When I thought about leaving, I was pretty sure the things I would miss most were these exercises around the community oven and my mother’s bread. And I was right.
4.
THINGS ARE NEVER really silent. You may think you’re in a completely quiet place, but if you listen carefully, you’ll hear a great many sounds, starting with your own breathing. You’ll start to hear your heart beating, your body digesting the last meal you ate, maybe even your blood swishing in your veins. If you’re in a house, the house itself makes sounds, wood expands and contracts, with noises. A fire in a fireplace, a steam radiator, a furnace, an air conditioner. People walking and talking in other rooms, or maybe other apartments, radios playing, cars and trucks in the road, insects, birds, dogs barking, the sound of the wind or rain. They all fade together and blend into the background, and you think it’s quiet because you’re used to those noises.
It was the same in the village. There, most of the sounds came from nature, but there were plenty of them. However, the sounds at home didn’t compare to the noise in the city when some of us girl Dwergs took the bus to school. The school itself was insane with noise. It was like some kind of factory where garbage cans or church bells were made. This was just from human voices, and stamping and shuffling feet, and trucks and buses and cars on the street outside. Also there is another kind of noise that’s more subtle, and gets under your skin more than all the other kinds of noise. That’s the noise of people thinking. Maybe because we were Dwergs, or just because we had been raised in the comparative quiet of the woods, we’d pick up on that. It would have been unbearable, except that because there was always a bunch of us we were able to tolerate it. I can’t say just why, but together we were somehow able todeflect the noise, or at least the worst effects. Maybe the more gentle and familiar Dwerg noises of our own displaced the horrid noises of the school and the city, I can’t really say.
I didn’t have my bunch of Dwerg girls with me on a mild summer morning when I walked out of the village, through the woods to the highway, and into the city of Kingston all by myself. The traffic on the highway made a monstrous roar, and the fumes from the engines stank and hurt my eyes. This is going to take some getting used to, I thought.
I walked past the high school, and into the old part of the city. There were shops and restaurants, one after another, a food market, a pawnshop. That was what I was looking for. I knew what a pawnshop was because I read about one in a story in my English class. It was on a side street, sort of dark and crummy-looking. The windows, which were not very clean, had guitars and power tools, and all kinds of junk showing. I went inside. This was the first time I had been in a shop of any kind. I was there to do business, and I didn’t want to seem to be a hick kid from up in the mountains, which of course was what I was. There was a bald-headed guy behind the counter. I walked right up, and plunked down before him a large, lumpy gold coin. “How much for this?” I asked.
His eyes bugged out. He knew what it was. I don’t know if I heard him say this, or if I heard him think it, or if I just knew it from the bug-eyed expression on his face, Dwerggeld! It’s Dwerg-geld! I’ve heard about this all my life, and thought it was just a story!
“Interesting,” he said, trying to sound cool. “Where did you get this, kid?”
“My father found it, or maybe it was my grandfather. It’s been lying around the house for a long time,” I said without lying. “Is it worth anything?”
I’d better be careful, the bald-headed guy was thinking, little female, old-fashioned clothes, big hands and feet, she could be one herself, you don’t want to mess with them—they can be dangerous.
“Maybe a hundred bucks,” he said out loud.
“My father said I shouldn’t take any less than two hundred,” I said. “He said anyone who offered less was trying to cheat me, and I should tell him about it.”
“Didn’t I say two hundred?” the bald guy said. “I’m sure that’s what I said,”
“Throw in that banjo, and you’ve got a deal.” It was an old-fashioned, long-necked banjo. It just happened to be the first thing that caught my eye, I had no particular use for it, I just didn’t want Baldylocks to think he was completely getting the better of me.
I walked out of the pawnshop with the two hundred dollars and the banjo, went into another shop just up the street, and came out with a pair of blue jeans, some green sneakers, and a sweatshirt with the words St. Leon’s College printed on it. I also got underwear printed with cartoons of bunnies. I looked like a regular Kingston, New York, kid. I felt pretty sophisticated.
