by Lamb, Wally
Unsure of what I was aiming at, I fired and missed. Fired again and hit it. It moved. When my third BB also hit its mark, it emitted a high-pitched pinging sound. A wing unfolded. My fourth try was a miss, but my fifth was bull’s-eye accurate. The bat skidded several inches along the wall, flapped its wings twice, and took flight. It soared from one side of the classroom to the other and then began circling the perimeter. It dipped and swooped between the projector and the screen, its shadow bisecting Marcelino’s face in close-up. Alarmed, my classmates sprang from their seats, screaming, running for the door and the cloakroom. Arthur Coté raised the top of his desk, stuck his head inside, and let the top bang back down. Rosalie Twerski ripped one of her posters off the wall and curled it over her head like a tent.
The commotion awakened Sister Dymphna from her funk just as the bat zoomed across her field of vision, did a U-turn, and landed on her desk. The two faced off for a second or two. Then the bat opened its mouth, hissed menacingly, and took flight once more. That was when Sister began screaming about the devil. I was momentarily taken aback by this. I’d known that Bela Lugosi, Grandpa Munster, and other vampires could transform themselves into bats, but I’d not been aware that the Prince of Darkness could perform that particular parlor trick, too. Then I remembered that Sister Dymphna was crazy and that the bat was probably just a bat.
Her shrieks were high-pitched and cringe-inducing, and I watched in horror as her flailing arms sent her statue of the Blessed Virgin teetering back and forth on its pedestal, then crashing to the floor where its head and torso parted company. “Satan, I rebuke you! Merciful Jesus, save these poor children!” To save herself, Sister dropped to the floor and crawled beneath her desk in an approximation of the duck-and-cover exercise we had practiced in the event that those evil atheists, the Soviets, ever dropped the bomb on the submarine base in nearby Groton—a despicable act of which, we were assured, Khrushchev was fully capable.
When Sister Dymphna’s duck-and-cover defense dislodged her headgear, our class emitted a communal gasp. I had snuck back to my assigned seat by then and, from my vantage point (second desk, first row—the parochial school equivalent of a pricey orchestra seat), I had a better look than most at what was beneath. For years, Simone and Frances had had a running argument about what, exactly, the veils and wimples of nuns concealed. Simone swore “on a stack of Bibles” that these Brides of Christ shaved their heads as smooth and shiny as Yul Brynner’s. Frances, the family skeptic, insisted just as adamantly that nunly baldness was nothing but a myth. Now I saw that both sisters had been half-right and half-wrong. De-wimpled, Sister Dymphna sported a stubbly salt-and-pepper buzz cut, the kind I got every first day of summer vacation.
It was the reliably pragmatic Kubiak twins, Ronald and Roland, who restored reason to room fourteen. The sons of a dairy farmer, they had both practical natures and experience with the multitude of bats that flew in and out of their barn on Bride Lake Road. While Roland threw open the classroom windows, Ronald walked calmly and purposefully to the supply closet, retrieved the broom, and began shooing. Grateful to be directed, I suppose, the frightened bat complied. It took a sharp right by the filing cabinet, sailed through the open window, and disappeared into the day. Everyone except Sister Dymphna took note that the crisis was over.
It took Mother Filomina, the principal, Mrs. Tewksbury, the office secretary, and Mr. Dombrowski, the school janitor, to coax Sister Dymphna out from under her desk and back onto her feet, all the while shushing her as she babbled a stream-of-consciousness cataloguing of her sins: she had coveted Sister Fabian’s lavender soaps and pilfered all the butter creams out of Sister Scholastica’s Whitman’s Sampler; she had knowingly eaten half of a liverwurst sandwich on Friday and imagined what Father Hanrahan might look like naked. Mother Filomina, Mrs. Tewksbury, and Mr. Dombrowski closed ranks around Dymphie so as to protect her from us thirty-four incredulous eyewitnesses. Order was restored to Sister’s habit and she was hurried out the door, down the stairs, and back over to the convent.
