Teen Angel (7 page)

Sonny’s mother had taught them both to read English on the lace-covered kitchen table. Her mother would sound out the words, slowly, syllable by syllable, and then proudly declaim CON-STI-TU-TION with a distinctly Polish accent. That’s how she became an American citizen and Sonny developed precocious reading tastes. It was a little club they had, the two of them. Her father worked in the factory all day so they had hours to read together. They began with
Reader’s Digest
but by the time Sonny was old enough to enter the first grade they had read in the encyclopedia about Darwin and evolution and how snakes and frogs became monkeys and finally, human beings. “Daddy’s a monkey’s uncle!” Sonny had exclaimed, delighted with her own connection. Her mother had laughed. Then she had to begin school and everything changed horribly. She had run away four times in the first year, but each time her mother brought her back like a policeman. And she cried every morning, clutching at her mother’s neck because she didn’t want to leave her. And her mother couldn’t want her to leave, could she? She looked almost as
sad as Sonny when she left her at P.S. 28 on 155th Street and walked slowly away in her red wool coat with the checkered scarf.

“How would you define responsibility in terms of the characters of the book?” Mrs. King asked, peering at the class over her glasses.

An arm shot up and waved in the air. “Yes, Mr. Weinstein.”

He stood up, revealing a short, lumpy body about as sexy as a rhinoceros in a yellow bikini. His hands were covered with ink and he chewed gum furiously. “Responsibility means when you have an obligation to someone else that you have to do even if you don’t want to,” he said proudly, as if he had invented the word.

“Good,” Mrs. King said. “Now how does that apply to
Ethan Frome?
”

“Well,” he said, biting his lip.

“We do not begin a sentence with ‘well,’” Mrs. King corrected him.

“Well, I mean, um–”

“Begin again,” Mrs. King said. “Maybe if you spit out your gum, you might have an easier time. Now this time, correctly, Mr. Weinstein,” she said.

He took the gum out of his mouth and held it between his fingers, nervously rolling it. “Um, well … Even though the man does not love his wife and he loves the other woman, he should stay with her. She’s his wife and she’s sick. She is his responsibility.”

“Very good. Now you see, that wasn’t so difficult, was it? You can sit down.” She wrote something down in her marking book. Lenny smiled, pleased with himself. The only reason he got 100% was because he wrote all the answers on his desk before tests. That’s what Sonny hated about the SP. They would do anything for a good mark in the bitch’s book. And she wielded it like she was God choosing who’d go to heaven and hell.

Sonny knew about love from
Gone With the Wind
with Vivien
Leigh and sex from
Splendor in the Grass
, but Ruben was something else. She wrote his name in her best handwriting, giving the R and O magnificent flourishes and underlining it with a curlicue ending in a heart. She did this several times, feeling a kind of magical power with each effort.
Ruben hated her. He had used her. “I know I’ll feel bad in the morning.” “Sleep late.” He thought she was a tramp. He was in love with the Gooch. The Gooch would kill her. WILL YOU SHUT UP!
She crossed his name out so hard that her pen went through the page. Then she wrote his name backward, hoping there might be some secret message that she could decipher. NEBUR. NEBUR? Now what the hell did that mean?
Love thy neighbor. She did! She did!
She rhymed his name with all the letters of the alphabet and came up with: RUBEN IS A CUBAN. But that didn’t make any sense. He was a P.R. which was okay but her parents would hang themselves if they found out. RUBEN IS A CUBAN. NEBUR LOVES HER.
Mrs. Sonny Ortega. And I’d like you to meet my children: Ruben Ortega Jr., Maria Ortega, and Ellisa Ortega. Oh, my husband’s out in Hollywood doing a film. Yes, he is the Ruben Ortega
… When she grew tired of this game, she began to cross and recross her legs but could not find a comfortable position. Her arm was falling asleep on the desk, so she began to shake it. Then her leg started to
get
pins and needles and her ass ached.
“My aspirins! My aspirins!” the lady from Georgia cried when she accidentally dropped her aspirins out of the taxi window. The driver turned around and said, “Then stick it out of the window
.” Besides, it was getting steamy in her jacket. Sonny raised her hand.

For several minutes, Mrs. King looked directly at her, but would not call her. Finally, after she waved her right arm nonstop like a windshield wiper, Mrs. King called her.

“Yes, Miss Palovsky?”

“Can I please have the pass to the bathroom?”

“Did you read today’s assignment?” Mrs. King asked.

Sonny nodded, even though she had skimmed the book and had
read her mother’s copy of
Peyton Place
from the library instead.

“Could you give us a summary of the chapter?”

