by Jack Gantos
Everyone gasped and looked at me as if I had just stabbed Harold. But I had done him a favor.
“I helped you get your wish,” I said to him. And he jerked his head around like a spastic robot and I could tell he was happy.
“See,” I said to everyone as I pointed at Harold’s mouth. “He’s smiling, ‘cause I helped him out.”
That’s exactly when Mrs. Howard took my hand and led me across the room. “I think you need to settle down for a few minutes,” she said. She made me sit in the Big Quiet Chair and read a book that couldn’t be read because when I looked at the letters they kept sliding off the page like drops of mercury when you smash open a thermometer, which is something I know about. I kept asking for a cupcake but Mrs. Howard said, “The last thing you need is sugar.” And she gave me a carrot.
“What’s up, Doc?” I said to her, and chewed the carrot really loudly with my mouth open.
But she didn’t answer because just then Mrs. Jarzab opened the door and brought in a scary-looking new kid who she said had come to our class from a school that didn’t have their own special room.
I never did make it back up to Mrs. Maxy’s class for math drills like I wanted to, and when school was out I walked home. That’s when I found out I left my key on the bulletin board, so I just lay down flat on the porch to hide from the bad kids and waited again for my mom. I was thinking about her all afternoon because of something I wanted to ask her.
When she turned the corner I ran up to her and tugged on her arm. “Can I ask you a question?”
“One minute,” she said, and gave me her purse to hold.
We went inside and she undressed, and hung her dirty work clothes that smelled like bleach on the back of the bedroom door, and put on her bathrobe, and all the time I kept saying, “Can I ask now? Can I?”
“Just let me wind down for a moment while you tell me where your key is,” she said. I told her about the bulletin board as I followed her to the kitchen and watched as she fixed herself a drink. She sat down at the breakfast table and opened the newspaper and hid her face behind the huge pages as if she were reading the wings of a giant butterfly.
“Now?”
“Count to a hundred first,” she said.
I was counting the numbers off as if I was running down a huge flight of stairs, and staring at the color photos of a car crash on the front of the newspaper.
“Now?” I asked, after I had counted to a hundred.
“Okay,” she said. “Fire away.”
“Did I eat paint chips when I was a baby?”
“No, just potato chips,” she said, and turned the page.
“Well, did I ever fall on my head?” I asked.
“Mostly your butt,” she said.
“Did you drink a lot when you were pregnant with me?”
She paused, and I could tell the fun was over. She didn’t lower the paper, so I couldn’t see her face.
“No more than the usual,” she finally said, as if she was far away, reading something.
“What’s usual?” I asked. “I don’t know what’s usual. You know. What?” And as I spoke I could feel my heart just picking up speed so I closed my eyes and sat on my hands because sometimes that helps settle me down like I’m in my own straitjacket.
“A glass of wine with dinner and an Amaretto sour after.” She said it like she had said it a million times already, and she was sick of saying it. And then she began to fight back. She lowered the pages for a moment. “Why are you asking? Why? Why?”
She knew when she asked “why” that the millions of little gears in my head just jammed all together. She knew I could never get to the why of anything. I could never get my mind to gather exactly what I wanted to say, and I could never find the trail to the bottom of what I meant. There were so many other trails that wandered off along the way, and me with them.
“We got a new kid today in specials,” I said as she rattled the paper, with my heart climbing high up into my chest. “And I heard one of the moms say he is ‘over the fence and long gone’ from his mom drinking too much when he was the size of a peanut. And he’s skinny, and his head is so small, like a kicked-around softball and he can’t do nothing. I mean nothing. Like my worst day is better than his best day. Ever.”
“Then count your blessings,” she said, turning the page. “And don’t go looking for ways to blame me for your problems. Other people drink wine and their kids are geniuses. You could of gone either way.”
I still couldn’t see her face, but it was like I could see her voice and it said, “Don’t push me. Just stop now and turn around before you go too far and get hurt.”
And so I buttoned my lip and just went back to eating the salty nuts out of the big bowl of party mix and then she lowered the paper and I saw two small wet spots where she held it across her lap. She was crying but I didn’t know if it was because she drank too much or if it was just the everyday sadness of her life with me.
She sniffed and sniffed as if she were pulling something up hand over hand on a rope, as if to pull it all back into her eyes and nose, and then she said, “Why me? Why? I try so hard.”
I don’t have an answer to that one. But someday all that asking me “why?” is going to wear my brain down so that it is as smooth as a boiled egg and I’ll just sit in Mrs. Howard’s big chair all my life like the coma kids and that word why will float through me from ear to ear like a warm breeze. We have a kid in specials named Kerwin Klump and Mrs. Howard calls him “My cute little lump,” but not in any kind of mean way. And he doesn’t do much but sit there and drool and then every now and again he jumps up and pulls the plastic fire alarm. He did it a couple times to the real one in the hallway during the first week of school, so they put a fake fire alarm in the specials room and he can pull that without the whole school having to empty out and the fire trucks arriving with ambulances screaming right behind them. And all the while Kerwin hopping up and down like he’s permanently on a pogo stick, saying, “I bad. I bad.”
