F.I.S.H by Margaret Laureys: Part-2

My Uncle Joe lived in the school district and it was arranged for Sharon to catch the bus from his house. I knew nothing of her sexual identity struggle, but I sure felt sorry for her now. Uncle Joe’s house was pigsty. He was actually a great-uncle, my maternal grandmother’s retarded brother. Mom brought him to our house once a week to bath him and do his laundry. Otherwise, Uncle Joe sat on the porch with his hand his pants shouting at traffic or in his house shouting at wrestlers on the TV. His filthy house provided work for some of the more desperate FISH clients, whom Mom hired to clean, but it could never be a pleasant place for a teenage girl to live, boyish or not.

I think of this girl often now because of the way my sisters’ respective attitudes changed in their adult years. Cecilia went to art school in New York and developed the open-minded ethos of the single, city chick. Kathleen moved to Oregon and became a born again Christian. Her take on homosexuality is right down the line with her fundamentalist church: it’s a sin because the bible says so. The paradigms of acceptable behavior changed with age and geography. Everything changes – politics, culture, and media tropes on tolerance. Only the compassion that animates such things is constant. Mom was constant.

She forbade the term “white trash” at a time when most people were just learning that it wasn’t ok to say “nigger.” The whole country had just finished watching Roots and was engaged in a mass self-flagellation about slavery. The guilt was followed by a glut of sitcoms telling us how to see blacks in a way that could make us feel good about ourselves again. We could watch Archie Bunker say racist things to the Jefferson’s and know that we weren’t racist because we understood that the canned laughter was at Archie’s expense. We knew our cues. Likewise, Goodtimes’ introduced us to ghetto cool and told us it was right to repeat after JJ, “Dy-no-mite!” But there was nothing on TV telling us it wasn’t ok to despise poor, ignorant white people. I didn’t even see any poor whites on TV. I only saw them on Allen Street, the poorest street in town where people lived in two family dwellings without garages and where disassembled cars rusted on view. My schoolmate Missy Kappes lived in one of those houses.

The Kappes were one of those poor families who had not even ethnicity to help. When my classmates bragged about being Irish or Italian (usually Italian), Missy Kappes had nothing to contribute. Her family descended from various lines of intersecting poor for so long that they had become what my father called “mutts.” This seemed to degrade them as much as poverty in a town where there was already little money and ethnicity became a proxy for class. It didn’t help that the Kappes’s never went to church. Even a Baptist Church would’ve helped, though of course, it was best to be Catholic.

My best friend, Debbie Fiorello, had the sort of pedigree that counted in our town. She was a full-blooded Italian christened at St. Michaels. Debbie’s father was an auto mechanic who wore his hair in a doo-wop like Frankie Valley. Her grandfather hailed from the province of Caserta, in Southern Italy, as did my grandparents. Many of the town’s people were from Caserta and many, likewise, were related. The only relatives the Kappes had were packed into the same house. Or half a house. An old lady with hundreds of cats lived in the other half. And she was probably a Baptist.

Missy achieved a certain degree of fame when, at twelve, she developed the largest bust in the school. Boys began to notice her and the girls followed suit. We invited her to spin the bottle parties, but I noticed that I was one of the only kids who invited her home for dinner. Debbie Fiorella once told me that she wasn’t supposed to play with Missy. I assumed it was because Missy’s brother had gotten a girl pregnant and it was bit of a scandal. But it wasn’t the just the brother. It was Missy’s whole family.

Whenever Andy Lamberto taunted Missy about her breasts he finished her off with the phrase, “poor white trash.”

“You’re just poor white trash. Everybody knows that.”

I knew it, of course. I just didn’t know why “white” was part of the equation. We were all white and none of us knew any black people, rich or poor. Yet I did appreciate the problem of Missy’s being white without being one of us. The Kappes were so out of the loop that they weren’t even on FISH’s list for free turkeys. It was just as well, as I visited the house once and saw that nobody there was of a mind to play Thanksgiving anyway.

