Miss Twinkletoes       

I eat a lot of candy, but it's nothing compared with how I used to eat last year. I'm still getting bigger all the time. Around my waist there's like a tire that you forgot to take the air-hose off of. I'm starting to get these tiny zits on my chin that are ugly. My ma will say, --Oh, you're getting a bump, when she sees them, but she's not kidding me a bit with that bump stuff. They're zits, filled with white crap. My father had acne when he was young. He still has scars on his back. I've seen them.

       I'm addicted to my lunch I bring to school. In fact, sometimes I tell Sister Ted I have to get another pencil out of my bag, and I go back in the middle of the MORNING to the cloakroom, and I stick my head between the coats and lean over my knapsack, and eat half my sandwich in one bite. We get three sheets of smoked turkey on white bread with mayo. That is so little meat that I can breathe it right down, almost without chewing. George Gack gets the WHOLE PACK of meat on his sandwiches, since he's an only child. He makes the sandwich himself. It's quicker for him just to flip the whole stack of meat right onto the bread than it is to peel it away, one sheet at a time. Sometimes I eat so fast I don't even remember eating. But if I eat slow, food tastes funny, like when I'm reading and I stare at one word for too long, and it starts to look ridiculous, like the word "the."

       The the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the

       At school that day they were making the usual to-do about who the Science Fair judges were going to be. There was a priest who used to teach chemistry in high school about fifteen years ago, and also one of the nuns, but not Sister Ted, thank God, who would rather have her head chopped off than hand me a ribbon, and an engineer named Ray Lasher, who happened to be Ray Lasher Senior, the father of the Evil Ray Lasher, Junior.

       Ray Lasher Jr. had been in my homeroom every year for eight straight years. For seven straight years we had faced each other in the science fair. Where I looked crusty, Ray looked shiny. He had dark black hair that waved around on his head like it was looking for a nice place to land. His eyes were brown and he was lean and strong, and always the fastest, first and furthest in every gym class. And since homerooms always took gym class together, I always got to see him do it the best, whatever it was. And It was a lot of things.

       I hated his hair and his head. I hated his clothes and the way that he swung a golf club like it was the lightest thing in the world, and all he had to do was to give the ball the slightest touch to send it rocketing through the air to the middle of the fairway. I hated the way teachers said his name, -Raaay, when he was acting up in class, because they said it with little smiles on their teacher-mouths that meant that things some kids did wrong were funnier than others. And he always smiled because everything always went his way.

       So Ray Lasher Junior made me nervous enough. I didn't want to have to face his father, too. Not to mention the time over the summer that I caddied for Ray Senior at the Country Club. He had gone into the clubhouse after 9 holes of making fun of me for being a lard-ass to have a drink. He came out, made fun of me for nine more holes, and gave me $6.10. $6 is the minimum they have to pay, so he only tipped me a DIME, like a fink, considering that his bag was as heavy as a torpedo, and that I got poison sumac on my legs from searching in the woods for all his duffed balls in deep brush. If I found one, I'd try to hand him an iron to dig himself out with, and he'd just walk right past me, and then say over his shoulder, -- I think the foot-wedge is the right club for this shot, caddy. Don't you? Then he'd kick the ball back out onto the fairway.

       If you're going to have the most expensive clubs in the world, and all those accessories, for God's sake you should be able to hit the ball. He was hopeless. I stared at his stupid white shoes that looked like they had a bib on them. I didn't even look at Lasher's face when he came over to get a club out. He did that bad.

       But the joke was on him, because when he took that break after the first 9 holes, I ordered five dollars worth of food instead of the one soda we were allowed. I heard that he came out cursing like a madman when he went to pay his greens bill and found out what his caddy refreshment tab was, but by then, I had vamoosed to the caddy shack to hide. I was hungry after walking around for two hours in the sun with a bag on my neck full of golf clubs! I alreadys said I'm getting bigger all the time. Big guys get hungry. If you're smaller, of course, you might not. You can probably survive for a full week on an apple or some crackers. But I get so hungry I get angry. Sometimes I want to walk up to the Keebler Elf tree and knock on it, and when one of the Elves sticks his little green cap-head out through the tree-hole, I want to grab him by the neck and shake him like a toy-dog, until he comes up with some free cookies for me.

       Lasher caught up with me later, though, in the parking lot.

--I got my eye on you, Shaw, and I don't like what I see. I think you don't have any balls. You got any balls, boy?

