So Much Blue
Her name was Mrs Martinez, Mrs J. Martinez, and when she said the ‘J’ part, her eyes squinted, just to let you know that when you addressed her, you’d better say it, too.
She was my third-grade art teacher. She was chic. With almost every other sentence, she mentioned she was from France, even though her name ‘might lead you to think otherwise’. She was French, she’d repeat again and again, and had a Hermes scarf wrapped around her neck to prove it.
‘This is what every woman wears in Paree,’ she would say, patting at it with her long fingers, the strawberry-coloured nail polish, too, telling you she was special.
I didn’t know France. I only knew Gravesend, Brooklyn, but I loved the elegant look of that silk scarf and everything about her.
The very first Wednesday of third grade, Mrs Brown, our home room teacher with the mousy brown hair, horn rimmed glasses and monotone voice, said, ‘OK, children. Clear your desks. It’s time for art now.’
The classroom door flew open and there she was, travelling gracefully across the floor, like there were two silver blades under each foot, moving her across some unseen ice.
Tall and reed thin, she commanded the room with a dramatic, ‘Bon jour, children,’ in a tone that made her seem both excited and exasperated at the same time.
She was bougie, BoHo chic before I even knew exactly what that was, always in long flowing skirts, subtly layered one under the other, the colours perfectly blending, but nothing you would ever think could match and certainly nothing like the plaid-printed white and maroon of our stupid catholic school uniforms.
When she spoke, her voice commanded authority. Her Parisian accent turned on and off like a light switch and she inserted French words and phrases throughout the lesson. She didn’t explain them and we didn’t expect her to. We just knew we should pick them up from context. I struggled with what she meant sometimes, but loved how cool it sounded. I’d repeat the words to myself in the school yard, but by the time I got home, I’d usually have forgotten.
She was fascinating to behold, yes, but she was tough. Colour outside the lines or reply, ‘yellow,’ when asked, ‘what does red mixed with blue make?’ and you could have yourself a problem.
She brought to every class a grey cart, piled high with whatever she chose for us to work with on a particular day, and as she handed out those coloured pencils, crayons or small palettes of oil or water paints, she encouraged us to free our artistic imagination.
Each week, she would challenge us to create something different. Sometimes it would be an object that had popped into her head.
‘Draw this,’ she would say, pointing to the large yellowed-faced clock hanging over her left shoulder. Sometimes it was a feeling.
‘Capture sadness,’ she would say, and mimic wiping tears from her eyes.
When poor Elvis was found, bloated and dead, in his Graceland mansion at just forty-two years old, she clicked her tongue and said, ‘Classe, today, draw poor Monsieur Presley.’
As if that wasn’t all good enough, on the bottom of the grey cart, along with the art supplies, she kept her beloved ‘victrola’ and a few records.
As we began our assignment, she would slip an LP out of its cardboard sleeve, close her eyes and sigh. Then she would place the needle down and Edith Pilaf would begin belting out, Non, Jene Regreet Rien, while we all got busy.
English was OK, history was a bore, music could have been good, if Ms Jankowski would play something good for us to sing along to, instead of My Country Tis’Of Thee. Here, in third period art class, was a woman who knew how to entertain a bunch of eight-year-olds.
Everything she did was pure art. She could draw a perfect circle, placing the chalk at a random place on the blackboard then twisting her wrist ever so steadily, clockwise, never picking it up, until arc met arc at a point that was nothing short of perfection.
Sometimes, she would show us one of her own personal drawings.
‘This is something I worked on last night,’ she would say, ‘it’s no chef-doeuvre,’ and then, from her zippered portfolio, she would pull something out that looked more like it belonged on the walls of her beloved Louvre than a in second-grade classroom.
How did she capture the glare inside a person’s eye, that small glint you really didn’t notice unless you were thinking about it or marvelling at how another person could sketch it?
I lived for those Wednesdays at noon. I was seated in the last row of that class room next to my best friend, Rosalee.
Rosalee was new to both the school and the neighbourhood. She had moved into my building right before the start of the school year.
We befriended each other out of logistics but quickly took an actual liking to each other, which was fortunate, because if you lived in our apartment complex, separated from the school by literal train tracks, you might as well live on the other side of the world.
Our building was one of several, in a group of indistinct red bricked apartment buildings with run down grounds and small, dingy apartments. Most of the students in our class lived across the tracks in oversized capes and ranches, with curved driveways and sprawling, manicured lawns.
