Losses: An older brother, who died in a terrible crash. He was really drunk when it happened. Not many people know all this, but Nenny does because Jill used to be her best friend.
Used to be.
Jackie Monroe: Jackie Monroe is weird. Like, really weird. She’s always bringing random bunches of things to school, as if grouped together they make sense: a sewing bobbin with three hairpins; two bookmarks wrapped in newspaper; a broken charm bracelet and a photo of someone on skis. At lunch she sits in the middle of the commotion, humming and sipping soup. She’s the only kid at Sacred Heart who brings soup.
Losses: Probably a lot, when her home planet was destroyed.
Franky O’Shea: In the first grade, Franky’s mother—who at the time was a secretary at school—was arrested and sent to jail for assaulting a police officer. She’d been at an anti-abortion rally and become enraged and ended up punching a cop. It’s hard to imagine: Ms. O’Shea (there was no mister, other than her sons), thin and lithe and with wispy red hair, hauling back and slugging some guy in the face. And then she was gone and the rumor spread and they hired a new secretary and then it was the end of the year. In September everyone watched Franky for some sign of change—his mother was still in jail, after all—but he just smiled and ran around with the other boys, red from the summer months. You could tell he was kind of faking it, though, all that exuberance, all that joy.
Losses: His mother, for a maximum of 3 years and a $10,000 fine.
Melissa Ryder: Melissa’s father owns a yacht, Melissa says. She’ll have her birthday party on it in the spring, she says. Everyone’s invited, Melissa says. Her father owns a yacht, they vacation in Spain, they’ve got a pool like the kind in the Olympics—Melissa says, Melissa says, Melissa says. But when her mother comes to pick her up, every day after school, in a beat-up old van like a wad of crushed paper, like a turd, it’s clear there’s no truth in what Melissa says. Still, “You’re all invited,” she says, always says.
Losses: Don’t believe anything Melissa says.
Steve Smoot: He’ll eat pieces of paper, small ones, but only if they’ve got drawings of food on them. Jill draws a tiny apple, Steve Smoot wolfs it down. Michael draws a banana (or something like it), Steve Smoot wolfs it down. It’s his party trick, except they’re not at a party; they’re at school.
Losses: He lives with his grandma and eats paper. You do the math.
Matty Souza: However unuttered, everyone agrees that whatever it is, whatever Matty’s got, it’s electrifying and rare. Everything he does is incredible, and not just the way he rolls his pants. The tiny air guitar he plays when he lip-syncs “La Bamba.” The way he undoes an orange, aiming for an endless, unbroken peel; the way he seldom succeeds. His skin is buttered toast. His hair is raked with gold. The boys treat him as the ringleader of their awkward, bumbling gang, circling him like loyal dogs, and there’s Matty, glancing around and blinking as if only now remembering they’re there. Or on Valentine’s Day each year, as his desk becomes piled with notes and candy and gifts, Matty regards his treasures as one might regard a strange light moving in the sky—with some confusion and some curiosity and perhaps, even, some fear. It isn’t that he’s dumb (Or who knows? Maybe he is.); it’s that their unflinching, constant adoration completely eludes him. To be sure, that only increases the appeal: wherever he is in his gold-addled brain, he is there completely alone, a prince on a planet far, far away.
How disastrously easy it is to love someone who has no idea that he is loved.
Losses: (Oh, but his eyes! You should see his eyes!)
Michelle Wynne: Spend your whole life trying to understand a girl like Michelle Wynne—good luck with that. She’s the only girl in the entire third grade who’s allowed to wear makeup. Well, “allowed.” Thick liner rims her eyes, and her lips glisten with pink gloss that she spends the day applying again and again. Mother Superior’s talked to her about it a number of times, sent so many notes home that the notes begin to write themselves.
