Good Graces (11 page)

I know what she means by that. They’re always trying to convince girls to be nuns and boys to be priests up at school. To keep their ears open for a call from Jesus.

I say, “Kenny Schultz was told to join up in a dream. He went to St. Nazianz seminary right after high school.”

“Yeah, that’s how it goes for most boys, but M.P.G. . . . well, he wasn’t most boys.” I must look like I lost track of the conversation. “That was Mickey’s nickname back then. Ya know, his initials? M.P.G. Miles per gallon?” She rumble laughs deep in her throat. “That boy could give a girl the ride of her life and . . . hey, don’t take my word for it. Ask your mother,” she says, with a wink.

“That’s quite enough, Betty!” Mrs. Kenfield smacks her hand down on the glass case. Then to me, she says, “Make no mistake about it, I’m reporting you and your sister to Father the first chance I get.”

“Oh, for chrissakes.” Mrs. Callahan throws up her hands. “The kid’s not responsible for her sister, isn’t that right, Sally?”

“I . . . I . . .” Don’t agree with her. And neither did Daddy.

“I am my brother’s keeper,” Mrs. Kenfield says, holding her teeth closed so tight that I can’t believe the words got through them. “I believe the Lord would have the same apply to sisters.”

“Oh, you do, do you? You got a direct line to Him now?” Aunt Betty says, losing her cool. “Outta anybody in the neighborhood . . . you should know ya can’t take heat for whatever foolishness somebody in your family is doin’, Joyce. Get off your sanctimonious horse. You used to be the life of the party. When’d ya get that goddamn stick up your butt?”

Not waiting to hear Mrs. Kenfield’s answer, which I was interested in because I would like to avoid that sort of thing happening to me, Mrs. Callahan spins toward me and says, “I’ll tell ya what I’m gonna do, Sally. I’m gonna give you an advance on your baby-sittin’ money and a few pennies more for what I lost to Troo playing rummy a coupla nights ago.” She snaps open her shiny black pocketbook. On the bottom, I can see the peppermint schnapps she keeps in there. She tells people it’s just to freshen her breath. She sets the bottle carefully on the top of the candy counter, slips out her coin purse, which is one of the leather ones Troo made at camp, and slaps down two quarters. Looking her right in the eye, Aunt Betty flicks them with her pointy red fingernail too hard toward Mrs. Kenfield, who doesn’t put up her hands to block them. The coins go tumbling down to the floor. One of them rolls away for a long, long time. “And
that
should cover whatever Troo took.” Aunt Betty sets her jaw the same jutting way my sister does when she won’t back down, and starts unscrewing the schnapps cap. After she’s taken three deep swallows, she dabs at her mouth and giggles. “Care for a nip, Joycie?” she says, thrusting the bottle across the counter. Mrs. Kenfield’s arm stays as frozen in place as her face, which looks like an ice-skating rink, cold and flat like that. “Not right now? Well, maybe you’d like to take some home to holier-than-thou Chuck. I’m sure he’d have no problem finishin’ it off.”

It goes midnight-in-a-cemetery quiet. The parakeets stop chirping and even the corn has stopped popping. All I want to do is get out of there and catch up with Troo and be on our merry way, but then I remember why I got sent up here in the first place. Mother’ll blame a flight of imagination if I forget to pick up her afternoon “nummy,” which she takes very seriously and goes even grumpier without. I’ve had my fill of cod liver oil this week.

“I . . . I’m sorry . . . Mrs. Kenfield . . . I . . . ah . . . forget something.” She doesn’t notice that I’m talking to her so I reach up to tap her on the shoulder, but then I’m not sure that’s a good idea, so I ring the bell next to the cash register instead. “I’ll take one of Mother’s usual please, if you don’t mind and that’s all right with Mother’s usual please, if you don’t mind and that’s all right with you.”

The owner of the Five and Dime doesn’t take her eyes off Mrs. Callahan when she grabs the candy out of the case and pitches the Snirkle at me.

“Thank you, Mrs. Kenfield. You, too, Aunt Betty,” I say, fast as I can. “If I don’t see her first, tell Nell we’ll be there next Friday night to sit for the baby. I hope you have a nice time eatin’ and dancin’ with Detective Riordan,” and then I scramble out of the store.

