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

  Instead of having us move on from Current Events to religion the way we usually did on Monday mornings, Madame Frechette rose, caressed her front, and told us to écoutez, s’il vous plaît, because she had two important Current Event items of her own. Turning to the blackboard, she picked up a stick of chalk and wrote the words remplaçante and tableaux vivants.

  “Remplaçante,” she said, turning back to face us. “Any guesses?”

  “Replacement?” someone said.

  “Oui. Très bien. Replacement, or substitute.” Madame explained that she would be taking the train home to Québec over the Thanksgiving holiday and so would not be in class on Wednesday for our half-day session. We would therefore have a remplaçante. Jackie Burnham reminded her that she was the remplaçante.

  “D’accord,” Madame agreed. “And so, on Wednesday, you shall have a remplaçante for your remplaçante, heh heh heh. And, mes élèves, the Good Lord willing, I shall rejoin you all next Monday, one week from aujourd’hui.” Her saying it that way—“the Good Lord willing”—made me think of that movie we’d been watching when Sister Dymphna went cuckoo, The Miracle of Marcelino. One day you could be walking around like normal, and the next day your bed would be empty and God the Father’s voice would be telling your family or whoever, “Sorry. I needed him in Heaven.” Still, I wasn’t too worried. Unless Madame’s train got derailed near a cliff or something on her way back from Canada, I figured she’d be back after Thanksgiving like she said.

  MaryAnn H. (not MaryAnn S. or MaryAnn V., the other two MaryAnns in our class) asked Madame who our sub was going to be, and Madame said she was quite sure it would be Sister Mary Agrippina. The entire class, minus Zhenya, who had yet to be ruler-slapped or skin-twistered, groaned. Madame shook a scolding finger at us, but she was smiling as she did so. “And now,” she said, pointing to the other thing she’d written on the board. “Who can tell me what tableau vivant might mean?”

  I recognized the term from Madame’s report card and raised my hand. “Is it a tablecloth?” I asked.

  “A tablecloth?” Madame Frechette looked puzzled. “Non, non.”

  When nobody else said anything, Madame explained that tableau vivant meant a “living picture,” and that our fifth grade class had been given a very special role in the upcoming Christmas program. Our class would present a series of four tableaux vivants, which would complement the musical interludes of St. Aloysius Gonzaga’s eighth grade orchestra, seventh grade choir, sixth grade chorus, and fourth grade glee club. “But you, mes amis, will be the stars of the show!”

  Madame assured us that she had had considerable experience as a director of theatricals back in her native province and even un petit peu of experience in the big city of Montreal, and that now she had been called upon to direct St. Aloysius Gonzaga’s first-ever Christmas tableaux. Recalling Mother Filomina’s “additional remarks” on Madame’s report card, I thought I remembered not that she’d been “called upon” but that Madame had asked for this assignment and Mother Fil was thinking about it. “It will be very exciting,” she promised now. “When the curtains part to reveal you all, en costume and as still as statues, depicting the various scenes of l’histoire de la Nativité, you will hear gasps of wonder from the audience!” There would be much to talk about, and much to do, upon our return from Thanksgiving break, but for now she could tell us that the four “living pictures” in which we would star would be the Annunciation, the shepherds’ spotting of the Star of Bethlehem, the Wise Men’s journey to see Baby Jesus, and the grand finale: a nativity which would include shepherds, angels, Magi, the Holy Family, of course, and last but not least, the little drummer boy, heh heh heh. (Here, Madame looked right at me.)

  Hands flew up even before Madame stopped talking. “Oui, monsieur?”

  “What about Santa Claus?” Monte Montoya asked.

  “Non, non. Father Christmas was not in Bethlehem that night, heh heh heh, and so he will not be a part of our tableaux.” Madame acknowledged Susan Ekizian. “Oui, mademoiselle?”

  “Will there be animals?”

  “Well, we shall have to see about that. Live animals? Most likely not. But put on your thinking caps, mes amis. How might we represent cows, sheep, donkeys, and camels?” Ernie Overturf said his father could maybe cut out some plywood animals with his table saw and Ernie could paint them. Madame clapped her hands and said that would be magnifique.

  When Rosalie Twerski’s hand went up, I knew what was coming “Can I be Mary?” she asked. Madame said she had made no decisions about casting yet, but that she would think about this over vacation and get back to us.

