The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  Inside that makeshift theater, clothespin dolls were her costars—dolls more real, and charismatic, than kids she knew. You go over here, and you there, now all of you repeat after me. That was the start.

  “Lucille, how special you are,” DeDe said, opening the closet door, applauding. “My love!” (DeDe had returned, in a way—visiting occasionally, looking more or less alive.) The mother had the prototype model of the daughter’s quill-feather eyebrows; their noses were almost touching now. “My sweetest.” (DeDe never believed she could be a mother, but really she did love me, Lucille always thought. Time would prove DeDe right.)

  Two hours after the closet, DeDe sat next to her second husband and sniffed at Lucille: “Well, look, it’s the half-pint Sarah Bernhardt—or, rather, it very much is not.” Smoke from her bitter nostrils. This, a reaction to her husband’s having clapped enthusiastically. “Watch out everyone, here passes the thespian of Jamestown Elementary.”

  DeDe laughed and Lucille’s step-grandfather laughed and this meant Lucille laughed, too, though she didn’t feel like laughing. “Go and play with your little dolls now, kiddo.” And five weeks later, DeDe was gone again….

  Jump ahead now, again to 1950, back at that Buffalo drugstore with Desi; Lucille feels sick, and she is sure it’s the fault of all these memories. (It isn’t.)

  DeDe and her second husband, Ed Peterson, had gone off to Detroit without Lucille or her brother. DeDe and Ed were seeking “respectable jobs in the skilled or semiskilled industries.” And so, at the Weideman Cigar Co. of Michigan, for a while there, DeDe very nearly got a— Okay, well, next she inquired at the Krolik garment factory and almost, or just about— But, see, then DeDe did find partial employment, at least a couple days at— DeDe ended up taking classes in “domestic science and household arts.” This was at the Lansing Young Women’s Christian Association’s vocational school: old-crone teachers, parchment diploma, good luck to you.

  When Lucille was nine, DeDe finally returned to Jamestown for good. And daughter looked up at mother and new father.

  Lucille said, “DeDe, will you and Ed stay and be my parents?” Ed Peterson eyed her, and not a thing in the man smiled.

  * * *

  —

  IT’S 1:30 A.M. now, in Buffalo, and Lucille has left that drugstore counter; she’s walking arm in arm with Desi. The screen of every storefront’s window is playing its late show of the moon. Lucille notices just one stranger halfway down the long, dark street, in front of a lunch stand, lurking—maybe a fan, maybe a drunk, could be both—and when this man sees her, he begins waving frantically, without a sound. She’s glad to have the manly shield of a husband between her and this person. She leans against Desi as they cruise smoothly to the hotel.

  Desi’s all right. This is how she’d patched things up with him after dancing with Hold-on: Desi had said, “Did you know that Jewish guy?” She’d answered, “It’s not like we drank out of the same bottle.” Then Desi’d snorted, closed his eyes, opened his eyes, smiled at her, and that had been that.

  The hotel doorman has Bill Holden’s manly glossed hair, neat even at this hour. But he doesn’t have Holden’s shoulders or dimply chin. We all have one or another thing. Only the Bill Holdens of the world have them all.

  Lucille and Desi open the door to room 258, the suite, such as it is. Their longtime maid, Clara, is there. “Mr. Arnaz!” Clara says, her plump, milky face clotted with worry. “I told them you were out, but they insisted.”

  “ ’S’okay!” Desi says. His hand thrusts out to receive the newspapermen—all three of them—who now cross the drawing room.

  “Miss Ball,” one wearing a blue suit says. “Give us a quote!” the second says: “You certainly made us wait all night.”

  All of them men, she thinks. Men, men, men. Are there no real-life Lois Lanes? She can feel their eyes on her body.