Heading back down North Avenue toward Troo, who I can see a few blocks down bouncing her ball again, I’m feeling sorry for Mrs. Kenfield. First she had problems with her daughter and then her husband starts falling down a lot and now she’s gotta run the Five and Dime looking like a rag picker with a stick up her butt.

I guess, just like Granny says, when it rains, it pours.

Mrs. Kenfield really could use an umbrella.

I
t’s not just Troo and me,
all
the kids who go to Mother of Good Hope School have to write charitable stories over the summer. If you don’t show up with it the first day of school you’ll be punished by Sister Raphael, who is the principal but is also in charge of good deeds. She’s also the nun who wants to kick my sister out of school for more than one reason. Since Troo was in her office at least once a week for doing one bad thing or another, Sister told me she’s thinking of having the chair in the corner of her office engraved permanently with Troo’s name. (If she bothered to look at the back, she could save a few bucks. Troo stole a penknife outta the Five and Dime last summer.)

The last straw happened at recess two weeks before school let out.

Jimmy “B.O.” Montanazza was hanging off one end of the monkey bars. My sister was sitting on top. She musta been holding her breath because B.O. can’t even play hide-and-seek, that’s how easy he is to track down. His pits just reek. I couldn’t hear what exactly Troo asked him; I was playing double Dutch at the time, but I heard B.O.’s answer cut through the sound of the slapping ropes because like all the Italians, he talks so darn loud. “Take it from me, O’Malley, sex is like a hot dog. It’s all about the weiner and the bun,” B.O. said. Troo started hooting like a maniac. Sister Imelda didn’t. She dragged the both of them off the bars straight into the principal’s office. I had to take the note home because Sister Raphael didn’t trust Troo to deliver it to Mother:

My sister’s dirty mind doesn’t have a thing to do with where Mother lives. Troo is being influenced by a bad element. The Italians. These are a people who are interested in getting as much of the sex as they can. Look at Gina Lolloabridgida. Her bosoms . . . they’re the size of watermelons. Same goes for Annette Funicello. I don’t think it’s my imagination that Mousekeeter Lonnie couldn’t keep his eyes off her chest.

And then there’s Fast Susie Fazio, who might be the worst Italian of all. She’s three years older than me and knows all there is to know about first base and second base and sliding into home. Thanks to her, I couldn’t listen to a Braves game for over a month after she told me and Troo how babies are made during one of our sleepovers.

This is why I try to avoid going anywhere near her house, but when the noon whistle goes off at the Feelin’ Good factory, I call back to Troo, “We were supposed to be there fifteen minutes ago. Hurry up.” We don’t have any choice now but to cut through the Fazios’ yard to get to Mrs. Galecki’s place. I’m already late and Ethel keeps to a schedule. She likes me to read to Mrs. Galecki right after she feeds her an early lunch but before she takes a long afternoon nap. Troo is dragging her feet on purpose. She knows how much I hate being tardy.

Like always, Italian opera music is coming from outta the Fazios’. Fast Susie’s grandma is singing along to Rickie Caruso while she’s cooking, which is pretty much all she does besides casting spells on people. She is a Strega Nana . . . an Italian witch! But an excellent cook for such a small person.

The reason I know that is because it was another one of Troo’s genius plans last summer that we should just show up over here around suppertime because nobody was feeding us at home. Hall was spending day and night up at Jerbak’s Beer ’n Bowl and Nell quit taking care of us the way Mother told her she was supposed to so she could have more time to exercise with Eddie.

Even though we pulled chairs up to their kitchen table at least once a week, I still don’t know the names of all the Fazio kids because there’s ten of them. I do know Fast Susie’s oldest brother, Johnny, everybody does. He’s a singer in a band called the Do Wops. They’ll play at the Fourth of July celebration at the park and the crowning of the King and Queen of the Playground Festival the same way they do every summer.

Fast Susie’s mother likes to be called Jane; I don’t know why. Her real name is Angelica. Every afternoon, Jane lies in her robe on the davenport in the living room and watches “her shows,” which I have seen with her a few times when Troo wants to spend time yakking with Fast Susie and I don’t. The one called
Guiding Light
reminds me of our neighborhood because so many things go wrong . . .
zip
. . .
bang
. . .
boom
. And
Queen for a Day
I like because after those down-on-their-luck women are done telling the host, Jack Bailey, how crummy their lives are, I feel really grateful that we have our own washing machine.

