She had weightier issues on her mind, after all. Her friend Arlene had been right about Maria DeCastro: Slim and Maria broke up that summer. Toni wasted no time buying several stylish new fashions at Helene’s Dress Shoppe on Anderson Avenue, and Minette instructed her in more sophisticated “war paint”—mascara and eye shadow. Suitably armed, Toni marched into her junior year. She shared no classes with Slim, unfortunately, but when word got out of the semester’s first after-school softball game, Toni hurried to the athletic field—not to participate, but to sit in the bleachers and watch the teams compete. She thrilled to the sight of Slim, who’d grown even more strapping over the summer. At his first turn at bat, he hit a home run and she cheered for him—loudly enough, she hoped, that he could hear her. Watching the game, part of her longed to be out there on the field too, running the bases or playing outfield; but she told herself that she was out to catch something bigger than just a pop fly.
Her cheers did catch Slim’s attention, and now he glanced over to the bleachers and looked straight at her. She put two fingers between her ruby lips and whistled. He smiled, waved, then went back to the game.
After Slim’s team won 7-2, he came over to the stands, stood with one foot on the bench in front of Toni, and smiled. “Hi. Missed you out there.”
“Oh, you did fine without me,” she said. “You were super.”
“Would’ve been a shame, I guess, getting that pretty hair of yours mussed up,” he said, sitting down beside her.
“Can’t have that,” Toni said, fluffing her curls. Sweat was dripping down Slim’s forehead and into his eyes; she took out a handkerchief. “Here, let me get that for you,” she said, standing up to mop his brow.
“Thanks.”
The handkerchief had his scent on it, and she resolved right there and then to never, ever wash it again.
“Hey,” he said, “you want to go to Bischoff’s and get some ice cream?”
Toni beamed. “I’d love to.”
The rest of the afternoon was strictly a dream, the two of them talking and drinking malteds as Tommy Dorsey and Sinatra played on the jukebox. They chatted at first about baseball, and Slim seemed impressed with this girl who not only enjoyed the game but knew who Ted Williams and Snuffy Stirnweiss were; she could even rattle off their batting averages and RBIs.
“I really like baseball,” Slim told her, “but I’m thinking about going out for football.”
“You should! You’re so big and strong, you’d make a great quarterback. Or wide receiver.”
Slim grinned. “Are you an expert in every kind of sport?”
That flustered her—was she being unfeminine? “Oh, no … not—”
“It’s okay. I like sports. I’ve never known a girl who liked them as much as me … especially not a girl who’s a knockout like you.” She blushed at the compliment. “So what’s your favorite sport?”
“Oh, that’s easy. Swimming and diving. For a long time I thought about being a high diver, but…”
“A high diver? Like those guys who dive into tiny tanks of water?” He laughed. “Girls don’t do that, do they? Doesn’t seem very … ladylike.”
Her worst fear realized, Toni said quickly, “Oh, that was when I was a little girl. Like little boys wanting to be cowboys when they grow up.” Slim looked relieved. “But I do like swimming … my family owns a French fry concession at Palisades, I practically grew up in that pool.”
“French fries? With that malt vinegar? Those are the tops.”
“I know how to make them,” Toni said, “if you ever want some.”
He looked at her as no boy had ever looked at her before and said, “Oh, man. She cooks, she’s beautiful, and she knows who Spud Chandler is. You are a rare dish.”
Slim moved fast—he was “active duty,” as Arlene would say—wasting no time in asking her out again. The next afternoon, he took her bowling at Taylor’s Bowlarium. Toni had never tried this game before, but being a good softball pitcher she had a fair sense of aim, and did well in her first few frames—a little too well compared to Slim, who left more than a few spares. Afraid of showing him up, Toni pulled back, allowed herself a couple of gutter balls, and finished just a few points behind Slim.
Afterward they walked down to Miller’s Ice Cream Parlor, ordered milkshakes, and Slim held her hand as they drank. Despite the cold shake, Toni felt herself overheating like a car radiator on a hot, sultry day.