  This is what it means to be a beautiful, famous woman. Or famous enough for the press to come out in Buffalo. Not that the fame was ever much. Even before its current fade-out. And perhaps the beauty, too, now. She can feel eyes prod her face, prod her skin, the exposed real estate under her throat. Her breasts. It is not friendly. She can feel eyes prod her hips and her thighs; it’s too forward. And even if she doesn’t want the attention, she’s cursing the scratchy crinkles around her own eyes—those little autographs signed by years. Do other actresses feel what she feels? This staring, these invasions? I hope I look all right. Ugh, the hungry insistent searching eyes of men.

  It half-reminds her of some other time, some other night, some other man, very young, who looked at her like that. What was that kid’s name?

  “How’s it feel to be back home, Miss Ball?”

  The reporters appear lumpy compared to Desi; undercooked.

  “She’s not from Buffalo,” one says. “Don’t tell me you call Jamestown Buffalo, Harry.”

  And now, implausibly, two of them start talking to each other as if she and her husband weren’t there:

  “Ah, it’s all the same once you get west of Syracuse.”

  “A coffee-and-doughnut hole like Jamestown, though?”

  “Fair enough. A dump if ever there was one.”

  The third reporter catches Lucille’s attention. “You know,” he tells her, “there is the Buffalo Audubon Center. Might be fun for you. The mornings are nice and cool here.”

  “Boys,” she says. “Boys.”

  Why do they treat me as if fame works retroactively? she wonders. Why would it change where I was born? Do they think I don’t know it here?

  She goes to bat now for a place she’s always putting down.

  “Here’s the thing about Jamestown,” she says. “You ever try to enjoy some crowded, dirty California beach after seeing how pretty Lake Chautauqua looks in August?”

  “Well,” Desi says. “ ’S nice, but Jamestown’s not the Playa del Este, now, is it?”

  His voice still surprises her after all these years. How it loses its characteristic tightness when easing into Spanish.

  “Cuba, gentlemen,” he says. “Cuba.”

  “Bet the Chiquita banana girls down there are nothing compared to Miss Ball,” says reporter No. 1 in the blue suit. His voice is a vocal leer.

  Desi has numerous ways he might answer this: Hey, my mother is Cuban, for one. My mother is no banana girl.

  “Ah,” Desi says, giving himself a small, calming breather.

  One of the things he’s good at is frightening the type of men who could use a good fright. Does he curl his hands into fists now?

  “Ah,” he says. “Gentlemen.”

  And with effort that only Lucille notices, Desi smiles his widest: his big-timey smile that would light up a million cathode-ray tubes behind a million screens, if only given the chance.

  “I may be Cuban Pete,” he says, “but you’ve got something there, fellows: She is Sally Sweet.” A meeting with the press was not a time for fists.

  In his smile there are just top teeth, a dimple nuzzled in one cheek. And his wink shows charm, and material comfort, and striving itself. The reporters nod like a troop of baboons.

  Where had these reporters kept hidden these pads they’re now scribbling in? “Oh come now,” Lucille says, “my hubby’s just getting sentimental about me, fellows.”

  Normally she’d be up for this banter. She’s a bit ill now, though. Tired and sort of nauseated, and she wants to speed these men toward the moment they’ll bow out of the room and her life.

  She senses Desi sensing her restlessness. A twitch in the hand he’s rested on her back. So she feels the first rattles of her own smile coming on. Even though sleep’s begun to pull at her eyes and brain. Because ambition isn’t a targeted dreaming; you can’t knock down any one enthusiasm without knocking down the whole pile of matchsticks.

  “Boys?” she says. “If you want anot
her quote, the secret to looking this good? Live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.”

  There’s also an inescapability to her delivering what Desi wants—the appeal of sacrificing her mood to his.

  “Yup,” reporter No. 1 is saying. “You lovebirds love each other.”

  She keeps up her smile. Soon enough, this tour will be at an end, in the big final show in New York City.

  Phil. Phil! That was the name of the young kid with those gloves on that beach. With the prodding eyes. Hold-on’s brother. Turns out, it was lovely to want to kiss someone else, to remind yourself life can still surprise you. Or had there been more to it than that?

