One time, p.3
One Time, page 3
Miss Judy:
So we had to cart up a different table—
Miss Marlene:
And we made tea in these little cups—
Miss Judy:
These same cups you’re drinking out of—
Miss Marlene:
And we had little cookies—
Miss Judy:
Better than these cookies—we had little fancy ones—
Miss Marlene:
For the empress of Japan—
Miss Judy:
And we’re talking, talking—
Miss Marlene:
Talking, talking—
Miss Judy:
And after all this talking, do you know what the empress of Japan said?
Miss Marlene:
It was so—so—cute.
Miss Judy:
She said, “May I have a cookie?”
Miss Marlene:
The empress of Japan!
Miss Judy:
“May I have a cookie?”
They were so eager, Miss Judy and Miss Marlene, to tell us their story of the visit of the empress of Japan, and when they finished, Dad nodded appreciatively while I looked longingly at the cookies.
Because Miss Judy worked in our school office, I saw her nearly every day. She winked at me, even if I was late or in trouble, like the time when I saw the angels.
Now, Miss Judy was standing like a gawky bird in the doorway of our classroom, handing Miss Lightstone a folder and introducing her to a new student. The whir this set off in our class reminded me of sitting with Miss Judy and Miss Marlene and hearing the tale of the empress of Japan. There was a rhythm to the whispers in my class, and I tried to capture it quickly in my notebook.
Who is that?
Is it a boy? Is he new?
Must be—
Never seen him—
Or her. Maybe it’s a girl.
Will he—or she—be—
In our class—
Oh, I hope so—
What’s the big deal?
Who is it?
Starting school two weeks late?
Must have just moved here—
From where?
Who is it?
“Class,” Miss Lightstone said, ushering a boy into the room, “we have a new student. This is Antonio.”
Everyone gaped at him. He was so perfectly perfect standing there, confident and at ease, all cleaned up.
He smiled.
At everyone.
The New Boy
My classmates tripped all over themselves offering to help “the new boy,” volunteering to show Antonio around the school and where to put his jacket and how to maneuver the cafeteria line and how to interpret the schedule and, honestly, I think they would have taught him how to walk and talk if he had needed it.
“He’s so different—”
“Mysterious—”
“Do you see how he smiles?”
Yes, I saw how he smiled, and I was disappointed.
He was in our room for nearly ten minutes before he recognized me.
“Hey,” he said. “This your class?”
“Yep.”
And then someone nudged him, eager to show him something, and he turned away.
Margie snagged my arm. “You know him? How do you know him?” She sounded as if she were accusing me of keeping him a secret.
“Neighbor,” I said, watching him being ushered across the room by Arif and Renaldo, with Claire, Audrey, and Ruby trailing behind.
Margie was affronted. “You never said! You never mentioned him!”
“He hasn’t been here long.”
Miss Lightstone seated him at the one empty desk on the far side of the room, near the bulletin board. Just before lunch, Audrey asked Miss Lightstone if Antonio could sit near her, because she was “very good at helping new people.” Ruby said that she, too, was very good at helping new people.
Antonio seemed dazed by all the attention, but not so dazed that he forgot to smile. He offered everyone the gift of that smile, everyone in equal measure.
I was feeling grouchy about that, but when the dismissal bell rang at the end of the day, Antonio made a point of finding me and asking me if I would show him where to catch the bus.
“Sure,” I said, aware that other students—Margie and Audrey and Claire and Ruby especially—were surprised, momentarily frozen in place.
He joined me in the bus line and he sat beside me on the bus.
That was no small thing.
Normally, I sat with Margie or one of the other girls. Boys and girls did not usually sit together, and I briefly worried that other boys would make fun of him, but they did not.
He told me he didn’t want to get off at the wrong stop.
The next morning, he waited in his driveway until I came out of my house, and we walked to the bus stop together.
He sat beside me on the bus.
When we reached school, he said, “Okay, now I know how to do it.”
Renaldo greeted him and then a few other students joined them and they all walked into school together and that was the last day Antonio sat beside me on the bus or waited for me in the morning.
The Smile
A person was more than a smile. I knew that.
I knew that, and still I was mesmerized by Antonio’s smile—the way it began slowly and then got wider and wider—and I attributed all sorts of positive things to his character because of that smile.
He must be a good person.
He must be happy.
He must be kind.
He must be thoughtful.
He must be smart.
He must like me.
He didn’t smile all the time, or else he would have appeared goofy, like Renaldo. Sometimes Renaldo was funny and sometimes not, but if I was around him too much, I got a headache.
I did not get a headache around Antonio.
The Moon and the Lake
On the bulletin board, a new word: lunar.
Beside the word: a photo of a creamy full moon against a dark sky, reflected in a lake below.
Beneath the word and the photo, a new first line: “Rendi was not sure how long the moon had been missing.”2
“Lunar refers to the moon,” Margie said.
