“In what context?” asks Mr. Finkelstein. I don’t know what he means.
“Cassie says they said a lady got mad at her husband and she cut his penis off.” Molly says this like she’s telling him she had toast for breakfast.
Mr. Finkelstein’s face scrunches up like he’s in pain. I don’t know what to say, so I say, “I did not!” I can’t believe how much I hate Molly right this very minute.
Mr. Finkelstein recovers and smiles at me. “You certainly do have a vivid imagination,” he tells me. “What else do you see on your shows?”
I’m so embarrassed about the penis thing that I start babbling. “The World Series was on. The Los Angeles Dodgers won the pennant.”
“Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Dodgers,” he says. “And the World Series was over last fall. They didn’t win.”
“No, I’m sure it was the Los Angeles Dodgers,” I say. He gives me a funny look, like I don’t know baseball or anything, which I do, for a girl. “Maybe it’s a different team,” I say so as not to be rude, but I know that I saw what I saw. It was the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Molly folds up the Sorry board, puts it away. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go to Al’s and read comic books.” I put my finger to my lips to shush her up but her dad doesn’t get mad and say “You’re what?” like Mom would do.
I’m so mad at Molly for telling the penis story that I don’t even care whether we go to Al’s or not. All I want to do is get out of their house and disappear from Mr. Finkelstein’s sight.
When I think about the mothers I know and ask myself which one I would pick if I could, I’d choose Mrs. Finkelstein. She’s different from other mothers. She has long, long hair that hangs down to her waist. She wears flowy dresses down to her ankles and goes barefoot inside, even in winter, and she walks smooth, like she’s on wheels. Sometimes I think she’s not home when I’m over at Molly’s, and then she’ll kind of glide down the stairs to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and then glide on back up. I used to think maybe she was sick but Molly says she’s always up in her room writing poetry.
“Poetry?” I say. “You mean, roses are red violets are blue?”
“No,” Molly says, “not like that. She writes books. She’s goingaway this summer to a writers’ colony where all she’ll do is sit in a house in the woods and write all day.” And then she gets this skinny book out of their bookcase which has real books in it and not just magazines, and shows me one of her mother’s poems.
Well, I’ll tell you, I never saw a poem like that. It doesn’t even rhyme. Or even make sense, something about “the wild weird piglet of your passion.”
“What does this mean?” I ask Molly.
She just shrugs. “Oh, she always writes stuff like that. She reads it to Dad after dinner. He really likes this one,” she says, flipping to a poem that starts out “bursting forth from womb a snarl defied O woman woman woman.”
“Yeah?” I say, trying to figure it out.
“She writes a lot about women.”
“Yeah?”
“About how strong we are and stuff.”
“Strong?” I think, Maybe she’s right. I can beat Tommy Taylor in arm wrestling, and I always get picked first in kickball.
“She says I can be anything I want when I grow up. Not just a secretary.”
“Like what?” I say, thinking, Mom was a secretary before I was born. Was that bad?
“Like a doctor. Or a judge.”
“Or a welder in the shipyard?”
“Well, yeah, I guess.” She looks at me funny. “Is that what you want to be?”
“No,” I say, even though it’s something I’ve thought about, how neat it would be to use the welding torch like Dad does, climb high into the sky and make sparks fly like the Fourth of July. “I was just wondering.”
There are lots of things I think about being, but the one thing I don’t want to be is a secretary, just typing up other people’s letters all day. Unless I could be a secretary who uses this really neat typewriter I saw on test-pattern TV the other day. It looked like a typewriter, only it had a TV screen on top, and it didn’tjust type words but pictures. In color. If I had one of those typewriters, then I wouldn’t mind being a secretary so much.
But if it’s true like Mrs. Finkelstein says, that if I want, I can be anything, then I can think of a whole bunch of things I would rather be. A welder, maybe. Or a drummer in a band, like Gene Krupa. Or maybe a pilot—or even a space cadet, like Tom Corbett, so I can go to the stars.
I think Mrs. Finkelstein is just dreaming, like Mom dreams about being a famous dancer. There’s no such thing as lady doctors or judges or welders. But what I like about Mrs. Finkelstein is that she thinks about stuff like that, things I never even thought about before.
