As I sat at my cluster (Kimberly Fleming and Arjun Gupta completed our pack) I caught myself smiling—something I should do more often, according to friends’ moms and complete strangers—at the thought of a reborn Vic at Glenwood school.
But my jubilance was as short-lived as our recess rugby ruse last year. By October, Mrs. Mason was having complications with her pregnancy, and we were told she would be absent “indefinitely”; they used “indefinitely” with eight-year-olds. I suppose I had been so enraptured by her voice and rotini hair to even realize that she was pregnant on the first day of school. So at eight years old I learned that “indefinitely” meant forever, because I never saw Mrs. Mason again.
The class formerly known as Mrs. Mason’s was subsequently run by a series of substitute teachers, each one glancing at the triumvirate of principals seated in the back of the class like they were auditioning for a Broadway show. The winner was a stout woman with a giant square head who made us do mental math.
She would stand at the front of the class and just start spouting numbers at a staggering pace like a robot: “Three plus four minus five plus six plus nine minus eight.”
“Nine!” shouted Kevin Liu and Matt Dershowitz simultaneously—it had already turned into a two-horse race.
“Six!”
“Eleven! Mrs. Sherman, I was first. Eleven!”
I don’t know how those guys did it. It wasn’t fair that she had all those numbers arranged in that monster head of hers, but I never even got close to guessing right. Sometimes I would watch Arjun’s lips in front of me and try to read what number he was going to say. It was times like these that I needed Karl.
I often stared out the window that offered a view of the kickball diamond and woods in second grade. Not because I was afraid of the Green Knight galloping out of Hell with an army of serpents, but because I was bored.
Mrs. Sherman ended up separating Lenny from our cluster after he fired a spitball that zoomed across the room and struck Andrius square in the chin. It was a magnificent shot, but Mrs. Sherman thought Lenny had targeted Andrius for being a foreigner and made him sit by himself for the rest of the year. She didn’t want to hear that they walked to school together every day, barring inclement weather, of course, when Andrius’s mom—maiden of my imagination—would drive them instead.
She even made me sit in the hall once—a real cheap form of public embarrassment where any sock with a damn hall pass could mock you as they passed by your desk—for using, well, the word “sock.”
“It doesn’t even mean anything!” I’d shouted, but the box-headed woman would have none of my pleas.
And as if Mrs. Mason being ripped from my heart didn’t take enough of a toll on my fragile psyche, the genius overlords of Glenwood Elementary made the unforgivable decision to integrate the tables at lunch. Now the class formerly known as Mrs. Mason’s was “free” to mix with the pupils comprising Mrs. Kowalski’s and Mrs. Greenberg’s second-grade classes—and therefore I was once again thrust into the gauntlet with the malignants.
“Hey Ferraro, is that ham made of rubber?” Pierce Stone inquired as he leaned into the middle of the table just so he could get a look at my face, red as a jersey tomato.
He was referring to the slices of ham that were one of the three integral ingredients comprising the trifecta famously known as the Lunchable—including cheddar cheese and toasted crackers. I had begged my mother to pack the boxed lunch in an effort to assimilate into the Glenwood lunch scene, but my plan had backfired, and now Pierce Stone wanted to see if the round slice of ham would stick to the ceiling.
“Hey, if it falls, we’ll just feed it to Louis.”
Uproar.
Perhaps I could’ve just changed tables and avoided the Short Hills clobberings altogether; if only it were that simple. The multi-purpose room, with its aforementioned faux-wood tables, resembled the long trestles where burly men of the sword gathered to feast on pink pork and mead. The paladin Uther the Lightbringer wouldn’t get up and move to another trestle before he’d finished his dripping ham leg. Vercingetorix, defender of Gaul, enemy of Rome, wouldn’t rise from his bench and move to the chair “over there” to finish slogging his ale. If I ever aspired to become a true hero like these men I had to stay put, no matter the consequences.
I skipped the after-school viewing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Karl that day—we were down to three showings a week—and met my mother with a full head of steam while she was unloading crumpling bags of groceries in the garage.
“Are you trying to embarrass me?”
“What? Victor, what are you saying? Don’t just stand there; help your mother with these bags, will ya?”
“No. I won’t lift a damn finger until…”
“Hey! You listen to me, kiddo. I don’t care how your friends talk to their parents, but I work my butt off every day… and…” I knew she was angry because she sucked in her bottom lip and exaggerated her F’s. She would always use this line when I complained that something wasn’t fair: “Fair? Fair is a four-letter F-word.” I didn’t really know what she meant, but I still understood. “What is it this time? Did that son of a…” She stopped herself, even though my father wasn’t home, as if conditioned to watch her Philly mouth around her children. “Did that Pierce Stone kid bother you again? I swear I’ll… Ya know what, Victor, honey, give me those and go take a hot shower. Then we’ll talk.”
I listened to my mother and took the shower. When my father got home I explained to him my rubber ham debacle.
“Why
