My Most Excellent Year (3 page)

So naturally Papa retired as ambassador to Mexico when I was fourteen because Harvard University’s history department made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. We sold the houses in Mexico City and Washington, D.C., emancipated all of the serfs, and moved into one of the loveliest homes in Brookline, Massachusetts. The rest of that summer was taken up with visiting the museums, walking the Freedom Trail, learning how to ride the T, and trying to figure out what these people saw in the Boston Red Sox. (I discovered no rational clue. Perhaps it’s viral.)

I didn’t realize what Papa and Mamita had done to me until right after Labor Day, when I found myself sitting in the third row of a ninth-grade public school classroom filled with thirty-five chattering kids I’d never seen before in my life, but who all seemed to have known each other from the womb. And just
kids
. No
nannies, no bodyguards, no heads of state, no dinners with Chelsea Clinton or Tobey Maguire, and no one who wouldn’t think you were a stuck-up pain in the ass if you mentioned either one of them. I was terrified. There was one boy in particular who always wore blue and white sneakers, easy-fit jeans, and gray T-shirts (half of them unraveling so badly he could have played The Mummy). He spoke with such an unseemly Boston accent that you were lucky to catch every fourth word, he tried to be cool by pretending he didn’t know how cool he was, and his bangs looked like brown flax woven on a loom.

His name was Anthony and I detested him. I even told him so—and assumed he believed me.

I didn’t know it then, but my clock was running out fast for a lot of things. Especially since my much-loved Gwen Verdon had recently passed away, and there was nobody in the wings to replace her.

Yet.

Diary

T.C. Keller, 9
^th
Grade

Mrs. Norwood’s Class

INSTRUCTIONS:
While we’re studying Anne Frank, try to remember that a diary isn’t just a book with blank pages. It’s a place where you can put down all of the thoughts and feelings that nobody else knows you have. Anne Frank called hers “Dear Kitty.” So think carefully before you give your own diary a name.

Dear Mama,

Pop and Nehi and I go to visit you all the time with flowers, but there’s a lot of things we don’t have time to tell you while we’re sitting on the ground. These are some of them.

1.   I’m getting a B+ in everything except for the A in algebra,
which is the way I like it to square out. Pop always says you should never pretend to be something you’re not, and I don’t want to be a know-it-all gink who thinks he’s better than anybody else. Besides, Pop got a B+ in everything except for an A in algebra too.

2.   Right after you left, me and Pop started building a model of Fenway Park in the basement. And you know how Pop is when he gets started on projects like these. One time we had an assignment at school on the solar system and all I had to draw over the weekend was Jupiter. But when Pop found out about it he made me a planetarium from an old crate, a motor, and nine cut-up bicycle spokes with different-sized rubber balls on the ends of them that we painted to look like planets. They spun around a yellow lightbulb sun and had all of the constellations in the sky behind them except for Ursa Minor because we ran out of stars. Lori Mahoney is my adviser, and she was a little pissed off that we got carried away, but not as pissed off as the time our homework just said to list the ten biggest cities in the state. It took two people to carry the map Pop built down the hallway.

So the only reason the model of Fenway Park is twelve feet long is because there wasn’t any more room in the basement than that. It took us two years to finish, but it has the Citgo sign behind it and all 33,871 seats inside. Pop said, “Tony C, where are we going to find the right color green for the walls?” and I said, “Maybe we could puke on them,” and he said, “You have your mother’s sense of humor.” Then when it was all done, we opened our old scorecards to find our ticket stubs and we painted each of the seats that we ever sat in. Bluish green for the ones that just me and Pop had, sparkly silver for the ones we bought when you were with us
too, and gold for the two that you and Pop were sitting in when you first met each other.

3.   When they decided that they weren’t going to tear down the ballpark after all, Pop and I had to give up our “Save Fenway Park” website and our hotline and our T-shirts. We used to stand at different corners on Yawkey Way and Kenmore Square, hand out flyers to people, get them to sign petitions, and make them call all of the Red Sox phone numbers so many times that nobody could get through to buy tickets. Pop always says, “Tony C, the best thing Mama ever taught me was how to be a pain in the ass. That’s how I got my own company instead of just being somebody else’s carpenter.” Mama, it worked this time too. I mean, they stopped talking about tearing down Fenway Park, didn’t they?

4.   But we missed being troublemakers, so Pop told me I could be in charge of the next crusade. So I picked Buck Weaver. He was one of the eight Black Sox who got banned from baseball for cheating in the 1919 World Series—except that he didn’t do it. The other seven guys asked him if he would throw games with them, but he called them hosers and said “Count me out.” And they busted him anyway for not squealing on his team. What’s up with
that
? But that’s all going to change once I get 20,000 signatures on my “Free Buck Weaver” website.

