by Tricia Dower
TWENTY - FIVE
FEBRUARY 3, 1959. Linda understood three things about herself: one, she didn’t know beans about suffering; two, Arlene Varga thought she was wildly funny; three, she could no longer think about some things except in fragments. She often transcribed her shard-like thoughts on baby blue stationery and cut the paper into shivering narrow strips.
Thought: If the Bible is right and God never forgets a single sparrow, He must not have forgotten her. But seeing her and doing something about what He saw were not the same thing because, if He intervened in everything, what would be the point of having free will?
Tuesdays after school, Daddy picked her up at Arlene’s apartment instead of Doctor Pierce’s—a seemingly major concession from Mom that Linda suspected was meant to somehow annoy Daddy, who’d moved back after the girl from Avenel turned up stabbed to death. With her parents afraid she’d be next and hovering like bats, she felt like a bug in a glass jar with only a few pinholes poked for air. Tuesday afternoons at Arlene’s apartment were rare gasps of smoky breath.
Arlene’s radiators groaned as if constipated and the air always smelled of whatever Buster’s Bar and Grill downstairs was cooking. But Linda could suck on a cigarette and blame Arlene’s father for the smell on her clothes. Today, smoke curling above their heads, Linda and Arlene had watched American Bandstand and split a bottle of beer. Then Arlene insisted they play Jesus Calms the Waves for the umpteenth time, even though Linda was bored with it and wanted to do almost anything else. Arlene’s mother was dead and her father had never taken her to Sunday school, so she thought the whole “concept” of Bible games was wildly funny. Taller by a head, she would sit on her bed so that Linda could stand over her, wag her finger and say, “Today we’re going to listen to a really scary story about what happened to Jesus’ disciples. And you’re going to help me tell it.” Arlene would say “creeeak” and pretend she was pulling hard on oars whenever Linda said “boat.” Count to twelve really fast when Linda said “disciples.” Blow when Linda said “wind” and so forth. Today, as usual, they’d ended up on the bed laughing their faces off. Arlene had dark wide-set eyes and a mouth that smiled more on one side than the other. Linda coveted Arlene’s long, black wavy hair and thick bangs. Some girls at school said Arlene liked her only because Linda was fat and no competition for boys. They said she mocked Linda behind her back and only invited her over to get more material to make fun of. They were lying, jealous because Arlene was so popular.
Thought: Georgie probably wasn’t his real name.
For extra credit in social studies, Linda volunteered Saturday afternoons at the Menlo Park Home for Delinquent Boys, a disinfectant-smelling, red-brick building to which the county court sent eight- to twelve-year-old boys when they got in trouble with the law. They couldn’t be held longer than three months. For some it was the best place they’d ever lived, despite having to be locked into their rooms at night. Saturday was visiting day and Linda would play Go Fish and Hangman with the boys who didn’t get any visitors. She sometimes saw Georgie in a delinquent boy’s eyes. Maybe, like the kid whose mother ran a boarding house, he hadn’t had a bed to call his own. Or, if he did have one, he might have been chained to it and forced to drink his own urine like the skinny boy with cave-like eyes.
It wasn’t okay to set fires or torture cats, of course, but you could understand it a little.
This afternoon, after Jesus Calms the Waves, Linda had said, “My mother gripes that I’m getting so fat I’m dee-vel-oping an Oriental look around the eyes. What do you think?” She and Arlene stretched the corners of their eyes and shuffled around Arlene’s bedroom, saying “Ah so” over and over in high, squeaky voices.
Some people would say Linda was lucky. She had both a mother and father, even though Daddy slept in the downstairs room in which Grandmother Wise had died. Arlene had only a father who got drunk and sat on the couch scratching his you-know-whats most nights after he got home from his job as a stock boy at Woolworth’s. Arlene said he got all his calories from beer. She cooked herself a TV dinner every night and pretended she was eating on an airplane.
On the evenings Mom worked at Doctor Pierce’s office, Linda persuaded Daddy to eat TV dinners with her. Tonight it had been fried chicken with mashed potatoes and succotash. One TV dinner was never enough for Linda; she kept a stash of Oreos under her bed.