My mother was raising two kids alone, struggling to send my sister and me to a good catholic school, and could barely make rent, but Rosalee, whose family wasn’t quite as impoverished, found herself there because her house in Bay Ridge had caught fire and burned to the ground.
She didn’t say as much, but the rumour was her parents were ‘cash under the mattress’ type of people, so when the house caught fire the mattress burned, and the cash under it was no exception.
The only thing that survived that fire was Rosalee’s pet parakeet, Joya.
‘We thought he’d be fried. But when the fireman handed me the cage and I pulled up the cover, he was on his swing, singing away. He’s a God-damned miracle, that bird,’ she told me.
On the first day of school, Rosalee and I took seats in the back of the classroom where we would remain all year, banished from the ‘in’ crowd who let us know, on more than one occasion, that we were ‘out’. We didn’t care. We had our own group of last row misfits we kept company with, and thought everyone occupying seats one to eight in front of us could go ahead and suck an egg. As far as we were concerned, they were a bunch of mindless miscreants.
Unfortunately, Mrs Martinez ignored us, too. There were those students who had the gift and those who didn’t, and those who didn’t, she had no time for. She would walk around the room while we were working, her bright coloured Slingbacks ever so gently tap, tap, tapping, quietly surveying our work over our shoulders.
If she liked something you were drawing, she might let out a little sound that expressed joy. If it was particularly fetching, she’d take the drawing and lift it up, even as you were still working.
‘Classe, classe,’ she’d call to get our attention, and we’d all stop and momentarily ogle at what wasn’t ours.
The kids that really showed some talent, she’d swoon over, playfully give them a pinch on the arm, lovingly calling them her ‘Little Monet’ or ‘Petite Degas’. Those kids were her kids, the ones she invited into her home on Saturday afternoons.
I longed for her attention, for any recognition at all, and leaned myself away from my desk as she was passing by so she could have a good look at what I was creating, but she was having none of it. I don’t think she even knew who I was, other than calling out my name while taking attendance. But even this I loved, the way she gave it a little French-sounding flare.
‘What do you do at Mrs Martinez’s house on Saturdays?’ I asked Rita Jayson, who, on more than one occasion, was the recipient of a Mrs Martinez arm pinching.
‘Oh, different things. Listen to music… talk… sometimes she makes us lunch.’
The way she said it, so casual, like she wasn’t even excited, like it was an everyday occurrence, made me instantly hate her. I thought of waiting for her after school that day and stomping my foot down on hers as hard as I could when she passed by, but instead I bought a large blank drawing pad at Cheap Charlie’s, went home, looked out the window and tried to draw.
My bedroom window faced the back courtyard. I pulled up the shade and squinted from the late afternoon sun. I took in the details, nothing exotic: oak trees and juniper bushes, brick walls and, directly across from us, several pairs of Mrs Comsett’s big bloomers blowing back and forth in the wind on her makeshift clothes line.
I focused hard, took a deep breath and drew. I worked that entire afternoon, only stopping when the sun went down and I couldn’t see anything anymore. When I was done, not even I could believe it. It was like my brain saw one thing and told my fingers, but they went and drew another.
‘I want to be a good artist,’ I told Rosalee, because she would listen. We were headed to the 99 Cent store after school. It was a comment of Mrs Martinez’s that had sent us there.
Rosalee’s parents were quirky. They had lots of rules and some of them bordered on bizarre, like not allowing her out of the house after 4pm, even in the summer time. Another quirk was their refusal to let her eat anything they didn’t make themselves.
‘Even bread? Even tomato sauce?’ I asked incredulously.
Rosalee’s father hand-made it all, even got up at the crack of dawn to start squeezing tomatoes to prepare sauce for that evening.
When her parents caught her scoffing a Twinkie in the bathroom, she was smacked hard and sent to her room for the rest of the day.
‘It was worth it,’ she reported happily.
Most of her parents’ rules, she found a way to tolerate. But the one that gave her the most trouble was their refusal to let her shower. They had lost an infant son to pneumonia before Rosalee was born and weren’t taking any chances. In their minds, water plus airsomehow equaled death.
The best they would do was let her have a very quick shower, but not often enough.
I had noticed it as soon as I met her, a noxious odour wafting through the air, lingering sometimes long after Rosalee had gone. It annoyed me, sometimes even made me feel nauseous, but I had decided that good friends were just too hard to come by.
It was Mrs Martinez, with a nose that was perhaps as perspicacious as her eyes, who made mention of the matter.