That weekend they had their first formal date, Slim picking her up in his pre-war jalopy, a ’39 Oldsmobile. Slim passed inspection from Eddie, who told him with a smile, “You seem like a nice guy, Slim. But that won’t stop me from gutting you like a trout if you don’t have her back by eleven. Enjoy yourselves, but not too much.”
Slim didn’t let it faze him. “Yes, sir. Understood.”
Eddie shook his hand and settled in to make dinner and prepare to listen to Harry Owens’s Hawaii Calls radio show at eight o’clock.
They had dinner at the Fairmount Diner in Hackensack and then walked down to the Oritani Theater, showing Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, and Orson Welles in The Stranger. As they sat under the lush fabric dome of the theater auditorium, Slim looped an arm around Toni’s shoulders and she felt as if she was going to pass out right there. Somehow she managed to retain consciousness, if not the plot of the movie, which vanished from her memory within minutes of leaving the theater.
It was almost eleven and all the way home to Edgewater, all Toni could think about was whether Slim would try to kiss her goodnight and whether she should let him. This wasn’t technically their first date, after all—Bischoff’s and bowling counted for something, didn’t they? If this wasn’t their third date it certainly wasn’t their first, either.
Lights were on in the second floor of Toni’s house as Slim walked her round back and up the stairs to her door. When he leaned in and kissed her, she shut her eyes and welcomed the soft but firm press of his lips against hers. It was a brief, polite kiss—the kind a boy gives when he’s standing on a girl’s doorstep with her father lurking nearby—but it thrilled her more than anything had since she had seen Bee Kyle dive that first time.
“See you again?” Slim asked when they broke the clinch.
“You bet,” Toni replied, which may not have sounded “ladylike” but it made him laugh.
She watched him walk back to his car and drive off, excited and amazed that she was actually dating Slim Welker.
Inside, Eddie was waiting up. “Have a good time?” he asked casually.
“Oh yes,” Toni said dreamily.
“Do I have to kill him?”
“Oh, trust me, Daddy, that would be such a waste,” she said, and her father laughed. “G’night.”
“G’night, honey.”
Before she went to bed she washed her hair, painstakingly rolled and pinned her curls into place, and didn’t complain to herself for a moment about the discomfort. She marveled at how much better life was when you were pretty, something her mother had tried in vain to tell her.
Whether it was buying the latest Sinatra records at Taliferro’s Record Shop with Arlene, Celia, Bridget, and Maria—who tried not to show her annoyance that Toni was now dating her former boyfriend—or sitting in the bleachers watching Slim, nicely filling out his crimson and black uniform, quarterbacking for Cliffside as they trounced Tenafly 8-0 and Hackensack 35-6—everything about her life was better than she could have imagined six months ago. She and Slim grew closer over the winter months, ice-skating together at Sunny Park Rink or necking—and a little petting—in Slim’s car as they parked in a quiet turnout on River Road along the waterfront.
When Slim had picked her up at her house a half-dozen times without meeting Toni’s mother, Toni finally admitted the truth, though couching it more casually than anyone in the family really felt about it: “Oh, my mom and dad are divorced,” she said, and when Slim displayed no shock, only sympathy, she gradually told her friends at school—leaving out any mention of mag
icians. They found it only mildly scandalous: this was 1947, after all.
Toni’s relief at this was tempered by increasing tensions with her brother, once he found out who she was dating: “Slim Welker?” he said incredulously. “The guy who kicked me off his softball team?”
“For Pete’s sake, Jack,” Toni said as she painted her nails at her mother’s old vanity table, “that was four years ago! He was just a kid.”
“So?”
“So, people change.”
Jack said pointedly, “Yeah. They sure do.”
Stung, Toni snapped, “Will you grow up? You’re just jealous because I’m popular and you’re not!”
Jack snorted. “Like hell!”
“Ever since Mom left you’ve been sulky and moody. I don’t think you’ve made a single friend at school this year, have you?”
“That’s none of your beeswax,” Jack snapped, walking away. And he pretty much stayed out of her way for the rest of the school year. Toni felt bad, wishing there was some way to convince him that just because she was making friends—and dating Slim—it wasn’t a personal betrayal of him.
