The Pigman & Me

by Paul Zindel

  “Mama, Betty put a spoonful of soup into my bowl!” I lied.

  “I did not!” Betty complained. “I only made believe I was going to!”

  “She did, Mom! She did!” I kept bellyaching.

  I think it was exactly at that moment my mother went really wacko for the first time.

  “I can’t take it anymore!” she suddenly screamed. “I’m going to kill myself!”

  “No, Mama! No!” Betty and I pleaded. We ran around the room after her, but she put on her coat.

  “I’m going out to jump off a bridge!” Mother said.

  I cried and cried, and we both pulled at her coat to stop her, but she smacked us away. “I hate life! I hate getting stuck with you two stones around my neck! I hate the way you rotten kids fight! I hate everything, so I’m going to leap headfirst off the Bayonne Bridge!”

  I wailed still more, pleaded, but she brushed me away, went out, and slammed the door. Betty and I ran to the front window. Our apartment was on the second floor, and we had a good view of Mom as she walked across the street to wait at the bus stop.

  “She’ll be back,” Betty said, suddenly very factual, comforting me. She often had to act as emergency babysitter.

  I threw open the window, leaned out, and cried to Mom.

  “PLEASE DON’T KILL YOURSELF! PLEASE DON’T,” I wept.

  “IT’S TOO LATE! I’VE HAD ENOUGH! THE BAYONNE BRIDGE IS THREE HUNDRED FEET HIGH!” she yelled. “I’LL BE DEAD WHEN I HIT THE WATER!”

  “NO, MAMA! NO!”

  “YES!”

  “NO!”

  “IF I’M NOT KILLED IN THE PLUNGE, I’LL DROWN IN THE UNDERTOW!” Mother added. “GOOD-BYE YOU UNGRATEFUL CHILDREN! GOOD-BYE!”

  Betty didn’t look very worried, but I felt my heart was ready to break. I hung out the open window, wailing, begging. My only hope was that when the bus came, Mother would tell us she had changed her mind.

  But the bus did come, and the last thing Mother called to us was “WISH ME A HAPPY SUICIDE!” Then she got on the bus and was gone.

  Later that day, at her usual time after work, Mom came home. Her clothes were dry. She didn’t mention anything more about hurtling herself off any bridge. She didn’t even mention our treachery with the Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. But my sister and I behaved ourselves for a rather long time. We were so good, in fact, that Mother didn’t threaten to kill herself after that more than two or three times a year. Sometimes she’d tell us she was going to put her head in the oven and turn the gas on while we were sleeping. A few times she said she was going to run out and hurl herself in front of a speeding five-axle truck. Once she threatened to run through a park during a thunderstorm so a bolt of lightning could strike her in the head. After a while, though, my sister and I both got used to her threats.

  “I don’t blame Mom for thinking about suicide,” Betty once told me. “The world is a pretty horrible place.”

  “Yoo hoo!” Nonno Frankie’s voice floated upstairs, along with the most delicious smells of food I’d ever smelled. My mother made a face and strutted to the top of the stairs like a prison matron disturbed by an inmate.

  “What do you want?” Mother called down to Nonno Frankie. Betty and I scooted to peer out from behind her.

  “Dinner’s ready!” Nonno Frankie beamed.

  “Look, you have your kitchen down there and we have our kitchen up here.” All my mother was heating up was a can of frankfurters and beans. “Don’t worry about us,” Mom said icily.

  “No,” Nonno Frankie said. “You’re eating with us tonight! The table’s set for all of us!”

  I could tell Mom was poised to cut off her nose to spite our faces, when the house began to vibrate with a tremendous VAAAAROOOOOOOOM! The entire house shook whenever any plane took off over it.

  “Hey, who invented the first airplane that didn’t fly?” Nonno Frankie called up.

  “I don’t know.” Mother frowned, convinced she was speaking to an immigrant lunatic.

  “The Wrong Brothers!” Nonno Frankie laughed.

  Mom thought that over a minute. Then she actually laughed. Finally, we were all laughing at the silly joke, and I knew we’d all be having dinner together downstairs.

