by Dennis Smith
Father Hamilton is just being a pain, I am thinking as I walk up First Avenue, and it’s not so bad. I shouldn’t let him rile me up. Mommy says that we should be careful about what people we let rile us up, because most of the time it is just a waste of a good rile. I have a lot to feel good about. I am the youngest in the altar boy class. I got in the class even though I’m only in the third grade, because of the high marks I got in vocabulary. So they made an exception. Usually, you have to be nine.
I see Mr. Dempsey standing outside of his delicatessen when I get to the corner of 56th Street. He waves to me and calls out.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says, “do you want to earn fifty cents and sweep the store out?”
It would take me just a little while, I am thinking, and I would be a little late for dinner, but he said fifty cents this time. At least it wouldn’t be a dime. I wouldn’t risk being late again for a dime and spend the whole time after school tomorrow with Mommy at Mrs. Grayson’s apartment on Sutton Place.
Mr. Dempsey gives me a broom and asks me to start in the back of the store, where there are a million boxes waiting to be unpacked. There is a customer in the store, and I start to move the boxes around and sweep behind them. The boxes are like mountains, stacked very high, and I feel very little in front of them. As I sweep, I am thinking about the eraser job that Sister Maureen took away from me. She should have known just how careful I was to get every last speck of chalk dust out of those erasers, so that she would be glad that she asked me of all the boys in the class to do the job. And here I am, being as careful as I can to get to all the corners and sweep them clean.
Mr. Dempsey is saying goodbye to the customer at the front door. I am thinking that I never saw him walk a customer to the front door before, and I wonder why he is doing it. I see him from way back in the storeroom corner. He turns the lock and turns the OPEN sign over. It is so early to be closing the store, I am thinking, and I begin to sweep a little faster so that I can be through before he closes the store. And Mr. Dempsey comes to the back of the store and says he wants to show me something, and he picks me up and puts me on one of the small boxes, and he is holding my wrist, and I don’t like that he is doing that, and he is unbuttoning his pants, and then he takes himself out of his pants and I begin to get very frightened, and I don’t know why he is doing this, and I wish Mommy was here to see me make a face, and to tell me to stop, and to tell him to stop. He pulls my wrist over so that my little hand is near to himself, and I pull away, but his grip on my wrist is so strong, and I want to run, anywhere, and to tell somebody that I am only eight years old, and Mr. Dempsey has me a prisoner in the storeroom of his delicatessen, and he pulls my little hand a little harder until it is nearly on top of himself, and I want to get away, but he is pulling, and I think of my brother Billy and of how quick he is in everything, and so I begin to yell at the top of my lungs and wriggle as quickly as I can, jumping down from the box, screaming, trying to free myself from his strong grip, jumping fast from foot to foot, pulling away on one side and then on the other, beginning to punch at Mr. Dempsey with my free hand, saving all my strength for one big tug away from him, and then he looses his grip, finally, as I charge away and I run to the front of the store, but the front door is locked, and I am screaming now as loud as I have ever screamed, and Mr. Dempsey looks afraid, and he is yelling for me to shut up, shut up, and he opens the lock, and I never look at him, but run out of the store as fast as I’ve ever done anything, and I run to my stoop where there are some women sitting on newspapers, and I thank God that Sue Flanagan is not there because I can feel the red in my face and the tears in my eyes, and I feel so embarrassed, like I did something very bad and people were pointing at me and saying there is Dennis, the little kid who will do anything for fifty cents, and so I jump up the steps of the stoop and run right past them, into the hall and up the stairs, not a word or a squeak out of me.
Then I am on the fourth floor, and I am out of breath. I remember now that I never started to cry, and that makes me feel a little better, and I think it is because there is nothing that I did wrong and I wish I could make everything go away and just go back to church and Father O’Rourke and the bells. And I would even listen to Father Hamilton. I am not in the mood to cry. Instead, I am in the mood to get a zip gun and shoot Mr. Dempsey. And I think, too, that I am too mad to go into the house, and I don’t want Mommy to see me like this because she will ask a hundred questions like Sam Spade. I try to calm down by counting to one hundred in sevens, and I get to ninety-eight, and I try to think of something else to think of. I am having a hard time breathing, I guess from running so fast up the stairs, and I am making the faces.
