The Radical Element

“‘Yet here’s a spot.’” I recognized Sandra’s Ethel Barrymore voice immediately as she quoted the text.

  “Ye-e-e-s,” Mr. Pendergrass said slowly. “Now, class, let’s talk about . . .”

  But Sandra was now out of her seat, staring off at a space in the distance and moving slowly toward the front of the class like a guilt-ridden sleepwalker. “‘Out, damned spot! Out, I say!’” she whispered furiously.

  Mr. Pendergrass practically jumped back in alarm. “Excuse me, Miss . . .” He looked frantically down at his roll call, clearly trying to remember Sandra’s name.

  “‘One: two; why, then, ’tis time to do it.’” Sandra continued to walk slowly and regally to the front of the class. I saw more than one classmate fighting back a smile, including Tomás Chavez, whose reactions I noticed more than most. “‘Hell is murky!’” Sandra suddenly screamed as she turned around and stared at a point above everyone’s heads, before making her voice soft once more. “‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’” At this point, she turned her head slowly and gave what could only be described as a chilling stare at Mr. Pendergrass.

  “That’s why I always rely on the cleaning power of Tide!” With a snap of her head, she was facing the class again and had suddenly adopted a cheerful midwestern drawl along with a Pepsodent smile. “Tide gets clothes cleaner than any soap! And we are so lucky to have this wonderful product as sponsors of the Macbeth family. It’s on your shelves at the grocer’s. And if it’s not there, ask him to put it there!” She placed her hand on the hip of her belted skirt and froze in place.

  Most of my classmates had already burst out laughing, instantly recognizing the riff on the laundry detergent commercials that Red Skelton did almost every week as part of his shows. I laughed along with everyone else and allowed myself another covert glance at Tomás, whose lips were parted in a grin that made me feel things.

  Like, for one of the first times that I could remember, disappointment that nobody besides Sandra knew I had anything to do with the class disruption.

  I watched Mr. Pendergrass’s mustache wiggle up and down in anger, looking incongruously like Groucho Marx’s eyebrows, as he told Sandra to immediately pack up her things and take herself to the principal’s office. I didn’t want to get in trouble, wasn’t brave enough like she was, and yet . . .

  And yet, maybe I wanted the credit for coming up with the bit in the first place. Maybe I wanted one of those laughs to be directed at me. Maybe, most of all, I wanted to finally have the discussion with my mother. The “Why, Rosemary?” and the “How ill-mannered, Rosemary!” and, most hopeful of all, the “You are clearly not cut out to be presented as a deb, Rosemary, and will obviously be an embarrassment to me and our family, so we can just forget that whole thing.”

  But a much more realistic part of me knew that, barring some sort of tragic bus accident, my mother would not let me out of this stupid debutante ball even if she had to drag me there in chains. It was too important to her. In fact, I’m sure she’d pictured my coming-out party as soon as the doctor had informed her that she’d just had a baby girl.

  After school, as I waited for the light at the crosswalk to change, I eyed the bus driving past me. Then I remembered that it was Monday. I Love Lucy was on. Maiming myself could wait.

  Mrs. Lucy Ricardo’s impending shenanigans were the only thing that propelled me to our block of crowded brownstones, through our front gate, up our stoop, and through our apartment’s door.

  Because Mondays also meant something else.

  “Hurry up now, Rosemary,” Mother said as she came out of our parlor to greet me, nearly bumping into the seventeenth-century baroque side table that was one of the only pieces of her inheritance that she’d managed to salvage. It was huge and ungainly, especially for the small sitting room, and I’d never quite figured out why she had chosen to keep that piece out of all of them. But maybe nobody had wanted to buy it. “Didn’t Mrs. Fenton insist she would drop you from the class if you were late one more time?”

  If only that were more than an empty threat, I’d figure out a way to inspire a massive subway strike.

