Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Jennifer Gillan

“stupids.” Miss Marino, our teacher, alternated the rows of good students with the bad, hoping that by sitting side-by-side with the bright students the stupids might become more intelligent, as though intelligence were contagious. But we didn’t progress as she had hoped. She grew frustrated when one day, while dismissing class for recess, Little John couldn’t get up because his arms were stuck in the slats of the chair’s backrest. She scolded us with a shaking finger when we knocked over the globe, denting the already troubled Africa. She muttered curses when Leroy White, a real stupid but a great softball player with the gift to hit to all fields, openly chewed his host when he made his First Communion; his hands swung at his sides as he returned to the pew looking around with a big smile.
    Little John asked what I was doing, and I told him that I was taking a break from work, as I sat comfortably among high weeds. He wanted to join me, but I reminded him that the last time he’d gone door-to-door asking for work his mother had whipped him. I was with him when his mother, a New Jersey Italian who could rise up in anger one moment and love the next, told me in a polite but matter-of-fact voice that I had to leave because she was going to beat her son. She gave me a homemade popsicle, ushered me to the door, and said that I could see Little John the next day. But it was sooner than that. I went around to his bedroom window to suck my popsicle and watch Little John dodge his mother’s blows, a few hitting their mark but many whirring air.
    It was midday when Little John and I converged in the alley, the sun blazing in the high nineties, and he suggested that we go to Roosevelt High School to swim. He needed fivecents to make fifteen, the cost of admission, and I lent him a nickel. We ran home for my bike and when my sister found out that we were going swimming, she started to cry because she didn’t have the fifteen cents but only an empty Coke bottle. I waved for her to come and three of us mounted the bike—Debra on the crossbar, Little John on the handlebars and holding the Coke bottle which we would cash for a nickel and make up the difference that would allow all of us to get in, and me pumping up the crooked streets, dodging cars and pot holes. We spent the day swimming under the afternoon sun, so that when we got home our mom asked us what was darker, the floor or us? She feigned a stern posture, her hands on her hips and her mouth puckered. We played along. Looking down, Debbie and I said in unison, “Us.”
    That evening at dinner we all sat down in our bathing suits to eat our beans, laughing and chewing loudly. Our mom was in a good mood, so I took a risk and asked her if sometime we could have turtle soup. A few days before I had watched a television program in which a Polynesian tribe killed a large turtle, gutted it, and then stewed it over an open fire. The turtle, basted in a sugary sauce, looked delicious as I ate an afternoon bowl of cereal, but my sister, who was watching the program with a glass of Kool-Aid between her knees, said, “Caca.”
    My mother looked at me in bewilderment. “Boy, are you a crazy Mexican. Where did you get the idea that people eat turtles?”
    “On television,” I said, explaining the program. Then I took it a step further. “Mom, do you think we could get dressed up for dinner one of these days? David King does.”
    “
Ay, Dios
,” my mother laughed. She started collecting the dinner plates, but my brother wouldn’t let go of his. He was still drawing a picture in the bean sauce. Giggling, he said it was me, but I didn’t want to listen because I wanted ananswer from Mom. This was the summer when I spent the mornings in front of the television that showed the comfortable lives of white kids. There were no beatings, no rifts in the family. They wore bright clothes; toys tumbled from their closets. They hopped into bed with kisses and woke to glasses of fresh