What They Call Him

His name is Leonardo, and his friends call him Leo, but his family calls him sardine. This is because once, several years ago, when the relatives were over, shouting and laughing and shaking their fists, Leo got squashed in a corner and cried, and when they asked him why he was crying, he said, "I'm just a little sardine, squashed in a tin."

"A sardine?" his brother Pietro said. "A sardine?”

And everyone laughed and took up the chant: "Leo's a sardine! Leo's a sardine!" Leo's youngest brother, Nunzio, lisps. He calls Leo thardine.

It is not a good idea to call yourself a sardine in a family like Leo's, who will not let you forget it.

When they are not calling him a sardine, they sometimes call him fog boy. "Hey, fog boy!" his older sister Contento calls. "Earth to fog boy — " Some of his teachers even call him fog boy. "Fog boy! Wake up! Get with the program!"

Once, the drama teacher called him the dreamer, adding that it was not a bad thing to be a dreamer, that all the great writers and artists and musicians were dreamers. Leo wished his teacher would tell his family that.

The Attic

It is raining, pouring, the wind beating against the house. Pietro and Nunzio are fighting, Contento is whining, and Leo flees to the attic. The rain pelts the window, seeping in around the edges, dripping in thin streams down the wall. Leo pokes through the dusty boxes, an explorer on the verge of an important discovery.

Leo unearths a box with his father's name, GIORGIO, on it. Inside the box, near the top, he finds a small blue leather-bound book with yellowing pages containing his father's handwriting in small script, brown ink. On the title page: The Autobiography of Giorgio, Age of Thirteen. Leo flips to the middle, where he reads these words, "When I am happy, I tap-dance."

Tap-dance? His father? Leo tries to imagine his father so full of happiness that he tap-danced. This is not an easy thing to imagine, as Papa does not seem very happy lately. Leo closes the book, slips it into his pocket, rummages in the box, pushing aside year­books and photographs and letters. Near the bottom, wrapped in tissue paper, he discovers a pair of tap shoes, scuffed, wrinkled, and cracked on the sides.

On the bare wooden floor in the dusty attic, Leo taps. Tappety, tap, scuffle, tappety, tap. He slides across the floor, whirl, tappety, tap, kick.

Leo is on national television, tapping up a storm. The studio audience has risen to its feet, and they are applauding wildly. The microphone picks up the host's voice: "Have you ever seen any­thing like it? Have you ever seen so much talent in such a young performer?"

Leo taps like mad, spins, leaps over a chair.

"What is going on up there? Stop that noise! Stop it, you hear me?" Papa bolts up the stairs. "Sounds like stampeding buffalo!"

"It's just me," Leo says. "I was just — "

"What are you doing? Where did you get those shoes?" Papa spies the opened box. "You've been in my things?"

"I was just — "

"Don't you go through my things. Those are my things, what little of my own that I have in this zoo-house."

"But were these really yours?" Leo asks. "Did you really tap-dance?"

Papa scowls at the floor. "Take them off. Put them back."

The rain lashes against the window, and the wind rattles the frame as Leo takes off the shoes, rewraps them in the tissue paper, and returns them to the box. His father kicks the box into a corner and stomps downstairs, pulling Leo behind him. Papa doesn't know that Leo has his little blue book in his pocket, and Leo is not about to tell him.

As he descends the steps, Leo hears the crowd noise fading, "Bravo! Bravo, Leo!" He pauses on the steps to bow.

"Hey, sardine-o!" Pietro shouts. "Your turn to clean the bathroom!"

Improvising

The maple tree is the only quiet place today, what with everyone running and shouting and zipping and dashing in the house. There is comfort in the smooth, cool feel of the bark and in the sound of the breeze flipping the leaves. Leo is reviewing his lines for Rumpopo's Porch.

"Get in character," the drama teacher, Mr. Beeber, said at the last rehearsal. "Feel the charac­ter. Be the character."

