Tag: adolesence

Small Change

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Excerpt

Rick looked disconsolately through the second-storey classroom
window at sheets of freezing rain, the weathered fence of the Pennsylvania
Railroad coal yard and the blackened struts of the steel bridge that
shuddered ever so slightly when a train passed over it, then back at Sister
Assunta who was preaching, again, about The Immortal Soul as she paced
back and forth in front of the blackboard behind her desk, slapping the
pointer against her palm like a riding crop.
“Pagans!” she was saying, “You were all born pagans and you must
be taught to fear (her pointer hissed and snapped loudly against the desk
blotter) the power of Almighty God.”
Silence. Some of them lowered their heads to avoid her stare. But
Rick was puzzled. That kind old man who lived forever in the sky was
merciful and just. He was love itself.
Why should anyone be afraid of him?
He raised his hand. Forty-two pairs of eyes swung toward the front of the
room, afraid for him, but excited by the drama that might be about to
unfold. Sister Assunta merely glared and went on pacing, her voice hoarse
with a nearly demonic fierceness. Rick took his arm carefully out of the air.
“Daily, you neglect your immortal souls. They may already
be lost
to eternal damnation.” She stopped precisely behind her desk chair, her
florid minutely wrinkled skin drawn into a tight smile.
Rick tried to look inside himself. There wasn’t much light. After
a while he became concerned. Where was his immortal soul, anyway, why
couldn’t he find it? Then something
round and flat like a communion
wafer came into focus. It was tilted, like the head of a snare drum, and it
was so clean it glowed. He began to understand. When you did bad stuff,
soot fell on it out of the dark, then, if you confessed and said five Hail Marys,

five our fathers, and an act of contrition, an invisible power swept
it clean again. And immediately, almost automatically, his pubescent mind
reached for what he knew to be forbidden.
The kids called her The Beauty Queen. Her dad owned the bar and
grill at the corner of Monmouth and Fifth. She spent a lot of time with
her followers in the extra lot next to her house her grandparents
had made
into a large garden surrounded
by hedges, and dotted with trees. When
she came out for a walk, all the guys stopped what they were doing and
watched her tight pedal pushers, her graceful careless moves…

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Small Change

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Excerpt

“You know why I left. An excuse is irrelevant.”
He could see she didn’t like his vocabulary, for which he had already been chastised by Sister Assunta. It’s good you know words, she had said, but you use them with too much pride. If saying what you know to be true is prideful, Rick decided he would have to continue to do it, and take his chances with God.
“You know very well that I sent you home because you were a disruptive influence. You simply cannot pay attention and it interferes with the other children.”
“I’m sorry to have to say this, Sister, but you know very well yourself that I don’t need to practise as much as the others. I can sight read and I know all the parts I have to sing by heart. And you didn’t send me anywhere, I left.”
Her face was a faded parody or horror and spiteful righteousness.
“You are a proud and sinful boy!”
“I’m just being truthful, Sister. Isn’t it very important to tell the truth?”
Rick could see that she was not willing to deal with his question. All she said was, “Well, I don’t know why you’re acting so contrary, but I just won’t have it. Now. If you are truly sorry for the way you have spoken, the Lord will forgive you.”
“Forgive me? For what?”
“For your sins.”
“What sins? Is it a sin to know how to read music?”
“Don’t get smart, young man. You know your sins. Disobedience, vanity, willful…”
He cut her off.
“Is it true that choir is a voluntary extra-curricular activity?”
Sister Rose glared suspiciously at him out of her small, pale blue eyes, their pink rimmed lids and short blond lashes flickering with confusion.
“Yes, of course, once you’ve been accepted for the privilege. But what has that got to do with anything?’
‘Just this,” he said. “I quit.

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Swamped

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excerpt

When Saturday finally arrives, it is a beautiful, hot summer day,
so hot Eteocles goes to the sea twice, early in the morning and again
in afternoon. He meets Antonia on his morning visit to the sea, and
she tells him she is planning to go to the party with her girlfriend
Koula. Eteocles sends her a kiss with a movement of his lips, and Antonia
responds in kind, then they dive into the water together and
swim well out from the shore. Eteocles swims close to her and puts
his arm around her waist, but Antonia isn’t a good swimmer. She is
uncomfortable in deep water, and his touch makes her nervous. She
asks him to let her swim in peace, then says, “Tonight … tonight at
the party.” It is a promise.
Hesperus, the lone evening star, bright as ever, gazes down at the
earth later that day, watching the little ants that scurry about searching
for a common goal, a common word, a common future without
perils or famine or devastation. Bright as ever, the evening star gazes
at the land below and wonders how long it will take before its inhabitants
figure things out and settle on the concept of people helping
people rather than bombing and obliterating each other.
Under its gaze Eteocles and George walk together down the road
along the hillside toward the shore where the house of the party girl
is located. When they reach there, they find a crowd of boys and girls
already gathered in the backyard that faces out toward the sea no
more than about thirty meters away where the elevation dips sharply
down to the seashore with its sand dunes and lapping waves.
All the partygoers gather around the boys who have brought the
music from Athens, waiting for Eteocles to put a disc on so they can
dance, and as soon as this is done, all the boys and girls suddenly become
couples. George quickly pairs off with Maria, his favorite girl
in the village, and pulls her tight while the music, the latest hit by a
popular Italian singer, tuneful and modern, excites everyone and mixes
with the heady smell of the sea to create an exhilarating atmosphere.
At that moment Antonia enters the yard with Koula, a girl with black
eyes and black hair tied in a bun on top of her head.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562976

