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 sentences 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.
This Blessed Maria had a very hard life in Italy. It was just around the time the automobile was invented, and the radio, but before the First World War. We are now getting all those dates right in class, and I guess that is why Sister is making everyone read this.
Her father dies when she is a little kid, so she has no father, and her mother is very poor, so poor that they don’t have any food at all, and they look for scraps of food around the town. But Blessed Maria just smiles at everybody and always tries to make people happy, until one day a guy comes in and tries to rip her clothes off. She is only eleven years old, and she tells the guy that she would rather die than be impure, but the guy is crazy and he has a knife with him. He threatens her, but she tells him that she belongs to God. She is just eleven, and she stands up to this guy and tells him that she is with God—something, I think, that takes a lot of courage.
This poor girl, I am thinking. She must have gone through so much more than what they are telling us in the pamphlet.
“This is a very beautiful story,” Sister Stella says when the class finishes the pamphlet.
And I guess it is, too, except that it is so sad when the guy kills her with the knife. They then sent him to prison for twenty-seven years, and the first thing he did when he got out of jail, because he talked to Blessed Maria one night in a dream, was to go to her mother and ask for her forgiveness.
I don’t know if Blessed Maria’s mother ever forgave him. I guess she did, but the pamphlet didn’t say. I don’t think my mother would forgive someone if I was killed like that. Maybe she would if he became a priest or did a lot of penance, but she would have to say a lot of prayers first to get her in the mood.
M
ommy has made me put on a tie, and Billy, too. We don’t have a real suit to wear, either of us, but we have on our best clothes, each in a white shirt, tie, school pants, which are the light gabardines, and a plaid lumberman’s jacket. I am wearing my old Klein’s-on-the-Square shoes which Mommy glued together when the sole fell off completely, but she keeps talking about going to Thom McAn’s to get new ones. Sometime soon, she says. I hope it is soon because the holes are getting to be dollar holes, and I have to change the cardboard every night. Billy and I never care much about the dime-sized holes, or the penny holes, the nickel holes, or the quarter holes, but when the holes get to be half dollars or silver dollars, it is hard to make the cardboard work right, and if it rains, it is like walking barefoot in the bathtub.
Mike Shurtliff did not pay Mommy any money for washing and ironing his shirts for a long time, because he works in show business and hasn’t had a job. But he is our next-door neighbor and Mommy told him that she would do his shirts, anyway, and he could pay her sometime when he got the money. And today was the big day—that’s what Mommy said—the big payoff, because Mike gave her twice as much money as he owed her for the shirts. He got a good job on Broadway with a play about the death of a salesman. Mommy said we should celebrate Mr. Shurtliff’s good works, and so she is taking us out to dinner.
I am nine years old, but I feel as excited as a little kid because this is the first time I have ever gone to a restaurant. Well, I’ve been to Riker’s for a Coke and a doughnut, and to Nedick’s for a hot dog, and a couple of times to Emiliano’s for pizza pie.
But this time, Mommy told us, it will be so different. There will be linen napkins and flowers on the tables.
It is cold, and Mommy and Billy walk so fast that I have to run to keep up with them, and our breaths make enough smoke for a steam engine to go to Canada. It is dark on Second Avenue, and there is hardly anyone on 57th Street, which is usually crowded. We race to Third Avenue and then up to 58th Street. Every once in a while I look at Mommy. Her head is very erect, and her shoulders are back, and her hair is blowing way out behind her. She reminds me of one of those women you see on the front of an old sailing ship, sailing through the New York wind as if she were sailing across the ocean.
Mommy points, and I can see the big sign surrounded by lights. It says JOE’S ORIGINAL RESTAURANT. I have never been to a play on Broadway, or to the movie palace in Radio City, which is a whole city not far from here, but I cannot think that it would be more exciting than going into a restaurant where there are napkins and flowers on the tables. The restaurant is big, but I cannot see in because all the windows are steamed up and dripping. There’s something very exciting about a steamy room on a cold night.