Gee Whiz (6 page)

Jerry said, “Cannelloni.”

I could not imagine what this was. Danny started chopping an onion. I decided I had no idea what was going on, and walked on into the living room. Mom was sewing two pieces of her afghan together and Dad was looking at some papers. I kept going.

It turned out that cannelloni was very large noodles—rather like the egg noodles that Mom sometimes made, but as wide as your hand—rolled around some sort of white cheese and then covered with a spaghetti sauce, topped with more cheese, and baked in the oven. It was exactly the sort of thing you would have at the Goldmans’ house, and you would taste it politely a few times until you decided that it was pretty good and there was nothing else and you might as well eat it. Danny and Jerry each had two helpings; Dad, after a slow start, had a helping and a half, and Mom was polite. I pushed the white part to one side; the rest was good, and I ate it. It was true that Danny would eat anything, had always been ready to eat anything, including asparagus, which Mom grew behind the house and only made us eat in the spring, when it was very young. If you put enough brown butter on it, it was fine. There was also salad. I ate that. I thought that this must be what Sophia felt like most of the time—it was on her plate,
staring at her, she knew she ought to eat it, but in the end, why bother?

In the meantime, Dad was quizzing Jerry about his family, as if they had come from Mars or something. When he asked what his grandfathers did, Danny and I just kept our eyes on our plates (Jerry’s grandfathers were both butchers), but when he asked where the family went to church, we glanced at each other. Danny’s left eyebrow, the one toward me, lifted slightly. I coughed. Jerry laughed and said, “They all go to Saints Peter and Paul. It’s a pretty famous church. It was bombed five times in the twenties, and then Joe DiMaggio got married there, though not to Marilyn Monroe. To his first wife. My mom saw the celebration when she was a kid.” He spoke cheerfully. It was clear that Danny had not said a word to Jerry about Dad or Mom or our church. Jerry thought he was just conversing.

Dad said, “I never heard of that church. But I guess, even though I’ve been up around there, I’ve never actually been in the city of San Francisco.”

Now it was Jerry’s turn to have his jaw drop to his plate. He said, “You’ve never crossed the Golden Gate Bridge? You’ve never been to Chinatown or the Embarcadero?”

And Dad said, “Maybe we should go there sometime.”

Danny said, “You should.”

That was how we knew that Danny had been there without ever telling us. I was sure he’d been up to visit Leah Marx.

Mom said, “I hear that people like to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“It’s a beauty,” said Jerry. “I’ve done that twice. If there’s a
high wind, it trembles. But they don’t allow you to walk across it in certain weather conditions.”

Dad said, “Hmph. So your family are Roman Catholic.”

Jerry said, “Most Italians are. I was an altar boy for six years.” He continued to eat, now his salad. I could see that Dad was toying with whether he should witness to Jerry. A Catholic was unsaved, according to our church, and it was his job to witness to everyone who was unsaved. All we knew about Catholics was that they bowed down to statues of saints and they worshiped Jesus on the cross—not Jesus himself, but an image of him. Also, Catholics could only talk to Jesus through Mary or the Pope. I started holding my breath. Maybe Mom started holding her breath—she was poking at her salad with her fork. But Dad, I guess, decided not to risk it. Jerry was Danny’s friend. Danny and Dad had gone months and months without speaking, and things had only gotten more or less (sometimes less) back to normal in the summer. I could hear all of Danny’s arguments in my head, too—he is our guest, he didn’t ask you, his religion is not our business (your business). I could even see them as I had so many times in the past, looking alike as they sat across from one another at the kitchen table, slamming their coffee cups down just before jumping up and not speaking to one another for another month. There was a silence—not long enough for Jerry to notice—and then Mom said, “What’s for dessert?”

“Oh!” said Jerry. “I got something at a bakery in San Jose. It’s in a box in the truck.” He pushed away from the table and went out the back door. I started clearing the plates. The long silence continued. I wasn’t quite sure whether or not the danger had passed. Then Jerry came in, and he was carrying a box
of large round cookies with ridges in fancy shapes. He said, “These are pizzelle. The bakeries only have them around Christmas and Easter. I love them. They aren’t terribly sweet.” He set the box on the table, and we each took one. They were crisp and tasted like black licorice.

Mom said, “You like to cook.”