5.   I wish you’d known Augie while you were still here—but come to think of it, if you were still here I wouldn’t have needed him so much. We play soccer together in the fall, we’re both forwards, and the other team hates it when we get the ball because they know it’s already over. We pass it back and forth to each other so many times that they get mixed up, and all of a sudden the ball is in the
net. We never practice who’s going to make the kick—we just know when it’s the right time.

I’m five weeks older than Augie is but he’s a lot smarter than I am, except that he doesn’t know he’s gay yet. I don’t see how he couldn’t. I guess he figures that because he loves women like Audrey Hepburn and Judi Dench so much, he’s automatically going to wind up with one. (Shh. What he really loves is their clothes.) But Augie is the best at everything he does and I’m betting that once he puts 2+2 together, he’ll have a steady boyfriend before I even get this new girl Alejandra to
think
about kissing me. Of course, once in a while he gets called things like “fag,” and since we’re brothers, sometimes I do too. But the kids who say it usually aren’t around for very long. Besides, I found out that when girls think you might be gay, you turn into a chick magnet on the spot. It’s like they can’t help themselves—even the ones who tried to smack your face off in fifth grade when you hit on them. So I go with the flow. I’m easy that way.

6.   Remember how you told Pop that if he didn’t get married again you would kick his ass? Because I think he finally got the hint. Last month, he wrote an ad for the Internet and I got to help. “49 y/o SWM, 6′2″, athletic, with irresistible son who owns a Carlton Fisk rookie card, seeks intelligent, romantic woman for long walks, long talks, and candlelit moments.” Even though the candlelight part made me and Augie gag, he started getting answers right away. The first girl he went out with was a blond grad student who didn’t tell us until she got there that her diploma was for witchcraft. So Nehi and I stayed awake until Pop got home, and while he was brushing his teeth I asked him things like “When she spilled her water, did she melt?” and “Was your waiter a scarecrow?” and “Did she land on
the roof and throw fireballs?” Pop sprayed me with a can of Right Guard and I stunk for three days.

7. Even though I’m almost fifteen, I’m getting tall fast. You probably wouldn’t even recognize me anymore. But I still remember what your voice sounds like.

Love,

Your son,

T.C.

Dear Mama,

Pop says he knew you were already falling in love with him after the first two hours because you held on to his arm when Bucky F. Dent hit the home run. But I remember when you would tuck me in and tell me the same story, you always said it was the other way around and that Pop kept sending you snapdragons so you would call him back. I used
to think that somebody was making up their half of it until I started to fall in love. Then I found out how complicated it really is.

Even though I should have listened to Augie when he told me that Alejandra needed special handling, I didn’t. Instead, on the first day of school I stuck a note into her social studies book. This wasn’t a kissing kind of strategy to show her how cute I am, it was because my voice is changing so fast I couldn’t count on it not to crack when I told her I loved her. And who wants a boyfriend who sounds like he needs a tune-up?

After phys ed there was a vanilla envelope on my desk with purple writing on it that looked like it came from the principal’s office—and I don’t usually get called in
there
until at least November.

She calls Mrs. Norwood “ma’am,” she turns in her quiz papers first, she didn’t laugh when Stu Merliss farted in the middle of factoring x
²
-y
²
, and her father knows the Queen of England. Big zow. Any poser can say that. But when Mrs. Fitzpatrick introduced her to the class and asked her who the most famous person she ever met was, she didn’t say the Prince of Wales, she said Hilary Duff. By lunchtime, all the other girls were afraid of her and the boys were conferencing on their cell phones in study hall to figure out who was going to make the first move. Andy Wexler won. It was too late for me to come up with a new game plan and even my Benedict Arnold of a brother wasn’t going to be any help. Why? BECAUSE HE WAS THE ONE SHE WAS HAVING LUNCH WITH!!

But it was the picture of you and Robert F. Kennedy at the rally in 1967 that
really
got me into hot water. Pop hung it on the wall next to my bed when I was seven, and because I liked the way RFK’s eyes squinted while he was smiling at you, I read an old kids’ book called
Meet Senator Kennedy
. Now I know everything there is to know about him, from the Freedom Riders to his blue ties. That’s why I signed up for the Young Democrats Club at school, and Alé joining right before me didn’t hurt either. So when she picked President JFK as the most important American who ever lived, Pop said it meant we had something in common. He also said she might need to know who was the brains in that family and who wasn’t. But he left it up to me to choose my own arguments.