Wishin' and Hopin'

by Wally Lamb

  Well, I sure wasn’t going to whip myself or bathe lepers, whatever they were. I could do the chunks of wood thing, though, I figured. So what I did was, before bed that night, I fished my can of Lincoln Logs out of the bottom of my toy chest and dumped them into bed with me. That lasted for about five minutes’ worth of tossing and turning before my foot got an itch and I tried to scratch it with a Lincoln Log and it gave me a sliver. I sent the Lincoln Logs flying onto the floor. French-kissing Annette’s poster might be the kind of sin that could get me cast into hell, but if heaven was going to be full of goody-goodies like Aloysius Gonzaga and Rosalie Twerski, then I figured I’d just go to H-E-double-toothpick instead. After all, Lonny was probably headed there. And Chino. And a bunch of our regulars down at the lunch counter.

  It rained on Halloween, gently at first—a moist caress that made the glistening, streetlamp-lit fallen leaves slippery, but not the kind of rain that made your parents say you couldn’t go trick-or-treating.

  Lonny was a bum: rippy dungarees, a busted straw hat, and flannel shirt, and cheeks smeared with ash from his mother’s ciggy butts. (He’d carried them over to my house in a Baggie.) A lot of people thought Lonny was Huckleberry Finn. I was Speedy Alka Seltzer, although so many people mistook me for a flying saucer that I started singing, “Plop, Plop. Fizz Fizz. Oh, what a relief it is!” whenever homeowners opened their door. We were trick-or-treating for UNICEF, too.

  Lonny said everyone in his neighborhood turned off their lights and sat in the dark because they were too cheap to buy kids candy, so he’d had to “borrow” my neighborhood. My mother told me that when she’d called Lonny’s mother to see if he could sleep over, Mrs. Flood had said sure—we could keep him as long as we wanted, forever as far as she was concerned. She’d been joking, Ma said, but Ma hadn’t thought it was very funny.

  It felt pretty grown up trick-or-treating with just one of my friends; this was the first year Ma hadn’t made my sisters take me, against their protests and mine. Lonny and I worked our way down Chestnut Street, then up Franklin and McKinley as far as Warren Street, then right onto Broad Street, and back down Grove. “How can they not know you’re a bum and I’m Speedy Alka Seltzer?” I sighed.

  “Because people are idiots,” Lonny said. “Get used to it.” Lightning illuminated him as he said it, then thunder cracked the sky. Seconds later, the sky let loose, soaking our costumes, our candy, and us. The cigarette soot on Lonny’s cheeks dripped down his face and then washed away altogether and my sneakers were squishing with every step I took. The bottom of the First National bag I was using to trick-or-treat with gave way from the weight of my loot. “Let’s go home,” I said. Me and Lonny were transferring my candy from the sidewalk to his pillowcase when my father pulled up in our army green Studebaker. “You fellas need a lift?” he asked. We both got in the backseat, so it was kind of like Pop was our chauffeur. “Take us home, Salvatore,” I said.

  “Don’t push it, wise guy,” Pop said.

  After we changed into our PJs, Lonny and I poured all our candy out onto my bed, divided it into piles, and traded. Ma told us we could each eat three things and then we had to stop. We could stay up until eleven o’clock, she said, and then it was lights off and go to sleep. “Do we have to go to church tomorrow? I whined. She said yes, we certainly did; it wasn’t only Sunday but also All Saints Day—a holy day of obligation, which meant mandatory Mass on two counts, not just one.

  “Well how come he never has to go?” I demanded, pointing to Pop.

  “Because your father has a business to run,” she countered. “And may I remind you, Mr. Knows Everything There Is to Know, that that business is what puts food on our table. Now maybe you should stop arguing with me and embarrassing yourself in front of your guest. What do you think?”

  “Oh, I ain’t embarrassed, Mrs. Funicello,” Lonny assured her. “Our family fights all the time.”

  “Well, Lonny, that’s very polite of you to say,” Ma assured him. “But we’re just having a discussion, not a fight.”

  “Oh,” Lonny said.

  Since Pop was in the room, I decided to negotiate. It worked, too. We got Ma to compromise: five pieces of candy each, an eleven thirty bedtime, and Lonny and I didn’t have to go to the 9:15 A.M. mass with my mother and sisters. Instead, free agents, we could go by ourselves to last mass at noon.

