Good Graces

Chapter Five

Just like the park, where the O’Malley sisters are this morning is another important place to be in the neighborhood-Vliet Street School playground. The school is three stories high and made out of brick with a flat roof and a lotta doors, but none of us cares about that. It’s the blacktop we’re interested in. The heat comes off it in waves. And it’s not only the way it looks that reminds me of a bottomless sea. It’s the kids. Even if the last thing on your mind is playing a game of Statue Maker or Captain May I you can get lured over here by their happy sounds the same way those sailors did by those singing sirens the nuns taught us about when they covered the importance of resisting temptation. (Those sailors ended up dead, which is a word to the wise.)

The playground is about a block wide, so there is plenty of room to get together all kinds of games. Boys take off their shirts at the basketball court, which I have nothing to do with. Troo does. She likes any games that you play with balls. There are yellow-painted hopscotches and four-squares and flat green wooden benches that you can sit on if you want to play checkers or best of all, braid lanyards underneath the one shade tree, which I warned everybody is going to die soon if they don’t stop carving their initials into it. The playground’s also got four swings, a shiny slide that can blister the back of your legs in the afternoon if you forget to pull your shorts down far enough, a sandbox and two different kinds of monkey bars. The flat ladder ones that you can swing across jungle-style (Mary Lane’s favorite) and the other kind that are twisted metal pretzels that I don’t really get what you’re supposed to do with.

Just like I adored being at the lagoon, I used to adore being here. Nowadays I leave the house feeling brave, but by the time I get over here my tummy is letting me know it woulda rather stayed right where it was. It’s the counselors’ shed that Bobby grabbed me out of that’s causing all the problems. That shed is like Hound of the Baskervilles quicksand to me now. Smooth on the surface, but if you aren’t paying attention to the details, if you make one false step, it will suck you under and it only makes it worse if you struggle, so what are you supposed to do?

Thank Jesus, Mary and Joseph that the playground counselors this summer are both girls who aren’t murderers and molesters. Barb Kircher is back for more. I’m glad. Barb makes me feel a little less dumb. Like me, she didn’t notice last year that Bobby was a bad egg. I think she had a crush on him for a while the same way I did. She is also an expert lanyard maker and I just love those things. The silky colors and the slippery feel of them gliding through my fingers. I’ve made over fifty of them. I give them to people on their birthdays or any time I think they could use a little pick-me-up.

The other counselor, the new one who is taking Bobby’s place, is a girl named Debbie Weatherly, who is a friend of Barb’s from their college cheerleading team. Debbie must be the captain because she keeps telling us how she is so, so, so happy to be here! She reminds Mary Lane of that guy on The Mickey Mouse Club and I would have to agree with her. Mousketeer Roy, that was his name. (He got me so jumpy that I had to stop watching on Wednesdays, which was Anything Can Happen Day.) The new counselor lurks around in the background the same way he did. She isn’t going bald, though. Debbie’s got a sleek brunette do that she keeps out of her eyes with a colored headband that she changes every day, so she is very fashionable, but just like Roy, she is on the chunky side and has somewhat of a slack jaw.

The whole Vliet Street gang is here. Troo and me, Willie O’Hara, Mary Lane, Artie Latour and his sister, Wendy Latour, who is the only one of us who is not waiting in line to play tetherball. Wendy is swinging, which is her most favorite thing to do besides wandering off and turning up in the most unexpected places. Once she got found over at the zoo feeding the elephants peanuts way too close for comfort. She showed up in our own bathroom eating a stick of butter when Mother was in the tub. Another time, they found Wendy all the way downtown. This morning, she’s swinging, practically naked from the waist up, which she always tries to do because I don’t think clothes feel good on her skin. She does have on her training bra. She needs it now because her bosoms are growing up even if she isn’t. She is the strongest kid. When we play Red Rover, she can break through our closed-up arms like we’re a paper chain and she’s a pair of scissors right outta the box. She’s also a great hugger and a lot smarter than people give her credit for. She likes me better than she likes Troo and I am just nuts for her, too.

I call over to her, “Hi, Wendy.”

She yells back the same way she always does in her voice that sounds a lot like Froggy the Gremlin on the Andy’s Gang television show, “Thally O’Malley, hi… hi… hi!”

Wendy isn’t a regular kid, she is something called a Mongoloid. With her shiny black hair that is ruler straight, she looks like one of the waitresses over at the Peking Palace where you can get good chop suey on special occasions. Mother told Troo and me that the Chinese are an inscrutable people, which means they’re hard to understand, which fits Wendy Latour to a T.