For the remainder of that afternoon, our class was demoted back to fourth grade where we doubled up with Sister Lucinda’s class. “My students will practice their multiplication tables and Sister Dymphna’s class will work on vocabulary,” Sister Lucinda (a.k.a. “Juicy Lips Lu-Lu”) decreed. “Who would like to go next door and get the workbooks?” Two hands shot into the air, mine and Rosalie Twerski’s. “All right, Felix, you may go,” Sister said. This was a small but rare victory; I was almost never chosen over the bane of my existence and chief competitor.
Standing at the threshhold of our evacuated classroom, I surveyed the chaos I had unleashed: spilled books and book bags, an overturned chair, the cock-eyed angle of Pope Paul’s framed portrait, the decapitated Blessed Virgin. Up front on the pull-up portable movie screen, The Miracle of Marcelino played on. From the looks of it, the film had reached its climax. Marcelino’s humble little bed was empty; the tearful monks, hands clasped in prayer, were looking skyward; and no lesser a deity than God the Father Himself was explaining (in voice over) why He had decided to croak the saintly waif and recall him back to heaven. I looked from the screen back to the empty corridor and, verifying that the coast was clear, entered our room. I turned on the lights, yanked the projector’s electrical cord, and tiptoed over to my desk where I stuffed my pockets with incriminating evidence: BBs, cafeteria straws, the one-word note that Lonny Flood had passed me: “Now!” Then I gathered up the workbooks and walked back down the hall.
Sister Dymphna was absent for the rest of that week, and our substitute was Sister Mary Agrippina, a nasty all-purpose permanent substitute/enforcer nun who suffered neither fools nor funny business and maintained discipline by pinching the skin of a transgressor between her thumb and index finger, then twisting it. I should know; I had the black-and-blue marks to prove it. I’d been twistered twice, once for talking to my neighbor during silent reading and once for sticking a pencil stub between my nose and upper lip and pretending I was Hitler while Sister Mary Agrippina was talking about World War II. I was philosophical about my bruises, though, figuring that Sister Mary Agrippina was my penance for having awakened the bat. Still, I was relieved when, at ten minutes to three on Friday afternoon, Mother Filomina came into our classroom to tell us that the following Monday we would meet our long-term sub—not a nun this time, but a lay teacher. “And Sister Dymphna will rejoin you all after Christmas vacation.”
“Lay teacher,” Lonny mused as we walked home together. “I guess that means all us boys are gonna get laid.” I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but I could tell from the sound of Lonny’s snicker that it was dirty.
“Yeah,” I snickered back. “That’ll be cool. Right?”
“Yeah. Hey, knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Marmalade.”
“Marmalade who?”
“Marmalade me. Who laid you?”
I dirty-snickered some more. “You’re a pig,” I said, hypothesizing that he’d just said something piggish.
Not long before this conversation, I had accompanied my pop during the morning doughnut run—we had a standing order for six dozen assorted from the Mama Mia Bakery, which we picked up every day at 5:00 A.M. before opening the lunch counter. “Hey, Pop, what’s all this stuff about ‘the birds and the bees?’” I’d asked, as nonchalantly as possible. He’d swallowed hard and taken a long time to respond, and when he finally did, he said, “Well, Felix, let’s see now. I guess the first thing you oughta know is that, whenever you get a drink of water from a drinking fountain, you should never let your lip touch the metal. Because there are these diseases you can get, see?”
I didn’t see, but by then we had pulled up to the bakery. “Be right back,” Pop said and popped out of the car faster than a jack-in-the-box. Five minutes later, he was back with the six boxes, a chocolate doughnut for me, and a cruller for himself. “Here you go,” he said. “Let’s you and me stuff our faces.” Halfway back
to the bus depot, I figured out that stuffed faces couldn’t ask or answer any more embarrassing questions. Pop’s warning about drinking fountains would be both the beginning and the end of his sex education tutorial.
“A pig? Yeah?” Lonny said. “I know you are, but what am I?”
“A fuckhead,” I said. Down at the lunch counter, Chino Molinaro was always calling someone a fuckhead when my mother wasn’t around.
Lonny laughed. “I know you are, but what am I? Hey, by the way, Ding Dong, I bet you can’t say this five times fast: I slit a sheet, a sheet I slit; upon a slitted sheet I sit.”
“I can so.”
“Yeah? Okay, let’s hear you.”