6
LORENA
BUBBLING AND BOILING in black-and-white, the mushroom cloud fills the screen of the Paramount as a sepulchral Movietone News voice intones facts about the H-bomb test: Firestorms. Radioactive rain. An entire island vaporized.
“Did Binky actually fight in Korea?” Delia whispers to Lorena, reaching over to claw a buttery handful of popcorn.
“He’s got a real scar from World War II,” Lorena says, bypassing the fact that during Korea Binky worked in the commissary at Fort Bragg and never, not even once, crossed the Pacific.
“Well, I’m glad the war’s over,” Delia says around kernels of popcorn that squeak as she chews. “I never understood much what that was all about. North Korea. South Korea. Turn on TV news and what’s on? Korea. Who cares?”
“Well, somebody cares. It’s in the paper a lot.” Lorena feels around the bottom of the popcorn box, fishes up a couple of
unpopped nuggets, tosses them and the box on the floor. “We wouldn’t send soldiers all the way over there if it wasn’t important.” She looks sidelong at Delia’s profile silhouetted in the dark, light from the belching bomb on-screen pinging off her upturned nose and mobile chin. She hopes people don’t think she’s as dense as Delia just because they’re good friends.
“Still and all,” Delia says, “I don’t know what we were doing in a place with all those weird names, Panmunjom, Seoul, whatever. I mean, I thought we were finished after World War II and then what happens? Korea.”
“SHHHH!” says a man with tall fuzzy hair two rows in front.
Lorena thinks about war all through the movie, maybe because it’s From Here to Eternity. When she comes out, she picks up the war theme like a dropped stitch.
“Rosalind, the kid down the block, only eighteen, she married this guy before he shipped out,” she says, squinting in the midday sun. “Her mother didn’t want her to marry him but she did anyway, had to, I heard, because the guy was leaving for Korea and she was in the Family Way.”
Delia nods knowingly. “The Family Way. That’ll do it.” They pass their reflections in a storefront window. Delia takes out a comb, fluffs her bangs, checks her teeth.
“Next thing we know, we hear his ship got blown up.” Lorena waits as Delia slathers a fresh coat of Tangee on her full lips in the window’s reflection. “I didn’t go to the funeral but I heard it had flags and drums and all. Shoulda gone, I guess, ‘cause I’ve known Rosalind since she was about Cassie’s age.”
Lorena senses that Delia isn’t really listening because a couple of sailors lounging against the wall of Harley’s Hardware have caught her eye. Delia’s pillowy little body becomes increasingly animated, accelerating into feverish gyration as they pass by the sailors.
Unfazed, Lorena continues: “Turns out she wasn’t in a family way after all. She was just in love. I see her sometimes, sitting onher porch. Sometimes she’ll walk down to the water and stare over at Norfolk. I guess that was the last place she saw him, when she said good-bye. Her husband was a sailor.”
Delia perks up at the word, seems to pay attention. “Yeah?” she says.
Lorena glances over at Delia but Delia’s head is turned around and Lorena knows she’s giving the sailors a wink. “Sh
e seems lost now, even walks different,” Lorena persists, “not like that little bounce she used to have. I want to go up to her sometimes, tell her I know how she feels, but I don’t. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a widow.”
Delia has clearly signed off of Lorena’s story, but Lorena continues it silently, asking herself, Was I that much in love with Pete when I married him? I think I was. He was nice-looking, seemed like he knew what he wanted. Seemed like he wanted me. We were happy. I liked being married, being half of a couple.
When Cassie came along, Pete liked playing with her, buying her toys, talking baby talk. But when she got older, he got bored with it all, with the crying and tantrums and stuff kids do. Once when Lorena accused him of treating Cassie like some Cracker Jack toy that broke, his sudden tears of denial startled her. Sometimes he’d do that—cry, and she wouldn’t know why.
Pete was stingy with emotion, but those tears were coming more often these days. When she saw them, Lorena was more stunned than dismayed. She felt oddly powerful, as if Pete had shrunk down to her level. He was weak. She was strong. Now would be the perfect time to give him an ultimatum: She wasn’t just a housewife anymore. No more vacuuming, no more biscuits. She was going to have a career. She had to practice, get her act together, do what she had to do. With or without him, she would dance her way to fame.
