There are twenty-one of us in the classroom, and I am sitting in the front row, next to Marilyn Rolleri. Marilyn is a quiet girl, one of those girls who you never know is there except that she has the right answer to every question that is ever asked. And Marilyn has the thinnest legs, so thin that I wonder how they hold her body up. She wears white socks which she folds over neatly, and when I have nothing to do in class, I look at her legs against the old, gray wooden slats of the floor and think about touching them, maybe playing Trust Me, where you keep inching your hand up a girl’s uniform saying trust me until she says I don’t trust you anymore. Then you have to stop. I have never done this, but Joey Jurgensen told me he did it with Jenny Gilmore before she transferred to public school. Joey got lucky there, but I know that he never got to kiss her. It is not easy to kiss a girl in our neighborhood.
There are three tall windows that shine light into the classroom like it was a movie set. I am doing my penmanship lesson, practicing the capital letters as Sister Stella has written them on the board. It is the Palmer Method of writing, and it works out pretty good if you remember to use the Sunday cane at the front of the
H, K, M, N, U, V, W, Y,
and
Z.
“More than a third of the alphabet,” Sister Stella told us, “depends on the straightness of the Sunday cane.”
I think I am doing them all right, but Sister Stella is now behind me and hits my knuckles with a ruler. It doesn’t hurt. Sister Stella wouldn’t hurt anyone because it would interfere with them being happy, and if you are not happy, you can’t learn.
“Your Sunday canes,” Sister says, “are wiggly, and you could make them a lot straighter.”
The problem is that I can’t get Billy out of my mind. I never saw Billy being a wise guy, or a tough guy, and I wonder why he would write curse words in his notebook. Mommy has a small sign on a piece of cardboard that she tacked up on the wall next to the icebox in the kitchen.
Let your speech,
it goes,
be like apples of silver set in pictures of gold.
I think it’s from the Bible, but it doesn’t say. I only know that Mommy always wants us to use proper language, and cursing is not allowed.
I work on my Sunday canes, especially the starting lines on the Ms and Ns, making them perfect half-moons at the top and lines straight as a fire pole at the bottom. I do this, and I am happy, the way Sister wants us to be.
The art teacher arrives, and the class stands to greet her, singing, “Good morning, Mrs. Gray.”
Mrs. Gray is a woman almost as wide as the blackboard, and she has hairs growing under her chin. She may not be pretty like Mommy, or happy like Sister Stella, but everyone in the class always likes to be with her. She has this way of drawing pictures on the easel she carries from class to class, and it is something like a magic show. She creates things so quickly. She can draw a boy catching a homer, or a girl running through a field, faster than a magician can pull a rabbit out of a hat. She makes outlines of figures first with a charcoal, and then she colors them in. I so wish I could do that, make something come to life with nothing more than a little piece of charcoal.
“Pastels,” Mrs. Gray says. “Today we are going to learn how to use pastels. And I have a set of pastels here for each of you.”
Petey Poscullo gives them out, and I open the box. There are six colors, like chalk, but square instead of round. I touch one and the color stains my finger with just the smallest touch. I have never had a box of real artist’s colors, just the crayon box that Mommy always brings out when I am sick with a cold and in bed.
Mrs. Gray has put a large sheet of clean paper on her easel and begins to draw the outline of a house.
“What color should I use?” someone in the back calls out.
“Any color you like,” Mrs. Gray answers. “We are going to draw a barn on the side of a hill in the countryside.”
“Are there barns in Central Park?” Robert Reilly asks.
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Gray says. “But this one is in the country where there are cows and chickens and lots of trees. I am going to make my barn red, because that is the way I remember it, but you can make it anything you like.”
“Even blue?” Barbara Cavazzine asks.
“Sure, blue would be nice.”
“How about brown?” Diane Gillespie asks.
“A brown barn sounds exciting.”
I am not so sure about the color of my barn, and so I begin to copy the shapes the way Mrs. Gray is doing on her easel. I begin to make my barn red, like hers. Only hers looks like a real barn, with boards going across the sides, and mine looks like a red box. But I can suddenly see how the colors are folding into one another, and the lines get thick or thin depending on how hard I press down on the pastel. I forget about everything as I fill in the greens of the trees and the field. It is so much fun, and I definitely fall into the category of happy learning as I make the picture look something like a real barn in a real field with real trees. I study the picture a little, take the yellow pastel stick in my hand, and dab at the side of the barn.
