“I guess I must have developed temporary amnesia,” Sister said with a sarcastic smirk. “Because I can’t recall having given you permission to get up and use the pencil sharpener.”
“Don’t need peermission,” Zhenya countered. “What ees beeg deal you are making h’about thees?”
“The big deal?” said Sister. “The big deal is that you are being openly defiant, and that, young lady, is entirely unacceptable.” She moved a step closer so that the two were face to face, separated by a scant few inches.
At which point Zhenya called upon one of the expressions that Lonny Flood had taught her. “Why not you go sheet een you het?” she said.
The rest of sat there frozen—a wide-eyed, horrified tableau vivant. All of us, that is, except Rosalie. “She just told you you should go to the bathroom in your hat, Sister,” she said.
“Oh she did, did she?” Sister Mary Agrippina said. Then she reared back and slapped Zhenya, hard as she could, across the face.
Zhenya looked stunned. She reached up and, with her right hand, rubbed her stinging cheek. Then she, too, reared back, formed a fist, and clocked Sister Mary Agrippina in the jaw, hard enough so that the old coot lost her balance and fell back against Eugene Bowen’s desk. Attempting to get up, she fell back again, this time landing in Eugene’s lap. Rosalie stood, ran toward the back door, and down to the office to tattle.
You’d have thought Zhenya’s actions would have gotten her expelled, wouldn’t you? Or, at least, suspended indefinitely? But that was not the case. The language barrier and cultural misunderstanding, not Zhenya, were blamed for the assault on Sister Mary Agrippina who, over the Thanksgiving interlude, got transferred from St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parochial School to some retirement home for Catholic sisters in Galilee, Rhode Island. I felt sorry for those old nuns if Sister Mary Ag was going to be taking care of them the way she took care of us, but I felt glad for my class and me. Zhenya had brought Sister Mary Gestapo’s reign of terror to an end. And besides, maybe she only liked to torture kids.
When we returned to school the following Monday, other things had changed as well. Madame Frechette was wearing high heels with a leopard skin pattern, a new “poodle”-style hairdo, and a bright red beret, which she wore both outside of class and in. As director of the upcoming tableaux vivants, she also had a new, strictly business attitude. Lonny and Zhenya, over our four-and-a-half-day hiatus, had somehow become boyfriend and “geuhlfriend.” About a third of our female classmates had returned from break wearing braids or pigtails. Three girls—two of the MaryAnns plus Nancy Whiteley—had tried conditioning their hair with mayonnaise and were now doing it on a regular basis. No fewer than seven girls had pierced their ears with little gold threads—“starters,” they called them.
Even Rosalie Twerski had transformed herself. She showed up that Monday with shaved legs—the left one bearing Band-Aids in two different places, the right leg in three. Shockingly, she, too, had pierced her ears and was wearing tiny gold crucifixes on her punctured lobes. More shocking still, she had emerged from her mother’s maroon Chrysler Newport that morning wearing a lime green Carnaby Street cap—and a bra! At first I assumed Rosalie was mocking Zhenya—that she had turned her into a belated Halloween costume. Then I took into account Turdski’s fiercely competitive nature and realized what was really going on: if she could not defeat this foreign interloper whose popularity had soared into the stratosphere as a result of her having assaulted and banished the scourge of St. Aloysius, then she would try her damnedest to out-Zhenya her.
The race was on. The tableau vivant was upon us. The role of the Blessed Virgin Mary was up for grabs.
5
Meatloaf
Monday, December 7, 1964. I had awaited its arrival for weeks, little suspecting that it would become a day that would live in Felix Funicello infamy.
My classmates, too, had been anticipating the arrival of Monday, December the seventh, as Madame Frechette had told us this would be the day when, after Current Events and recess, she would announce her decisions about who would be who in our tableaux vivants. But for me, the casting of a Christmas program still two weeks away was of lesser importance than what would happen later that afternoon. I’d arrived at school that morning dressed not as a parochial school student but as a seafaring boy. (Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Junior Midshipmen had permission to wear their uniforms to St. Aloysius on the days when they had after-school meetings.) During Current Events, my current event was that in six more hours I would board a bus to Hartford with my fellow Midshipmen and, at 4:00 P.M., appear on Channel 3’s Ranger Andy Show. Over the weekend, I’d rung doorbells up and down our street to let neighbors know about my impending television debut and had made a sign for Pop to post at the lunch counter alerting our regulars. When I’d suggested that he might also want to lug our TV down to the lunch counter again and pass out more free pie, Pop had nixed that idea, claiming that more heavy lifting might give him a “sacroiliac attack” and that the last thing he needed was for our customers to get too used to free food.