One day during class, while perusing the aisles, she stopped abruptly by Rosalee’s desk. Staring straight ahead, she dabbed the tip of her nose twice and said, ‘I smell something very sour.’
Our homeroom teacher, Mrs Brown, was more subtle. The first week of school, she had sent Roe home with a note regarding the importance of personal hygiene.
Her parents read her concerns, then tore the paper into tiny shreds and sent Rosalee to bed, without even so much as letting her wash her hands. What did this woman know about the horror of losing a newborn?
But the very next day after Mrs Martinez’s comment, Rosalee went to the 99 Cent Discount Store, bought a bottle with a tacky photo of flowers on it, the liquid inside the colour of blush roses, and splashed herself silly. It had such a bizarre, overwhelmingly unpleasant scent, it made me choke. I scoffed, waving my wrist back and forth in an effort to clear the air.
‘It’s toilet water,’ she explained.
‘It smells like it,’ I told her.
Rosalee took the glass bottle and threw into the street, where it shattered to bits. Then she cried.
We stood on the corner of Avenue U and tried to come up with a plan.
That night, Rosalee hid a washcloth in her book bag and took it to school with her the next morning. While I stood outside the bathroom door, she washed herself in a stall as best she could. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped. That was the only problem in our third-grade lives we felt we had remotely solved.
The first time I garnered any kind of attention at all from Mrs Martinez was the day she announced we’d be drawing our favourite animal. ‘Whatever you choose, wild, domestic…humane,’ she said with a little wink.
I chose the giraffe because it was quiet and gentle, traits I believed I possessed myself, but it was also tall and very thin, things I wished I was. Rosalee picked a dog because she wanted to have one of her own, more than anything else in the world.
For our drawing music, Mrs Martinez pulled out the Victrola.
Before dropping the needle, she announced, ‘Classe, something different. She is American…but French.’
I dipped my brush into a small jar of water then the palette and got to work, while the sweet voice of Josephine Baker crooned J’ai deux Amours.
I was almost finished when I felt it, a light tap on my shoulder that made me look up. Mrs Martinez had paused at my desk and was looking directly at my painting.
‘It’s a giraffe,’ I said, in case she needed me to help her out.
‘It’s blue,’ she shot back instantly. I looked down at it again, and indeed it was. I had coloured it blue. I was waiting for her to continue, but when I looked back up, she was gone, having shifted over, now standing over Rosalee and lifting her paper.
Mrs Martinez cleared her throat, stroked her chin with her pointer finger, looking down.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Rosalee.’
‘Rosalee, what’s this you have here?
‘A dog,’ she said.
I leaned over to take a look. I saw six circles – one for the head, one for the body, two for each leg – with a crude tail and ears, a plain dog face.
‘Rosalee, this is neat,’ Mrs Martinez said. ‘You’re very, very neat.’
She placed the drawing back on Rosalee’s desk and paused. Then she said,
‘You are going to make some man very, very happy one day, Rosalee,’ and she walked off.
I looked at Rosalee, who kept her eyes on her drawing, but on her face I saw satiated, I saw proud. Rosalee was no artist but she was neat, and there was something to be said for neat.
‘But, remember, a few weeks ago, you said she smelled,’ I wanted to cry out.
When Halloween came, Roe and I dressed up as Batman and Robin, feeling giddy in our plastic masks and capes. We skipped trick or treating at our own apartment complex and went straight across the tracks to McDonald Avenue. We knew better houses meant better treats. We made sure we got to work fast, trying to cover as much ground as we could before Rosalee’s curfew.
Within a few hours, our shopping bags were filled with everything good: baby-sized boxes of Junior Mints, Milk Duds, Snow Caps. I pulled some of them from my bag and shoved them into my front and back pants pockets because I didn’t want my sister to have it. She had feigned illness that day and my mother said I would have to split my loot with her when I got home, but what my sister didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
It was almost dusk when Rosalee and I stopped to take stock of our bags, now stuffed to the brim, full of candy.
In all the excitement of trick or treating, we had missed her 4pm curfew.
‘What time do you think it is?’ she asked, taking in the view of the quickly setting sun.
I shrugged, talked her into one more block.
‘It’s on the way home,’ I defended.
Rosalee shrugged. ‘I’m already dead meat,’ she said flatly, leading the way.
I don’t remember much about the outside of the house. We walked the long driveway toward the front entrance. Birds, hiding in Juniper bushes, trying to get in one last song before sunset, silenced themselves as we passed.
We took three steps up onto the porch and Rosalee rang the front door bell.