Calm down, I tell myself, calm down or you’ll never be able to go home. What am I going to say to Mommy? I can’t say anything. I can’t even tell Billy because I know Billy will go around and throw bricks through all of Mr. Dempsey ‘s windows, and the police will come, and Billy will tell them everything, and then I’ll go to jail, too, because I told Billy and so I started it all.
Elephants, I think. I’ll count the elephants clumping through the jungle, stepping on trees and making them fall over so that the other elephants have a path, and in my mind I can see these animals in slow motion, one by one, each holding the other’s tail, each helping to keep the line straight so that they will all get to where they are going in one piece. One, two, three, four, and they are moving so slowly I wish I could make them gallop, but they just plod ahead like turtles.
I notice now that I am breathing better, and I begin to walk down the long, dark hall to apartment 26. At the apartment door I pick up a corner of the linoleum at my feet, grab the key, and open the door.
Billy and Mommy are at the kitchen table.
“Boy oh boy,” Mommy says, “are you lucky. One more minute and you would be in your bed without your dinner.”
I bless myself as I sit, and look at the plate that Mommy has put before me. It is ravioli, soft ravioli, the kind from the can. They are like marshmallows. I once had real ravioli at Dante Vescovi’s house, and it didn’t taste anything like this. It was scrunchy. I can’t talk, and so I just yes and no everything to death, and try to be anything but suspicious. I can’t eat, either, but I force myself. The raviolis don’t taste so bad, but they are as hard to eat as the tripe because my stomach is beating time with my heart, and I keep thinking that all I want to do is lie down and go to sleep.
God, I don’t want Mommy to find out about this.
Chapter Eleven
Everyone in the third grade except for Greta Schmidt is lined up for the bus that will take us to the Guggenheim Dental Clinic on 72nd Street. Greta’s father is Dr. Schmidt, and we go to him for school examinations. The welfare doctor does not do regular exams, just the emergency ones. The Schmidts have their own house on 53rd Street, and so they are rich. Dr. Schmidt would not sign the release form to send Greta to the dentist with us, and Greta does not know why. And so I feel a little sorry for Greta because she has to sit in Sister Urban’s class all day, and nobody likes Sister Urban. Not even the priests, and they like everyone. Father O’Rourke and Father Hamilton never seem to talk to her at our assemblies, but they talk to all the other nuns. I’ll have to go to Sister Urban in the fifth grade, and Billy told me it is like going to reform school, only she beats you worse than the prison guards. Maybe she’ll get diphtheria or something before I get there, and she’ll have to recuperate for ten years. Billy had diphtheria last year and almost died. He had to stay in the hospital for a month, down in Bellevue, and Mommy cried a lot every night. I made her tea. It always cheered her up when I made her tea.
We were doing sentence diagrams all morning, and I hate that. I hate grammar the way I hate tripe. It is not necessary, because if you are going to tell someone a story, it will be a good story or it won’t, and how you diagram the sentences of the story won’t help. If I am late for dinner, and Mommy is rip-roaring mad at me, the last thing in the world I would think of is diagramming the s
entences of my excuse.
My favorite sentence is one I made up, which says, “Me and Billy are going to Abbie’s candy store because Abbie is giving away free egg creams.” I know it’s wrong to write it that way, but I only care about the egg cream part.
School has been a lot of trouble to me this year, and I don’t know why.
I haven’t been memorizing hardly anything, like the dates for the discoverers I have to know for the tests, and the rivers in Brazil. You have to know these things to be promoted, but I just don’t care about being promoted, or even knowing that Hannibal crossed the Alps because he happened to have a lot of elephants. It’s not that I want to do anything different, either. I just feel that school is as important to me right now as swimming in the East River in the wintertime.
