New York is where I can wear my silver studded leather gloves which are not allowed in New Haven.  I am seven and my mom still makes me go to church which isn't so bad if Shelley is there.  I can walk up to Shelley on the street outside of church where I am meeting her and scare her with my mean, studded, fingerless gloves.  Even though she brings me books on black holes and the universe and everything and thinks I'm a boy genius, I still get a kick out of scaring her.  I am keeping track of how many times I see Shelley at church and how many times I can get away with scaring her, wearing my stud gloves.

I live in New Haven during the week with my dad and come into New York for the weekends to be with my mom.  I always count the poster ads made just for trains which I see over and over again each week coming and going.  Ads for CATS -THE LONGEST RUNNING SHOW ON BROADWAY and HELP FOR ACNE SUFFERERS - CALL DR. ZIZMOR which I think is a crack-up.  (Get it?  Zits-more for a guy who's supposed to clear your zits up.)  On the train up here today I counted seven 1.800.LOAN.YES ads.   I asked my mother how to call 1.800.LOAN.YES.  She thinks that is a crack-up but I am serious.  I mean, how can that be a number?

There are some things I just don't get.

Like my mother globbing our clothes with puff-paint and encrusting everything we own with sentimental junk from our childhoods.  She made herself a memory jacket that had her charm bracelet and 4-H ribbons sewn on it which is fine for a woman, I guess.  But I'm not old enough to even be out of my childhood yet and she went and confiscated practically my whole, entire collection of micro-machines and glued them up and down the arm of my favorite jeans jacket.  I'm not even old enough to be sentimental.  I just wanted to play with them.

When I point out to my mother that a sweater has been thrown up into the branches of the honey locust outside our window, she looks out at it and says, "Humpf.  I wonder who's been undressing out there."  (Up in the tree; get it?)

I tell her she is a real crack-up and how much would I have to pay her to get her to stop with the jokes.  She only shakes her head and says, "You have no cents and I have no sense, so there we are."  I choose a black tee shirt to puffpaint for the Sunday School craft project.  All the other kids bring in bright colored ones.  Shelley gets all impressed about my choice.  Actually, I am not too thrilled about having to puffpaint my shirt since this is how my entire wardrobe will look after Mom gets done with it.  But it is a novelty for the kids whose mothers bake cookies only.  

My mother is beside herself with pride when I choose only black and yellow paints when everyone else is using the whole range.  She says to Shelly, my Sunday School teacher, "What child do you know makes such fine discriminations, choosing only yellow and black, when there is an entire palette at their disposal?" Shelly goes right along with this observation like it's some big deal.  I say this is nothing to be impressed about.  Sometimes I tell my mother a story and she says, "Say it again to me?" She is looking faraway and vague and then I know that she is not listening to me at all but formulating another one of her own stories.  She writes things for "Guideposts", a Christian magazine and sometimes, other places, and does our church newsletter.  

She gets really wigged when I try to watch TV nonstop, unless, of course, she is typing one of her own stories.  Then I am liable to be able to get away with murder for at least all of "Knight Rider" and half-way through "Baywatch".  I am a writer, too.  She wigs out when I use up all of her typewriter cartridges late in the day on Saturdays and there is no stationery store within walking distance to run to for more.  At school, I write down a notebook of all my tormented feelings being trapped in a first grade classroom.  But my teacher writes it all up full of her own notes.  I wish she would get her own notebook.   I am losing all my space.

Mom and I count flags and water towers coming back and forth on the train from New Haven to New York for weekends.  We've been doing this since I was four; this is how I learned to count.  She puts a lot of stock in this little ritual of ours.  One time I tried to get her to just let me play my Gameboy but it looked like she was going to start to cry so I quick changed back and said, "Oh, Mommy, I wanna play the counting game; it's all right."  Maybe it's because I am the only one who counts with her.

Sometimes she reads me her stories coming and going to New York on the train.  Or stories by her favorite writers.  She only reads Christian stuff or contemporary female writers like Anne Tyler and Ann Beattie.  Amy Hempel wrote a story with me in it.  It's called "Lead Us Not Into Penn Station".  I know I am the boy on the tricycle because I am the only boy on a tricycle in New York outside of the playgrounds and I used to ride it back and forth to Penn Station every weekend to meet my Dad at the train.  Mom and Dad would trade off and then Mom would carry the trike back to our apartment by hand.  She bought it for me at Pearl River in Chinatown when we first moved here because the tall buildings made me feel like I couldn't walk.  But then she bought the tricycle and that did the trick.  

