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

  When the play got over and the curtain closed, Rosalie was half-crying and half-screaming at Marion that he wrecked her whole play, but she was also having to hurry, because she had to get into her Wise Man clothes and get her makeup off, plus stick her fake beard on with that spirit gum stuff, and all’s the time she had to do it in was the time it took for the seventh grade choir to sing, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” It wasn’t that bad, though, because Madame gave Mrs. Twerski permission to come backstage and help her change. Plus, the seventh graders were singing all the verses of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” not just the first couple, on account of Rosalie having to change.

  Here’s why things might have been way different if Pauline hadn’t kept her Hostess Sno Balls with her on the stair landing. I seen her eating at least one package of Sno Balls before The Annunciation even, and then a bunch of other kids in our class said they saw her eating at least four more Sno Balls during the shepherds’ and Wise Men’s scenes and Rosalie’s play. No one really knew how many she ate, but afterwards when I looked inside her bag, it looked to me like there was more empty cellophane than there was unopened packages.

  Anyways, downstairs? Right at the part where Father Jerry was bringing out the fake Christmas tree and going to the audience, “Do you folks hear what I hear?” Upstairs, Pauline started crying and holding her stomach and saying how she didn’t feel good. So Madame went over to her and said what’s the matter, and Pauline said she was having the worst stomachache of her whole life. Madame told her to put her head down between her legs and take deep breaths. And when Pauline did that, she started crying louder and saying that made her feel even worse and she was maybe gonna have to puke. And so Madame looked around and spotted Rosalie’s mother standing there. And she said, “Mrs. Twerski, take Pauline to the girls’ room, s’il vous plait.” And Mrs. Twerski started saying something about how maybe Madame should be the one to—and Madame cut her off and said, in this kind of yelly voice, “Maintenant, Madame!” Which in French means like, “Now! Step on it, lady!” And so Mrs. Twerski took hold of a little bit of Pauline’s veil with her fingernails and they started toward the girls’ room. But halfway there, Pauline stopped and she did puke, and some of it got on Mrs. Twerski, who used a swear word right in front of all us kids. And I thought, wow, between Danny Baldino on the bus on the way to Hartford and now poor Pauline, I sure had seen a lot of kids puking in just one month. (And I wasn’t even counting that trick that Lonny played on me Halloween night, cause that was just fake puke, not real puke.)

  Madame started looking at us all with these kinda crazy eyes. Then she snatched Bridget’s baby doll away from her and, holding it in one hand, pointed at Zhenya with the other. “Mademoiselle, you’re Mary!” she said.

  Zhenya shrugged. “How I be hair? No custoom h’except shepairdess.”

  Madame’s crazy eyes found Franz. “Change costumes with Zhenya,” she ordered him. Franz’s eyes kinda bugged out and he told her he couldn’t—that all’s he had on underneath his fat aunt’s nightgown was his underwear. But Zhenya had already slipped her feed sack over her head and was standing there in her underwear—pink polka dot underpants on the bottom and just this white bra on top! “Come on, beeg boyzy,” she said to Franz. “Ticher wants h’us to sweetch, we sweetch.” And so they did. (And for the rest of that school year and into the next, kids talked about seeing the two of them standing there for a few seconds with almost no clothes on.) But while Zhenya was getting into Franz’s nightgown and and he was getting into her burlap sack, I looked over at Lonny and thought to myself, uh oh. Because in just a few more minutes, while he was wearing my too-short-for-him bathrobe, Lonny was going to have to walk out on the stage and be Joseph, and there it was again, triggered, no doubt, by the sight of his “geuhlfriend” in just her underwear: what Zhenya had once referred to as “feeshing pole” in Lonny’s “paints.” Panic-stricken, Lonny saw that I saw what was going on down there, and, hunchbacked, he sidestepped over to me and whispered, “I can’t go out there like this! What the crap should I do?”

  At first I couldn’t think of anything, but then I did. “You know that movie we saw? Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember the part where that guy got his head chopped off by the meat cleaver?”

  “Yeah? What about it?”

  “Pretend someone’s swinging that meat cleaver at you. Except instead of your head, it’s about to come down right on your—” Lonny winced and doubled over even further. And by the time he stood up straight again, I saw that my idea had begun to work. Lonny said I was a genius.

