I was terrified that Mrs. Johnson was going to embarrass the hell out of me, too. I fought the urge to look to the front of the room to see if she was watching. Kerri was hunched over her desk, intent on her arithmetic. It happened so fast. I don’t remember walking back to my desk. Kerri never looked up to see if anyone saw it. She only slid the cup closer to her with her left hand and kept writing with the other. She kept it near her like she was going to save it for when she really needed it. I never noticed it before, but when she leaned over like that her hair was long enough to reach her desk.
THE BIGGEST, MOST SILENT THING
I can’t cook yet, she says. I hang out in the kitchen because I like food and because my mother always asks me to keep her company. I’m eight; I know how to cook. Maybe it’s an Italian thing. She turns the radio on to an oldies station and some guy is singing about taking his girl away into the moonlight, throwing her eyes into the sky, loving her in some deep moment of bliss forever and ever. Maybe it’s a fifties thing. She says, now I can cook, rubs her palms together and grabs me by the waist. Let me show you how we used to dance when I was a kid. You put your hands here like you’re leading, ’cause that’s how the guys did it, but really you’re gonna follow. Just follow me. You just kind of rock back and forth, that’s right. She sings along and hums when she can’t remember the words. She says, you know what I want for Christmas this year? I want a special gift. What? I ask. I want you to write a poem about me. A poem just about me. Then she says, oops, we can’t let this burn. She reaches to the stove and pushes the escarole around in the pan, her right hand still around my waist.
THE NEXT NIGHT, my mother asks me to go with her to pick up my sister from religious instruction class. I say it’s too early to go and she says she wants to drive slowly because the roads may be icy. On our way out the door we run into our neighbor Gloria, and my mother asks her if she had a nice Thanksgiving. Gloria went to her sister’s in Philadelphia and, she says, she’ll be going there for Christmas as well. My mother says, that’s nice. Three years ago, Gloria’s husband took off without notice and wrote her a letter explaining where he was and who he was with and served her with papers two weeks later. I am quiet. She says, hi, Joey. Hi, Gloria. Mom tells Gloria to stop by if she needs anything.
Mom says, give me your arm, Joey, there’s ice on these steps. They need salt on them. I told your stepfather to do it, she says, but who knows with him. She asks me if I’ll put some salt down when we get back and I say, yes. As we walk down the stairs, she sticks to my arm and tells me how sorry she feels for Gloria being alone during the holidays. I can relate to her very well, she says. Of course I can. She’s had two last names and I’ve already had three.
During the drive, she asks me if I’m excited to go to my father’s house for Christmas Eve. I say, yeah, and she wants to know what Patty, my stepmother, cooks for Christmas Eve dinner. I say, fish and things. Is it good? she wants to know. I say it is.
We pull up to the Catholic school twenty minutes early. We sit quietly in the car. My breath turns to vapor out the window. Mom tells me she’s cold and can I roll the window up a little. I leave it open a crack. She says the church looks like the one in the Bronx she and my father went to when they were still married. And that was the beginning of the history lesson. It dated back before I was born, when Mom and Dad weren’t having a good time. When, my mother tells me, my father wasn’t always nice. When he wasn’t nice to her. She tells me how he used to yell at her and hit her and how he started dating Patty while they were still married. I always figured it was that way. There had been many innuendos and opinions thrown around the house that weren’t intended to land in my ears. This is the first formal sit-down on the subject. I feel like the kid in class who’s terrified to get called on. I just take notes, ask no questions and try to be invisible.
When the history lesson is over, she brings us in to the present by talking about my last report card. It left a lot to be desired, she says. The kids start coming out of the Catholic school and Mom says we’ll talk more about it later. She starts up the car and I can see my sister Catherine walking toward us. I think maybe we can talk about the apostles on the ride home. My mother says, Joey, can you roll up that window, please, Mommy’s cold.
Later, I get the talk about the report card. My mother has trouble understanding why my sister does so well in school and I don’t. The thing is, it doesn’t occur to me to be a good student when my sister already is. That’s her calling. Why should I do that? There’s no reason for two people in one family to play the same part.
My mother tells me that no one is going to come along and just give me good grades. Or give me anything else, for that matter. She wants to know how I think the family eats around here and how I get clothes to wear. She says, what do you want to do when you get older? I tell her I want to be a baseball player. And what if that doesn’t work out? she says. Then what? What are you going to do then? I say, I don’t know. She says I have to know because life isn’t a game. I say, I don’t know, OK? I don’t know what I want. Then she explodes. Don’t say that. It just kills me that you could say that. She looks like she’s going to spit. You sound just like your father.
I GO OUTSIDE to throw salt on the front steps. I see Gloria’s TV on and I watch my breath turn to steam again. I wrote a poem once, when I was six. In the first grade I went on a school trip to the Museum of Natural History. The intention for most of the first-graders (at least all the boys) was to see how much trouble they could cause. But something in me didn’t want to. The museum didn’t feel like the kind of place where we should’ve been causing trouble. I thought, Don’t fuck around. See if you can learn something. Go somewhere and learn something. It was the first time a thought like that had ever occurred to me. So I went to the butterfly exhibit and learned how they camouflage themselves. They hold the top part of their wings—the bright, colorful side—together so only the underside of the wings shows. The underside is covered with browns and grays, which allow them to blend in with dirt and branches. They become invisible in their own surroundings. They hide their beauty for safety. This is known as crypsis. I took a Magic Marker and wrote “crypsis” on my arm and covered it with my sleeve.
Then I saw the blue whale they have on the ceiling. It was the biggest and most silent thing I’d seen. All the other big stuff I knew was so damn loud—our house, the school, my parents’ divorce, dinner. Even my mother’s new marriage was loud. My stepfather was a very low-key individual. The longest conversation I ever had with him went like this: What time’s the Yankee game on? Seven o’clock. When my mother would fight him, he would never fight back, so she would have to fight herself. She’d lock herself in the bathroom, yelling at my stepfather through the door. She’d scream about the life he had promised her and how good things were supposed to have been and how it was all bullshit. That’s how she fought him. He never screamed back. The loudest thing I ever heard my stepfather say to my mother was, “No, I’m not like your ex-husband. I don’t beat you.”
That was really loud.
So I wrote a poem about the blue whale on the ceiling at the Museum of Natural History. The poem said that the biggest thing I ever saw was also the quietest. Mom hung it on the refrigerator. Also, I took my blue Magic Marker and I drew a picture of the whale on the bottom of my kitchen chair. Then I would lie on the floor and look up at my picture, so the whale could be over my head, just like they had it at the museum. Also, no one else would see it there.
When I come back in the house, the report card discussion continues. She says, Joseph, I know you’re a smart kid. I know you can do very good in school, that’s the only reason why I get upset, OK? She throws a hug on me and my head lands in her stomach. She plays with my hair and asks me if I’ve locked the side door. I say I have. See, she says, and holds me tighter, poor Gloria, she doesn’t have a man around the house anymore. It’s scary. God forbid
