The Complete Series Read online

  With a sigh of irritation, Miss Swift finally turned to Lily and said, “Miss Capotosti, when an adult is speaking it is quite rude to thrust one’s hand into the air, and wave it about like a confederate flag of surrender. What is it that is so urgent that you felt it was necessary to interrupt?”

  But by then, Lily was worried about the tissue, completely forgot all about the proper phrasing, and in a moment of panic, she blurted out, “I have to go pee-pee.”

  The other children burst into laughter, and realizing her faux pas, Lily slowly lowered her hand, feeling the cool rush of blood back into her arm and the warm flush of it into her face.

  “Miss Capotosti, you have disrupted this class, which is something I will not tolerate. You may go into the cloakroom, and stand quietly until I give further notice. The rest of you, please take your seats.”

  It was late summer – the time of year when it was cool enough to wear pajamas to bed, but not so cool as to need a coat during the day. Except for Lily and her shame, the cloakroom was empty. The space itself was nothing more than a wall with hooks on it, separated from the rest of the room by a stationary room screen that was open by about two feet at the top and at the bottom. The side that faced the inside of the cloakroom was of rough unfinished particleboard. The side of the screen that faced the classroom was a chalkboard. From where she stood in the cloakroom, Lily could see the feet of the desks and chairs in the classroom, as well as those of the children who sat at them. She could see Miss Swift’s feet moving about the room, and when she wrote on the chalkboard, the whole wall would shake – especially when she dotted her “i”s or crossed her “t”s.

  After counting the hooks on the wall (Lily counted twelve of them, two times), there wasn’t much else to do. All she wanted was that gold star. Then she could go home and show everyone how lovely she was, what a fine young lady or gentleman she was becoming. And then her mother and Auntie Rosa and her father and Uncle Alfred would hug her and kiss her and maybe Auntie Rosa would even let her play with the bric-a-brac on the shelf in the back room where Lily was never allowed to go alone. After all, children with gold stars don’t break fine things. They know how to be quiet and gentle like Iris. In fact, she could be quiet and gentle, starting right now. And she could prove it. She would stand still, and not make a fuss, and Miss Swift would see that she is a fine young lady who knows her place and doesn’t cry or whine too much.

  So Lily stood in the cloakroom, watching feet. Miss Swift’s were easy to spot because they were the largest. And those over there in the back must be Patrick Cullen’s – he never ties his shoes. Probably doesn’t even know how. Mary Beth’s were easy, too, since Lily saw them every day. And those shiny black shoes must be Tricia Cortellini’s because she always has fancy white socks with the lace and the little pink bows. Now there’s a lady.

  Having flubbed her lavatory lines, and with no proper tissues at home, Lily’s best bet was to demonstrate her ability to tie her shoes – it was her only hope now. Until her chance came to get her shoe-tying star, Lily was intent on practicing being still and quiet in the cloakroom. She followed along with the class by participating in the lessons in her head. They recited the days of the week, counted past twenty and practiced printing the letters of their names. Since Lily had no paper or pencil, she scratched her letters into the particleboard with her fingernail. Lily could already print all the letters of her first name. She was glad it was so simple – just mostly a bunch of straight lines. She guessed that if she was sitting out there with the other children, she might very well be the only one who could do it – surely Alexandria Hawthorne wouldn’t have such an easy time of it, what with all of those loops and everything. After scratching L-i-l-y into the board a few times, it occurred to her that you could scratch at the wall and draw on it - almost like an Etch-a-Sketch - except you couldn’t erase it. What would happen when Miss Swift found those letters there? She surely would not give Lily a gold star for learning to print her name, even though she had mastered the task. And there would be no way to claim self-defense, or to deny having done it. She would surely be apprehended.

  Her fear of future shame was overcome by a more pressing and immediate problem – after standing in the corner all during letters and writing, Lily really did need to go to the bathroom. But there was no way to ask proper permission without leaving the cloakroom before further notice was given, or without speaking out of turn.

  Just then, Miss Swift clapped her hands twice with such force, that it startled Lily, and a little bit of pee came out before she could clutch herself and stop the flow.

  “OK class, one by one, I want each of you to first visit the lavatory, and then come back to your desks and tidy up before going home.”

