by Wally Lamb
I sat down at a table with two overweight younger girls involved in a conversation about horses. They snuck nervous glances at me and then stopped talking. “I’m new at this school,” I said, unscrewing the top of my thermos. “I’m in seventh.” Both girls shoved their faces into their sandwiches and chewed uneasily.
A boy tapped me on the arm. “She wants you,” he said, pointing to one of the old-lady cafeteria workers. But when I walked up to her, she told me to hurry on if I was just going to stand there and not buy anything. I returned to my seat. My thermos had been tipped over and grape drink was splattering onto the floor. My sandwich was a soggy, purple-stained mess.
From the corner of my eye, I could see the Pysyks and their friends bending and stretching. Stacia’s face was pressed against the tabletop and she was snorting. The two girls at my table stared open-faced. “What are you looking at, Fatty?” I snapped at one of them.
Miss Lilly came back from lunch smelling like cigarettes. I mouthed the magic word, cramps, and she handed me the hall pass. Outside the classroom, I lingered for a moment at the statue of Mary, intending to let her in on what Rosalie had done to me. “Hail Mary, full of grace . . .” I whispered, then stopped. Her nose was chipped and her sky-blue eyes stared out at nothing. She was unaware of the serpent curling at her feet.
Down in the main corridor I paused at the long rows of framed pictures, St. Anthony’s graduates of the last forty years. I located my mother in the bottom row of the brown-tinted portraits of the Class of 1944. Her dark, frizzy hair was parted in the middle and held tight to each side with oval barrettes. Her eyes looked slightly away from the camera and she wore an expression of quiet seriousness. I was astonished that she looked more like an old-fashioned me than she did my mother. The corridor was cool and peaceful. “Hi,” I said aloud. The sound of my voice set my heart thumping, but I continued. “You’re divorced, you know. You have a daughter. I’m her.”
For homework, Miss Lilly had assigned us a chapter on religion and one on Mesopotamia. My bedroom was hot, so I set up the table fan from the kitchen and aimed the breeze at my face. “Dear Daddy,” I wrote on a fresh piece of loose-leaf paper. “I know for a fact that Mommy still loves you very much. We both miss you more than I can say. I think I may be coming down with stomach cancer. I just have this feeling.” Then I gouged out the words with deep, dark pencil marks that dented several of the pages beneath it.
North of what is now the region of the Persian Gulf, a civilization nearly as advanced as Egypt’s began to flower. With soil enriched by the Rivers Euphrates and Tigris . . .
I stared at the whirring fan, trying to make out the shape of the blades in the blue-gray blur. I moved a finger closer and closer, watching it shake. “They’ll find me in a pool of blood. Daddy will hate himself for the rest of his life. Rosalie Pysyk will have a nervous breakdown.”
The Sumerians flourished on the flat, fertile land made rich from the alluvium of the two rivers. Their contributions to civilization . . .
I shifted the breeze away from me and the shiny pages of my opened religion book began to turn by themselves. I watched the goody-goody girl and boy in the textbook photos. “I hate your guts,” I told them. Suddenly, the book fluttered open to page 232. A previous user—some greasy boy with dirt-caked fingernails, no doubt—had altered the photo of the model students. In the picture, the two counterparts were walking down the steps of a school that looked something like St. Anthony’s, smiling radiantly at each other. Both of their midsections had been erased white. The ideal girl was wearing an inverted triangle of loopy pubic hair and two mismatched breasts that looked like garnished cupcakes. The ideal boy’s hoo-hoo was a periscope. Two makeshift cartoon bubbles floated above their heads. “How about some sex. Intercourse. That means FUCKING!” the girl said, beaming brightly. “Mmmm Okay!!!!” the boy replied, his enthusiasm measured in exclamation marks.
The Sumerians flourished on the flat, fertile land made rich from the alluvium of the two rivers. Their contributions . . .
In the next hour, I drank two large glasses of ice water, slid my eyes repeatedly over the same paragraph in my history book, stuck my entire face one inch away from the fan, and covered the front and back of my loose-leaf with Richard Chamberlain’s name and birthday in ornate block-lettering. None of it worked. Whenever I’d turn back to page 232, reasoning I’d imagined the whole thing, there they’d still be.