“Ah,” Madame noted. “First your mother was on télévision, and now you shall be, too, eh?”
“Yeah. Plus, my third cousin, Annette Funicello, has been on TV billions of times.” Turning back to the class, I asked if there were any questions. Zhenya’s hand went up. “Zhenya?”
“Who eez det? H’Annette Foony Jello?” (To Zhenya, I was Fillix Foony Jello, as in, while choosing sides at recess, “H’okay, I peeks Fillix Foony Jello.”)
“Well, she used to be a Mouseketeer on TV and now she’s a movie star.”
“Ya? Movie star at seenima? Wow-ee, Fillix! You cousin beeg shut, ya?”
I nodded. “Anyone else?” Turdski’s hand went up. “Rosalie?”
She wasn’t at her desk; she was over at the first aid station by the pencil sharpener that had been set up for the girls whose pierced ears had gotten infected. “Just a sec,” she said. Upturning the bottle of rubbing alcohol, she soaked a pair of cotton balls and applied them to her inflamed and oozy earlobes. Then, instead of asking me something about my current event like I thought she was going to, she turned to Zhenya and phony-smiled. “Zhenya, I just want to point out to you that it’s pronounced ‘cinema,’ not ‘seenima.’ Like ‘mortal or venial sin.’ Say it: cinema.” From his seat in the back, Franz Duzio, who’d never quite mastered the art of whispering, wondered not-so-quietly who’d died and made her the teacher.
“Seenima,” Zhenya said.
Rosalie shook her head. “Sin…ema. Try it again.”
“Seen…ema.”
“En…ema,” someone mumbled. Giggles followed.
Rosalie smiled with patronizing patience and, turning to Madame, promised to work with Zhenya on her pronunciation during recess. Zhenya shook her head. “Uh uh. Nyet. At recess, I play bezbull or dujbull.”
As a parochial school student, I was, of course, well acquainted with the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and knew that a kiss or a sugary smile from a “friend” could be treacherous. And so, in defense of Zhenya, I smiled, too—at my nemesis. “Oh, that reminds me, Rosalie,” I said. “It’s ‘picnic,’ not ‘pitnic.’”
Turdski’s smile turned sour. “Yeah? So?”
“You always pronounce it ‘pitnic.’”
“I do not!”
“Yeah, you do, Rose,” one of the unassailable Kubiaks chimed in. Several of the boys nodded. Some of the girls might have nodded, too, had Rosalie not wielded so much power. Geraldine Balchunas sprang to the defense of her best friend. “If she says ‘pitnic,’ then how come I never heard her, and I go over to her house all the time?”
“Et bien, mesdames and messieurs, ça suffit. And now—”
Ignoring Geraldine and Madame, I kept my focus on Rosalie. “Repeat after me: I will bring potato salad to the class pic…nic.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Madame cover her grin with her hand.
“I’m not repeating anything,” Turd Girl said. “I know it’s ‘picnic
,’ so you can just shut up, Dondi.” At this point, Madame intervened in earnest, reminding Rosalie that telling others to “shut up” in her classroom was grounds for a check-minus. Opening her grade book, she turned a deaf ear to Rosalie’s argument that she hadn’t told me to shut up; she’d merely said that I could shut up—if I wanted to. Madame rose and wrote the French spelling, pique-nique, on the board. To me she said, “Finish up now, monsieur, s’il vous plait.”
I nodded. “Any other questions?”
Geraldine was gunning for me now. “When you go on that show today, are you afraid you’ll break the TV camera and have to pay for it because you’re so ugly?” None of the boys laughed, but several girls did. Madame Frechette came to my defense—or tried to, anyway. I wish she hadn’t. “That will be enough of that, mademoiselle. I am quite sure no cameras will be broken. And I’m sure you will all agree that Monsieur Felix looks quite dashing in his seaman’s uniform.”
Lonny’s shocked whisper carried up from the back of the class. “What’d she just say then? Did she just say what I thought she said? Holy crap!” I didn’t get why he was going so mental.
