Small Change

excerpt

Rita McCrae
SHE TRANSFERRED INTO our school halfway through the year.
I remember how she stood at the front of the room, clutching the battered
pigskin briefcase to her chest. The brass catch was loose and the scuffed
flap curled up at the edges. There was something about her shyness,
the vulnerability of her knobbly knees, the way she carried her slender,
energetic body, something that drew me and held me and wouldn’t let me
go, even before I discovered the grey-blue eyes under a storm of auburn
hair and the wide, sensitive mouth. As the days passed in their familiar
boredom, I felt an increasing need to occupy the vacant desk on her left,
back in the middle of the alphabet. But that was the problem right there.
In grade one, Sister Angelica told us that the ABC’s were the roots
of the tree of knowledge. She was very enthusiastic and it sounded much
like one of those catchy little sayings you could keep impressing people
with for the rest of your life. Unless, of course, they’d heard the story
about the apple and the snake and how we got kicked out of the easy life
and had to wear uniforms and go to school every day and haul a shoe shine
box around the Jersey side of the Hudson Tubes, or deliver papers on roller
skates, or even invent some legitimate sounding educational expenditure
so we could go to the candy store and act important. I believed her though,
in spite of all the evidence. It was her soft voice, I think. Or the way she
would touch us lightly on the shoulder or brush the hair out of our eyes
with her long white fingers and thank us when we turned in our tests. I
remember this because it was the last time I got an A in penmanship. Even
though I knew that the ABC’s had come to Jersey City via the Canaanites
and the Phoenicians and the Greeks and the Romans, by my second report
card, I was flunking that most mysterious of subjects because my essays
looked, even to me, like an Arab had scribbled them off while riding a bad
tempered camel in a sandstorm. This bothered me for a long time. Then
one day I figured it out. I hated the alphabet. That’s why, when I tried to
write, my fingers would tighten up and go too fast. But was it the ABC’s
that gave me precocious arthritis or the way the roots of all knowledge
meant I had to present myself every day at the front of the class?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763157

Small Change

excerpt

I knew they were telling Italian stories and making family decisions about property and vacations and whether my father should sell his ‘41 Ford and buy a new used car. But I had them gambling for high stakes and getting drunk enough to reveal explosive secrets about the future of the great frontier. At the same time, I knew that Nonno Pasquale was having a birthday. All the rules, routines, and patterns of daily life were temporarily suspended. In a way, I resented it. I wanted to go back in there, nuzzle into Aunt Katy’s lap while she played Chopin on the out of tune upright, her fingers doing their, to me, magical and superhuman duty, while her eyes looked vacantly up through the cracked ceiling into some other life. But I knew that if I went in they’d talk all over me – hey, Georgie, little man, what do you have to say for yourself – and their hands would be patting my head and pinching my cheek, and their smiling, adult attitudes would embarrass me with unanswerable questions about school and what I wanted to be when I grew up, until my dad gave me that look that said, you’ve had enough prince of the realm attention, kid, get your ass off to bed.
It wasn’t bed I minded. I just couldn’t face that gauntlet of bright eyes, flushed cheeks, and unrestrained enthusiasm. So I leaned against the wire fence, a little proud of myself because I was lonely and separate and tired but ready for something I hoped would happen, even though I couldn’t put it into words.
I felt like I owned the whole night, the breeze riffling the leaves of the hard-pruned saw tooth poplars, the quarter moon in its thin wrap of cirrus, the sounds of the city spreading and dying off around me; and I wanted to stay out as late as I could, until someone in there, I hoped it would be my grandfather, came and took my hand and led me in.
A few neighbours were still sitting out on the sidewalk, or on their front stoops, taking the air. The Morgas next door were listening to the Yankee game on a portable radio in a tangerine case Mickey Martin had given Don Andonio for Christmas last year; and across the street, the Scibettas were arguing about money with their kids. I need a ‘vance on my ’lowance mom. Get in here you little bastard, where you gonna spend a ‘vance tonight. Paulie, get im, get im in here. And the grandfather, deep into his zinfandel, was growling and whapping the cards down on the barrel-top with his buddies, playing scopa for a dollar a hand.
It was really boring, this predictable nightlife. I dropped my yo-yo down along its bright new string, and lifted my wrist.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763157