       I didn't really think that was something I had to chat with anybody about, because I have seen my own balls and that's good enough for me, so I didn't say anything to him. My father doesn't ever play golf. He doesn't even have any friends who play golf. Come to think of it, I don't think he has friends. He wasn't like other fathers. He wasn't very coordinated (not that I should talk). He got the shakes when we were punching around, playing got-you-last, and I threw him my half-assed head-fake. And he shook if he tried to throw a ball. He didn't go to church anymore, too, and wouldn't look at my ma when she stared at him on Sunday mornings, when everyone else was dragging out to 11:15 Mass.

       Luckily, there was also usually somebody else judging the Science Fair, who had nothing to do with science at all, called the "Layman Expert." That was to make sure that even dummies could understand what you were talking about.

This year, just like last year, it was going to be a second grader's mother, Mrs. Vaughan, because she didn't work during the day and liked to read science fiction. She loved me because I talked to her about her shoes. She was wearing Dr. Scholls the day of the fair. Dr. Scholls were these wooden sandals where your toes went into a scooped-out section in the front.

She walked up to judge my Enzymes project and put out her hand to lean against the table my exhibit was on.

-- Ooo, this shoe is killing me, she cried. She told me Dr. Scholls were designed to exercise the foot. -- The toes are supposed to be able to stretch out and flex below the foot! But I think I'm being maimed by them, she added.

-- That would make a pretty good science project itself, I said.

-- Excuse me? Mrs. Vaughan said.

-- Somebody should study whether or not Dr. Scholls actually do what they're supposed to do, exercise the foot.

Mrs. Vaughan looked at me and smiled. There was a little bit of orange lipstick on her front teeth. -- You seem to be a bright young man, she said. -- Let's see. Enzymes? Well, that's interesting. What can you tell me about the little devils?

I was glad she'd be judging again this year since we were old buds.

It turned out in the end that Mr. Lasher was replaced as a science fair judge because they miraculously scored this blind scientist from the National Institutes of Health. He was very famous. HE couldn't see my horrible paint job or any of my typos. He liked my title: ARTIFICIAL FERTILIZATION IN A LOWER ANIMAL: A VIRGIN BIRTH, and kept saying it to himself after I told him. He had said that I was unafraid to follow through on a valid experiment, even if it wasn't popular.

Mrs. Vaughn liked it, too. She stopped by and said that my project was politically important, that I was suggesting that women's bodies are like their own laboratories, and that it was a good thing for control of that particular lab to be given back to them. Not a bad speech for a housewife with orange lipstick on her teeth and mutilated toes.

It was nice to have somebody believing in me, even if the whole believing-in-you thing can be a lot of baloney. Most of the time someone older says it to you, to force you to do something.

--I believe in you.

--You do?

--Yes, I do. I believe you will do the right thing.

--How will I know if it's right or not?

--You Just Will.

In eighth-grade, you felt like a king inside your own head and your own school, but once you were outside it everybody was older than you. And since you weren't even in high school, they ruled out whatever you said automatically as being immature. It was like you weren't alive yet, you were just saving a place in line for someone who was going to get there eventually, and that person was you, only when you were older.

Everybody was pretty excited at recess, but not because of the science fair. That night was going to be the second Ali-Frazier fight. All the guys in the eighth grade were making bets on it. Even I made a bet on it. I'm very cheap about betting, because it's hard to win. I was taking Frazier this time, because the first time I had taken Ali and he had gotten whupped. Speaking of bets, when Evil Knieval jumped the Snake River Canyon, a lot of the eighth grade bet that he was going to die. He really wanted to jump the Grand Canyon, but that was a national park, so it was no-can-do. Plus, that would have been too far to jump. Evil didn't even make it over Snake River, but he floated down in a parachute and only broke a couple of ribs, which was not too bad.

I was betting my friend Fitz Patrick and was trying to have some common sense. I figured Frazier was the better fighter, since he had won the first one. I only bet four dollars. Fitz Patrick was very cool and once his father had taken him to a prize-fight, even though it hadn't been heavyweights, only bantamweights. He told me I made a good bet, so that was something. But most of the eighth grade seemed to be going for Ali, which scared me.

I had stolen the four dollars from my ma's purse. You can pinch sixteen quarters between your thumb and first finger easily. It's only a little more than an inch of a stretch. I can dip into her purse and be out in a split second, not that that's something I should brag about. But now you know, so deal with it.

