Boy, Snow, Bird(17)
She didn’t seem to care that they weren’t buying anything, so I said: “They ought to be in school.”
“That’s your opinion,” she said. “That’s what you think.”
“Don’t blame me when it turns out some of your stock has been stolen.”
She stared at me as if I had three heads and she was curious about which one was boss. “Just don’t let the youngest eat apples around my books, that’s all.”
“How am I supposed to tell which one’s the youngest?”
“Don’t annoy me, Boy.”
I thought she was terrific, and hoped she liked me, but she was clearly very precise in the allocation of her affections, so she probably didn’t. At six-thirty, an hour after the store was supposed to close and only half an hour after the kids had put their books back on the shelves and sauntered out, I heard her hooting with laughter and put my head around the door of the back room, thinking I’d better take advantage of her good mood and ask if she wanted me to come back the next day. She was leafing through the obituaries section of the newspaper and wouldn’t let me in on the joke, but said: “See you tomorrow.”
I took a magazine quiz on the bus home, but I knew the result before I added the figures up. I wasn’t in love with Arturo, and I wasn’t going to be. You don’t need a quiz to tell you these things; they don’t escape your notice. The flag stuffed into the back of my wardrobe was there because someone had once draped it around my shoulders in such a way that the touch of his fingers made me feel like a million bucks. That’s not how it was with Arturo. He held me so tightly that numbness stretched all the way down my arms and only let go a few minutes after he did. It wasn’t as nice a feeling as the flag around my shoulders. But I felt more certain of it because it lasted longer.
6
people—well, Mia and Webster—told me I should make Arturo take me out more. Webster gave me lectures. “You don’t seem to understand how quickly a man will stop treating you right if you let him. So when he gives you half-assed invitations like ‘Hey, why not drop by for potluck tonight?’ you can’t stand for that, Boy.”
(Tra la la, I can and will. She didn’t know about his grilled cheese sandwiches. I’d asked him what made them taste so good and he’d closed my hand up into a fist, wrapped his own hand around the fist, and told me: “This much butter.” Webster’s lecture persisted, but my attention wouldn’t stick. She had a lot of powder on, which made me think of geishas. She was probably right, though; she was wise in the ways of getting what you want; she was walking on air and sporting an engagement ring with a rock so notable that I and the other boarding house girls took to including it in our conversations, addressing it as “Gibraltar,” demanding that it take sides.)
I made excuses. I was tired of my date dress. In fact I felt a little violent toward it. I’d open my bedroom closet and the red silk would shrink and shudder among the clothes hangers, as if it knew that I was on the brink of tossing it onto a trash heap. There was no need to go public with Arturo. I was happy to go to the Salome Club with Mia and a couple of her family friends, different ones each time. Her half brother came along one night too—her father’s son, a gangly fellow with a passing resemblance to Frank Sinatra. His name was Rocco, and he knew how to lean in and light a girl’s cigarette with a look and a smile that had me stubbing my cigarette out whenever his attention was elsewhere, just so he’d light up another one for me. It could have been the way he guarded the flame with his palm, the unexpected care with which he carried it up toward your lips; who knows what makes a man’s gesture attractive?
If you’re not afraid of a real night out, hit the town with guys who just got out of jail. They’re the ones who can’t be kept off the dance floor—they’ll dance till they drop, and even when they’re stretched out flat on the floor, they’ll still shake their ankles. Sometimes our companions didn’t speak much English and communicated with me through smiles and mimed gestures. It was nice. Their questions were some of the simplest there are. Will you have another drink? Care to dance? Simple to give clear answers to—sì, sì. I sat out the meaningful slow dances and sipped my sarsaparilla with closed eyes, trying to squeeze every drop of meaning out of the love songs. According to Kitty Kallen, little things mean a lot.
Mia’s “Secret World of Blondes” had been the subject of enough letters to the editor for the paper to let her go ahead with a new piece. Her plan was to attend catechism classes with three girls and be an eyewitness to the preparations that led all the way up to each girl’s Mexican, Italian, or Irish Holy Communion. By the time she’d attended one class with each girl, she already had a title: “Lucrezia Borgia Never Died.”
So Mia was all right and I was to be one of Webster’s bridesmaids. I’d become respectable overnight, was greeted on the street with cheery variants of “What’s new?” instead of blank glances. Flax Hill had begun to see the point of me. Aside from bridesmaid duties, I was holding down a job at a bookstore notorious for having an owner who’d as soon fire her assistants as look at them. And I apparently had something to do with the renewed spring in Arturo Whitman’s step, as well as his tone-deaf whistling of show tunes.
I hear singing and there’s no one there . . .