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08WP3LMPX

Small Change

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excerpt

“Do you think Nonno and Nonna will let me borrow the… ukelele sometimes?”
“I think so, yes. But you’ll have to ask them.”
When he talks with his grandparents the next morning, Rick can feel that his question has made them sad. Something that doesn’t need to be said passes between them. Then Nonno Arsenio puts his thick, strong arm around Rick’s shoulders.
“We have give you Enrico’s name, caro. He would be glad you want to make music like him. Many years we save it, to keep him here, with us, but now we see, also, why. We don’t know all that time, but it was for you, too, that we save it. Maybe you play for us when you learn. Tomaso can teach you.”
For the rest of the summer, for a few hours almost every day, he sits with his father in the big front room, learning where to put his fingers, the chords, and the keys. In the fall, he takes it back with him to the city.
Year after year, through the long hot summers, cars come in from the city and park on the grass outside the fieldstone gateposts. Guests with smiling faces bring in their roasts and flowers and bottles of wine. There are hugs and handshakes, kisses, chatter and raillery and laughter.
In the shade of the swamp willow that leans from a corner of the guest bungalow, long trellis tables are set up and covered with white cloth. People in shirt sleeves and suit-pants, in summer dresses and bathing suits with pink, sun-warmed faces renew old intimacies, drink pineapple and cream soda punch or red wine spritzers with ice from frosty, sweating pitchers cruised by flies, smoking, exchanging gossipy tidbits, arguing politics or points of law, flirting outrageously, trading friendly insults, sharing stories and the latest jokes. Theresa, large and gregarious, cooks in the outdoor kitchen, or talks to everyone at once as she pours narrow glasses of homemade Strega, asking after the numerous god-children she mid-wifed into the world, making real estate deals; and Arsenio, round faced, red with exertion and sheer enjoyment, picks lettuce, tomatoes, green peppers, cicoria, dandelion leaves, cucumbers, and onions for the evening salad.
After the children are in bed, those who will stay overnight say good bye to those who are leaving and everyone moves to the arbour of grape leaves near the peach and cherry trees behind the big house.

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Small Change

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excerpt

As he comes up off the beach road and turns into Andrews
Street,
he is surprised by voices. To his right, the spacious
yard of the Simone
place is crowded with people. Strings of lights from the trees to the
outdoor kitchen swing in the light breeze. He feels a twinge of discomfort.
If they should see him they will insist that he come in, and the moment
he has timed his return for will be lost… But no, they are surrounded by
lights, food, music; they are having a good time; they will not notice his
brief shape in the night.
As soon as he enters the house he knows it is empty.
There is a note on the kitchen table.
Dearest Rico,
We are all at the Simone’s across the street. Please come.
Your loving mother,
Andrea
He returns to the darkened living room and sits in the big, soft
chair. Should he go over and ask Marianna to come back with him? They
will want to know why. They will smile and wonder and tease and he will
have to admit… he will have to say… and they will make fun of him, they
will think he is a crazy kid.
He remembers that his aunt always practises
her piano just after
dark and as he consoles himself
with that thought he hears footsteps on
the gravel walk outside.
The door opens and Marianna stands for a moment looking
puzzled. “Rico!” she says, “What are you doing sitting here in the dark.
Didn’t you see the note? Oh, I’m so sorry. You must have thought we all
abandoned you.”
He gets down out of the chair. She comes to where he is standing
and gives him a hug. Without meaning to, he stiffens.
She backs away and
looks down at him, her head tilted to one side.
“What’s wrong, caro? Are you all right?”
He doesn’t know what to say at first, then he goes to the piano
bench and opens it. He takes out the papers he has worked on and holds
them up to her. Suddenly he feels very small, and scared and shy.
She reaches down and smoothes his hair.