“I love to cook. That’s my hobby. But at my house, I can hardly get to the stove, because everyone else is there first, arguing about what to have for dinner. So this is fun for me. And there isn’t a real kitchen in my dorm at school, just a hot plate.” Then he said, “I had my apprentice meat cutter’s license when I was sixteen. Youngest in our family. But I don’t know. There are other things to do in life besides cooking and eating.”

Maybe there had never been anyone like Jerry Gardino in our house. He was good-natured and a little loud, and he moved around a lot. He leaned from side to side in his chair; he waved his hands and even his arms. He smiled. His hair bounced. While he was eating (he was sitting beside me), he tapped his foot. He turned his chair away from the table, stretched his legs, crossed them at the ankles. I looked over at the stove—he did not believe in “clean as you go.” I guess I’d thought that Beebop would be wild in the pasture, but it turned out that Beebop was quiet in the pasture but Jerry was wild in the house.

Even so, Mom and Dad seemed to like him. When he and Danny left that evening (after cleaning up, of course, though I helped), Mom said, “Come back anytime,” just the way Mrs. Goldman said it, as if she actually meant it.

* * *

Since the next day was beautiful, everyone was at church. What with all of the events of the week, I had forgotten about Brother Abner. He was missing again. Apparently, Sister Hazen and Sister Larkin had decided to go see him. Before the hymns started, I heard them talking to Mom about it. Sister Hazen said, “I’d been there before, about fifteen months ago. I went there to deliver a chair we gave him, and I have to say the place looked a little basic then, but …”

“You know he uses an outhouse,” said Sister Larkin. “Just like the old days. I grew up with an outhouse.” She clucked and waved her hand.

“And if he wants hot water, he heats it on his range. He said to me he thought piped-in hot water was bad for you. Lead in the pipes.”

“A bath a week, according to him, Saturday night, and he uses one piece of soap. Carries it from one sink to the other, until it’s down to a little bead.”

“That’s very frugal,” said Mom.

“Oh, ‘frugal’ isn’t the word,” said Sister Hazen.

Sister Larkin said, “But those are the old ways. Go to bed at dusk, read the same few books over and over, use up your bar of soap. When my folks got electric light on the farm, my mother was ashamed of how dirty the walls were, but that was decades of gas lamps and kerosene lamps for you.”

Mom said, “But does he seem ill?”

“Oh, he does,” said Sister Larkin. “Coughing into his handkerchief, then asking us if we’d like a cup of tea. My land! I am worried.”

Mom said, “Was his place cold?”

“Well, it was a sunny day, and his place faces south. It was warm enough that afternoon, but it must get chilly. Must. The little woodstove looked unused to me, though there was some firewood in the kindling box. Maybe he doesn’t feel good enough to put a fire in there, and he thinks that blankets will be enough.”

“He’s very thin,” said Mom.

“Gracious me, I was shocked!” said Sister Larkin, who loved to cook and looked it.

Then they all started shaking their heads.

Sister Hazen said, “He thanked us for coming, but with these old men, you never know what to do. Pride means everything to them, and they don’t want anyone to see how they are. I sometimes think …” She shook her head again, then said, “Well, what is the charitable thing to do? Hurt their pride by saving them, or let them go on the way they want to?”

Sister Larkin said, “And you can’t ask them, because they won’t give you a straight answer.” All three women started tutting.

After that, we had our usual service, with five hymns before the brothers started sharing the passages in the Bible that they wanted to talk about, then some more hymns, which were my favorite part, because Dad had a good voice and Mom knew how to harmonize. After that, supper, which Sister Lodge and Sister Larrabee had made, chicken stew and boiled potatoes, with cupcakes for dessert. But I could see the talk about Brother Abner go around the room. Two or three people would lean toward one another, heads would bend, lips
would move, heads would shake, then those people would talk to someone else. The sisters would talk to each other, then to their own male relatives, then the men would talk to each other. It would be Dad and Mr. Hollingsworth and Mr. Brooks who would be expected to come up with an idea. I didn’t know what it would be, though.

At the end of the meal, there was plenty of chicken left, some potatoes, and two cupcakes. Sister Lodge said that she would take the food by Brother Abner’s place and tell him the congregation was thinking of him. Everyone agreed that that was not only a charitable thing to do, but a tactful one. On the way home, Mom and Dad mumbled in the front seat. I could have leaned forward and heard them, but I didn’t. I had no ideas, either.