  Of course, what Lonny and I had agreed to didn’t mean that, once my bedroom door was closed, we had to stick to it. I ate nine pieces of candy and Lonny ate about twice that much. Hepped up on sugar, we had a tickling war and a pillow fight. Then we each opened our packs of Sugar Babies and NECCO Wafers and started whipping them at each other. When Lonny began pouring packets of Kool-Aid down his throat, I warned him that he was gonna get sick.

  “No, I won’t!” he insisted, and then, immediately after, began clutching his stomach and moaning. Then he ran to the corner of my room and started up-chucking. At least that was what I thought he was doing. “Are you okay?” I asked, approaching him cautiously. The two of us stood there looking at the pool of chunky brown puke on the floor. Then, to my horror, Lonny reached down, picked it up, and threw it at me. All’s it was was plastic puke; he’d bought it off the Tricks & Jokes rack at Central Soda Shoppe so’s he could fool me.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” I said. I went over to my desk, opened my social studies book, and took out his whoopee cushion.

  “Hey, this is the one Dymphie took away from me,” he said. “How’d you get it back?”

  “That’s for me to know and for you to find out,” I said.

  “No, really.”

  “I’m Robin Hood,” I said. “I rob from the rich and give to the poor.”

  I thought Lonny would think that was funny, but he didn’t. He got kind of mad, actually. His eyes got crazy and his nostrils opened and closed like a bull’s in a bull fight. He shoved me up against the wall and held me there, his arm pressed against my chest. “What makes you think I’m poor?” he demanded.

  “I don’t think you are,” I assured him (though I knew he was.) “All’s I meant was that the teachers are like the bad guys and us kids are the good guys.” I was on the verge of tears, either from the pressure against my chest or his sudden, unanticipated move against me. I wasn’t sure which.

  “Okay then,” he said, and let go. “You gonna eat that Almond Joy or can I have it?” I handed it over.

  At lights out, Lonny and me lay side by side in the dark. I was in my sleeping bag and he was borrowing my sister Frances’s. At first, we were both quiet. Then, out of the blue, Lonny said, “Your father’s old, isn’t he?”

  “Kind of,” I said. “Older than my mother. She’s 42 and he’s 51. Why?”

  “No reason. Did they have to get married?”

  “Have to? Uh uh. They wanted to, I guess.”

  “Oh. Because my old man had to marry my old lady. Because my brother Denny was already in the oven, if you get my drift.”

  I didn’t, but what he’d just said reminded me of that joke one of the sailors had told Chino down at the depot. “How is a woman like a stove?” I said. Lonny said he didn’t know, and I said, “Because you gotta heat the oven up before you stick the meatloaf in.” I still didn’t get why that joke was funny, but Lonny laughed the exact same way Chino had.

  Both of us were quiet some more, and I started wondering if Lonny’d already fallen asleep when he said, “You know something. You’re lucky. My old man, when he used to live with us? If he knew I was out trick-or-treating in a thunderstorm, there’s no way in hell he woulda come looking for me.”

  “How do you know?” I said. “Maybe he would have.”

  He laughed. “I can see you don’t know my old man.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say that would make him feel better, so all’s I said was, “Well, I’m getting kinda sleepy. G’night.”

  He reached over and poked me. “Night, shithead.”

  I poked him back and said what Frances always said whe
never I called her a name. “I’m the rubber and you’re the glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”

  “Yeah, you’re the rubber, all right,” Lonny laughed. “For a teeny, tiny, little dickie.” I wasn’t sure if, when he said dickie, he meant a guy’s you-know-what or one of those fake turtleneck things that kids wore under their shirts. But knowing Lonny, he probably meant the first thing.

  “I know you are,” I said. “But what am I? Gate’s closed!” Which, when you say “gate’s closed,” it means the other person has to stop. So Lonny was the little dickie, not me.

  The next morning after 9:15 mass, Ma had Simone drive her and Fran down to the lunch counter and then come back so she could make Lonny and me pancakes for breakfast. I was pushing it, I knew, when I asked Simone if we could have soda instead of milk and she said no. “What do you think, Felix? That you died and went to Heaven?”

