“Good luck,” Walsh says, rubbing his hand up and down the outside of the Coke bottle.
“Those Italian girls,” Scarry laughs, “like the sausage.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say as I walk away and toward Marilyn.
She looks at Gilda Galli as she gets up to dance with me, saying, “Mind my place.”
I walk to the middle of the dance floor and turn to see if she followed me. She is there, standing with her hands at her sides, flat against a tight black skirt, which wraps her down to her ankles. It is so tight I can see the outlines of her thighs.
I don’t know what to say to her, and just grab her around the waist and pull her close to me. The nuns say that you should leave room for the Holy Ghost when you dance, but I don’t think there is enough room between us for one of Uncle Tracy’s toothpicks. Her hair is falling behind her, halfway down her back, in long black curls. I can smell it, and it is like canned peaches. We are dancing, but we are hardly moving at all. She smells so good, and I put my face against hers. My lips slide softly over her cheek.
I could ask her any number of things, like, “How are things in school?” or “How are your ballet lessons?” or “How do you get along with your parents?” But I wonder how many opportunities like this I am going to get. Just get it over with, I say to myself. I slide my lips up to her ear, and I whisper, “Could I take you home tonight?”
She knows I like her, like I have been liking her since the fourth grade. But she doesn’t seem impressed. It is almost like I said, “The moon always comes up when the sun goes down.” Knowing I want to take her home is nothing new.
“I have to go,” she says, “with Barbara Cavazzine and Gilda Galli to Emiliano’s for a pizza after the dance.”
The three of them, I think, are like the Italian mopsy triplets. I picture myself, just for a moment, saying, “I can’t go. I have to be home before ten, or my mother will kill me.”
I could never say that to Marilyn. She would think I am a stupid schmo, a kid.
My mother is a whack job when it comes to time and schedule, and if I’m late, each minute becomes a crime of some kind. “Being on time,” she says, “is as important as wearing clothes. If you’re late all the time, people will see you as nothing more than a little naked oddball.”
Oh, Marilyn.
I pull my head back a little to look at her, as I have been looking at her since the fourth grade. I like her more each year, and I am beginning to think about what I am feeling as I hold her so close to me as we dance.
Johnnie Ray begins to sing “The Little White Cloud That Cried,” and I feel myself up against her thigh, the inside of her thigh. It feels like she is pushing into me. Oh, God. Johnnie Ray sounds like he’s in tears. There are a hundred kids around us, some doing the foxtrot, some doing the fish, but I have Marilyn stiffly around the waist, and we are grinding. She’s doing the grind with me in the middle of the floor, behind a curtain of others. I feel like I won the grand prize in some happiness contest, and I’m hoping that Archie doesn’t see us. You’re not supposed to do the fish, and you’re especially not supposed to do the grind.
“As I went walking down by the river,” Johnnie Ray is singing, and I am thinking that I would like to take Marilyn down by the river, to sit with her on a 51st Street park bench, to put my hand all over her tight skirt, to watch the Pepsi-Cola sign blink on and off across the river, to kiss her big, red Italian lips, and to move my hand into her blouse, softly, quietly, to feel the cotton of her brassiere.
I’m not sure if she is pressing into me deliberately. I only know we are grinding slowly, hardly moving anything but our hips on the dance floor. Am I grinding into her, or is she grinding into me? Nothing matters as long as her thighs are against mine, and I can feel her breath on my neck.
“Why don’t you come to Emiliano’s for a pizza with us?” she asks in a whisper.
“I can’t,” I say, “ ‘cause I have something to do.”
“What do you have to do?”
Her breath is going all over my neck and the side of my face, and her legs are like hot wax against me.
“Just something to do,” I say, “that’s all.”
“Something to do?”
“Yeah, something to do.”
“What are you,” she says, “a bookie or something, going off with something to do that you can’t say what it is?”
“Some other time,” I say, “maybe I could go with you.”
She doesn’t answer, and I am too excited by all the grinding that I don’t think much about how sad it is that I can’t go with them for a pizza pie. All I can think about is how hard I am pressing into her, and how I would like to take her to see the Pepsi-Cola sign.