Almost instantly, there she was –Mrs Martinez, her magical, larger-than-life presence hovering above us.
Seeing a teacher out of the teacher zone, especially one you loved, was mind blowing.
We pulled our masks to the top of our heads. I heard the rubber band on the back of mine snap off, rendering it useless, but I didn’t care. I shoved it into my candy bag.
‘Hi, Mrs J. Martinez,’ we said eagerly.
She put her hands to her neck, tightened her beautiful Paisley scarf and smiled. ‘Ahh, salut le felles.’
All at once, there was so much to take in. The beautiful, wafting smell spilling out from inside that home which, try as I might, I could not recognise; murals full of ornate seraphic imagery, some covering floor to ceiling, wherever the eye could see; and, perhaps most fascinating, standing behind her, the marble likeness of a real man, gallantly posed and brazenly showing every single thing he was born with.
I was in shock. Rosalee must have been, too, because I felt her elbow me hard in my side.
I was trying to take all of it in, but what I really couldn’t get over was all of those vibrant hues, covering every surface: curtains, furniture, carpeting; colour everywhere.
‘I like your walls,’ I heard myself say. As soon as the words tumbled out of my mouth, I realised how ridiculous they sounded. I felt like a fool.
Mrs Martinez didn’t seem to notice. She looked over her shoulder to see what I meant and pointed to a random surface.
‘Crimson,’ she said.
I wasn’t sure what crimson was, but her place was lovely.
‘Girls.’ She paused, as if she was thinking of exactly what she wanted to say. ‘Always remember, the home must always be a symphony for the eyes.’
I wanted to tell her that I understood, that I tried.
Just a few weeks earlier, my mother took my sister and me on an afternoon outing.
‘Where are we going?’ we asked.
‘We’re going to get stuff to fix the apartment up.’
It was an odd feeling, sitting on the bus with my mother. We seldom got to go anywhere together. She was too busy going from job to job to have time to take us anywhere at all. She was still pining for my father, who was already long gone. She was so forlorn that she had left his nightstand untouched, cufflinks and Parliament cigarette pack right where he had last put them down, before he stopped coming around.
I thought we were going to Sears and Roebuck to get some well needed new furniture. I envisioned myself laying in a grand four poster canopy bed with frilly lace draperies, but when I asked my mother which furniture store we were headed to, she said, ‘None. We’re going to the hardware store to get some paint.’
As soon as we arrived, my mother headed over to the colour samples printed on small strips of paper at the register, while my sister and I perused the aisles to see if we could find something interesting in an otherwise bland store.
‘Bor-ing,’ my sister announced, and I wholeheartedly agreed, as we walked aisle after aisle, surveying drills and drill bits, hammers and hooks.
When we got to the aisle that held the paints, my sister reached up and pulled a large pail down from the shelf.
‘You like this one?’ she asked, pointing to the colour on top of the can.
My favourite colour was blue, but I had to admit, purple was definitely a close second.
I nodded excitedly, and she pulled down another pail and handed it to me. It was so heavy I was almost dragged to the floor, and we struggled to bring them up to the counter.
We placed them next to my mother, who was still engrossed in strips of colour samples.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, looking down.
‘I think it’s called Plum Pizzazz. It’s for our bedroom,’ my sister said.
‘No way. Put it back,’ my mother said.
‘Please,’ we begged. ‘You don’t have to do anything. We’ll paint it ourselves.’
‘White, Egg Shell White,’ my mother announced, pointing to the sample in her hand.
‘What?’
‘That’s the colour we’re getting, Egg Shell White.’
‘But the walls at home are already white,’ I cried.
My mother didn’t budge; she just shook her head again and went back to those samples.
Disappointed, my sister and I schlepped Plum Pizzazz back to the proper shelf while we heard our mother order several pails of the Egg Shell.
It was as if, even if her universe was given to falling apart, at least some things could be just as she wanted them.
I was about to tell Mrs Martinez about Plum Pizzazz, believed she could truly appreciate my frustration, but before I could say a word, I heard a male voice from somewhere behind her.
‘Who is that?’
Mrs Martinez didn’t answer.
‘Who is that?’ the voice repeated, louder and even more angrily this time.
I wanted so badly to see him. Who got to live with Mrs J. Martinez?
It was impossible to match the voice to the face, of course. I couldn’t tell who he was, but I could tell who he wasn’t. He didn’t sound refined or sophisticated. He didn’t have an accent. If he reminded me of anything, it was an Archie Bunker type, bellowing from the domain of a favourite armchair.