5.
IT'S NOT AS THOUGH I sneaked out of my house in the middle of the night, stole some coins, and left my family a pathetic note. It wasn’t like that at all. It was less dramatic. I told my mother that I couldn’t stand living in the quaint little hidden village anymore, and wanted to give the outside world a try. She said she understood, and that when they were young she and my father had hiked into Kingston one night and gone to the movies. The picture they saw was Gidget Goes Hawaiian. They decided city life was not for them, and never went back. But she and my father understood, and had no objection to my trying things out for myself. They tried to get me to take a whole bag of Dwerg geld to cover expenses, but that would have been much too heavy, and I only took three coins. The whole conversation was brief and quiet and without emotion. My sister was present, but was looking out the window at some squirrels the whole time, and pretty soon my father was humming and my mother was sewing as though their daughter had not just told them she was leaving home. This, in a nutshell, is why I had to get away from the place. They are sweet, the Dwergs, and I love them of course, but I felt I owed it to my brain to skedaddle.
I walked along the street with my Dwerg clothes stuffed into my banjo case, money in the pocket of my blue jeans, and no plan of any kind. You have to understand that, for activity and distraction, compared to my little village in the mountains, being in uptown Kingston was like being in Times Square in New York City, unless you come from New York City, in which case the comparison breaks down. There were people I did not know walking on the sidewalk, there were cars going up and down the street, there were all kinds of sounds, and smells. One smell caught my attention. It was coming from a shop. Babatunji’s Authentic Neapolitan Pizza it said on the sign over the door. Pizza! I’d had pizza in the high school cafeteria, but it wasn’t interesting, and it didn’t smell anything like this. The smell reminded me that I was hungry. I walked through the door. Inside, the smell of baking and spices was stronger and warmer, it surrounded me. There were some tables, and a counter. Behind the counter I could see the wide door of an oven. A little fat man wearing a little round hat was standing behind the counter.
“Buongiorno! Welcome to my pizzeria, ragazza strana, strange girl,” he said. “How may I serve you?”
“I’m interested in having some pizza,” I said. “Do you sell it by the piece, or do I have to buy a whole pie?”
“You’ve never had pizza before, have you?” the little fat man said.
“Practically never, and it was nothing like this is smelling.”
“This is the real deal. This is the authentic pizza of Naples, Italy, my adopted home.”
“Is that where you come from, Naples, Italy?”
“Well, not all that far from it.”
“Such as where?”
“Sierra Leone, it’s in West Africa.”
“And it’s close to Naples?”
“Not right next to, not very extremely close, but it’s in the same hemisphere. In my heart I am a Neapolitan . . . although I have not actually been there . . . because of the pizza. Amo la pizza, I love pizza, and Naples is the home and the heart of pizza. My name is Arnold Babatunji, and to whom do I have the honor of serving a slice of my authentic pizza, absolutely free of charge, by way of saying hello?”
“I’m Molly O’Malley.” I used my school name. I bit into my slice of pizza. “My goodness!” I said. “I happen to
know something about baking, and I want to tell you, this is just wonderful!”
“So, you know something about baking,” Arnold Babatunji said. “I had a feeling you might be coming for the job.”
“The job?”
Arnold Babatunji pointed to sign taped to the window. The sun was shining through it, and I could read the letters backwards, Kid Helper Wanted, Inquire Within.
“It doesn’t pay much, and the work isn’t interesting, but you get to be around pizza. If you’re anything like me, that makes it a dream job. You interested?”
I was looking past Arnold Babatunji, past the counter and the ovens. There was some kind of kitchen or prep room in the back of the store, and a back door, which was open, and beyond some garbage cans I could see a stand of trees, a little miniature forest that appealed to me very much.
6.
