"Why should I?"
"Then forget the whole thing." She started pushing the door shut but I caught the knob on my side and leaned forward. Rosemary was more than twice my size but she yielded easily to my push. I felt the crush of thick carpeting underfoot; I was inside.
Fear was in her eyes but she tried to act calm. "Okay. Long as you're here, come in."
She turned and walked down the dim hallway. I followed slowly, my eyes still adjusting from the bright sunshine.
We went to the room she'd shared with Mel. On one side was a cot, the thin mattress rolled up at one end like a snail shell. The network of springs reminded me of a skeleton.
On the other side of the room was a huge, overloaded bureau — saint statues, perfume bottles, toilet water. A cup with a red candle in it, the wick blackened. The overstuffed bed was stacked high with throw pillows. A doll dressed in white sat on the pillows, shiny plastic legs spread wide.
On the wall over the bed was a photo of Vic, totally out of his element — he wore a jacket and tie, the same costume he'd donned to meet the baseball scout. I wondered where it had been taken, why he'd been dressed that way.
Rosemary opened the closet on Mel's side of the room. "She left some stuff here. Maybe she didn't want it. Maybe she just forgot it. I'll give it to you. If you don't want it, throw it out."
She spoke into the closet, passing stuff behind her: a stickball bat, two scuffed Spaldeens, a brand-new box of chalk. She straightened and groaned.
"That's all of it. You can go now."
"The address," I said, cradling the stuff as if it were the corpse of'a beloved pet. "I need the address."
"Go home, Joey. I'd appreciate my books back."
"You can shove those books, Rosemary."
Her open hand smacked my face. It didn't hurt but tears sprang to my eyes, liquid anger. I ran out hugging Mel's stuff to my chest.
CHAPTER NINE
Now I spent a lot of time in the house, watching Connie cook. When she wasn't looking I'd unscrew caps from her spice jars, stick my nose in and inhale deeply. Basil, thyme, rosemary - I especially liked the smell of rosemary, even though it had the same name as a person I hated with all my soul. I wondered how rosemary grew, where it grew, and if my father might be in a land where it was harvested.
I looked through Vic's old Yankee yearbooks and his paperbacks, mostly light sports reading and adventure stories. I'd stay in the bathroom so long with books like Tarzan that Connie would pound on the door, warning me I'd get hemorrhoids. In my fantasies I was Tarzan, swinging on vines, killing lion after lion, escaping from all sorts of trouble, just like my father.
When Connie managed to chase me out I'd go to the construction site and watch the men work. I had a spot on a hill where I'd sit alone for hours. They came to know me and left me alone, while other kids got chased. At lunchtime one day a worker even offered me half of his salami on pumpernickel, but I declined, remembering Connie's edict about Food Outside the Home.
I thought about looking for Phil, the kid from the stickball game, but decided not to. I couldn't bear the idea of having someone else torn from me. Nothing was worth the risk of that.
Another postcard came from my father soon after Mel was gone.
Dear Everybody,
The picture on this card was taken right near where I'm staying. Oregon is a very beautiful place, and the trees you see here are the ones they cut down to make paper. I like it here but miss you all and hope everyone is line.
Sal
"I want to tape it on my wall," I said, taking the card from Connie's hand.
"Yeah? Why? You tore up the last one."
"I know what I did," I said, irritated. But at this point I needed any contact I could get from my father, even if it was just a lousy postcard.
"He didn't sign it 'love,' " Connie said. "Would it have killed him to sign it 'love'?"
"Probably he was in a hurry." Look at who I was defending!
"Always in a hurry," Connie said. "Use tacks, tape pulls the paint off." She walked away murmuring. "Oregon, Oregon . . ."
Moments later she returned with Vic's old geography book and hunted up a map of the United States. She traced around it with her finger in search of Oregon. Her cheeks sagged as she shut the book, snap.
"He's gettin' further away," she said softly.
It seemed like a good time to probe for the truth. "But he's comin' back soon, isn't he, Connie?"
She shrugged. "Eh, what do I know?"