“Mr. and Mrs. Wynne, Please keep in mind the dress code when you send Michelle to school. Makeup is strictly prohibited.” Or “Mr. and Mrs. Wynne, We are happy to have Michelle here, but she must comply with our rules.” Or “Mr. and Mrs. Wynne, Please.” Sending letters home really means no more than walking them across the street, where the Wynnes live in a tangle of run-down duplexes. It’s the kind of place you can tell used to be cute, scalloped edges on the buildings and a bird fountain in the courtyard. But the building’s all faded now, broken screen doors and dead grass and chipped paint. No water or birds in the fountain anymore. Michelle Wynne doesn’t pay tuition at Sacred Heart. If you saw her mother and father, you might be able to guess why, but no one’s ever seen them so then you knew why. Michelle is Sacred Heart’s charity case, and everyone is aware of this so they take pains not to treat her any different—but you know how charity cases are. There’s a force field around them like a wall of snow.
Take, for example, this: Last year, for the Halloween fair, Michelle came dressed in a tube top and a tiny skirt. Nenny was (cleverly) a half boy, half girl; Franky was Peter Pan; Matty Souza was it doesn’t matter, he was Matty Souza; and so on. But Michelle had on this tiny skirt, just a little afterthought of a thing, and with Magic Marker had scribbled all over it: “Two-for-one special” and “Want to spend some time?” She sat on a bench near the girls’ bathroom, snapping her gum and bouncing her crossed legs, her skinny, freckled little legs, hands on the bench, surveying the crowd. Everyone knows a girl with charcoal eyes, a girl whose parents never leave the house. Everyone knows, but at the same time—second grade, bench outside the bathroom—no one, not Nenny or Katie or Yvonne or any of them, knew anything about anything yet.
“Michelle, what are you supposed to be?”
“I’m a bachelor’s wife,” she said. “It’s the oldest profession in the world.” She didn’t even look at them, just looked out at the crowd, and no one had any idea what she was talking about. Mother Superior must’ve known, though, because at some point she came storming across the yard.
“Home, now.” Her face was charred concrete, her hand shaking angrily as she pointed across the street. And you know Michelle: she just shrugged and got up off that bench and walked home, turning once to give a little toodle-loo wave.
Please, Mr. and Mrs. Wynne. Please.
Losses: Next year, her father, of a drug overdose. Charcoal eyes, beginning of the fourth grade.
New Nun
AT THE beginning of February, out of nowhere, Sister Timothy is sent to live in Holland—the children there must need a furious, boring dictator—and a new nun arrives. Her name is Mary. With a name like Mary you half expect a Maria type, with a voice like an angel singing, but Mary has yellowish teeth and grey hair poking from under her habit, deep wrinkles around her warm eyes, and a walk like an injured man’s. First thing she says is “Oh no, this will never do” and makes them rearrange their desks into a circle. Then she says to José, “My dear, would you please open the blinds?” The sudden winter light is shocking, and the children all blink like moles as it spills into the room. Sister Timothy kept the blinds closed. She said things like “You will speak when spoken to” and “An idle mind is the devil’s playground.” She’d clap her hands to wake them, in a ruthless, unforgiving way, or rap her yardstick on their desks—thwap—to drive home her points. She never smiled and often shone with spiteful sweat.
Sister Mary is not Sister Timothy. This afternoon, after the students have gone home, she’s going to take down all the bloody, sorrowful pictures of Jesus and replace them with the other Jesus, the one who sits in a field of eternal spring, smiling at a crowd of cheerfully dressed children and bright white sheep.
Right now she says, “You don’t have music hour?” and everyone shakes their heads. As if it’s the most incredible thing she’s ever heard, she asks again. “Sister Timothy didn’t teach music?”
No. Sister Timothy most definitely did not teach music. Mary gazes at t
hem for a moment as if she’s landed on an alien planet, where no one plays music and all Jesus does all day is cry.
“Well, all right,” she sighs. “That’s an easy enough problem to fix.”
By the Pool
“WE GOT a new nun.”
“You got a new nun? I want a new nun.” And who knows what Boots even means by that, but they both laugh anyways.
“What’s she like?”
