The Wednesday Wars (15 page)

On the counter was the late edition of the
Home Town Chronicle.

And on the front page, there was an action shot—of me, Holling Hoodhood, flying high in the air across the intersection of Lee Avenue and Main Street, my legs splayed out as though I really
was
flying—which I guess I was. Underneath was the headline, which was this:

Local Hero Holling Hoodhood Soars Across Intersection to Rescue Sister

You could see her in the picture, too, but mostly just her buttocks.

The doctor was right about being sore. I'm not sure about the bruise, since it hurt to stretch around that far to see. But it didn't matter all that much, because when I got to school on Monday, someone had gone up and down the halls of Camillo Junior High taping up pictures of Local Hero Holling Hoodhood soaring across the intersection. They were on the eighth-grade lockers, on the asbestos tiles on the ceiling, on the stalls of the boys' restroom and the girls' restroom, too, over the drinking fountains, on the classroom doors, on the fire escape doors, on the walls of the stairwells, over the doors of the main lobby, and on the backboards of the basketball hoops in the gym.

Can you imagine what it's like to walk down the halls of your junior high and just about every single person you meet looks at you and starts to grin, and it's because they're glad to see you?

It's sort of like Macduff walking in with Macbeth's head in his hand and showing it to Malcolm—who, as we all know, is one of the king's sons—and everyone starts to celebrate because Malcolm will finally be king. But all that Malcolm is thinking is that now he has no more need for vengeance.

Let me tell you, it was a great day back.

And Tom Seaver had a pretty good day, too. The Mets announced that they were going to pay him twenty-four thousand dollars next season, just like Ed Kranepool.

Can you believe it?

On the first Friday of February, my father missed Walter Cronkite and the
CBS Evening News
because he was spending almost the whole day getting ready for the formal presentation of the Chamber of Commerce Businessman of 1967 Award at the Kiwanis Club that night. Actually, we were
all
spending a lot of time getting ready for the Kiwanis Club, because my mother and sister were wearing long gowns, and my father and I were wearing tuxedos, which are uncomfortable and don't fit right and come with shoes made for people with very wide feet.

My sister had used most of the getting-ready time to complain, especially about the stupid purple orchid that the Kiwanis Club had sent and which she had to pin to her shoulder. It didn't help when I pointed out that I had to wear a white carnation in my lapel and that wearing a purple orchid wasn't nearly as bad. And it really didn't help when I pointed out that I had had to wear white feathers on my butt and that wearing a purple orchid really wasn't as bad as that.

And it really,
really
didn't help when my father pointed out that she had wanted to be a flower child, and so here was her chance.

"You don't take anything I believe seriously, do you?" she said to him.

"Tie your hair back from your face," he said.

She went upstairs to the bathroom to tie her hair back from her face.

I went up after her. "You should take the orchid and flush it down the toilet," I said.

She looked at me. "Why don't you take your carnation and flush
it
down the toilet?"

"Maybe I will."

She pointed toward the toilet. "Go ahead."

But I didn't have to flush my carnation down the toilet, because right then a whole series of low chords sounded from the piano in the Perfect Living Room below us, followed by a roar and crash as the entire newly plastered ceiling fell, smashing down the top of the baby grand piano, ripping the plastic seat cushions, flattening the fake tropical flowers, tearing the gleaming mirror from the wall, and spreading its glittering shards onto the floor, where they mixed with the dank, wet plaster that immediately began to settle into the carpet to stain it forever.

All four of us stood in the hall, the sickly smell of mold in our nostrils.

If the committee that chose the Chamber of Commerce Businessman of 1967 had heard what my father had to say about the carpenters and plasterers who had come to fix our living room ceiling, they might not have given him the award, since one of the requirements was that the nominee had to support the general business atmosphere of the town, and my red-faced father was hollering and swearing about how he was going to decrease the number of the town's businesses by two—and he was shredding his white carnation as he said this, which is probably what Shylock would have done if he had been wearing a white carnation after being cheated out of his ducats.