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Small Change

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excerpt

THIS IS DEEP MEMORY. Childhood. The South Beach summer house on Staten Island. Late light fades from the sky, the window, the upstairs bedroom where Rick lies under a cool sheet, watching the stars come out, listening to silence.
Slowly, as his mind opens, the heavy stillness after rain dissolves into small sounds. A breeze sweeps through the willow and sighs off over the glassy skritch of crickets, tree frogs like a troop of wet grace notes, the faint hiss of traffic on wet pavement from Hyland Boulevard, and beyond that, far away, but close, too, like the pulse of a double bass, the sea builds to a rush and subsides, again, and again, with a soft crash that makes him think of God and time without end.
Then, below the open window, it begins. Tentative chords from his father’s guitar. Three clear notes. A fourth. A fifth. A melody takes shape, picked up by his uncle Vincenzo’s mandolin. It’s lazy at first, until his mother’s clear soprano joins the strings. A male voice comes under it, then another, and a song rises to full strength, steered off and back by the wind. He smiles to himself. It’s what he was waiting for. He rides that comfort into dreams.
Rick sits at the oval table in the kitchen with his colouring book. He is trying to keep the slippery crayon tips inside the lines. At the other end, his father and his uncle Vincenzo are playing a game called briscola. They study their cards then slap them down hard enough to make them bounce off the coarse grain of the wood. Sometimes they shout at each other, but he knows it’s for fun and their raised voices pass over him without breaking his concentration.
As he works, he can hear his grandfather, Arsenio, talking back to the radio in the front room where his wife, Theresa, argues good-naturedly

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Small Change

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excerpt

sixteen-year-old breasts, long legs, the outline of her female parts where the wet cloth of the suit pulled tight, and I felt a surprising warmth flow down from my racing heart to fill the netted sling in my swim trunks with muscular intensity. I could barely breathe. My head seemed to float above my shoulders, and as I stared like a hypnotized animal, she caught my look and smiled.
I never saw her again until that fall. It was almost supper time; the street was deserted and it had begun to get cold. She came right up to me and I felt my chest tighten till I was breathless and a little giddy. I couldn’t read the look on her face. It was amused, but not quite sure of what she was going to do, as if she were crossing a line, or testing something, and there was a challenge too, and I remembered that smile from the summer and I saw it now as something else, something that made me feel a flicker of anxiety along with the excitement and the wonder of this unexpected proximity.
She didn’t say hello, or what’s your name, or I know you, she just blurted it out, “Wanna wrestle?” and she was a little breathless too. It was something my friends and I did all the time, but I’d never even imagined wrestling with a girl, much less an older girl who was already a woman, and I didn’t know what to think about that, and before I could think anything, she stepped up and put her right arm around my neck, trying to pull me into a headlock. I slipped out, spun around, grabbed her forearm and wrist and attempted to force her arm behind her back, but she was taller and heavier than I was and she used her weight to push me off balance. She grabbed me from behind, but I squirmed around until we were face to face inside her bear hug, and I could feel her warmth, smell the light fragrance of her deodorant and a deeper, muskier scent that astonished and aroused me so quickly that I could feel my stiffness fit between her legs, and her face looked shocked and she tried to twist away and we fell, and my ankle caught on the curb and she landed on top of me, both of us breathing hard, and I heard a dull crack, and a stab of pain like an electric current that shot up my left leg, and I went pale and started to faint, and she looked scared, rolled off of me, took off at a full run down the street.
I lay there catching my breath and wondering what to do next. When I tried to get back on my feet, the pain shot up from my ankle again and I felt a moment of panic. How long would I have to lie here before I could walk? Should I yell for someone to help me?

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Small Change

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excerpt

The grin left his mouth and he began to look wary. I was the one who got straight A’s, the only one in this pack of D’s and C minuses.
“Ten bucks, Paulie. You can read, can’t you? Go look it up. A British blue cheese. And if you lose, you also gotta buy a pound of the shit, and eat it with a pair of chopsticks.”
That did him in. He waved me off.
“So what. You know cheese. But you don‘t know shit about tools. Thought yer ol’ man was a engineer.”
“Yeah, well, what you think you’re talkin about here is a Stilson, a Stilson Wrench. Adjustable, with teeth and a long handle. A plumber’s tool, fool. What you want one of those things for?”
He tried to look like a poker player holding a pocket pair.
“Get me one and I’ll show ya.”
I thought about that for a second. I knew where I could get one, but the sure bet had bit the dust and here was another chance to do business.
“Cost ya a buck an hour.”
“Don’t need an hour.”
“Buck an hour or any fraction there-fuckin-of. Final offer.”
Paulie laughed.
“Some altuh boy, wid a mout like dat …” but he dug into his pocket and came up with a coin that looked like it had been dipped in chocolate and dusted with tobacco bits. “Heah’s fifty cent. The rest when you delivuh.”
Paulie had achieved heroic status when he organized the now famous watermelon raid earlier in the summer. A boxcar had been left for several hours on the spur track behind number five park and Paulie had picked the padlock, releasing hundreds of tubby fruits into the city. Kids from as far away as Railroad Avenue were toting melons on their shoulders, or sitting in small groups, slicing them up with kitchen knives, their faces and hands drenched with sticky juice. It was a hard act to follow, but whatever plan he’d hatched for the Stilson, it was designed to maintain his legendary, outlaw image. And as supplier of the necessary technology, I would earn a small slice of his notoriety pie. But I needed help with this enterprise, and I knew who I could count on. Anthony Morga was the smallest but scrappiest member of our tribe at Holy Rosary School, and I could get him on board for a tithe of the buck I’d make from the rental. He was a wary kid, always kind of skittish about promissory contracts, and as we made our way down the unpaved alley that ran like a neglected country

