Shake It If You Can

Allan A. De Fina

Halfway through the year, I got brazen. I would sneak over to the line where Lisa stood and try to get her to kiss me. And every day I would get caught by the junior monitors with their white armbands and straps and badges and very official patrol strut, and be returned to the boys’ side of the school.

When June came and school ended that year, while all of the other kids ran from the building screaming and cheering, I left feeling sad and depressed. I wouldn’t see Lisa for the whole summer!

Now, I knew Lisa didn’t live too far from my apartment building because every morning during the school year as my older sister yelled at me to “move it” on our walk to school, I would meet up with Lisa just a couple of blocks away from where I lived. I should tell you that my older sister didn’t really want to walk me to school, but my mother made her do it. Anyway, the whole time we were walking, she made me walk a few steps behind her, but she would turn around every half block and check to see if I’d gotten kidnapped or something. The whole time she’d be snapping at me to “move it” and “come on, shrimp”—making all of her girlfriends laugh and tease me as well. Usually, when Lisa met us on the way to school, my sister would say even more embarrassing things and make fun of us with that “sitting in the tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g” song. I think Lisa was embarrassed by my sister too, because she didn’t actually walk with me to school. She just kind of walked alongside me, never saying a word.

So I had decided that I was going to try and find Lisa Agostino’s house that summer. During those first weeks of vacation, I plotted my move. Since I was always in the “care” of my older sister, I had to wait until the right moment. One afternoon, when the big ice cream truck came with its tinkling song and my sister and her girlfriends went running for their fudgsicles, I started to walk slowly in the opposite direction toward the street corner. Just as I was about to stick my toes over the edge of the curb, one of my sister’s friends yelled out, “Hey, Linda. That shrimp brother of yours is trying to cross the street.”

I don’t think even a half second went by before I felt my sister grabbing me by t-shirt collar and jerking me around, screaming, “Whaddya tryin to do? Get me in trouble? No way, shrimp! I’m gonna tell mommy and daddy that you tried to cross the street all by yourself. You’re in for it now! I’m telling!”

The rest of that summer was even more miserable than anyone could imagine. My parents were so upset that I almost crossed the street by myself that they warned my sister not to let me out of her sight. And having to really keep her eyes on me didn’t make her very happy, if you know what I mean.

The first day of school in September finally came and once again we began our morning routine. My sister made me walk behind her, occasionally glancing back and warning me not to try anything funny and to hurry up. A couple of blocks from my house, Lisa Agostino was waiting. My sister saw her before I did and blurted out, “Hey, Allan. It’s your girlfriend!” She then proceeded to make kissing sounds.

Even though Lisa and I both sat up front in the classroom (we were both short), Lisa acted like she didn’t know me. She spent a lot of the day looking over at Tommy Quinlan and smiling a smile with some holes in it. I knew I had to get her attention.

During recess, I went up behind her and pulled at her blonde pigtails. She screamed so loud that Mrs. Richter came to see what the commotion was. Tommy Quinlan squealed on me and Mrs. Richter warned me to keep my hands to myself.

I figured I was in serious need of a new plan. How could I get Lisa Agostino’s attention without making her mad at me and without me winding up standing out in the hallway with my nose to the wall?

One morning, while we were sitting at our desks with our hands folded neatly, the idea popped into my head. Mrs. Richter told us that we were going to learn a poem about a tree. We had to memorize some lines about never seeing anything as lovely as a tree in our whole lives. Can you imagine that?!

Anyway, I remembered that my father always wrote my mother these love poems and he’d give them to her on her birthday, Valentine’s Day, their anniversary, or whenever he made her mad—which seemed to be quite a bit. The poems had lots of rhyming words like “you” and “true” and “sad” and “bad” and “love” and “above.” Well, anyway, whenever my mother read one of these poems, she’d get all giggly and smoochy and she and my dad would start acting goofy and to spare us from having to watch the whole sickening thing, my father would give my sister and me money to go see a movie. And, for about a week after my father wrote the poem, my mother would call all her friends up on the phone and yak all about my father writing her a poem.

So, I started thinking that this poem thing was a really good idea. If some guy with a girl’s name like “Joyce” could write a poem about trees and become famous and if my father could make my mother go all crazy with a poem, I figured that this might be the thing to get Lisa Agostino’s attention. And, conveniently, I had just learned to write some words and cut hearts out of red construction paper, so I decided to write Lisa a poem and make her a card.

I carefully printed the words into the red heart I made and as we were lining up for school (Lisa and I stood next to each other because we were short), I handed her the card. “Read that later,” I whispered to her.

The next day at school, Lisa was smiling at me with her toothless smile—not Tommy Quinlan. And, on our way to school each day, when my sister started making kissing noises and singing that song, Lisa smiled the most beautiful front-toothless smile I’d ever seen!

