I thought I heard him wrong. I was scared to move, scared to breathe, and the seconds that followed felt like hours. Finally I said, “Who?”
“Her,” he said, nodding at Sophia, whose face filled the screen like a sexy angel. I didn’t know what the scene was about and didn’t care-all I knew was that Max told me that I looked like her. I was about to say something witty (i.e., stupid) when he said that his mom was forcing him to go to the dance and that maybe I should suffer too. I said something back like, “Yeah. Whatever. Maybe,” while trying to stifle a smile that, if I’d allowed it to run its course, would’ve dominated my face.
“I mean, we could meet there,” he said, still staring at the screen.
“I guess so.”
“Shh!” Doug hissed.
“If you go and we run into each other, you know, well. . great,” Max whispered.
“Great,” I said in as casual a tone as I could muster, even though my heart was almost thumping out of my chest. Maybe it wasn’t the hearts-and-flowers way that I’d hoped he would ask me, but he’d asked me, and it was enough. I was going with, or meeting, or running into Max at the spring dance!
“My mom keeps telling me that I need to meet other kids, and that, quote, it’s not going to happen by spending all of my extracurricular time in a geeky movie club, end quote,” he whispered. “I reminded her that every kid with half a brain is a geek about something. With me it’s motorcycles. I’ve got this vintage Triumph Thunderbird and she promised that if I went to the dance, we’d get it out of storage. Have you ever ridden a motorcycle?”
“No, but I can drive a car,” I said shyly, and felt a small blush cover my cheeks.
“You can?” Max said, looking at me more closely, giving me the happy shivers.
“Shh. . for the second time!” Doug said.
I leaned in and whispered to Max how I’d sat next to my dad in the Lincoln a thousand times watching him turn the key, put the convertible top down, and drop the long, flat car into drive. One afternoon when I was thirteen, when he was at the bakery and my mom was out with Lou, I grabbed the Lincoln’s keys. Ten minutes later I was stuttering down Ashland Avenue-too much gas, too hard on the brakes, squeal of tires, repeat-until a red light came out of nowhere. I jammed both feet on the brakes as the Lincoln shrieked to a halt, rear wheels smoking and my heart punching my chest.
I looked to my right and a guy in a Mustang shook his head.
I looked to my left and it was my mom in her little Fiat, a red-lipstick slash of disapproval on her mouth.
“And then what?” Max whispered.
“She surprised me.”
After she followed me home and the Lincoln was safely in the garage, I expected a stern speech and punishment. Instead, she told me that normal society would expect her to say that driving at age thirteen was wrong, but that she didn’t agree. She said it was important to play by the rules, but that sometimes it was just as important to know how to break them, too. So the disobeying-the-law part, driving without a license-yeah, obviously that was wrong-but not the learning-to-operate-a-car part. As a teacher, my mom encouraged the accumulation of knowledge. If I wanted to learn to drive, she would teach me.
“That was cool of her,” Max whispered.
“So cool.”
I didn’t tell Max about what happened next because it didn’t seem to have much to do with the story. In fact, I wouldn’t realize until later that what my mom said at the end of our conversation was the real story-that it was best not to tell my dad about my little joyride. I should’ve been relieved that she encouraged me not to tell my dad about taking the Lincoln for a drive, but it surprised me, and I asked why not.
“It might upset him,” she said, looking away. “That old car was presented to your grandpa in 1965 to celebrate the birth of your dad, his first child and oldest son.”
“Presented?” I asked. “You mean like a gift? From who?”
“Just. . friends,” she replied vaguely, and for some reason my mind went immediately to the Men Who Mumbled.
“What about Uncle Buddy?” I asked, thinking of his beater convertible. “Was that a gift for Grandpa too? To celebrate the birth of his second kid?”
“No,” my mom replied. “Buddy bought that car himself.”
Back then, the idea of Uncle Buddy buying a convertible so he could have one just like his older brother made me sad for him. Of course, what I feel now-that he’s a twisted, world-class bullshitter who was jealous of my dad when they were kids and hates him now that they’re adults-is completely different. However, at the moment, telling Max the story in the darkened theater room, all I could really think was, I’m going to the dance with Max! Or at least going to a dance where he would be.
“Listen,” he said, pushing brown curls out of his eyes. “After I get this dance thing out of the way, do you want to go for a ride on my motorcycle? As soon as I get my license, I mean.”
“Yeah, sure. . I guess so,” I said breezily, with my heart about to burst.
“People, please,” Doug said. “There’s rude and there’s pathological. For the last time, and with feeling. . shh!”
I mouthed “sorry” to Doug as he settled back with junk food on the left and a root beer on the right. Watching him, I realized that Max was partly correct. Yeah, most kids with half a brain are geeks about something, but others require no brain at all.
Like Billy Shniper, for example.
Bully the Kid displayed zero evidence of having anything remotely resembling a cerebral cortex, yet he was a geek about teasing Doug.
Over the course of the school year, his bullying had progressed from frequently to constantly in pursuit of the goal he had yet to accomplish-making Doug cry. After Max witnessed one particularly intense display, he told Doug that he was going to intervene the next time it happened, and didn’t care what Bully the Kid said or did to him.
Doug smiled sadly and said, “Did you learn nothing from About Face? The only way to combat violence is with nonviolence. Aggression begets aggression.”
“Yeah?” Max said. “Well, someone needs to beget a fist in Billy’s mouth.”
Doug shook his head. “Dinwiddy turned away from violence. Bully the Kid or no Bully the Kid, I shall do the same.”
I had to admire Doug-his commitment to passivity was rock solid. He had created a set of rules for himself and vowed never to break them. I’d been boxing for years, where physical engagement inside the ring came with a set of hard and fast rules too. You played by them or were disqualified. You respected them or did not compete.
At that point in my life, rules were important to me.
I thought that if I followed them, they would apply order to the universe.
I foolishly believed they kept chaos at bay.
I didn’t know yet that the lesson my mother had taught me-knowing how to break or even ignore the rules-would become the only rule I would follow.
8
There's nothing louder or more disruptive to a family than prolonged silence.
Before my grandpa’s funeral, my dad and Uncle Buddy spoke only on a functional basis about orders and inventory. In the days that followed, that stilted conversation broke down even further, descending into monosyllabic grunts.
And then something so sad happened that it forced them to speak, at least briefly.
It forced them to make funeral arrangements again.
Grandma Donatella had returned to work almost immediately after Grandpa Enzo died, reclaiming her place behind the front counter. She had always been a tiny bundle of energy, constantly in motion-boxing up cookies and cakes, ringing the cash register, scrubbing display cases-but now she sat motionless on a low metal stool watching customers come and go with her mouth drawn down. Whenever someone from the neighborhood asked her how she was doing, her eyes filled with tears as she silently reached into a display case, removed a heart-shaped cookie, and broke it in half. She began to complain about her own heart, how it ached for my grandpa, and then how it just ached, and then she died too. She had made good on her promise to join my grandpa a presto-soon.