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Small Change

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Excerpt

I started walking, away from the fence. After about fifty yards, I came to an apron of freshly cut grass that bordered a wide road and a neighbourhood of the largest, most beautiful houses I had ever seen. Brick and fieldstone, white clapboard and freshly oiled cedar, some of them three and four storeys high, with ample porches and verandas and sprawling lawns. I limped a bit, but managed to make some progress along the wide, grassy median in the centre of the street I immediately thought of as a thoroughfare. What is this place, I wondered, and who lives here?
They were oddly dressed. The boy wore a striped tee shirt, a white cap which I later learned was a Polo hat, and knickers that were tucked into black stockings just below the knees. Two of the girls wore summer dresses in soft pastels, yellow and sky blue, with puffed shoulders, matching socks, and matching bows in their hair. They had white shoes with ankle straps, not sandals, exactly, but something like, and the third, taller girl wore white court shoes, white shorts with a white leather belt, and a vee necked tee shirt. Her honey blond pony tail hung half way to her waist and was tied with a white band.
I was astonished, but drawn toward them as if by a huge magnet. They seemed like sky children, but were so recognizably earth-bound I wanted to talk with them, to know what their lives were like. Especially her, with the startling eyes.
I stood very still until they became aware that I was watching them. They stared back, then they looked at each other. They seemed puzzled. I crossed back to the sidewalk and started up the lawn that sloped down from their slate grey house. They seemed hypnotized, or stilled by bewilderment, alarmed, but unable to break the spell of my dirty, sweat streaked face, torn jeans and bloody shirt.
Except for her. She looked straight at me, so directly and with such an open stare it stopped me in my tracks. I felt something I’d never felt before. It seeped into my chest and throat from a place I never knew was in me. It was as if I had seen her before, or known her all my life. Her face – the smooth skin, deeply tanned like her arms and legs, the full mouth, high cheekbones, and green, green eyes – burned itself into my memory and what I read there was not fear, but curiosity, because I was strange to her, and concern, because it was clear that I was hurt. There was something else too, and it made my heart accelerate.

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Small Change

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Excerpt

“It’s kinda like football. All you gotta do is get through dat gimlet.”
I thought, it’s gauntlet, you ignorant shit. Then I started running.
They tried to stop me, with their arms, their legs, with kicks and punches,
but they didn’t tackle me or stand in my way. When I broke through and
stood panting on the grass, I had a fat lip and I could feel some blood trickle
down from my eyebrow.
Buster nodded. “Okay. Now you gotta have a name.”
“I already have a name.”
“A gang name, pal. A gang name.”
Buster thought about this for a minute, biting his lips like a
schoolgirl, then he laughed.
“I got it! Yer name is lucky cauze, like I said, dis is yer lucky day.
You gotta knife?”
“No.”
“Dat’s all right, yuh kin use mine. Yuh hafta cut yer gang name in
yer arm like dis,” he said, holding up his freckled forearm. Thin, crooked
letters scarred the sunburned skin with what looked like BUSTER. I
couldn’t believe how stupid it looked.
“But first yuh gotta do one thing.”
The gang spread out and formed a large circle with Buster and I at
its centre.
“Yuh gotta fight,” he said. “Yuh gotta fight ME.”
He went into a crouch and poked a fist in my direction. I thought, if
I had a gun, I’d shoot him. Suddenly the whole morning struck me as a badly
drawn episode in a comic book. I shook my head, “No way.”
Buster came out of his boxing stance. He looked puzzled. He
came up and patted me on the cheek. Then he drove a sharp left into my
stomach. There was barely time to tense my abs and the shock of it drove
me back a step. I crossed my arms over the pain and took a deep breath.
“Come on dere, Lucky, you gotta. It’s the ‘nitiation.” He sounded
sweetly reasonable, as if all the world agreed, this is the way things are
done. “An hey, if ya win, you kin be leader.”
“I don’t want to be leader, Buster. I don’t even want to join your
gang.”
“Too late, pal. An I’m gonna keep hittin ya till ya tryan hit me
back.” He laughed a mean little laugh and backed down into a crouch. The
ring of gang members moved in a little closer, their bodies tense,

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