Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb Read Free Book Online Page B

passed by me. “What did you have to go to the office for?”
    I thought quickly about an answer that might really bug her. “Because I’m getting some big award,” I said.
    She went wide-eyed. “What for?”
    “You writing a book?” I said. “Make that chapter a mystery.”
    “I’d rather write a monster story,” she shot back. “About an ugly little dwarf named Dondi Funicello.”
    I told her her legs were so hairy she should comb them.
    “Mademoiselle et monsieur!” Madame Frechette called to us. Red-faced, Rosalie rushed back to her seat. I flashed Madame my innocent Dondi smile.
     
    A t home after school that day, Ma was at one end of the kitchen table, doing the books for the business. I was seated at the opposite end, alternately tonguing the “surprise” out of the middle of a Hostess cupcake—why did they call it a surprise when it was always the exact same cream inside?—and drawing a picture of the PanAmerican jet that, the following Thursday, was gonna fly my mother to California. Simone was making supper—the same thing she always made when it was her turn: English muffin pizzas, salad, and lime Jell-O with Reddi-Wip for dessert.
    “Are you ever going back to your regular hair?” I asked Ma.
    She patted her beehive and smiled. “You like my old hairstyle better?”
    “ Much better,” I assured her.
    “Well, I guess I’ll have to think about it then. Are you going to be okay while I’m gone?” I toldher I didn’t know yet because she hadn’t left yet. She said that, after she came home from being on her TV show, she couldn’t wait to see me on TV, too— Ranger Andy . Then she smiled and said that my father and sisters were going to take very, very good care of me until she got back. “Aren’t you, Simone?” she asked.
    “Yeah, sure,” my sister said. “And don’t listen to him about your hair, Ma. It looks real gear.”
    Ma smiled and, to me, said, “Is ‘gear’ good or bad?”
    “Good,” I said. “It’s Beatles talk. Means ‘groovy.’”
    “Ah,” she said. “Now maybe you’d better start your homework, huh?”
    When I opened my social studies book to the chapter we were on, both Lonny’s whoopee cushion and Monsignor’s booklet revealed themselves. I looked again at the cover picture of Aloysius Gonzaga, then began thumbing through the pages. “A noble lad of Venice, he was so offended by the vulgar talk of the palazzo and the waterways that he would faintwhen he heard it,” it said. It said, too, that Aloysius avoided females, even his own mother, and put chunks of wood in his bed at night to distract him from “temptations of the flesh.” His hobbies—“mortifications,” the book called them—were whipping himself, bathing lepers, and carrying away their slop pails. I wasn’t positive, but I was pretty sure that slop pails meant buckets of shit…. Merde! …The booklet said Aloysius had died of some plague he caught while tending to the sick. This was who I was supposed to be like?
    Well, I sure wasn’t going to whip myself or bathe lepers, whatever they were. I could do the chunks of wood thing, though, I figured. So what I did was, before bed that night, I fished my can of Lincoln Logs out of the bottom of my toy chest and dumped them into bed with me. That lasted for about five minutes’ worth of tossing and turning before my foot got an itch and I tried to scratch it with a Lincoln Log and it gave me a sliver. I sent the Lincoln Logs flying onto the floor. French-kissing Annette’sposter might be the kind of sin that could get me cast into hell, but if heaven was going to be full of goody-goodies like Aloysius Gonzaga and Rosalie Twerski, then I figured I’d just go to H-E-double-toothpick instead. After all, Lonny was probably headed there. And Chino. And a bunch of our regulars down at the lunch counter.
     
    I t rained on Halloween, gently at first—a moist caress that made the glistening, streetlamp-lit fallen leaves slippery, but not