“Ah, recess time, mes élèves,” Madame noted with a sigh of relief. “And après votre récréation, we shall discuss our tableaux vivants. Class dismissed!”
Some of the girls retrieved their jump ropes from the cloak room and others made for the rubbing alcohol and cotton balls. Us boys took bats, balls, and bases out of the closet and pushed past the girls and down the stairs.
“Hey,” I said to Lonny on our way out of the building. “What’d you think Madame said back there?”
He guffawed. “Oh my god, don’t you know what semen is?” I told him yeah—a seaman was a sailor. A squid. He shook his head and laughed even louder. “It’s, you know, spunk.”
“What’s spunk?”
“Oh, man, Felix. Ain’t you ever had a wet dream?”
Was he talking about bed-wetting? “Not since I was real little,” I said. That made him laugh so hard that he dropped to his knees. I still didn’t get it, but at least now I realized we were in the birds-and-the-bees ballpark. My ignorance was Pop’s fault, of course. All’s he’d told me about sex was that stuff about drinking fountains. If I was ever going to figure it all out, I’d just have to listen harder on the school bus—be Sherlock Holmes, kind of.
Out on the playground, everyone was talking about whether Rosalie or Zhenya would get picked to be Mary when we went back inside. Ever since we’d returned from Thanksgiving break, the class had divided itself, more or less, into two factions. Most of the girls wanted Rosalie and most of us boys wanted Zhenya. Both candidates, in their own way, had been campaigning for the part. Zhenya had taken out her braids and begun wearing her long brown hair (made lustrous with mayonnaise) down, and, I noticed, too, that she’d begun jacking up the volume when we prayed the rosary: “Blissid art dou kh’amongst vimmin and blissid eez duh froot uff die voomb.” Rosalie had left an anonymous typewritten note on Madame’s desk. (It had to have been her, although when Madame asked the writer to reveal him-or-herself, she hadn’t owned up.) The note said how Communists were atheists, and how atheists had no right to celebrate Christmas. In addition to the note, Rosalie had taken to wearing a winter scarf to school—not wrapped around her neck but draped over her head like a veil. Lonny, who, in the Virgin Mary sweepstakes, was rooting for his “geuhlfriend,” had at one point confronted potato-nosed Rosalie with the question, “How come you’re wearing that stupid thing all the time now?” Rosalie had fake-coughed and claimed that she had a very, very bad head cold and that her mother had insisted she cover her head in our draughty classroom. “Yeah, right,” Lonny scoffed. “You got a head cold and I’m the Leader of the Pack.” With a laugh, he crouched into a motorcyclist’s stance and made loud rum-rum-rum engine noises. Twerski’s retort was that Lonny was the Leader of the Retards.
But if Rosalie’s remark was inappropriate for a girl in the finals of the Blessed Virgin sweepstakes, then Zhenya’s conduct out on the playground twenty minutes before Madame’s big announcement that day was every bit as un-Marylike. Designated one of the day’s baseball captains, I was making my picks when, unexpectedly, Father Hanrahan appeared on the opposite side of the playground where the hoop was, dribbling a basketball and wondering real loud who wanted to play some Twenty-One? “Me!” all us boys shouted, throwing down our gloves and running toward him. Father Hanrahan was the only cool person at St. Aloysius—he even let you call him Father Jerry if you felt like it—and his appearance on the playground was almost like having Bill Russell or John Havlicek show up. But though Zhenya loved both “bezbull” and “dujbull,” she was indifferent to, and had no aptitude for, “bezgetbull.” Separating herself from the rest of us, she glanced over at the jump-roping girls and then walked by herself to the fence. Lonny, older and taller than the rest of us, was the best basketball player in our class. “Hey!” I called to him as he walked toward Zhenya. “Aint you playing?”
“Nah.”
A minute later, he had his arm around her. Two minutes after that, they were kissing, regular or French I couldn’t see.
