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Dancing for My
   Mother

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          There is a great tree in front of the house. And there is a one-car garage in the back, a cinder road leading to it. It is an ugly house covered in dark brown shingle siding with peeling white trim around the windows. The loft has only the single bed. Your clothes are given the space of one drawer in your sisters’ room downstairs. The loft is scary at night. It has no guardrails around the stairwell and you are always afraid of falling down the well and killing yourself. You have a chamber pot under your bed, which you use last thing before pulling up the covers and falling asleep. You’re not wetting as much now. Your mother has quit making you wear diapers. What accidents you have you clean up yourself, wiping the spot with a rag, hanging your wet pajamas on the headboard. Usually by bedtime your sheets and pajama bottoms are dry or almost dry. Dry enough.

          After the Christmas break you are enrolled in your new school. The teacher is nothing like Mrs. Cima. She doesn’t seem to care much for kids, especially ten-year-old boys. She has a peachwood paddle drilled with holes to make it smart. Any kid acting up will get spanked. It happens once to you for turning around in your seat and talking to notorious Raymond Hill, a bicycle thief and tough guy, but not as tough as his cousin Bucky Hill whom you simply adore. The teacher pulls you out of your chair and tells you she is not going to tell you again about talking in class. You can’t recall she’s ever had to tell you before, but her hand pulling your arm makes you instantly angry and you twist away and yell, Lemme alone! She swats your backside with the paddle and Christ almighty the thing stings! She orders you back to your desk and tells you to keep your mouth shut. You don’t argue. Raymond pats you on the shoulder and whispers, Fuck her. A few days later he is getting paddled for being bad, and as the teacher swings, Raymond cocks his foot backwards, the paddle hitting the heel of his shoe and shattering. Don’t worry, says the teacher, my husband can make me another.

          The winter gym class for boys is wrestling. The wrestling coach teaches the basic stuff, headlocks, cradles, body scissors, hip throws, takedowns, escapes, reversals. For the first week the class practices these moves. The second week the boys are paired by size and urged to have at it. To your amazed surprise you are good at wrestling and win your first matches easily. You’re very fast and fairly strong, maybe because you box with Pappas and shovel so much coal? Coach calls you wiry, a term you’ve never heard before, but it sounds like a compliment, so you’re glad and you like Coach and wrestling a lot. Every day that you compete you win. No one your size can beat you. It’s really marvelous. You’ve never been able to beat anyone at anything. But in wrestling you’ve found your forte. You start calling yourself Lou Thez Junior. The other boys call you Lou Thez Junior, too. Your confidence grows. Boys like Bucky Hill and his cousin Raymond start hanging around with you. Bucky is the best wrestler in fifth grade. He has also won all his matches. He is slightly taller than you and slim, but not as slim as you. Coach says you are well-enough matched and he wants to see you on the mat.

          You do and you don’t want to wrestle Bucky. You look up to him. You think he’s handsome and you like the way his hair curls behind his ears. You try to train your hair to do the same thing, but it always wants to curl out rather than in. The day the two of you wrestle the sound of the boys shouting your names is electrifying. Bucky and you throw each other and gather up points, do headlocks, hip throws, side mounts and escapes. The match is dead even and in the midst of it you have the sense that you can beat Bucky if you really want to. But you don’t really want to. You want him to like you. You want to keep him as a friend, and if you beat him he may not forgive you, and you don’t think Raymond will like you either. And so in the end you let up and Bucky wins on points. He might have beaten you anyway, what do you know? When the match is over he hugs you. You wish he was your brother. Later, he talks about the fall season of flag football. He will be the quarterback and captain and he wants you on his team.

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