Now, though, I am realizing that I can’t go with all my friends, and I am getting very pissed off. I don’t care if it is better to be pissed off than pissed on. Walsh, Scarry, Jurgensen, all of them are going for the pizza, and I have to go home. Just because my report card is not so good.
And I feel very sharp in my powder-blue jacket, too, and the white shirt with the big collar. My hair is combed in the front into a drop curl. I combed it after I left the house, in the dark of my hallway, because my mother doesn’t like my hair in a drop curl, and says that it makes me look like an Italian. She thinks the Italians all end up in jail because of the way they comb their hair, and so she wouldn’t let me out of the house with my hair combed like that. But I like it, the hair coming down in one big curl in the middle of my forehead, and in the back, combed into a duck’s tail. It makes me feel tough and with it.
Marilyn Rolleri seems to like it, too, for every time I ask her to dance she dances with me.
But something is missing. I feel like everything is okay, that I look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp, like the razor blades, and Marilyn Rolleri and the other girls have been noticing me, but, still, I feel like I am naked, that I am standing here with all my friends, and I am absolutely naked without a stitch on, and I am hoping that they don’t see me like this.
My mother, if you think about it, has ruined my whole night, just because of my report card. And I don’t care what anybody says, it isn’t fair to get punished like this. I could get good grades like Billy if I wanted, don’t they know that?
It just doesn’t matter to me, the famous report card, is all.
Martin Block, the disc jockey from the Make Believe Ballroom show on the radio, introduces the special guest he has brought tonight. Block’s been here many times before with Dinah Shore, Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney, and big stars like that. Tonight he has Les Paul and Mary Ford. They don’t say anything, but they start to play “How High the Moon,” and everybody begins to move and shake their bodies. Imagine, Les Paul and Mary Ford right here in our dance at Kips Bay Boys Club, just for us kids. Maybe Martin Block used to be a member here, or something like that, but he has brought Les Paul and Mary Ford right here into the club, and all of us feel like we were born on Sutton Place and we have front-row seats at Radio City Music Hall.
Mary Ford is wearing a big crinoline skirt, all black with bangles and beads, and Les Paul has a shoelace instead of a tie, and they are both playing guitars that are bigger than me, and the music is going through the room and through the bodies of all the kids, and everyone is smiling, and I forget for a minute that I can’t go to Emiliano’s with Marilyn after the dance.
When the dance is over, I can see by the big hall clock that I don’t have time to hang around, and I’ll have to run home if I am going to be there at ten.
On my way out I see Martin Block. I think about my mother’s harping all the time about being polite, and I know I should say thank you to him. But there are a bunch of other kids around, and they will think I am such a brizzer if I go right in the middle of them to thank Martin Block.
It’s too bad about Emiliano’s. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have the money to buy some pizza. Someone would give me a bite of theirs, probably.
I’ll have some money soon, more than my paper money. I am supposed to get a delivery job with the East River Florist. If I could buy my own pizza, I would split it with my friends.
But I could live without pizza if I had to. It would be okay to just sit there.
If only, I am thinking as I skip alone down the stairs of Kips Bay, I could see if Marilyn Rolleri would make room for me to sit next to her at Emiliano’s.
I guess my mother thinks that somewhere between ten and eleven o’clock that, because of a bad report card, I am going to murder someone, or that someone is going to murder me. So I have to leave everyone and be home at ten, if I don’t want to get murdered or if I don’t want to do the murdering.
It’s not right.
No one has to go home at ten o’clock. And everyone but me is going to get a chance to see if they can get Marilyn Rolleri down by the river to watch the Pepsi-Cola sign.
So now I am still alone on Second Avenue. Everyone else is behind me, walking slower, taking their time. I suddenly want to run, and I sprint forward. It’s not that I am late. I am running like mad because I want the wind against my face, and if I didn’t have to be home at ten, I think I could run all the way to the Bronx.
I
am lying here under the bunk bed, thinking. It’s dark. All I can see above me is the metal of a bedspring and squares of swollen mattress protruding down.