I could tell it made Mom nervous when I told Dad about the performance art thing she'd taken me to see at the Crafts Museum where they had this video of this pair of fingers that were dressed like little, tiny feet and that walked through dog doo.  Mom and I had thought it was a crack-up, but when I told Dad, he scowled and that makes Mom nervous; I can tell.  It has something to do with Dad wanting me for the weekends too and her saying, "You put him to bed five nights a week; that is the time that counts!"

So that was last weekend at Penn Station.  Now I have a scooter.  We stuck the tricycle out under the honey locust one day and looked down out the window until some guy came along and took it.  I hoped he would bring it to his own little kid or something but I have never seen anyone riding it again.  He probably just sold it on Astor Place with all the dead people's junk.  But that story I was talking about?  It got written back in the tricycle days.  It is called "Lead Us Not Into Penn Station" and I get the joke of that because I go to church.  But you should not be funning on the Lord like that.

I used to draw pictures when I was little and no matter what it was of, there was always a little devil down under the ground of the drawing.  No matter what, even if it was of a race car or a birthday cake on a table, you'd look and there would be that little devil with horns and holding a pitchfork just his own size at the very bottom of the page.  I don't know where I first heard about Hell; Mom says it's not a real place but everyone pretty much agrees that the core of the earth is a molten hot ball.  That's according to the physics books Shelly gives me to read.  I like all that stuff but what I'd like to know is how did anyone figure out there's a ball of fire down there?  How can anybody be too sure about it or about if there is or isn't a devil?  I just know Mom was glad when I stopped drawing them in.

I can't play my Gameboy in church because it makes a weird noise and plays a Japanese folk song when you win.  "Nekko hun ja ta!  Nekko hun ja ta!" Mom says that's "Someone's just stepped on the cat" in Japanese which I don't get since the game has nothing to do with cats but she used to collect Japanese folk songs before I was born and she can sing the whole thing, so I guess she should know.  At any rate, that pretty much limits my being able to play in church.  It would clash with "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!" pretty bad.  

If I am lucky, Mom lets me sneak out of the sermon and go down into the office to talk to Shelley.  Shelley will take me into the kitchen of the parsonage and make me a honey sandwich and there is nothing that tastes better.  If Mom won't let me go down to see Shelley during the sermon on any particular Sunday, I just sit there thinking of those golden honey sweet sandwiches, oozing out the corners and through the air holes of that white bread just getting crusty at the edges and I go over under the balcony to where the Blue Light of Heaven shines down.  You can only see it if you go on over there and look up behind the back of the balcony.  Earl showed me it.  It's from the stained glass windows up in there that no one really sees up behind the balcony.  (This is Washington Square United Methodist Church I'm talking about, in case you ever want to go there and see it for yourself if you don't believe me.  About the blue light, I mean.)  Also, I get to pass out the hymnals for Earl but if it weren't for Shelley being there, I could skip it entirely.  Church, that is.  Mom bribes me to go, in subtle ways, but I am on to her.

I go down into Shelley's office and see what book she's got for me this week.  "Hey, Shelley," I ask.  "How can you dial 1.800.LOAN.YES?  I mean, how can that be a number?"

She puts aside the papers she's working on and shows me how there's letters that correspond to the numbers on the phone dial.  Funny how I never noticed that before.  

"Wanna try it?" she asks me, lifting up the receiver and holding it out to me.

I get a recording, "Thank you for calling 1.800.LOAN.YES.  For a home improvement loan press 1 now."  Hey, that's a great idea, I think.  That's just what I need, a home improvement.   There's no buttons to push on this old church phone though.  "If you have a rotary phone please stay on the line."

Okay, I'll wait.  I feel like I maybe have a call into God himself and it makes me feel kinda silly and happy waiting there.  I wait for a long time in between the muzak and the recording telling me my call is appreciated.

Mom appears in the church office doorway.  Church must be out.  "Hey, who's hungry for burgers?" she asks, a nice mother smile on her face.  She always picks the rainy days to walk to Burger King for the Teenage Mutant Ninga Turtle badge happy meals.  I set the receiver back in its cradle, knowing that the back and forth of train rides will go on forever now because I never got through on the line.  She holds out her arms to me and I run to her and give her a big hug.  

We rush out through the big red church doors -- just the most wonderful picture of a mother and son you've ever seen.  We count dead umbrellas together along the way.

Author Bio

Marcy Jarvis lives in Germany and has published short stories in Hawai'i Review, Arts & Letters, Journal of Contemporary Culture, Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, Poor Mojo's Almanac and elsewhere.