I ALWAYS WONDERED IF Arnold Bababtunji knew or suspected that I was a Dwerg, or maybe just that there was something irregular about me that he wasn’t supposed to know. Arnold was very much a gentleman. He was careful not to ask questions that might be uncomfortable for me, things like where I lived, where I’d come from, who my parents were, or what school I went to when it wasn’t summer. It didn’t seem that he wasn’t interested in me as a person, he was always asking what I thought about this and that, but he stayed away from anything that would have identified me. It might have been natural politeness on his part, maybe that was just how people acted in Sierra Leone, and while I had no particular reason to keep things secret, I had the natural Dwerg shyness about outsiders knowing too much. Also, whenever a regular person finds out one is a Dwerg, right away they want to know if we’re the ones who handed out the drink that put Rip Van Winkle to sleep for twenty years. It gets boring.
Of course, it might also have been that Arnold wanted to be able to deny he knew my age or anything about me . . . my salary for working in the pizzeria was a dollar and a half an hour, and I was pretty sure that was below some legal minimum. Arnold said he had worked for even less when he was a kid helper in a pizzeria in Freetown, Sierra Leone, but he appreciated the chance to learn the secrets of pizza-making.
I didn’t have many expenses, pizza was free, and I never got tired of it, never could and never will. And I had no rent to pay. I was fairly sure Arnold didn’t know that I was living in the woods behind the pizzeria. I had found a big ball of string, and there were plenty of extra-strong giant black garbage bags in the shop. I used the string to fasten some thin saplings and branches together in a sort of arch or dome, and then I covered the dome with some of the black garbage bags, bunched the corners together and tied them to the branches, and there was my roof! I spread some garbage bags on the ground to keep the cheap fuzzy blanket I bought in a store from getting soggy, and there was my bed! There was a nice big smooth rock, just perfect for sitting on, where I could read, or attempt to play my banjo.
I had gotten a library card in the name of Molly Babatunji, giving the shop’s address as my home. I didn’t even know how to tune the banjo, but it was satisfying to make plaintive twanging sounds in the night. Nobody ever came near my woods. I wondered if there was something about it being a Dwerg’s residence that kept it unvisited and unknown. If you looked at the little stand of trees from the back door of Arnold’s shop, you wouldn’t notice a thing. The black garbage bags looked like shadows behind the leaves.
My job was easy. It was sweeping and mopping, wiping tables, washing dishes, taking out the garbage, chopping wood for the oven with a little hatchet, and making up pizza boxes, which came flat, and I had to fold them. The work itself was not interesting, but being around the shop was interesting. Watching Arnold Babatunji make pizza was interesting, and talking with him was interesting. He had a lot to say, mostly all about pizza. His main interest—it would be better to call it an obsession—was classic Neapolitan pizza. I learned the sauce for this pizza has to come from either San Marzano tomatoes or Roma tomatoes, which only grow in certain parts of Italy. Arnold bought these in big cans. Also, the cheese has to come from Italian water buffalos, and the flour has to be a certain kind, the crust of a certain thickness. Arnold said he tried to come as close to the authentic thing as he could, given that he didn’t have Naples water to mix the flour with.
His Neapolitan pizza was, as a matter of fact, the best thing I have ever tasted in my life, and I don’t suppose that will ever change. It is smoky, and crunchy and warm and flavorful, and . . . remember I told about those gatherings around our communal oven back in the village? Well, this pizza tastes like those sweet hum-fests feel. One day I took two pizzas, a margherita and a marinara in boxes, and walked them all the way to the hidden village, and my family’s house. We warmed the pizzas up, and my mother and father and my sister, Gertie, found them “sort of interesting.” but too exotic and spicy. If I didn’t already think so, this would have confirmed that moving out was the right decision. I decided I’d need to have a talk with Gertie when she was older. If I could teach a Dwerg like her to appreciate and make pizza, I would have done a great thing.