  Against her will, my mother was excited when she went downstairs. She looked happy. She had put on lipstick and an ironed brown shiny dress. Even my sister was cheerful, brushing her long blond hair and sniffing at the air with an appetite. For me, going to a real dinner seemed like an adventure. I was the last one downstairs because I brushed my teeth and combed my hair flat so it didn’t look like an unkempt carrottop.

  My grandmother and grandfather on my father’s side of the family. I never met them because they were dead by the time I was born. His name was Eugene, which is my middle name. Her name was Pauline. They fell in love, opened a bakery, and made crumb buns.

  My mother as a young girl. She looks so sweet and innocent to me, and I wonder why God let Life work her over so much.

  My mother and father are on the right as the bridesmaid and best man at somebody’s wedding. I wish marriages could last forever, or at least until the kids are thirty-three.

  This is my father, who became a New York City cop, met a girlfriend, and left us. I wish I had known him better.

  Me, my mother, and my sister. I’m the one all wrapped up like a baby mummy.

  A picture of my father before he cleared out when I was two years old. I dedicated my first novel, The Pigman, to my mother and father, calling them “The Boy and Girl from Stapleton.”

  My mother when she was still a normal, loving mother and wife.

  Betty and me.

  My sister Betty and me. I think I look like an extraterrestrial in this photo.

  Me, my mother, my sister, and a dog whose name I can’t remember. This photo was taken just before my mother and father called it splitsville.

  Betty and me sitting on a running board, which cars don’t have anymore.

  Me sitting behind the fence of our house on Glen Street. There was so much life back there and Nonno Frankie knew the names of the flora and fauna better than anyone.

  At sunset, the front hallway was dark and shadowy. The stairs creaked as I crept down alone. There was a naked bulb swinging in a draft near the front door. Farther down the hall it got much darker and more shadowy. To get into Connie Vivona’s apartment, I had to walk into a small dark storeroom, which appeared like a gaping monster’s mouth at the far end.

  The door was open. I went in. Around a little bend I could see Connie’s bedroom. Just the sight of her bed gave me a fright. It was shockingly gussied up by a bedspread with a design of giant roses all over it. Eight bizarre Kewpie dolls were reclining against a bunch of loud, flowery pillows, and all the dolls were staring at me. They had little white faces, two inches wide. These dolls were freaky, healthy-looking dolls, with huge crocheted hats and dresses that fanned out into large rainbow circles—not the kind of dolls with rotting wigs like my mother’s.

  I stared at the dolls like I’d been paralyzed by a black widow spider’s bite. The storeroom also had a pocket of chilly air, which made me think a ghoul might be living in it. I knew something horrible had happened in that storeroom, or that one day something awful would happen there. And as it would turn out, I was right.

  I shook off the premonition and walked out through Connie’s bedroom. Along the way I saw nice things:

  1) There were curtains, tablecloths, slipcovers on chairs, lampshades, Venice painted on velvet, and a pretty fringed orange throw rug. Connie and her parents had clearly been working all day and had fixed up the apartment so it looked like civilized people resided there.

  2) Connie’s closet door was open, and I glimpsed a few dresses with sequins and feathers, three pairs of high-heeled fancy shoes, embroidered sweaters, and a bottle of Evening in Paris perfume. Preliminary evidence suggested Connie was not a man-hater.

  3) There was a small Singer sewing machine.

  4) A radio playing Fra
nk Sinatra singing “I Get a Kick out of You” was sitting on a night table.

  5) The twins’ room in the front was deco- rated with Donald Duck blankets, toys, and normal children’s clothes on hangers.

  6) A red, blue, purple, yellow, and green beaded curtain had been put up, so when you walked through the archway

  7) In the kitchen, the table was set with attractive artificial camellias, red and gold cloth napkins, and dinner plates with dancing Italian peasants on them.

  8) The room was toasty with a wood fire in the stove.

  9) Pots of food were gurgling.

  10) There was a big, long loaf of succulent- looking bread.

  Most of all, I guess, I noticed happiness.

  “Taste! Taste!” Nonno Frankie said, rushing at me with a plate of delicious-looking fried somethings on it.