Yesterday was a two-time-terrible day. A Friday. A fragrant and feeble friggin’ Friday, and it all makes me want to puke to think about it.
Diane Gillespie threw up in the girls’ clothes closet, and Sister Alphonsus sent me down to the basement to find Mr. Greendust, the school custodian. I don’t think anyone knows his name, because all you ever hear is the name “custodian.” “Where’s the custodian?” and “Go get the custodian,” which is what Sister Alphonsus said to me. We call him Mr. Greendust because that is what he spreads around the floor when someone gets sick.
On the way up from the basement I met Marilyn Rolleri in the stairway. I guess she was late for school or something. I thought she was a gift from heaven when I saw her there, kneeling down to pick up a pencil case she had dropped. Her blue gabardine uniform skirt was tight around her round Italian thighs, and her great Italian breasts were pushing out against the white of her school blouse. I knelt down next to her and put my fingers around the pencil case just as she was picking it up. Her large brown Italian eyes were in a dance of some kind, looking me up and down.
Oh, Marilyn, I was thinking, what am I going to do? You are here in the quiet of the staircase, you with a smile of perfect teeth and a backside molded by an artist.
We were both standing then, she had her book case by her feet, our fingers were wrapped around her pencil case, and her smile was coming closer to me. No, I was moving closer to her. I don’t know what got into me. I closed my eyes a little and leaned in so close to her I could smell her breath. I thought her breath smelled like what love should smell like, soft and airy and warm. I let go of the pencil case, and it dropped again to the floor. I put my arms around her, and we leaned back onto the wired glass of the staircase wall, and we kissed. I wanted to open my mouth, but she pressed her two beautiful Italian lips together and pushed them hard against my own lips, and they felt like soft and moist pancakes as the breath from her nose covered my face.
Oh, Marilyn, I thought, this is better than watching the Pepsi-Cola sign. I did not try to open my mouth, but just breathed in her life’s breath and let the wetness of her lips enter my mind so that it will never be forgotten.
Not a single word was said between us. She gave me that one long kiss, and then she picked up her pencil case and her book case, and she trotted up the stairs so fast that I couldn’t catch her. She was already sitting when I opened the door to Sister Alphonsus’ eighth-grade class.
I waited for her in the school yard when we broke for lunch. She was walking out of the yard with Barbara Cavazzine, and I asked if I could talk to her.
They both stopped, and Marilyn came toward me. She whispered.
“I know,” she said, “that you want to ask me to go out with you, but I am going to go steady with Raymond Connors.”
“Right.”
That was all I could get out. “Right.”
But it wasn’t right, not after being like that with her in the staircase, not after having her lips pressed against mine for, what, a minute at least. One glorious, historic minute. It was like she had given me a hundred dollars and then takes it away after I bought presents for all my friends. And now it feels like I have the tab for the presents but no money, like I have this love in my heart for her but there is no her.
I wanted to shout, but I remembered what my mother said about being polite all the time. If you are polite in the good times, you will also be polite in the bad times, when it matters the most. And so I didn’t shout, but just turned and tried to get in the punchball game going on in the corner of the school yard.
Raymond Connors, who had enough red hair and enough teeth for triplets. I like Raymond Connors, but he doesn’t even know how to do the lindy. Why would Marilyn go steady with him when she could, well, get anyone she wanted?
All afternoon at school I could hardly pay attention to Sister Alphonsus. We were going over the English part of the State Regents examination. Mostly, they were grammar questions, and I was getting all the right answers. At least, when I did them, for I was doing one and skipping one, and every time I skipped one I thought about Marilyn sitting up there in the front of the class.
Sister Alphonsus kept looking at my answer sheet and shaking her head, and at the end of the day she asked me to stay. It is always a bad sign when the teacher asks you to stay after school, and I sat alone in my seat drumming my fingers until she came back from the dismissal.
“You’re hopeless, Dennis,” she said as she stood before me, “and I don’t think we will be able to let you graduate unless things are changed around here.”
I thought of a wisecrack. If you want a change, I wanted to say, put curtains on the windows. But Sister wasn’t in the mood to laugh, and it is always a good rule to say nothing until you find out what is going on.