I saw the dust on her back, between her shoulder blades. I wanted to reach my hand out and brush it away.
* * *
Eddie was oiling the lanes and saw me watching, eating french fries off a paper plate at the head of lane 3. “And there’s my girl.” He said it like we talked all the time, but it was the first time he’d ever said anything to me. “Stuck inside every day. Don’t you like to go to the Y or something? Go to the city pool?”
“I don’t like to swim,” I answered. Which was true, but my mother didn’t want me to go there by myself. When summer started, she let me go once to a pool day with the kids at school, but when I got home, she was sitting on the front steps of our building like she’d been waiting for me for hours. Her face was red and puffy and I never saw her so glad to see me. That was the only time I went. Besides, she’d never liked it. Mr. Upton, before he left, was always telling her I’d get diseases at the public pool.
“All kids like to swim, don’t they?” Eddie was saying. He tilted his head and smiled. “Don’t girls like to show off their swimming suits?”
I ate another fry, even though it was too hot and made my mouth burn, lips stinging with salt.
“I always liked to go, just splash around and stuff,” he said. “You got no one to take you, huh?”
“I don’t really swim much,” I said.
He nodded with a grin, like he was figuring something out. “I get it. Well, I’d take you, but I guess your daddy wouldn’t like it.”
I felt my thigh slide on the plastic seat. I looked at the far end of the lanes. I felt my leg come unstuck and slide off the edge of the seat and it was shaking. “He’s gone,” I said.
Eddie paused for a flickering second before he smiled. “Then I guess I got a chance.”
* * *
Fred Upton was my mother’s husband. My real old man died when I was a baby. He had some kind of infection that went to his brain.
There were some guys in between, but two years ago it was all about Mr. Upton. We moved from Kew Gardens when she got tangled up with him and quit her job at Leona Pick selling dresses. She’d met Mr. Upton working there, sold him a billowy nightgown for his fiancée, and he took her out for spaghetti with clams at LaStella on Queens Boulevard that very night. They got hitched at City Hall three weeks later.
Before he left, times were pretty good. It was always trips to Austin Street to buy new shoes with t-straps and lunch at the Hamburger Train and going in the women’s clothing store with the soft carpet, running our hands through the linen and seersucker dresses—with names like buttercup yellow, grasshopper green, goldenrod, strawberry punch. One day he bought her three dresses, soft summer sheaths with boatneck collars like a woman you’d see on TV or the movies. The sales lady wrapped them in tissue for her even when my mother told her they weren’t a gift.
“They’re a gift for you, aren’t they?” the lady had said, her pink–cake-icing lips doing something like a smile.
Those dresses were sitting in the closet now, unworn for months, yellowing, smelling like stale perfume, old smoke. Never saw my mother out of one of her two uniforms these days, except when she slept in the foldout couch, usually in her slip. Some days I tugged off her pantyhose while she slept.
“He said he was going to Aqueduct,” I heard my mother say on the telephone to a girlfriend soon after he left. “But his sister tells me he’s in Miami Beach.”
It had been three months now, and wherever Mr. Upton went, he wasn’t in Queens. Someone my mother met in a bar told her he’d heard Mr. Upton was dead, killed in a hotel fire in Atlantic City the same night he’d left. That was the last I knew. I didn’t ask. I could tell she didn’t want me to. I hoped she’d forget about Mr. Upton and marry a mailman or a guy who worked in an office. As it was, I figured us for six more weeks of this and we’d be moving in with my grandmother in Flushing.
* * *
“She’s got ants in her pants, that one,” Myrna was saying to Sherry. Myrna had a big birthmark on her cheek that twitched whenever she disapproved of something, which was a lot. She was talking about Carol, who she called “Lane 30,” because that was where the cocktail lounge was. “Thinks she’s got it coming and going.”
“Don’t I know. She better watch where she shakes that,” Sherry said, face tight and sallow under the fluorescent light. She looked like a sickly yellow bird, a pinched lemon.