  I hated cotillion classes with Mrs. Fenton, a woman who glided like a swan, chirped like a sparrow, and seemed determined to live her life like she was some sort of a decorative bird instead of a grown person. Worst of all, my mother paid her to try to teach me to do the same. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I didn’t tap into my inner hummingbird during the waltz or peck elegantly at my salad with the correct fork, but judging by the severity of Mrs. Fenton’s reaction, I’d guess something on the scale of Pompeii.

  “Would that be such a bad —” I started.

  “Not today, Rosemary. You’ve made your views on this dance quite clear, and so have I. Let’s spare both of us the irritation, and, please, just get to your class. We both know you are going to anyway.” Mother pointed a finger out the door.

  Frankly, she was right. I did always do what she asked eventually, no matter how I felt about it. The sense of familial duty that was hammered into me from an early age, coupled with my mother’s formidable personality, were too intimidating to overcome — especially in combination.

  I turned around and marched back out onto the street, taking my frustration out on a stray baseball that one of the Powell boys next door must’ve forgotten. I kicked it all the way to the entrance of the subway that would lead me from Brooklyn into Manhattan, where all the other debutantes naturally lived and, so, where Mrs. Fenton could make a living waxing poetic about cutlery.

  The cotillion classes took place in the basement of a church downtown. There were eight of us “lucky” eighteen-year-olds, forced to partner up to learn the waltz and fox-trot and some other dance, which, honestly, felt exactly the same as the other ones. Either way, I danced it just as clumsily, as pointed out to me frequently by Mrs. Fenton in a “ladylike” voice, which apparently meant speaking in whispering singsong. After all, far be it for a lady to speak in any tone in which she might actually be heard.

  As always, I left the church in a foul mood, my breath visibly indignant in the brisk early-March air. I made the trek back home, reclaimed the baseball that was still by the subway station, and kicked it right back to the Powells’ front yard. As I was depositing it back under their azalea bush, I heard Mr. Powell’s voice wafting from his kitchen window.

  “Women just aren’t funny.” The words rammed into me like a freight train. “Bob Hope is funny. Jerry Lewis is funny. Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers. You know why there isn’t a Marx sister? No one wants to see a woman make a fool of herself like that.”

  He said it like he was announcing the weather or reading a newspaper headline — like it was a foregone conclusion, a boring but irrefutable fact.

  It was his matter-of-fact tone, more than anything, that made me stop in my tracks. Because Mr. Powell was a professional and had actually written for some of the very people he’d just mentioned. Sure, it was hard to reconcile some of those famous, raucous bits with the serious man next door, but they had indeed bloomed from his mind.

  So how could he say that? How could he believe it? Women weren’t funny? Of course they were. What about Rosalind Russell?

  What about Lucy? I wanted to yell right through the window.

  “Lucy who?”

  I blinked. Had I said that out loud?

  I turned around slowly, and there was Tomás, looking at me from the stoop. The Powells lived below his family. Lucky them. My family lived underneath the Midnight Bowling and Shotput League of America, Brooklyn Chapter.

  Ever since Tomás had moved here back in October, I’d been trying to get this kid with his beautiful, lilting accent to speak to me, and this was how he finally did it: calling me out for talking to myself in the middle of his front yard.

  “Ball,” I responded. “Lucille Ball.” Well, I was going with it. I’d waited all this time to have a conversation with him, and I wasn’t about to miss th
e opportunity.

  “Oh,” he said. Then, after an interminable pause: “Like on television?”

  I broke out into a big grin. For a second, I thought he might not have known who Lucy was and that definitely would have tarnished his appeal. But now, standing in front of me with his slightly too-long dark hair and that tiny smile that was more in his eyes than his lips, he remained a perfectly suitable leading man. “She’s sort of my hero.”

  “You want to be Lucille Ball?” he asked.

  “No,” I responded. “I want to be Madelyn Pugh.”

  Tomás looked at me blankly. Obviously, he wouldn’t know who that was. Come on, Rosemary. The boy is dreamy, but he isn’t perfect!

  “She’s one of the writers for I Love Lucy,” I explained.

  Pugh’s name had gleamed out at me from the very first time I saw the show’s credits roll, like an oracle predicting my future. If someone named Madelyn could write for the funniest show to ever exist, then why couldn’t someone named Rosemary?

