Wishin' and Hopin'

Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb Page B

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Authors: Wally Lamb
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her, although when Madame asked the writer to reveal him-or-herself, she hadn’t owned up.) The note said how Communists were atheists, and how atheists had no right to celebrate Christmas. In addition to the note, Rosalie had taken to wearing a winter scarf to school—not wrapped around her neck but draped over her head like a veil. Lonny, who, in the Virgin Mary sweepstakes, was rooting for his “geuhlfriend,” had at one point confronted potato-nosed Rosalie with the question, “How come you’re wearing that stupid thing all the time now?” Rosalie had fake-coughed and claimed that she had a very, very bad head cold and that her mother had insisted she cover her head in our draughty classroom. “Yeah, right,” Lonny scoffed. “You got a head cold and I’m the Leader of the Pack.” With a laugh, he crouched intoa motorcyclist’s stance and made loud rum-rum-rum engine noises. Twerski’s retort was that Lonny was the Leader of the Retards.
    But if Rosalie’s remark was inappropriate for a girl in the finals of the Blessed Virgin sweepstakes, then Zhenya’s conduct out on the playground twenty minutes before Madame’s big announcement that day was every bit as un-Marylike. Designated one of the day’s baseball captains, I was making my picks when, unexpectedly, Father Hanrahan appeared on the opposite side of the playground where the hoop was, dribbling a basketball and wondering real loud who wanted to play some Twenty-One? “Me!” all us boys shouted, throwing down our gloves and running toward him. Father Hanrahan was the only cool person at St. Aloysius—he even let you call him Father Jerry if you felt like it—and his appearance on the playground was almost like having Bill Russell or John Havlicek show up. But though Zhenya loved both “bezbull” and “dujbull,” she was indifferent to, and had no aptitude for, “bezgetbull.” Separating herself from the rest of us, she glanced over at the jump-roping girls and then walked by herself to the fence. Lonny, older and taller than the rest of us, was the best basketball player in our class. “Hey!” I called to him as he walked toward Zhenya. “Aint you playing?”
    “Nah.”
    A minute later, he had his arm around her. Two minutes after that, they were kissing, regular or French I couldn’t see.
    Jump ropes fell to the pavement and the girls clustered en masse , looking over toward the fence. Oblivious, Father Jerry and half of the boys were still playing Twenty-One, but the other half of us were staring in disbelief at Lonny and Zhenya, same as the girls. This was the most shocking thing our class had witnessed since Zhenya’s socking of Sister Mary Agrippina. Glancing back at the building for a second, I saw that Sister Cecilia’s third graders were crowded at their classroom windows, watching the show as well. I figured Sister Cecilia was probably out in the hall talking to Sister Godberta as usual. But if thosetwo second-floor nuns were unaware of the passion on display, Mother Filomina was not. Her first-floor office window flew open with a bang, and she shook the bell harder than Ma shakes the thermometer before she sticks it in under my tongue when I’m sick. “Evgeniya Kabakova and the rest of the fifth grade girls should proceed immediately to the fire escape on the side of the building for an emergency class meeting with Sister Fabian!” she shouted. “Lonny Flood should come to the office, and any boy not playing basketball with Father should run laps around the school building. Now! ”
    When the recess bell rang, panting and sweaty from all those laps, I trudged up the stairs beside Zhenya, who looked both teary-eyed and defiant. “What was the emergency meeting about?” I whispered, as if I didn’t already know. Instead of answering my question, Zhenya asked under her breath what those “guddamned pinguins” knew about “keesing boyzes.” But at the drinking fountain, Susan Ekizian filled me in on the gist of the

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