  Madame handed Bridget’s baby doll to Zhenya. That was when the big fight started. Because Rosalie, who was still wearing her Wise Man costume, went kinda cuckoo and started screaming at Madame. “It’s not fair! I work harder than anyone in this whole class and you never appreciate it! And why her of all people? She’s an atheist, and a Communist, and she’s only been in our class since November! And you’re just a stupid substitute so I don’t care what you say! I’m Mary!” And with that, Turdski made a grab for Baby Jesus.

  But Zhenya, who’d told me she was “Russian Ortudox” not “no beleef in Gud,” was not about to relinquish the Christ Child to her chief critic. She held fast to the doll’s feet as Rosalie pulled it by its head. The rest of us, Madame included, stood there stunned. Something had to give, I figured, and then something did.

  As the doll’s head ripped away from its torso, Rosalie fell backward and let go. In horror, I watched the head bounce bumpity bump bump down the backstage stairs. Now, like Lonny a few minutes earlier, it was me who was wincing and doubling over. Joseph Cotten, Jesus: I would probably never, ever, get to sleep again. And when I finally was able to look up at something other than the floor, I found myself looking into the wild eyes of Madame Frechette.

  “Monsieur Dondi!” she said. “Remove your hat, chemise, and pantalons.”

  I began to shake. “My what?”

  “Your shirt! Your pants! Dépêchez-vous! There is very little time!”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m the little drummer boy!”

  She shook her head furiously. “No more! Now you have a much more important part. You are our Baby Jesus! Hurry!”

  Now I was shaking my head furiously. “I can’t! I’m too big!” A stupid argument, given the fact that I was the smallest kid in our class, boys and girls.

  “The show must go on,” Madame said. And then, using the same tone of voice she had used on Mrs. Twerski, “Maintenant, Monsieur!”

  I told Madame that, okay, I would remove my chemise for the sake of our tableau, but I wasn’t taking off my pantalons for anything. Madame nodded in agreement, so I agreed to be Jesus.

  Downstairs, behind the curtain, the Kubiaks rushed about, setting up the props for the big nativity finale, then ran to retrieve the live lambs they’d sequestered in a coop upstairs in our classroom. Out front, jingle bells were jingling. Accompanied by Brenda Lee’s vocal—You will get a sentimental feeling when you hear/Voices singing “Let’s be jolly, deck the halls with boughs of ha-olly”—Madame positioned all of her players except Lonny, Zhenya, and me, her 66 percent recast Holy Family. Yanking the silver turban from Marion Pemberton’s head, she ripped the pillowcase apart with almost superhuman strength, transformed it into a veil for Zhenya, and ordered her to kneel beside the manger. “And you, monsieur, kneel in the crib!” she ordered me. When I did so, she told Franz to hand her his blond Shirley Temple wig. Grabbing it from him, she stretched the wig over my skull. Then, in a sort of frenzy, she pulled apart one of the hay bales and stuffed straw around everything below my chest. “The doll!” she called over to Bridget, the way Dr. Kildare called for an instrument in the middle of an operation. Bridget handed Madame her headless baby doll, and Madame stuck it into the end of the corn crib opposite my head, then fussed some more with handfuls of straw. When she stepped away, Baby Jesus had my head and shoulders and, sticking out the oth
er end, infant-sized rubber feet.

  On the other side of the curtain, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” was winding down and, one by one, the first and second graders began jingling off the stage to the sound of applause and cheering. In the nick of time, the Kubiaks returned with the live lambs. Roland handed his to Eugene and Ronald placed his in Jackie Burnham’s waiting arms. “Aww,” everyone kept saying. “They’re so cute!”

  “Shhh!” Madame said. “Ecoutez!” By now, her red beret had slid back so far on her head that I wondered how it was staying on. The sixth graders were halfway through their second verse of “Away in a Manger” when I looked over at Rosalie, who was tugging on her fake beard and ripping it away in clumps. She’d managed to yank off most of it, but not the part still stuck to her chin. Then she reached around and pulled the back end of her velvet Wise Man cape over her head and hurried over to my manger. Kneeling beside Zhenya, she reached over and gave her a two-handed shove. Out front, the sixth graders were down to, “And stay by my cradle till morning is nigh,” and the curtain, in another ten seconds or so, would part.

