In the narrow alleyway beside the school, Jacob paused and then leaned down to whisper into his sister’s ear. “It was a fib,” he said.
He leaned down, out of the autumn blue sky, out of the cinder-block wall, out of nothingness (she would say later) and into awareness, into memory. His eyes were green and his lashes long and thick. There were marks on his face, freckles, lingering acne, nicks from his razor. There was the trace of a beard. He leaned down and put his lips to her ear and said, “It was a fib,” a buzz against the soft bones that made her raise her shoulder and giggle. Surely not her first memory of him—he had read to her when she was still in a crib, he had sat beside her on the stairs waiting to be called down on Christmas morning, at the dinner table he had spoken to her through his raised milk glass, the milk bubbling with his words until their father said, “Enough”—but surely this was her first clear memory of his face, leaning down to her out of the autumn sky.
There was no dentist appointment, he said. He had the car keys in his hand. He started walking again. He just wanted to take her for a ride, he said. She hurried to keep up. They were in the alleyway. On one side was the long cinder-block wall that separated the school property from the strip of stores and the parking lot next door. On the other, the low steps and wide glass doors of the gym. The alleyway itself was a magnet for lost mimeographed worksheets and loose-leaf paper, for candy wrappers and brown lunch bags and the yellowed wax bottles, many of them marred by teeth marks, that had once been filled with sweetened, brightly colored liquids, purchased from Krause’s store. There seemed to be a constant wind blowing along the ground here, full of sand and grit, and she felt she was racing through it, following him. He had the car keys in his hand and they jingled like a cowboy’s spurs as he led her around the cinder-block wall and into the parking lot next door, where he had left his car. He unlocked the door, opened it for her. “Hop in,” he said. There was a thin terry-cloth cover over the old leather seats. It seemed to be attached with rubber bands. It slid underneath her as she climbed in, but it was soft to the touch. He slammed the door, walked around the back of the car. He had parked under the single tree in the lot and a few leaves, yellow and gold and rust colored, had drifted onto the red hood and across the windshield. He got in the car, put the key in the ignition. “Let’s just drive around,” he said.
She said okay, although still she expected the drive to end at the dentist’s office—the eighth grader who had fetched her had said so, and so had Mrs. Walters when she called her to the front of the class. She could already smell the cinnamon and alcohol of the place. Hear the hateful sound of the drill. The office was in the basement of the dentist’s house. There was a long concrete stairwell, damp and steep, that went down to the door. The floor of the waiting room was black and white. There would be a shoe box full of charms and toy jewelry from which she could pick two when it was over.
Her brother put his arm across the seat and slowly backed out of his space. He drove first through the length of the narrow lot, past the candy store, the hardware store, the five-and-dime. “That’s where the ‘hoochie-koochie-koo’ man used to stand,” he said. He pointed to a row of shopping carts in a corner near the grocery store. “When I was your age,” he said. “He was just a crazy old man, always kind of drooling. If he got close enough to you, he’d pinch your cheek and say, ‘Hoochie-koochie-koo.’” He looked over his shoulder as he turned out of the lot. He was smaller than their father, but he had the same seriousness when he drove. “People said he was shell-shocked. From the war.” He made another turn, driving slowly, slower than she could walk. “I don’t know when he stopped being there.” He drove past the bowling alley and told her he’d been on a bowling team in eighth grade. He was so bad, he said, that he never broke a hundred. He said he used to sit there and pray, waiting for his turn. Just one spare, he used to say. Not even a strike. You don’t have to make me good, he used to tell God. “Just average.” He looked at her and laughed. She laughed, too, mostly because it was the middle of the morning and she was supposed to be in school and she wasn’t. She was sitting beside her brother in his car. He raised his arm and pointed and then quickly returned his hand to the steering wheel. “That’s where we used to go for our polio shots, when we were little. And then they changed it to those little sugar cubes.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I guess they worked,” he said. He looked at her. “I’ve never had polio, have you?”
She laughed, not exactly certain it was a joke. “No,” she said.