As far as Fast Susie’s father goes, I have only seen him at supper a few times and Mass every so often because he’s got an important job. His name is Tony. He sells silverware, which he must do really well because he wears shoes made outta alligators and suits made outta sharkskin. Mr. Fazio works with a man called Frankie the Knife.

When we come into her backyard, Fast Susie says, “O’Malleys!” This is almost where she always is during the summer, lying on a greasy white sheet. Next to her, there is a bottle of baby oil with iodine in it. She slathers it all over her arms and legs, the whole hairy mess.

My sister plops down next to her and says with a load of admiration, “Zowie.” Troo isn’t talking about the two-piece bathing suit Fast Susie’s barely got on. She’s impressed by her bosoms. She is
very
interested in them in general and can’t wait until hers come in. Every morning she stands in front of the mirror on the back of our bedroom door to check to see if they’ve grown during the night.

Fast Susie beams down at the polka-dotted suit top that’s standing out about a foot from her body. “It’s like that song. An itsy bitsy teenie weenie,” she says, bouncing.

She inherited her bosoms from her grandmother the same way I inherited my long legs from Dave. Back in the old days Nana’s musta looked like freshly filled water balloons, too, but now she has to strap them down with a belt when she’s cooking so they don’t accidentally dangle into a pot of spaghetti and I hope the same thing happens to Fast Susie. She’s mean to me. She thinks I’m not cool. Not the way Troo is.

Fast Susie says, “Funny you two should show up. A little birdie told me something that might interest the both of ya.”

For once, I think I know which little birdie she’s talking about, so I say, “If it’s about Greasy Al escapin’ from reform school, Henry Fitzpatrick already told us.” Even though it’s the worst news, I’m proud of him. It really is something if you hear neighborhood gossip before Fast Susie does. Mother calls her the Hedda Hopper of Vliet Street.

Fast Susie pops up and says, “
Fitzpatrick
told you? That . . . that Casper Milquetoast?”

I take a step back from her waving arms. You gotta watch out for her all the time, but especially when she gets mad because the Fazios aren’t only Italians, they’re a special type called
Sicilians
, who are a people from the south side of Italy who are famous for paying you back for anything mean you’ve ever done to them even if they die trying. In their language, this is called having a
vendetta
.

Fast Susie says, “Ya better watch out, Troo. When Greasy Al shows up, you’re
morto.
”

She runs her pointer finger across her throat and makes this awful gagging sound.

I gasp, but my sister says, “I’m shakin’ in my boots,” only she isn’t. Her sides are splitting. “Greasy Al can sit on a screwdriver and rotate.”

I don’t like where this is heading. “Ethel’s waitin’, Troo.” All I want to do is go see my good friend and read to Mrs. Galecki. We are in the middle of the best Nancy Drew and if I never hear the words
Molinari
and
morto
again in my entire life, that would be fine by me.

“Did that little soda jerk also tell ya that one of the orphan kids ran away?” Fast Susie asks me, taking another stab at breaking news.

“No, it wasn’t Henry. I heard that from . . .” I almost tell her that it was Artie Latour who told us that Charlie ran off, but that might make her have a
vendetta
for Artie, which is the last thing in the world that kid needs. Troo is still too busy staring at Fast Susie’s bosoms to notice much of anything else, so I know she won’t disagree with me when I say, “Nope. Haven’t heard a thing about any orphan runnin’ away.”

“I didn’t think so,” Fast Susie says, unclenching her fists, feeling better now that she’s finally got a scoop. “Charlie Fitch took off from St. Jude’s in the middle of the night.”

“No kiddin’,” I say, doing my best to act amazed. “Do you know why? I mean, did ya hear if it was something that Artie Latour did that caused him to run away?”

“Naw,” she says. “Fartie didn’t have nothin’ to do with it.” After Artie Latour eats certain kinds of foods . . . he toots. A ton. That’s why Fast Susie and some of the other kids have started calling him that nickname, which may not be charitable, but is unfortunately correct. “Fitch ran off ’cause he got caught stealin’ money outta the poor box at church.”