The Pigman & Me, Page 2

  Anyway, somehow it was worked out that my mother, sister, and I would live upstairs in the Travis house, and Connie and the twins would live downstairs. They would split the mortgage payments, which were around $150 a month, a lot of money then.

  Now that first day, after the attack of the angry cockroaches, I just wanted to get a breath of fresh air, so I decided to go out the front gate and see if there were any signs of life on Glen Street. To my surprise there was a girl my age jumping rope in front of our house. She was a pretty girl, with rosy-red cheeks, and she had nice shiny brown hair that flopped when she jumped.

  “Hi,” she said, still jumping rope. “I’m Jennifer Wolupopski. I live three doors up.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You just move in?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Paul Zindel,” I said.

  “Are you Polish?” she wanted to know, continuing to bob up and down.

  “Actually, no.”

  “I am.”

  Jennifer stopped jumping and strolled over to me. “Have you seen the water-head baby yet?” she asked.

  “The what?”

  “The water-head baby.”

  “No.”

  She pointed to a maroon house next door. A young black woman sat in front on a bench. She gently rocked a baby carriage that had a white veil draped over its hood.

  “You live next to the only colored families in town, you know,” Jennifer said.

  “No, I didn’t know,” I admitted.

  “Everyone else is Polish. You want to see the water-head baby?”

  “O.K.”

  She marched me toward the baby carriage.

  “Hi, Mrs. Lillah,” Jennifer called out to the black woman. “This is Paul, one of your new neighbors.”

  Mrs. Lillah smiled, cooling herself with a Japanese fan. She was a fascinatingly delicate woman who kept lovingly rocking the veiled carriage. I began chatting with her, but I was afraid to look down into the carriage. I didn’t want it to look like I had strolled over only to see her water-head baby. Besides, I had never even heard of a water-head baby, much less seen one. I kept my eyes glued to Mrs. Lillah, telling her about my mother and sister. I also explained that an Italian woman with identical twins would soon be moving in, too. Meanwhile, Jennifer stood behind Mrs. Lillah and kept signalling me to look into the carriage. Finally, Mrs. Lillah turned to swat a fly and I did take a quick look down. There, beyond the veil, was the baby. Its tiny body looked like that of a normal six-month-old, but attached to the body was a head the size of a watermelon with the texture of glistening cauliflower. I gasped at the sight of the huge head, with its tiny wet eyes and practically no nose or chin. The baby’s skull was twice the size of its entire body, and it gasped like a fish out of water. I felt my knees grow weak.

  “Hope you’re gonna like livin’ ’round here,” Mrs. Lillah said, lifting the veil and reaching into the carriage to gently stroke her baby’s tummy.

  “I’m sure I will.”

  “See you later, Mrs. Lillah,” Jennifer said, taking my arm and leading me quickly away.

  When we were out of sight behind the hedge, I started to gag. Jennifer began to laugh nervously. I know this’ll sound horrible, but after a while my gagging turned to laughing, too. And I knew Jennifer and I weren’t laughing to be cruel. It was simply the only way we could handle coming face to face with one of God’s mysteries. I mean, we laughed and laughed out of fright until I knew I had found a new friend and kindred spirit in Jennifer Wolupopski. In fact, that afternoon she took me all along Glen Street and Victory Boulevard and pointed out the important sights. She told me the old abandoned graveyard was called “Cemetery Hill” and was great for sled riding in the winter as long as you didn’t crash into one of the tombstones.

  Suddenly, there was a VAAAAARRRRROOOOOOOM! A plane took off right over our heads, nearly splitting our eardrums.

  “That’s a BT-6 Basic Trainer,” Jennifer said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, you’ll know every plane from the airport soon enough. You know, I bet we’ll be in a lot of the same classes when school starts.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  Suddenly the excitement in Jennifer’s eyes turned to concern.

  “The other boys are really going to not like you in this town, you know,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re not Polish. And because you have blond hair. And because you’re new. Some of the boys’ll try to work you over.”

  “What’ll they do?”