Some time went by and Lisa’s teeth came in. And, one day as we were lining up in size order, Lisa handed me a little white envelope. “Read it later,” she whispered to me. I stuck it deep in my pocket where my sister couldn’t possibly see it, and, as I walked home from school, I kept running my fingers over the pointed corners and edges of the envelope. As soon as I got home I ran to my bedroom and carefully opened the envelope. Out came a little card with a teddy bear on it. Sounding out the second word, I read: “You’re Invited!” Lisa Agostino had invited me to her seventh birthday party!

I excitedly showed my mother the card. Of course she was nosy. She asked, “Is this your little girlfriend?” I didn’t really want to tell my mother all about my love life, but I had to: “Yes. So, I have to get her a really nice present, okay?” My mother, of course, started talking about what I was going to wear to the party. I would wear a white shirt, my little red “X” snap tie, a jacket, and my pants with the cuffs that always had lint and crumbs in them.

The night before Lisa’s party I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking that Lisa and I would sit, holding hands. She’d be wearing a little white dress with a veil and maybe we’d even decide to get married. When it was time to blow out the candles on the cake, I’d help Lisa do the job. I don’t know when I finally fell asleep, but I do know it was really early when I woke up. My mother and father kept telling me to go back to bed but I was worried that we’d all oversleep and I’d miss the party. So, I just sat in the living room and made a lot of noise until everyone got up. Actually, I made a lot of noise that woke up my sister, and it was her screaming that woke up my mother and father.

My mother walked me the two blocks to Lisa’s house. She rang the doorbell and Lisa’s mother answered the door. When Mrs. Agostino saw me, she yelled, “Lisa, your boyfriend’s here!” I expected Lisa to come running to the door, but if she did, I didn’t see her. The door yanked open wide to a crowd of screaming and giggling girls. Every girl in my first grade classroom was there! Even some other girls I didn’t know were there. Finally, a hand pulled me into the house. There, before my eyes, was the most beautiful sight!

A huge bowl of M&Ms was placed on a table. Around it were placed little plastic basket cups with handles. Each cup was filled with candy and had a name tag on it. While I surveyed the table looking for my candy cup, I saw Lisa Agostino, standing in a white dress, staring at me. She wasn’t wearing a veil, but she looked so beautiful anyway. I wanted to kiss her, but with all those giggling girls around me, I wasn’t about to make a move! And, I was grateful that there were no guys around because then I’d have never heard the end of it!

No guys around! It suddenly dawned on me that I was the only boy at the party. It actually didn’t bother me. I had all the M&Ms I could eat, I was about to eat a huge slice of ice cream cake, and Lisa Agostino sat right next to me at the table. All the other girls kept daring me to kiss Lisa and Lisa kept closing her eyes and puckering her lips, but I didn’t want them all going crazy with more giggling, so I just kept eating my M&Ms.

When we finished eating our cake, the girls started yelling, “It’s time to play games. Come on. It’s time to play games!” I just kept eating my M&Ms until Lisa’s mother said, “Allan, would you like to play a game?”

Now, of course, I didn’t want to play any games, but I couldn’t exactly tell her that—especially while I was choking down huge piles of M&Ms. So, I reluctantly allowed myself to be dragged into the middle of the room where the girls were singing about Mary Mack and slapping each other’s hands.

I don’t know what it is about girls when they play games. They sing a song for everything. If they skip rope, they sing. If they play Patty Cake, they sing. If they sit in a circle, they sing. Boys don’t sing. We make truck noises. We make siren noises. We make explosion noises. We don’t sing.

Well, at some point, one of the girls pulled me into the middle of a circle. She said, “You’re Lisa’s special guest. You have to stand here while we sing a song. And, you have to do whatever we tell you to do.” I was a little nervous as all of the girls started to tighten the circle around me. But, I looked over at Lisa, who was smiling at me, and I shoved a couple of handfuls of M&Ms (stored in my jacket pockets) down my throat, and listened to the girls as they began to sing.

At first the song was real sweet and kind of melodic. It was a song about a little old lady going to Kentucky to the county fair. The girls sounded soft and nice as they sang to me there in the middle of the circle. But when they started singing the chorus of the song their voices started to sound almost like they were yelling at me: “Shake it, shake it, shake it. Shake it if you can.” They kept repeating the chorus until they were no longer singing; they were commanding me: “Shake it!”

Being a seven year old boy who’d just eaten a lot of M&Ms, a huge wedge of ice cream cake, and with a severe nervous condition from having a mean older sister, I didn’t want to shake anything for anyone. Under the circumstances, I threw up my sweaty hands, all covered in melted chocolate from having squeezed all the M&Ms in my pockets into a mushy pulp, and did what all nauseous nervous boys surrounded by screaming girls would do: I started to cry. Well, that pretty much ruined the birthday party. Some of the girls started to holler when they saw my fingers dripping with chocolate, and a few of them even started to cry. (Who can figure them out?)

My mother sent my older sister to get me. (I hadn’t been humiliated enough.) And, the M&Ms I stuck in my jacket pocket melted all over the insides of the pocket as I crammed my hands deep down in there while I followed my sister back to our apartment building.

It was a long time before I went to another birthday party or wrote another poem.

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