Goldfish

Michelle was the kind of kid my mom didn’t want me playing with. He knees were always dirty, and she said “shit!” and “damn it!” whenever the mood struck. Once, I saw her kill a toad with stick. Her father was dead.

One afternoon, Michelle came to my door with a plastic shovel in her hand, the kind you use at the beach.

“Come on,” she whispered, motioning for me to follow her. We ran through the patch of woods connecting our yards.

In her backyard she knelt down and began to dig until a hill of sandy dirt formed. She reached into the hole and pulled out a small fish, its eyes like plastic discs.

“It was my brother’s,” she said.

A call from inside the house prompted her to toss the goldfish back into the hole and quickly bury it.

I ran home, and never told a soul.

Canada

Timmy Paine tossed his backpack onto the bedroom floor. Crammed with pajamas and socks, he struggled to get the zipper closed. Just as he tossed the bag over his shoulder, his mother came in. “Where are you going?” she said. “There’s no school. It’s Saturday.” Tim was only in the second grade, but he knew what day it was. “I’m going to Canada,” he said. When his mother didn’t reply, he offered, “There’s polar bears there. And I won’t have to listen to Jeff. He says I talk like a girl.” Jeff was Tim’s older brother. He was in the fifth grade and knew just about everything. “It will take a long time to walk to Canada,” his mother said. “Why don’t I give you a ride? We can get ice cream on the way.” Relieved, Tim handed her his backpack. “Can you carry this? It’s kind of heavy.”

Dead Girl

Outside the funeral home I heard a boy say that she had fallen off the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. Broken her neck. She never knew what hit her, he said. I was 13. The dead girl had been a junior in high school.

The line to see her snaked around the building. Boys with long hair, wearing ties they’d borrowed from their fathers, and girls with thick blue eyeshadow smoked cigarettes in the parking lot. Someone passed a bottle of Jack. There were no adults there, just very old kids.

She almost looked like she was sleeping, except that she was too still. There was a puffiness to her face that didn’t seem quite right. They had dressed her for the prom; the crinoline sleeves of her gown like poofs of pink cotton candy. Some kids prayed, but I couldn’t. I just stared at the roses in her corsage.

Corner Store

When you walked into Rocco’s the first thing you noticed was the smell. All Italian stores smell this way, at least the real ones, like warm cheese and cured meats. These smells still transport me to my old neighborhood, where the houses stood just feet apart and mothers hollered from their porches.

Rocco’s was owned by an older couple, originally from Sicily. Their son was a doctor and they had a newspaper clipping about him under glass at the counter. Sometimes on weekends you’d see him there, wearing a stained white apron at the deli.

The freezer was in the back. There were rabbits wrapped in thick butcher paper, whole chickens, veal and geese. But the best things were the ices: little cardboard cups of joy that came in a rainbow of flavors. For a quarter you could get one, then sit out front eating it with a wooden spoon.

Cat in the Wall

“How’d he get in there?” said Amy, peering into the opening in the basement wall with her hands cupped around her eyes.

“Got me,” I said, taking a look. Barney, our 18-pound Maine Coon, peered up at me with his yellow eyes. The cat had squeezed his massive frame through an opening in the wall that an animal half his size would have had trouble with. He was trapped.

“What are we going to do?” said Amy. “We can’t just leave him there.”

A metallic aroma, the scent of panic, perfumed the damp cellar air. She was right. We couldn’t leave him. But we wouldn’t get him out without tearing down the wall, and we were only summer tenants.

The cat let out a mournful meow.

“Barney’s going to die!” Amy cried.

So I brushed the tears away from her little cheeks and grabbed the hammer from the toolbox.

Magic Show

“Come on! It’s starting!” Greg, my neighbor, hollered from the sidewalk.

“What’s starting?” I said. Behind him, groups of kids hurried down the street.

We’d moved to the neighborhood just weeks before. I was shy; a bookworm, waiting for school to start. Greg was the only kid I’d met.

“The magic show!” said Greg, exasperated. “At Mr. Hale’s house!”

At the end of the Hales’ dirt driveway, rows of kids were seated on the grass.

White-haired and very thin, Mr. Hale wore a black top-hat and tails. In his hand he gripped a wand, producing doves from an urn. He asked for a volunteer to be sawed in half. I raised my hand. No one breathed.

“Just relax,” Mr. Hale whispered. “There’s nothing to it.” I got into the box and held my breath.

A collective gasp went up. And when I emerged in one piece, I was a star.

Ice Cream Truck

You still see them in the mill cities: ice cream trucks trawl the neighborhoods like hulking beasts seeking kids with loose change. Their knife-sharp melodies perforate our thick summer evenings like an ice pick passes through butter.

When I was a kid, that music was a call to run, to beg your mother for a dollar and hurry into the street. Today hardly anyone comes.

Our ice cream truck is yellow. Cheerful decals decorate its sides. The driver, a slender Vietnamese man, speaks little English but smiles as he passes. The speakers on his truck blare “Silent Night” and “Easter Parade” because he’s unaware, or perhaps doesn’t care, that the songs are out of season. We joke that he got the soundtrack cheap, but in our neighborhood those tunes have become the soundtrack of our after-supper-time summer nights.

Alone, our Asian ice cream man rolls on, sometimes long into October.