  “What are we going to do for Baby Jesus?” Margaret Elizabeth McCormick wanted to know. She volunteered her three-month-old nephew.

  Madame said she thought using an actual infant might present complications and that we would probably use a prop—a baby doll. Margaret Elizabeth said she had one of those, too. “Et bien. But more about our tableaux vivants later,” Madame said. “For now, please take out your livres mathématiques so that we can see how successfully you have borrowed your fractions, heh heh.”

  Just as Madame had said, on the Wednesday half-day before Thanksgiving vacation, she was gone and there in her place sat the Enforcer, Sister Mary Agrippina, her hands folded in front of her, her scowl saying, Just try something, anything and the pain I will inflict in return will make you wish you hadn’t.

  Of course, none of this was obvious to Zhenya Kabakova who, midway through that morning, rose from behind her desk and, pencil in hand, walked toward the pencil sharpener on the other side of the room—a perfectly legal act in the classroom that Madame Frechette superintended, which, of course, was neither apparent nor acceptable to Sister Mary Agrippina. “Young lady!” she called out. “Just where do you think you’re going?” In response, Zhenya held up her pencil.

  Sister Mary Agrippina informed Zhenya that she did not read sign language and invited her to say what she thought she was doing.

  Zhenya shrugged, looked around at the rest of us, and then turned back to Madame’s substitute. “Pincil sharpenter,” she said. “My pincil point ees dull.” Sister Mary Ag rose from behind her desk and walked toward Zhenya. The rest of us geared up for the showdown.

  Height-wise, Zhenya had Sister Mary Agrippina by at least three inches, and whereas our classmate was robust and muscular, her opponent had jowls and a considerable paunch. But if this was a match between David and Goliath, it was difficult to decide who was who.

  “I guess I must have developed temporary amnesia,” Sister said with a sarcastic smirk. “Because I can’t recall having given you permission to get up and use the pencil sharpener.”

  “Don’t need peermission,” Zhenya countered. “What ees beeg deal you are making h’about thees?”

  “The big deal?” said Sister. “The big deal is that you are being openly defiant, and that, young lady, is entirely unacceptable.” She moved a step closer so that the two were face to face, separated by a scant few inches.

  At which point Zhenya called upon one of the expressions that Lonny Flood had taught her. “Why not you go sheet een you het?” she said.

  The rest of sat there frozen—a wide-eyed, horrified tableau vivant. All of us, that is, except Rosalie. “She just told you you should go to the bathroom in your hat, Sister,” she said.

  “Oh she did, did she?” Sister Mary Agrippina said. Then she reared back and slapped Zhenya, hard as she could, across the face.

  Zhenya looked stunned. She reached up and, with her right hand, rubbed her stinging cheek. Then she, too, reared back, formed a fist, and clocked Sister Mary Agrippina in the jaw, hard enough so that the old coot lost her balance and fell back against Eugene Bowen’s desk. Attempting to get up, she fell back again, this time landing in Eugene’s lap. Rosalie stood, ran toward the back door, and down to the office to tattle.

  You’d have thought Zhenya’s actions would have gotten her expelled, wouldn’t you? Or, at least, suspended indefinit
ely? But that was not the case. The language barrier and cultural misunderstanding, not Zhenya, were blamed for the assault on Sister Mary Agrippina who, over the Thanksgiving interlude, got transferred from St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parochial School to some retirement home for Catholic sisters in Galilee, Rhode Island. I felt sorry for those old nuns if Sister Mary Ag was going to be taking care of them the way she took care of us, but I felt glad for my class and me. Zhenya had brought Sister Mary Gestapo’s reign of terror to an end. And besides, maybe she only liked to torture kids.

  When we returned to school the following Monday, other things had changed as well. Madame Frechette was wearing high heels with a leopard skin pattern, a new “poodle”-style hairdo, and a bright red beret, which she wore both outside of class and in. As director of the upcoming tableaux vivants, she also had a new, strictly business attitude. Lonny and Zhenya, over our four-and-a-half-day hiatus, had somehow become boyfriend and “geuhlfriend.” About a third of our female classmates had returned from break wearing braids or pigtails. Three girls—two of the MaryAnns plus Nancy Whiteley—had tried conditioning their hair with mayonnaise and were now doing it on a regular basis. No fewer than seven girls had pierced their ears with little gold threads—“starters,” they called them.