‘Kids,’ Mrs Martinez shouted back, still looking directly at us.
‘More kids? Now? Judy, close the fucking door.’
Mrs Martinez reached into the wicker basket she was holding and dropped some candy into each of our bags.
‘Get home safely, girls,’ she told us. ‘Bon soiree,’ and she quickly shut the door.
The voice, all that beautiful colour, her attention; it was all gone in seconds. I was so pissed, I kicked the air. Then I heard Roe rustle her candy bag and say, ‘It’s just bubble gum,’ in a disappointed whisper.
I don’t know what we were thinking she would give us.
I knew she wasn’t perfect. I knew Mrs J. Martinez could be a little cruel sometimes. She had this saying in French that sounded something like ‘boop, boop’. She would say it in a cheery, sing song kind of way, but always, the recipient of ‘boop, boop’ seemed to be very down on his or her luck.
Maureen Hutchins was a quiet girl who sat in the back of the room, next to Rosalee and me. She was a nervous sort with a jerky tick to her neck, constantly asking us, ‘Do you think we’ll have a quiz today? You don’t think there’s a quiz, do you?’ She was picked on, like Rosalee and me, and this made her even more nervous. We felt really sorry for her and even when we knew a quiz coming, we would lie.
For one lesson, Mrs Martinez asked us to bring something from our homes to draw.
‘Bring something from your rooms that you’ve been looking at forever, but have not really ever seen.’
I was perplexed, not sure what she meant. I went home and asked my mother. She shrugged, looked around the kitchen and pulled a small Pyrex dish off the shelf that I stuffed into my bag.
The next class, Mrs Martinez asked us to take out what we would be drawing.
Maureen Hutchins let out a scream. ‘Oh my God! I forgot.’
She slapped the top of her forehead, hard.
‘You can draw mine, too,’ I offered, holding up the dish.
But Mrs Martinez shook her head and wagged her finger.
‘No artifact, no art,’ she said.
‘But what am I gonna do for the rest of the class?’ Maureen cried out.
Mrs Martinez just shrugged.
I looked over at the face of poor Maureen Hutchins. I don’t know what she expected to happen if she didn’t participate, but she looked sickly, like the sky would fall and the end of the world would come. I watched her face grow redder than anyone’s I’d ever seen. Then she burst into tears.
‘Boop, boop,’ Mrs Martinez chirped, and continued on with her instructions.
Another day, she announced, ‘Classe, something a little different. I’d like you to draw something that scares you. Something you think about, that horrifies you to the core.’
I drew a bug I called a ‘thousand legger’. My sister said the correct name was millipede. I didn’t care what they were. They had endless legs and huge bodies and scared the shit out of me. Somehow, even with windows shut and the screens down most of the time, they found their way to creep in from the courtyard. On more than one occasion, I woke to find one had decided it would like to share my very bed. I lived in terror of them.
Rosalee drew her old house, with yellow and orange flames bursting through the windows and front door.
Tommy Corso, who was kind of a class bully, drew a stick figure family. The two largest of the group stood centre frame, one with its stick arms around the other’s neck.
When Mrs Martinez came to his desk, she lifted up the paper.
‘Who’s this?’ she asked, pointing to the offending stick person. ‘Mommy or Daddy?’
‘Both,’ he said.
‘Boob, boop,’ she said, putting the drawing back on his desk and walking away.
Even at my age, I knew she should have been asking more, doing more.
No, I knew she wasn’t perfect. Still, I pined for her approval, for her to lift that paper into the air, marvel at what she was looking at. Week after week, she gave the instructions: draw a sunset, draw a tiger, draw your favourite food. When I was done, you couldn’t make out if it was cotton candy or egg foo young.
I had plenty of time to practise my craft. My home was usually empty. My sister was off doing her own thing and my mother at one of her jobs. I didn’t see my father too much, either. He was always away on business. That’s what my mother told the neighbours, who asked, ‘Hey, Carol, where’s Tommy?’
She let my sister and I know what that business was.
Anytime we inquired where he was, she didn’t even hesitate to answer.
‘Womanising,’ she’d tell us, sitting exhausted at the kitchen table, Parliament cigarette dangling from her lip
‘He’s not travelling?’
‘Womanising,’ she’d repeat.
She wasn’t bothering to spare us and, anyway, we kind of already knew. After all, there wasn’t much out-of-state travel necessary when your job was to drive an eighteen-wheeler tractor trailer up and down the streets of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. A lot of his paycheck went to this womanising and what was left over, he blew on bets at the race track.