No, I’m not like Kerwin. I can have good days. Entire days when I wake up and I’m calm inside like water when it’s not boiling, and I just plant my feet on the floor like every kid in America and do a sleepy walk down to the bathroom and take a nice hot shower and wash my hair and dry off and get dressed and eat breakfast and all the while thinking about what I’d like to do with my day. And then the most amazing thing to me is after I think about what I want to do, like read, or see a friend, or say something nice to Mrs. Howard, or write a poem, I actually do all that stuff. That is amazing to me. I think it, then I do it. This may be how everyone else operates, but this is not how I usually operate. Usually I wake up with springs popping inside my head, like I’m in the middle of a pinball game where I’m the ball, and I shoot out of bed and directly to the kitchen where I ricochet around after food until by chance I snatch some toast off the counter, then go slamming off the padded stool tops like they were lighted bumpers and zing up the hall and into the bathroom where I try to brush my teeth, but I brush mostly my lips and chin and then I explode back out the door and across the living room and carom off the furniture until Mom gets a grip on me and wipes the toothpaste off my face and works a pill down my throat. Then she holds the back of my head and pushes my face into her soft belly and just holds me like that for a few minutes, and if the meds are working I begin to settle down real well and when I pull my face away and look up at her she is smiling and stroking my head and if she is in a good mood we both start to laugh because it is so funny that I’ve just gone from being Ricochet Rabbit to Charlie Brown in no time flat. And this makes both of us so happy. I love it when she rescues me like this, and when the meds work, and when I go to school and stay in my seat and kids don’t call me Zippy and teachers pat me on the head at the end of the day and give me gold and blue foil stars and say nice things to me, and later when Mom comes home I tell her how good I’ve been and she smiles and smiles and I get so pumped up I run to mix her an Amaretto sour and she keeps
smiling and then calls me her genius, her hyper smart buddy, and we laugh.
6
WHO?
My day started out great. All the fourth- and fifth-grade classes got to go to the Amish farm for a field trip. There must have been about a hundred of us because we filled two long orange buses. My morning meds were working and I had a window seat and just loved watching all the cars and houses and fields speeding by, and when Mrs. Maxy was busy with other kids I sat up on my knees and stuck my head out the top window and felt the breeze sweep past me so fast and hard it made everything in my head stand still. That was the best part of my day right there, sticking my head out the window like a dog.
When we got off the bus Mrs. Maxy and Mrs. Deebs and two other teachers and a gang of moms had us all line up, and Mrs. Maxy gave everyone the lecture about “respecting differences in other cultures so no pointing and snickering or unpleasant comments or you sit on the bus. You got that?” We did, or we didn’t, but nobody knew which just yet. Once that was out of the way we marched toward the front steps of the farmhouse as if we were a line of ants dressed in clothes.
“Stop,” hollered Mrs. Deebs when we reached the steps. When she said “stop” she meant it because she had extra-short hair and a big head on a really wide body that there was no getting around. Every time her head moved left or right I thought it was about to roll down her sloping shoulders like a boulder down a hill.
Two clean-looking Amish girls in long blue dresses and starched white aprons came out and said, “Welcome. The Amish have been in Lancaster County since the seventeen hundreds. We are a people who keep alive the traditions of the past. Please follow us inside to see our plain and simple way of life, our crafts and cooking.”
For a moment I thought how it would have been so funny if kids took a field trip to my house when me and my grandma were living together. We’d step out the front door and say, “Welcome. Our place looks like a tornado’s just hit. Run around inside like we do and have a blast!”
The Amish girls led us across the porch, which had a line of rocking chairs, so while I was waiting my turn to get inside I ran from chair to chair giving each one a good push as if a family of ghosts was rocking, until one of the moms gave me a look and pointed to the end of the line which meant I had already lost my place.
Finally, I stepped through the front door. In the large room to one side were a bunch of old ladies with handkerchief hats on their heads. They were huddled together like a circle of mushrooms after a rainstorm and hand sewing a big quilt with huge sunflower stars in the middle. In the next room more ladies were hooking rugs and doing needlepoint, and even though the moms were all oohing and ahhing as if they were watching fireworks I started not to listen to any of it because I smelled something really good and sweet coming from down the hall and after just one whiff of that smell I couldn’t pay close attention to anything else. We passed a few more rooms and I didn’t care if the Amish were doing card tricks or shaving their beards off. My eyes were watered over and that smell had me staggering like a zombie.
After a lot of very polite and very boring questions and answers about Amish life one of the Amish girls led us the rest of the way down the hall into a huge kitchen. By then the sweet smell was so powerful I felt my nose swelling up, just getting bigger and bigger, and I had to touch it with both hands to make sure it wasn’t growing like Pinocchio’s. It was still the same old size, but that smell was so overwhelming to me I couldn’t get enough of it and I just kept gulping down huge breaths as if I could eat the air.
“Every product made in this typical Amish kitchen is based on what nature provides,” one of the girls said. “We make butter and cheese. Bread and biscuits, jams and jellies. But we are especially famous for our molasses shoofly pie.”