“Uh,” Sonny paused. “This man is plagued by a guilty conscience. He loves this woman, I forgot her name, who isn’t his wife. He’s caught in a conflict and doesn’t know what to do. Besides, his wife is sick all the time. She’s this hypochondriac and nags him all the time. But,” Sonny read the word written in bold letters on the blackboard. “But his sense of responsibility is stronger than his passion. Can I please have the pass?”

Mrs. King stood up, pulling on her strand of cultured pearls with a fake diamond clasp. “That’s not a bad summary of the book but you could have taken that off the book jacket. What specifically happens in chapter five?”

Sonny knew the answer to the question, but she couldn’t stand one more moment of class. She stood up and walked to the front of the class.

“And where do you think you’re going?” Mrs. King asked.

“To the bathroom.”

“But you don’t have a pass,” Mrs. King said, dangling the wooden square with the word PASS like she wanted Sonny to wrestle it from her.

“Yes, I do,” Sonny said, walking past her. “Mother Nature gave it to me.”

As she closed the door behind her, she heard Mrs. King tell the class, “Miss Palovsky’s parents will be notified immediately. She’s nothing but a troublemaker. And no manners!”

Manure
. She was free! At last. She could hear some gab going down as she pushed open the door of the third-floor girl’s room. A tall black girl named Dresdene sat on the sink while Florenda was rebraiding one of the five tight braids wound around her head.

“So listen to this, Flo,” Dresdene said, totally ignoring Sonny, who ducked into her favorite stall. “Keith Johnson came over last night. Believe it or not, he’s acting like nothin’ happened.
Nothin’! The bastard. So I says to him, ‘Hey, baby, you been bullshitting me and I ain’t stupid.’ You know what I mean? And he says innocent as a babe, ‘Bitch, I wouldn’t bullshit you.’ ‘What’s this I hear about you and Cheryl?!’ I ask. Well, this dude thinks he’s real foxy. ‘Cheryl who?’ he asks, all innocent-like. ‘You lying black motherfucker,’ I says and rap him in the mouth. ‘The Cheryl you made it with last Tuesday!’ Before I know it, he slaps me across the face and says, ‘Look a’ here, girl. What I do is my business. You dig? You want to go around with me, you mind your own.’”

“Men are like that,” Florenda said matter-of-factly. “That’s what my momma always says. ‘Trust ’em about as far as you can throw them-or you’ll be the one who’s lying in the gutter with your face in piss. Not them. They’s always take care of themselves and if not, there’s some bitch who will.’ Sure, they can say they love you, you’re the one and only. But, like the Shirelles’ song, will they love you tomorrow? It don’t mean shit. I’m sorry, honey.”

“Yeah, but you should have seen this guy, smooth as cocoa butter, talking like you wouldn’t believe, how he gonna take me to the Corso dancing. I even bought a new dress …”

“Well, you was wrong to buy the dress without even having a date,” Florenda interrupted. Her voice was indignant. “It don’t matter what a man says. All they do is bullshit. It comes natural to them. They tell you they’ll put the moon on your little finger like a diamond ring. But until he says when and where, I don’t budge.”

“You smart, Flo.”

“You gotta be smart. Otherwise they takes advantage. And then where are you?”

“Strung out, hung up, and crying in your mammy’s lap.”

“You got it. All they knows is bullshit.”

After they left, the bathroom was quiet as a cemetery.
Ruben was so full of shit, his tonsils were brown. And he just wanted to take advantage of a “free cunt.” But maybe he didn’t. Maybe he liked her for
her personality. But suppose she didn’t have a personality. He hated her. She loved him so much it hurt
.

Sonny knew all the graffiti by heart because she wrote most of it, using different-colored markers and disguising her handwriting so no one would know. But above the bowl a new entry had been scrawled over her old standard:

GOOD GIRLS GO OUT ON A DATE,
GO HOME, GO TO BED.
NICE GIRLS GO OUT ON A DATE,
GO TO BED, GO HOME.
TRAMPS DO IT ANYWHERE-EVEN IN THE ALLEY

She immediately recognized the shade of lipstick. Look who’s calling who a tramp. It was like Audrey Hepburn calling Marilyn Monroe flat-chested. The only thing that surprised Sonny was the speed of the Gooch’s meanness. And she was always trying to be friendly to her without being a leech about it. But the Gooch would never accept her. She did it with doorknobs, fire hydrants, and pogo sticks.
Was that possible?

Sonny turned on the water faucets so she wouldn’t feel so lonesome and blue, like that French guy she saw on TV who had to go to prison for life just because he stole a piece of bread. She applied more makeup. But it didn’t help.