I have tried to study my lessons every night, but after ten minutes or so I begin to get fidgety, and so I quit and listen to the radio. Sister Stella yells at me every day for not doing my homework, and then she puts her arms around me like she is sorry for yelling at me.
I keep thinking that if my father was with us and he had a job, everything would be a lot different. Mommy wouldn’t have to spend all that time on her hands and knees, and we could go places, and buy things, and Mommy could have time to have a lot of friends.
Mommy knows that my school grades are not as good as they used to be, and she keeps asking if Sister Stella is spending enough time with me and helping me. She thinks Sister Stella doesn’t pay much attention to me. But I keep telling her that Sister Stella loves all the students because of Saint John Bosco, and she is always being nice to everybody. How do I know if she’s spending enough time with me? She’s always there in the class, anyway.
All the kids like Sister Stella because she never hits anyone and no one ever gets into trouble in her class. Except for Raymond Rab-bitscabbage, whose real name is Rasakavitch, and who calls things out in the middle of her lessons and then gets sent to stand in the coat closet with the door closed.
But Sister Stella always hugs him when he comes out.
The bus stops in front of a building that looks to me like a Con Edison plant, for there are high windows that are wired to keep the crooks out. We go in, the twenty of us, two by two, and sit on long metal benches. Sister Stella is there watching over us, and so it is easy for us and we don’t have to keep absolutely still. Some nuns will clout you good if they catch you talking when you’re supposed to be quiet, but not Sister Stella. If she catches you talking, she just clips you under the chin with her bent finger a couple of times. That makes most of us laugh, and then Sister Stella laughs with us.
Each of us has a list with the capitals of the countries in South America.
“Memorize the list,” Sister said to us when we sat, “and we will have a test tomorrow.”
I start with the first five, Lima, Montevideo, Caracas, BogotÁ, and Rio something. Maybe the dentist will know.
I am one of the first to be called, and a nurse takes me into a small cubicle. I am told to sit in a large stuffy chair, like the one at Freddy’s, the barber on 58th Street. A young guy comes into the room, wearing a white jacket with two pencils in the handkerchief pocket. He looks a little like crazy Mario, and he is carrying a small pick and a round mirror. He tells me to hold the mirror up so that I can look into my mouth, and he picks at my teeth. He goes right to a tooth that hurts, and I yell. It is up top and way in the back, and my jaw begins to sting. My teeth never hurt like that unless I let cold water go on them.
“That’s one,” he says as he goes to the next tooth and jabs at it. “Ahh, here’s another. It is the next-door tooth.”
I yell again as he picks at it.
Another man comes in. This one is also in a white jacket. He has hairs sticking way out from his nose. The guy steps back and the man looks into my mouth and then reads a paper that the young guy shows him.
“Okay,” he says, looking at me, and then they both leave.
In a minute the young guy comes back with a nurse who is carrying a tray of silver tools.
They give me something to drink, a small paper cup of orange syrup. It makes me a little dizzy, and after a while the nurse comes behind me and holds my shoulders as the young guy shoves a pair of pliers in my mouth. He begins to tug at my tooth, and I can feel the tooth moving. I realize he is pulling my tooth out, and it comes out easily. It hardly hurts at all. He holds the tooth out in front of me so that I can take a good look. And then he throws it in the garbage can.
As he goes in for the next one I realize that this one hurts the moment he touches it, and I wince and try to shift out from the nurse’s grip. This tooth, though, is like a mule, and it won’t come out, and he pulls so hard I think that my mouth is leaving my body. The nurse’s hands are practically going through the skin of my shoulders as I shake and squirm, and she never loses her grip.
“Take it easy,” the young guy says, “take it easy.”
I am yelling bloody murder now, trying to figure out why they would let such a young guy do this in a clinic, and the guy keeps saying, “Take it easy, don’t make it hard on me.”