Jesus, it wouldn't have killed her to reassure me, but then again, why should she have bothered? She hadn't asked to get me in the first place. I decided being with people who didn't want me around was even worse than being alone — I had to escape.
But there was no escape from the brick and cement prison these peculiar people called home. Sometimes in bed I would wrap my arms around my head, trying to hatch some kind of a getaway plot. Me, a kid who'd rarely strayed past my father's hedge line in Roslyn!
The answer came to me one hot night as I stared across the room at Vic's empty bed, which I had chosen not to sleep in after he left: a hundred dollars, said the voice of my mother. With a hundred dollars you can even go to the moon. . . .
Sweat-soaked, I sat up in bed, the sheet sticking to my chest like a bandage. There it was, plain as the instructions on an aspirin bottle; get a hundred bucks and go. I was starting with nothing, because the few dollars my father had slipped me had gone toward barrels of lemon ice.
So it was prophetic that the first person I saw upon venturing outside the next morning was Zip Aiello, a sack of deposit bottles slung over his shoulder, glass cash. I ran and fell into stride with him.
"Hiya, Zip."
He gave me his lemon-sucking nod, the same one President Kennedy would have gotten had he been taking a stroll down Shepherd Avenue that morning.
"Okay if I walk with you?"
He stopped. "Why?" The word hung in the air like a dried fig.
I decided to come clean. "I wanna get money for bottles like you do. I need some money real bad."
He set his sack on the sidewalk, removed his fedora, and pushed back his hair with a yellow-nailed hand. "Why?"
"I can't tell you."
"If it ain't none of my business say, 'It ain't none of your business.' "
"It ain't none of your business."
"Fair enough." He pulled the fedora back on so that the hatband hid his eyebrows. "Kid. I got my own territory around here, unnerstand? Don't nobody touch it but me."
Uh-oh. He was afraid I'd be horning in on his turf. "Look, I'll go someplace else to find bottles. You just gotta show me where to bring them for money."
He pushed back the hat. "Another neighborhood?"
"Uh-huh. I promise I won't take any bottles from around here."
The lemon turned to honey in his mouth. The smile was both friendly and grim. "You leave this neighborhood, you might never come back."
"I'm not afraid," I lied.
"You oughta be. Rough streets around here."
A bit of his breakfast was irritating his gums. He took his false teeth out, ran his tongue around his gums, spat toward the curb and replaced the plates, double-clicking them in place. Those teeth were probably Zip's only possession that hadn't first been owned by someone else.
"You swear you'll stay off my territory?"
"I swear."
"You swear on your dead mother?"
He deserved a kick in the shins for that but he didn't get it. "I swear on my mother."
"Ya dead mother."
"My dead mother." They really made you drink your bile without a chaser when they knew they had your number on Shepherd Avenue.
Zip shouldered the bag, then looked behind as if checking for an oncoming posse of lawmen. "Awright, let's go."
We turned right on Atlantic Avenue. Seven blocks of silence, and then we went through an open garage door with the word DISTRIBUTOR over it. Crates of soda were stacked everywhere. We headed for
a man in a green windowed cubicle. It was lighted by a small lamp on a desk, which cast a round circle of light on the area where he kept his charts. You forgot it was daytime back there. The man peered over the tops of his half-glasses at us.
"How many, Zip?"
"Thirty. Four big."
"You know where they go." The guy wasn't even going to bother counting them. Almost daintily, Zip removed the bottles one at a time from the sack, as if he were unpacking treasured Christmas ornaments, and set them into a shallow tin bin. When he was through the man paid him, dropping coins one at a time into his hand. The sound made my mouth water.
"Nat, this here's Joey, he's gonna bring you bottles."
Nat came out of the cubicle, tall and lanky, Lincolnesque in a white shirt with sleeves rolled to elbows, a loose stringy tie, and a vest. He had stiff hair shaped like corrugated iron. Roslyn women spent fortunes to have such patterns inflected upon their scalps. His lips were beaky and fishlike, as if he stayed alive by sucking moss off lake bottoms.