* * *
The next day at school, Miss Lilly was wearing an ankle-length paisley skirt and a tight turtleneck shirt that let you see the entire outline of her bra. Her hair was yanked back tightly and crowned with a bun the size of a small hamburger patty. She looked nothing like she had the day before. I wondered if she might have a split personality like Margo on “Search for Tomorrow”—if she might even be crazy like my mother, if the whole world wasn’t crazy. All morning long, I kept turning against my better judgment to page 232, wanting over and over to verify its secret existence.
On Wednesday morning, Miss Lilly smiled mysteriously and said she had a surprise for us. “Popsicles!” someone guessed. She ignored this and pulled at the two roll-down maps that hung over the blackboard. The entire board area was filled with Miss Lilly’s beautiful penmanship. She had come to school a half hour early, she said, to copy down a poem for us, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” She explained she was something of an expert on this poem, having written in college a paper on it that ran to twenty-three typed pages. “Now if you will be still and concentrate very hard, I think you’ll appreciate the cadences as I read aloud. After I finish, we’ll discuss its beautiful meaning.”
She began in a low, moaning voice and seemed almost immediately to fall into a trance. In her hand she held a fresh stick of chalk, which she swung back and forth as she read, like Mitch Miller.
Rosalie Pysyk looked back at the rest of us and pointed to herself. I knew Miss Lilly was in trouble. Rosalie raised her forearm to her lips, her cheeks puffed out, and she let loose an amazing reproduction of a fart, the kind I hadn’t heard since my father’s move to Tenafly.
The class burst into nervous laughter. Miss Lilly stopped as if someone had doused her with ice water. Her face contorted in several odd ways and she walked to the board and began erasing away “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with swooping strokes of defeat, going over and over the same area until I realized she was crying. Rosalie sat sideways in her chair, shaking from the laughter she was swallowing. I imagined myself drawing a gun from my desk, taking aim, and killing her without so much as a quiver.
My Mesopotamia essay was a dismal failure. With a tired sigh, Miss Lilly suggested I skip lunchtime recess and revise it, little knowing the reward she was giving me. “When you finish, just put it on my desk and join the rest of us next door at church for seventh-grade confession. Did you remember to bring your mantilla?”
I sat listening to her sandals clack down the corridor. One of the fluorescent lights made a funny sputtering noise, which the strange silence of the empty classroom amplified. I tiptoed to the front and sat down on Miss Lilly’s chair. I hadn’t planned it. I looked out at the rows of empty desks and was flooded with sympathy for Miss Lilly. There was a silver thermos on her desk and several notices and reminders from Sister Margaret Frances, the principal. When I picked up the battered poetry book, it opened automatically to “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The print was underlined and circled and everywhere on the page were little arrows and notations, each ending in an exclamation point.
Her straw purse was behind her desk. I picked it up and reached inside. Watching the classroom door, I pulled out her car keys, a pack of Winstons, and a brown plastic vial of pills. The label read, “Sandra Lilly. Take one at bedtime when needed. NO REFILLS.” There was a five-dollar bill in her wallet, three quarters, and some seven-cent stamps. Sandwiched inside the worn, scratchy cellophane windows were her pictures: a blond woman with a bubbletop hairdo, an elderly couple standing in front of a fancy cake, and a black-and-white shot of Miss L
illy and some man at the beach. Miss Lilly’s hair was wet and stringy and her bathing suit straps were down. The man wore sunglasses and had a flabby waist.
I banished him from the picture and imagined Big Boy from the superette instead. They were in the sand, Big Boy and Miss Lilly, kissing and kissing. No one else was around. They were rubbing against each other. Then, suddenly, they were both naked.
When I looked up, I saw Rosalie’s red vinyl notebook. My plan presented itself to me fully developed, like a gift from God.
I put Miss Lilly’s things back in her purse. I walked over to Rosalie’s desk and picked up her religion book. Back at my own desk, I made the exchange, then placed my book amongst Rosalie’s things.