  Zhenya shoved back. Rosalie retaliated with a harder shove.

  My eyes found Madame, standing in the wings. One of our vocab words the week before was “transfixed” and that’s what Madame was: as transfixed as someone in a tableau vivant as she watched the two combatting Marys.

  Zhenya’s next shove knocked Rosalie back onto the floor. Trying to right herself, she reached out and accidentally grabbed Zhenya by her bazoom-booms. I was staring in shock—we all were—when Lonny called “Felix!”

  He’d been staring, too, I guess, and when he’d seen where Rosalie’s hands had landed, he’d begun having his problem again. As the curtain began to part, I lifted an imaginary meat cleaver over my head and brought it down with a vicious whack! To my relief, and more important, to Lonny’s, he doubled over once more.

  At first, the audience was stunned to silence as it stared upon what, I’m guessing, was the most bizarre nativity they’d ever seen. For there before them, below the electrified Star of Bethlehem, was a Baby Jesus with shrunken feet, a bent-at-the-waist Joseph, and not one but two Marys, one of whom seemed to be wearing a goatee.

  The seventh graders began singing “The Little Drummer Boy,” but, of course, the little drummer boy was a no-show, his shelf-papered hat box and chopsticks abandoned backstage. The crowd started mumbling and murmuring. The murmuring turned steadily into snickering and, by the choir’s closing pa-rumpa-pum-pums, many audience members were…what’s that word? Guffawing.

  By the time “Joy to the World” began, the laughter had begun to die down—until, that is, Ernie Overturf’s brother Richard accidentally bumped into Mr. Dombrowski, who, startled, let go of his rope for a second or two, then grabbed onto it again, then let go for a second time, then made another grab—the effect of which, on stage, was that the Star of Bethlehem seemed to keep changing its mind about whether it wanted to be a shooting star or one that remained high in the heavens. And when I looked over in the wings again? Madame wasn’t transfixed anymore. Now she was doing something really weird: drinking perfume from one of those two bottles I’d seen in her purse that day when I had to go up and get her sunglasses. Not her lily-of-the-valley perfume but the other one: cognac.

  After “Joy to the World” ended and the curtain closed again, Father Jerry began his closing remarks to the audience. “Well, I’m sure every one of you will agree that this has been just about the most memorable Christmas program in the entire United States of America—or maybe I should say, the United States of Hysteria.”

  Everyone laughed at that.

  “But the kids and their teachers have all worked very hard on today’s event, so let’s first of all give a hand to Mrs. Lillian Button and her wonderful singers and players, to whom we say, “If music be the gift of life, play on!” Out front, there was lots of cheering for the musicians. I was glad Father Jerry wasn’t saying anything about us, because I didn’t want to get booed at.

  But then Father Jerry said, “And, of course, there’s our actors to thank as well. Ladies and gentlemen, this afternoon you’ve seen the world premiere of “Jesus Is the Reason for the Season” by Saint Aloysius Gonzaga’s very own fifth-grade playwright, Rosalie Twerski, and you’ve also witnessed on this historic afternoon Saint Aloysius G’s first-ever tableaux vivants, which I sure hope will now become an annual tradition at this great school. And who knows, maybe by next year we may even have those couple of little kinks worked out for you.” That made people laugh. “So why don’t we get the curtain open again and have our players and their director extraordinaire, Mrs. Marguerite Frechette, step forward and take a bow. (“Oh my god,” Simone noted later. “The audience gave you guys a standing ovation.” When I asked what that was, Ma was the one who answered. “It means everyone liked you so much, they got up off their culos to cheer for you.”)

