Good Graces

Chapter Ten

It’s not just Troo and me, all the kids who go to Mother of Good Hope School have to write charitable stories over the summer. If you don’t show up with it the first day of school you’ll be punished by Sister Raphael, who is the principal but is also in charge of good deeds. She’s also the nun who wants to kick my sister out of school for more than one reason. Since Troo was in her office at least once a week for doing one bad thing or another, Sister told me she’s thinking of having the chair in the corner of her office engraved permanently with Troo’s name. (If she bothered to look at the back, she could save a few bucks. Troo stole a penknife outta the Five and Dime last summer.)

The last straw happened at recess two weeks before school let out.

Jimmy “B.O.” Montanazza was hanging off one end of the monkey bars. My sister was sitting on top. She musta been holding her breath because B.O. can’t even play hide-and-seek, that’s how easy he is to track down. His pits just reek. I couldn’t hear what exactly Troo asked him; I was playing double Dutch at the time, but I heard B.O.’s answer cut through the sound of the slapping ropes because like all the Italians, he talks so darn loud. “Take it from me, O’Malley, sex is like a hot dog. It’s all about the weiner and the bun,” B.O. said. Troo started hooting like a maniac. Sister Imelda didn’t. She dragged the both of them off the bars straight into the principal’s office. I had to take the note home because Sister Raphael didn’t trust Troo to deliver it to Mother:

Dear Mrs. Gustafson,

Once again, Margaret is suffering from impure thoughts. She will not be allowed back next year if she continues down the path she is heading. Perhaps your current living arrangements are a contributing factor.

May God have mercy on

your soul,

Sister Raphael, S.D.S.

My sister’s dirty mind doesn’t have a thing to do with where Mother lives. Troo is being influenced by a bad element. The Italians. These are a people who are interested in getting as much of the sex as they can. Look at Gina Lolloabridgida. Her bosoms… they’re the size of watermelons. Same goes for Annette Funicello. I don’t think it’s my imagination that Mousekeeter Lonnie couldn’t keep his eyes off her chest.

And then there’s Fast Susie Fazio, who might be the worst Italian of all. She’s three years older than me and knows all there is to know about first base and second base and sliding into home. Thanks to her, I couldn’t listen to a Braves game for over a month after she told me and Troo how babies are made during one of our sleepovers.

This is why I try to avoid going anywhere near her house, but when the noon whistle goes off at the Feelin’ Good factory, I call back to Troo, “We were supposed to be there fifteen minutes ago. Hurry up.” We don’t have any choice now but to cut through the Fazios’ yard to get to Mrs. Galecki’s place. I’m already late and Ethel keeps to a schedule. She likes me to read to Mrs. Galecki right after she feeds her an early lunch but before she takes a long afternoon nap. Troo is dragging her feet on purpose. She knows how much I hate being tardy.

Like always, Italian opera music is coming from outta the Fazios’. Fast Susie’s grandma is singing along to Rickie Caruso while she’s cooking, which is pretty much all she does besides casting spells on people. She is a Strega Nana… an Italian witch! But an excellent cook for such a small person.

The reason I know that is because it was another one of Troo’s genius plans last summer that we should just show up over here around suppertime because nobody was feeding us at home. Hall was spending day and night up at Jerbak’s Beer ’n Bowl and Nell quit taking care of us the way Mother told her she was supposed to so she could have more time to exercise with Eddie.

Even though we pulled chairs up to their kitchen table at least once a week, I still don’t know the names of all the Fazio kids because there’s ten of them. I do know Fast Susie’s oldest brother, Johnny, everybody does. He’s a singer in a band called the Do Wops. They’ll play at the Fourth of July celebration at the park and the crowning of the King and Queen of the Playground Festival the same way they do every summer.

Fast Susie’s mother likes to be called Jane; I don’t know why. Her real name is Angelica. Every afternoon, Jane lies in her robe on the davenport in the living room and watches “her shows,” which I have seen with her a few times when Troo wants to spend time yakking with Fast Susie and I don’t. The one called Guiding Light reminds me of our neighborhood because so many things go wrong… zip… bang… boom. And Queen for a Day I like because after those down-on-their-luck women are done telling the host, Jack Bailey, how crummy their lives are, I feel really grateful that we have our own washing machine.

As far as Fast Susie’s father goes, I have only seen him at supper a few times and Mass every so often because he’s got an important job. His name is Tony. He sells silverware, which he must do really well because he wears shoes made outta alligators and suits made outta sharkskin. Mr. Fazio works with a man called Frankie the Knife.

When we come into her backyard, Fast Susie says, “O’Malleys!” This is almost where she always is during the summer, lying on a greasy white sheet. Next to her, there is a bottle of baby oil with iodine in it. She slathers it all over her arms and legs, the whole hairy mess.

My sister plops down next to her and says with a load of admiration, “Zowie.” Troo isn’t talking about the two-piece bathing suit Fast Susie’s barely got on. She’s impressed by her bosoms. She is very interested in them in general and can’t wait until hers come in. Every morning she stands in front of the mirror on the back of our bedroom door to check to see if they’ve grown during the night.

Fast Susie beams down at the polka-dotted suit top that’s standing out about a foot from her body. “It’s like that song. An itsy bitsy teenie weenie,” she says, bouncing.

She inherited her bosoms from her grandmother the same way I inherited my long legs from Dave. Back in the old days Nana’s musta looked like freshly filled water balloons, too, but now she has to strap them down with a belt when she’s cooking so they don’t accidentally dangle into a pot of spaghetti and I hope the same thing happens to Fast Susie. She’s mean to me. She thinks I’m not cool. Not the way Troo is.

Fast Susie says, “Funny you two should show up. A little birdie told me something that might interest the both of ya.”