In all of this time, he has one hand pressed down hard on my nose, and I don’t know now if my nose hurts more than my mouth.
“It’s coming,” the guy says. “Don’t make it hard on me.”
I don’t know how he could be thinking that it is hard on him when I am being picked apart like this.
When the jackass of a tooth finally does come out, it comes out suddenly, and the pliers jerk from my mouth and slam into my lower lip. The lip begins to bleed, and the nurse is getting upset. She doesn’t have any gauze, and she runs to get some.
The young guy throws this tooth into the garbage can, too.
When the nurse returns, she has a big wad of cotton that looks like it has been soaked in monkey grease. She puts it into my mouth and tells me to bite down hard. It feels funny in there, like the whole side of my mouth is missing. She then presses gauze on my lower lip until it stops bleeding. After a while, the nose-hair man comes in again and looks into my mouth. He takes the cotton out and throws it into the garbage can with my teeth.
“Good, good,” the man says. “All right.”
When he leaves, the nurse smiles at me and then fills my mouth again with the cotton. She is close to me, and I can see how the material of her uniform is being stretched at her breasts. I wonder if Sue Flanagan has ever been in this clinic with her nurse’s uniform, and if she leans in close to people like this. I can smell the nurse’s hair, she is so close, and it smells like applesauce. I think it is so funny that they have tortured me here and left the Grand Canyon in my mouth, and still I am thinking about Sue Flanagan and applesauce.
In the bus, going back to school, I sit next to Ann Kovak, a tall blond girl who could be the prettiest girl in school if she wasn’t so quiet and shy. She sees I have my hand pressing against my mouth, and she leans over and pats my other hand.
She says, “It will be okay tomorrow, Dennis.”
Most of the rest on the bus are quiet, except for Dante Vescovi, who is bragging that he doesn’t have any cavities.
“How about the cavity on top of your shoulders?” Raymond Rabbitscabbage says.
“Maybe they missed a cavity,” I say. It is hard to talk with all the cotton in my mouth, and it hurts as I move my jaw up and down. “They can miss things at the clinic, you know.”
The bus hits a bump, and the bump goes right to the empty space in my mouth. I don’t want to yell because no one else on the bus is yelling. Sister Stella is knitting something in the front seat. She doesn’t look at the knitting as she does it. She is looking out the window, watching the buildings go by.
“That’s no clinic,” Dante says to me. “That’s a school for jerk-offs.”
A school for jerk-offs. It’s no wonder Dr. Schmidt wouldn’t let Greta go.
I think about this all the way back to school.
The next day at school, Sister Stella gives each of us a
pamphlet about a girl named Maria Goretti who died a long time ago, even before my mother was born.
I like it when they give things out at school, like scapulars and holy pictures and miraculous medals. Usually, we just take these things home, but today Sister gives us the pamphlet and then makes us read it out loud. I like to read out loud, but today is not the day to do it. Ann Kovak was wrong, because my mouth is still so sore from the dentist that I can’t really talk.
The class is reading like they are singing a song or saying the pledge of allegiance, and Sister sees that I am not doing it with them. She quietly comes down the aisle and knuckles me under the chin a few times. She does this to everyone, and no one ever seems to mind, but now my mouth is hurting like she poured boiling water inside of it.
“Oww,” I say, and the class shuts up like there was a fire alarm or something.
Sister Stella looks so surprised, because everyone knows she wouldn’t hurt a fly.
“My teeth hurt,” I say to her. “I have a teethache.”
The class laughs at this, and I am laughing to myself, too, because there aren’t even any teeth there anymore where it hurts.
Sister puts her arms around me and smiles at me. She tells me that I don’t have to read with the others, and then she starts them up again.
Soon I forget all about the pain in my mouth because this Maria girl got me so interested in her life. She is called Blessed, which is not like when you bless yourself. But Bless-ed, which is kind of a title, and it is something that you have to get to be before they can make you a saint.