Had my mother heard my attempt, she would have whacked me a good one, the way she had when she overheard me, in imitation of Chino Molinaro, refer to Giants’ quarterback Y.A. Tittle as “Y.A. Tittie.”
On Monday, I smelled our new teacher before I saw her—and began immediately to sneeze. As she would do each day thereafter, she had doused herself with lily-of-the-valley perfume, a scent to which I discovered I was highly allergic. “Bonjour, mes enfants,” she began. “Je m’appelle Madame Marguerite Irène DuBois Frechette, but you may call me, simply, Madame Marguerite. Je suis enchantée to make your acquaintance!” She had the kind of face that you’d expect to see gray hair on top of, but hers was a fiery red frizz. She was wearing a tight red sweater with a bow on one shoulder and high heels that you could see her painted toenails in and a straight black skirt—the kind my sisters, for some reason, called “pully skirts.” She wore lots of big jewelry that made noise when she moved. Madame Marguerite was pretty exotic for St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parochial School.
“Je suis from Québec, Canada,” she announced. (She pronounced it Cana-DA, not CAN-ada, and I remember thinking, sheesh, she comes from someplace that she doesn’t even know how to pronounce?) I was busy holding a finger beneath my nose, trying to stifle another sneeze, when she asked who would like to go up to the world map and point to where Québec was located. I certainly could have done so; the year before, I’d placed second in the fourth grade geography bee. But of course, Rosalie Turdski had placed first, and now her hand shot up as I let go an explosive achoo.
“Très bien, très bien,” Madame Marguerite said when Rosalie lifted the pointer off the chalk tray and pointed correctly to Québec. “And what, mademoiselle, might your name be?”
“Je suis Mademoiselle Rosalie,” Twerski said, as if she, too, were French-Canadian, even though her mother had brought our class a pan of pierogi every single St. Joseph’s Day since second grade.
“A-ah-ah-choo!” I said, with a force that probably could have registered on the Richter scale.
“God bless you, mon petit chou,” Madame Marguerite said, turning to me. “Comment vous appelez-vous?”
I said the only thing I could think of. “Huh?”
“Heh heh heh heh,” Madame said. “I asked you what your name is.”
“Oh,” I said. “Felix…. Funicello.”
“Ah, mais oui” she said. “But you remind me of another garçon Italien—a nice little boy I read about in the newspaper every Sunday. And so I shall call you Monsieur Dondi!”
The whole class erupted in laughter: Rosalie, Arthur Coté, the Kubiak twins, even Lonny Fuckhead Flood. That was when I realized I’d been wrong before. Sister Mary Agrippina had not been my penance after all. Madame Marguerite was or, by Christmastime, would be.
2
French
I was seated at the far left end of the lunch counter, doing 360-degree spins on my stool and studying, kind of. “La plume est sur la table…. La pluie est fine et persistante…. Mon parapluie est noir.” The week after her arrival at St. Aloysius, Madame Marguerite had reshuffled the seating chart; no longer were my classmates and I seated according to our academic rankings. Madame also reconfigured the fifth grade curriculum: less religion and long division to make room for the addition of conversational French.
It was a quiet evening down at the bus depot—a few travelers in the main hall waiting for the Short-line bus to Providence and a couple of sailors, just in on the Greyhound from New York, seated at the opposite end of the lunch counter eating cheeseburgers. None of our regulars were around: Spiro Sidoropolous, who ran the Elite Barbershop next door; or “Cowboy” Zupnik, the parking lot manager, with his fringed leather jacket, snakeskin boots, and yarmulke; or Cindy Creamcheese, the obese go-go girl who danced in a cage at the Hootenanny Hoot and always ordered the same thing: vanilla Coke, pepperoni omelet, and an Annette for dessert. (The Annette was my sister Simone’s creation: a hot fudge sundae topped with two upright Oreo cookies—edible Mouseketeer ears.) Reverend Peavey, another regular, had stopped in earlier but hadn’t stayed when there were no sailors for him to do his missionary work on. (I was well into my own adulthood when it finally dawned on me why all the adults back then made quotation marks with their fingers whenever they mentioned Reverend Peavey’s “missionary work” with the young men of the U.S. Navy.) This drunk guy, Mush Moriarty, had been there earlier, too, but Chino’d told him he had to leave because he was sitting at a stool with his pants so droopy that you could kinda see the crack in his culo. (Culo’s Italian for your rear end.) “Hey, Mush!” Chino had said to him, shaking his shoulder. “How am I supposed to sell ham sandwiches with your hams hanging out for all the world to see? You’ll take away everyone’s appetite.”