  * * *

  —

  AS ISIDORE WOKE one morning from an uneasy dream, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous adulterer. And with a bruised face. Or, a would-be adulterer. Am I, though? What happened to me? he wondered. It was no dream.

  Ow, he thought, my cheek—and the memories returned with force. He’d been out on Coney Island eight hours before.

  This is what happened: Isidore had watched Lucille leave him; later, he’d hurried to her a second time. Then he actually stole a kiss. A single kiss. And got punched for it—all of which occurred after we cut away….

  On a brain-sized movie screen, he was reliving it all in his bed, eyes closed.

  His own light silver hand combed through Lucille’s dark silver hair. Memories playing in opulent black-and-white. A gloss on her opened lips, raindrops across her collar, shimmer and flash.

  “You and I got interrupted, Lucille,” is what he’d walked up and said, that second time. “And we’d been having such a lovely conversation, too.”

  He’d known the husband would reappear. But Lucille stared into his face—smiling cheeks, thrilled eyes. And the ensuing pause in banter, a little nook of intimacy, was a break in the hard weather of such knowledge. “Some Enchanted Evening” played again. The choppy noise of a horn section, a drummer going slap with his brushes. Then Isidore had said, “Hey, we can relive the times we almost had,” and led her by the hand. But with Desi’s arrival, that pause, that nook, caved in….

  Afterward, Isidore slunk back home and into this bed with Harriet. Her sleeping face looked slackly kind. He lay touching the warmth of her and in the guilt of resting in that warmth. They had been married about ten years. But he’d scarcely thought of Harriet the night before, even though they’d gotten engaged there.

  “Mmnf,” she said now, waking, “ugnfff”—worming her body to full length.

  Somehow, with a look, Harriet always detected every bad thing Isidore’d ever done, every fib, every evasion. Would she know?

  He spent last night’s homeward drive inventing a breezy explanation: Ah, Harriet, boring party, you missed nothing, I just stood (he would say) listening to that Fred Trump guy, alone, then I tripped, and my cheek, and, oh you know me…

  But now Harriet slithered from bed, escaping on considerate tiptoes. Thinks I’m asleep, he told himself. On his bed table, his to-do list—an artifact of some extinct age, the doting-husband period, where he’d worked on what he now believed shouldn’t be work. Or maybe he could convince himself he believed that.

  Sounds from the kitchen reached the bedroom, smells, the sputter and salt-tickle of bacon, some ear and nose identifications of home.

  Get up, he told himself.

  Approaching the kitchen, Isidore had a sense, or a hope. In the hall mirror, he avoided the bruise under his eye. Or maybe what he had was a fear.

  When he looked at Harriet, maybe it’d be like turning to a page of a beloved novel after you’d lost the ability to read. Hard as you try, the old text would hold no meaning.

  He lost nerve at the door, turned from where his family was, imagined going back upstairs, outside, away to Mexico.

  What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come upon suddenly, your family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as you find it you become its prey. He’d read that once, Emerson or Thoreau, and hadn’t understood then.

  “Hello!” he cried, entering.

  His wife crossed the floor—Harriet passing the window, its stripy light.

  Nobody acknowledged him. In his robe, his pad-about slippers, carrying a folded Herald Trib. A whorl of bacon smoke rose in the sunbeam like a blue thought bubble.

  Bernie, Isidore’s dark-eyed son, sat eating cereal. He was eight. The kitchen radio played staticky classical. Haydn? Bernie’s younger brother, Arthur, stood near a second woman at the table.

  “Hello,” Isidore tried again.

  The scene felt eerie as Pompeii. It was all just the way he’d left it, frozen; none of the reticent particulars spoke of last night’s cataclysm.

  But did his wife seem to him a stranger? That was the question.

  Stuff about Harriet people noticed (pick a card, any card): She had her mother’s slightly pointed nose. Out in the world, she was kind and inhibited and always last to take a sip of anything. Or to be offered one.

  “Smells good,” he said now.

  Yes, Harriet lived in a locked crate of shyness; her vivacity did come out to wag its tail, but only when she was with Isidore and the kids.