“Everyone knows that,” Freddy felt compelled to add.
Arif studied the board. “And the moon is in the photo.”
“And the moon,” Renaldo added, “is in that first line of a book.”
Freddy approached the board. “Except that in the book the moon is missing: ‘Rendi was not sure how long the moon had been missing.’”
Like me, Antonio was watching and listening, but said nothing.
Midway through attendance-taking, Margie jumped up. “That new image with the moon—see? It’s also a reflection—just like the other picture with the trees and the lake.” She sat down, cradling her head in her hands. “What does it all mean?”
Renaldo adopted a stern voice and demanded, “Who put it there?” He drummed his fingers loudly on his desk. “Did you, Miss Lightstone?”
She raised her eyes from the attendance book, blinked a few times, glanced at the board, and murmured, “Hmm.”
The rest of the day was a blur of books and assignments and in the midst of it all, an awareness that Antonio was accumulating fans, layers of students surrounding him wherever he went.
At dismissal, he was whisked aboard the bus by several boys and they all sat in the back, talking and laughing like a band of chattering crows.
It wasn’t until I got off the bus that I remembered we were expecting company that day.
Uncle and Auntie Pasta
Each September, my father’s aunt and uncle made a pilgrimage from New York to our home in Ohio. With them, they brought the auntie’s sour mood and the ingredients to make the uncle’s pasta, which he could not live without. He would not eat “store bought”—it had to be fresh—and because of their pasta obsession we privately referred to them as Uncle and Auntie Pasta.
They also brought two presents for me. The presents were always the same: a pair of white socks with lacy cuffs (the sort of socks I wore when I was four) and a contribution to the money box they had given me when I was born. The money box was a square tin painted with red and yellow flowers. In the top was a narrow slot. During each visit, Uncle Pasta would make a great show of presenting me with a coin to put in the box. When I was little, it was a nickel. Later, a dime. Then a quarter.
“Save, save, save!” Uncle Pasta ordered as he handed me the coin each year.
One time after they’d left, Mom said, “Maybe by the time you are all grown up, you can buy yourself a cup of coffee with those savings.”
To prepare for the visits from the auntie and uncle, I cleared space in my dresser and closet so they could have my room, and I slept on a cot in the hall.
“The bed, it is too small,” the auntie complained.
“Too lumpy, oh, my back,” moaned the uncle.
My mother conveniently had to work late most nights that the auntie and uncle were in town.
The auntie made pasta for lunch and dinner, for this was all the uncle would eat, and it is what the rest of us ate, too. Flour littered the counters; sauce splattered the stove and floor.
“You need to learn to make pasta,” the auntie told me, but when I offered to help, the auntie said, “No, no, I make this. Uncle only likes my pasta.”
When the auntie and uncle were not making or eating pasta, they liked to visit. “Let’s visit a while. Talk. Catch up.”
First they would tell Dad that he needed to get some help raising the povera ragazza (me). “If your wife has to work so much, you can’t do this on your own,” they told him. “You need some help. You need someone to teach her things.”
The little veins on the side of Dad’s neck bulged, but he did not argue. Instead, he nodded and murmured, “Mm, mm.”
Auntie said, “Her head is filled with those angel stories. Tell her about the bad things, too. So many bad things!”
“Terrible, terrible,” Uncle Pasta agreed.
“Our neighbor in New York, that woman, you know, I told you last time? That woman with the dogs? Shot! Outside her own apartment!”
“Shot!” Uncle Pasta echoed.
“And my cousin Guadalupe? You remember her? The one with the big nose? Cancer! From eating canned soup.”
One morning, when Auntie Pasta spotted Antonio’s grandmother outside, she dragged Dad to the window.
“See there? Who is that woman?”
“A grandmother. She’s new here.”
Auntie marched outside and spoke to the grandmother, while Dad and I stayed at the window watching. Antonio’s grandmother stood very still, listening to Auntie Pasta, whose arms waved in the air, occasionally pointing toward our house.
Auntie returned triumphant. “I fix it!” she said.
“Fix what?” Dad asked.
“I told her about you and povera Gina, with her mother working so much and you needing some help.”
Dad was not amused. “You what?”
“I will fix. You’ll see.”
They tried so hard, Auntie and Uncle Pasta, and I knew they meant well, but when they left, I stood on the front steps waving at the back end of their car, relieved.
Mångata
One morning at school Renaldo raced into class waving a blue notecard. “I have a great word! Wait till you see!”
He showed Miss Lightstone the card. “Really?” she said.
“Really. My grandpa is Swedish.”
“Okay, then, go ahead.”
Renaldo tacked the card next to the word lunar and the picture of the moon’s reflection in the water. Reading from the card, he said, “Mångata, a Swedish word meaning the path-like reflection of the moon over water.” He touched the photo of the moon already on the board. “See? That light path that the moon makes in the water? That reflection? That’s mångata.”