He put the turn signal on again and once more pulled out into the road. It was a familiar route, the one that led from the church or the school to home, but it was made strange and new by the fact that it was mid-morning and she should have been in school, by the fact that she was alone with her brother, in his car, and they were driving even more slowly than she could walk. They passed the playing field at the back of the school, beside the cemetery. Without a word, the two of them turned their heads to watch it go by. The grass was balding and the fence behind home plate was bent and torn. There was still something of summer’s dust over the whole thing although the leaves on the trees at the far end were yellow and red. They turned again, down another street, this one lined with houses like their own. Lawns and driveways and sidewalks. Jacob named the friends who lived in some of them—Louie, Kevin Malloy, Ted Fish. He told her a story about one Halloween. He turned again. Lori Ballinger’s house. Michael took her to the prom. Bobby Kent’s house. Bobby cried in sixth grade when people wouldn’t stop calling him Clark. He turned again. Now they were off the familiar route to church and school and she began to suspect once again that he was taking her to the dentist.
“Did you ever see this house?” he asked her and once more raised his hand from the steering wheel. She looked. A house like all the others but as they passed she saw that the bushes beneath the front windows were scattered with garden gnomes, maybe a dozen of them. And then that the front steps were full of ceramic animals—dogs, geese, rabbits. And then, as they passed, that the garage door was painted with a huge, colorful portrait of the Blessed Mother, surrounded by stars and rainbows. “Not sure what’s going on there,” he said.
She said, “It’s pretty.”
They passed a woman pushing a baby carriage. Lawns with sprinklers going. He reached to turn on the radio. He said, “Don’t let me hear you listening to anybody but the Good Guys while I’m gone.”
She said, “I won’t,” and remembered for the first time that last night before she went to bed her mother had said that when she got home from school today Jacob would be gone off to the army. Like their father had done.
He turned again, the signal making a ticking sound, and she recognized the street once more. They were nearly home. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Scoot down.” She looked at him, unsure. “Scoot down,” he said, more urgently. He put his hand on the top of her head, over her beanie, and pushed her a little. The terry-cloth cover slid with her. He did not increase his speed. “Just in case Mom’s looking out the window,” he said.
All she could see were the tops of the trees and the blue sky, but she knew they were passing their house, the driveway and the lawn, the white shingles and the dark red trim, the sheer white curtains in the front window and the drapes upstairs, in their parents’ room. She knew her brother had turned and was looking at their house over the top of her head. It was like a dream of passing her own house and not turning in. There was a slow song on the radio and the tick tick tick of the turn signal seemed to mar it somehow. Jacob looked down at her over the rolled-up sleeve of his arm. Her beanie had come down over her forehead and she had buried her chin in her chest. He glanced back at the street and then reached out to touch her thin elbow. “Okay,” he said, softly. “Sit up again.” But the terry-cloth cover was slipping under her and it was more of a struggle than she would have imagined. She wiggled and pressed her palms against the seat and raised her legs and pulled at her skirt. Her saddle sho
es flashed black and white beneath the dashboard. He watched her, his eyes going back and forth from the windshield. “Jeepers,” he said, finally, when she had settled herself, pushed the beanie to the back of her head. “A little spastic there,” he said, and although he was smiling, not teasing, she pouted at him anyway, for saying spastic. He reached out again and put his palm on her head.
They drove on, through an intersection and up a hill and then around the front of the high school with its long row of gray doors. Past the football field and the tennis courts, then, turning again, back among houses that over here were all single-story with long front lawns. He gave names to only a few of them. He was mostly listening to the music, only occasionally, softly, singing along. His sleeves were rolled up and his arms looked strong to her, although his hands, fingers and nails, were pale and thin, like her own. He said, “This can be Michael’s car when he gets home from school, Thanksgiving and Christmas. But Dad’s got to go out and turn the engine over every other day or so. Remind him.”