It was a good thing that neither the carpenters nor the plasterers were at the Kiwanis Club that night.

We drove there in silence, and just before we walked into the club, I took off my carnation and handed it to my father. He took it without a word, and while my mother pinned it to his lapel, I held my flowerless lapel out to my sister and smirked.

She smiled back very sweetly. Then, as soon as we had gotten inside, she excused herself, went into the ladies' room, and came back without her orchid. She was still smiling sweetly when she leaned down to me and whispered, "Down the toilet, you little jerk."

So we were both flowerless as we went into the reception hall, but no one would have seen the flowers anyway, since the hall was so dark. The only light came from the candles on the tables, the lit ends of cigarettes, and the lamps at the head table, which shone off the fake paneling on the wall behind. My father sat up there, and the rest of us sat below him at a center table with the wives of the Kiwanis Club officers. My mother refused an offered cigarette—I could tell this wasn't easy—and then she chattered to the Kiwanis wives while my sister and I sat silently through the dinner—roast beef and mashed potatoes and buttered lima beans—and through dessert—lemon meringue pie with a whole lot more meringue than lemon—and through the opening greetings and speeches, and then through my father's speech of grateful acceptance.

He was still red in the face when he got up to speak, and you could tell he was looking out at the audience for the carpenters and plasterers. But he made it through without any hollering and swearing, and everyone clapped when he talked about the growing business opportunities of the town, and how he was glad to be a part of it all, and how someday he hoped to leave a thriving and FEbRuARy 133 prosperous business in a thriving and prosperous town to his son to carry on the good name of Hoodhood and Associates. Lots of clapping at this. When everyone at the head table looked down at me, I smiled and nodded like I was supposed to, since I'm the Son Who Is Going to Inherit Hoodhood and Associates.

My sister kicked me under our table.

Toads, beetles, bats.

When we got home that night, my father phoned the carpenters and the plasterers. He told them that he didn't care that it was late on a Friday night. And he didn't care that tomorrow was a Saturday. They had better be at the house first thing in the morning, ready to fix the ceiling permanently and to offer restitution for the property damage their carelessness had caused.

They were there, first thing in the morning.

If I had had anything to say about it—which, of course, I didn't—I would have had the carpenters and plasterers head over to Camillo Junior High as soon as they were done with the Perfect Living Room, because the ceiling in our classroom was getting to be a bigger and bigger problem as the weeks went by and Mr. Guareschi and Mr. Vendleri couldn't trap, poison, snag, snare, net, corner, maim, coax, or convince the rats to give themselves up. Eight asbestos ceiling tiles had started to bulge down, which meant that either Sycorax and Caliban were getting fatter or the ceiling was getting weaker. Every morning, Mrs. Baker looked up at the bulges to inspect them. And every morning she looked a little more nervous.

"So suppose she looks up there and sees that they've chewed a hole in the tiles and they're looking back down at her. What happens then?" I said to Danny.

"You know that sound the bus driver made just before she hit you?"

I remembered the sound.

"It wasn't anything compared to what Mrs. Baker would do."

We waited hopefully, but the eight bulging tiles stayed intact.

At the beginning of February, Mrs. Baker had assigned me
Romeo and Juliet.
I read it in three nights.

Let me tell you, these two wouldn't make it very far in Camillo Junior High. Never mind that Romeo wears tights—at least according to the pictures—but he just isn't very smart. And Juliet isn't too strong in that department, either. I mean, a potion to
almost
kill you? She drinks a potion to
almost
kill you? Who would drink a potion to
almost
kill you? Then Romeo goes ahead and drinks a potion that
will
kill you because he can't figure out that she's only had a potion that
almost
kills you? And then Juliet, who at least is smart enough to figure out that Romeo really is dead, makes sure that she uses a knife this time, which is not
almost
going to kill you, but really
will
kill you?

