You Can’t Be Serious(2)

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In fifth grade our teachers thought that immersion was the best way to teach history, so they took us to a place that would become my favorite field trip destination outside of New York City. Old Sturbridge Village is a living history museum set in 1830s Massachusetts. All the people who work there have to dress, act, and talk like they’re living in that period. They put on olden-days accents and say things like, “Hoo-where is Ezekiel? Behold! He has been churning the butter ’fore the sun shone its warm face this blessed morn.” (I offer zero distinction between the speech of 1830s reenactors and, say, pirates.) It was on trips like these that it dawned on me: This was an actual job someone could have—showing up every day and pretending another moment in time was reality. I fell in love with Old Sturbridge Village because of this suspension of disbelief that the dressed-up employees maintained.

Without fail on these kinds of trips, somewhere around the time when Ezekiel stopped churning butter to show us where his wife, Temperance, keeps “chamber pots for whence we must make waste,” some bold, dumb kid (usually Randy Finn) would test the museum actors’ ability to stay in character. “Hey Ezekiel, can I use your phone? That Big Mac I ate gave me the runs, I gotta call a doctor!” Ezekiel would rebut as best he could, “I’m afraid I don’t understand, pray tell who is Big Mac and hoo-whatever is a phone and a doc-tore?” The absurd commitment! I couldn’t get enough of it. Temperance would try to distract us kids (and in my opinion won the reenactment Oscar): “Poor child! When I find myself with such ailments I must thrice pare thin the yellow rind of an orange, unto which I will mix an amount of bitter brandy as prescribed by the barber.”2

On the way back to the buses on that first trip, we stopped at the gift shop (which was disappointingly not run by old-timey people and charged modern-day prices). Our school had earmarked a couple of bucks for each student to buy something, and all the kids went straight for the personalized items: license plate key chains that said “Ryan,” large pencils pre-engraved with “Tommy,” little glasses that said “Randy” and seemed useless to drink from because they only held one and a half ounces of liquid—what good is that? I knew from previous experiences in gift shops down the Jersey shore and in the city that personalized items never included my real name, “Kalpen.” I always checked anyway. Always held legitimate hope that maybe this was the place that had a “Kalpen” mug. I’d go straight to the K section: Kacey… Kagan… Kareem. Then, willing to settle for a misspelling, I’d do the same with the Cs: Cain… Caleb… Cameron. No dice. They never had any variation of my name. I was too different. Maybe the next gift shop…



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An early spring afternoon that same year. Three p.m. School was dismissed. Ryan Sokolowski and I walked past the flagpole just as Zita Guardino’s mom sped up to the turnaround in her jet-black Trans Am with the windows down. Bon Jovi played through the speakers. Mrs. Guardino was the cool mom. She was younger than the other parents, wore formfitting jean jackets, tight leather pants, and the same dangly earrings and teased bangs as her daughter, who everyone had a crush on. Everyone. Zita Guardino was a fifth-grade version of Mrs. Guardino, who, by the way, looked much more like a fun older sister than somebody’s mother, and how this happened was one of the great mysteries of our eleven-year-old lives.

Ryan and I smiled and waved. Zita hopped in, and the Trans Am peeled out just as fast as it came in. With “You Give Love a Bad Name” fading down McClelland Avenue, Ryan confidently asked, “Doesn’t Zita’s mom look like such a hooker?”

Now look, I had no idea what a hooker was. But I could tell from Ryan’s face that I was supposed to know. That it was cool to know. Whatever this hooker business was, it seemed like Ryan finally made sense of the mystery of Mrs. Guardino’s youth. (A hooker, yes, that explains it!) “Totally!” I shouted, with too much enthusiasm. “I was actually just thinking that!”

The next day on the playground, I was super eager to share this cool, secret piece of information I had about Zita’s awesome mom. So, when a bunch of us were at the monkey bars, I covertly announced, “Hey guys, did you know that Zita’s mom looks like a hooker?” Randy Finn was standing within earshot. His eyes got so wide he looked like a frog. This excited me. Whatever a hooker was, Randy clearly knew, too, and he couldn’t believe I was cool enough to be in the know.

After recess, when Randy tried to start a humming contest in class, the teacher busted him quickly and threatened to send him to the principal’s office. In a desperate gambit, he stood up and declared to the entire room, “Well, shouldn’t Kalpen get sent to the principal’s office too? He said that Zita’s mom is a hooker!”

Stunned silence. “That’s it, Randy!” the teacher screamed. “To the principal’s office! NOW. You can apologize to Zita and Kalpen later.” As Randy stormed out the door, I was horrified. I looked to Ryan Sokolowski for guidance. He avoided my stare. Whatever a hooker was, in this fragile moment it had become obvious that it was not the answer to the mysterious creature that was Mrs. Guardino. I panicked. I wanted to cry. “It’s okay, Kalpen,” the teacher said, “I know he’s lying. I know you would never say something like that.”

I was so distraught and guilt-stricken when I got home from school that day. What was so bad about being called a hooker? I didn’t intend to say anything mean about Mrs. Guardino. I was just trying to fit in. Is Zita’s mom a hooker, or is she not a hooker? Is being a hooker a religion? A job? Does it involve a hook? I needed answers, which meant I needed to ask somebody, fast.