“You got ideas.”
“Sure I got ideas. And I’m no rabbit. Maybe she needs to hear that.”
“I’ll see she does.”
Sherry nodded. Those flat eyes were jumping. That slack lip now drawn tight. Her face all moving, all jigsawing around. She looked different, more interesting. Not pretty. It was all too much for pretty. But you couldn’t take your eyes off it.
* * *
I wasn’t supposed to be back there at all. Once, years before, some kid, not even fifteen years old, was working at the Lanes. He got stuck in the pinsetter machine and died. There were a million different stories of how it happened, and ever since, no one under twenty one was supposed to be back there. But I never got near the clanging machine. I stayed in the alcove where they kept the cleaning equipment.
From there, I could see them and they never saw me. They never even looked around.
Sometimes, Eddie would be whispering to Carol, but I couldn’t hear.
They were just pressed together, and when the machine wasn’t going, when no one was bowling, you could hear the rustle of their uniforms brushing against each other.
The more he moved, the more she did, and I could hear her breathing faster and faster. He covered her and I couldn’t see her except her long hair and her long legs wound round. I was too far to see her eyes. I wanted to see her eyes. It was like he was shaking her into life.
* * *
“Things are getting interesting,” Mrs. Schwartz said to my mother, who was resting against the counter, slapping a rag around tiredly. You can lean, you can clean, Jimmy always said.
“Don’t count on it,” my mother replied.
“Sherry might try harder, wants to keep a man like that,” Mrs. Schwartz said. She was the head of one of the women’s leagues. She was always there early to gossip with Diane. I think she knew Diane from the Stratton, where Mrs. Schwartz met her second husband. They liked to talk about everybody they knew and the terrible things they were doing. “Looks like a singer or something,” she added, twisting in her capris. “A television personality. Even his teeth. He’s got fine teeth.”
“I never noticed his teeth,” my mother said.
“Take note.” Mrs. Schwartz nodded gravely.
Diane walked up, clipping her name tag on her uniform. No one said anything for a minute. They were watching Sherry walk into the ladies’ room, cigarette pack in hand.
“She can’t even be bothered to put on lipstick,” Mrs. Schwartz said, shaking her head. “Comb her hair more than twice a day.”
“Her skin smells like grill,” Diane commented under her breath. The two women laughed without making any noise, hands passing in front of their faces.
Mrs. Schwartz left to meet her teammates surging into the place with their shocks of bright hair and matching shirts the color of creamsicles.
Diane was watching Sherry come out of the bathroom. “Trash,” she said to my mother. Then, in a lower voice, “They used to live upstate. Her father’s doing a hitch in Auburn. Got in a fight at a stoplight, beat a man with a tire iron. Man lost an eye.”
“How do you know?” my mother asked.
“Jimmy told me. He gave her hell for making a call to State Corrections on his dime.” Diane shook her head again. “Mark my words, she’s trouble. Trash from trash.”
I looked over at Sherry, leaning against a ball return to tie her apron. She had her eyes on them, on all of us. She couldn’t hear, but it was like she did.
“Mark my words,” Diane said. “Blood will tell.”
* * *
That whole summer, I�
��d lie in bed at night waiting for my mother to come home from her shift waiting tables at the tavern. I’d lie in bed and think about Eddie and Carol. It was like how I used to think about Alice Crimmins, the Kew Gardens lady who killed her kids so she could be with her boyfriend. I couldn’t get her face from the newspaper out of my head. Two, three times a night, I’d run around testing all the window latches, the window gates.
Now, though, it was all about Eddie and Carol. I’d stay under my sheets—cool from sitting in the refrigerator for hours while I watched television and ate Chef Boyardee—and think about how they looked, all flushed and pulsing, how you could feel it coming off them. You could feel it burning in them. It made my throat go dry. It made something ripple in me, like the time I rode the rollercoaster at Fairyland and thought I just might die.