  Lily watched as each set of shoes disappeared out into the hallway. Tricia Cortellini’s shoes tapped against the tile, like one of those dancers on The Lawrence Welk Show, and the ends of Patrick Cullen’s shoe laces whipped from side to side, hitting the floor with a click-click. Once the last of the children returned from the lavatory, Lily was certain that Miss Swift would come and give her further notice, but she didn’t. Lily stood still and quiet as the children collected their pencils, discarded their scraps, and finally joined in the closing prayer.

  IntheNameoftheFatherandoftheSonandoftheHolyGhostamen

  God in heaven hear my prayer,

  Keep me in thy loving care.

  Be my guide in all I do,

  Bless all those who love me too.

  IntheNameoftheFatherandoftheSonandoftheHolyGhostamen

  Shoe by shoe, the other children filed out of the classroom. Surely interrupting the class was not so bad as to not be allowed to go home, was it? Lily imagined her father ringing the bell for dinner. All of her brothers and sisters would come running home from every direction, the side door swinging open and banging closed again and again, her father shouting, “Jeepers Cripes! Don’t let the door slam!” The boys would just laugh and the girls would try to stay out of the way, and they would all take their places at the dinner table. Then Lily’s father would count, just as he does every night.

  “One, two, three,” and so on. Then he would say, “Wait a minute – is someone missing?” he would ask, and then he would look around the table and point and call out each name – and finally Iris would shout out, “It’s Lily! Lily is missing!”

  Then they would look all over the house for her – up in the girl’s bedroom, in the boy’s bedroom, maybe even up in the attic where Alexander and John sleep. They would look in the linen closet, thinking she was in there playing pretend, but they wouldn’t be able to find her. Finally, her mother would start to cry, and she would call out, “I don’t care if Lily did break my back – I want my baby to come home!” and Iris would go get her some toilet paper to blow her nose, and she would say, “Now I wish I would have bought some tissues so Lily could get her gold star.”

  Just the image of seeing her mother so sad, and of her brothers and sisters frantically running about the house looking for her made Lily’s eyes well up with tears, and her body lurched with the force of a squelched cry, at which time she lost control of her bladder, and stood crying as the warm fluid ran down her legs, soaking her tights, and collecting as small puddles in her shoes.

  “Who’s there?” called out Miss Swift.

  Lily watched as the large shoes moved closer. When Miss Swift appeared in the cloakroom, she gasped and covered her mouth with her hand; Lily was amazed to see a grownup with such a look on her face.

  “Lily,” she said, walking over to Lily. There was softness and sweetness in her voice that Lily had never before heard. “I am so sorry… you were so quiet, I forgot you were in here. Why didn’t you say something?”

  The tenderness in her voice broke Lily’s resolve and she burst into tears.

  “I was standing quietly until further notice,” said Lily, forcing each word out in between sharp breaths. “Can I please go home now?”

  “Are you alright? Are
you allowed to walk home alone?” said Miss Swift. She seemed unaware of Lily’s accident, and Lily hoped to get out of there before she noticed.

  “I’m fine. I just want to go home, OK?” Lily pleaded.

  “Of course, dear, of course.”

  Lily ran from the cloakroom, bolted down the hallway, the urine squishing in her shoes with every step. Out the door she ran, down Chili Avenue, past the bakery where they sell half-moon cookies, past Case’s Diner, past the big house on the corner with all the flat stones across the front of it. When she turned the corner, she ran smack-dab into Bobby Rose, who caught her by the shoulders, and said, “Slow down, little cracker! Watch where you’re going!”

  But Lily didn’t stop. She didn’t slow down, she didn’t pay any attention to the cracks in the sidewalk or to the fact that she just touched a colored boy. She spotted the front porch of her house peeking out from behind the profiles of the ones before it, and as she cut across the front lawn and threw the side door open, all she cared about was that she was home, a place where she could be loud and stick up for herself – a place where at least she understood the rules, and could tolerate the punishments.

