He smiled.
At everyone.
The New Boy
My classmates tripped all over themselves offering to help “the new boy,” volunteering to show Antonio around the school and where to put his jacket and how to maneuver the cafeteria line and how to interpret the schedule and, honestly, I think they would have taught him how to walk and talk if he had needed it.
“He’s so different—”
“Mysterious—”
“Do you see how he smiles?”
Yes, I saw how he smiled, and I was disappointed.
He was in our room for nearly ten minutes before he recognized me.
“Hey,” he said. “This your class?”
“Yep.”
And then someone nudged him, eager to show him something, and he turned away.
Margie snagged my arm. “You know him? How do you know him?” She sounded as if she were accusing me of keeping him a secret.
“Neighbor,” I said, watching him being ushered across the room by Arif and Renaldo, with Claire, Audrey, and Ruby trailing behind.
Margie was affronted. “You never said! You never mentioned him!”
“He hasn’t been here long.”
Miss Lightstone seated him at the one empty desk on the far side of the room, near the bulletin board. Just before lunch, Audrey asked Miss Lightstone if Antonio could sit near her, because she was “very good at helping new people.” Ruby said that she, too, was very good at helping new people.
Antonio seemed dazed by all the attention, but not so dazed that he forgot to smile. He offered everyone the gift of that smile, everyone in equal measure.
I was feeling grouchy about that, but when the dismissal bell rang at the end of the day, Antonio made a point of finding me and asking me if I would show him where to catch the bus.
“Sure,” I said, aware that other students—Margie and Audrey and Claire and Ruby especially—were surprised, momentarily frozen in place.
He joined me in the bus line and he sat beside me on the bus.
That was no small thing.
Normally, I sat with Margie or one of the other girls. Boys and girls did not usually sit together, and I briefly worried that other boys would make fun of him, but they did not.
He told me he didn’t want to get off at the wrong stop.
The next morning, he waited in his driveway until I came out of my house, and we walked to the bus stop together.
He sat beside me on the bus.
When we reached school, he said, “Okay, now I know how to do it.”
Renaldo greeted him and then a few other students joined them and they all walked into school together and that was the last day Antonio sat beside me on the bus or waited for me in the morning.
The Smile
A person was more than a smile. I knew that.
I knew that, and still I was mesmerized by Antonio’s smile—the way it began slowly and then got wider and wider—and I attributed all sorts of positive things to his character because of that smile.
He must be a good person.
He must be happy.
He must be kind.
He must be thoughtful.
He must be smart.
He must like me.
He didn’t smile all the time, or else he would have appeared goofy, like Renaldo. Sometimes Renaldo was funny and sometimes not, but if I was around him too much, I got a headache.
I did not get a headache around Antonio.
The Moon and the Lake
On the bulletin board, a new word: lunar.
Beside the word: a photo of a creamy full moon against a dark sky, reflected in a lake below.
Beneath the word and the photo, a new first line: “Rendi was not sure how long the moon had been missing.”2
“Lunar refers to the moon,” Margie said.
“Everyone knows that,” Freddy felt compelled to add.
Arif studied the board. “And the moon is in the photo.”
“And the moon,” Renaldo added, “is in that first line of a book.”
Freddy approached the board. “Except that in the book the moon is missing: ‘Rendi was not sure how long the moon had been missing.’”
Like me, Antonio was watching and listening, but said nothing.
Midway through attendance-taking, Margie jumped up. “That new image with the moon—see? It’s also a reflection—just like the other picture with the trees and the lake.” She sat down, cradling her head in her hands. “What does it all mean?”
Renaldo adopted a stern voice and demanded, “Who put it there?” He drummed his fingers loudly on his desk. “Did you, Miss Lightstone?”
She raised her eyes from the attendance book, blinked a few times, glanced at the board, and murmured, “Hmm.”
The rest of the day was a blur of books and assignments and in the midst of it all, an awareness that Antonio was accumulating fans, layers of students surrounding him wherever he went.
At dismissal, he was whisked aboard the bus by several boys and they all sat in the back, talking and laughing like a band of chattering crows.
It wasn’t until I got off the bus that I remembered we were expecting company that day.
Uncle and Auntie Pasta
Each September, my father’s aunt and uncle made a pilgrimage from New York to our home in Ohio. With them, they brought the auntie’s sour mood and the ingredients to make the uncle’s pasta, which he could not live without. He would not eat “store bought”—it had to be fresh—and because of their pasta obsession we privately referred to them as Uncle and Auntie Pasta.
They also brought two presents for me. The presents were always the same: a pair of white socks with lacy cuffs (the sort of socks I wore when I was four) and a contribution to the money box they had given me when I was born. The money box was a square tin painted with red and yellow flowers. In the top was a narrow slot. During each visit, Uncle Pasta would make a great show of presenting me with a coin to put in the box. When I was little, it was a nickel. Later, a dime. Then a quarter.
“Save, save, save!” Uncle Pasta ordered as he handed me the coin each year.
One time after they’d left, Mom said, “Maybe by the time you are all grown up, you can buy yourself a cup of coffee with those savings.”
To prepare for the visits from the auntie and uncle, I cleared space in my dresser and closet so they could have my room, and I slept on a cot in the hall.
“The bed, it is too small,” the auntie complained.
“Too lumpy, oh, my back,” moaned the uncle.
My mother conveniently had to work late most nights that the auntie and uncle were in town.
The auntie made pasta for lunch and dinner, for this was all the uncle would eat, and it is what the rest of us ate, too. Flour littered the counters; sauce splattered the stove and floor.
“You need to learn to make pasta,” the auntie told me, but when I offered to help, the auntie said, “No, no, I make this. Uncle only likes my pasta.”
When the auntie and uncle were not making or eating pasta, they liked to visit. “Let’s visit a while. Talk. Catch up.”
First they would tell Dad that he needed to get some help raising the povera ragazza (me). “If your wife has to work so much, you can’t do this on your own,” they told him. “You need some help. You need someone to teach her things.”