She said okay. They were driving back down the hill. She could see the wiry spire stuck on top of St. Gabriel’s round roof. There was the stubble of a beard on her brother’s cheek and his hair brushed the collar of his shirt. She was beginning to feel the first pinpricks of doubt, or guilt. The morning was growing long. The sun was now hot through the windshield. She was supposed to be in school. Surely it was not her first memory of her older brother—he had once helped her make a bus for dolls out of a cardboard box and pushed it across the living-room carpet, from bus stop to bus stop—but it was, perhaps, the first memory in which she saw him distinctly, on his own, apart from their house and their family, separate. He took his hands from the steering wheel one at a time and rubbed the palms against his jeans. He glanced at her again. “Got me a ticket for an aeroplane,” he said, and grinned, but stopped at a light at the next intersection, he leaned his head back and blew air at the cloth ceiling. He closed his eyes and for a moment she was afraid that he had forgotten about her completely. But then the car behind them beeped to get them going again. “Hold your horses,” he said, his eyes on the rearview mirror. There was a brown scapular, a small picture of the Sacred Heart, dangling from it. They were now passing the far side of the church and her school, the cemetery and the gray incinerators.
“I don’t want to get yelled at,” she told him.
He nodded slowly, as if she had said much more and he was slowly, bit by bit, agreeing with it all. He pulled into the parking lot beside the church and walked her only to the door of her school. He pushed the door open for her and she walked under his arm, from the heavy autumn sun to the cool shadows of the hallway. The entire school was reciting the prayers before lunch—Sister Rose’s voice on the PA sounding from every classroom, the children’s collective voice following along—Our Father and Hail Mary and Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty…She walked along the shining linoleum, down the stairs, and pulled back with a start as she began to turn into the wrong classroom. By the time she found her own, the prayers were over and the children were reaching under their desks for their lunch boxes. When she saw Mrs. Walters’s powdered face, smiling at her, she began to cry, all unaccountably until she felt the woman’s hand stroking her head and realized that somewhere along the way she had lost her beanie. In the parking lot where they played during recess, she recruited a pair of friends to help her search for it, but with no luck, although one of them spotted Jacob coming through one of the doors of the church and called to Clare. She looked up just in time to see him leave.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, on the plane, his first flight, he leaned his head against the window and tried to distinguish the streets and highways and parks below, looking for the thrill of spotting something familiar. He looked for the church and the school, certain they would be his surest landmarks: the roof of St. Gabriel’s, from up here, would indeed look like a flying saucer. The school and the gym made identifiable, from up here, by the way they jogged around Mr. Krause’s store. But the plane was banking already and wisps of cloud touched the rising wing. He could not get his bearings. Down below, there were green yards and long gray roads and more baseball diamonds than he would have imagined. There were the blue ovals of backyard pools. There was the Unisphere and then the stadium and then the spires of the city, a glimpse of limitless ocean before the plane banked again and the clouds took over. He sat back. He was aware of an obligation to say something to the woman beside him—she was a smallish woman, older than the girls he knew, younger than his mother, she was already reading a paperback—but he was uncertain of the protocol. Where you headed, maybe. Or, Good book? Fly much? He was leaving home for the first time and already he saw how ill equipped he was, how unready. He could not make conversation with strangers, and yet conversations with strangers were perhaps the first thing required of him in his new life. He touched his seat belt. Put his hands in his lap. He closed his eyes and thought to pray but all petition was undermined by Jesus’ superior prayer, on the night before his death: Your will, not mine. Jacob wanted only to say, Take care of me. Give me a break. The change of light in the cabin made him open his eyes again. The plane had cleared the clouds—they now ran like a great white field just below the wing, they were touched with gold—and the sky was a solid blue. “Incredible,” Jacob said, and the woman beside him put down her book and leaned forward, their shoulders brushing, her hair smelling fresh, like green leaves. He had a memory of the scent of green willow leaves on yellow, pliant stems, small starbursts of blood on his palms. “Isn’t it pretty?” she said.
IN JUNE, Susan Persichetti found a job at the Woolworth’s in the mall—the cosmetics counter, which was fun and gave her a chance every once in a while to slip a lipstick or a bottle of nail polish into her purse. She had to wear a smock, a pale blue polyester thing, all the employees did, and by early August she was bringing it home and putting it on over her clothes in her bedroom before she went downstairs and out past her parents to work.