  I scooped up one of the dark, crispy squares and put it in my mouth. It was the most savory thing I’d ever chewed in my whole life.

  “Watch out for the bones,” Nonno Frankie warned.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Fried eel!” He beamed. “Fried baby eel!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Zombies on the

  Porches

  Nonno Frankie and Nonna Mamie had made the best meal I had ever seen or eaten on earth. Mom, Betty, me, and the twins sat around the big kitchen table while Connie and her mother and father put a breathtaking Sicilian gourmet feast before us. After the eel appetizer came large hot plates of spaghetti with shimmering lakes of tomato sauce ladled out from a ten-gallon pot bubbling on top of the stove. Nonno Frankie ran around with a big slab of Parmesan cheese, rubbing it like crazy against a metal-toothed rack. I had never seen fresh-grated cheese before.

  “Ho! Ho! Ho! What’s a ghost’s favorite food?” he quizzed.

  None of us knew.

  “Spookghetti!” he howled. “Spookghetti!”

  Everybody was laughing and eating, as lip-smacking course after lip-smacking course hit the table. There was Italian ham with wedges of fresh mozzarella, anchovies and tomatoes with oil, vinegar, and exotic herbs. There were fat green olives and steaming garlic bread. And just when any ordinary meal would have been over, out of the oven came the main event: a deep, hot pan with luscious pork chops, browned sausages, plump zesty chicken breasts, thighs, necks, and legs. There were so many shiny, undulating delicious things floating about, the scent made me nearly faint. Along with the meats, Nonno Frankie served a dark, blood-red wine from a straw-covered bottle.

  “It’ll grow hair on your chest,” he said, laughing, giving even little Nicky and Joey each a small glass, which they chugalugged like seasoned imbibers. As usual, the twins didn’t sit still for long. They stuffed their faces and went dashing around the house to play some more.

  “They run around too much,” Nonno Frankie said.

  “They’re just kids,” Connie reminded him.

  “They should walk, and not yell so much!”

  I could tell the twins got on Nonno Frankie’s nerves a little, but he’d give them candies and hugs from time to time so they knew he really loved them.

  “I can’t wait until they get to be grown-up like you,” Nonno Frankie whispered to me. That made me feel good.

  After the main course came the desserts: lemon sherbet, cannolis, which are tubular crusts stuffed with cream, cassata rum cake, cookies with rainbow sprinkles on them, chocolate-covered nuts, Stella D’oro crisps, espresso coffee, a shot of almond liqueur, and a big bowl of pears, grapes, berries, oranges, and figs. The whole meal took over three hours to eat, but there was a lot of sophisticated, titillating conversation as well. Topics covered were B-17 bombers, the Brooklyn Dodgers, Sir Winston Churchill, bobbysoxers’ fashions, slumber parties, imbecilic, moronic screaming-meemie autograph fans at Frank Sinatra concerts, Nazi spies, the price of nylons, the glory of worms, and the importance of a good virgin olive oil.

  The one who turned out to have a great sense of humor, besides Nonno Frankie, was Connie. She was sweet and generous. She had made her face up with lipstick, rouge, and eyebrow pencil so she looked very fetching and hardly plump. She was much happier than when she had first knocked on our old apartment door in tears. Connie mostly made a lot of jokes and comments about men and what awful husbands she and my mother had gotten stuck with, and my mother laughed a lot. After a second glass of wine, Mom even agreed to do the one imitation she knew, which was to laugh like a wild witch. She usually only performed that around Halloween, but Betty and I urged her on after dinner because we knew her “witch laugh” was surefire to warm up any party. When she let out her first loud, two-minute cackle, even the twins stood still, their big dark eyes wide open in amazement. Then they pleaded for Mother to do eight encores of her witch laugh.

  The only part my mother didn’t enjoy about Connie’s humor was when Connie occasionally blurted out, “Oh, he can park his shoes under my bed anytime!” Connie said this almost every time the name of any male star came up, including Clark Gable, Laurence Olivier, Rudolph Valentino, Enrico Caruso, and Roy Rogers.

  It was a meal to remember, and when Nonno Frankie and Nonna Mamie departed on Sunday, they left lots of food for Connie to share with us during the week.