‘What I couldn’t do, if he just gave me that money,’ my mother sometimes said, wistfully.
When I was younger she had tried to get some of it, fought with him, hard, but eventually she gave up. Now she was busy, constantly working to support two kids. She was unskilled as far as potential employers were concerned and floated from menial, poorly paying job to menial, poorly paying job. She tried to stretch the paychecks as far as they would go, but was always worried. Especially at Christmastime.
As the holidays approached, if my sister or I saw something advertised on TV we wanted, she’d start biting her bottom lip a lot, switching channels. If you reminded her later or the next day, all she’d give you was a weak ‘we’ll see’.
She tried her best, though, always coming up with something on Christmas morning. But it was never what you asked for.
One year, I begged for a pink Schwinn two-wheeler, but the kind of bike I got was more for the size of a Barbie doll than a human being.
The years she couldn’t scrounge up money for anything at all, she resorted to asking her mother for help. That painful phone call was usually delayed as long as possible, made the day before Christmas Eve and we could hear the shouts come through the ear piece as my grandmother chided her. My mother nodded, listened carefully, didn’t say much, just waited for my grandmother to cave.
After a quick hello kiss, we’d wait in the entryway while my grandmother disappeared upstairs to get the money she kept in a secret hiding place.
‘You know why I can do this for you?’ she would ask, placing the crisp bills into our waiting hands.
‘Why?’
‘Because I didn’t marry a two-timing fucking loser. That’s why.’
‘OK,’ we’d say.
Walking back home, we knew we should be feeling some kind of shame, but it was just pure excitement, closing our fingers around all that cash.
There was other excitement, too, as the holidays approached. The houses on Shore Road were decorated with such an amazing profusion of lights, the rumour was they could be spotted from the moon. Holiday music blared from tinny sounding speakers coming from every storefront on Avenue U and in class, we each picked a name out of a hat for our Secret Santa.
There was excitement, too, in art class. A few weeks before the winter break, Mrs Martinez announced we would be making our own puppets.
‘We will be working in the French method, called papier-mâché,’ she announced. ‘That’s French for chewed paper,’she explained, ‘but pay no mind, nothing chewed here. Just pure magnifie.’
It was a big task, she warned us. Nothing like we had done before and would have to be carried out over two classes. I absolutely loved puppets and was beside myself with excitement.
To start the project, that first day, she handed each of us a rubber balloon. Then, she instructed us to tear newspapers into long, thin strips. Once we inflated the balloon, we were told to dip the strips into a gooey glue paste and carefully cover the surface.
I took stacks of old issues of the Daily News and the New York Post and began tearing, then dipping. I dipped my fingers in, too. It was delightful. I loved the feeling of pushing my hands through that mush and slapping it on the top of the rubber. I felt like an expert at a pottery wheel. I felt like I belonged in the short film we watched on Abstract Expressionism, where artists feverishly slapped splotches of colour on a large white canvas. I felt like Mrs Martinez herself, how at any moment she could stand over a blank sheet of paper, reach into her cardigan, pull out a charcoal pencil, begin to draw and make everything right with the world.
When we were done coating the balloons, we carefully painted the newspaper and put our projects back on the cart to dry. I didn’t like leaving my puppet, who, by then, I was calling Dolly, even though Rosalee said the name was common and corny. She named hers Luanne.
I could barely wait until that last week, when we would finally be able to take our puppets home.
Not much ranked up there with Mrs J. Martinez and making puppets. Nothing could compete with the excitement. Not even my father showing up randomly one day. I was coming from school when I spotted him in front of our building one afternoon.
Every year, he took us to see Santa downtown at Abraham and Strauss. But when my parents stopped seeing each other, those trips stopped too. Now it was odd, spotting him in front of our apartment building, leaning against the old Cheville with the busted headlight. He was still wearing his grey work overalls, waving as I walked up the street. I abruptly broke from the conversation with Rosalee and ran to him. He was a gigantic man, with a strong grip, and his arms swallowed me up like some giant sea creature devouring its prey.
‘Let’s go see Santa Claus,’ he said. ‘Go inside and get your sister.’
My sister wasn’t delighted to see me and was even less happy to hear she was being summoned.
‘Dad’s outside.’
‘Thrilling,’ she mumbled.
She gently removed her Zeppelin 1 LP from the turntable and slid it ever so carefully into its cardboard sleeve, treating it like a newborn baby.