He didn't squat to meet me, and I got a good feeling shaking his hand at the end of that long arm. I was going to be taken seriously. Nat looked me in the eye as he spoke to Zip.
"Never thought I'd see the day when you took on a partner. What are you, getting old?"
"He ain't my partner. He's gonna work other streets."
"Around here? Ho! You got a gun, Joey? I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Anyway, you'll do a lot of walking, my friend. Zip has a regular Ponderosa to pick."
Neither of us laughed.
"Yiz don't watch 'Bonanza'?" Nat crooned. "Ah, well."
I pulled out of his grasp. "I don't mind walking," I said. Nat shrugged and gestured at his office. "I'm here every day but Sunday until seven. Two cents for little soda bottles, a nickel for the big ones." He clasped his hands as if to beg for mercy. "Please, booby, if the bottle's chipped you won't try and sneak it past old Nat, eh?" The hands came apart. "Bring ten at a time, at least. That way I don't look at your ugly face five times a day."
Zip and I walked out into the sunshine and squatted at curbside. Zip smoothed dirt into a blackboard and, with a Good Humor ice cream stick, diagramed his terrain. It ran in a four-block radius from his house.
He tapped his chest with the stick. "Mine. You got that?"
"I got it. Don't worry, I won't screw you," I said, using an expression Mel had taught me. I don't think she knew what it meant, either.
On the walk home he softened. "I'll give ya a sack," he said abruptly. "I got a extra one." He stopped short and grabbed my shoulder. "Look over there!" He pointed at a small paper bag, twenty yards ahead. "Whaddya see?"
Was this a trick? "A bag."
Zip got the answer he'd hoped for and smiled. "That ain't what I see." In hunched Groucho Marx steps he jogged to the bag, picked it up, and, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, removed a Coke bottle.
"Just made two cents." He put the bottle into his sack, crumpled the paper bag, and threw it over his shoulder. "Ya gotta have a eye for that stuff, kid. See how the bag wasn't blowin' around in the wind? You gotta ask yourself, 'How come that bag ain't movin'?' Then you can make some money. These bottles, they like to hide, if ya know what I mean."
We made the turn on Shepherd Avenue. "You ain't gonna touch my territory, right?"
How many times did I have to tell him? "No, Zip."
"You ain't lyin', right?"
"Hey," I said, recalling another of Mel's favorite sayings, "whattaya, deaf?" I waited outside his house while he went in and got me my sack. It was wadded up in his hands. He looked both ways, yanked my shirtfront out of my pants, and stuffed the secret sack against my belly. The rough burlap fibers scratched my belly but I didn't cry out.
"Someday you'll do somethin' for me." He went inside, jingling the coins in his pocket.
My father's old painting equipment became a new source of solace for me. I spent so much time in the basement making watercolors on the good paper my grandparents had given me that Connie became fretful.
"You need sunshine," she said. "This light is no good." She pointed at the dusty, yellowy bulb that burned on the ceiling.
"I want to paint," I said, covering my work in progress with my arms.
"The sun is better light. You can set up the paper in the yard."
"I like it here," I insisted, willing her with my eyes to leave.
"You're gonna turn into a mushroom." She clumped away, defeated.
I was working on my masterpiece, a portrait of my mother. Incredibly, I was having trouble remembering what she looked like - had her eyes been blue or brown? Why couldn't I make a pencil outline that even remotely resembled her?
I tore up sheet after sheet of paper ruined by my clumsy strokes - noses too large, foreheads too small, necks too short.
The rock-hard watercolors withstood punishment, no matter how hard I scrubbed my brushes into them. I could barely deepen the crescent-moon scallops on their surfaces.
The floor beside the rolltop desk was littered with crumpled papers. It took days, but at last I succeeded in sketching a decent outline of her profile. I knew it was right because my heart leapt at the sight of it. It was her, all right.
Cautiously, I applied the paintbrush to the outline. No way I was going to botch it. Her eyes were blue, I remembered - how could I have forgotten that? I mixed yellow and brown on a sheet of scrap paper until the color of her hair seemed right.