Nenny shrugs. “She seems nice.”
“That’s good. The other one…”
“Sister Timothy.”
“Yeah, her. She seemed like a bitch.”
“Boots!”
“What? You know it’s true.”
“You can’t call a nun a bitch.”
“Why not?”
Good point.
“She wants us to learn the recorder,” Nenny says.
“The what?”
“It’s like a flute.”
“That’s cool. My uncle plays the flute.” Boots throws a pebble and it plunks into the murky water.
Mr. Baldy comes out of his apartment then. “Hey, now! No messing with the pool!” he calls.
“Okay, Mr. Baldy!” Boots calls back.
This happens at least once a week, Mr. Baldy emerging from his apartment and calling, “Hey, now! No messing with the pool!” and Boots calling back, “Okay!” It’s never an unfriendly exchange, and he seems nice enough. He seems like the kind of guy who would ask you how’s school or what’re you girls up to today—but maybe like he always forgets, like he’s got other things on his mind.
* * *
Later, when Nenny hands Dad the information sheet about the recorder, he says, “Fifteen bucks? For a plastic flute?”
Nenny shrugs. “She says we need it.”
“You need it? Flutes teach history now?” But he writes out a check anyways. On the little memo line, next to his signature, he writes “recorder,” then scratches it out and writes “plastic flute” instead.
The Size of the World
ON THEIR third day with Sister Mary, Michael Barber reveals that he does not know where Spain is, and Sister Mary slaps a hand to her forehead as if they are too much—just too, too much. And it’s true. As a group, they are woefully ignorant about the world. Nenny knows where Spain is but has no idea what goes on there. The pope lives in Italy, which is shaped like a boot. Russia is a paw print smashed into a pane of glass. But it’s not enough, because Sister Mary regards them from the front of the room, clearly disturbed, and when she speaks, she chooses her words very carefully so they might understand.
“This,” she says, waving her hand to indicate them, the room, “is not the world. The world is very big. We are just a tiny part.” She is silent for a moment to let that sink in: you, you precious little beasts, are not the center of the universe.
Then she turns abruptly and begins writing on the board. “Every week you will bring in one item from the news. You will give us the facts and your opinions about them. Everyone will share.” She turns back to face them, dusting the chalk off her hands as if chalk, too, was a small disgrace. On the board she has written, in bold block letters, “THE WORLD IS VERY BIG,” and below, smaller, “What is our place in it?”
So now they have to give reports. Michael has to go first because he got them into this mess.
“Michael, why don’t you begin?” Sister says calmly the following week, as though ready to forgive their collective stupidity and start anew.
Michael walks to the front of the room. He is a very awkward boy, the kind of boy whose mother irons his pants every day to no avail. He’s messy in a cartoonish sort of way, beyond help.
“On Monday,” he begins, “a boat carrying hundreds of barrels of oil crashed in Alaska. It was a disaster! There was oil everywhere. Oil in the water. Oil on the ducks! Will they ever be able to clean up all that oil? I guess only history will tell.” He lets his hands drop to his sides and smiles expectantly. The room’s as quiet as an empty box.
“And…” Sister Mary says, her eyebrows raised.
“And that’s all.” Michael shrugs. “I guess history will tell.”
“Michael,” Sister says, with the gentle patience of trying to teach something to a two-celled organism. “Where’s your article?”
He flips his paper over as if it will miraculously be attached, then shrugs. “My house?” as a question, as if someone else might know.
Sister Mary blinks and takes a deep, deep breath. “Thank you, Michael. You may return to your seat.” She stands at the board, deep in thought. After a pause, she writes, “Who What Where When Why How.”
