KooKooLand (9 page)

The Reverend S. F. Whitehouse performed the brief ceremony. Jimmy seemed anxious to get it over with and joked he'd give the reverend a fin if he made it snappy, but the reverend just looked confused 'cause he was a greenhorn and didn't know a fin was a five.

They drove back to the States in a car Jimmy had borrowed from a buddy of his. His own car was always breaking down and Jimmy didn't think it would make the trip. The friend's car wasn't much better. It broke down a few hours out of Tusket.

They stayed at the cheapest joint Jimmy could find.

They did the thing grown-ups do when they love each other, even though Shirley realized she didn't love him.

She didn't feel a thing that first time, although later on she said she got to like it, but only after a few highballs.

When they finally made it back to the States, they went right to YaYa and Papou's. YaYa handed over Jimmy's three-year-old daughter, Virginia. Papou handed over the want ads.

Greek women work, he told her. Not like these Yankee princesses.

Get a job, he ordered her.

And don't expect me to babysit, added YaYa. I've done my share already.

Jimmy dropped Shirley and Virginia at his crummy apartment and took off for the bookie joint. Shirley felt so alone she burst out crying.

Virginia began to cry too. Shirley tried to comfort her, but Virginia hauled off and kicked her, leaving a big, blue knot on Shirley's leg.

I want YaYa, wailed Virginia.

Well, YaYa doesn't want you, thought Shirley, but she didn't say it. Because despite being kicked, she was already feeling something for Virginia, who looked like a little blond doll.

We're two peas in a rotten pod, Shirley thought. All we have is each other.

There wasn't much food in the apartment, but Shirley was used to making a good meal out of nothing and made something for them both to eat before they fell asleep together.

Jimmy never came home that night.

Shirley got a job at the Chicopee mill, working the mothers' shift, from five to eleven.

After a few months, Jimmy said they might as well have a brat of their own.

A year and a half later I came along.

“I'm sorry,” were the first words Shirley said when Jimmy walked into the hospital room. “I'm sorry it wasn't a boy.”

T
he car door slammed.

Jimmy was back from the bookie joint.

I jolted awake. The sun had sunk down and was now right in my eyes. My shorts were soaking wet. I panicked, thinking it was pee, then I realized it was only sweat. I still had to pee real bad.

Jimmy started up the car. He was as quiet as my Chatty Cathy doll after the string broke. Not a good sign. Usually he'd be talking a blue streak if he'd made some dough.

He yanked the wheel of the car and we screeched away from the curb, pulling out before the car already coming down the street could get in front of us.

“What's the matter,” he said. “Cat got your tongue?”

He leaned closer to me.

“Or maybe Fuad Ramses's got your tongue?” He laughed and took a playful swipe at me with the Hairy Claw.

I exhaled. I was wrong.

He hadn't lost. Probably just broke even or mostly broke even, just picked up a fin or something.

“How'd you do?” I asked.

“Ah, I only made a fin,” he groaned. “I coulda come outta there with a big score. A stupid jockey held my horse back when he shoulda let him run. He took him on the outside when he woulda run better on the rail.”

The old Coulda Shoulda Woulda. That's what Shirley called it.

Every racetracker who sat at our kitchen table gobbling down Shirley's homemade bread and fried mackerel when he couldn't afford a square meal or who hitched a ride to Suffolk Downs with us in Jimmy's Pontiac when he couldn't afford a bus ticket had his own version of the Coulda Shoulda Woulda.

To me, they all sounded the same.

Finally we pulled up to the curb in front of our apartment.

I scrambled out of the car like a convict being sprung from the slammer and ran toward the house.

I glanced up at my bedroom window on the second floor and saw the faded paisley curtain move back into place. I knew that Virginia had been keeping one eye out for the Pontiac while she spun those 45s and now she was slamming the cover shut on the pink record player and flying down the stairs.

Jimmy raced me to the front door and got there first.

“Slowpoke,” he chirped.

He pulled the screen door open. Virginia was standing in the kitchen, her face pink and sweaty from doing the twist around our bedroom. She was holding a dust mop as Exhibit A that she wasn't dancing around to colored people music.