My sister and I climbed into the back seat. That’s when I first noticed a lady was sitting up front. She had a bright orange updo, fastened by a large, pink sequined barrette, and as we sat down she turned and gave us a wave like she was in some kind of beauty pageant.
‘Hello, girls,’ she said, before turning back around.
‘Who is that?’ I whispered to my sister, who just shrugged.
‘This is Rita,’ my father said, climbing into the driver’s seat, beside her.
I poked my sister’s leg hard as the car began to move, anxious to see what she thought of this Rita, riding shotgun with us to A&S, but she just waved me off and kept watching out the window as parts of Gravesend slipped by.
Rita kept glancing back at us, saying nothing.
‘Yep, Santa is waiting,’ my father said.
I guess no one told him it was years since we had believed such a thing existed.
Once we arrived at A&S, we made our way to the top floor, where we joined the crowds of parents and kids waiting on the line.
When it was our turn, my sister and I were escorted past the red velvet ropes by two adults dressed like elves, toward a small podium where Santa was waiting in a large, white rocking chair.
Santa was an old guy with a worn expression, like maybe he had seen too many Christmases. He motioned to me and I took a seat on his lap, taking note of his yellowing beard. If I had any doubt it wasn’t real, the elastic straps that hooked around his ears to keep it in place were a sure giveaway.
He then motioned to my sister, who snapped, ‘I’m not sitting in no one’s lap. I’ll stand here.’
Santa turned his attention back to me. He leaned in, breath brimming with halitosis, and asked me what I’d like for Christmas. I shrugged, thinking there were too many things to tell this pathetic stranger.
He seemed kind of annoyed. ‘Well, think about it,’ he said.
My sister called out, ‘I’ll take a Gibson Les Paul, electric, circa 1970.’
Santa turned toward her, looked a little confused, but nodded, as a man stepped in front of us holding a large camera and said, ‘OK, girls, smile.’
It was then my sister tapped me and when I looked at her, she motioned to my father, who I could see standing with Rita. He had his arm around her waist and was pulling her close, whispering something. Rita started giggling. Then she leaned her head into his chest.
‘Ready?’ asked the photographer, but before we could say anything, he snapped the photo.
All I could think about on that car ride home was that about a week later, my mother would open the mail and get a copy of that photo, her two daughters posed with Santa, a look of complete bewilderment on their faces.
Back in school, there was plenty of action to keep me occupied. For the Secret Santa gift swap, I received an Elf pin with a nose that lit up when you pulled the string attached to the bottom. I was really loving it, until I pulled the string too many times in a row and the light stopped working. Still, it wasn’t such a bad gift, considering I had given Arlene Grossman a pack of rainbow-coloured highlighters I bought in September but never used.
No one got anything that great, but it was poor Maureen Hutchins who fared the worst. When she opened her exquisitely wrapped jewelry-sized box, she found, much to her horror, three dead crickets. The culprit wasn’t very smart, though. The deed was easily traced to Reese Austin after Mrs Brown forced each person to stand up and reveal who their Secret Santa had been.
Reese Austin was on some kind of bad trajectory that year. Earlier that week, when Mrs Brown was distracted, he had left his seat and taken the arms of a cardboard snowman decoration hanging on the wall and taped them between its legs, making it look like it was touching its own snow privates.
‘He’s groovin’ on his ball sack,’ he shouted.
The laughter in the classroom caught the attention of Mrs Brown, who became so flustered at seeing a masturbating snowman on the wall that she immediately sent for Sister Catherine Louise, math teacher and self-appointed school disciplinarian. Sister Catherine had jowls like a bull dog and a wrestler’s body. She had a self-proclaimed love of God and the wooden paddle.
‘One tells me how to use the other,’ she’d say.
Students were known to walk into her office and never come out the same.
A frightened hush came over the room as Sister Catherine’s demonic presence hugged the air. She took a look at the snowman on the wall, then turned to the class.
‘Do you think Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, would find that funny?’
No one said a word.
Then the punishment. We would be denied the chance to go to the auditorium for the Christmas Craft Sale. I was crushed. Even if you found nothing to buy in that auditorium, you had a full hour to walk around and miss a whole period of math. I couldn’t believe my luck.
I was going to be really pissed at Reese Austin, but then I saw Sister Catherine charge toward him. She looped her arm into his and began dragging him down the aisle toward the door, as he ricocheted off of desks like a ball shot out of a pinball machine. I knew whatever he was facing would be much worse than missing the Christmas Craft Sale.