Miss Lilly smiled at me when I slid into the girls’ pew. I smiled back, feeling strangely confident. Inside the confessional, I waited for Father Duptulski to slide open his window.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last confession. These are my sins.”
I told him I had been disrespectful to my grandmother and had sworn under my breath on eleven different occasions. Then, in the most humble voice I could manufacture, I confessed how I had sat wickedly by while I watched my good friend Rosalie Pysyk deface her religion book with a filthy, immoral picture. I listened, somewhat amazed, to the treacherous catch in my voice. “She’s really okay, Father. I’m sure she didn’t even mean to do it. . . . For these and all the sins of my past life, I am heartily sorry.”
For my penance, Father Duptulski gave me ten Hail Marys, something that struck me as a reasonable punishment for an accomplice, a mere bridesmaid in crime. I knelt and prayed—not for forgiveness but for the accuracy of my assumption: that the sanctity of the confessional applied more to murderers than kids.
Back in class, Miss Lilly was talking about apostrophes when Sister Margaret Frances appeared at the door. “Miss Lilly?” she said in a sweet voice. “We’ll be doing a seventh-grade textbook inspection.”
Miss Lilly looked bewildered. “Will this be next week?” she asked.
“This will be today. This will be right now.”
* * *
Outside after school, Stacia milled around impatiently. “You seen Rosalie?” she kept asking everyone. “You seen Rosalie?”
Rosalie Pysyk was absent on Thursday but word had gotten around about what she’d done. So had the news of her punishment, which broke all school records for its severity: every afternoon until Thanksgiving vacation, Sister Margaret Frances would make an X on the blackboard. Rosalie would stand for one-hour sessions with her nose affixed to the intersection.
I walked home from school that afternoon so free of burden that my steps felt like a preliminary to flight—as if, at any next moment, I might be airborne. Power had made me hungry and I was already eating out of the bag of potato chips as Connie rang up my sale.
Grandma watched as I poked my finger into the corners of the bag for salt and crumbs, then ate two of the tapioca puddings she’d made for supper.
“My gracious, school certainly gives you an appetite,” she observed.
“It’s a free country,” I said. “Granny babes.”
That night up in my room I pulled Ma’s flying leg out from behind the dresser and saw, for the first time, that it was beautiful.
I hung it above my bed.
4
In January the hospital gave us back a new version of Ma: a smiling, twitchy woman with plucked eyebrows. She smoked menthol cigarettes now and was thin again—thinner than ever. Bony. She told me she’d spent half her months in the hospital circling the grounds with a pedometer hooked to her leg, thinking about things and walking off her “bucket seat.” Mileage-wise, she’d gotten three quarters of the way to California.
On her first weekend home, we sat together watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan,” Ma, next to me on the sofa, tapped her foot against my foot to the beat of the music. I cried silently for Paul McCartney. Across the room, Grandma shook her head and scowled.
“What’s your problem?” I snapped, when the camera left the group to pan the hysterical studio audience. My hatred for Grandma at that moment was as pure as my love for Paul.
Her problem, she said, was that she couldn’t tell the difference between the singing and those screech owl girls in the audience. If people thought this was hot stuff, then she guessed she just gave up.
“Fine, give up then,” I told her. “Be my guest.”
Ma intervened, wanting to know which Beatle was which.
“That one’s George. He’s the quiet one. That’s Paul McCartney, the cute one . . .”
“Cute?” Grandma scoffed. “You call that homely beatnik cute?”
Ringo Starr’s face suddenly filled up the screen. “And that’s Ringo,” I said. “By the way, Grandma, he’s the one.”
“The one what?”
“The one who’s the father of Diane Lennon’s illegitimate baby.”
Her face registered a fleeting look of alarm before she dismissed the comment. “Nuts to you,” she said, then rose from her chair and announced that she was disappointed in me, my mother, and Ed Sullivan—the three of us—and that she was so disgusted, she was going to go to bed.
“Fine with me,” I said. “Make like a tree and leave.”