After school I walked home and went downstairs to do some homework. Ultraman, using the old Beta capsule, was about to transform himself and kick some serious butt. It turned out I had already seen the episode before, but I always had the TV on when I was downstairs. Why else go down there? I also had the "W" World Book open on my lap, and I was copying the section on Henry Wallace word for word, because we were studying the 1948 Presidential elections in Social Studies and I had to give a speech the next day, while my cool teammates giggled and passed notes behind me that were probably about what a spazz I was.

I always do my homework in front of the TV. It's less boring that way, but sometimes it gets confusing. On that particular day, my brain wandered off into a weird cloudy world where Henry Wallace was shooting electrical bolts shaped like circular saw blades out of the side of his hand, and Ultraman was the one shaking the hands of regular old Americans who worked with their own hands, and still could never make enough money to own anything. Ultraman shook their hands, and asked them in Japanese if they would vote for him. It was a dream, so it wasn't a big whup that now I could understand Japanese all of a sudden.

When you get up to turn off TV after you've been watching for a long time, the set is really hot. On the old TVS, when you turned it off, the picture collapsed into a little white spot that kept getting littler and littler, and then you couldn't see it anymore but it seemed like it was probably still there somewhere. You just couldn't see it because you were finished watching TV for that day. When you went outside, the sunlight felt fake.

That night after dinner my ma drove me downtown to the Library of Congress, because I had to find this old book from 1903 written by a guy named Jacques Loeb. I needed it for my science fair project research. I was going to make a sea urchin's eggs reproduce without fertilization. It's called parthenogenesis. Bees do it naturally. But at the science fair, I was accused of being Anti-Life and trying to play God, and eliminate men. Old Jacques was the guy who first did parthenogenesis on sea urchins, the one whose experiment I was planning on stealing. The school librarian had called around and found the book for me at the Library of Congress. It was the only place in our whole area that had a copy of it.

I had been nervous about going to the Library of Congress, so I'd laid out everything I'd need ahead of time for going. That way I could practice like I was already there. I had my slide rule in its little plastic holder, with my name on it on a little piece of plastic tape. I put labels on everything I owned with this little gun that had the alphabet on a little wheel. You dialed up each little letter and then squeezed the trigger. That was practical.

The slide rule was so I could warm up a little on it before I took notes. I had only learned how to do square roots, multiplication and division on it, but it was possible to do a ton of other stuff, like trig and calc and Vectors. I had no idea how to do them but I kept the booklet. The slide rule was also good for giving someone like my sister Maud a chop if they got in your way. I almost killed her with it once. She still has a tiny scar underneath her right eye where it scratched her that looks like a checkmark.

I had put a pocket-protector in the shirt I was going to wear, so I wouldn't ruin it by putting my pen in without a cap on it. The protector would still get ruined, no matter what. I also put a Texas Instruments calculator in my bag. And I brought a book of chess problems, just to have a book. You should always have a book with you.

My ma was pretty good about helping me with stuff like this.

-- You have a good brain and you're not going to toss it away like an old pair of pants, she told me.

-- I don't do that, I said back to her. I actually do do that, but you have to fight back.

-- You don't have any common sense. I'm saving your brain. It's the only thing that will ever get you anywhere.

Having a brain means I remembered a lot all the time, that it never shut off. The worse things get, the more I remembered. If I had common sense, I would remember just what I needed to remember and get along okay. It would be like a little bit of oil that lasted a long time.

Of course, my ma wasn't only interested in my brain. She also liked having fun. But sometimes she went too far. Near the end of my Scouting days, something weird and embarrassing happened that stopped me from ever really liking being a boy scout, and it also made me realize my ma was a little bit crazy, so I couldn't really help it if I was strange, too.

My den was putting on a magic show to raise money for a camping trip. Wouldn't you know it, but old Digby goes and volunteers to play the magician's assistant. I was nine and a half. I had made Wolf Cub and I got a Wolf Cub badge which had gold and silver arrows. It's in my scrapbook. On the back it said, --Your den mother must be proud! The rest of my Wolf Cub card had said, "... When you're nine you can be a BEAR CUB SCOUT!" But I was old enough to skip right into Weeblos (or the We-Blow-Anyones, as Fitz Patrick called it.)

Then, our den mother, Mrs. Missel, had the brilliant idea that I should be the magician's GIRL assistant, though. I complained and said I wouldn't do it, but when my ma came to pick me up that day, Mrs. Missel ran out to the car and called my ma by her first name and told her about the idea.

My ma thought it was just great. -- I'm sure Digby would be happy to do it. In the car we fought about it, and I said it would make me look gay, but my ma said it would be fun and that she would help me. So I was doomed.