“That’s good swingin’, Wendy, but maybe you should slow down a little.” I point to her head. “Your tiara’s slippin’.”

It’s actually my tiara. Troo calls me a chump, but I don’t regret what I did for one second. I knew I was gonna win. The counselors wanted to give me a prize for not getting murdered and molested last summer, but when Barb Kircher was about to announce me as Queen of the Playground at the biggest party we have in the neighborhood at the end of the summer, I looked down at Wendy in a pink party dress, smiling up from the crowd with shiny lips and her Cracker Jack ring on her wedding finger, and I grabbed the microphone and announced, “The Queen this year is… Wendy Latour!” The reason I did that is because someday I will grow up and get married to a pale pharmacist, but Wendy… one of the worst things about Mongoloids is that they don’t live very long, which I try never to think about.

“Hey,” I tell Artie Latour, who is her brother and one of the other twelve Latour kids, “Wendy’s goin’ too high and she’s got her blouse off again.”

He looks over fast, but he’s in the middle of a tetherball game with Willie O’Hara so he doesn’t want to stop and take his sister home to their mother so that she can get dressed.

Artie asks outta the side of his mouth, “Could ya do it for me, Sally?”

I say, “Yeah… okay,” because I’m just waiting to get back in the game, but even if I wasn’t, I would help Artie out. I like him. I also feel sorry for him. He is not the best-looking kid. His Adam’s apple goes out of whack when he gets jittery, which is a lot because he is really high-strung. He walks with his knees bent and pigeon toes and he’s got a harelip and is hard of hearing, too, because his oldest and meanest brother, Reese, who is in the Army now, smacked Artie so hard that his ear swelled up to the size of a fist. That’s why he’s a half-deaf mess.

Thinking I might not have to go all the way over to the swings because I’m already so sweaty, I stay where I am and shout at Wendy, “Artie says you gotta stop swingin’.”

“Flyin’,” she hollers back. She is pretending to be the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz. This movie made a HUGE impression on her. Ever since she saw it on TV, it has become her favorite. She likes Dorothy and Glenda and the Scarecrow okay, but it’s the witch she really loves. “Come. Wish laugh.” (I can do a pretty good Wicked Witch imitation. I taught myself how because I knew Wendy’d get a kick out of it.)

By the time I get over there, she is ripping even higher, bouncing in the swing with her head stretched back as far as it’ll go. She is a very good pumper for a girl with such stubby legs.

I yell at Wendy, “Slow down. You’re gonna go over the top bar like you did last month. Remember what a bad boo-boo ya got on your knees, my pretty?” I rub my hands together and throw my head back the way the green witch does. “Aha… hahahaha.”

Troo leaves the line and comes panting up to my side. “You’re up next.”

“Thally O’Malley… me high!”

“Artie,” I call to him when I can’t get Wendy to listen to me. “Artiiieee!” He lost his tetherball game to Willie, and now he’s just standing off to the side of the group looking like someone let the air outta him. “Get over here.”

He trudges over, leans against one of the swing poles, but doesn’t tell his sister, “If you don’t stop, you won’t get any tapioca tonight,” the way he always does to get her to listen. Instead, he tells me and Troo in a barely there voice, “Did you guys hear about Charlie Fitch?”

The O’Malley sisters say louder than we would for a kid who hears real good, “What about him?”

Charlie Fitch is an orphan and you’d know he was right off. Those kids all got that same look, like if you knocked on them they’d sound hollow. Charlie’s also an altar boy so I see him at Mass. He’s older than us, the same age as Artie-fourteen. The two of them are best friends. The other thing I know about Charlie besides him having brown hair and one of those dents in his chin is that he wants to be an actor when he grows up. He was Joseph in last year’s Nativity play up at church. With that sad-sack look he’s got on his face all the time that really seemed believable when him and the Virgin Mary got turned away from the inn and had to go sleep in the manger. (Not with the manager, the way Troo says.) Since both Artie and Charlie are ninety-eight-pound weaklings and not good at rough-and-tumble games, they love playing with their yo-yos when they come to the playground. They know a lot of tricks like walking-the-dog and baby-in-a-cradle and will put on a show. Everybody stops whatever they’re doing to watch.

Artie’s Adam’s apple is going up… down… up… down when he says, “Charlie’s gone.”

“What do you mean gone?” my sister asks, suddenly interested.

“He ran away from St. Jude’s when you guys were at camp,” Artie says.

I say, “He probably just went out to get a breath of fresh air and fell asleep.”