  Even Rosalie Twerski had transformed herself. She showed up that Monday with shaved legs—the left one bearing Band-Aids in two different places, the right leg in three. Shockingly, she, too, had pierced her ears and was wearing tiny gold crucifixes on her punctured lobes. More shocking still, she had emerged from her mother’s maroon Chrysler Newport that morning wearing a lime green Carnaby Street cap—and a bra! At first I assumed Rosalie was mocking Zhenya—that she had turned her into a belated Halloween costume. Then I took into account Turdski’s fiercely competitive nature and realized what was really going on: if she could not defeat this foreign interloper whose popularity had soared into the stratosphere as a result of her having assaulted and banished the scourge of St. Aloysius, then she would try her damnedest to out-Zhenya her.

  The race was on. The tableau vivant was upon us. The role of the Blessed Virgin Mary was up for grabs.

  5

  Meatloaf

  Monday, December 7, 1964. I had awaited its arrival for weeks, little suspecting that it would become a day that would live in Felix Funicello infamy.

  My classmates, too, had been anticipating the arrival of Monday, December the seventh, as Madame Frechette had told us this would be the day when, after Current Events and recess, she would announce her decisions about who would be who in our tableaux vivants. But for me, the casting of a Christmas program still two weeks away was of lesser importance than what would happen later that afternoon. I’d arrived at school that morning dressed not as a parochial school student but as a seafaring boy. (Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Junior Midshipmen had permission to wear their uniforms to St. Aloysius on the days when they had after-school meetings.) During Current Events, my current event was that in six more hours I would board a bus to Hartford with my fellow Midshipmen and, at 4:00 P.M., appear on Channel 3’s Ranger Andy Show. Over the weekend, I’d rung doorbells up and down our street to let neighbors know about my impending television debut and had made a sign for Pop to post at the lunch counter alerting our regulars. When I’d suggested that he might also want to lug our TV down to the lunch counter again and pass out more free pie, Pop had nixed that idea, claiming that more heavy lifting might give him a “sacroiliac attack” and that the last thing he needed was for our customers to get too used to free food.

  “Ah,” Madame noted. “First your mother was on télévision, and now you shall be, too, eh?”

  “Yeah. Plus, my third cousin, Annette Funicello, has been on TV billions of times.” Turning back to the class, I asked if there were any questions. Zhenya’s hand went up. “Zhenya?”

  “Who eez det? H’Annette Foony Jello?” (To Zhenya, I was Fillix Foony Jello, as in, while choosing sides at recess, “H’okay, I peeks Fillix Foony Jello.”)

  “Well, she used to be a Mouseketeer on TV and now she’s a movie star.”

  “Ya? Movie star at seenima? Wow-ee, Fillix! You cousin beeg shut, ya?”

  I nodded. “Anyone else?” Turdski’s hand went up. “Rosalie?”

  She wasn’t at her desk; she was over at the first aid station by the pencil sharpener that had been set up for the girls whose pierced ears had gotten infected. “Just a sec,” she said. Upturning the bottle of rubbing alcohol, she soaked a pair of cotton balls and applied them to her inflamed and oozy earlobes. Then, instead of asking me something about my current event like I thought she was going to, she turned to Zhenya and phony-smiled. “Zhenya, I just want to point out to you that it’s pronounced ‘cinema,’ not ‘seenima.’ Like ‘mortal or venial sin.’ Say it: cinema.” From his seat in the back, Franz Duzio, who’d never quite mastered the art of whispering, wondered not-so-quietly who’d died and made her the teacher.

  “Seenima,” Zhenya said.

  Rosalie shook her head. “Sin…ema. Try it again.”

  “Seen…ema.”

  “En…ema,” someone mumbled. Giggles followed.

  Rosalie smiled with patronizing patience and, turning to Madame, promised to work with Zhenya on her pronunciation during recess. Zhenya shook her head. “Uh uh. Nyet. At recess, I play bezbull or dujbull.”

  As a parochial school student, I was, of course, well acquainted with the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and knew that a kiss or a sugary smile from a “friend” could be treacherous. And so, in defense of Zhenya, I smiled, too—at my nemesis. “Oh, that reminds me, Rosalie,” I said. “It’s ‘picnic,’ not ‘pitnic.’”

  Turdski’s smile turned sour. “Yeah? So?”

  “You always pronounce it ‘pitnic.’”

  “I do not!”