Her room was in the attic, the long, dormered space that had been left unfinished by the builder (although he did provide the center-hall staircase that led to it), and paneled and plumbed rather inexpertly by her father and Tony while he was still in high school. She’d borrowed the room while Tony was in the army and now that he had left home—for good, it seemed—the space was hers alone, but it still retained the dark scent and insurmountable dreariness of a boy’s room: oak paneling and brown shag carpet and a wooden toilet seat in the bathroom. She didn’t mind. She had even kept a couple of her brother’s old posters on the far wall.
Putting her smock on over her clothes, she skipped down the stairs, her car keys in her hand, and cried, “Going,” to her parents, who would always look up from the couch or the table or the television and then—if they were in the same room—look at each other to confirm how they both understood that this summer’s quick glimpses of their teenage daughter breezing in and out the door were mere prelude to her leaving them for college in another year. And then for the rest of her life. But the look they exchanged acknowledged, too, how pleasant it was to know that for her, stepping off into her life, there would not be the quicksand that had met Tony: the army, the war, the year away in which the child they had known was lost, utterly drawn down, sucked under by the troubled, angry, silent young man he had become.
“Drive safely!” they cried back. Or, “Be careful!”—cheerfully, because girl children went off but they also returned, bringing grandchildren and their own solicitousness to their parents’ old age.
Sometimes her father would begin to sing, teasing her, “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store.”
It was amazing, she learned, what you could find out. There was no sense looking under A in the phone book, for instance, you should look under W instead: Women’s Health. Women’s Medicine. (Woman itself sounding in their mouths like a newly coined word—not ladies, not girls anymore, but women.) Informat
ion filtered down from a college-age friend of a co-worker at Woolworth’s that one of the clinics in the city was in the same building that held a famous hair salon everyone at school was talking about going to. She called the clinic from a pay phone. She needed proof of age and three hundred dollars and if she hadn’t had a pregnancy test yet, they would do one there. Also someone to accompany her home.
She wasn’t eighteen but she could use Annie Keane’s phony birth certificate and driver’s license, the one she used to get into bars. Although Annie had hazel eyes and hers were brown, they were both five foot five or so and slim. Annie said she’d come with her, too, so no need to call the boy—“The Jackass” was how Susan now referred to him—who had stopped calling her himself early in July. There was only the matter of the money.
She had saved seventy dollars so far this summer. Annie loaned her fifty from her own savings and then two more ten-dollar bills, filched (on two separate occasions) from her mother’s lingerie drawer. Susan added thirty-five of the fifty dollars her father had given her to shop for fall clothes—indulgently, because her mother wanted her to use her own money—saved by buying a single sweater and then going into the dressing room to put a blouse and a kilt skirt into the same bag. The trick—amazing what you could find out—was to go to the better departments of the nicer stores where there was usually only one saleslady working the floor (a plump grandmotherly type in this case, whose daughter had gone to Mary Immaculate Academy as well), and no one counting hangers as you moved in and out of the dressing room, looking for another size.
She added the next thirty of the thirty-seven dollars from her second-to-last paycheck.
In her blue polyester smock, her arms pressed against her stomach, she drank a Coke and smoked a cigarette with Jill O’Meara who had come into Woolworth’s just as Susan was going on her break. They sat together on the concrete rim of a planter in the middle of the mall. It was humid, but there was that orange color at the edge of the blue sky—the beginning of a late-summer sunset. Because they had not seen each other since June—they were not particular friends—conversation demanded an accounting. Jill had had a perfectly boring summer, working at a card shop in a strip mall near her home, the backyard pool, Jones Beach, two weeks camping with her family—where, she added, a spontaneous lie, she met this guy. They went pretty far, she said, improvising, swimming together late at night, in the lake, out of their suits. He was dark-haired and blue-eyed and funny—but from Syracuse, she said, the first place she could think of that sounded like the dark side of the moon.
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