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

  “Oh, yeah? Well, you’re—”

  “Keep quiet and listen, you two!” Pop said, slapping the backs of both our heads on account of Ronald Reagan had just said, “Now let’s see what’s cookin’ with the gals from the Nutmeg State.” And everyone at the lunch counter started whooping and hollering and squeezing in closer.

  The camera zoomed in on Mrs. Parzych, the other Connecticut winner. She told Ronald Reagan how she’d invented “Creamy Dreamy Sweetheart Torte” out of leftover cake that she’d made from a Pillsbury cake mix, plus cream cheese and whipping cream that had gone bad in her refrigerator but that she didn’t want to just throw out because she’s thrifty. And Ronald Reagan went “Sweetheart torte, eh? And who’s your sweeheart?” and she said it was her husband, Stanley. Here’s what I didn’t get: nobody was at the stove next to Mrs. Parzych’s—which was Ma’s, I figured—but you could hear her oven timer going off like nyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeee-aaaaaaaaaaa.

  I pulled on Frances’s sleeve. “Where’s Ma?” I said. Me and Ronald Reagan must have had ESP or something, because before Fran could even answer me, he goes to Mrs. Parzych, “Now what’s become of your Connecticut cohort?” Mrs. Parzych fidgeted with her fingers and looked away from Ronald Reagan and said, well, that Ma was coming right back but that she’d had to make a quick visit to the toilet.

  “Jesus Christ and Jiminy Cricket!” Pop shouted in front of everybody. “Marie’s got the trots! Same as she always does when she’s a nervous wreck!” Pop must have been pretty nervous, too, I figured. Why else would he be making an announcement to sixty-something people about Ma having diarrhea?

  In support of her “Connecticut cohort,” Mrs. Parzych silenced the stove timer, pulled on a pair of plaid mitts, and took Ma’s dish out of the oven. It was all smoky, and the Pillsbury crescent rolls that formed the top crust looked kinda burnt. Everybody at the lunch counter got real quiet, except for someone way in the back that said, “Uh oh.”

  And then? On TV? There was Ma, running in from the right. Her beehive was kinda wobbling from side to side, and there was this weird white thing flying behind her that reminded me of the surrender flag they waved sometimes in cowboy movies. When Ronald Reagan seen Ma coming at him, he looked kinda scared, and he said, “So let’s see what’s cookin’ down in Louisiana! Mimi’s Mumbo Jumbo Gumbo! Now that sounds pretty darn delicious, doesn’t it?” And instead of walking toward the Louisiana lady’s stove, he sort of broke into a run.

  As it turned out, that white thing flying behind Ma was sort of like a flag of surrender. After she’d finished her diarrhea, she’d somehow gotten toilet paper stuck in her apron strings and the elastic waistband of her skort. I was pretty sure, even before they announced that “Sandra’s E-Z Tuna Stroganoff with Pillsbury Biscuits” was the winner in Ma’s category and that “Coco-Nutty Blond Brownie Bars” was getting the $25,000 grand prize, that that 1965 Buick Riviera with the hideaway headlights wasn’t going to end up parked in our driveway. “Booooooo!” I said when Art Linkletter shook hands with the winners. Simone slugged me one and told me to stop being a poor sport. Then she said to go ask my teachers if they wanted any pie and coffee. “What do you mean, my teachers?” I said.

  I looked back to where my sister was pointing, and there were Sister Fabian, Sister Lucinda, and Mother Filomina. Nuns from my school at our lunch counter? It was like some kind of psycho dream! I didn’t want to go over to them, but Simone and Pop both made me.

  Sister Lucinda wanted pie but no ice cream—apple, which was good because there was no more blueberry. Mother Filomina said she’d take a little bit of ice cream but no pie. Sister Fabian said no thanks, she didn’t want anything. Christopher Creamcheese, who was still shadowing me, said, “Can I have hers then?” So I told him okay, but this time he couldn’t lick his plate because it was bad manners. And he said if it was gonna be his pie, then yes he could so lick the plate, and I said, “Okay, fine, no pie then,” and he said all right, all right, he wouldn’t. And after I gave it to him, he said, “You know what? You’re weird” and I said, “So ain’t you.” And he stuck his tongue out at me and there was ice cream and pie crust all over it. But at least he stopped following me around.