  “Yeah, you do, Rose,” one of the unassailable Kubiaks chimed in. Several of the boys nodded. Some of the girls might have nodded, too, had Rosalie not wielded so much power. Geraldine Balchunas sprang to the defense of her best friend. “If she says ‘pitnic,’ then how come I never heard her, and I go over to her house all the time?”

  “Et bien, mesdames and messieurs, ça suffit. And now—”

  Ignoring Geraldine and Madame, I kept my focus on Rosalie. “Repeat after me: I will bring potato salad to the class pic…nic.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Madame cover her grin with her hand.

  “I’m not repeating anything,” Turd Girl said. “I know it’s ‘picnic,’ so you can just shut up, Dondi.” At this point, Madame intervened in earnest, reminding Rosalie that telling others to “shut up” in her classroom was grounds for a check-minus. Opening her grade book, she turned a deaf ear to Rosalie’s argument that she hadn’t told me to shut up; she’d merely said that I could shut up—if I wanted to. Madame rose and wrote the French spelling, pique-nique, on the board. To me she said, “Finish up now, monsieur, s’il vous plait.”

  I nodded. “Any other questions?”

  Geraldine was gunning for me now. “When you go on that show today, are you afraid you’ll break the TV camera and have to pay for it because you’re so ugly?” None of the boys laughed, but several girls did. Madame Frechette came to my defense—or tried to, anyway. I wish she hadn’t. “That will be enough of that, mademoiselle. I am quite sure no cameras will be broken. And I’m sure you will all agree that Monsieur Felix looks quite dashing in his seaman’s uniform.”

  Lonny’s shocked whisper carried up from the back of the class. “What’d she just say then? Did she just say what I thought she said? Holy crap!” I didn’t get why he was going so mental.

  “Ah, recess time, mes élèves,” Madame noted with a sigh of relief. “And après votre récréation, we shall discuss our tableaux vivants. Class dismissed!”

  Some of the girls retrieved their jump ropes from the cloak room and others made for the rubbing alcohol and cotton balls. Us boys took bats, balls, and bases out of the closet and pushed past the girls and down the stairs.


  “Hey,” I said to Lonny on our way out of the building. “What’d you think Madame said back there?”

  He guffawed. “Oh my god, don’t you know what semen is?” I told him yeah—a seaman was a sailor. A squid. He shook his head and laughed even louder. “It’s, you know, spunk.”

  “What’s spunk?”

  “Oh, man, Felix. Ain’t you ever had a wet dream?”

  Was he talking about bed-wetting? “Not since I was real little,” I said. That made him laugh so hard that he dropped to his knees. I still didn’t get it, but at least now I realized we were in the birds-and-the-bees ballpark. My ignorance was Pop’s fault, of course. All’s he’d told me about sex was that stuff about drinking fountains. If I was ever going to figure it all out, I’d just have to listen harder on the school bus—be Sherlock Holmes, kind of.

  Out on the playground, everyone was talking about whether Rosalie or Zhenya would get picked to be Mary when we went back inside. Ever since we’d returned from Thanksgiving break, the class had divided itself, more or less, into two factions. Most of the girls wanted Rosalie and most of us boys wanted Zhenya. Both candidates, in their own way, had been campaigning for the part. Zhenya had taken out her braids and begun wearing her long brown hair (made lustrous with mayonnaise) down, and, I noticed, too, that she’d begun jacking up the volume when we prayed the rosary: “Blissid art dou kh’amongst vimmin and blissid eez duh froot uff die voomb.” Rosalie had left an anonymous typewritten note on Madame’s desk. (It had to have been her, although when Madame asked the writer to reveal him-or-herself, she hadn’t owned up.) The note said how Communists were atheists, and how atheists had no right to celebrate Christmas. In addition to the note, Rosalie had taken to wearing a winter scarf to school—not wrapped around her neck but draped over her head like a veil. Lonny, who, in the Virgin Mary sweepstakes, was rooting for his “geuhlfriend,” had at one point confronted potato-nosed Rosalie with the question, “How come you’re wearing that stupid thing all the time now?” Rosalie had fake-coughed and claimed that she had a very, very bad head cold and that her mother had insisted she cover her head in our draughty classroom. “Yeah, right,” Lonny scoffed. “You got a head cold and I’m the Leader of the Pack.” With a laugh, he crouched into a motorcyclist’s stance and made loud rum-rum-rum engine noises. Twerski’s retort was that Lonny was the Leader of the Retards.