  When the others stepped to the front of the stage to take their bow, I was too embarrassed to get up, so I stayed put in my corn crib. But when Lonny looked back and saw me, he had him and Ronnie Kubiak carry the manger up to the front, too. And when they did that, everyone cheered kinda loud, and so I waved at them and that made them cheer even louder. And while I was looking out at the audience, I found Ma, Simone, and Frances. They were in the fourth row, right in the middle. Nonna wasn’t with them, though, so I guess her corns were bothering her. I kept looking for Pop, but he wasn’t there, so I figured Chino musta still been sick. And then? I did see Pop. He was way over on the side, three quarters of the way back, between this old lady who must have been somebody’s grandma and this other, younger lady with big giant hair and a kerchief. And when I waved, Pop waved back, and so did the kerchief lady next to him and I was like, I wasn’t waving to you, Mrs. Big Hair.

  Then Father asked Mrs. Button and Madame to join us on stage, and when they did, Sister Fabian and Mother Filomina each came out with these bouquets of roses. Red ones. Sister Fabian gave Mrs. Button her bouquet and Madame got hers from Mother Filomina. And Mother Fil not only gave her her flowers, but then she hugged her for a kind of a long time, and it wasn’t one of those fake hugs that people give, but a real one. And when they stopped hugging, Madame blew a kiss to the audience and gave them one of those curtsies like people give to Queen Elizabeth, and one guy even whistled.

  And then Father Jerry said, “Well, folks, I guess that wraps things up except for one final detail. So let’s all stand and sing, ‘God Bless America.’” And everyone did, even me. And in the middle of it, Jackie’s lamb started squirming so much that he let him go. Then Eugene let his go, too, and the lambs started running around the stage bleating, and the first and second graders, and even some of us older kids, started chasing them, and one of the lambs jumped off the stage and people in the audience started chasing him, too.

  Back up in our classroom, Pauline Papelbon must have been feeling better because I seen her eat some of the refreshments, including two of Ma’s pizelles. Zhenya’s father kept telling me to have some of his raisin and milk curd strudel, and I didn’t really want to but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings either, so I tried some. It wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t that good either, and when Mr. Kabakov was talking to Marion and his family, I chucked it in the garbage can. I asked Ma where Pop was, and Ma said that it was too bad, but he must not have been able to get away from the lunch counter. “Yes, he did,” I said. “I saw him.”

  “You did? Then I guess he had to go back to the depot and finish up.”

  While all the other kids and their families were eating and talking and laughing about stuff, I kept looking over at Mr. and Mrs. Twerski and Rosalie.

  They were sitting by themselves in the back, looking kinda gloomy. Rosalie had changed back into her regular clothes and had gotten the rest of her beard off, but there was this kind of big red mark on her chin where her goatee had been. When I walked toward her, her eyes squinted like she was getting ready for me to say something snott
y. But what I said to her was, “I really liked your play.”

  “No you didn’t,” she said. “You told me you thought the ending was dumb.” Mrs. Twerski put her hand on Rosalie’s arm and shook her head.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But then I thought about it some more and changed my mind. Now I think it was a good ending.”

  She blinked. Nodded. “What do you say, sweetie?” Mr. Twerski said.

  “Thanks,” Rosalie said. I said you’re welcome and started to walk away. “Hey, Felix?” she said. When I turned back toward her, she said, “You were a pretty good Jesus, too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Better than that doll, anyway.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Out in the school parking lot was where Simone and Frances had their disagreement about whether Franz Duzio had only picked his nose or if he had both picked it and eaten it, and Ma said, well, she hadn’t seen Franz do either of those things, but maybe that was because she liked to focus on the positive and not always on the negative like some people she knew. (She looked at Frances when she said that last part.)

  When we got home, there was a note from Pop that said to meet him down at China Village in Easterly so’s our family could celebrate what a great job everyone did in the Christmas show, “especially whoever that kid was who played Baby Jesus. He was terrific!” To this day, I remember in vivid detail what happened next….

  We get in the car—Ma, my sisters, and me—and drive to Easterly. Along the way, I count the number of houses that are decorated with Christmas lights. That song by the Chipmunks, and “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bell Rock” play on the car radio. Plus that French song by the Singing Nun, “Domenica nica nica….”

  Pop’s already there, sitting in a half-circle booth with red plastic upholstery. He’s drinking a bottle of beer—Rheingold—and has already ordered Ma this fancy red drink that comes with pineapples and cherries on a stick. “What do you kids want to drink?” he asks us. Me and Frances both want Shirley Temples, and Simone just wants a Coke.