She walked out of the bathroom. As she passed her own classroom, Sonny crouched on her knees. Next, she passed Mary Kelly’s classroom. The teacher was writing something on the blackboard, but Mary was whispering to Marilyn, who sat behind her. They did not notice Sonny. Several doors down, in Room 317, Ruben Ortega sat in the fourth seat, second row.
God, is he gorgeous
. He looked out of the window as the teacher wrote a math formula on the blackboard. She whizzed by so he wouldn’t think she was spying on him.
Maybe he liked her for her personality, if she had one. Yoo hoo, I love you!
Ruben looked up momentarily and Sonny fled down the long hallway. She peeked into the CRMD
class. It was all broken-cuckoo-clocksville. Carlos slept in the back of the room. Hansy concentrated intently on a heart she had cut out of a piece of red felt. Even though Valentine’s Day was two months away, they started early. That’s how slow they were. The teacher sat at her desk reading a psychology book. Sonny came to D.B.’s class. She had her head lowered over a social studies textbook with a romantic comic book inside of it. The door was open.

“Psssst,” Sonny whispered to get her attention. D.B. was so preoccupied that she did not stir. Sonny tried again, this time a little bit louder. “PSSSST!” D.B. still did not look up but the girl in the first seat of her row did. Sonny pointed to D.B. and the girl turned around and called her. She looked up surprised. The girl pointed to the doorway. Sonny waved.

“What do you want?” D.B. mouthed in an exaggerated way.

Sonny indicated that she should come out. D.B. pointed to the teacher, a heavy-set man with a receding hairline and chalk on the sleeve of his jacket. He looked in her direction several times, but each time Sonny ducked out of sight. She then pointed to her mouth and mimed the act of talking with her hand. D.B. nodded reluctantly. She raised her hand and when the teacher called her, she said, “Can I please have the pass to the ladies’ room, Mr. O’Brien?”

He gave her a piece of cardboard stenciled with the word PASS.

“Okay, what do you want?” D.B. asked when they were several feet from her classroom.

“I just wanted to talk,” Sonny said, looking down at her feet.

“About what?” D.B. demanded.

“Just talk. I’m feeling sort of funny,” she said, shifting her weight from foot to foot.

“You mean, you dragged me out of class just to say that?” She stared at Sonny like she was an escaped orangutan from the Bronx Zoo. “What do you mean, funny?”

“Well, you know, uh, Ruben …” Sonny said.

“Yeah?” D.B.’s eyes lit up with sudden interest.

“Have you ever frenched?” she said, biting her lip.

“Of course!” D.B. exclaimed. “A million times. Haven’t you?”

“Yeah … But it doesn’t seem like fun or anything, the guy putting his tongue in and moving it so slimy around like that.”

“You’re shitting me!” D.B. cried. “You really don’t know anything, do you? Listen, why don’t you come over to my house after school and we’ll talk. So you know your twat from your belly button. What do you say?”

“Sure,” Sonny said. “And can we walk to your house together?”

“I just live two blocks away,” D.B. said. “We’ll meet in front of my class at three.” D.B. turned and walked toward her class.
Hey, do you like me? Huh? For my personality?
Sonny watched D.B. until she entered her classroom, hardly believing it. D.B. was the first woman Sonny could talk to, really, about woman sort of things. And she wanted her to come over to her house. Mary and Dot didn’t have any idea about such woman sorts of things. As for her mother, Sonny just
couldn’t
talk to her. Besides, she didn’t probably even know about them. They were really private. She had so much she wanted to talk about that she could hardly wait.
Maybe D.B. even wanted to be her best friend
. Then she could tell her everything that was so personal she’d die if anybody found out.

When Sonny returned to class, Mrs. King couldn’t touch her. Neither could the guys. They were such
infants
. When she accidentally brushed against Lenny’s desk, he wiped the spot off with his sleeve and passed it to Harvey Roth, who made a horrible face and passed it on.
Leprosy is crawling all over Sonny. There goes her fingernail into her ginger ale. There goes her eyeball into your highball. There goes her skin-that’s why she’s so thin
. It was just a song. Who cared anyway? The girls whispered mean things loud enough so she could hear. But all of them were immature, insecure, vomitatious, armpit gangrene. The world would be a much better
place if they all fell into quicksand and contracted paralytic polio. As for Mrs. King, who sat there with her arms crossed like Big Chief Sitting Bullcrap, Sonny hoped she would die from the one-handed clap or rectal cancer, which she heard was the slowest and most painful way to go. She didn’t care one iota of a bit about the whole lot of them. She was going to have a woman-to-woman talk with D.B. who was mature, understanding, and had bigger tits than her mother and Mrs. King combined.