  He took a seat now and leaned his elbows on the table. It felt poignant to see his backyard in the window. His home, his family.

  A different Harriet fact was more relevant this morning: Very occasionally and unpredictably, she could fall into anger through the littlest of holes.

  “…no, don’t thank me, Bernie,” she was saying now, her robe cinched. “Thank the lady who cooked it.” She gestured to the second woman here. This was “Aunt” Mary, an African American of the family’s employ.

  Mary sat holding out a forkful of egg to the younger boy. White privilege had spread its apron wide and now Mary was here, cooking and cleaning and living with the Strauss family, five, sometimes six days a week. Mary was the only person in the room not wearing pajamas and/or a robe.

  “There you go, a big boy today,” said Mary to Arthur. “Yum.”

  Isidore watched his wife walk to the oven, the skirt of her robe not lifting at all. He realized her walk had a short, practical, thud cadence.

  “Daddy!”

  “Hello.” Isidore looked straight ahead while he talked. “Everybody. Hello.”

  Harriet came to place before him a breakfast but didn’t say hi or quit the run of her conversation:

  “Mary, you’re always so diplomatic, but can’t you agree, I don’t want to pressure you, but, I mean, it’s difficult when somebody close to you lets you down, isn’t it?”

  “That certainly is the case, Mrs. Harriet. Hello, Mr. Isidore.”

  “Hi there, Mary”—and next, quiet. Whatever troubles he’d had in the past, he always entered this family tableau with a calm sense of his own vigor. Difficulties receded, then.

  Harriet made a noise like nnnh. She said, “It’s just upsetting.”

  Isidore’s head shot up. Upsetting? Somebody close to her? Fred Trump’s party had teemed with photographers. The newspaper! His picture, leaning in to kiss Lucille, on some page near the middle. Or maybe a snapshot of him getting slugged? Probably Harriet saw it already.

  He opened the Herald Trib discreetly, without looking down.

  “You’re really welcome to disagree, Mary,” Harriet accused. On the counter, a copy of her paper, the Daily Mirror, lay perilously open. Yes, she was definitely talking about his wrongdoing. In front of him. As a kind of torture.

  Harriet stood with her back to the counter, patting her dark hair. Her thin waist. And the newspaper in Isidore’s hands sounded like rustled leaves. He was shaking.

  “You know how it is, Mary,” Harriet said, “when you’re mad at someone in your family.”

  She wasn’t looking at Mary as she talked; she lay her gaze on Isidore.

>   Isidore whipped past five pages, six, whooth! And, right there in his ear, the knowledge of good and evil was broadcasting its staticky program.

  Slow down, he told himself. Could it be that Miss Lucille Ball herself, wherever she was, now acted suspicious and lovelorn, too? Seven, eight pages, no smooch pic yet, whooth whooth.

  “Well?” Harriet said. “Well, Isidore?”

  He raised his eyes to Harriet. She faced him full on. Ulp! Panic. Her dark brows. She knew, she definitely knew. I don’t want my marriage to end, he thought. Her eyes bright under her widow’s peak. It did feel like torture, just sitting here. Isidore was the type never to manhandle life and in fact preferred not to leave any fingerprints on its lapels. But what if I lost my world, my family, this house with that nice backyard—

  “So? Come on,” Harriet said. And with contented, smiling nosiness, added, “How was the party?”

  She went to him, touched the side of his face. “I was lonely and waiting for you,” she said.

  He coughed out relief—a breathy, laughish humf! Saved.

  They hadn’t had sex before they married. Ever. But she’d let him—and that’s how Isidore thought at the time, she “let” him—do almost everything else.

  “Wait,” he said now, chewing a forkful, his mind curling like a dog around this domestic table. Saved. But he realized what it meant that Harriet had reached her hand to him—heartbreaking!

  “So, uh, what were you talking about?” he said. “With Mary just now?”

  “My mother. I mean, who else could make me so—hold on. What happened? Your eye looks like I don’t know what.”