“Let’s try again,” she says patiently. It’s obvious she’d do anything to have another adult in the room, someone to nod vigorously and say Yes, it is crazy making, isn’t it? “Each week you will bring in an article from a newspaper or magazine. The article must be stapled to the back of your report”—she doesn’t glance at Michael, but the rest of them do—“and cannot be from the Citrus Times.” A small murmur moves through the room, because clearly they’ve all referred to the Citrus Times. “Why can’t it be from the Citrus Times?” Sister asks, anticipating their idiocy. “Because the purpose of this assignment is to understand the scope of the world.” She pauses so that anyone may write that down, which Katie Marion—and only Katie Marion—eagerly does. “Finally, when you present, you must answer these basic questions in your report. Who, what, where, when, why, and how. For example, Michael might have told us, who was the captain of the ship? What caused the crash? When did the accident happen—during the day, or at night when most of the crew was asleep? And so on.” Michael nods eagerly, as if the answer to all of those questions is yes. “Any questions?”
Jessica raises her hand. “My family only gets the Citrus Times…” and trails off, as if it’s hopeless, there’s nothing she can do.
“That’s fine. I’ll bring in extra papers and leave them here. Anyone may come in during lunch. Any other questions?”
No, there are no other questions. If they thought they could skirt through the third grade thinking only of themselves, well, clearly they were wrong.
Daddy’s Boy
THE FEBRUARY 27 issue of Time magazine features a painting of a man with a big white beard and eyes so deep it’s impossible to discern if they’re kind or cruel. The cover reads “The Ayatollah Orders a Hit” in bold, threatening yellow. Nenny has no idea what any of that means, but a report due is a report due.
“Can I have this?” she asks Dad, who’s in the kitchen making beans & franks. All their meals are linked with ampersands: beans & franks, spaghetti & meatballs, macaroni & cheese. It’s the divorced-dad fare. Cheap & not good for you, but tasty & easy to prepare.
“Let’s see that,” he says, goofily taking the magazine. He holds it up to his nose as if he can’t see the print. When Dad cooks, he becomes excitable, happy for company and distraction. It’s actually not difficult to discern his moods. If you want something, try to catch him when he’s cooking or folding laundry or, really, doing any chore. If you’re looking to piss him off, tap his shoulder when he’s driving or, better, knock on the bathroom door. Bug him when he’s grading papers if you want to be ignored. That’s really the best and the worst time: you can effectively get and do what you want, but have you ever been ignored? Or been nine and ignored?
“You’re reading Time now? Baby-Sitters Club not informative enough?”
You know what I read? Nenny is so delighted he’s picked up on this detail that she ignores the jab.
“It’s for school,” she says. “Sister Mary’s making us do reports.”
“Good for her.” He starts flipping through the pages. After a minute, he shakes his head mournfully and lays the magazine in front of her. “Messy stuff,” he says and sighs then, a heavy and distressed sigh. If she could, she’d just bring Dad to school and have him sigh like that in front of the class. His sigh illustrates perfectly the size of the world, that it is very, very big.
The article about the ayatollah is long and hard to understand. It’s filled with words she’s never seen before, so she gives up before the end of the third paragraph. She flips to the letters at the front. There seems to be a lot of back-and-forth about last month’s issue. One guy writes, “There is no reason a private citizen should have need for a semiautomatic rifle.” A guy from Portugal is upset about luxury bunkers in Japan: “Who wants to live underground like a mole?” Nenny flips and flips. There’s an article called “The Immigration Mess,” accompanied by a photo of people waiting in an endless, hot-looking line. A complicated chart details the trial of some guy named Oliver North. At the bottom of page 20 she spies a tiny article, Dad shouts, “Dinner!” and she decides whatever it’s about, it’s good enough.
* * *
“Encouraged by his father’s success as president, George W. Bush is considering a run for governor,” Nenny reads the next morning, standing in front of the class.
“Nenny, if I may,” Sister Mary says from where she’s leaning on her desk. She rarely sits at it. She tends to lean against this side of it so that at any moment she can scribble something on the board or circle the room with big gestures. “Rather than reading, would you please summarize the article in your own words?”
“Okay.” Nenny glances at the article, then says, “Basically, President Bush’s son wants to be governor, but nobody likes him.”
Every Other Weekend Page 13