The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  “We can’t!” I said, shocked that he could even suggest such a thing. “That’s stealing from kids who are starving.” Lonny may very well have been the dumbest kid in our class, grade book-wise, but his response was brilliant.

  “Oh, okay, Rosalie. I guess you’re right.”

  “Rosalie? I ain’t her! How come I’m her?”

  “Oh, that’s right. You’re Felix. I always get you goody-two-shoes girls mixed up.”

  Ma had always vetoed my going to scary movies on the pretext that they might give me nightmares, but here’s what Lonny and I saw that day: this really, really scary movie called Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. It was about this guy who, long ago, had gotten his head chopped off with a meat cleaver, and everyone thought this weird woman named Charlotte did it. Except she hadn’t. I recognized the lady who played Charlotte; she was the same lady who’d played Apple Annie in another movie that Frances, Simone, and I had seen the Christmas before called Pocketful of Miracles. Pocketful of Miracles had been in color, but Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte was in black and white, which somehow made it even scarier. There was this piano that played all by itself and a bunch of other creepy stuff. When that guy got murdered with the meat cleaver at the beginning of the movie, I closed my eyes, but Lonny caught me and made fun of me and said I was Mr. Chicken, cluck, cluck, cluck. So later, when this other guy got his head chopped off and the head went bouncing down the stairs, I had to force myself to keep looking, even though I didn’t want to. And after? When we were walking out of the show? Lonny said he thought Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte stunk and wasn’t scary. What did I think?

  “Huh?…Oh, yeah. It stunk worse than a skunk. You call that scary? Gimme a break. We should’ve asked for our money back.”

  What I’d really been thinking was that Ma had been right—I was going to probably get nightmares, which, whenever I got them, I’d get up and go to her and Pop’s bedroom and tap her on the shoulder and go, “Ma?” and she’d get out of bed and stumble back down to my room and sit in my chair until I got back to sleep. Except what was I supposed to do if I got a nightmare about that guy’s head bouncing down the stairs while she was all the way across the country in California? And plus, was I now going to have to let Monsignor Muldoon know that, not only had I French-kissed my cousin’s poster, but also that I’d skipped church on a Sunday and a holy day so that I could go to the movies instead, and that we’d bought our tickets with UNICEF money that was supposed to be for poor kids who could drink milk for a whole month for like two pennies or something?…Except it was Lonny’s UNICEF money, not mine, I reminded myself. My own UNICEF carton, heavy with dimes, quarters, nickels, and half dollars would be turned in dutifully on Monday morning. Where was the sinning in that?

  Monday was always Current Events day in Madame Frechette’s class, which meant that our weekend homework included looking through magazines and newspapers and cutting out articles that might get thumb-tacked to the side bulletin board titled “Our Town, Our Nation, & Our World.” On Mondays, after lunchtime recess, we were called, one by one, to stand, walk to the front of the room, and summarize our articles. That Monday, November 2, 1964, several of my classmates reported on stuff about the next day’s Presidential election. Ronald Kubiak told us that Dr. Martin Luther King had broken his rule of not endorsing either candidate and was now urging colored people—black people! I keep forgetting—to vote for LBJ, not Goldwater. Oscar Landry quoted President Johnson himself: “We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” Geraldine Balchunas predicted that, if Johnson got reelected, it was entirely possible that one of his daughters, Lynda Bird or Lucy Baines, would have a White House wedding.

  Jackie Burnham informed us that Great Britain had elected its youngest prime minister ever, Harold somebody, and Edgy Chang reported that the Boston police had rounded up a suspect in the Boston Strangler murders. (Edgy’s real name is Doris, but everyone calls her Edgy on account of when her mother was pregnant with her, she was always real nervous.) When Edgy spoke in detail about the Strangler’s gruesome methods, Madame cut her off with a “Merci, mademoiselle.” She called on Lonny Flood.

  Lonny stood, sauntered to the front of the room, and, with a yawn, informed us that the previous Saturday had been Halloween. We waited.

  “And what of that?” Madame finally said.

  Lonny shrugged. “That’s it. That it was Halloween…. And, oh yeah, it rained. On Halloween. Which was Saturday.” He returned to his desk and sat.

  Rosalie Turdski raised her hand in protest. “That’s not really a current event,” she said. “It’s just something that was on the calendar.”

  In defense of Lonny, I raised my hand. “It wasn’t on the calendar that it rained. That was the current events part of it: that it rained.”

  Madame looked unconvinced, and I was pretty sure that the mark she recorded in her grade book for Lonny was yet another check minus. “Rosalie,” she said. “Would you like to go next?” And when she did, I was furious! Because rat-fink Rosalie had clipped the exact same item from the paper that I had—the article about how a local woman, Mrs. Marie Funicello, my mother, not hers, would later that week compete for the grand prize in the Pillsbury Bake-Off. “And I just want to say that I have fingers and toes crossed, and that I’m praying every single night that Mrs. Funicello…that Mrs. Funicello…”

  Rosalie stopped abruptly, upstaged and rendered speechless. At the back door of our classroom stood Mother Filomina with a broad-faced man in a long black coat and a wooly black hat and a broad-faced look-alike girl who was grinning from ear to ear. Besides her plaid St. Aloysius jumper, she was wearing an oversized crushed velvet Carnaby Street–style cap, bubble gum pink, and Cheeto-colored knee socks, and black galoshes with metal clips. Shockingly, she was also wearing blue eye shadow. (Makeup was strictly forbidden by St. Aloysius Gonzaga’s Code of Conduct. The only exception, I knew from my sisters, was for eighth grade girls at the final graduation dance, when they could wear lipstick, plus nylons.) Zhenya’s hair was plaited in long, greasy, brown braids. She had pierced ears. She had “bazoom-booms.”

  “Khello, clissmates!” she proclaimed. “I em Zhenya Kabakova, and I em veddy, veddy kheppy to mek you acqueentinks! Khello, new frinds! Khello! Khello!”

  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 Annette’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.”