The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (283 page)

Via a letter each of us carried home the week before, Madame had assigned our parents homework:
they were supposed to buy or make us our costumes if they could (except for the angels, whose costumes would be on loan from Careen of Careen’s Costume Shop, who was friends with MaryAnn Vocatura’s mother.) Because Chino Molinaro had come down with the flu, Ma was pinch-hitting for him at the lunch counter with Pop, so she handed over the costuming assignment to Simone, who was the most theatrically inclined of any of us Funicellos anyways, not counting Annette. And since Lonny had been assigned the pivotal role of Joseph and his mother, as usual, had shirked
her
responsibility, Simone agreed to outfit him as well.

In my opinion, Simone was not that successful in costuming me as the little drummer boy. With my shorts, knee socks, and tricorn hat, I looked more like Johnny Tremain than a boy from Bethlehem. For my drum, Simone covered one of Ma’s hat boxes with contact paper, poked holes in the sides, and threaded it with yarn so’s it could hang down in
front of me. My souvenir chopsticks from China Village, where we’d gone after Frances’s eighth grade graduation, would do as drumsticks, Simone said.

As for her dressing Lonny as Joseph of Nazareth, the summer before, Simone had caught the bouquet at our cousin Anna Ianuzzi’s wedding and then had had to sit on a folding chair while Anna’s creepy cousin Frido stretched this blue garter over her foot and halfway up her leg. Now she stretched that very same garter over Lonny’s head, which she had covered with one of our striped dish towels. My blue terrycloth bathrobe, which went down past my knees, looked more like a tunic on Lonny. Simone had me go out to our garage and get the pushbroom. Then she had Lonny unscrew the broom part. After he’d done it, she handed him the handle and told him that was his staff. Lonny was good to go as Joseph, Simone said, except for his feet. On the day of the
tableaux
, she said, he would have to wear sandals or flip-flops, not his high-top Keds. Lonny said he
thought there were some flip-flops in his father’s closet from before he left to go to work in Florida as a fisherman. I didn’t say anything when he said that, and neither did Simone, but we both kinda looked at each other for a second. We knew from our Uncle Bruno that Lonny’s father was in prison in New York, not in Florida on some fishing boat.

O
n the Wednesday before the big Christmas program, we all got copies of Rosalie’s play whether we wanted one or not. Her father had printed them on fancy paper at Twerski Impressions. After Rosalie passed them out, she made Ernie, Geraldine, and Marion read their parts. It was raining that morning, which meant indoor recess—unsupervised, for the most part, while Madame went off to the teachers’ room. This was Rosalie’s stupid play.

The End.

After the read-through, I raised my hand. “Felix?” Rosalie said, her eyes squinting with suspicion. I told her I liked her play okay, but that the end didn’t make sense.

“Yes, it does,” she said. “Why doesn’t it?”

“Because nobody in fifth grade still believes in Santa. How can they ride around the world with someone who doesn’t really exist?”

Geraldine intervened. “Because they’re saints, stupid. So they can fly.”

“
Angels
can fly,” I retorted. “No one ever said saints can.”

Several classmates entered into the argument about whether or not saints could fly, and then MaryAnn Haywood pointed out, reasonably enough, I thought, that the younger kids in our school still believed in Santa, and so for their sake, Rosalie could have the three saints travel with him in his sleigh on Christmas Eve so’s it wouldn’t wreck their innocence.

“Okay,” I said. “But I still think it’s kind of a dumb ending.”

“Not as dumb as you are,” Rosalie noted.

Then Marion Pemberton said he was quitting Rosalie’s play. “You
can’t
quit,” Rosalie informed him. “You’re the only one in our class who can play Martin de Porres.”

“Why?” he shot back. “Because I’m black?” He made the point that Rosalie was playing one of the Three Kings in the
tableaux
. So if a female could play a male, why couldn’t some white kid play a black saint? In return, Rosalie pointed out that Marion
was also the black Wise Man in the
tableaux
and that
that
didn’t bother him. “Yeah,” he said, “but in your play, I have to cry, and I ain’t crying in front of my father and my brothers Marvin and Roscoe and a whole bunch of other people that I don’t even know.” Rosalie made a big show of counting to ten with just her lips, no sound, and then she blew out this long, slow breath and said okay, all right already, he didn’t have to cry. He could just look real, real sad.
“Okay?”
Reluctantly, Marion agreed.

When Madame returned, she let us get drinks and go to the toilet. Coming out of the boys’ room, Lonny and I ran into Zhenya coming out of the girls’ room. I asked them both what they thought of Rosalie’s play.

“I think it’s cornier than corn on the cob,” Lonny said.

“I theenk eese sheetier than sheet,” Zhenya said. “And I theenk, too, Rosalie ees
zhopalís
.”

“What’s that?” Lonny and I both asked.

“
Zhopalís?
Means peerson who gets nose brown from…how you say here sheet vit plinty vauter?”

“Diarrhea,” I volunteered, thinking of poor Ma at the big Bake-Off.

“Ya, ya. Gets nose brown from direeya so det everyone theenk she good, good geuhl when she rilly just, how you say? I heered on TV last night: funny blunny.” Lonny and I looked at each other and shrugged.

It wasn’t until we were back in the classroom, starting science, that I realized Zhenya had called Rosalie exactly what she was: a brown-noser and a phony baloney.

A
fter the Christmas program, Madame explained, each grade was going to invite their guests back to their own classrooms for refreshments. So all of us were supposed to go home and, for homework, find out what our mothers were making. The next day, she called us each by name and, when we told her what our mothers had said, she wrote it down.

The Kubiaks were bringing milk from their farm:
five gallons, plus paper cups. Arthur Coté was bringing three cans of Hawaiian Punch and a can opener. Pauline Papelbon said she’d be bringing cupcakes with sprinkles if her mother felt good enough to make them or, if she didn’t, either Hostess Twinkies or Hostess Sno Balls. Eugene Bowen was bringing potato chips on account of his father was a driver for State Line. “Aw, crap,” Lonny said. “
I
was gonna bring potato chips. Okay, I’ll bring napkins then.”

Bridget Mann: Scottish shortbread cookies.

Monte Montoya: sopaipilla cheesecake pie.

Jackie Burnham: plum pudding.

Edgy Chang: Chinese almond cookies.

Me: pizelles. (The Christmas before, Pop had given Ma a bottle of perfume, a bottle of anisette from Italy, and a pizelle iron.)

Rosalie: Polish poppyseed roll, rum babka with marzipan Christmas decorations, and
chrusciki
. “Otherwise known as angel wings,” Rosalie added. “And I’ll have my mother put extra powdered sugar on them. They’re so good.”

“How about you, Zhenya?” Madame said. “Will your mother be able to make something?”

“Een our house, my fodder eese cooker,” she said. “He mek for party samouk vid pruns.”

“Did you say prunes, Zhenya?” Madame said.

“Ya, ya. He mek dat end he mek strudel vid meelk curds end raisins.”

Prunes and raisins? Milk curds? Well, it could have been worse, I figured. At least she wasn’t bringing that stinky herring she ate at lunchtime.

“Merveilleux!”
Madame said, clapping her hands together. “Our food table will be worthy of
l’Organisation des Nations Unies!
And I myself shall add two desserts
québecoise
to our
fête internationale
.” She wrote what she was making on the board—
tartelettes au sucre
and
bûche de Noël au chocolat
—then turned back toward us, beaming. “Sounds good.
Oui?
”