Thought: Everyone has the potential for good, even Georgie.
On Friday nights Daddy would invite two people over to play canasta with him and Linda: it might be Mrs. Ernst and her hard-ofhearing sister; Daddy’s secretary, Madge, and her husband; or the crippled Mr. Klaussner, two blocks away, and his elderly mother. Daddy and Linda made little club, heart, diamond and spade sandwiches filled with cream cheese and pimiento, egg salad, Cheese Whiz and crunchy peanut butter. Linda could make Arlene laugh until she cried just by saying her father served can-a-pees and highballs.
Mom stayed in her room during the canasta games.
Thought: Maybe God had intervened; otherwise Linda would’ve ended up dead, too. When they found the Avenel girl, Daddy said, “You do know better than to go off alone with a stranger, don’t you?” They were studying World War II in history, at last. How, in a world of such horrors, could an insignificant sparrow named Linda Wise have remained safe and warm?
At church camp, over two years ago, Linda had sat under the stars one evening singing “Jacob’s Ladder” with a hundred others. So many voices reaching up to the night sky, singing every rung goes higher, higher. It had made her ache to believe in the possibility of a world in which everyone was loved and no one suffered.
Tonight she would kneel by her bedroom window and softly sing it before surrendering to sleep and dreams that were nothing but noise; a howling that came from a vast dark place.
MAY 21, 1959. “See you at ten,” Tereza said. “Couple minutes after, okay?”
“Till then, my Juliet,” Buddy said, inching the car forward as she closed the door. He peeled out of the playhouse parking lot, leaving her in a gust of exhaust that threatened to make her upchuck Dearie’s tuna surprise. She pushed open the door to the hundred and fifty– seat playhouse, home to the Union County Dramatic Club. Normally she loved smelling the coffee the director brewed for rehearsals. Tonight it made her queasy. She had two small speaking parts in the production of A Streetcar Named Desire that opened in three weeks: a woman relaxing on steps in the first scene and, in the ninth, a Mexican woman who sold tin flowers for funerals.
You had to start somewhere.
Buddy was heading for Bible study to learn more about the big bad devil. He had private sessions with Pastor Scott Mondays and Thursdays when Tereza was in rehearsal. Sometimes he came out feeling good; other times he’d be all twitchy and have to take a long hot bath.
If Tereza had told him tonight, he would’ve had a few hours for it to sink in before dropping her off and been able to talk to the preacher about it. But it hadn’t sunk into her yet and she needed time to come up with the right words. You couldn’t count on Buddy’s mood. He might have gone weird on her and not given her a ride. And since he wouldn’t let her take the bus at night, she would have missed rehearsal.
He’d gotten a promotion but it had come with a transfer to the Stony River store, which Buddy said had an “unbalancing energy,” whatever that meant. One night he came home in a state because he’d accidentally touched a woman’s hand while at the cash register and she’d pulled back as though he burned her. He said she’d looked into his eyes and seen Satan in him.
The devil thing was getting to be a bit much. When Buddy learned that Satan could appear as a frog, he smashed every one of Dearie’s miniatures. Tereza had insisted Buddy clean them up and apologize, but Dearie took to her bed for a full day anyway, refusing to eat anything. Tereza regretted having snuck back the frogs she’d pinched. If she’d left them in Alfie’s box of old receipts Dearie still would have had them, at least.
The cast and crew were standing
in a clump in the middle of the floor that served as the stage, the audience seats rising on three sides around it. She didn’t see Marilyn Shore. Tereza understudied for Marilyn’s role as Stella and Stanley Kowalski’s upstairs neighbor, Eunice.
The script called for the relaxing woman to be a Negro. Tereza was the darkest in the company. Her other character was supposed to croon “Flowers, flowers for the dead” in Spanish, but since the director didn’t expect any Mexicans in the audience, Tereza would say it in English. She’d wear a serape and wide-brimmed straw hat so the audience wouldn’t recognize her as the relaxing woman from the first act, although anybody reading the program would find Ladonna Lange listed as both.