  “Well, Felix, you must be very proud of your mother,” Sister Fabian said. I wasn’t sure when she and the others had arrived, but I figured it had to have been after Ma’d come out of the bathroom, trailing toilet paper and scaring Ronald Reagan.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, yes, Sister…. Sisters. And Mother.”

  “Why, you’re entirely welcome, Felix,” Mother Filomina said. “And I hope you know how proud we are of you.”

  “Huh?” I said. I didn’t know what I’d done that they should be proud of me for, but still, I thought, it was too bad Rosalie wasn’t there because it probably would’ve killed her to hear Sister say it to me, not her.

  In a long distance call from her hotel room that night—you could hear both sides of Ma’s and Pop’s conversation because they were both using these real loud long-distance voices—Ma verified that her nerves had given her the runs just before the broadcast began. Her fellow contestants had been very nice about her having burned her Shepherd’s Pie Italiano, she said. But still, she’d been mortified—about that and about the toilet paper. She asked Pop if you could see it on TV and he lied and said, no, no, the only thing you could see was how beautiful she looked—that in his opinion, she was the most beautiful woman in that whole big room. Ma said she couldn’t wait to come home. “Well, Tootsy Cake, we can’t wait for you to get home either,” Pop assured her. “I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since you left.” He looked at me when he said the last part, and I couldn’t really blame him.

  Because, as I had feared while I was watching Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte with Lonny that day, Joseph Cotten’s stupid bouncing head had haunted me nightly in Ma’s absence. Some nights it wouldn’t let me get to sleep, and some nights it woke me up. Either way, I’d wait a while, listening to the chiming of our downstairs clock every fifteen minutes, and then finally have to get out of bed, go down the hall to my parents’ room, and tap my father on the shoulder. “Pop?” I’d whisper. Wait. “Pop? Yoo hoo?…HEY, POP!” By then, I wasn’t so much tapping his shoulder as pounding on it.

  “Mffph? Wha…?”

  “I’m thinking about it again.”

  “Thinking about…?”

  “That head.”

  He squashed his pillow over his own head. “Jesus Christ, Felix, how many times I gotta tell you that it’s just your imagination? Go back to sleep.”

  “I can’t. Unless—”

  “Look, I’ve sat up with you for three nights now. I need my sleep, Felix. You’re turning me into a zombie.”

  I’d seen a zombie movie on Channel 8 Shock Theater a while back and they scared me, too. “Please, Poppa. Pleeease.”

  Pop came up with a new solution. For that night and the next—the last two nights of Ma’s absence—he let me sleep in my sleeping bag on the floor in his and Ma’s bedroom. And when Frances snuck in the second night and rolled that cantaloupe at me, chanting, “Ooooo, Felix, it’s the head! Oooooo,” and I started screaming? It woke Pop up again, and he got so mad at Fran that he chased her all around the house, and when he caught her, he kicked her in the fanny, kind of like Zhenya’s father did to Zhenya in the schoolyard, except not kidding around like Mr. Kabakov. Not hard, though, either. And the next day? For her punishment? Frances had to come right home after school instead of going to field hockey practice and wash all the downstairs windows in our house, inside and out, plus the storm windows, too, even though they weren’t even that dirty, except for the two where I stuck my fingers in the peanut butter jar and wrote on the glass FF was here and Hi Frances Ha Ha.

  After Ma arrived home from California, she kept getting all these consolation prizes in the mail: cases of Nestlé cocoa and quilted Kaiser aluminum foil, a big basket of jams from Knott’s Berry Farm, a spice rack, a G.E. electric mixer, and this
other new G.E. thing, an electric knife. Oh, and along with all her consolation prizes, Ma also got a copy of the judges’ comments about her Shepherd’s Pie Italiano. (The judges had judged all the food the day before the TV show, so they didn’t judge Ma’s burnt Shepherd’s Pie Italiano; they judged the one she made the day before.) One judge said Ma’s recipe was “quite good, quite inventive” and another judge called it “scrumptious.” The third judge was snotty, though. Ma figured it was probably the stuck-up lady judge who’d worn a pillbox hat and a jacket with a mink collar and had acted all full of herself. She’d written, “To my mind, the ground lamb & Niblets mixture combined with tomato sauce does not make for a happy marriage.”

  Simone was setting her hair with juice-can rollers while Ma read her the snotty judge’s comment. “Oh, I know that type,” she said. Then she mimicked her. “The marriage of ground lamb and tomahto sauce should get a divorce.”