  “Rotten things. They always think of rotten things. They’ll also not like you because you live next to the town’s only colored families. The kids in the town are really demented, you know. The worst is Moose Kaminski, who lives over there.” She pointed to a large gray house far on the other side of Cemetery Hill. “Moose’s whole family are lunatics. His brothers. His mother. His father. Sometimes they stick strange parts of their bodies out the upstairs windows when you walk by. I think they’re genetically defective. Of course, some of the families who live here have never even been off Staten Island. Never even taken the ferryboat to Manhattan. All most of them do is sit around drinking beer, eating sausages, and dancing the polka.”

  “What kind of dance is that?”

  “It’s like a waltz, but at high speed. And a lot of the Polish guys get drunk at St. Anthony’s Parish Hall dances on Saturday nights.”

  “There’s got to be some nice Polish people in town.”

  “Oh, most of them are. But those you don’t have to worry about. I’m just warning you about the teenage fiends.”

  “That’s really nice of you.”

  ‘That’s O.K.,” Jennifer said. “I’d really like to be your friend,” she added.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I need a friend. I’ll be your friend, too.”

  When I finally went back home, Mother had already unpacked everything and was playing her phonograph. She was in our kitchen dancing and singing along to an Andrews Sisters record when I came up the stairs.

  “Hello, my baby!” she sang. “Hello, my honey! Hello, my ragtime gal. Send me a kiss by wire! Baby, my heart’s on fire.”

  She pranced. Did some boogie-woogie steps. I remember hoping she would never be depressed or threaten to kill herself ever again, but that stuff I’ll tell you about later. Of course, I also hoped seeing a water-head baby would be the only ghastly thing that would happen to me in the town of Travis.

  But no way. No way!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Day I

  Learned the

  Beauty of Worms

  Early the next morning, my mother started laying down a lot of rules about the house for me and my sister. She wanted us pretty well regimented before Connie and the twins arrived. The major rule was that we were to respect Connie’s privacy and shouldn’t hang out in the downstairs apartment, except for one room, the “side room,” which my mother had claimed as “our territory” because it had a Pianola in it. A Pianola is a piano that you can play the regular way or put a special roll in it and pump it with your feet so it plays songs like “The Hungarian Rhapsody” without you using your fingers.

  “Don’t go into Connie’s rooms,” Mother said. “Then her two wild little brats won’t feel free to come upstairs and rampage through our rooms.”

  That was the one thing that used to drive me nuts about Mom. She always made up hundreds of rules. My sister and I sometimes felt like helpless puppets on strings. Also, that morning she had us move around a few beds and other pieces of junky furniture she had bought with the house. My sister and I each had a lumpy bed in our upstairs front rooms. Mom had a double bed in the rear, and we had a peeling, brown kitchenette set in our upstairs kitchen. I’d better draw you a map of the layout, because the house and yard got to play a very big role in all our lives.

  At 11 a.m. a Sabatini Brothers moving van pulled up and stopped in front of our house. Th
is was not a modern moving van. It was old, came with two moving men who looked like they had just escaped from The Lost World, and boasted a sign that said “Cheap Rates.” It was an open-top truck piled high with Connie Vivona’s furniture, in addition to a considerable amount of human cargo.

  Connie, in a purple dress, and her twins, Joey and Nicky, climbed out of the back along with one of the hairy moving men. The other moving man got out from behind the wheel of the truck, loped around, and opened the passenger side. At first, all I could see was a wall of shopping bags, but then a little old lady, who turned out to be Nonna Mamie, got out. The last one to get out was Nonno Frankie. He was a little on the short side and had a bit of a pot belly and eyes that danced, like a Sicilian Santa Claus. I figured he was at least fifty years old but better preserved than Nonna Mamie.

  Connie introduced her mother and father to us. The twins immediately began running around like matching mice, jumping over the fence and swinging on the porch poles. The Sabatini Brothers started unloading the truck and checking the best way to get all the furniture and packing boxes into the house. Connie had beds and wooden bureaus and big nightstands and at least thirty cartons of clothes and kitchen items. None of the furniture looked custom-made or anything like that. It was more like the kind you saw in advertisements offering three full rooms of furniture for $99. Of course, it was elegant compared to anything we had ever had, but everything was gold or scarlet or bright pink with weird tassels and gizmos swinging from it.