Tereza hadn’t realized how lonely she’d been for her kind of people, hadn’t even known what her kind of people were. The day she showed up for auditions and somebody said “Your hair is just like Dana Wynter’s in The Body Snatchers,” she knew she belonged there.
When she wasn’t on stage she helped out with sound effects and props. The sound effects were cool, especially the trains, Stella getting smacked and the jungle sounds. Some props were heavy; she’d have to be more careful from now on when moving Blanche’s trunk. She lightly pressed her flat belly. Hard to believe someone was growing in there and would burst out in December. “Don’t gain much weight,” the doctor had said. “You’ve got a small pelvis.”
She’d gone to see him because a popcorn kernel had scratched her throat and she thought that was why she couldn’t stop barfing. His office was close to the theater where she’d gotten a job selling matinee tickets after Herman sold the restaurant. She could eat all the popcorn she wanted for free. “Didn’t you wonder when you didn’t get your period?” the doctor had asked.
Yeah, she had, but she didn’t think you could get knocked up if the sex wasn’t fun.
“Hey!” she called out to her fellow actors. Blanche DuBois waved her over. Wouldn’t it be something to understudy for that drunken nympho part? Adele Baruch, the director, said Blanche’s problem— one, anyway—was that she was “over-civilized.” Adele wasn’t, with her long, wild-looking gray hair and tight black leather slacks. She was cool.
“Ladonna, you’re Eunice tonight,” Adele said. “Marilyn’s kid sister, Evvy, has been missing all week and Marilyn says her brain’s not worth shit right now. Her family is beside themselves. They’re all out searching for her.”
Tereza felt a sudden stab for her kid brother. “When’d she go missing?” How old would Allen be now? Thirteen? He wouldn’t even know when he became an uncle.
“Two, three days ago,” said the guy who played Eunice’s husband. “Marilyn told me some boys spotted Evvy getting in a car with a man on Monday night. The police are involved finally. At first they thought she might be a runaway.”
“I hope they find her,” Tereza said. If she wanted to be found.
“Okay, people,” Adele said, “let’s evict this sad news from our minds for the next two hours. We’ll rehearse the first half tonight, special emphasis on Eunice’s part for Ladonna’s sake. Places all, please, scene one.”
Adele was tough: twice a week from eight to ten, no matter what, twenty-one rehearsals in all. If you missed more than a third, you could lose your part. Although Tereza hoped nothing bad had happened to Marilyn’s sister, wouldn’t it be something if she got to do Eunice after all?
She opened her script and took her place on the prop stairs, kicking herself for not having memorized Eunice’s lines. What Buddy had said in New York about not doing anything to prepare herself to be discovered had gotten her off her ass and into the dramatic club. But she still didn’t think enough ahead, wasn’t ready for opportunity’s thump, thump, thump.
Luckily she’d heard Marilyn do Eunice many times and could read without having to trace the script with her finger. She stumbled over only a few words.
Eunice wasn’t in the second scene. Tereza liked watching the guy who played Stanley rehearse; he could really turn himself into the creep. He was built like Buddy but a few years older with a smoky voice. At the first rehearsal Adele had explained the plot and what the actors were supposed to project. Stanley was a jerk, like Jimmy, but Tereza wouldn’t have figured out that he rapes Blanche when he carries her off to the bedroom in scene ten if Adele hadn’t said. Some things so obvious to others were thick as paste to Tereza.
Buddy wasn’t a drinker or gambler like Stanley and she couldn’t imagine him hitting her. But just once she would have liked to have great sex like the Kowalskis—“implied” in the script, Adele said, like the rape. Tereza’s mouth was so hungry for a kiss she often pressed Buddy’s hand to her lips as he slept. She wouldn’t stick around if he ever hit her, but something about him had a hold on her, like something about Stanley did on Stella.
Tereza had to be alert in scene three because, after Stanley hits her, Stella hides in Eunice’s apartment, which the audience never sees because it only exists in their minds, like the devil in Buddy’s. Eunice tells him to stop yelling “STELL-LAHHHHH!” and tries to keep him away from her friend. But love-stupid Stella comes out and Stanley gets down on his knees and kisses her pregnant stomach. She couldn’t picture Buddy doing that, but she hoped he’d be okay with the news once he got over his surprise. A&P liked their managers to be family men.