  For a while, it became a family joke. “Would you care for orange juice or tomahto juice?” Or at Sunday dinner, “This marriage of tomahto sauce and Marie’s macaroni and meatballs is simply exquisite, is it not?”

  “Indeed it is, Mrs. La Di Da. Now be a dahling and pahss me the cahviar.”

  Zhenya Kabakova won over Madame Frechette first, perhaps because of what they had in common: both were weird; both were foreigners; both were inexplicably cheerful despite having been assigned second-class status by their respective majorities—in Zhenya’s case, her “clissmates,” and in Madame’s case, the Sisters of Charity. (Carrying a note to the office one afternoon for Madame, I’d passed Sister Cecelia and Sister Godberta kibitzing in the hallway and overheard one of them whisper something not very charitable about “the Canadian in her tight sweaters.”)

  Lonny Flood was the next to fall to Zhenya’s curious charms, possibly because they were close to the same age, or because Zhenya had had a considerable head-start over her female peers with regard to bazoom-boom development, or both. In class, Zhenya was sweet, but out on the playground, she was salty—as salty as Lonny, even. No, saltier. Lonny took it upon himself to teach her dirty American slang and she was all-aboard for his tutorial.

  “Say this,” he’d say. “Go shit in your hat.”

  “Go sheet een you het,” Zhenya would repeat. But the mentoring went both ways. “H’okay, Lunny, now you say thees: Ya zhópay chuvstuyu, chto menya sevodnya vyzovyet directora shkoly.”

  Lonny did his best to repeat what he’d just heard. “What’d I say? What’d I say?” he demanded.

  “You sed yode ess says you gunna hef to go to principal’s offees today!”

  Lonny turned to me. “What’s yode ess?” he asked. In response, I kicked him in his. “Oh! My ass!” he said, laughing. Then, to Zhenya, he said. “Come on! Give me another one!”

  “H’okay. Ripit ifter me, Lunny. Ón igráyet s Dúnkăy Kulakóvăy.”

  Lonny imitated his tutor and asked again what dirty thing he’d just spoken. In her broken English, Zhenya told him he’d said he was playing with Dick McFist. Lonny doubled over with laughter, as did Zhenya. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Who’s Dick McFist?”

  “She just taught me how to say, like, ‘He’s playing with Mrs. Palm and her five daughters,’” Lonny explained—or tried to.

  I shrugged “I still don’t get—” Lonny dropped his hand down there and made a gesture as if he were doing what Chino Molinaro referred to as “diddling yourself.” “Oh,” I said. “Okay. Now I get it.”

  At which point, Zhenya shrieked in comic horror. “Lunny, ha ha, you a pizdăstradátil!” she declared. I followed her pointing finger to his you-know-what, which was poking out the same way it had that morning when Simone had sat on Lonny’s whoopie cushion and then pretended to choke him. I looked away and asked Zhenya what a pizda-whatever-it-was was. “How you say it? A hoorny boy. A pooh, pooh boy who has prublem like Meek Jagguh in Rulling Stuns: he kent git no satisfacting, he kent git no geuhl reacting.”

  Embarrassed by Zhenya’s pointing and her remarks, Lonny turned his back to us and ran doubled-over to the edge of the school yard. With his fingers gripping the chain-link fence, he looked out at the passing cars. And when the bell rang, he was the last to reenter the building. “Lunny, you noty, noty boy!” Zhenya called over her shoulder with a laugh as she climbed the stairs. “Where go’d thet feeshing pole eenside you paints?” Yeah, she was definitely the saltier one.

  If Zhenya’s sexual awareness was what had piqued Lonny’s interest, it was her athletic prowess that won over the rest of us fifth grade boys. She could fire a dodge ball with such force and precision that the Kubiak twins’ reign as “ends” was over. Uninterested in jumping rope like the other girls, and uninvited by them to do so, she played baseball with us boys instead. Bezbull, she pronounced it. Zhenya could field, she could hit, and, man oh man, could she pitch. “I peecher today, h’okay, fellas?” she’d ask. It got so, when we chose up, whichever captain got “first picks” picked Zhenya. “I good bezbull player, eh, Fillix?” she asked me. “Mebbey I gooder player then Meeky Moose, ya?”

  “Mickey Mouse, you mean?”

  “Ya, ya. Meeky Mouse. He good bezbull player, ya?”

  “I guess so,” I said, shrugging. “For a cartoon.”