And then a nasty nightmare would intrude on that threat: Suppose he said no? Suppose he left? Suppose she had to work? She’d be typing, not tapping. That would be her future: typing, typing, endlessly typing the days away, just as she was doing theday Pete walked into her life. The thought of those days made her fingers wiggle and stretch in involuntary mimicry of the rhythm and movements of typing. She could feel the tapping of her fingers on the keyboard, hear the musical clatter of the keys— tappity tappity tap tap tap. Then cold panic would grip her and still her dancing dream, and just for that moment she’d be glad she had Pete.
“Cute, huh?” Delia’s scratchy voice jolts Lorena back. Now that they’re out of range of the sailors, Delia’s walk has decelerated to its normal swing and sway. “Don’tcha love those adorable little sailor hats?”
Lorena, Rosalind still on her mind, says, “Why would you be interested in somebody who could be shipped out any day?”
“Well,” says Delia, pouting, “it’s not like we’re still at war. Didn’t they sign a peace treaty or something?”
“It’s called an armistice,” says Lorena. Honestly, she thinks, Delia can be such a dingbat. “We still got all kinds of problems with everybody, Russia, China, I don’t know who-all else,” she informs her. “Now that Russia’s got the bomb, we got to worry about whether they might try to hit us here, what with the shipyard and all.”
“The shipyard? They’d want to bomb the shipyard?” Delia’s eyes go wide.
“The shipyard. Norfolk, the naval base. Fort Eustis. Fort Monroe. Langley Field. All kinds of places around here they’d like to blow up. Where have you been? Don’t you know we live in a target zone?”
“Jeez Louise! I work in the shipyard.”
Lorena rolls her eyes. “Well, it wouldn’t matter if you worked at Chicken in a Bucket if the H-bomb hits. It would scoop out a crater from here to Richmond.” She doesn’t know that, but it sounds terrifying enough to warrant Delia’s horrified gaze.
“Jeez Lo-uise!” says Delia.
* * *
THE ROOM IS dark except for the first faint glow of early morning that seeps around the edge of the window shade. Lorena tucks her head farther under the covers. She feels herself rise a little as Pete’s weight shifts. Now he’s sitting up. Now he’s up and out, she can tell because the bed feels lighter.
She burrows into the nest she’s made of sheets and blankets, flannel nightgown scrunched high around her waist. She waits until she can hear the bathroom door shut, the flush, the knocking of the pipes as the shower shudders to life. She ducks back under the covers. Warm and dark, musky odor of bodies, sweat, stale sex. She pulls her pillow in after her and curls her body around it.
She thinks of Binky’s lips. How she tingled when she touched that pink and tender surface, how they felt like the skin that forms over chocolate pudding after it’s cooled. She mentally runs her fingers once again over his Cream of Wheat scar, follows it down his back, lower, lower …
Oops. Pete’s out of the bathroom. He plunks himself on the bed, jarring her. Flicks the light on his side of the bed, tips the tiny pleated lampshade to a rakish angle, examines the frayed toe of one sock with a probing finger before he pulls it on. “My mother darned socks,” he says.
Lorena doesn’t answer. His mother darned socks. His mother scrubbed clothes on a washboard. His mother canned tomatoes and nearly wiped out his family with botulism. Her image shadows Lorena at every domestic turn. Last Sunday she came for dinner and hovered at Lorena’s shoulder while she fixed apple pandowdy for dessert. His mother had a stake in its preparation since it, as well as her biscuit recipe, was handed by her to Lorena with great ceremony after the wedding.
“Slice those apples thin, dearie,” his mother had admonished in her Pall Mall-rattled voice. “Pete doesn’t like them thick and chewy, and that crust should be crunchy, you know he’s picky about his crust.”
When Pete’s mother did that, Lorena’s mind transported herselfright out of the kitchen, straight to the hall closet. She saw herself rummage through winter coats and mildewed umbrellas and bowling shoes; saw herself pull out Pete’s mail-order Red Ryder BB gun, load it with pellets, turn with the gun heavy under her armpit. She saw herself point it at her mother-in-law and shoot her right between those bullfrog eyes.
“What’s for lunch?” Pete’s asking. Lorena pops her frilly-capped head out of the covers.