  A full smile spread across Tomás’s face. “Like how you write for Sandra?”

  My mouth gaped. “You know about that?” Sandra had long worn the crown for class clown, but all this time, I’d thought my role in it had been the best-kept secret at school.

  “I’ve been watching you,” Tomás responded with a sheepish grin. “I saw what you wrote. And then a few minutes later, Sandra said it . . .” He tapered off. “Why aren’t you the one to say it?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “I’m more of a behind-the-scenes kind of girl. I love Lucy but . . .”

  “You want to be a Madelyn?”

  I gave a small laugh. “Exactly. So do you watch the show?”

  He started to play with one of the early-blooming azaleas on Mrs. Powell’s bush, looking a little embarrassed. “I’ve seen an episode at a friend’s house. But we don’t have a television.”

  “We only got ours last year,” I said quickly, hoping he wouldn’t feel ashamed. Honestly, most people on our block had only gotten a set recently. “Did you like it? The episode you saw?”

  “I did. It was very funny.” He paused. “You don’t usually see a guy who looks like me on television.”

  It took me a moment to realize he meant Desi Arnaz. And another to realize that he was completely right. I couldn’t think of another Latin man on TV.

  “I like Desi, too. He’s a great straight man to Lucy.”

  “She is very funny,” he agreed. “So is the woman who writes her lines.”

  “I think so.” I lowered my voice. “Apparently, he doesn’t.” I gestured toward the ground floor of his building.

  “Mr. Powell?”

  I nodded as his voice came through the window again. “I’ll just have to convince George that the show doesn’t need ‘a female touch,’” he said. His son Gary had been boasting all over school about the great gig Mr. Powell had finally landed — a new NBC television show. Rumor had it that the Powells had fallen on some hard times due to the Hollywood blacklist — hence their move to our working-class neighborhood.

  “It can get on just fine with me, Eli, and Peter. Fifteen years of being a powerhouse team . . . all our credits . . .” Mr. Powell grumbled. “Auditioning female writers. Ridiculous!”

  I rolled my eyes at Tomás, who seemed frustrated on my behalf. “He’s the one being ridiculous,” Tomás exclaimed. “He should read some of your bits from school!”

  I snorted. “If only.”

  Tomás let go of the flower he was pinching, and the delicate stem snapped right off the bush. We both watched it flutter and land amid the frost-covered grass. Then he looked up at me again, brushing his dark hair off his forehead, before shoving his hands deep in his pockets. “I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’m supposed to watch my brothers for Mama.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay.” It looked like he might say something more, but then he turned around and walked into the house.

  Drat. If I could’ve scripted that, maybe it wouldn’t have been so anticlimactic. Or maybe, at least, I could have said something funnier for him to remember me by. Like something about how Mr. Powell tuning out women’s voices was self-preservation after having to hear his wife sing “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” every time she did the washing up. Assuming the Powells’ ceiling was just as thin as the walls between our two buildings, surely Tomás would’ve gotten the reference. I could’ve gotten a laugh.

  Instead, I absentmindedly picked up the purple flower from the otherwise spotless lawn and took it with me inside my own building.

  All night, Tomás’s words stuck with me. What if Mr. Powell could read my work? He had said something about auditioning female writers, hadn’t he? How did that work?

  I mulled it over during my walk to school, which was prime daydreaming time anyway: thinking up jokes or stunts to file away for possible future use. I wasn’t used to being interrupted, so it took a while for me to realize someone was calling my name.

  When I finally turned around, Tomás quickened his pace to catch up to me. “Mind if I walk with you to school?”

  “Of course not.” For a moment, I wasn’t sure if I was still in daydream mode after all.

  He fell into step beside me. “So what did you think, then? Of last night’s episode?”

  I glanced curiously at him. “Of Lucy?”

  He nodded.