For once, I think I know which little birdie she’s talking about, so I say, “If it’s about Greasy Al escapin’ from reform school, Henry Fitzpatrick already told us.” Even though it’s the worst news, I’m proud of him. It really is something if you hear neighborhood gossip before Fast Susie does. Mother calls her the Hedda Hopper of Vliet Street.

Fast Susie pops up and says, “Fitzpatrick told you? That… that Casper Milquetoast?”

I take a step back from her waving arms. You gotta watch out for her all the time, but especially when she gets mad because the Fazios aren’t only Italians, they’re a special type called Sicilians, who are a people from the south side of Italy who are famous for paying you back for anything mean you’ve ever done to them even if they die trying. In their language, this is called having a vendetta.

Fast Susie says, “Ya better watch out, Troo. When Greasy Al shows up, you’re morto.”

She runs her pointer finger across her throat and makes this awful gagging sound.

I gasp, but my sister says, “I’m shakin’ in my boots,” only she isn’t. Her sides are splitting. “Greasy Al can sit on a screwdriver and rotate.”

I don’t like where this is heading. “Ethel’s waitin’, Troo.” All I want to do is go see my good friend and read to Mrs. Galecki. We are in the middle of the best Nancy Drew and if I never hear the words Molinari and morto again in my entire life, that would be fine by me.

“Did that little soda jerk also tell ya that one of the orphan kids ran away?” Fast Susie asks me, taking another stab at breaking news.

“No, it wasn’t Henry. I heard that from…” I almost tell her that it was Artie Latour who told us that Charlie ran off, but that might make her have a vendetta for Artie, which is the last thing in the world that kid needs. Troo is still too busy staring at Fast Susie’s bosoms to notice much of anything else, so I know she won’t disagree with me when I say, “Nope. Haven’t heard a thing about any orphan runnin’ away.”

“I didn’t think so,” Fast Susie says, unclenching her fists, feeling better now that she’s finally got a scoop. “Charlie Fitch took off from St. Jude’s in the middle of the night.”

“No kiddin’,” I say, doing my best to act amazed. “Do you know why? I mean, did ya hear if it was something that Artie Latour did that caused him to run away?”

“Naw,” she says. “Fartie didn’t have nothin’ to do with it.” After Artie Latour eats certain kinds of foods… he toots. A ton. That’s why Fast Susie and some of the other kids have started calling him that nickname, which may not be charitable, but is unfortunately correct. “Fitch ran off ’cause he got caught stealin’ money outta the poor box at church.”

“He did?” I say, dumbfounded. Even though I didn’t know Charlie all that well, I was positive he was a good kid. Even after Mary Lane told me that no-tripper story about how he might be the kind of orphan that kills people and strings them up in his living room to drip-dry. Now here’s Fast Susie telling us Charlie’s a thief. How am I ever going to protect Troo when I can’t tell the good guys from the bad ones?

I ask, “How… who caught him stealin’?”

Fast Susie picks her suit out of her crotch and says with a smile, “Father Mickey.”

I say, “Oh,” and look over at Troo to see what she thinks about all this because she’s always interested in any news about our pastor, but she’s still staring at those Italian cantaloupe bosoms.

“Hey… I just thoughta something. You two… wanna stay over one a these nights?” Fast Susie says, all of a sudden like we’re her best friends. (That’s the other thing you have to watch out for in Italians. They can turn on a dime.)

“Ah… thanks. I can’t. I’m… ah, busy,” I tell her.

Troo, finally breaking free of the spell Fast Susie’s chest has put on her, says, “I want to!”

I knew she’d say that because Fast Susie is her idol, but I despise staying overnight at the Fazios’. We have to sleep in her spooky attic, which is bad enough, but then Fast Susie will tell us a bedtime story she knows will scare the underpants offa me. Like the one she told us the last time we stayed over, the one about Count Dracula. How after he sucked everybody dry in his Transylvania neighborhood, he’d turn into a bat and fly off to somebody else’s neighborhood to quench his blood thirstiness. A neighborhood just like ours. All I could picture was Henry sleeping in his bed on 49th Street with the window open. He would be like finding a pot at the end of the rainbow for the Count. That vampire would lick his bat lips and open up my boyfriend’s hemofeelya neck like he was the drink spigot at the soda fountain. The time we stayed over and Fast Susie told us about Frankenstein stealing body parts was bad, too. I had to go home in the middle of the night because I couldn’t stand hearing that story for a minute longer. I should’ve waited until the sun came up because that was the first time Bobby came after me. I didn’t know it was him. I couldn’t see his face in the dark, only his pink-and-green argyle socks from under the Kenfields’ bushes where I hid.

“Aw, c’mon, ya gotta stay over, Sally,” Fast Susie says. “I wanna tell you all about this movie Tommy took me to see last week.” She’s going steady with Tommy Molinari, who is one of Greasy Al’s brothers, but is mostly known as The Mangling Meatball. “You’d love Psycho. It’s all about this square who takes extra good care of his mother!”

Troo, really keyed up now, says, “Can we eat over, too?” She adores all of Nana Fazio’s cooking, but especially her cannolis, which are these creamy little rolled-up sandwiches.

I check Daddy’s watch on my wrist for the third time. “Troo, I’m goin’.” I nudge her with my foot. “Did you hear me?”

She nudges me back in the ankle much harder and shouts, “Do I look deaf?” She reaches into her shorts and slides a pack of L &M’s out of her pocket.

I say, “You know where I am if you change your mind,” and then I run out of that backyard because when her and Fast Susie light up those cigarettes and start puffing away, Nana Fazio starts shouting some crazy-sounding Italian curse out of the kitchen window and Fast Susie yells something back that sounds like “Basta or pasta” and Troo begins her French hunh… hunhing and more than anything, all I want to do is be with somebody who speaks my own language.