“It’s in the Frigidaire.” Why does he always ask? She’s been packing his lunch bucket the night before for the past twelve years, same thing, never changes: two bologna sandwiches on white, heavy mayo; big dill pickle, bag of chips, piece of fruit, slab of cake, thermos of black coffee left over from breakfast.
He makes the coffee, thick and sludgy, she makes it too weak for him. He’s already down the stairs, calling, “Coupla eggs sunny-side, and gimme some bacon to go with that.” She hears him rummaging around in the cabinets, banging doors, clanging pots. She crawls out from under the covers and stares at the ceiling. Shoves the mound of blankets and sheets away from her. She is not, never was, never will be, chipper in the morning, and she starts her day as she always does: loathing the fact that he is.
She shuffles into the bathroom, pulls her nightgown up around her waist, sits on the cold seat, yawns. She’s up, and to prove it, she looks into the mirror. Yep. Her eyes are open. She must be up.
She digs her arms into the sleeves of the gray flannel robe, shoves pink feet into her slippers, flaps down the stairs to the kitchen. He is jazzed, got that Maxwell House perking, the glass knob on top of the coffeepot jumping with dark brown juice, the smell of it curling under her nostrils just like it does in the TV commercial. He’s tossing Wonder Bread bags out of the bread box, some empty, some holding a fuzzy green heel or two. “Well,” he says. “I guess this means no toast.”
A pair of eggs stares cross-eyed at her from the pan as she shoves the spatula under them, jostling their mucous gaze untilthe yolks run into the whites. He sees what she’s doing. “Hey! I hate that, yellow in the white. And where’s my bacon?”
“We’re out.”
“Jeez.” He’s not so chipper anymore. She feels better now.
THE HOUSE IS empty, like somebody knocked the wind out of it. Cassie’s left for school, Pete’s off to work, and the house suddenly, blissfully, rings with silence. Lorena scrapes the remains of breakfast into the garbage pail that gasps open with a stomp of her fur-slippered foot. It’s eight twenty-five.
A cold gray day. She looks out the kitchen window at a stone-colored bird hopping on the clothesline in the backyard. Beyond that are the back doors of another row of houses. She’s surrou
nded by houses, rows and rows of wartime housing called Stuart Gardens, an overnight development built for the influx of shipyard workers and servicemen.
For unbroken blocks, identical white frame row houses trimmed in dark green face each other across scraggly squares of grass and weeds called “courts.” The main feature of the court in front of Lorena’s house is a dusty diamond of dirt defined by somebody’s worn-out cushions that serve as bases for kickball or baseball, depending on the season. A sidewalk runs from the street past all the houses, linking them and framing the court in white.
In summer, people pull out metal lawn chairs, set them on their little patches of front lawn, and wave at each other across the court while the kids play ball or catch fireflies. Each house has its own front porch, just big enough to stand beneath when it rains. Each house has a ligustrum bush under the front window. In spring all the bushes bloom with white flowers and the court smells just like honey.
Many houses have a view of the water, the flat gray bay of Hampton Roads which laps at the narrow beach just down the hill from the court. Ships of all sizes—fishing boats, aircraft carriers, freighters—doggedly crisscross the water. Norfolk sprawlson the horizon. Dim forms of distant buildings visible in daylight become a carnival of lights at night. Lorena hasn’t been there for years.
She pulls her robe around her, steps onto the front porch. A gust of wind from the water balloons her robe. She clutches it with one hand while the other shades her eyes from the eastern sun as it brightens the morning sky. She smells the musky odor of brine, of rotting sea life snared in tattered remnants of nets washed up on shore. The fragrance somehow thrills her. She’s drawn to the water, always has been. But now she fears it, too.
Polio. You can catch polio from the water. That’s what she’s heard. She’s warned Cassie to stay away from it, not even to dip a toe. The warm and milky water she splashed over Cassie’s baby body a few short years ago has become as polluted and poisonous as witches’ brew.
Lorena stares at the water from her porch, then from her bedroom window as she gets dressed. She finds herself walking across the court, down the hill, over the patchy grass of the so-called park to the beach. Flat black sandals hanging from two fingers, bare feet sinking into brown-sugar sand, she gazes across the opaque water at Norfolk.
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