  I grinned. “It was spectacular, of course,” I gushed. Strangely enough, on last night’s episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy had accidentally eavesdropped on her neighbors’ conversation, too, only in her case she thought she heard them plotting her own murder. “There was a scene with Lucy on the phone to a police officer . . .”

  “Where she said she pretended to be a chair?” he finished.

  “Yes!” I replied. “Hey! I thought you didn’t have a television.”

  “I don’t. I asked Gary if I could watch theirs last night.” Tomás grinned, and I could tell whatever he was about to say was why he had flagged me down this morning. “You will be happy to know I caught Mr. Powell laughing at least twice.”

  My heart soared. Good ol’ Lucy. Still . . . “Only twice?”

  “I know. For a man who writes comedies, his sense of humor seems . . .” He gestured with his hands, obviously looking for the right word.

  “Nonexistent?” I attempted. “Six feet under? The size of a peapod . . . from a dollhouse kitchen set?”

  Tomás laughed. “Yes. Definitely one of those.”

  “So tragically true,” I said as I hoisted my bag higher on my shoulder. Tomás made like he was about to offer to carry my books, but I immediately thought of something much more important. “Did he say anything more about auditioning female writers for his show?”

  Tomás shook his head, moving his hand away from my bag. “I could maybe find out? Are you thinking you might audition?”

  It would sound silly to say yes. After all, I didn’t know how to write a real script. Or how to get Mr. Powell to read one from an eighteen-year-old girl he knew best from snooping in his front yard and, one time, accidentally crashing a tricycle into his wife’s prized azaleas. (All right, so maybe it wasn’t quite an accident. Maybe it was an attempt — a successful attempt, I might add — to get my younger brother Jacob to laugh at the sight of me on his bike after some older boys had chased him away from their baseball game.)

  But I smiled. And said yes anyway. I’d already told Tomás more about who I really was and what I really wanted than practically anybody, except Sandra. Why stop now?

  “Let me see what I can find out,” he promised as we neared the school. And I suddenly felt much lighter than if he really had carried my books.

  Did you hear about . . . what? A carnival? A circus? A discount at the beauty parlor?

  I had been agonizing about that line for an hour. It was also the only line I had written.

  Tomás had come back with the intelligence that the scripts — the ones by other female writers — were being sent t
hrough the mail for Mr. Powell to evaluate. I’d seized my opportunity and borrowed one of the many manila envelopes I’d seen the postman drop off at Mr. Powell’s mailbox. It was the only way I could think of to see an example of a real, live script. After I hastily copied it out and returned the original, I pored over it. It was fascinating. I watched and listened to all of the comedy that I could, but I’d never seen the jokes laid out like this before. This one was a sample sketch for The Red Skelton Show, which made me think I should write a sample episode of the show that I knew and loved best.

  But I needed further research. So on Monday, when Lucy came on, I decided I’d try my hand at being a scribe.

  When the show first started airing last year, it was only Jacob and me who really watched, with Father reading his newspaper and Mother flitting in and out as she cleaned up. But as the season progressed, I noticed that the living-room mantel seemed to suddenly need extra dustings on Monday and that, more often than not, my father would only think to turn the page of his newspaper during a commercial. Though I was elated by this revelation, I knew better than to bring attention to it. It wouldn’t take much for Mother to denounce the show as vulgar or low class, especially if she knew that I saw it as more than a weekly diversion and more like a potential career path.

  But I certainly wasn’t able to go unnoticed that night when the four of us were gathered around our television set. Mother, Father, and Jacob all watched me agape as I wore out two and a half pencils trying to transcribe Lucy’s and Ethel’s every word.

  “Rosemary, may I ask what on earth you think you’re doing?” Mother finally asked as a piece of paper flew from under my graphite-covered hands and nearly hit the ceiling before fluttering slowly and dramatically to the ground.

  I didn’t want to answer her, afraid that I would miss the next line if I did.

  “Rose . . .”

  But better a few lines than the whole thing, so I thought quickly. “Oh, it’s an assignment. A transcription assignment. For my journalism class.”

  “I see,” Mother said after a pause. “I didn’t know you were taking a journalism class.”