When Grandma’s bedroom door slammed, I looked my mother in the eye. “I can’t stand her!” I said. “She’s so mental!” Ma’s face twitched and I looked away, down at the rug, at my feet next to her feet. “No offense,” I mumbled.
* * *
Each morning after breakfast, Ma sat at the kitchen table, chain-smoking and checking off want ads from the Easterly and Providence newspapers. She told me getting a job scared her, but she was determined not to shy away from risk. “That’s what life’s all about, Dolores,” she said. “Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.”
My mother’s job search miffed Grandma, who had already lined up a position for her as a housekeeper at St. Anthony’s rectory.
“Look,” my mother told Grandma. “One thing they taught me out there is that you cook your own goose when you limit yourself.”
“Well what’s that supposed to mean?”
Ma made us wait while she lit a fresh Salem. “It means I don’t have to clean toilets and fold men’s undershorts for a living if I don’t feel like it. That was my life for thirteen years and look where it got me.”
Grandma shot me a brief look of alarm, then lowered her voice. “There’s a parochial-school student in this room, in case you forgot,” she said. “I don’t see as priests’ underclothes are something we need to talk about in front of certain young ladies.”
My mother sighed; smoke streamed out of both her nostrils. “Two sixty-two Pierce Street,” she mumbled. “The house of repression.”
Grandma picked up a dish towel and flapped at Ma’s cigarette smoke. “I hate this filthy smell. It’s cheap. This whole house smells cheap.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Ma. Just because a woman smokes, it doesn’t mean—”
“I see you swear now, too, Miss High and Mighty.”
“Ma, ‘for crying out loud’ isn’t a swear. You go ask Father Duptulski.”
“Well, in my day, women knew their place.”
My mother rolled her eyes at God or the ceiling and turned her attention to me. “You can be two things if you’re a woman, Dolores. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place—even if it kills you.”
“What makes you such an authority, I’d like to know?” Grandma huffed.
“Ma, where do you think I’ve been for seven months? Disneyland?”
Grandma and I looked away.
“You take poor Marilyn Monroe, for instance,” Ma continued.
Grandma’s eyes widened angrily. “You take Marilyn Monroe!” she said. “I certainly don’t want her. For instance or otherwise.” Marilyn Monroe’s death—how her wickedness had finally caught up with her—was a favorite subject of my grandmother’s. To
Grandma’s way of thinking, Marilyn Monroe resided in the same trash bin as Roberta across the street.
“But, Ma, can’t you see it? The poor thing got trapped. Limited by what everyone expected from her. There was this book about her in the hospital library. Deep down she was just a scared little girl.”
Grandma clamped her lips so tightly together they turned white. She got up slowly, walked over to the plastic tray where she kept her medications, and took a blood-pressure pill. When she finally spoke, it was to the stove. “This she says about a sexpot who made three pictures condemned by the Legion of Decency. This she says about a woman who didn’t even have the modesty to kill herself with a bathrobe on.”
Ma and Grandma didn’t speak to each other for the next several days. Mostly, Grandma sat scowling in front of her soap operas and westerns or trailing after my mother with a jet spray of Glade. Once, when a Salem commercial was on, Grandma stuck her tongue out and gave the TV the raspberries. If she wanted to say something to Ma, she used me as a transmitter. “Dolores, tell the chimney stack my cousin Florence is having gallbladder problems again.” Or “Dolores, tell Marilyn Monroe’s best friend that the doctor says my pressure’s sky-high.”
* * *
None of the places where Ma filled out job applications called her back. Each evening after supper, she put on her peacoat, wrapped her striped muffler around her neck, positioned her ear muffs, and rigged her pedometer to her sneaker.
“You want to walk with me?” she’d ask. I didn’t want to. I was a quiet detective, collecting each small sign of weirdness: the way she now made a cup of tea with two teabags, not one; the way she said, “Will do,” when you hadn’t even requested anything. She’d be gone over an hour, then come back—red-faced, nose dripping from the cold. The back door opening, the stomping of her boots in the pantry, always surprised me. Each time she went out, I braced myself for the news that Grandma or unemployment had broken her—that she’d hiked back to the hospital to be crazy again. I couldn’t walk with her. I couldn’t.