I look over at Marilyn Rolled, and I see that she has made a swell picture, which looks a lot like Mrs. Gray’s barn. She could be a great artist, I am thinking as I make wide stripes of yellow. A great artist with skinny legs.
I am in the middle of 56th Street now, and my yellow barn is rolled up and tied with a rubber band. I see Billy just in front of me, and I run to catch up with him. He is still limping a little.
“How are you?” I ask.
“All right.”
“Why did you write those curses, anyway?”
“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
“No, Richie Gilmore did.”
“Why didn’t you tell Mommy that?”
We are on the stoop now, and Billy pushes the big, red, glass and wood door open. He holds it for me.
“Because,” he says as I pass, “I let him write it there, and I didn’t rip the page out. Why should I get him in trouble for something that I could have avoided in the first place?”
“But Richie Gilmore is a brizzer,” I say, “and who cares if he gets in trouble?”
We are on the stairs now, taking them one by one, slowly. Billy laughs, and punches me lightly on the shoulder.
“That,” he says, “is beside the point, Dennis.”
It is much later now, and I am lying on the top bunk. It is dark, and I guess Mommy and Billy are asleep. I can hear two cats battling it out down in the backyards, and then all is quiet. I can think better in the quiet. I am still trying to figure out what it is that is beside the point.
M
ommy is punishing me because I was ten minutes late for dinner yesterday, and so I cannot go to Kips this afternoon. I would have been on time, but Mr. Dempsey asked me to sweep the store again. I thought he would give me a quarter or even more, but I only got a dime. It wasn’t worth a dime to be kept from going to Kips. Instead, I have to sit around Mrs. Grayson’s apartment on Sutton Place while Mommy works the vacuum and washes Mrs. Grayson’s clothes in the sink.
She puts on a housecoat over her skirt and sweater. It has so many flowers that it looks like wallpaper. As she buttons it up she tells me to sit in a kitchen chair and to read my book.
“I don’t have a book,” I say.
Mommy takes a book from her bag and hands it to me. It is a library book,
Hans Brinker,
a book about a person in another country where there is a lot of ice on the ground. It snows sometimes on 56th Street, but there is never any ice. Slush comes with the snow.
You can always tell a library book because the corners are usually popping out with frayed cardboard, and I think of a new book and new snow, and how quickly both get dirty. I don’t think I have ever seen a new book, one that has never been read before. I take this book and begin to read it. I have read most of it before, and soon I am rooting for this Hans guy to win the ice skating race. All the time, I am watching Mommy out of the corner of my eye. She keeps running from room to room, whistling and carrying things. She is mopping, and dusting, and lifting photographs from the piano. I’d like to try the piano, but I know Mrs. Grayson wouldn’t like that, because I once opened a bottle of Coke there and she made Mommy pay for it, and so anything of hers was not mine. That’s what Mommy said.
In the kitchen Mommy puts the washboard in the sink and runs the water. There is a mound of clothes on the floor, blouses, pants, underwear. Mrs. Grayson is very old, and so I don’t care much about her underwear. But the idea of underwear on the floor makes me think about Sue Flanagan. I know I would like the underwear if the underwear belonged to Sue Flanagan. Sue Flanagan always wears those sweaters that are so thin and tight you can see the complete outline of her brassiere, and I know I would like to see Sue Flanagan’s brassiere.
I stood next to Mommy. She is sweating, and looks tired from so much running from room to room, and from the washing.
“Can I help you, Mommy?” I say, dropping the book on the table. “Could I wash those things for you?”
“Go read your book,” Mommy says. “Boys don’t do people’s wash. Especially little boys. They read books if they know what’s good for them.”
I am always reading books, anyway, and so I don’t know why she won’t let me help her. Mommy is now scrubbing up and down the washboard, and her eyes are closed. Up and down, she goes, up and down, like she is exercising.