It may be that Kyle Gonzalez had seen every movie about the Roman Empire ever made, or at least he had read about them. Whenever Miss Cumberland said any name at all—Antony, Caesar, Cleopatra, Marcus Aurelius, Scipio, Carthage—Kyle would raise his hand and ask if she had seen the movie about that person. His favorites were
Ben-Hur
,
Spartacus
, and something about Hannibal, which was in Italian, which Kyle did not know, but he enjoyed the film anyway. I supposed that he was allowed to stay up all night, anytime he wanted, and watch old movies on TV. All I knew before we studied the Romans in class was the Bible stories and the Shakespeare play
Julius Caesar
, which we had read at the end of seventh grade. I was very fond of that play because we did a reading of it at the Goldmans’ house, and that was when I started to be
friends with them. Since we had spent a little too much time on the Greeks, Miss Cumberland’s favorite, we had to rush through the last four hundred years of the Roman Empire before we took our test on Friday. In the spring, we were to go on to medieval Europe.

My favorite thing about the Roman Empire was that it got as far as England, which Miss Cumberland said was as far away from Rome as we were from Colorado Springs, which might not seem very far, but try walking, which is what the Roman soldiers had to do. Miss Cumberland was very fond of Hadrian, who was one of the good emperors and who visited England and built a wall there that still stands. He also visited Egypt and Jerusalem. He liked to take architects with him and have buildings and temples built. She showed us a slide show of some of the buildings, as well as of statues of Hadrian, and she also said that a French writer had written a book called
Memoirs of Hadrian
. I was sure Kyle would do an extra-credit report on it by Friday. We were looking forward to Christmas vacation. Once the tests were over Friday, we would have eighteen days. I did not expect to do well on my test, but thanks to being friends with Sophia, who didn’t mind explaining things, I had gotten an A on the Egyptians, an A-minus on the Sumerians, a B-plus on the early Greeks, and an A on the classical Greeks. These grades averaged out to an A-minus, so a C on the Romans would only take me down to a B-plus for the whole semester. A B-plus would get past Dad, no problem. However, the week was hard work, with scads of homework, more than I could do on the way home on the bus. Mom helped me by always riding Nobby and Lincoln. Dad rode Oh
My and Marcus, and I let Blue slide a little. I would catch up in the course of eighteen days of vacation.

About the only fun at school for that whole week was lunch, and even then, we spent a lot of time listening to Sophia explain geometry problems to Stella, who listened carefully, but always seemed amazed at what she heard. At least, she was no longer getting an F or even a D—thanks to Sophia, she was getting a C-plus. I liked geometry. I thought it was pretty easy to picture what the teacher was talking about, and as for the numbers, you just had to memorize them. Even pi you only had to memorize out to four decimal places—3.1415. It was like a good phone number—3+1=4+1=5. Sophia’s phone number was like that, 835-1448: 8–3=5–1=4+4=8. I didn’t tell anyone that that was how I memorized stuff. I thought it sounded too much like Kyle Gonzalez.

The other interesting thing at school was that Leslie had a boyfriend, and he was a Condor. True, he was a basketball Condor (and taller than she was) rather than a football Condor (the basketball team had had a 6–3 season, and so they were pretty popular). He was a junior. His name was Ronny Wood, and sometimes he sat with us at lunch. Leslie always sat with us. She said that if he wanted to have lunch with her, he had to sit with us, too. He was a guard on the basketball team, and as a sophomore had averaged fifteen points a game. Leslie said that this was good. He had a driver’s license, and he brought her to school every morning by seven o’clock. They ran at least two miles around the track before changing and going to class.

All in all, I liked high school better than I thought I was going to, but there was a lot to think about. You couldn’t just roll out of bed and put some clothes on and go, making sure you were clean and your hair was combed. You had to have made up your mind about all sorts of things, like what group you wanted to look like (even though you might not be a part of that group), whether you wanted to stick out or fade into the woodwork (I wanted to fade into the woodwork), whether you wanted the teachers to like you,
really
like you, or just get along with you. The high school was big, and there were a lot of ways to be famous there, not all of them good. Stella and Gloria said that you had to
seize
your opportunity, and talked a lot about what opportunities there were. So there were plenty of reasons I was glad to see the end of the semester. No one in my family had had to worry about any of this—Mom and Dad had gone to a country school in Oklahoma that had about ten students of all ages, and Danny had quit (after goofing off most of the time before that).