So Leo tries to shrivel up, to be an old crone. He thinks of Great-grandma before she died, a million wrinkles, hollow cheeks, watery black eyes. Leo sucks in his cheeks, squints his eyes. He curls his fingers, like Great-grandma's. Hunches his shoulders. Nearly falls off the branch.

The last rehearsal was a disaster. Everyone goofed, even Dreadful Melanie Morton, of the golden hair and freckled nose, playing the part of the abandoned girl, Lucia, who comes to Rumpopo's house with her brother and their dog. Melanie forgot many lines. The rest of the cast stood around waiting for cues that never came as Mr. Beeber pulled at his collar, saying, "No, back up," and "Wait, that wasn't — " and "Stop!" Finally, he said, "You are all going to have to learn to ad-lib, to improvise, if someone forgets his or her lines. You can't just stand around waiting. The audience will be snoring in the aisles."

For the rest of rehearsal, when Melanie forgot a word or a line (which was often), off she went, talking about things that had nothing whatsoever to do with the play. Here is the way one scene was supposed to begin:

RUMPOPO:	I am going to the porch now.
LUCIA:	Will you tell us about the green woods again?

Dreadful Melanie Morton, however, forgot her line and decided to improvise:

RUMPOPO:	I am going to the porch now.
LUCIA:	(Long pause. Very, very long pause.) Good. I mean, that's great, you going off to the porch and all. Cool. Everyone should have a porch. We've got a huge porch, a wraparound porch. Do you know what that is?

Rehearsal continued like that until everyone else was so confused that they were making up things at random, and Mr. Beeber's collar was nearly torn off his shirt.

On the way home, Ruby says, "Leo, what do you think of all this improvising stuff?"

"I like it because if you forget your line, you can still have something to say, but I don't like it when Melanie goes on and on — "

" — and on and on!"

"Exactly."

"Improvising is just like normal yakking," Ruby says. "Like right now, I don't have a script. I'm just improvising. You say something. I say something. Like that."

"But in the play, if we improvise all over the place, then it won't be the real play, will it? It'll be a mess."

"Sort of like life, you mean?"

Ruby will do this. Leo will be talking with her about any regular old thing, and she will rattle his brains.

"Imagine if we had a script," she says.

"What? You mean like now?"

"Yes. Think how easy life would be."

"Huh."

If you had a script for your life, Leo thinks, you could look ahead to what would come next. You could see what is going to happen to you. You could read all the thousands and millions of words you will say. You will never again have to wonder What should I say or do? because it will all be written there for you.

You could know what dumb things you will do. You could find out if you ever will do anything that isn't dumb. But then, what if your script was dull, if you never got to do anything exciting? Or what if something awful was going to happen to you? What if your script was very, very short? You would definitely not want to know that.

It is Delivery of Script Day, when each twelve-year-old is given his Life Script. A gray-haired woman comes to Leo's class with two large red trunks, which contain their scripts. It is a day of high anticipation. Everyone is fidgety. Some are extremely nervous and feel ill; some are giddy, almost delirious with excitement.

As each student's name is called, he moves for­ward to receive his script. What follows is bedlam. Those who have received short scripts sink to the floor, wailing. Everyone else flips rapidly through his script, shouting out highlights. Some shout in excitement; others moan in disappointment.

"Harvard! I'm going to Harvard!"

"What? An appliance salesman?"

"What? Not a pro basketball player? A teacher?"

"A scientist! A famous scientist!"

"I'm getting married? To her?”

"I'm gay?"

"I flunk out of college? Twice?”

They then turn to the final pages of their scripts, and a somber, sober hush falls.

"Cancer. I knew it."

"I'm going to drown?”

"Peacefully, in my sleep? Oh, that's good."

"A plane crash?"

"A heart attack?"

"One hundred and twenty years old? Wow!"

The teacher dismisses the class because there is no way any more work will be done that day.

© Sharon Creech