ROGER TRIES IT. He tries to talk without moving his lips.
“I hope Davy gets killed in Vietnam,” he says, pushing the words through his closed mouth.
“Don’t say things like that,” Roger says in his regular voice. He gives Mike Nesmith a hard shake. “Don’t ever say that again.”
Mike Nesmith stares back at him with his heavy-lidded eyes.
ONE OF THE THINGS that his mother always reminds him of is that even though his ancestors are Italian, he is American. “We all are,” she says. “You and me and Daddy and Davy and Debbie. We’re American.” Even when he had to do a report in school last year called “My Heritage,” his mother wanted him to write about living in Connecticut and the big Fourth of July party she threw every year.
“But I want to write about Mama Jo,” Roger said. He stared down at the yellow paper with blue lines, his pencil poised over it. “I want to write about being Italian.”
His mother had looked at him with a hard, even gaze. “But we’re American, sweetie,” she’d said. “Doesn’t Davy play football and baseball? Don’t I make the yummiest pies?”
“Yes,” he said, wondering what pie and football had to do with anything.
He wanted his mother to praise him, like she praised Davy. So he wrote about living in Connecticut and the Fourth of July party and all the things she told him made them American. For his last line, Roger wrote: I am American through and through and proud. His mother smiled when she read it and told him it was the best paper he’d ever handed in. But the day they read their papers out loud, it was Gilda DiCaprio who had the best paper, and Gilda wrote about her Italian grandmother and helping her make meatballs. Gilda’s last line was: Even though I live in America, I will always be Italian in my heart. The teacher actually got teary-eyed when Gilda read that, and the whole class applauded. Except Roger. He stared at his own stupid paper and tried very hard not to rip it up.
THE DAY THE TWO SOLDIERS in their neat, crisp uniforms ring the doorbell with the news, Roger is home from school sick with tonsillitis. Golf balls, Dr. DiMarco said when he came to the house the night before, swinging his black bag. Tonsils as big as golf balls. Roger’s mother made the doctor coffee and waited outside the bedroom door holding a cup of it for him while he examined Roger’s throat. She put on perfume, too, which made Roger’s throat hurt even more.
After Dr. DiMarco gave him a shot of penicillin, he patted Roger’s head and told him to sleep. Then he went and sat with his mother in the kitchen, the sound of their voices rising and falling lulling Roger to sleep. In the morning, he tried to get his mother to play Crazy Eights with him, but she said she wasn’t in the mood.
That is why Roger is on the couch under one of the afghans Mama Jo crocheted watching Jeopardy! when the doorbell rings. Art Fleming is one of his heroes. Roger believes Art Fleming knows all of the answers that the contestants say in the form of a question. He believes that Art Fleming is maybe the smartest man in the world.
The category is “Fairytale Heroes.”
“In this fairy tale,” Art Fleming says, “she restores Ariel’s voice.”
“Roger,” his mother calls from somewhere in the house. “Are you too sick to get the door?”
Roger wants Paul Marx from Phoenix, Arizona, to win, mostly because he has two x’s in his biographical information but also because he is an amateur ventriloquist. During the interview portion of the program, Art Fleming asked Paul Marx to talk without moving his lips, and Paul Marx said: What is the art of ventriloquism, Art? His lips really didn’t move, unlike Davy’s.
Paul Marx doesn’t buzz in fast enough and the three-day winner answers correctly.
The doorbell rings again.
“Roger?” his mother says. “Tell whoever it is that I’m busy.”
She is vacuuming. She vacuums all the time, rolling the baby-blue Electrolux around the house with a vengeance.
“I’ll take ‘Fairytale Heroes’ for three hundred,” the three-day winner is saying.
Roger sighs and gets up from the couch. He has on his old fuzzy footy pajamas, red ones with cowboys and Indians on them. They don’t really fit anymore; there is a hole in the feet part and his big toes poke out. He will always remember that he was wearing those pajamas that day, and that as soon as the men left he went into Davy’s bedroom, took them off, and cut them into pieces with the scissors in the desk drawer.
Just as he opens the door, he hears the vacuum turning on.
Surprised to see Army men there, he thinks maybe the Russians have attacked Connecticut and the Army is here to evacuate them.
“Should I pack my stuff?” Roger asks them. He tries to think what he should take and what he should leave behind. Mike Nesmith he will take. Underwear. Socks. His toothbrush.