Next, the skin. I cleaned off my softest brush, touched it to the red cake, and watered it way down before filling in her face.
Hours. When I was through I cleaned all the brushes and straightened out the desk, leaving only the portrait on its surface. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands. They were stained mostly red, as if I'd just performed surgery.
I came back to examine the work. Yes, it was still a satisfying image of her - I hadn't imagined that. Its surface, still wet with water, reflected yellow light from above.
Standing over the painting, I clasped my hands behind my back and puffed gently on the paper, urging it to dry faster. It worked. In a few minutes my mother's skin was nearly dry.
I sat and put my head in my hands. It seemed heavy as a cannonball. My back ached. My face was dropping closer and closer to the work until my lips touched her forehead in a soft kiss.
The poison-tasting watercolors jolted me back to reality. I recoiled, wiping my lips with the back of my hand.
Footsteps descending the basement steps, heavy and slow: Connie's. I made no effort to cover the painting.
I didn't turn around to look at her but felt her breath on my shoulders. An odor of garlic; she was holding a plate of macaroni for me.
"My God, it looks just like her."
Still I didn't turn around. "Sort of," I allowed.
Her hands gripped the knobs at the back of my chair. She'd put the macaroni down on the old ironing board.
"A pretty woman, she was."
"Yeah, but you never liked her, Connie."
"That's not true."
"Yes it is." I turned around. "You never visited us. Everybody around here likes to fight."
She refused to respond. "What are you gonna do with the picture?"
I shrugged, feeling the soreness in my shoulders. "I don't know. Hang it in my room. I mean Vic's room."
"It's your room too."
"No, it isn't."
Connie's eyes wettened. "Your grandfather can put a frame on it. We got one out in the garage with nothin' in it."
I was stunned. I'd never dreamed of framing my pictures, and here was Connie conferring immortality upon one, of my mother at that.
"Why didn't you like her?" I said, so softly I was nearly drowned out by the gurgle of the nearby water heater. She heard me and shrugged.
"Never really knew her."
"Whose fault was that?"
"Mine." She blinked back tears. "I didn't give her a chance, Eat the macaroni."
She went away. I didn't touch the food. It was
late - I noticed the dirty cellar window was black with night. I folded my arms and fell asleep on top of the painting.
But when I awoke in the morning I was in my cot, stripped to my underpants. Angie had carried me and undressed me without awakening me. Sunlight filled the room, and when my eyes adjusted to it I saw the framed portrait of my mother hanging on the wall next to my bed.
Angie had done that, too, but I didn't thank him. I went outside to look for bottles.
Bottles. It all came down to bottles.
When I wasn't painting, I was looking for bottles, and when I wasn't doing either thing I dreamed about where the bottles and paintings would one day take me.
As long as I was home in time for lunch and supper I was never asked how or where I spent my daylight hours. I never tried to sneak out of the house after supper, either. What for? It was too dark to see bottles at night.
I was true to my word with Zip and never took bottles from his turf. Even if I found one right in front of the house, I'd carry it across the street and put it inside Zip's gate. This was no untainted act of generosity, of course. In return I had his promise never to tell Connie and Angie what I was doing.
"I can keep my mout shut," he said with a wink.
And he did. I gathered Nehi soda bottles from surrounding black and Puerto Rican areas without anyone but Zip Aiello knowing about it. In the world of Shepherd Avenue this, like anything else kept from public knowledge, was a minor miracle.
I became a maniac about bottles. They were the only things I could depend on not to let me down, and what or who else could that be said about?
In the basement I found an old preserves jar, the kind with the rubber-rimmed lid that clamps down with a stiff wire handle. It was very old glass, freckled with air bubbles. There was a raised pattem of a bunch of grapes on its surface. I washed the thing out, then dropped the first of my deposit bottle earnings into it.
Plink, plink, plink . . . the coins bounced noisily off the glass bottom. I figured if I could fill my jar I'd have a hundred bucks.
"A hundred bucks? A hundred?" Nat's voice was awed when I told him my goal.
"That's what I need," I said, unloading my latest haul.
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