Nothing seemed to be going right, but at least there was my puppet, Dolly. That last art class before the holiday break, we were finally going to be able to finish our puppets and take them home. Mrs Martinez said we would spend that entire last session decorating them.
‘Children, let your puppets see, let them talk, let them…be. Ne reculedevantrien,’ she shouted, whatever that meant.
I ran to Cheap Charlie’s the night before, where I bought a pair of plastic eyes, then to The Knitting City, where Dolly’s blonde locks were purchased from a roll of yarn.
For her lips, the night before class, I pocketed my mother’s lipstick from her make-up drawer. It was a colour she wore every day and one I loved so much, Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow.
‘Where the fuck did it go?’ I heard her say aloud the next morning, while she was getting dressed for work. I sat at the kitchen table and ate my Cheerios in silence, thinking of the tube safely hidden in the bottom of my knapsack.
‘Don’t worry,’ I wanted to tell my mother, ‘it will be back.’
Just then, Dolly needed it more than she did.
There was a frenetic energy that last day; anticipation for the finishing of our final project and the start of a long winter break.
Right before noon, as always, Mrs Martinez stepped into the room. Above the roar of the classroom chatter, she stomped her foot, hard, a few times. She stood silently and folded her arms, waiting for silence.
I was drawn to her then, or rather to what was different about her. Something was off. There had been no ‘belle journe’ or other French colloquialism to greet us, no scarlet lipstick; even the Hermes scarf she wore every day was missing.
‘I was running late today, children,’ she announced. ‘Vite! Vite!’
With those words, we sprang from our seats and charged up to the front of the room. I found Dolly waiting for me on the grey cart and rushed back to my desk.
We spent the entire time making our puppets seem real, giving them eyes, mouths, jewelry, glasses, whatever we could think of. In all the excitement I realised I hadn’t brought anything to make a nose for Dolly, so Rosalee lent me two silver sequins.
‘I’m using them for earrings, but they might make good nostrils.’
I was all set to begin gluing Dolly’s golden yellow yarn tresses to the top of her head when I heard the familiar tap, tap, tap of Mrs Martinez’s heels making their way down the aisle.
I don’t know what made me do it, if it was the excitement of Christmas or the woe of knowing I wouldn’t see her again for a few weeks with the upcoming break, but I waited until she was close to my desk, then lifted Dolly into her view.
She looked surprised for a moment, as if I had somehow disturbed her. I saw her eyes float over my face, then to Dolly’s.
‘What’s this? What’s this here?’
I rested Dolly on my desk and nervously twirled the yellow yarn around my finger.
‘Why is the head so large?’ she asked.
The head was…large?
I looked down and examined my puppet, who smiled at me through Cherries in the Snow.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I had used too much papier-mâche. The head was a little too big for the body.
I looked back up at Mrs Martinez. There was a small movement in her head, a very slight back and forth like she was reading something written on Dolly’s face.
I thought she might be looking for something constructive to say.
‘And it’s blue…Blue, again. What’s with you and blue?’
She was yelling now, and when I looked up into her face, her eyes were focusing on mine, hard.
I tried to open my mouth, to push some words out.
‘So much goddamn blue,’ she shouted, and waved her arm into the air before walking off.
I looked down at Dolly, who looked back at me and smiled through red lips.
By now the class was still, silenced by the shouting. I didn’t have to look at them to know all their eyes were on me.
Mrs Martinez continued down the aisle, still talking, but there was a loud roar in my head that wouldn’t let me hear.
Rosalee leaned over, gently tapping my arm to get my attention, but I was too busy grabbing my things and heading for the door. Before it slammed behind me, I heard her say, ‘Where you going?’
Once out of that classroom, I ran and kept running away. Away from the ‘hey, hey,’ I heard Mrs Martinez call out, but I wasn’t sure if it was for me or for the class who, upon my exit, were sent into a roaring frenzy.
I ran down the hallway, out the double doors and down the front steps. Once at the bottom, I removed the cardboard paper towel cylinder that gave Dolly her neck, lifted her into the air and slammed her head down, as hard as I could, on a post of the school yard’s wrought iron fence.
Very soon, the bell would ring and my classmates would spill out of that building with all the frenzied energy you would expect from third graders on their way to winter break. I was sure they would see Dolly. I was sure she would meet a fate worse than mine.
I knew I had to hurry and get away as fast I could. I ran a few steps more before I stopped and turned back to see her one last time. I had skewed her so hard that the pointed fence tip had come straight up through her head, splitting one eye in half. If she had a heart, I hoped I’d split that, too.
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