Doesn't this sound like something that two people who can't find their way around the block would get themselves into?

Of course it does.

Mrs. Baker couldn't see this problem at all. Because she's a teacher, and no teacher ever does. "Didn't you find it tragic and beautiful and lovely?" she asked me when I told her I'd finished reading it.

See?

"Not really," I said.

"What did you find it then?"

"Stupid."

"There we have an opinion that overturns three hundred and seventy-five years of critical appreciation. Is there a particular reason that you find it 'stupid'?"

"Because they never would have done what they did."

"Fall in love?"

"All the stuff at the end."

"The poison and the knife," she said.

"Yes. They never would have done that."

Mrs. Baker considered this for a moment. "What would they have done?"

"Gone to Mantua together."

"And their parents?"

"Ignored them."

"I'm not sure that life is quite as simple as that. These are star-crossed lovers. Their fate is not in their own hands. They have to do what has already been decided for them. That's why it's so tragic and beautiful and lovely."

You see? Tragic and beautiful and lovely again. Why not just stupid and dumb?

Meryl Lee thought it was wonderful that I was reading
Romeo and Juliet,
since, having been inspired by the Long Island Shakespeare Company's Holiday Extravaganza, she was reading it, too. "Don't you think it's romantic, Holling?"

"I guess so."

"And you're reading it just before Valentine's Day."

"Yeah."

"The most romantic day of the year. Don't you love the balcony scene?" She clasped her hands and held them beneath her chin. "O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?"

"Meryl Lee, let's go somewhere together for Valentine's Day."

I turned around to look behind me, because someone else must have said what just popped out of my mouth.

"What?" said Meryl Lee.

I was still trying to figure out how that popped out. I think it must have been because of Mrs. Baker and her "Shakespeare is expressing something about what it means to be a human being" and the "tragic and beautiful and lovely" routine. It all had gotten into the air and mixed together, and the first thing you know after you start breathing that stuff, you say things like what I said to Meryl Lee.

But what could I do now? So I said it again: "Let's go somewhere together for Valentine's Day."

She put her hand on her hip and thought for a moment. Then, "No," she said.

This, in case you're missing it, is the tragic part.

"Why not?" I said.

"Because you called me a blind mole, and then you acted like a jerk about your father winning the Baker Sporting Emporium contract."

"That was three months ago, and I did not act like a jerk."

"You still called me a blind mole and hoped—let me see if I can get this right—you hoped that an unwholesome dew from a wicked fen would drop on me."

It was actually a wicked dew from an unwholesome fen, but I'm a lot smarter than Romeo, and I know when to shut up.

Now, here comes the lovely part.

"Meryl Lee," I said, "there lies more peril in thine eye than twenty of their swords. Look thou but sweet."

"Twenty of whose swords?"

"It's Shakespeare," I said. "It doesn't have to make sense. They just have to be words more beautiful than have ever yet been written."

"So
mole
and
blind
are two words more beautiful than have ever yet been written?"

"Had I it written, I would tear the word."

Meryl Lee smiled. "All right," she said. "I'll go."

I told you it was the lovely part.

Even though I still can't figure out how those words popped out of my mouth.

That night, I sat through supper trying to decide where I could take Meryl Lee on an allowance that I had to string together for three weeks just to get some cream puffs. There was a moment—this will tell you how desperate I was—when I thought I might ask Mr. Goldman about another play. But it might be
Romeo and Juliet,
and that would mean more tights. And not for the whole wide world was I going to wear tights again.

So I asked my mother, "Where could I take someone with $3.78?"

The supper table quieted.

"Well," she said, "I suppose for an ice cream cone."

"It's February," I said.

"Then, maybe to Woolworth's for a hamburger and a Coke."

"Woolworth's."

She shrugged. "And then to a movie afterward."

My mother was not powerful at arithmetic.

"Who are you taking?" asked my father.