  “Nyet, Fillix. He no cartun. He play for H’Yinkees in Bronx, Noo H’Yoke.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “You mean Mickey Mantle.”

  She laughed at her error. “Oh! H’okay, Fillix! I mek meestake. Meeky Mantle eez bezbull player. Mickey Moose eez cartun.”

  One day Zhenya brought to school, inside a blue cloth bag, her father’s “shout poot.” I was happy for Lonny, who, at recess that day, threw the shot put the farthest of anyone. Franz Duzio and Ernie Overturf came in second and third, respectively. But Zhenya’s throw landed further than any of the other boys in class, myself included. At the end of recess, Sister Godberta, who had playground duty that day, confiscated Zhenya’s father’s shot put and told Zhenya she could have it back at the end of the day but should not bring it back to school again. And sure enough, at closing announcements, Mother Filomina came on the P.A. to inform all St. Aloysius Gonzaga students that shot-putting had been added to the list of forbidden activities, along with wearing makeup, writing hurtful things about others in opinion books, getting a Beatles haircut, and girls pulling the “fruit loops” off the backs of the boys’ blue uniform shirts. From my desk to the left of her, I heard Zhenya mumble, “No shout poot? Thet eez boolshit. Thees boolshit skool.”

  Rosalie Twerski led the girls’ campaign against Zhenya. She was critical of her boyish play, her indestructible cheerfulness, her mangling of grammar and pronunciation, and her pierced ears. (Unlike makeup and shot-putting, pierced ears were allowable by the rules of the St. Aloysius Gonzaga Code of Conduct, possibly because of their connection to saintly self-mutilation.) One morning, Rosalie came to school armed with a new poster. It was titled What You Should Know About Communism—AND WHY!!!!! Beneath the numbered, hand-lettered charges Rosalie had made against the evil Soviets, she’d drawn and colored a picture of the Kremlin and, in front of that, had glued magazine pictures of the new Russian leaders, Aleksei Kosygin and bushy-eyebrowed Leonid Brezhnev. Cartoon bubbles hovered over each. “We will conquer the world!” Kosygin declared. Brezhnev warned, “We will atom-bomb the U.S.A. and take over your country and turn it COMMUNIST!!” It had yet to be established whether or not our newest “clissmate” and her family were members of the Communist party, but given Zhenya’s playground prowess, it had come to seem irrelevant to us boys. It was apparently irrelevant to Madame as well, because when she took Rosalie’s poster from her, she told her she would give her extra credit for it and then exiled it to the closet.

  “Aren’t you going to hang it up?” Rosalie wanted to know.

  “At some later date, peut-être,” Madame told her.

  “Well, I hope so. Because I worked really, really, really hard on it.”

  “Oui, mademoiselle. So noted. Now
please take your seat.”

  Rosalie heaved a disgusted sigh and walked to her desk, rolling her eyes and mumbling about the number of hours she’d spent on her stupid poster.

  On the Monday morning before Thanksgiving vacation, during Current Events, kids’ reports included the news that President Kennedy’s perpetual flame had drawn thousands of people to his grave at Arlington National Cemetery on the first anniversary of him getting assassinated. And that Mariner 4 had been launched successfully toward Mars. And that South Vietnam had destroyed a bunch of secret underground Viet Cong tunnels. Kitty Callahan, who was our class’s biggest Beatlemaniac, said that, according to something called Variety, the Beatles were the Entertainers of the Year on account of their 45s had hit #1 for seventeen different weeks and A Hard Day’s Night was the second most popular movie of the year after Mary Poppins.

  During the part where you got to ask the speaker a question about their Current Event, Marion Pemberton raised his hand and Kitty nodded. “Are you sure it’s the Beatles and not the Four Tops or the Supremes?”

  “Uh uh,” Kitty said, shaking her head. “It’s definitely the Beatles.”

  “Oh, man,” Marion exclaimed. And three or four of us boys said it along with him. “Wait’ll the NAACP hears about this!”

  Geraldine Balchunas was the last Current Events person. Her report was about some experiment up in Hartford called “subscription television” where you had to pay for TV instead of getting it for free. During the part where you got to ask the speaker a question about their Current Event, I raised my hand. Geraldine pulled her mouth to the side of her face, none too pleased. “Felix?”

  “That would be like going to a store and buying water instead of just getting it out of the sink,” I said.

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So why would anyone pay for something they were already getting for free?” Geraldine shrugged and said how should she know? When no one else had questions, she returned to her seat.