I was too hungry for my mom to finish getting dinner ready, so I snuck over to the cabinet and pulled down a jar of fruit cocktail from the shelf. From my knees, I fished out the maraschino cherries with my index finger and popped them into my mouth. I heard the garage door clink open and then close with a thud!
“Where’s my family!” my father sang as he walked up the stairs.
“Hold on, hold on, Mom. Tony! Can you get Britney?!”
“Something smells good,” Dad continued his melody.
“Brit!” Mom called. “Victor, go get your sister… are you eating? What are you eating?”
I twisted the jar shut and darted out of the kitchen and into the dining room we only used for special occasions. The china and rows of fancy glassware vibrated with every step.
“Hellooo, my friend,” my father sang as he put out his hand for a low five.
“Not now, Dad. I need to get Britney for dinner,” I said as I sprinted by him.
“Where’s ya mother? On the phone, I see, being a yacyadonne.” (Translation: chitchatter, blabbermouth, rambler, one who prates.)
“No running in the house!” my mother yelled with the phone tucked behind her ear.
Britney was in the basement watching Pocahontas and holding Marlene.
“Come on, Brit, it’s time for dinner.”
“No.”
“Come on, Brit, let’s go.”
“No. I won’t. I just won’t do it.”
I hit the pause button on the VCR. She launched from the couch and pointed at me with her eyes closed. “I’ll have him hanged for this!”
“No movie talk!” I yelled back. “Mom says you have to use your own words, no movie talk.”
“It would’ve been better if we never met. None of this would’ve happened.”
“Britney! Get upstairs for dinner… fine.” I pretended to start going toward the stairs but made a quick snatch for Marlene and sprinted away.
“Hey! That’s… that’s mine!”
We were having stuffed peppers for dinner, and the smell of cheese melting into rice stuck in every corner of the house. I liked when the pepper itself was a little burnt; I ate that part. If it wasn’t a little burnt, I wouldn’t eat it.
“Vito, put away the cranberry juice and make yourself a glass of chocolate milk. Don’t you want to grow up big and strong?” asked my father.
Like an inmate with toilet-bowl hooch, I had concocted the best alternative to my soda-less occupancy of the West Road split-level: saturated chocolate milk. The key was to swirl the milk as you drank it. This picked up the settled sediment, making each sip better than the last.
I shoveled the powder into the milk with cartoonish fury.
“Okay, high-lows. Okay, okay, Vito, that’s enough Ovaltine. Come sit down so we can do high-lows.”
“Oh, come on, Tone, not tonight.”
“Yes. We do it every night. Brit, would you like to go first? What was your ‘high’ and what was your ‘low’?”
“…”
“Britney… come on. What was your ‘high’ and what…”
“I’m going to play kickball this weekend,” I said.
“Oh? With who?” asked my father.
“Paxton and Lenny and Karl... and this kid Andrius. He’s from Lith-U-A-NIA.”
“Oh, sounds exotic,” said my father.
“Mom, have you been to Lith-U-AN-IA?”
“No, honey, but I’ve been to Sweden and Norway… and Denmark. They aren’t that far… I don’t think.”
“Is it nice there?” I asked, struggling to get as little pepper with my rice as possible.
“Where? Denmark? It’s nice. A bunch of socialists, but it’s nice.”
“How about Gianluca?” asked my father.
“He’s not my friend.”
“He should be, Vito. He’s a good kid. I spoke with his mother. She’s from Sicily.”
“Is that in Italy?”
“Ehh… kind of.”
“Yes. Yes, Sicily is in Italy,” my mother corrected.
“Have you been to Italy, Mom?”
“Yes, I have. I spent my twenty-fourth birthday sipping espresso in Piazza San Marco.” She looked off into a time far-removed from the banalities of suburban New Jersey.
“Dad, have you been to Italy?”
“Not yet. I got too much work to do. I’ll make it over there someday. A nice trip when I retire, just me and your mother.” He hoisted his jelly glass half-filled with Valpolicella. “How’s that sound, hun?”
“Oh, just lovely, dear.”
The multi-purpose room at Glenwood, where we ate our lunches and had indoor gym during poor weather, was tan-tiled with beige walls. At the front was a low stage, which had been converted to storage for a sundry assortment of crafts and instruments. At lunch, our tables were long and brown, and the benches folded up and clanked onto the tables themselves. I hated to fold up the benches, because one time Pierce Stone was showing off to Avery Burnham and flung the bench up and it smacked me in the elbow. I didn’t cry, I swear, but my whole arm went numb and I just kept saying “Ow ow ow ow” between fake laughs.
I had to sit at his table too. All of Ms. O’Donnell’s class had to sit at the same table. I wanted to sit with Karl, but we didn’t have lunch at the same time because he was a grade younger. He still got nap time, that sock.
I opened my bulky yellow lunchbox that had the ice compartment in the bottom, adding an extra few inches to the base. I hated that lunchbox. I wanted to bring my lunch in a brown paper bag like the other kids, but my father said it was a gift from my Great Aunt Josephine—she had heard that I liked yellow. I don’t know where she had heard such things, because I hated yellow. I liked red, like Karl, like the Romans, because it was the color of blood. My dad liked that and promised me my next lunchbox could be red. I had read that in a book, that the Romans liked red. I could read! I mean, I was learning to read, at least.
I took out my leftover ruby-red pepper stuffed to the brim with rice and specks of meat. The savory odor wafted down the faux-wood table, and like a domino effect, each