At first I didn’t think I heard her right. “A pie made out of shoes and flies and molasses?” I said to Seth.
“I bet it’s really good,” he said. “You should ask for some with extra flies.”
“Yeah,” I said, and was thinking about the pie so much I didn’t hear another word the girl said about Amish cooking secrets. The thought of a pie made out of shoes and flies was amazing me. And really, I didn’t care if they made their pies out of sweat socks and wiggle worms, as long as they turned out this sweet-smelling I’d eat them. Even as I stood there the sweetness was making me dizzy. I experimented and closed my eyes and took a deep breath, and I had to open my eyes quickly as I stumbled into Seth and he gave me a shove back and called me a moron. By the time I pulled myself together Mrs. Deebs was saying, “Okay, everyone line up for a little piece of shoofly pie before we go to the garden, and later to the barn.”
All I could think about was shoes and flies as I stood in line, and from where I was in the back I didn’t see any kids spit it out, so it must have been good. I dropped down on my knees to see what kind of shoes the Amish girls were wearing. They may have had some special shoe tradition I didn’t know about. Maybe their shoes were made out of licorice or rock candy. But their dresses were so long I couldn’t see their shoes and a mom gave me a stern look and yanked me up by the back of my shirt, as if I was trying to peek up their dresses.
“Mind your manners, young man,” the mom said with her eyebrows raised.
“I’m just doing research,” I shot back.
When it was close to my turn Mrs. Maxy called me to one side and whispered, “That pie is not good for you, Joey. It’s got too much sugar. So it’s better to just stick with fruit.”
She must have seen the hurt look on my face because I couldn’t hide it. It felt like my whole face turned into a crumpled piece of paper. And then she reached forward and handed me a small white napkin with an apple slice on it that had already turned brown on the edges.
“It has cinnamon on it,” she said. “It’s very good.”
“I don’t want this,” I replied. “I want the shoe fly pie.”
“Don’t make an issue out of it,” she said firmly. “We’re just doing what is best for you.”
And she didn’t want to talk about it anymore because other kids were beginning to bunch up at the back door and stare at us.
“Now move along,” she said to the kids. “If you’ve already had your pie, go over to the pumpkin patch and carve—”
And then she stopped talking, like she was saying something wrong in front of me, as if she wanted to spell it out like adults do when they want to keep a secret from kids who can’t spell. I took the apple slice and put it in my back pocket and kept on wondering why she didn’t finish telling me about the carving.
It didn’t take long to find out. A few minutes later we were all in the pumpkin patch with our baby pumpkins that we were allowed to pick off the vines. The Amish girls were handing out wood-handled carving tools and all the kids were sitting at picnic tables surrounded by the moms who were helping them.
I ran up to the Amish girl and got my tool, but Mrs. Maxy was right on me.
“Joey, you can’t have that knife,” she said. “It’s dangerous.”
I looked at the knife. The blade was real stubby and about an inch long and it wasn’t even that sharp. It was more like safety scissors.
“It’s not dangerous,” I said. “Besides, my mom lets me slice bread and stuff.”
“We just don’t want you to hurt yourself,” she said calmly.
“I want to carve one too,” I said.
“You can draw on one now,” she suggested, and held out a black marker. “And well carve it later. I promise.”
“I want to do it now with everyone else,” I said, and held the knife behind my back.
“Later,” Mrs. Maxy said. “All the moms are busy helping other kids.”
“Now!” I shouted, and my fists balled up and I could feel that surge of energy run through me like nothing in the world was going to keep me from doing what I wanted.
“Give me the knife,” she ordered, and held out her hand.
“No,” I said, and stepped back, then threw
it as far as I could into the pumpkin patch.
“I think it’s time for you to go have a time-out in the bus,” she said, getting tired of me. “If you can sit still for ten minutes and calm down, you can come back here and draw on your pumpkin.”
“Everyone else gets to carve theirs,” I said, pointing to all the other kids who were busy scratching out big evil eyes and teeth with their unsharp baby knives.
“We just don’t want any more accidents,” she said, and pointed toward the bus in front of the house. “Now be a good boy and go directly to the bus. I’ll be watching from here, and when we get ready to tour the barn I’ll get you.”
I turned around and stomped back alongside the farmhouse, and for a moment I thought I’d just keep walking all the way home and get my own knife and carve my own pumpkin. But I felt Mrs. Maxy’s eyes staring at the back of my head so I didn’t. And then I passed a window and smelled that sweet pie again. I glanced back over my shoulder and some kid was pulling on her sleeve and talking to her, so instead of walking home or going to the bus I sneaked around to the front door of the farmhouse. The quilt ladies were still working as I marched by real quick down to the kitchen. The Amish girls were out in the garden and no one else was on guard so I grabbed a whole shoe fly pie off the table because it popped into my head to do it and by then my feet were moving a mile a minute and I opened a side door and headed out beyond the barn toward the cornfield. I ducked down low and ran between two rows of tall stalks until I couldn’t see nothing around me but corn plants. I sat down and stuck my finger straight through the brown crust as if it were a knife and I carved out a broken-looking Halloween face on the pie, and when I was finished I stuck my finger in my mouth.