  “You know how to tell twin witches apart?” Nonno Frankie whispered to me in farewell.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, it’s not easy to tell which witch is which! Ho! Ho! Ho!” He winked, grabbed Nonna Mamie’s hand, and hobbled off with her to catch the #112 bus back to Manhattan.

  By Tuesday, I missed Nonno Frankie.

  Everything was too quiet with him gone, but Jennifer stopped over and asked if I felt like taking a walk.

  “Sure,” I said.

  First we strolled up Glen Street, and I told her all about the meal, Connie’s decor, and Nonno Frankie.

  “I’d really like to meet him,” she said, tossing her shiny brown hair all to the left side of her face. It made her look very pretty in an unusual sort of way.

  “I’ll introduce you next weekend,” I promised.

  “Great.”

  Then we stopped at Jennifer’s house. She wanted me to meet her mother and father, who were sitting on rocking chairs out on the porch.

  “This is Paul,” Jennifer told them.

  “Hello, Mr. Wolupopski,” I said. “Hello, Mrs. Wolupopski.”

  They smiled from their chairs and nodded. They both had white hair and looked like their idea of a good time was to sit all day on the porch and count the tombstones across the street on Cemetery Hill. Jennifer looked very embarrassed, and she got me out of there real quick. We continued up the street.

  “They’re ancient, aren’t they?” Jennifer said.

  “They seem nice,” I said.

  “You don’t have to kid me,” Jennifer said, looking down at the ground. Her hair fell back to frame her face. “I know they’re zombies. My mother didn’t give birth to me until she was fifty-three.”

  “Why’d she wait so long?”

  “She was busy having my eleven brothers.”

  “You have eleven brothers?”

  “None of them live at home.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Oh, they’re married with kids of their own. A lot of them work across the Arthur Kill at factories like the American Cyanamid Company and U.S. Metals. I got left home with the two zombies.” The sad way her eyes looked toward the river made me feel depressed.

  “Your parents look O.K.”

  “O.K., but drained. A lot of the parents in this town look just like them. They pop out kids all their lives and then retire to sit on their porches.” She sighed deeply.

  Jennifer pointed out other houses, and sure enough, a lot had a pair of pleasant-looking mother and father zombie duos on them. They had neat, civilized, earth-colored pants, skirts, kerchiefs, and sweaters on, and most had full shocks of white hair.

  “Half of them only know a little English,” Jennifer said. “They’re ashamed to speak to anyone w
ho isn’t Polish. They make all of their teenaged kids deranged. All the young boys go really nuts until they can flee this place. I warned you they’ll be mean to you when school starts. You’ll see about that soon enough.”

  I was glad I had the whole summer ahead of me before then.

  Then Jennifer pointed out two houses with normal families. One had a nice teenage girl called Jeanette Filopowicz in it, and she had a colorful family with a lot of older, dynamic married brothers who Jennifer said had good hearts. Jennifer also told me about the Matusiewitz family, who had lovely daughters, one of whom could play the first ten bars of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and sons who were supposed to have become loving, fine fathers. But a lot of the other porches had rocking parent zombies on them.

  When we got back from our stroll, I suggested we hang out at the stupendously big apple tree in the back of my yard. On closer inspection the tree was even more appealing, because I realized my nosy mother with her eagle eyes couldn’t see us there. The toolshed and a few other trees blocked her view from both the upstairs kitchen and bedroom windows.

  We sat down on the ground and leaned against the tree, and I started filling Jennifer in on a few of the weirder details about my own mother so she wouldn’t feel so bad about her zombie parents, but the twins came running out, scooting in circles around us, until I invented a game I called “let’s jump out of the apple tree!” Jennifer and I just sat and conversed while I told the twins to climb the tree and see how high they could leap from. The first jump they made was from about three feet. They jumped from there for about ten minutes. Then I told them they should climb higher so it’d be even more fun to jump. They got as high as about ten feet and kept jumping, climbing, and jumping, landing in a pile of dried weeds. They were good kids, but I really wanted to be alone with Jennifer for a while. I finally told them to see how many other things they could find to jump off in the whole yard. They liked that idea and dashed off out of our sight.