The Library of Congress was almost as big as the Capitol Building. My ma and me walked into a huge central round room that had millions of little desks and chairs, and balconies way up high, near the roof. I had to look up the Loeb book in a thick encyclopedia, and write down all the information about it on a little card. Then I gave it to this librarian guy with big frizzy hair, who had a green Afro-pick in his pocket, but he was white. He told me to sit down since it was going to take a while. Then he put the card in this little round tube, and put the tube into a chute, which sucked it up into a pipe.

-- Whuushh!

For the next half-hour my ma and me whispered about what other people might have been reading, based on what they looked like. We also did some worrying about getting caught whispering. Then a little elevator behind the librarian's desk clanged open, and the librarian took a small book out that had the card I filled out stuck to it with a rubber band. The librarian looked at it and called out my name, and I got my book. I made a copy of the pages I needed so I could read them at home. My ma fished some change out of her purse. She didn't say anything about the half of her quarter roll that was already missing which at that very moment was in the process of being doubled, since Frazier had already broken Ali's jaw and went on to win by a unanimous decision. Instead of paying up, Fitz offered to let me peep on his sister when she was changing clothes, which I had to admit was better than eight bills.

On the way home from the Library of Congress, we stopped at Hot Shoppes.

--We'll just get a little something, my ma said. She had an ice cream sundae, and I had a small fries and a piece of blueberry pie. The fries had to be fought over, because I was too hungry, as usual, and fries somehow made it a meal, instead of just a snack.

--We had dinner at home, my ma said. --Why don't you just get the pie, and see if you're still hungry after that?

--I know I'm that hungry, I told her. --I didn't have much dinner. I said this not really believing that she would believe me, but my ma looked guilty, like it was her fault for not cooking a big enough dinner, so she let me get both. Then it turned out I felt guilty for making her feel guilty, and I also was completely stuffed, so I felt disgusting. But I still had to act happy as a clown.

We talked about my science project. I told her I wanted to be a scientist and that's why I catalogued and saved everything, and also why I had to test everything, because there was the scientific method that had rules you had to follow. One of the main rules was that you had to be empirical: you had to test things and you had to pay attention to the results. I could see she was listening to me at the very beginning, but then she looked like she was getting ready to talk.

Sometimes my ma tries to talk to me, but I don't want to, and other times I try to talk to her, but she doesn't want to. And sometimes she just can't hear what I'm saying. Like that time I got roped into being "Miss Twinkletoes" at the Cub Scout magic show. She wouldn't let me get out of it. Some of those guys STILL think I'm gay because of it and I was only 9 years old then. On the night of the magic show, my ma dragged me into the bathroom at the public elementary school where we had our meetings. All the parents and brothers and sisters of all the Cubs were out there. My father was outside having a cigarette when we were in the bathroom. My ma put red lipstick on me and a blonde wig, and I wore my sister, Maud's plaid skirt and white blouse. And HIGH HEELS. I tried to argue with her, but I could hear the people arriving for the show, and their voices made me feel a little sick but also excited. I was peeping out the bathroom door and one of the other Cubs saw me and gave me the finger and I gave him the finger back, and the gold bracelet on my wrist flashed at him.

I ran out into the audience and squeezed my father's biceps when the magician needed a volunteer. I tried to pull him to his feet so he would come up and hold one end of the rope for the rope trick. I tried to pull him put he wouldn't budge. I had seen him laughing so hard he had to press a handkerchief to his face. (Maybe he was crying because his son was going GAY WACKO in front of his very eyes.) If he was laughing that hard, I figured he would get up and come with me and be the volunteer. I jumped onto his lap and put my arm around his neck, and he got this bug-eyed look on his face and started coughing. He pushed me off his lap and I fell on the floor. The parents stopped laughing but the kids kept going. My father sounded like he was choking to death.

I gave up and when back on stage but all of a sudden the joke of it all seemed dumb. I could hear the magician asking me in this serious voice, -- Miss Twinkletoes, would you be so kind as to produce the silk handkerchief? It seemed to take me forever to pull it out, because I was watching my parents, and a bunch of heads in the audience had turned to look at them, too.

It reminded me of when I used to go with my brother, Emmet, and my father to the barbershop. Now my ma took us, because she didn't want us to get crew-cuts anymore, and my father didn't want to take us anymore because he didn't think any haircut but a buzz was fun . But he had liked to sit and laugh at us while we got scalped.