  Simone had set her hair and Scotch-taped her bangs because she had a modeling job that afternoon—some stupid fashion show that Ma was making me go to after we dropped Lonny back at his house. Lonny had a hoody older brother, Denny, but no sisters. “What are those things in your hair?” he asked Simone.

  “Transmitters,” I said. “She’s a space alien. Her boyfriend is Robby the Robot.” The last time Lonny had come over to my house, we’d watched the movie Forbidden Planet on Big 3 Theater.

  Simone rolled her eyes. “They’re Spoolies,” she said.

  Lonny kept looking over at her while she was making our pancakes. Looking at her funny, I mean—mouth-breathing and swallowing like he was thirsty. Every time he’d swallow, his Adam’s apple would go up and down. What the heck was the matter with him, I wondered.

  And then in the middle of eating our pancakes, Lonny said to Simone, “Aren’t you having any?” She said she was going to, but that first she had to put away all the stuff.

  “I’ll help you,” Lonny said. He got up. Grabbed the milk and eggs and put them back in the fridge. I didn’t get why he was acting so weird. “Come on, Simone,” he said, “Sit down and eat before these delicious pancakes get cold.”

  She smiled and nodded. Placed her plate on the table. But when she sat down, there was this fart that was so loud it practically broke the sound barrier!

  Simone jumped up, mortified, and looked down at her chair.

  “Gotcha!” Lonny guffawed.

  She picked up his whoopee cushion and started whacking him with it: once, twice, three times, four. Then, giggling, she put her hands around his neck and pretended she was choking him. It was pretty funny, and I was laughing, too, kind of—and then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t. Because I could see Lonny’s you-know-what poking up from inside his pajama bottoms. And I guess Simone must have seen it, too, because she said, “Oh!” and ran out of the kitchen. And that was the last either of us saw of her that morning.

  Later, walking over to St. Aloysius for noon mass, Lonny said, “You know what we should do? Ditch church and go to the movies instead.” I reminded him that it was not just Sunday but also All Saints Day—the Catholic church’s equivalent of a baseball double-header. “Yeah?” he said. “So what?”

  “So what are we going to buy our tickets with? Our looks?” Pop used that line whenever my sisters and me argued that we should buy a color TV like the Shaefers next door: and what do you kids suggest we should use for a down payment? Our looks?

  “How about we use this?” Lonny said. He reached into his coat pocket, took out his UNICEF carton, and shook it like a castanet.

  “We can’t!” I said, shocked that he could even suggest such a thing. “That’s stealing from kids who are starving.” Lonny may very well have been the dumbest kid in our class, grade book-wise, but his response was brilliant.

  “Oh, okay, Rosalie. I guess you’re right.”

  “Rosalie? I ain’t her! How come I’m her?”

  “Oh, that’s right. You’re Felix. I always get you goody-two-shoes girls mixed up.”

  Ma had always vetoed my going to scary movies on the pretext that they might give me nightmares, but here’s what Lonny and I saw that day: this really, really scary movie called Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. It was about this guy who, long ago, had gotten his head chopped off with a meat cleaver, and everyone thought this weird woman named Charlotte did it. Except she hadn’t. I recognized the lady who played Charlotte; she was the same lady who’d played Apple Annie in another movie that Frances, Simone, and I had seen the Christmas before called Pocketful of Miracles. Pocketful of Miracles had been in color, but Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte was in black and white, which somehow made it even scarier. There was this piano that played all by itself and a bunch of other creepy stuff. When that guy got murdered with the meat cleaver at the beginning of the movie, I closed my eyes, but Lonny caught me and made fun of me and said I was Mr. Chicken, cluck, cluck, cluck. So later, when this other guy got his head chopped off and the head went bouncing down the stairs, I had to force myself to keep looking, even though I didn’t want to. And after? When we were walking out of the show? Lonny said he thought Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte stunk and wasn’t scary. What did I think?

  “Huh?…Oh, yeah. It stunk worse than a skunk. You call that scary? Gimme a break. We should’ve asked for our money back.”