“Mmph?” Mush had said, lifting his face off the counter. “Wudja say?”
Chino said he’d just told him to am-scray. “Yeah, okay, boss,” Mush said, sliding off his stool and staggering away. One thing about Mush, Pop always said: When you told him to go, he went.
“Does Mush have a wife and live in a house and stuff?” I asked Chino.
“No wife as far as I know,” he said. “Used to have one, maybe. He’s got a room at that fleabag hotel on Bank Street, last I heard. But he lives mostly inside the bottle these days.” I thought I knew what Chino meant, but it made me think of that miniature U.S.S. Nautilus in the bottle that Pop made from a kit we got him last Christmas. (Pop used to be in the Navy, before there were nuclear submarines.) He keeps it on top of his dresser in his and Ma’s bedroom. And I pictured Pop’s same bottle, except instead of the Nautilus, a little shrunken Mush Moriarty in there going, “Help! I’m stuck! Get me out.”
“Madame Marguerite est Québecoise…. Je suis Américain.” Grabbing on to the counter, I pushed off as hard as possible, closed my eyes, and began counting the number of rotations my stool would make before stopping: four, five, six, seven. The record I had to beat, set just minutes earlier, was nine…. Je suis getting very dizzy, I thought. Je hope I don’t puke sur la counter.
Chino Molinaro called over to me. “Hey, ’Lix, what’s that you’re speaking down there? Pig Latin?”
I brought my stool to an abrupt stop, opened my eyes, and rolled them at him. “It’s French,” I said, something any moron but him would know. “I’m doing my homework.” Chino had once tried to justify to my sister Frances why he’d quit high school the day he turned sixteen: having seen a Gravy Train truck back up to the cafeteria, he refused to attend any school that fed its students dog food.
“French? Yeah? Well listen, Pepé LePew. Your old lady left me a note that I’m supposed to feed you supper cause they ain’t getting back until around seven. So whataya want? French toast? Bottle of French dressing?”
“Hardy har har har,” I said. “That was so funny, I forgot to laugh.”
“Yeah, and maybe for dessert I can see if Ruthie Rottencrotch is around so’s she can give you a French-kiss.”
I wasn’t sure what distinguished French-kissing from regular kissing, but in response, I made a face and rubbed the back of my hand across my mouth. Ruthie was another of our regulars—a cross-eyed “chicky boom-boom” (another of my sisters’ terms) who’d recently been arrested for something called “lascivious carriage.” I’d looked up “lascivious” in the dictionary—wi
th some difficulty. That letter “c” in the middle had thrown me. Exciting sexual desires, it said. The “carriage” part was what was confusing; I couldn’t imagine how a shopping cart from the First National could be used to do dirty stuff. Still, I wasn’t about to ask Chino to explain. Pop’s birds-and-the-bees tutorial might have come up short, but Chino’s might be too informative. Sex was a subject I wanted to know more about but also (kind of) didn’t.
“You know what?” I said. “In French, nouns are either male or female.” High school drop-out or not, Chino was probably still educable, I figured.
He shrugged and said the same was true of American.
“English, you mean? No, it’s not.”
“Sure it is. The word boobs is female, right? And jockstrap’s male.”
Or then again, maybe he wasn’t educable. Sighing with exasperated tolerance, I glanced up at the menu board and told him I’d have a Sal’s torpedo and a Suicide Coke.
“A Sal’s and a Suicide. You got it, Frenchie.”
My father’s signature sandwich—ground chuck sautéed with onions and green peppers, simmered in tomato sauce, scooped onto a torpedo-shaped grinder roll and topped with provolone—was a nod to the nearby submarine base and a favorite of the “squids” taking buses out of “Rotten Groton” or returning to it. The Suicide Coke was Chino’s invention: a fountain-drawn Coke mixed with squirts of lime, cherry, and strawberry syrups and topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup.