RUMPOPO:
I am going to the porch now.
LUCIA:
(Long pause. Very, very long pause.) Good. I mean, that’s great, you going off to the porch and all. Cool. Everyone should have a porch. We’ve got a huge porch, a wraparound porch. Do you know what that is?
Rehearsal continued like that until everyone else was so confused that they were making up things at random, and Mr. Beeber’s collar was nearly torn off his shirt.
On the way home, Ruby says, “Leo, what do you think of all this improvising stuff?”
“I like it because if you forget your line, you can still have something to say, but I don’t like it when Melanie goes on and on—”
“—and on and on!”
“Exactly.”
“Improvising is just like normal yakking,” Ruby says. “Like right now, I don’t have a script. I’m just improvising. You say something. I say something. Like that.”
“But in the play, if we improvise all over the place, then it won’t be the real play, will it? It’ll be a mess.”
“Sort of like life, you mean?”
Ruby will do this. Leo will be talking with her about any regular old thing, and she will rattle his brains.
“Imagine if we had a script,” she says.
“What? You mean like now?”
“Yes. Think how easy life would be.”
“Huh.”
If you had a script for your life, Leo thinks, you could look ahead to what would come next. You could see what is going to happen to you. You could read all the thousands and millions of words you will say. You will never again have to wonder What should I say or do? because it will all be written there for you.
You could know what dumb things you will do. You could find out if you ever will do anything that isn’t dumb. But then, what if your script was dull, if you never got to do anything exciting? Or what if something awful was going to happen to you? What if your script was very, very short? You would definitely not want to know that.
It is Delivery of Script Day, when each twelve-year-old is given his Life Script. A gray-haired woman comes to Leo’s class with two large red trunks, which contain their scripts. It is a day of high anticipation. Everyone is fidgety. Some are extremely nervous and feel ill; some are giddy, almost delirious with excitement.
As each student’s name is called, he moves forward to receive his script. What follows is bedlam. Those who have received short scripts sink to the floor, wailing. Everyone else flips rapidly through his script, shouting out highlights. Some shout in excitement; others moan in disappointment.
“Harvard! I’m going to Harvard!”
“What? An appliance salesman?”
“What? Not a pro basketball player? A teacher?”
“A scientist! A famous scientist!”
“I’m getting married? To her?”
“I’m gay?”
“I flunk out of college? Twice?”
They then turn to the final pages of their scripts, and a somber, sober hush falls.
“Cancer. I knew it.”
“I’m going to drown?”
“Peacefully, in my sleep? Oh, that’s good.”
“A plane crash?”
“A heart attack?”
“One hundred and twenty years old? Wow!”
The teacher dismisses the class because there is no way any more work will be done that day.
PAPA’S SCRIPT
It is hard for Leo to find time to read his father’s Autobiography, Age of Thirteen, because there is always someone around, and everyone is so nosy. If they discovered what he was reading, they’d be sure to tell his father, who would probably explode. If Papa didn’t like Leo looking through his things, how would he feel about Leo looking through his life?
Leo finds a chapter where Papa writes about his own father:
One time my father took my brothers and me camping. No sisters allowed. We spent one whole evening packing sleeping bags and tents and food, and we left early the next morning, when it was dark outside. The sun came up when we reached the lake, and it looked like we were in a whole new world.
We spent all morning fixing up our campsite. We gathered wood and built a roaring fire, and we cooked beans and sausages over the fire. My father didn’t say much, but I could tell he was happy, out there in the woods with us.
That is all Papa says about the camping trip. Leo wonders why Papa mentioned that his father seemed happy out there in the woods. Was it because he didn’t seem happy the rest of the time?
Leo remembers a time Papa took Leo and his brothers camping. He rummages through his schoolbooks and finds the drama notebook in which he has written about Pietro and Nunzio. He adds:
One night, Pietro, Nunzio, and I helped Papa pack the car with the tents and fishing poles and food. Contento wanted to come too, but she was sick. In the early morning, Papa woke us, saying we were going on an adventure. “Shh, very quiet, very secret,” he said.
We piled into the car, sleepy and groggy, and rumbled along until we reached the campsite. The mist was rising off the lake, and it looked eerie. By the time we’d set up our tents, the sun had cleared the mist, and the lake was calm and quiet. We jumped in and splashed and swam. Later we fished. I caught two! It was a great day.
That night, Papa told a ghost story, which scared us, so we all slept in one tent. Papa had to tell us a funny story so we wouldn’t be scared anymore.
Papa seemed very happy then. He does not seem so happy now.
OBSESSED
Leo is obsessed with that strange exercise Mr. Beeber gave the cast, writing about people when they were younger and how they are now. Leo tries to do one about himself but can’t do it. He feels as if he’s always been the same.
I was always in the middle or on the edge. Watching.
He tries again:
It was like everyone else was in a play and I was the audience. I couldn’t see myself, but maybe everybody feels this way. You never see yourself (unless you look in the mirror). You only see everyone else. I still feel that way.
Pretty sad, Leo thinks.
He finds his mother in the kitchen, her head in the cupboard beneath the sink.
“Mom? What was I like when I was little?”
“Look at this mess! Water dripping everywhere! Get me the bucket—”
Leo retrieves a bucket from the basement. “Mom? What was I like when I was little?”
“Isn’t there some valve thingy to turn off this water?”
Leo peers under the cupboard. “This one, maybe?” He turns the valve, and the water slows to a drip and then stops.
“Well, at least the water has stopped,” she says. “Now what?”
“Maybe Papa can fix it.”
Leo’s mother sighs. “Sardine-o, the way Papa would try to fix this is by bashing the pipe with a wrench and calling it a lot of nasty names, and then the pipe would break and then—”
“Mom? What was I like when I was little?”
“What? I don’t know. You were you.”
“But really, what was I like? Was I different from now?”
“Hand me that rag. Different? What do you mean, different? Of course you were different. First you were an infant and then a toddler and you had to learn to walk and talk, so of course you were different. Not that rag, the other one.”
“But what was I like?”
Leo’s mother turns to him, a rag in each hand. “You were sweet and curious. Sometimes you said funny things, like once you said, ‘Do I look like a potato?’”
“A potato?”
“Yes, a potato. Another time you said you were going to make dirt when you grew up.”
“Make dirt?”
“Yes.”
“But why would I say that? You can’t make dirt.”
Leo’s mother is pulling things from the cupboard. “What a mess!”
“Did you write all that stuff down, the things I said?” Leo asks.
“No, alas, I did
not. I was a leetle bit busy, sardine-o.”
A potato. A dirt maker. This is not very enlightening to Leo, and because he cannot write about himself, he turns to his drama notebook and writes about Contento.
He remembers following Contento from room to room, and down the sidewalk, and through the park, and she would take his hand and say, “Here, Leo, take my hand, don’t fall.” This was before he became the sardine and fog boy. She’d say, “Here, Leo, I will show you how,” and “Here, Leo, I will read to you.” That was a kind and generous Contento, a big sister, full of importance and love.
“Here, Leo,” she would say, “kick the ball with me.” And even when Leo couldn’t kick the ball, or couldn’t kick it far or in the right direction, Contento would laugh and whiz past him and rescue the ball and dribble it nimbly with her feet, her cheeks ruddy, her dark hair flying. Leo thought she was amazing and glorious and that she could do anything and everything. Sometimes at night, she’d lean against his bed and talk to him about soccer or her friends, anything at all, chattering on in the dark room to her friend, her brother.
Leo doesn’t know when Contento began to change. Maybe it wasn’t overnight; maybe it was slower than he imagines.
One day: “Quit following me everywhere, sardine. Are you my shadow?”
Another day: “Don’t hold my hand. You’re too old for that.”
And another day: “Will you never learn to kick that ball? What is the matter with you?”
And one night: “Go talk to Nunzio and Pietro. I’m too tired.”
There were the rages, too, coming out of nowhere. One minute she’d be quietly sitting there, and the next minute she’d be throwing pillows or clothes, shouting at the others to be quiet or go away.
At the dinner table one night, Contento sat there, with her bottom lip curled out, pouting:
PAPA:
Pout like that and a big crow will land on your lip and peck your nose.
PIETRO:
(forming his fingers into a pecking bird and snapping them in front of Contento’s face) Peck, peck, peck, peck—
(Contento bursts into tears and flees the table.)
PAPA:
What? What did we say?
MOM:
Zitti! Zitti! Quiet, everybody! Leave her alone. She’s just trying to grow up.
And Leo wondered if that meant that he would have to turn into a moody, raging boy in order to grow up.
Today, on the way home from school, Ruby says, “You know why it’s so weird writing about people when they were younger?”
“No. Why?”
“Because we’re kids. We’re always thinking about now, about how to get through each day without being a complete moron, or else we’re thinking about what’s ahead, what we’re going to do, what we’re going to be.”
“Huh,” Leo says. He doesn’t realize things like that when he’s talking. He only makes sense of things when he is alone, thinking, or when he writes.
Ruby stops, puts her hands on her hips, and says, “Old people think about when they were young.”
“Huh.”
“And isn’t the whole point that you can change? You might be a dorky, little, nobody kid, but you might be an amazing grown-up.”
Leo wonders if she means him, personally. Does she think he’s a dorky, little, nobody kid? He is about to ask her this when she says, “I don’t mean you, Leo. I’m just saying, that’s all.”
“But do you think you could also be a happy kid and an unhappy adult? Like maybe the old crone was a cute little kid, very happy.”
“So what made her into an old crone? Why didn’t Beeber put that into the play?”
“I don’t know,” Leo says. “And why didn’t he give the old crone more lines? If I’d written this play, I would have given her lots and lots more lines, and I’d have made her able to become invisible or to read people’s minds or to do other astonishing things.”
“Well, if I’d written this play,” Ruby says, “I’d certainly have done something more with that donkey.”
THE SHOES
Home alone again, silence and space! It is Saturday, and Mom and Papa and Nunzio are out doing errands, Contento is off with her friends, and Pietro is at football practice. Leo assumes no one even noticed that he would be there alone, or he might have been dragged out for errands.
In Papa’s Autobiography, Age of Thirteen, Leo reads the part where Papa tells about finding the tap shoes:
The tap shoes, like new, were sitting on top of an open trash can. An old man was sitting on the porch. I asked him if he was throwing away these shoes.
“Take them, take them,” he said. “No good to us.”
I tried them on. A perfect fit! The old man smiled at me. I tapped all the way home.
Rosaria wanted to try on the shoes. They were, of course, too big, but she put on three extra pairs of socks and then she tapped all around the room, around and around and around.
When I am happy, I tap-dance.
Leo darts up to the attic, puts on the shoes, and off he goes, tapping, round and round the attic, and as he taps, he practices his old crone lines:
OLD CRONE:
I will find out (tappety, tap) what that old Rumpopo (tappety, tap) is up to (tappety, tap, leap).
Leo is in a play on Broadway, rehearsing the part of a young, poor boy who dances his way to stardom. The other actors stand in the wings during Leo’s scene.
“You ever see anybody tap like that boy?”
“Never saw anything like that in my life!”
As he finishes his scene, there is a clamor at the stage door. Teenage girls are screaming for Leo.
“Leo! Leo! Leo!”
Leo wipes the sweat from his brow and goes to meet his fans.
A door slams. Commotion below. “Sardine! You up there? Your turn to take out the trash!”
As Leo returns the tap shoes to the box, he wonders if, like his father, he tap-dances when he’s happy, or if it’s the tapping that makes him happy.
THE RELATIVES
Leo’s family and some of the aunties, uncles, and cousins from his father’s side of the family, and his father’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa Navy (that’s not their real name; it’s what Leo calls them because they always wear navy blue clothes) gather for Sunday dinner at Leo’s house.
On the front porch, Auntie Angela is bristly and sour. “I’m not going in,” she says.
Uncle Guido, the peacemaker, says, “Oh, come on, Angela—”
“I do not want to see Maddalena and her perfect children.”
In the front hallway, Auntie Maddalena says, “Angela is being a pain.”
Leo’s mother, Mariana, says, “Oh, Maddalena, don’t be silly.”
“Don’t call me silly.”
Leo wanders to the back porch, where he overhears his cousins, Tina and Joey.
Tina says, “Nunzio still has his stupid lisp.”
Joey says, “What a baby.”
“And Contento’s hair—did you see that?”
“Looks like a monster wig.”
“And the sardine—you’d think he slept in those clothes!”
“For two weeks!”
Leo glances at his clothes. They look okay to him. He slips back into the kitchen, where Grandma Navy is complaining to Auntie Carmella.
“Didn’t Mariana make potatoes? How could she not make potatoes?”
Auntie Carmella, who loves to hear Grandma Navy complain about Leo’s mother, says, “I told you we should have dinner at my house. I always make potatoes.”
Grandma says, “Where’s your brother Carlo?”
Auntie Carmella shrugs. “Traveling. As usual.”
“He travels too much. Where’s that husband of yours?”
“Golfing. As usual.”
“He golfs too much. And where are my grandchildren? You’d think they would be at the door to welcome their grandmother.”
She spots Leo as he is about to duck back out of the kitchen. “You there,” she
says.
He’s caught. “Hi, Grandma.”
She says, “Pietro—”
“I’m Leo.”
“Pietro, Leo, ack! So sometimes I mix you up. I have so many grandchildren!”
Leo makes an excuse, says that he’s looking for Papa, and he makes his way to the garage.
Grandpa Navy and Papa are there.
Grandpa says, “You got a new car?” The way he says it, it sounds like, “Are you nuts, getting a new car?”
Papa says, “Not completely new. It’s used. Four years old.”
Grandpa taps the fender. “I’ve had my car for twelve years. If you take care of them, they last forever.”
Papa closes his eyes. He is trying to stay calm.
Grandpa sees Leo. “Well, who’s this? Pietro?”
“I’m Leo. I’m the short one.”
“You still playing football?”
“That’s Pietro. I’m an actor.”
Grandpa snorts. “Actor? Don’t be silly. What kind of thing is that to be? Be a doctor. There’s always a need for doctors.”
As everyone sits down to dinner, Papa says, “I’d like to propose a toast—”
Grandpa interrupts. “Mangia, mangia! Let’s just eat. I’m hungry.”
Mom says, “Where’s Angela?”
Auntie Maddalena says, “On the porch. Pouting. As usual.”
Uncle Paolo sits quietly, smiling absently at everyone. He doesn’t need to talk because Maddalena will speak for him. Occasionally, he begins a sentence, but he does not need to finish it. “Is Carlo—”
Maddalena continues for him. “—traveling again? Again?”
Over at the kids’ table, cousin Tina says, “Mom! Mom! Pietro hit me.”
Pietro says, “You big baby.”
Cousin Joey pinches Nunzio and calls him a little booger.
Nunzio says, “Thtop it.”
Auntie Carmella points her fork at Leo’s mother. “Mariana, you really should do something about Nunzio’s lisp. You need to send him to a speech therapist.”