  It didn’t take long before everyone had said “Hello.” When Nonna Mamie put her arms around me to give me a hug, I realized she was a dwarf. I mean, she wasn’t quite a full-fledged dwarf, but she was a very tiny lady whose feet looked like they could’ve fit into a pair of Tom Thumb’s boots, which I had seen on display at Barnum’s Circus Hall of Curiosities. Right off the bat, she hit the downstairs kitchen and started sprinkling cleanser into the sink, mopping the floor, and shooting orders to the Sabatini Brothers about where to put all the pots and pans and boxes. Almost everything she said was in Italian, but you could tell she was a friendly, hard-working old lady.

  Soon, my mother put on a how-dare-you-trespass look on her face and shot it straight at me and my sister. Betty groaned, gave me a wink, and headed upstairs. I ran out into the backyard. To my surprise, Nonno Frankie followed me out.

  I’ll never forget the expression on his face when he saw the big backyard. He looked like he had died and gone to heaven.

  “What a place to grow tomatoes!” he cried out.

  “Yes, sir,” I agreed, though I had never planted a living thing in my life.

  He knelt down and grabbed a handful of dirt. “I’ll plant tomatoes! And eggplants! And corn and rhubarb and carrots!”

  He stood up, sniffed at the earth in his hands, then breathed in deeply like he was sampling a French perfume. He began checking out every square inch of the backyard. His billowing plaid shirt flickered against his belly, and he wore brown baggy pants like a clown’s. Excited, he talked a mile a minute.

  “You like meatballs?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Nonna Mamie makes meatballs so good and spicy, they’ll blow your ears off. You like vegetables?”

  “Not really, sir.”

  “Ho! Ho! Ho!” he laughed, giving me a wink. “Don’t clean your plate!—don’t get any dessert! You like carrots?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Then all you have to remember are the three B’s.”

  “What three B’s?”

  “Be careful, Be good, and Be home early!” He laughed so heartily I thought he was going to tumble over. He stooped to snatch another handful of dirt near the remains of a grape arbor, which divided the backyard exactly in half. I knew there’d be a problem.

  “THAT’S MY HALF OF THE YARD! WOULD YOU MIND KEEPING ON CONNIE’S HALF?” my mother screamed from her upstairs back window.

  Nonno Frankie whirled to see Mom hanging half out the window, motioning that he was to keep on the territory to the right side of the arbor.

  “Okay Dokay!” Nonno Frankie laughed, waving that he understood. He shuffled like a good little old man back to Connie’s side, still happy as a lark, and started pulling up weeds.

  “Do you know why you should never tell a secret to a pig?” he asked me out of the blue.

  “No, I don’t, sir,” I admitted.

  “Because they’re squealers!” He laughed loudly.

  “That’s very funny,” I said.

  “And did you see that graveyard across the street?” he asked, his eyes twinkling.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead there. Do you get it? I wouldn’t be caught dead there!”

  “Yes, sir.” I laughed. “I get it.”

  He strolled onward, with me right behind him. “Look at this!” he gasped, pulling a cluster of long, pink, wiggling bodies from a clump of moist earth. “Worms! Hardworking worms! Worms are in only the best dirt! The very best! Worms in a yard are a dream come true. A miracle! What tomatoes they will give us! What tomatoes!”

  “PAUL!” My mother screamed from the upstairs window again. “STOP PESTERING NONNO FRANKIE AND GET BACK ON YOUR OWN SIDE OF THE YARD! GET OVER THERE IMMEDIATELY, PAUL!”

  I cringed.

  “He’s not bothering me,” Nonno Frankie called back to her. “He’s a good boy. A good boy!”

  “PAUL, JUST DO AS I SAID! DO IT NOW!” my mother shrieked, slamming the window closed.

