“You make one more face at me and I’ll put my foot so far up your culo you’ll have to open your mouth for me to take my shoe off.”
Frezza laughed at this and then said, “Mannaggia, look at the knockers on her, Vito,” offering him a picture torn from a magazine.
Quaglia opened his mouth wider, as though to see the picture better, showing his chipped tooth.
“Where’s your fairy banana man friend?”
Though I was hot and anxious, I pretended not to hear, made myself small, and slipped away as he looked closer at Frezza’s picture of a woman in a tight sweater.
He meant Walter, who was bullied because he was new, because he was weak, and especially because the word got out that he went to church on Saturdays. “Your wacky religion”—he couldn’t go to soccer games on Saturdays. Everything about him was noticed: he couldn’t eat meat, didn’t drink Coca-Cola because of the caffeine, couldn’t go to dances; he was a little too tall, and his clothes didn’t fit. His ears turned red and he went breathless and silent when he was bullied, suffering it, his ears reddening even more, and hadn’t fought back when he was depantsed.
“Quaglia hocked a louie at me in the corridor,” Walter whispered in English class. “At the bubbler.”
“He’s a pissah,” I said. “Tell him to rotate.”
Vito and Frezza always sat at the back of the class.
Mr. Purcell said, “Jay, do you wish to share your thoughts with the class?”
“No, sir.”
“Then sit up straight and pay attention.” He was holding a book. “Has anyone finished the book?”
He meant The Human Comedy. I did not raise my hand. I simply sat, breathing through my nose. It wasn’t that I hadn’t liked the book; I knew the book was bad. I could not have said that of the previous book, Silas Marner, but this one was unbelievable, sketchy, sentimental, and written like a lesson. I knew the fault was with the book and not with me.
My certainty that it wasn’t good made my head hot, as though I had been told a lie. I could have written an essay on why I didn’t like it. Instead, all of us had to write about why it was good. That was another reason I hated school, finding it unfair. But my disliking the book was a secret that also made me feel powerful, superior to school, but also out of place, like an outlaw. I believed in Little Richard more than I believed in Homer Macauley.
“Do you have something to say, Jay?”
“The teacher calls Joe Terranova a wop in chapter twelve,” I said.
Quaglia slammed his loose desktop and said, “Mannaggia!”
“Quiet,” Mr. Purcell said. “But the teacher was reprimanded for it. And what did the principal say?”
I had said enough. I had only wanted to shock the class by using the word “wop.” I shrugged, as though I didn’t know.
Mr. Purcell was holding the book open. “He said, ‘This is America, and the only foreigners here are those who forget this is America.’”
“And go to church on Saturday,” Vito said in a harsh whisper.
In science, the next class, Mr. Hoolie showed us a large glass ball filled with water.
“I’m taking for granted that you read the assigned pages,” he said, attaching a rubber tube to the glass ball. “This will show us two things. What two things? Anyone?”
“Air displacement,” Corny Kelleher said.
Mr. Hoolie took up a piece of chalk and wrote Air displacement on the blackboard.
“And?”
The answer was lung capacity. But I merely sat, squinting.
“It was in your homework,” Mr. Hoolie said.
“Air temperature?” Kelleher said.
“Lung capacity,” Mr. Hoolie said, and wrote the words on the blackboard. “Who’s first? Evelyn?”
We watched as Mr. Hoolie inserted a mouthpiece into the rubber tube, and then as Evelyn Frisch took the tube in her dainty fingers and placed it between her lips, there were murmurs from the back of the room.
“Settle down, people,” Mr. Hoolie said. “Go ahead, Evelyn. Blow as hard as you can.”
Vito muttered something, making his friends laugh.
“Mr. Quaglia, one more word from you and you’ll be seeing me after school.”
Evelyn had finished. The water in the glass ball had slipped down. Then it was Walter’s turn. He did it, reddening from the effort, and gasped when he was done. The class laughed, and even Mr. Hoolie smiled.
Next Ed Hankey took the tube and blew, and the water level dropped sharply. He bowed to the class, making them laugh, then sat behind me and flicked my ear with his finger.
“Beat that, banana man,” he said into his hand, and the class bell rang.
“Homework,” Mr. Hoolie said. “The principles of the light bulb, chapter five.”
Walter was hit by a spitball in history class. The teacher, Mr. Gagliano, was asking about the Louisiana Purchase, the previous night’s homework, and called on Walter, who was wiping the back of his head where the spitball had hit.
“Can you tell us about the Louisiana Purchase?”
As Walter shook his head, Mr. Gagliano turned to me. “Jay?”
Thomas Jefferson. 1803. The French sold it after they failed in Haiti. Slavery. Napoleon. Fifteen million dollars. I said, “Nope.”
Something at Miller Baldwin, a caged and hung-up feeling, and a jostling, and a gummy taste of failure I could not explain, made me wish to be mediocre and anonymous, and to hide my head from the ferocity of the school. It made me want to live in a foreign country. While depending on a hidden strength for no one to know me, I succeeded in keeping myself at Walter’s level, though the assaults were worse for him than for me. The rest of the day was the same, the routine of avoiding eye contact, or any contact, threading my way through the students without calling attention to myself. We sat with Burkell over our sandwiches at lunch at a far table, and at recess we stayed by the fence. We knew we had to keep ourselves apart.
The end of the day was the worst class of all, phys ed — Mr. Gagliano also taught phys ed. The embarrassment of changing in the locker room among the shouting boys; the pushing, the actual nakedness, the towel snapping; then the run to Hickey Park for soccer. Two times around the track, and then kicking. The other boys, especially Quaglia and his gang — Frezza, Hankey, Zangara — were fast, deft, accurate in their kicks. Nervousness made me stumble, took away my coordination, and when two teams were chosen and the game started, I sat on the bench.
Gagliano liked the boys who were good at soccer, the Italians especially. Instead of teaching us the moves — passing, kicking, heading, stopping the ball, he yelled at us to do them, and blamed us when we failed. For the games he chose the good players.
I watched the boys on the field, and Gagliano shouting, and just wanted it to rain — thunder and lightning — anything to end this; for someone to be seriously hurt, someone to die.
After the game, two more times around the field.
“Pick up the pace, Jay!” Gagliano screamed at me.
Another awful day at school. Homework tonight, then the same thing tomorrow, a whole day of hiding the fact that I was afraid, afraid of being exposed, mocked, bullied. I was weak — I was reminded of it every minute. Walter was weaker, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I was picked on because I was his friend. I slightly disliked him for being geeky and helpless, for depending on me, for not having a girlfriend, for not realizing his religion was weird.
“What’s wrong with you?” my mother asked me on Friday afternoon.
“Nothing.”
“What happened at school?”
“Nothing.”
Saturday — a game day — Walter had to go to church. But neither of us was on the soccer team, so when he got home from church at noon, we went for a hike, usually a long hike, eight miles to the Sheepfold, to make a big fire at the campsite there. We sat and watched the ragged flames licking at the smoke, the fire like an expression of our anger.