Then I’d start thinking of Sherry standing behind that counter all day. When she’d first started she cracked gum and looked bored, went in the bathroom twice a day to wash hot dog sweat off her hands and spit out her gum in the sink.
But lately she didn’t look bored. And nights, she’d get into my head. Standing there like that, her head dropping, eyes lowered, watching. I wondered when she was going to make her move. Was she waiting to see it for herself? Hadn’t she figured out yet when and where it was happening, right behind the wall of pin trestles that she—we all—stared at every day all day?
Each day it seemed closer and closer. Each day you could feel it in the place, even as the clean and fresh-faced Forest Hills kids pounded their bright white tennis shoes down the alleys; even as the shiny-haired teenagers hunched over the pinball machines, shoving their hips, twisting their bodies, like they wanted to squirm out of their skin; even as the customers at the bar, steeled behind smoked glass by lane 30, cocooned from the pitch of the squealing kids and mooning double dates, cool in their adult hideaway of tonic and beer, crushed ice and lemon rinds and low jazz and soft-toned waitresses with long, snapping sheets of hair and warm smiles, and a bartender who understood them and would know just what to do to make them happy . . . even with all that going on at the Lanes, it was going to happen.
* * *
“I don’t like the way they talk about her,” Diane was whispering to my mother, leaning over my mother’s counter, tangerine nails tapping anxiously. “Sherry and Myrna and Myrna’s friends from the Tuesday league.”
“Talk’s just talk,” my mother answered, loosening her apron.
“Listen,” Diane said, leaning closer. Looking over at me, trying to get me not to listen. “Listen, she deserves something. Carol does.” Her voice even lower, husky and suddenly soft. “Her mom’s at Creedmore. She’s been there awhile. Took a hot iron to Carol when she was a kid. She was sound asleep when it happened. Still a scar the shape of a shield on her stomach.”
Diane was looking at my mother, looking at her like she was asking her something. Asking her to understand something.
My mother nodded, eyes flickering as the fluorescent light made a pop. “You got a customer, Diane,” she said, pointing toward the bar.
* * *
I was thinking they might stop. Might take a few days off, let things cool off. But they didn’t. They only changed it up a little. From what I could tell, Carol came in the back way for her shift and met Eddie first. Met him back there before anyone even saw her. But they didn’t stop. And one day Eddie came out with a streak of Carol’s lilac lipstick on his bleach-white collar, just like in a story in a women’s magazine.
I watched him walk across the place, lane by lane, with the stain on him. I glanced over at Sherry, who was leaning against the pinball machine and watching him. I thought: This is it. She’s too far to see it, I thought to myself. But if he moves closer. If she moves closer.
Yet neither of them did.
When I saw him later, the lipstick was gone, collar slightly damp. I pictured him in the men’s room scrubbing it off, scrubbing her off. Looking in the mirror and thinking about what he’d done and what he couldn’t help but keep doing.
* * *
The kids from Forest Hills High School were all over the place that afternoon, all in their summer clothes, girls with tan legs and boys freshly showered and gleaming. The rain had sent them, some straight from lounge chairs at the club, others from lifeguarding or the tennis courts. I always noticed the fuzzy edges of my summer Keds around them. I always wondered how the girls got their hair so shiny, their clothes so crisp, their eyes so bright.
I had a feeling it was going to happen that day. I couldn’t say why. Before Sherry even got there. But when she did, I knew for sure.
She looked like she’d been running a fever. There was this gritty film all over her skin and red blotches at her temples. Her uniform was unwashed from the day before, a ring of grease circling her belly.
She was late and I’d just left my post, just left the two of them. They never took their clothes off, ever, but sometimes he’d lift her skirt so high I could see flashes of her skin. I was searching for the scar, but I never saw it.
Her fingers pinched around his neck, the rushed pitch to her voice . . . it felt different this time. It felt like something was turning. Maybe it was something in the way his hands moved, more quiet, more careful. Maybe something in her that made her move looser, almost still.