She wished that he could see Slim as she saw him—never more so than on one chill night in February, after a snowstorm. The roads were cleared by evening, and as Slim drove Toni down Palisade Avenue she looked out and saw the slopes of the Cyclone padded with two feet of snow. “Oh, wow,” she said. “The coaster looks like a map of the Himalayas.”
The park gates and the towers behind them were also draped in snow. “Yeah,” he said, and then, with a grin: “You want to take a closer look?”
“What do you mean?”
“That hole in the fence is still there, isn’t it?”
He parked off Route 5, and in winter coats they sneaked through the hole behind the free-act stage. Hand in hand they stole into the empty park, giggling. The midways had been plowed by the steady staff that maintained the park in winter, but the rides and concessions were blanketed in white. The pool was a sloping valley filled with fresh snow, the diving boards standing like bare birch trees around it. The Funhouse was an ice fortress, its two snow-covered towers standing sentinel like wintry paladins. Toni and Slim walked over to the Cyclone, which did resemble a mountain range with snowy peaks. Toni had practically grown up in Palisades Park, but she had never seen it like this—and the fact that she was seeing it with Slim made it all the more special. They walked down the main midway toward the cliffs, past shuttered concessions whose marquees were studded not with hot lights but icicles, toward the Ferris wheel looking like elaborately spun white cobwebs against the night sky.
When they approached the edge of the cliff, Toni’s stomach tightened as she recalled the last time she had been here. But the performers’ trailers were all gone, leaving only the towering letters of the Palisades sign crowned with snow and ice. If Palisades in winter was like an abandoned faerie kingdom, across the river the kingdom of Manhattan was the exact opposite, its castles and parapets of light glittering eternally in the cold, clear air.
Still holding her hand, Slim turned and kissed her. It was the deepest, longest, most passionate kiss they had shared; and even though they were bundled up like store manikins, it was more intimate contact than any of the petting and groping they had done in Slim’s car. Toni believed it was because, at that moment, she realized how much she truly loved him.
* * *
“So, kiddo,” Bunty said, digging into the steak Eddie had just grilled, “how’d you like to become a lifeguard?”
Even though he was staring straight at her, Toni couldn’t grasp at first that he was addressing her. “What?” she said.
Bunty took his first bite of steak, told Eddie, “Excellent cut of meat, Ten Foot. When you’re grilling steak, never buy low-grade meat.” Then he repeated to Toni, “I said, how’d you like to be a lifeguard at Palisades?”
They were sitting at the Stopkas’ kitchen table for what Toni had thought was just a friendly Sunday dinner, but appeared to be about more.
“But I’m a girl,” she said.
Bunty rolled his eyes. “Jeez-us. What’s got into you? How far across the English Channel do you think Trudy Ederle or Millie Corson would’ve gotten if they’d said, ‘But I’m a girl’? For your information, plenty of beaches these days have lady lifeguards on duty.”
“They do?”
“Sure. Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, for one. Irving Rosenthal thinks having a pretty young girl as a lifeguard at Palisades might boost attendance at the pool. I told him pretty is nice, but what counts is getting the strongest swimmer for the job. So I suggested you.”
Toni beamed. “I’m the strongest girl swimmer you know?”
“Don’t let it go to your head, you’re still just a tadpole in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, you’ve got the strongest stroke, the most stamina, and you ain’t bad to look at either. But it’s no cakewalk. Before you can be hired you’ve got to be trained and certified by the Red Cross. I’m a trainer at the Hackensack Y and I can fit you into my afternoon class, after you get out of school—two hours a day, five days a week, for three weeks. You game?”
Toni looked to Eddie. “But—don’t you need me at the stand, Dad?”
“Jack can take up the slack, honey. And I can always hire a third hand. This is a good opportunity for you.”
Jack, listening to this with incredulity, asked Toni sarcastically, “Aren’t you afraid diving in and rescuing someone will ruin your hairdo?”