I only said that to make Artie feel better. I’m pretty sure that Charlie’s not snoozing under some bushes. He’s probably dead. That happens to kids around here. First they disappear and then they’re found murdered and molested. On the flip side, trying to be a little sunnier in my personality the way I promised myself I would this summer, Charlie could have left to try his adopting luck somewhere else. He wouldn’t be the first kid to run off from St. Jude’s. At least once a year one of the older ones makes a break for it by climbing down the fire escape in the middle of the night. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in an orphanage named after the patron saint of lost causes either.

Artie says, “Charlie… he was about to… he was gonna get adopted by the Honeywells.”

“Maybe they changed their mind at the last minute and that’s why he ran away,” I say.

“Or maybe Charlie changed his. Mr. Honeywell’s got black hair growin’ out of his ears,” Troo cracks.

“No… it’s all my fault,” Artie mumbles to himself. “I shoulda listened to what he was tryin’ to tell me. I mean, I did, but I didn’t believe him and now he’s…”

I never would have thought that Artie could go more awful-looking than he already is.

“You can tell Charlie you’re sorry for not listenin’ when he gets back,” I say, taking outta my pocket one of the leather coin purses I was forced to make at camp and sticking it in his hand. I’ve got eleven of them, so what the heck. “I’m sure he’ll turn up real soon and be more than happy to forgive you, right, Troo?”

“Yeah, sure,” she says, tossing him a piece of Dubble-Bubble that she always has plenty of in her pocket because she takes other things from the drugstore besides cigarettes and that’s one of them.

But nothing we’re saying or giving Artie seems to be helping much. Such sadness is shooting out of his eyeballs. The kind that holds you in place, you can barely swallow, that’s how bad it gets you around the throat. I know how he’s feeling. He’s about to start choke-crying.

The only one still moving through the thick, hot air is swinging Wendy and even she’s dragging her feet across the blacktop to slow down. “Artie, Artie.” She cocks her head to one side and calls to me, “Thad?”

When I nod, she jumps off the swing and lopes over to hug him. Her brother steps away, which is not like him at all. He loves Wendy and she looks up to him like he’s all the stars in the sky.

Artie says, “Father Mickey-”

Troo perks up. “What about him?”

My sister worships the ground Father walks on. And so does everybody else. Attendance at church has been way up since he became our new pastor. The ladies of the parish get all dolled up and cram themselves into the front pews at his ten o’clock Sunday Mass, and after church, when he’s greeting everybody out on the steps, the mothers bring him plates of devil’s food cake and make jokes about that. Even the nuns smile creakily at him when he stops by a classroom to tell us a parable. Father Mickey is not my cup of tea, I don’t know why. But I am grateful that he’s taking time out of his busy life to give Troo extra religious instruction up at the rectory this summer. She’s gonna get kicked outta Mother of Good Hope School for her impure behavior if she doesn’t get holier by September, so Father better do a good job. I couldn’t stand being without her.

Artie says, “Father Mickey told Charlie that he was one of the chosen few and…” Whatever he’s trying to tell us isn’t coming out so he just gives up, stoops to pick up Wendy’s yellow blouse where she threw it and says to her, “Tapioca,” and this time she listens.

“What are ya waitin’ for, Sally?” Mary Lane hollers at me from the tetherball pole line. “The second comin’ of Christ? You’re up!”

I know I should go after Artie and offer to help him go look for Charlie because that would be the charitable thing to do, but I have been waiting for over a half hour for my ups and just in case I’m right and we find that orphan over in Jack Hoyt woods hanging from a tree by a noose or in an alley strangled with his yo-yo string, I don’t want to see another dead kid. I’ve already gone to one funeral. I didn’t even know they made caskets that small.

I tell Troo, “C’mon,” but she doesn’t. She’s watching Wendy and her beloved big brother making their way home hand-in-hand.

When she turns back my way, she’s got the kind of look on her face that I can only describe as the same one she gets when she stares at the picture we have of Daddy hanging on the wall in our bedroom. She points over her shoulder and says, “We’re not like them anymore. We’re not whole. You’re only a half sister to me now.”

She’s been saying this a lot lately. “You know that’s not true. We belong a hundred percent to each other forever, no matter who our fathers are. Bein’ sisters… that doesn’t have nothin’ to do with how much of the same blood we have.”

Troo bumps into me real hard before she runs across the blacktop, yelling, “Spilled milk.”

I shout after her, “No, it’s not. Wait up!” But when I take off after her, I can’t stop myself from crying even if it is no use.