  I started to walk away. Nonno Frankie sighed and looked at me so kindly, I knew he understood I had a slightly wacko person for a mom.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  An Unexpected

  Dinner

  As I’ve already hinted, my mother wasn’t completely nuts. She had positive traits, like being pretty and energetic. She could let out a good loud laugh from time to time, had a lot of dreams and schemes, and had beautiful brown darting eyes and bouncy hair like a flapper’s. On the other hand, because of my father’s divorcing her and other sundry reasons, she was a man-hater, didn’t know how to love, couldn’t cook, didn’t care for housework, and didn’t join social groups and neighborhood coffee sessions because she thought people wanted to spy on her.

  The only man my mother had really loved had been her father. He was an Irish man who married a lovely Irish woman, who gave birth to my mom. Mom’s mother died when she was fifteen, so Mom had to be raised by her father, a gentle, skinny man who hawked fruits and vegetables from a horse-drawn cart. Mother and her dad used to ride together through the streets of Stapleton singing songs about vegetables at the top of their lungs. “APPLES! PEARS! FRESH CUCUMBERS!” Sometimes they’d get down and dance around the wagon, ringing bells in the street. Anything to attract attention to sell their wares.

  Mother told me only two stories about her growing up. The first one was about the day she took the horse and wagon without telling her father and gave all her teenage friends a big, long joyride. The second story was more hair-raising. It concerned a doll salesman who rented a room in her dad’s dilapidated old brown house on Grove Street. The salesman rented the room only to store hundreds of magnificent dolls in it. Each was wrapped separately in a casket-shaped box with a cellophane window, and the salesman would take only a few dozen or so with him when he’d go on selling trips to towns between Boston and Atlantic City. Mother desperately wanted one of the expensive dolls, but all she was allowed to do was go outside the house and stand on a milk crate to peer through the window at the tiny frozen faces staring back at her. Each of the dolls was identical, about two feet tall, with gorgeous platinum-blond hair, glowing white porcelain skin, delicate expressive fingers with painted red nails, and deep-blue imitation star sapphires for eyes.

  A day finally came when my mother’s dream to own one of the dolls came true. What happened was the doll salesman didn’t come back for over a year, and was so far behind in his rent that Mom’s father broke the padlock on the door and gave her one of the
dolls. Mother said she grabbed the box, ran to her room, and trembled with excitement as she lifted out the doll. She felt as though she had paradise within her grasp. But as she went to hug the doll, its wig fell off, leaving the doll completely bald except for a massive colony of wiggling and very surprised maggots that were eating the glue on the doll’s head. Mom’s dad had to throw out all the dolls. He was really going to give the salesman a piece of his mind, but the man never returned.

  Anyway, when Mother was sixteen, she started dating my father, the baker’s son. There’s a picture of them I cherish because my mother and father have their arms around each other, and they look like a very loving couple out of an extremely emotional movie based on a novel like The Grapes of Wrath. Mother has on a blouse and nice hat, and my father looks strong and ready to protect her like the high school football hero he was. According to Mother, however, she and my father got married only because her dad got TB and on his deathbed he squeezed her hand and said, “Please get married before I die.” Since he only had a few weeks left to live, that didn’t leave much time, so my mom and pop became husband and wife when they were in their late teens. Within a year, Mom gave birth to Betty, and two years later I was born, just in time, because my mother and father were already heading for a divorce. My father had changed professions, had graduated from Police Academy to become a New York City policeman. He had to commute to work in Manhattan. He also graduated to having girlfriends on the sly. My mother found out about his girlfriends and divorced him, and that was the end of her having a husband and me having a father.

  Now I can get on to the shocking part of this flashback, which has to do with screaming and opening windows. That part happened when I was four years old and my sister was six, and we had a fight over a bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Betty and I were sitting at the kitchen table in our tiny apartment while my mother was getting dressed to go to work. She earned about twenty-five cents an hour at a women’s stockings and garters factory. My sister was teasing me, pretending she was going to sneak a tablespoon of boring chicken soup from her bowl into my bowl.