I rolled the word around in my mouth: man-gotta, MAN-gotta. It amazed me that there was a single word to describe the way the moon’s light reflects on a body of water, creating a path, as if inviting you to follow it back to the moon.
Miss Lightstone ran her hands through her hair. “Words!”
Others chimed in:
“Mångata!”
“Mooooon!”
“Lunar!”
“Re-flec-tion!”
“Stupid!”
That last one was Freddy, pouring cold water on our enthusiasm. Was there a word for doing just that, spoiling the mood with one word? Maybe it would be floshenslosh or splattenmatt.
Audrey and Ruby hovered beside Antonio’s desk.
“Ooh, mångata! Isn’t that funny, Antonio?”
“Isn’t it so—so—unusual and—and—”
“Particular? Specific?” he added.
“Oh, yes! That’s it, Antonio! It’s so—so—particular and specific!”
I caught his eye for a moment and must have blinked my annoyance, for he turned his palms up as if to say it wasn’t his fault. What was he to do, poor, innocent, Antonio?
Ugh.
When I got home that day, Dad was already there, standing in the kitchen.
“Toast,” I said. “I need toast, with buckets of butter and cinnamon and sugar.”
“That makes two of us. Take a look at this.” On the counter were several serving bowls covered with foil. “You’ll never guess who stopped by.”
“Who?”
Dad nodded toward Antonio’s house. “Her. That lady. That grandmother.”
“No.”
“Yes. She brought us food. Auntie Pasta told her about povera you, without someone to make—”
“No, no. Don’t tell me. No. Is it—I bet it’s—”
He nodded sadly, a defeated man, and lifted the foil. “Pasta: Ravioli! Spaghetti and meatballs! Cavatelli!”
Sheep Talk and Family Trees
One time after school, when I had nearly reached my house, Antonio called out to me. He had hopped off the bus as usual with a posse of kids and had stood there chatting with them while I kept walking. Now, he caught up to me.
“I saw the sheep today,” he said.
“What sheep?”
“Two sheep, gray and dirty. They were having a conversation. I tried to tell Arif and Renaldo about them, but they didn’t believe me.”
“What were the sheep talking about?”
“Family trees.”
“Really? Odd subject for sheep, don’t you think?”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “No. Why shouldn’t they talk about family trees?”
“Sticky subject,” I said.
Later, I told my parents about Antonio seeing the two sheep, gray and dirty, having a conversation. “He told some other kids about the sheep, but they didn’t believe him.”
My mother said, “The sheep were having a conversation?”
“Yes, and you know what they were talking about? Family trees.”
My parents exchanged a glance. Dad said, “Uh-oh. Sticky subject, Gina.”
“That’s exactly what I said.”
One time the previous year’s pointy teacher said we were going to create family trees, and using her own family as an example, she created her family tree on the board. She wrote the names of each of her great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, along with her siblings and with her own name at the bottom. Her name looked so important there, with all those people merging to create her.
For homework she gave us a printout with blank spaces on branches so we could fill in the names of our own family members and ancestors.
From the start, it did not go well. We had questions.
“What if you have two mothers?”
“Or two fathers?”
“How can you have two mothers or two fathers?”
“Or if one is dead?”
“Or both, what if they’re both dead?”
“Or if they’re divorced?”
“Or no father?”
“How can you have no father?”
The pointy teacher said, “Ask your parents. They’ll know what you should write.”
But many of the parents did not know what to write. It was surprising how many versions of trees there could be.
Some parents were angry and complained.
“This is no business of the school’s.”
“We refuse to submit this.”
“My husband was very upset by this.”
“Some of us might be adopted, you know. Which parents and grandparents do you want on this form?”
The following evening, a previously scheduled parent meeting to review policies and upcoming events erupted into a loud, messy complaint session when several parents raised the issue of the family trees.
Mom was working that night, but Dad, who dreaded going to such meetings, went because he felt obligated. On that evening, he came home and said, “Toast! I need toast. People are so angry and crazy!”
The next day the pointy teacher canceled the family tree assignment. Many students were relieved, some were merely puzzled, but a few were frustrated and angry.
“What? I spent five hours on my tree. Five hours! And you’re going to cancel it?”
“Can I get credit for the one I already finished? It’s not fair if those of us who did them don’t get credit while the ones who didn’t do anything get away with being lazy.”
“I wasn’t lazy! My dad forbid me!”
On and on it went. It took weeks for people to settle down.
And then, a year later, came the day that Miss Lightstone unknowingly stepped into that old swamp.
That Old Swamp
It was at the end of class one day, after we’d been talking about characters in a book and how they were related to each other, that Miss Lightstone announced that it might be interesting to work on our own family trees.
