Read Online Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Wally Lamb
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hand in protest. “That’s not really a current event,” she said. “It’s just something that was on the calendar.”
In defense of Lonny, I raised my hand. “It wasn’t on the calendar that it rained. That was the current events part of it: that it rained.”
Madame looked unconvinced, and I was prettysure that the mark she recorded in her grade book for Lonny was yet another check minus. “Rosalie,” she said. “Would you like to go next?” And when she did, I was furious! Because rat-fink Rosalie had clipped the exact same item from the paper that I had—the article about how a local woman, Mrs. Marie Funicello, my mother , not hers , would later that week compete for the grand prize in the Pillsbury Bake-Off. “And I just want to say that I have fingers and toes crossed, and that I’m praying every single night that Mrs. Funicello…that Mrs. Funicello…”
Rosalie stopped abruptly, upstaged and rendered speechless. At the back door of our classroom stood Mother Filomina with a broad-faced man in a long black coat and a wooly black hat and a broad-faced look-alike girl who was grinning from ear to ear. Besides her plaid St. Aloysius jumper, she was wearing an oversized crushed velvet Carnaby Street–style cap, bubble gum pink, and Cheeto-colored knee socks, and black galoshes with metal clips. Shockingly, she was also wearing blue eye shadow. (Makeup wasstrictly forbidden by St. Aloysius Gonzaga’s Code of Conduct. The only exception, I knew from my sisters, was for eighth grade girls at the final graduation dance, when they could wear lipstick, plus nylons.) Zhenya’s hair was plaited in long, greasy, brown braids. She had pierced ears. She had “bazoom-booms.”
“Khello, clissmates!” she proclaimed. “I em Zhenya Kabakova, and I em veddy, veddy kheppy to mek you acqueentinks! Khello, new frinds! Khello! Khello!”
Rosalie’s mouth dropped open like a glove compartment door with a busted latch. November, I figured, had just gotten more interesting.
4
Zhenya
M y classmates and I were standoffish with Evgeniya “Zhenya” Kabakova at first. It probably didn’t help that she arrived at school each morning arm-in-arm with either her mother, her father, or both. And that half the time, as they entered the schoolyard, they were singing what I guessed were Russian songs. Zhenya’s mother was a short, squat woman with a limp and a missing tooth. “Mrs. Khrushchev,” we nicknamed her. Zhenya’s father, with his wooly black hat, longcoat, and droopy mustache, reminded me of those guards at the Wicked Witch’s castle in The Wizard of Oz . Mr. Kabakov had a strange little ritual that he performed each time he brought his daughter to school. First he’d bend and kiss Zhenya on the forehead. Then, as she turned away from him, he would lift his foot and give her a playful little kick in the rear end. After a while, the gesture became pretty predictable, but Zhenya never failed to giggle with astonished delight whenever her father booted her.
Zhenya was nice enough—friendly and cheerful, exuberant , even. (In vocabulary, we’d had to use the word “exuberant” in a sentence, and I’d written, “Our new classmate is very exuberant .) But each morning she smelled kind of like mayonnaise and, after lunch, definitely like fish. (Madame had assigned her to a desk one row over, so she was my right-side neighbor.) We watched her like hawks, boys and girls, in those first days. In the cafeteria at lunchtime, she didn’t take hot lunch; she brought her own. Surrounded byempty chairs, Zhenya would remove from a brown paper bag (a grocery bag, not a lunch bag) some weird-looking crackers and a square-shaped tin of herring. She’d pull the key from the bottom of the can and open it, then scoop out chunks of the oily fish with her crackers and eat contentedly, unaware of, or unbothered by, the fact that she was being shunned. Whenever she looked over at us, smiling and waving, we’d quickly look
In defense of Lonny, I raised my hand. “It wasn’t on the calendar that it rained. That was the current events part of it: that it rained.”
Madame looked unconvinced, and I was prettysure that the mark she recorded in her grade book for Lonny was yet another check minus. “Rosalie,” she said. “Would you like to go next?” And when she did, I was furious! Because rat-fink Rosalie had clipped the exact same item from the paper that I had—the article about how a local woman, Mrs. Marie Funicello, my mother , not hers , would later that week compete for the grand prize in the Pillsbury Bake-Off. “And I just want to say that I have fingers and toes crossed, and that I’m praying every single night that Mrs. Funicello…that Mrs. Funicello…”
Rosalie stopped abruptly, upstaged and rendered speechless. At the back door of our classroom stood Mother Filomina with a broad-faced man in a long black coat and a wooly black hat and a broad-faced look-alike girl who was grinning from ear to ear. Besides her plaid St. Aloysius jumper, she was wearing an oversized crushed velvet Carnaby Street–style cap, bubble gum pink, and Cheeto-colored knee socks, and black galoshes with metal clips. Shockingly, she was also wearing blue eye shadow. (Makeup wasstrictly forbidden by St. Aloysius Gonzaga’s Code of Conduct. The only exception, I knew from my sisters, was for eighth grade girls at the final graduation dance, when they could wear lipstick, plus nylons.) Zhenya’s hair was plaited in long, greasy, brown braids. She had pierced ears. She had “bazoom-booms.”
“Khello, clissmates!” she proclaimed. “I em Zhenya Kabakova, and I em veddy, veddy kheppy to mek you acqueentinks! Khello, new frinds! Khello! Khello!”
Rosalie’s mouth dropped open like a glove compartment door with a busted latch. November, I figured, had just gotten more interesting.
4
Zhenya
M y classmates and I were standoffish with Evgeniya “Zhenya” Kabakova at first. It probably didn’t help that she arrived at school each morning arm-in-arm with either her mother, her father, or both. And that half the time, as they entered the schoolyard, they were singing what I guessed were Russian songs. Zhenya’s mother was a short, squat woman with a limp and a missing tooth. “Mrs. Khrushchev,” we nicknamed her. Zhenya’s father, with his wooly black hat, longcoat, and droopy mustache, reminded me of those guards at the Wicked Witch’s castle in The Wizard of Oz . Mr. Kabakov had a strange little ritual that he performed each time he brought his daughter to school. First he’d bend and kiss Zhenya on the forehead. Then, as she turned away from him, he would lift his foot and give her a playful little kick in the rear end. After a while, the gesture became pretty predictable, but Zhenya never failed to giggle with astonished delight whenever her father booted her.
Zhenya was nice enough—friendly and cheerful, exuberant , even. (In vocabulary, we’d had to use the word “exuberant” in a sentence, and I’d written, “Our new classmate is very exuberant .) But each morning she smelled kind of like mayonnaise and, after lunch, definitely like fish. (Madame had assigned her to a desk one row over, so she was my right-side neighbor.) We watched her like hawks, boys and girls, in those first days. In the cafeteria at lunchtime, she didn’t take hot lunch; she brought her own. Surrounded byempty chairs, Zhenya would remove from a brown paper bag (a grocery bag, not a lunch bag) some weird-looking crackers and a square-shaped tin of herring. She’d pull the key from the bottom of the can and open it, then scoop out chunks of the oily fish with her crackers and eat contentedly, unaware of, or unbothered by, the fact that she was being shunned. Whenever she looked over at us, smiling and waving, we’d quickly look
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