  3. Iris

  Iris’s eyes popped open. It was Saturday! Not that she really minded school. In fact, she rather liked the structure and discipline of the classroom, and could have done with a bit more of both in the chaotic Capotosti household, where she relied upon her own internal set of rules to bring a measure of order to her life. Iris always rose with a smile on her face, got dressed and ate her cereal without anyone prompting her, relishing the clean, unblemished feeling of a new day before her as she set off for school. She enjoyed the walk, listening to the chitchat of her other siblings as she tagged along, stopping occasionally to check out the best driveways for freshly spit-out wads of gum. However, just minutes after arriving at school, her enthusiasm was flattened by the monotonous sound of Sister Josephine’s voice hammering the class with Morning Prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Instead of filling her with inspiration to pursue the ideals of the church and country into which she had been born, the morning ritual made Iris feel trapped in a system from which she sensed there would be no escape for many years to come. By the time the words, “with liberty and justice for all,” left her lips, and her right hand dropped from its place over her heart, Iris felt the same stabbing awareness that each day spent in that classroom was one day less she could devote to something else. She saw her days as blocks of time, like bricks. They might pave the way to someplace magical, like the yellow brick road of The Wizard of Oz, or block her vision of what lay beyond, if they were stacked really high like the wall that penned in the school playground. When Sister Josephine taught them about free will in Catechism, Iris was struck by the sinking sensation that no matter how she decided to lay her bricks, she might find a wall obstructing her road, and there would be nothing she could do about it. The notion that God was all-powerful and all-knowing, while pretending to let her decide, puzzled her, and when she tried to voice her doubts to Sister Josephine, she was told that the good thing about faith was that you did not need to understand, you just needed to memorize the answers in the book, and pray for God’s grace.

  As for the rest of her lessons, Iris was often left unsatisfied. She imagined how lovely it would be if all the knowledge school had to offer could be spread out before her, like an all-you-can-eat-buffet, the kind her ravenous Uncle Alfred favored when he treated Auntie Rosa, and sometimes Iris, to Sunday dinner at Case’s Diner. (Iris had just recently discovered that Uncle Alfred and Auntie Rosa were not even married, but were her father’s brother and sister, and she wondered how a brother could ever be so nice to take a sister to dinner, let alone never threaten to pound her.) Iris would pile her plate high with enticing things to learn, and take it to a quiet corner where she could savor the delicacies without interference, then go back for more, sampling the taste of new notions, scooping up the subjects she liked best, like spelling and reading, until her appetite was sated. Instead, she was forced to sit at school’s formal banquet table, where miserly portions of information were doled out according to the needs of those with the least appetite by the mean nuns who were so preoccupied with the rituals of serving and conserving that they paid no heed to how the victuals would be received by unseasoned palates, or that Iris was literally starving in the meantime.

  This Saturday morning Iris had risen early and helped herself to a breakfast of puffed rice, drowning the cereal in milk (even though you couldn’t really drown puffed rice, no matter how much milk you poured over it, because it always floated). The milk came from one of the glass quart bottles she found in the milk box, just delivered by Lipman’s Dairy. Oceans of milk were consumed at the Capotosti household, and even though Roy the milkman brought it every day except on Sundays, it still ran out sometimes. When it did, one of the Big Kids was supposed to go fetch more, but that was another one of the jobs like folding diapers that someone figured Iris would be good at, so she was often the one sent off to the dairy if someone had to go, an aluminum carrier rattling with six empty bottles hanging from her arm. Instead of trying to get out of the job by saying she was too little or too weak, Iris fretted over doing it well. Even though milk was milk, before setting off, Iris always asked her big brother Louis, who always knew the exact names of things, to test her to see if she remembered what to ask for. Iris concentrated so hard on remembering the right words as she walked to the dairy, that she didn’t even scout for gum wads along the way. When she got there, she kept repeating the words over and over in her head as she waited for Mr. Anderson, the man with the rubber face and the rubber apron and the rubber boots, to emerge from behind the shiny vats of milk. (She was too shy to call out for him, even though she disliked waiting there, in that dank damp dairy smell.) Mr. Anderson always smiled and said good morning miss when he saw her.