“I was helping Mom,” she said. “Cleaning up while she sleeps. And I rode the bike all the way to the cemetery.”

“The sun gave you some color,” Jimmy told her. “You don't look so pasty.”

I ran upstairs and peed like a racehorse. Then I went into my bedroom and pulled out the Good & Plenty box from under my bed and stashed the wrinkled dollar Hank had given me inside it.

I took out a lemon Chuckle and shoved it in my mouth. The sticky jelly stuck in my teeth. One of my teeth ached a little, but I didn't care. I thought of Susan and tried to picture what she was doing at that very moment. She must've thrown out all the beer bottles and put together that boat trailer by now.

Maybe she was reading a doctor book or playing her clarinet or eating some Chuckles of her own. Maybe she was doing the exact same thing as me that very moment. I didn't know for sure if she liked Chuckles, but I couldn't imagine anybody not liking them.

I ate the cherry Chuckle next. Or maybe it was supposed to be raspberry. It mixed with the lemon one still in my mouth and made a lemon-cherry-or-raspberry taste. Then I shoved in the lime one, the licorice, and the orange.

Then I lost a tooth.

I felt it give way and get lost in the Chuckles. I fished it out. It was a bottom tooth and wouldn't show too much.

I went and got some toilet paper and wrapped the tooth up to give to Shirley when she woke up. I knew she'd make a big deal out of it and we'd stick it under my pillow for the tooth fairy. If Shirley had the money I'd get a quarter, and if not, a dime.

I chewed up the rest of the Chuckles without losing any more teeth, then took out my favorite board game, Candy Land.

I pretended Susan was there playing with me. I gave her first dibs on the
playing pieces and then took one for myself. I rolled the dice for her and then I rolled the dice for me and then I rolled for her again.

We talked about whether we'd rather swap spit with Dr. Kildare or Dr. Ben Casey and about moving to KooKooLand to save people's lives and surf.

Maybe I cheated a little to win, but she was a good sport about losing.

I
wasn't hungry that night, but Shirley had fried up a mess of mackerel and I had to sit there and force some down.

“What's wrong with your appetite?” Jimmy asked, noticing my lack of enthusiasm for the fish. He thought if kids didn't pack it away like merchant mariners they'd waste away and die.

“She's eaten quite a bit,” lied Shirley, who'd snuck some of my mackerel onto her plate.

“I don't want one morsel of mackerel going to waste in this house while little Greek kids are starving to death at this very moment,” Jimmy said as he sucked the head of a fish and wolfed down the eyeballs.

Virginia avoided looking at him and managed to get down her mackerel by not chewing and guzzling Pepsi.

I did my best to copy her, trying not to breathe in the fishy smell. Supposedly I had been just wild about mackerel as a baby. Shirley said she would sing me a song as I stuffed fistfuls of it down my little gullet.

Little fishy in the brook

Papa catch him on a hook

Mama cook him in a pan

And baby eat him like a man.

I had no memory of being a mackerel-loving baby. Maybe Shirley had just made that up to get me to eat my mackerel now.

I felt a bone scrape the roof of my mouth and stuck a finger in there to try to fish it out of the fish.

“What're you doing?” Jimmy barked, even though he knew what I was doing. It was frickin' obvious.

“A bone,” I mumbled, the word coming out all garbled since my finger was still in my mouth.

“She's got a bone,” Virginia translated.

“Get your finger out of your mouth. Just swallow the bone, for Chrissake. A little bone won't kill you.”

A little bone could so kill me. Tina had told me she knew some kid who heard about another kid who found a bone in a fish stick and got it stuck in her throat and died.

As I was sitting there with the bony lump of fish in my mouth not knowing what to do, some guys rapped on the screen door.

Two raps. One rap. Two raps. It was a different code than the bookie joint.

Jimmy jumped up from the table.

I spit the fish into my hand.

The two guys came in. I could tell they weren't from around the projects. They were dressed in madras pants that looked like they'd just come off the ironing board, and penny loafers with extra-shiny pennies in them. They seemed surprised to see me and Virginia and Shirley and got all fidgety.