Missy had invited me to sleep over. I loved sleepovers and prided myself on the honor of always being invited for them at the Fiorella’s house. Debbie’s mother provided junk food and let us plays Nintendo in the den. There was only one TV at Missy’s house and I saw instantly that we weren’t getting anywhere near it. Her two teenage brothers, grandfather, and a middle-aged man who appeared to be an uncle of some sort were camped in front of it watching a car chase show, probably Starsky and Hutch. There were plenty of men, I noted, but none was the father. Missy said she didn’t have one.

There was an overweight woman in a tube top, which I remember because I wore one too. I always had trouble with tube tops because my chest was too flat too keep them up. This woman had no such problem; cigarette ash fell six inches deep in her ponderous cleavage. She looked too old for the brothers but too young for the uncle, though I think she belonged to him because that’s who she was screaming at. She told him that he nigger-lipped her cigarette. That started it. The n-word came up now like a drunkard’s hiccup. She was a nigger lover. He was as lazy as a no good nigger. She’d know it if he were to beat her like a nigger and she’d deserve it too, the no good nigger bitch.

I did not think “racist” when I heard the n-word. I thought “white trash.” I’d noticed that upstanding people – even those who might secretly regard blacks as inferior – were careful not to use that word. It could brand them as trailer park and that was the lowest caste of all, so low it eluded even the liberal’s scale for tolerance. Americans may forgive a black man for anti-Semitism or homophobia because there’s a mandate on compassion for minorities; but there’s no way to pat yourself on the back when it’s po’ white trash. People like the Kappes had no claim. On anything.

Missy’s mother sat at the kitchen table drinking and playing cards with the littlest brother, Charlie. I knew Charlie from school and while I ordinarily avoided second graders as too uncool for my fifth grade self, I suddenly gravitated to him. I invited him to come upstairs and play with us, which infuriated Missy. She wanted to fight with the men for TV time. I’d already seen the girlfriend throw a butt at the screen and declare it “the most stupidest, dumb show” she’d ever seen. I think the poor thing wanted to watch something smarter, like Laverne and Shirley. The man told her to shut her ugly, whore mouth or go home and watch her own fucking TV. Then he took a swig from the bottle.

I’d seen men drink before, but not like this. Dad did his drinking out of site, at the bar, after a full day’s work in the butcher’s room. Then he came home, alone, watched the news and went to bed. Adults didn’t gather to drink at my house unless there were a party, usually a First Communion or Confirmation party. The Italians on Mom’s side gathered at the buffet table and the Irish on Dad’s at the bar. It was festive and followed a certain protocol. The Kappes adults were drunk en masse on an ordinary Friday night. I was also perplexed by the way Missy’s teenage brothers drank openly in front of the TV. Teenagers might have come to my house to drink and smoke pot with my big brothers, but they snuck it, and getting over on our innocent mother was part of the game.
There was no game at the Kappes house, because there were no rules.

There wasn’t even any food. That floored me because I knew certain basics – bread, milk, pasta, rice – were cheap. Mom always had generic, economy sized batches in stock. She used stale bread to stretch her casseroles so that however bland, there was enough to offer any kid who visited. She doubled a gallon of whole milk by mixing it with powdered milk and water. I assumed all people, even poor people, had such staples in the house. Yet when I asked for something to eat, Missy had to turn and ask her mother for a few dollars to go to the Quick Check. Her mother told her to fetch a pack of cigarettes while she was at it and began to root through her bag for change which, of course, was missing. Another scream match erupted, this one so loud that old grandpa had to rise from his seat to be heard. He cussed as badly as his grandsons.

“Forget it,” I told Missy. “We can eat at my house. Why don’t we go to my house?”

Things began turn when I realized that we could do just that. I got it into my head that I didn’t have to stay there the whole night and following morning. I could escape. Missy seemed to think that if she could just feed me, I would stay. She made her mother look harder for some money. Mrs. Kappes went upstairs and then, on the way down, fell plop on her ass. She slid down the stairs laughing. The woman went from cussing over stolen change one minute to laughing about her fall the next. The whole family laughed, which Missy took to be a bit of comedic respite. “See,” she seemed to want to say, “We’re having fun now. You can relax.” Instead, I insisted on telephoning my mother.