I got it then. And I knew for sure when I saw them break apart and each look the other way. She dropped her skirt down with a snap of one wrist. He was already walking away.
I flicked off the last piece of the strawberried scar on my knee. The skin underneath was still tender, puckered.
And now there was Sherry. I was coming from the back and she was right in front of me, talking at me, her voice funny, toneless.
“I saw you sitting over there yesterday. By the machine room.”
“No one’s at concessions,” I said, wondering where my mother had gone.
“It was the same time. I saw you come out from there at the same time yesterday.”
“I guess,” I said.
It was ten minutes later, no more, when we all heard the shouting. Jimmy, Myrna, Eddie, two guys putting on their bowling shoes—we all followed the sounds to the ladies’ room.
Carol was hunched over, hair hanging in long panels in front of her. She seemed surprised, her mouth a small “o.” It looked like Sherry’d just punched her in the stomach.
But then I saw it in her hand. The blade was short and Sherry held it so close to her, elbows at her waist. The blade was short enough that it couldn’t have gone deep.
Jimmy backhanded Sherry. She cracked her head on the stall door and slid slowly to the floor, one hand reaching out for Jimmy’s shirt.
The knife fell and I saw it was one of those plastic-handled ones they used to open the hot dog packages at concessions.
Eddie pushed past Jimmy and knelt down beside Sherry. She had a surprised look on her face. He was whispering to her, “Sherry, Sherry . . .”
Carol was watching Eddie. Then she looked down at her stomach and a tiny blotch of red against the banner-blue.
“That ain’t nothing,” Myrna said, birthmark twitching. “That ain’t nothing at all.”
Myrna taped up Carol with the first-aid kit. Then Jimmy took all three of them to his office. I walked over to concessions, but no one was there.
That was when Diane came running in, shouting for someone to call an ambulance.
“We don’t need no ambulance,” Myrna said. “I hurt myself worse getting out of bed.”
But Diane was already on the phone at the shoe rental desk.
We all ran down the long hallway and up the stairs to the boulevard. Someone must have already called because the ambulance was there.
At first, it was like my mother had just lain down on the street. But the way her neck was turned looked funny. Like her head had been put on wrong.
Diane grabbed me from behind and pulled me back.
That was when I saw a middle-aged man in a gray suit sitting on the curb, his fac
e in his hands. His car door was open like he’d stumbled out to the sidewalk. He was crying loudly, his whole body shaking. I’d never heard a man cry like that.
Diane was telling everyone who would listen, “She said she saw him. She said she saw Fred Upton pass by on the 4:08 yesterday. But he’d never take a bus, would he? That’s what she said. So she wanted to watch for it at the same time today. See if it was him. You know how she always thought she was seeing him somewhere. No one must’ve hit the bell because the bus didn’t stop. And she just ran out onto the street after it. That car didn’t have time to stop.”
She looked over at the man, who started sobbing even louder.
“Hit her like a paper doll,” Diane continued. “Nothing but a paper doll going up in the wind and then coming down.”
* * *
Later, I would figure it out. My mother, nights spent looking out diner windows, uniform steeped in smoke, thinking of the stretch of her thirty years filled with glazy-eyed men stumbling into her life— all with the promise of four decades of union wages like her old man, repairing refrigerators, freezers in private homes, restaurants, country clubs, office buildings—for her whole life never stopping for more than one Rheingold at the corner bar before coming home for pot roast at the table with the kids.
Those men came but never for long, or they came and then turned, during the first or second night in her bed, into something else altogether, something that needed her, sure, but also needed the countergirl at Peter Pan bakery, or four nights a week betting horses at the parking garage on Austin Street, or a night watching the fights at Sunnyside Garden even when it was her birthday, and, yeah, maybe he needed the roundcard girl he met there too.
New York City Noir Page 92