“We're here for the pancakes,” the shorter guy mumbled.

“They're right upstairs,” said Jimmy. “Come on up to my office.”

The penny loafers hurried up the stairs.

I couldn't believe I had gotten stuck eating mackerel when there were pancakes on the premises.

“I want pancakes too,” I whined.

Shirley got all fidgety like the guys.

“I didn't make pancakes. That's just a figure of speech.”

I wasn't buying it.

“What kinda pancakes are they?”

Shirley started clearing away the dishes. She didn't answer me.

“What kind are they?” I repeated. “Blueberry?”

I heard the sound of our Super 8 projector whir to life in the bedroom upstairs.

“He's showing our home movies?” I wailed.

I could never get enough of our home movies, even though I had to sit through a lotta shots of dead deer to get to ten seconds of me falling down on the ice as I was practicing to join the Ice Capades.

“He's not showing our home movies,” Shirley said. I could tell by her voice that she was ticked off at Jimmy.

“What's he showing, then?” I asked.

She didn't say anything for a long time. I was getting ready to ask her again when she answered.

“They're grown-up movies. Not nice movies. Not movies for sweet little girls.”

I finally got it. They were movies about Down There.

“Like in the Combat Zone,” I stated, no longer asking questions.

“Yes,” said Shirley, dumping her own mackerel in the garbage, hiding it inside the egg carton from that morning's breakfast.

I suddenly remembered the mackerel that was still in my hand. A circle of fishy wetness had seeped between my fingers and onto my pedal pushers.

I jumped up and washed my hand, washed the mackerel mush right down the drain.

Shirley started doing the dishes, moving extra fast 'cause she had to leave for work soon. I decided to head back up to my room so I would be closer to the action and maybe could hear what Jimmy and the guys were saying about the pancakes.

I started to make my way toward the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Shirley asked. “Stay down here.”

“I'm going to play Candy Land,” I lied.

“All right. But keep your door closed,” she told me. “And why don't you play some records? But not too loud. We don't want to disturb Daddy when he's working.”

I headed for the stairs again.

She called after me.

“I'll make you pancakes for breakfast.”

T
he next day we had to go fishing for more mackerel. We were a mackerel-less household and that would not do. Not when the mackerel were running good, if you knew where to find them, and Jimmy surely did.

“Rise and shine,” he said, throwing open the bedroom door at six that morning. “You lucky kiddos are going fishing.”

Seeing Sylvester, our black and white cat, curled up in Virginia's arms, he had a brainstorm.

“And, hell, Sylvester's going too!”

Jimmy pulled the cat's tail. “You want to go, don't you, Sylvester, baby?” He had named the cat after his cartoon hero who was always scheming to gobble up Tweety Bird.

Sylvester shot out of bed and flew down the stairs. I could picture him scratching on the door to go out, pretending he had to pee, but really planning to slink off and hide somewhere.

“He's gonna be in pussycat heaven with all those fish,” said Jimmy. “C'mon, make like Sylvester and get your lazy asses out of bed.”

As an incentive, he informed us a special breakfast was waiting for us.

“I made milk toast,” he announced, and went back downstairs.

So much for those pancakes I had been counting on.

Virginia pulled her pillow over her face. I felt like barfing all over Barbie. Milk toast was worse than mackerel. By themselves milk and toast were not terrible, especially if you poured a mound of sugar and cinnamon on the toast and added half a can of Hershey's syrup to the milk. But put the toast and milk in a bowl and let it soak and it would make you gag worse than Sylvester with a hair ball.

That morning I managed to choke down half the milk toast. The garbage got the other half when Jimmy went upstairs to get something from his bedroom.

Outside, Sylvester was pacing on the front stoop. Jimmy had tied a length of rope to his rhinestone collar and secured it to the metal pole of the clothesline so Sylvester couldn't run off.

When Jimmy came back downstairs, he was carrying a couple of the other kind of pancakes. He put them in a brown bag and stuck them in his tackle box. He wrote a note for Shirley to read when she got home from making sunglasses.