  “May I please have six quarts of pasteurized, homogenized, vitamin D milk, please?” Iris would say, and Mr. Anderson would chuckle as he took the empties and replied, “Coming right up!” She wasn’t sure what made him laugh, maybe he just liked his job, but anyway she liked the kind look in his eyes as she turned and wobbled away with the bottles that still rattled, but made a dull thumping noise now that they were full, instead of the bright tinkling noise they made when they were empty, kind of like the way her stomach growled one way when she was hungry, and another way when she ate too many apples. The warmth of Mr. Anderson’s rubber smile on her back when she walked away made her want to look stronger, even though it felt like her arm would pop out of its socket. She wondered whether carrying all those heavy bottles would stretch her arms out until they were as long as her legs, and she looked like one of those chimps with the pink fannies she had seen at the Seneca Park Zoo. Maybe that was why the Big Kids never wanted to go get the milk.

  Yes, Iris definitely enjoyed Saturdays. Saturday was the only day with no morning obligations: no school, and no church. Iris so looked forward to this time that she always tried to get up before everybody else, and slipped down from her bunk and out of the bedroom without even waking Lily. She turned on the television, and watched it come slowly alive with a dot in the center of the screen, which miraculously blossomed into the image of a guy holding a finger in front of his lips. The Shhh! Show host spoke in a hushed tone as he invited his young audience to keep the volume down low, so as not to disturb sleeping parents. Iris loved it when people spoke softly, like her mother, instead of shouting like her father and her big brothers. Between the man’s quiet voice and the volume set at the minimum, Iris could hardly hear, as she sat cross-legged on the floor with her bowl of cereal, balancing it on the trampoline she fashioned with the nightgown she hooked over her knees. After she had skimmed off all the puffed rice (which she swallowed without chewing because the noise echoing inside her ears drowned out the man’s voice), and tipped the bowl to her mouth to drink the milk, she inched closer to the set, until her nose nearly touched th
e screen. Iris could only see things up close, but she refused to wear her glasses. They didn’t even work; all they did was make her feel like puking, and sharpen all the fuzziness out of people’s faces, which usually made them look worse instead of better. That was why Iris hid them in her last resort drawer, the one with the underwear with no elastic and the socks with holes in the heels (she didn’t mind holes in the toes too much because no one could see them), which she used when she ran out of the good underwear and socks, which was almost every day. What was the worst thing that could happen if she get caught not wearing her glasses? She would say she forgot, and then go put them on. It only happened every once in a while, especially when she first got them, but mostly no one noticed. The whole thing with the glasses was Sister Josephine’s fault. She was the one who told Iris’s mother that Iris always looked distracted and kept wandering to the front of the classroom to squint at the chalkboard. Iris’s mother said that she had always had that faraway look in her eyes, ever since she was born, but Iris’s mother told her father about the chalkboard anyway, and Iris’s father told her mother to take her for an eye exam. That was how Iris ended up with her mother and the three Little Boys in the waiting room of Julius Corvo, the eye doctor from Yonkers who was married to Iris’s father’s first cousin Dolores. Iris’s mother attempted to read “Good Housekeeping” magazine to William and Charles, who of course were too little to understand, but squirmed with joy at the opportunity to sit in their mother’s lap where they could tear and tug at the glossy pages of the magazine, while Ricci, being the baby, got the softest spot, cradled at his mother’s breast.

  Dr. Julius (that was how everyone in the family called him) took Iris by the hand and led her to the examining room. “Up you go,” he said, as he placed his big hands around her bony hips and lifted her to the seat of the tall chair. His hands were still squeezing her hips when he looked straight into her eyes, and said, “I’ll just turn off the lights, and we’ll see what we have here.” His voice was almost as hushed, but not nearly as reassuring, as the voice of the mustachioed man on The Shhh! Show. His thin lips twitched and curved up at the corners, but his smile wasn’t nearly as friendly as Mr. Anderson’s as he sent her home with her bottles of milk, and it disappeared altogether when the room was plunged into darkness. Dr. Julius stabbed the beam of a tiny flashlight straight into one eye, then the other. He leaned in very close to her as he observed her and told her to look up and down and at his finger here, and at his other finger there. She could see nothing but the finger, and the halo of frizzy hair that surrounded his head, and the tiny droplets of sweat glistening on his shiny brow as he peered into her eyes, wavering slightly on his feet as he inhaled and exhaled. She didn’t like the feel of his warm breath on her face, and it stank like cigarette butts mixed with stale coffee, like the smell of the cups her father sometimes left on his workbench out back in the garage.