Jump ropes fell to the pavement and the girls clustered en masse, looking over toward the fence. Oblivious, Father Jerry and half of the boys were still playing Twenty-One, but the other half of us were staring in disbelief at Lonny and Zhenya, same as the girls. This was the most shocking thing our class had witnessed since Zhenya’s socking of Sister Mary Agrippina. Glancing back at the building for a second, I saw that Sister Cecilia’s third graders were crowded at their classroom windows, watching the show as well. I figured Sister Cecilia was probably out in the hall talking to Sister Godberta as usual. But if those two second-floor nuns were unaware of the passion on display, Mother Filomina was not. Her first-floor office window flew open with a bang, and she shook the bell harder than Ma shakes the thermometer before she sticks it in under my tongue when I’m sick. “Evgeniya Kabakova and the rest of the fifth grade girls should proceed immediately to the fire escape on the side of the building for an emergency class meeting with Sister Fabian!” she shouted. “Lonny Flood should come to the office, and any boy not playing basketball with Father should run laps around the school building. Now!”
When the recess bell rang, panting and sweaty from all those laps, I trudged up the stairs beside Zhenya, who looked both teary-eyed and defiant. “What was the emergency meeting about?” I whispered, as if I didn’t already know. Instead of answering my question, Zhenya asked under her breath what those “guddamned pinguins” knew about “keesing boyzes.” But at the drinking fountain, Susan Ekizian filled me in on the gist of the fire escape confab. Addressing all the fifth grade girls, but mostly looking and shaking her finger at Zhenya, Mother Fil had assured them that young ladies who kept themselves pure for their future husbands ran a better-than-even chance of meeting those husbands in the confession line, and that God would reward them with happy marriages and beautiful children. She likewise had warned that any girl who made herself “the occasion of sin for a boy” just might be purchasing a one-way ticket to Hell. The meeting had closed with a recitation of the Catholic Legion of Decency pledge to embrace virtue and to resist lustful behavior and condemned movies.
Back in class, Madame was missing and the girls were abuzz about how Rosalie, beyond a doubt, now had a lock on the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in our tableaux vivants. What were they doing with Lonny, I wondered. Torturing him? Making him sit across from Monsignor Muldoon and read that Saint Aloysius Gonzaga booklet? Not out loud, I hoped—Lonny wasn’t too hot at reading aloud. But when I got up to sharpen my pencil, I saw Lonny back outside again with Father Hanrahan. Father was doing most of the talking, and Lonny’s head kept going up and down in agreement with whatever he was saying. Plus, they kept bounce-passing the basketball between them. Then Father stopped talking and they began playing one on one.
Madame returned, smelling like cigarettes and freshly applied lily-of-the-valley pe
rfume. I had assumed she would simply announce her tableaux vivants decisions, but she’d prepared in advance while we were at recess. The world map had been pulled down and, with a bit of dramatic flair, Madame approached it and gave it a yank. “Voilà!” she said. Our tableaux assignments were revealed on the blackboard beneath.
Most of Madame’s decisions were shockers, with two exceptions. I had been cast as the Little Drummer Boy in the nativity scene and Marion Pemberton, the only colored kid in our class, was to be the only colored Wise Man. But Franz Duzio, with his eight million detentions, as the Angel Gabriel? Lonny Flood as Joseph? Most shocking of all, neither Rosalie Twerski nor Zhenya Kabakova would be the Blessed Virgin Mary; both had been assigned the roles of lowly shepherdesses. Casting against type, Madame had chosen shy, chubby, cat’s-eye-glasses-wearing Pauline Papelbon to play the Virgin. “Sister Mary Potato Chips,” some of the mean girls in our class had dubbed Pauline because of her fondness for Ripples, Cheetos, Fritos, and Flings. I turned from the board to my fellow classmates. Zhenya looked indifferent. Rosalie looked outraged. Pauline Papelbon snuck something from her desk and put it in her mouth. I thought I glimpsed the trace of a smile.
Whereas my mother’s humiliation had been televised nationally, Ranger Andy was only a local program. Still, part of my excitement about my TV appearance that afternoon was rooted in my desire to vindicate Ma. I would erase the memory of her Pillsbury Bake-Off disaster with my own televised triumph. Kids who were guests at the Ranger Station sat together in three rows of bleacher seats, but Ranger Andy frequently needed helpers. If, say, a magician was a featured guest, a kid with quick hand-raising reflexes might be chosen to step to the front of the room and become a magician’s assistant. A zoologist from the science museum might need a kid to come on up, pet the snake coiled around his arm, and verify that its skin was smooth and cool to the touch, not rough and scaly. And, of course, whatever the needs of that day’s featured guest, there was the daily need for a volunteer to carry the Ranger Station’s mail pouch up to the front so that Ranger Andy could pull out a letter or two and answer questions that kids had written in to ask.