She tried to imagine their baby’s face. Like trying to see a picture before it was painted.
TEREZA WAS HOME before Buddy the next day, so she took a shower and changed into white shorts and a pink-for-girls blouse. Lisa was a nice name. She cleared cobwebs from the chipped white glider in the backyard and waited in it for Buddy. She called out to him as he padlocked the garage door like it was Fort Knox. When he wasn’t driving or washing his precious car he kept it locked up. He jumped. Obviously he hadn’t noticed her there.
“You look nice. What’s up?”
“I need to tell you something.”
“Out here?”
“Yeah, Dearie’s making us a special meal and the oven is steaming up the house. It got up to eighty today. I felt like a boiled egg in that ticket booth.” Tereza had given Dearie the news earlier, Dearie fake-clutching her heart and saying, “I’m too young to be a greatgranny.” But she’d smiled and cried and squeezed the bejesus out of Tereza.
Buddy ducked his head and climbed into the glider, making it creak and swing. He took a seat across from her. “What’s the occasion?”
“Sit beside me, okay? I want us to hold hands.”
“If I do, we’ll tip over. I need to put weights on the glider.”
She sighed. “Okay, stay there but you gotta look at me.”
He laughed. “I’ve never seen you like this. You get the bigger part for certain?”
“No. Marilyn will probably be back. Her sister will turn up.”
He laced his fingers behind his neck. “Then what’s the word, Thunderbird?”
She grinned at him. “You’re gonna be a daddy.”
“Is that a line from the play?”
She laughed. “No. I saw a doctor. Santa’s bringing us a baby for Christmas.”
He dropped his arms. “You’re pregnant.”
“Yeah.”
“What were you thinking?”
“What do you mean, me?”
He got out of the glider and walked around it, cracking his knuckles. He stuck his head in, his face close to hers. “You know there’s something wrong with me, don’t you?”
“You get moody, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t get moody, Ladonna. I’m fucking crazy. The devil lives in me. I’ve been trying to tell you that for how long. I’m a monster. What kind of life would a kid have with me?”
“You’re not a monster.” Jimmy was a monster.
He climbed back into the glider, sat and held his head in his hands. “We never talked about a baby. I would’ve said no.”
“We never talked about birth control either.”
“That’s the wife’s job.”
; “Good time to let me know.”
He looked up. “I can see it in your eyes. Why me, you’re saying, right? Why’d I get stuck with this maniac?”
She shook her head.
“Pastor Scott says we spend our whole lives trying to get back inside our mothers and Satan spends eternity trying to get inside us. He finds those who don’t find God. Some days I can feel God inside me. Other times the devil’s winning. I wish I could describe it so you’d understand. I’ve done terrible things, Ladonna.”
“Who hasn’t?” She thought about the guys in the cars and about taking Miranda’s money.
The porch door squealed open and Dearie yelled, “Supper!”
Buddy covered his face with his hands. “I don’t deserve supper.”
Tereza wanted to feel sorry for him, but she was tired of his devil talk. Seemed like he was only looking for attention like Stanley Kowalski. She was going to have a baby. She didn’t need a whiny husband. She stepped out of the glider and said, “Tough gazzobbies. Dearie went to a lot of trouble, so you’re going to eat. And you’re going to be a father whether you want to or not. Get used to the idea.”
TWENTY - SIX
OCTOBER 20, 1959. Shrouded in a forest-green caftan her mother had stitched, Linda came down to miserly breakfast rations: grapefruit, cottage cheese, toast, orange marmalade and tea with saccharine. She lived for the marmalade. “Where’s Daddy?”
“An early meeting.” Mom tapped the newspaper with one finger and looked up with a grim smile. “These mothers got lucky, letting their daughters walk home in the dark. Thank heavens one girl had the presence of mind to get the license plate number so the police could arrest this menace.” She folded the paper, reached across and set it beside Linda’s plate.
