I don’t know if my mother was trying to prove her point or to simply vent steam, but she rammed her bowling bag into Mr. Liverpool’s back, repeating mercilessly with each consecutive blow, “Now wha’ you do! Now wha’ you do?! Eh? Eh? You call a super tendant?”

Mr. Liverpool, understandably outraged, for enclosed in that red, white and blue segmented leather bag, was a fourteen pound bowling ball, stood to demand, “Leave this office immediately!” He trembled uncontrollably, which made him look a decade older in the span of a minute.

“Olga, please, calm down you, calm down you,” pleaded Ursula, thinking that maybe if she resorted to my mother’s syntax, her words might sink in more.

Cecilia acted as if nothing were going on. How one ought to behave was to her nonsensically abstract. She took people for the way they were and never expected variations of thought or temper from them. Cecilia, I thought, would make a good wife.

“I pay for dis office, it belong to me as much as it belon’ to you! Who you tink you are?!”

My mother did everything she could to get out of paying taxes, yet everything public, I noticed, belonged to her. She crossed her hands over her abdomen and concentrated.

“Mom!” I exclaimed, fearing the worst was to come and it did.

“Mótina!” gasped Cecilia, even she blushed this time. I guess as my mother’s own flesh and blood, she felt somewhat organically responsible for what had just occurred.

“You wan’ I do again?”

My mother now defied all of us in the office and I think she did try indeed, aiming her posterior towards Mr. Liverpool who had taken refuge behind a waste basket filled with reams of yellow legal paper.

Mr. Liverpool quietly mentioned that if I were too indisposed to seek help from a school authority, that Cecilia easily could have, and it was not proper conduct for a schoolgirl to have kicked a fallen boy in the head. With that, he gently asked if he could be of further assistance to us.

My mother said, “Yes. You keep you big words to youse’f.”

Outside, our mother gave us a choice. Feeling that she had already paid for our public transportation in her income taxes, the ones that she deducted to nearly zero the last few years, and thus unwilling to repay a supplement for car fuel, either we had to ask Barry Ramsey’s mother if she would give us a ride to school with him, or get up at five in the morning and walk.

Cecilia and I chose to walk.

CHAPTER 14

“To my biby I am prou’ of, you work very har’, you deser’ wha’ you get.”

My mother lifted her glass and, it almost goes without saying, her chin in the air. Fishing nets were strung up on the walls around us as though we were part of the catch, (clients, or suckers as my mother would put it when she would have to pay for anything). One dollar bills with signatures on them were tacked on the wall behind the cashier. My mother looked at these with distaste.