It is too bad that Daddy isn’t better. It’s too bad that he doesn’t have the good legs so that he can go to work, and Mommy could go to one of the parks down by the river, like the other women on 56th Street. And Mommy could sit there and read magazines, and knit, and talk about the Italian kids who wear pegged pants and get away with murder by their parents, and the way everything at Rossi’s store is so expensive. And Daddy could come home at night and talk about the actors in Hollywood like Ronald Reagan, who was complaining in the Congress house about communists in the movies, but I don’t know what communists are except they are bad and we pray against them in school, and about Jimmy Stewart, who was always talking about feeding the poor starving children in Europe, but they never mention Ireland, only Italy and India and China, even though I know that China is not in Europe. And I could talk to Daddy about the Dodgers being in Cuba for spring training and how come the Dodgers couldn’t just practice underneath the 59th Street Bridge the way we do at the Police Athletic League games.
“Mommy,” I ask, “could you buy me a new book someday, a brand-new one without anybody’s fingerprints all over it?”
“You mean,” Mommy says,
“would
I buy you a new book, not
could.
And my answer is that there are so many books in the library you should read first. After you read all of the library books, we can think about a new book. Okay?”
“Okay, Mommy.”
“Now,” Mommy says, like she has just finished something. She is standing with her hands on her hips looking around the kitchen in Mrs. Grayson’s house. “The kitchen floor once over, and we can go home.”
“Mommy?”
“Yes, Dennis?”
“I think I read all the books in the library already.”
“You’re full of soup, Dennis. You haven’t read all the books in the library.”
“How many more do I have to go?”
Mommy’s hands are still on her hips. She looks like a model in a magazine because she is thin and curvy. She’s smiling now, and her long brown hair swings back on her shoulders.
“Do you know our building?”
“Yes. 337 East 56th Street.”
“Right. How many floors?”
“We are on the fourth, and there is one more up and then another to the roof.”
“Six stories high, and made of all bricks, right?”
“All bricks.”
“How many bricks do you think?”
“Maybe a hundred?”
Mommy laughs out loud.
“No, Dennis,” she says. “There are thousands and thousands. And if you think of each brick representing maybe fifty books, then that’s how many books are in the library. And do you know how many books you’ve read?”
“How many?”
“Maybe two bricks’ worth,” Mommy says, holding two fingers up. “So think about how exciting it is when you look at all the bricks in our building, that you have so many more books to read, and to have all that fun still before you.”
“Yeah, and who is going to carry all those bricks home from the library, huh?”
She is bending over now in her laughter, a high giggle kind of laugh. She smiles a lot, but she hardly ever laughs, and to see her laughing makes me feel happier, too.
Mommy stops laughing and gets on her hands and knees. She looks around and begins to crawl across the floor, pulling a big bucket of steaming water next to her. She has a rag in one hand and a brush in the other.
I don’t even like to carry groceries up the four flights of stairs, I am thinking as I watch her, never mind all these bricks she is talking about.
She is now crawling backward, the brush going back and forth like an out-of-control clock. Every once in a while she stops and wipes the sweat off her forehead with the rag.
It would be good if I could have just one book that was new, where the corners weren’t tattered, and I don’t have to worry about all those bricks up the four flights.
Suddenly, watching Mommy, I begin to think that I am just talking about myself, and it’s so selfish to just think about what I want, new books or anything else. My mind goes weird, like it is on fire inside my head as I begin to think about her, watching her here on her hands and knees in Mrs. Grayson’s kitchen. I don’t know another kid whose mother does this anywhere, except in their own houses, and I am getting awfully sad awfully quick. And mad. I am mad about all this. Why is my mother the only mother I know who gets down on her hands and knees for all these people? This is not our house, this is not our floor she is cleaning.
No. We are in Mrs. Grayson’s house on Sutton Place. And why can’t we live here? I mean, why can’t Mommy be like Mrs. Grayson? I know she has no choice, but why can’t it happen, anyway? My mind is racing around in circles. I am thinking all this even though Mommy says you should never wish you were somebody else. But I am getting madder and madder as I continue to think about it. Why couldn’t Mommy be Mrs. Grayson, instead of the other way around?