The Magic Show was more than four years ago. But that was the last time I was a complete dumbass. Up until then I thought it was just that my father had a pretty bad temper, and that he only got it at night, when he came home from work, after dinner, on days he brought home his briefcase. If he yelled too much at my ma, and Emmet started crying in his bed in our room, sometimes Maud would come in and rub Emmet's shoulders and tell him it was okay. Then she would leave and Emmet would ask me questions.

-- Why does he get so mad?

-- Because he's Irish. Irish people have bad tempers

-- Is he going to hit her?

-- No.

-- How do you get a bad temper?

I didn't really know, so I'd make something up.

-- You get a bad temper if your face gets really red really easily, and you're Irish.

When I was Miss Twinkletoes I finally saw that that was all bullshit. We were waiting in the living room for my ma to come downstairs so we could go. The news was on TV about Kent State. My father's briefcase was under the piano. The snaps were not fastened, and it had popped open. He used to come home from work and have a cocktail in a lo-ball glass with painted bubbles on it. Now he still drank but you never saw it. Maud told me what it was called later on but it was at the Magic Show that I knew.

My father said, -- The hippies can cry all they want to. They're not going to end the war. It'll probably still be going on when you're draftable.

-- How old do you have to be get drafted? My ma was coming down the stairs.

He said, -- You can go to war when you're sixteen, if your parents give permission.

-- Not this again, my ma said.

-- The Army was the best thing ever happened to me.

She looked him straight in the face and said, --Ha!

Now the war is supposed to end pretty soon. We're pulling out.

That night with my ma at Hot Shoppes was different. Both my ma and I were ready to talk. I was excited about my project. My ma was excited because we were alone and doing a project together, and also because we were getting to have a snack, together, instead of her just setting out the snack for me and then having to watch me inhale it like a big dog. So we both wanted to talk, but at first I couldn't really understand what she was saying about my father.

What I am talking about is the Vague Speech.

--You kids don't know. But sometimes I think I am going to have to go away for a little while.

--What don't we know?

--It doesn't mean that I don't want us all to be together.

--I know he's an alcoholic, I said.

My ma almost dropped her spoon. --Who told you that?

--I just KNOW.

--Well, do you know what that means?

--Yes. But I was praying she wouldn't ask me for a definition. I knew it meant he drank too much, but since I didn't drink at all, I had no idea how much was too much.

This was why I avoided really talking to my ma, because it always got really serious and sad before it had the chance to get anything else. When I wanted to talk to her it was because I wanted her to hear about what I was thinking, even if it was stupid, just because I thought she might be proud to hear me talk, as if I was a two-year old who had just learned how to say "cat." But she took it personally, like we should change something about life every time I said something.

Maybe they will get divorced. My father is always fiddling with his wedding ring with one hand, but he never looks at it when he's doing it. It's almost like he's looking at one thing, way off in the distance, that he can adjust by tweaking another thing right at his fingertips.

He and my ma don't talk about their wedding. There's some old black- and-white pictures of them stuffing cake into each other's mouths, but that's about it, and as usual with a stunt like that, my father looks happier about it than my ma does. She looks happy, but happy-to-be-in-a-picture happy, not a happy-to-have-cake-stuffed-in-her-mouth happy. My father just looks happy.

We got home and things went regularly. I thought everyone had gone to sleep. I had already fallen asleep once watching the headlights on the ceiling that squeezed in over the curtains when a car whizzed by. Then I woke up, because I heard my ma talking very clearly.

--I want to talk to you about your drinking problem, she said.

--I don't want to talk about it.

--Well, I do, my ma said. She was not going to not say anything anymore. You could hear it in her voice. I could hear Emmet opening his eyes in his bed across the room. I could hear Maud lying on top of her quilt with her hands on her stomach listening. I could hear my little sister, Molly, stop sucking on her third finger.

--I'll just stop, my father said.

--You won't just stop. Try to think of the children.

--They don't know a thing about it.

--They do. Digby told me tonight that he knew you were an alcoholic. I think Maud knows too. Don't you want to try to stop now before it gets too late?

--It's not going to be too late. I can stop any time I want to. You'll see. I'll just stop now.

I grinded my face into my pillow until I saw stars and I could hear blood pounding down my ears. My face smashed the pillow. In the dark now, with the house asleep, I could think about whatever I wanted. I thought about butting my head against a wall, in the dark I could almost see what it would look like if my hands tried to tear my face, my aching hands on the pillow.

I felt guilty for trying to be smart with my ma. I felt guilty for eating the fries. If you had to try to be smart you ended up dumb. You tried to be funny and everyone looked like they would cry. Jacques Loeb was smart. Muhammed Ali was funny. I was just Miss Twinkletoes.

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