Arnold’s pizza culture did not stop with Naples. He made all sorts of pizzas, with various toppings, onions, peppers, sausage, things like that. Apparently every pizzeria in the United States offers those. But there are pizzas Arnold himself invented. There is the American Breakfast Pizza . . . it has cornflakes, two eggs, bacon, and a splash of orange juice and it’s dusted with instant coffee powder. Then there is the Pizza da Campo, which has marshmallows, Hershey bars, and crumbled graham cracker. The Pizza Africana has bananas . . . Arnold explained to me that there is a whole banana culture in Africa that we Americans know nothing about, lots of varieties very different from the big yellow ones we eat. The Pizza Elvis has those, plus peanut butter. Arnold also invented the Pizza Ebraica, which has slices of gefilte fish, which is a kind of ground-up fish log that comes in jars.
I, personally, stick with the Neapolitan style, and will do so for the rest of my life. Arnold says that New York City pizza can be a close second to Naples. As a Dwerg-American, this makes me proud.
7.
I’M SURE ARNOLD BABATUNJI could never understand why I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life becoming a pizza chef. He had already said that if I was still with him after two years he would begin letting me help make the dough. He had been a pizza apprentice in Freetown, and he expected to pass on the things he had learned, and I hope he will. I was not the first kid helper to work for him, and I knew I would not be the last, starting when it got too cold to sleep in the trees out back of the shop. Still, it was interesting working in the pizzeria. Not the work, the work was the complete opposite of interesting, but being around the shop, observing and listening to the customers who came in held my attention day after day.
Babatunji’s Authentic Neapolitan Pizza was located just a few feet outside the old stockade. A stockade is a kind of log fence, a fortification. Think of those forts they always show in Western movies, that’s what a stockade is like. Of course the actual stockade, made of logs, is long gone, but people know where it used to be. It took in about eight blocks, roughly thirty-two acres, and the Dutch settlers had built it in 1658, to keep the Indians out.
The town was called Wiltwyck then. It got to be Kingston when the Dutch handed it over to the English, who later burned the whole place down in 1777 as a hotbed of patriots during the American Revolution. The Dutch people lived in the town, and the Native Americans lived outside. They all farmed the soil, and grazed their animals in roughly the same area. Every now and then a bunch of Dutch types would drink some gin and go find some Indians and bop them on the head. Similarly, some Indians would drink some gin and go find some Dutch folks and bop them on the head. On some occasions, both the Indians and the Dutch would drink some gin, get the same idea, and go looking for each other. Apparently, in between these outbursts, they all got along reasonably well, trading with one another and so forth.
So, in 1658, Peter Stuyvesant, who was the governor o
f New York, ordered the settlers to build a wall, and they did so. They then built some neat stone houses, and built them quite well. The proof of this is that the stone walls withstood the burning by the British, the houses were restored in the space of a year, and some of them are still standing today. The city grew over the centuries, and spread out, but the stockade area, or where the stockade had been, sort of remained the center. It had the courthouse, and there were shops and offices, and houses built in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, all in this fairly small and compact space. Plus there’s a big church, with a graveyard where everybody is buried, and there are people living in some of the old houses whose families go back all the way to when the place was called Wiltwyck. It all fits together, and I liked walking around the neighborhood. It was like walking in and out of time and history.
The people who came into Arnold Babatunji’s pizzeria were as much of a mix as the old Stockade District itself. All different sorts of people, that’s what I liked best about living away from the Dwerg village, where everybody was . . . well, a Dwerg.
8.
DWERGS DON'T NEED MUCH SLEEP, or anyway, this Dwerg. A couple of hours wrapped up in my fuzzy blanket under my garbage bag roof, or maybe sleeping up in the branches of a tree, and I’d need to get up and walk around. So I was on the streets of the old stockade at all hours of the night, which was how I came to know that the place was overrun with ghosts. It stands to reason, the area had been there for such a long time, there were houses that had been continuously occupied for multiple generations, and the graveyard was just packed. Add to this Native American ghosts whose families had been in the neighborhood for nobody knows how long. Not everybody who’s dead goes in for ghosting, I’m not sure how it works, but certain ones do, and they tend to come out at night. The old streets were crowded with departed when it got dark. I can’t imagine how a neighborhood could be any ghostier.
Adventures of a Dwergish Girl Page 2