I said she was the idiot, not me, and she said, “I’m the rubber and you’re the glue. Anything you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, you’re—”
“Keep quiet and listen, you two!” Pop said, slapping the backs of both our heads on account of Ronald Reagan had just said, “Now let’s see what’s cookin’ with the gals from the Nutmeg State.” And everyone at the lunch counter started whooping and hollering and squeezing in closer.
The camera zoomed in on Mrs. Parzych, the other Connecticut winner. She told Ronald Reagan how she’d invented “Creamy Dreamy Sweetheart Torte” out of leftover cake that she’d made from a Pillsbury cake mix, plus cream cheese and whipping cream that had gone bad in her refrigerator but that she didn’t want to just throw out because she’s thrifty. And Ronald Reagan went “Sweetheart torte, eh? And who’s your sweeheart?” and she said it was her husband, Stanley. Here’s what I didn’t get: nobody was at the stove next to Mrs. Parzych’s—which was Ma’s, I figured—but you could hear her oven timer going off like nyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeee-aaaaaaaaaaa.
I pulled on Frances’s sleeve. “Where’s Ma?” I said. Me and Ronald Reagan must have had ESP or something, because before Fran could even answer me, he goes to Mrs. Parzych, “Now what’s become of your Connecticut cohort?” Mrs. Parzych fidgeted with her fingers and looked away from Ronald Reagan and said, well, that Ma was coming right back but that she’d had to make a quick visit to the toilet.
“Jesus Christ and Jiminy Cricket!” Pop shouted in front of everybody. “Marie’s got the trots! Same as she always does when she’s a nervous wreck!” Pop must have been pretty nervous, too, I figured. Why else would he be making an announcement to sixty-something people about Ma having diarrhea?
In support of her “Connecticut cohort,” Mrs. Parzych silenced the stove timer, pulled on a pair of plaid mitts, and took Ma’s dish out of the oven. It was all smoky, and the Pillsbury crescent rolls that formed the top crust looked kinda burnt. Everybody at the lunch counter got real quiet, except for someone way in the back that said, “Uh oh.”
And then? On TV? There was Ma, running in from the right. Her beehive was kinda wobbling from side to side, and there was this weird white thing flying behind her that reminded me of the surrender flag they waved sometimes in cowboy movies. When Ronald Reagan seen Ma coming at him, he looked kinda scared, and he said, “So let’s see what’s cookin’ down in Louisiana! Mimi’s Mumbo Jumbo Gumbo! Now that sounds pretty darn delicious, doesn’t it?” And instead of walking toward the Louisiana lady’s stove, he sort of broke into a run.
As it turned out, that white thing flying behind Ma was sort of like a flag of surrender. After she’d finished her diarrhea, she’d somehow gotten toilet paper stuck in her apron strings and the elastic waistband of her skort. I was pretty sure, even before they announced that “Sandra’s E-Z Tuna Stroganoff with Pillsbury Biscuits” was the winner in Ma’s category and that “Coco-Nutty Blond Brownie Bars” was getting the $25,000 grand prize, that that 1965 Buick Riviera with the hideaway headlights wasn’t going to end up parked in our driveway. “Booooooo!” I said when Art Linkletter shook hands with the winners. Simone slugged me one and told me to stop being a poor sport. Then she said to go ask my teachers if they wanted any pie and coffee. “What do you mean, my teachers?” I said.
I looked back to where my sister was pointing, and there were Sister Fabian, Sister Lucinda, and Mother Filomina. Nuns from my school at our lunch counter? It was like some kind of psycho dream! I didn’t want to go over to them, but Simone and Pop both made me.
Sister Lucinda wanted pie but no ice cream—apple, which was good because there was no more blueberry. Mother Filomina said she’d take a little bit of ice cream but no pie. Sister Fabian said no thanks, she didn’t want anything. Christopher Creamcheese, who was still shadowing me, said, “Can I have hers then?” So I told him okay, but this time he couldn’t lick his plate because it was bad manners. And he said if it was gonna be his pie, then yes he could so lick the plate, and I said, “Okay, fine, no pie then,” and he said all right, all right, he wouldn’t. And after I gave it to him, he said, “You know what? You’re weird” and I said, “So ain’t you.” And he stuck his tongue out at me and there was ice cream and pie crust all over it. But at least he stopped following me around.
“Well, Felix, you must be very proud of your mother,” Sister Fabian said. I wasn’t sure when she and the others had arrived, but I figured it had to have been after Ma’d come out of the bathroom, trailing toilet paper and scaring Ronald Reagan.
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, yes, Sister…. Sisters. And Mother.”
“Why, you’re entirely welcome, Felix,” Mother Filomina s
aid. “And I hope you know how proud we are of you.”
“Huh?” I said. I didn’t know what I’d done that they should be proud of me for, but still, I thought, it was too bad Rosalie wasn’t there because it probably would’ve killed her to hear Sister say it to me, not her.
In a long distance call from her hotel room that night—you could hear both sides of Ma’s and Pop’s conversation because they were both using these real loud long-distance voices—Ma verified that her nerves had given her the runs just before the broadcast began. Her fellow contestants had been very nice about her having burned her Shepherd’s Pie Italiano, she said. But still, she’d been mortified—about that and about the toilet paper. She asked Pop if you could see it on TV and he lied and said, no, no, the only thing you could see was how beautiful she looked—that in his opinion, she was the most beautiful woman in that whole big room. Ma said she couldn’t wait to come home. “Well, Tootsy Cake, we can’t wait for you to get home either,” Pop assured her. “I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since you left.” He looked at me when he said the last part, and I couldn’t really blame him.
Because, as I had feared while I was watching Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte with Lonny that day, Joseph Cotten’s stupid bouncing head had haunted me nightly in Ma’s absence. Some nights it wouldn’t let me get to sleep, and some nights it woke me up. Either way, I’d wait a while, listening to the chiming of our downstairs clock every fifteen minutes, and then finally have to get out of bed, go down the hall to my parents’ room, and tap my father on the shoulder. “Pop?” I’d whisper. Wait. “Pop? Yoo hoo?…HEY, POP!” By then, I wasn’t so much tapping his shoulder as pounding on it.
“Mffph? Wha…?”
“I’m thinking about it again.”
“Thinking about…?”
“That head.”