“Ha, ha. You’re a panic, Jack, really you are.” But he wasn’t far wrong. She was excited by what Bunty was offering her, but she worried what Slim would think. Would he find it—unfeminine? She wanted to say yes, but checked the impulse: “Can I think about it and let you know tomorrow?”
“Sure, kiddo,” Bunty said. “Whatever you want to do.”
The next day at school, Toni sat down to lunch with Slim, took a deep breath, and told him about the job offer. “My dad says it’s a really great opportunity,” she said. “Lifeguards work all day, seven days a week, but just like at my dad’s stand I’d get time off for lunch and dinner and we could see each other then and”—breathlessly and nervously—“what do you think?”
Slim considered a moment, then said with a smile, “I’ve been wondering what you’d look like in a swimsuit. Guess now I’ll find out.”
Happy and relieved, she threw her arms around him and kissed him, ignoring the catcalls of “Hubba hubba!” from surrounding tables. After school she hurried home, phoned Bunty, and told him she wanted the job.
She was fairly bursting with excitement. To think—her, a lifeguard at Palisades! What could be more delish? Other than Slim, of course?
That week she began training with Bunty, the only girl in a class with a dozen young men. Bunty gave each of them a copy of the American Red Cross’s book Life Saving & Water Safety. “This is your Bible,” he told them, “and that’s how you treat it—like the Gospel, you got that?”
Bunty hadn’t exaggerated: this was no cakewalk. Toni went home each night bone-tired, every muscle aching. The worst came when they practiced the “fireman’s carry,” the rescuer emerging from the water with the victim draped across his shoulders. Since the male students outweighed Toni by a good thirty or forty pounds, she felt like she was carrying a hundred-and-fifty-pound bag of cement on her shoulders, and though she managed it without complaint, her back ached for hours.
This was followed by intensive training in artificial respiration, kneeling astride a “victim” and pumping air back into his lungs.
She was working harder than she ever had in her life, but she was holding her own with full-grown men bigger and stronger than she was, and she could sense Bunty’s satisfaction in her performance—expressed more in his twinkling blue eyes than his words, which were usually on the order of, “Okay, kid, not too terrible. Try not to screw up this next one.”
At the end of the course, when Bunty handed her a certificate in senior lifesaving, he finally award
ed her a smile: “Congratulations, you’re a lifeguard. Now for God’s sake try not to let anyone die in your first week.”
She was given a patch on which her LIFE SAVING—SENIOR rank was embroidered in a circle around the Red Cross insignia. Toni proudly sewed it onto the new bathing suit Eddie had bought her. Palisades issued her a whistle, a kind of white pith helmet to shield her from the relentless summer sun, and her very own lifeguarding station—a red enameled chair sitting on a raised platform, the same as Bunty, the head lifeguard, sat on.
There were four lifeguards on duty this season—Bunty, Toni, the deceptively slim Hugh O’Neill, and a big, tanned side of beef named Al Soyaty—stationed around the pool like the points of a compass. They all had their individual “zones” of responsibility; when on duty they had to scan those zones at all times for possible hazards or bathers in distress. It did not escape Toni’s notice that she was given a station in the southeast corner, overlooking the shallow end of the pool—but she chose to interpret that not as a comment on her gender as much as her experience.
The pool opened on Decoration Day, May 30, and as the ticket booth opened, Toni climbed onto her lifeguard station and took a deep breath of the briny air. The roar of the waterfalls nearly drowned out the calliope from the Carousel across the midway as well as the light popular music piped in from WGYN, New York’s first full-time FM radio station, that issued from the park loudspeakers. Despite somewhat cool weather, hordes of bathers swept through the gate, onto the beach, and into the pool.
She had never felt as proud. She was a lifeguard at Palisades Park—for now, at least, her soul could not possibly aspire to anything better.
Making her day even sweeter was seeing her father watching proudly from the other side of the fence—and a few minutes later, when Slim unexpectedly showed up with his family. He looked up at Toni on her lifeguard station … and his jaw dropped. The gape turned quickly to a smile, and as he wandered over he said, “Damn, you sure fill out that suit nicely.”
Palisades Park Page 27