  What I’d really been thinking was that Ma had been right—I was going to probably get nightmares, which, whenever I got them, I’d get up and go to her and Pop’s bedroom and tap her on the shoulder and go, “Ma?” and she’d get out of bed and stumble back down to my room and sit in my chair until I got back to sleep. Except what was I supposed to do if I got a nightmare about that guy’s head bouncing down the stairs while she was all the way across the country in California? And plus, was I now going to have to let Monsignor Muldoon know that, not only had I French-kissed my cousin’s poster, but also that I’d skipped church on a Sunday and a holy day so that I could go to the movies instead, and that we’d bought our tickets with UNICEF money that was supposed to be for poor kids who could drink milk for a whole month for like two pennies or something?…Except it was Lonny’s UNICEF money, not mine, I reminded myself. My own UNICEF carton, heavy with dimes, quarters, nickels, and half dollars would be turned in dutifully on Monday morning. Where was the sinning in that?

  Monday was always Current Events day in Madame Frechette’s class, which meant that our weekend homework included looking through magazines and newspapers and cutting out articles that might get thumb-tacked to the side bulletin board titled “Our Town, Our Nation, & Our World.” On Mondays, after lunchtime recess, we were called, one by one, to stand, walk to the front of the room, and summarize our articles. That Monday, November 2, 1964, several of my classmates reported on stuff about the next day’s Presidential election. Ronald Kubiak told us that Dr. Martin Luther King had broken his rule of not endorsing either candidate and was now urging colored people—black people! I keep forgetting—to vote for LBJ, not Goldwater. Oscar Landry quoted President Johnson himself: “We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” Geraldine Balchunas predicted that, if Johnson got reelected, it was entirely possible that one of his daughters, Lynda Bird or Lucy Baines, would have a White House wedding.

  Jackie Burnham informed us that Great Britain had elected its youngest prime minister ever, Harold somebody, and Edgy Chang reported that the Boston police had rounded up a suspect in the Boston Strangler murders. (Edgy’s real name is Doris, but everyone calls her Edgy on account of when her mother was pregnant with her, she was always real nervous.) When Edgy spoke in detail about the Strangler’s gruesome methods, Madame cut her off with a “Merci, mademoiselle.” She called on Lonny Flood.

  Lonny stood, sauntered to the front of the room, and, with a yawn, informed us that the previous Saturday had been Halloween. We waited.

  “And what of that?” Madame finally said.

  Lonny shrugged. “That’s it. That it was Halloween
…. And, oh yeah, it rained. On Halloween. Which was Saturday.” He returned to his desk and sat.

  Rosalie Turdski raised her hand in protest. “That’s not really a current event,” she said. “It’s just something that was on the calendar.”

  In defense of Lonny, I raised my hand. “It wasn’t on the calendar that it rained. That was the current events part of it: that it rained.”

  Madame looked unconvinced, and I was pretty sure that the mark she recorded in her grade book for Lonny was yet another check minus. “Rosalie,” she said. “Would you like to go next?” And when she did, I was furious! Because rat-fink Rosalie had clipped the exact same item from the paper that I had—the article about how a local woman, Mrs. Marie Funicello, my mother, not hers, would later that week compete for the grand prize in the Pillsbury Bake-Off. “And I just want to say that I have fingers and toes crossed, and that I’m praying every single night that Mrs. Funicello…that Mrs. Funicello…”

  Rosalie stopped abruptly, upstaged and rendered speechless. At the back door of our classroom stood Mother Filomina with a broad-faced man in a long black coat and a wooly black hat and a broad-faced look-alike girl who was grinning from ear to ear. Besides her plaid St. Aloysius jumper, she was wearing an oversized crushed velvet Carnaby Street–style cap, bubble gum pink, and Cheeto-colored knee socks, and black galoshes with metal clips. Shockingly, she was also wearing blue eye shadow. (Makeup was strictly forbidden by St. Aloysius Gonzaga’s Code of Conduct. The only exception, I knew from my sisters, was for eighth grade girls at the final graduation dance, when they could wear lipstick, plus nylons.) Zhenya’s hair was plaited in long, greasy, brown braids. She had pierced ears. She had “bazoom-booms.”

  “Khello, clissmates!” she proclaimed. “I em Zhenya Kabakova, and I em veddy, veddy kheppy to mek you acqueentinks! Khello, new frinds! Khello! Khello!”