Lady in the Lake(41)

Now that baby, Sammy, is fourteen years old, an honor student. I don’t drink and our house is neat as a pin. A rental, but neat as a pin, whatever that means. How are pins neat? I go home every day and spend an hour with my feet up on the ottoman, a glass of Pepsi at my side. Because I do that, my legs are still worth a whistle, not a trace of a varicose vein. Less trot, more glide. Elevate. Those are the secrets I would share with the younger girls if they asked. But they never ask. They think they have all the answers, even the ones who manage to survive at the New Orleans Diner.

That name creates a lot of confusion, let me tell you. Some people think it’s supposed to be New Orleans food, whatever that is. But it’s just a joint that used to be on Orleans Street, then the owner moved it to Lombard, so he decided to call it the New Orleans Street Diner to keep his trade, but he screwed up and left the word “street” off the menus and was too cheap to fix it. He’s a Greek, good with money and cooking, dumb about everything else.

The woman at lunch with Mr. B—she asks him lots of questions. But not in a get-to-know-you way. Not in a date way. I don’t even need to hear the words to know that. This woman is like a dog stalking a squirrel, her body all a-quiver. Whenever I see a dog like that, I wonder: What do you want with a squirrel? You’re well-fed, it’s not going to taste that good. Whatever that woman wants from Mr. B, it can’t be as important as she thinks. Nothing is. I have learned that lesson over and over again. Nothing you want matters as much as you think it does.

It’s when I’m pouring Mr. B his third or fourth coffee that I hear her name, Cleo Sherwood. She worked in the kitchen at Werner’s, although not very long. She wanted to be a waitress, but the bosses weren’t having it. You had to be white to wait tables, they said it was what the customers wanted. Cleo was too pretty to be hidden away in the kitchen, in her opinion. She was right. Now she’s dead. I saw it in the Star the other day. She’s the first dead person I know, outside, you know, the kind of people who are supposed to die, grandparents and such. It was weird, reading in the paper that Cleo was dead. In the lake yet. How does a girl end up in a fountain? Had to be man trouble. A woman dies young, it’s man trouble.

Thinking about Cleo makes me realize how short life is, how a person needs to live a little. When I count up my tips that afternoon and see that I’ve had an unusually good day, I find myself walking the opposite direction from my bus stop, over to the center of downtown where the big department stores cluster. Hutzler’s is too much, I could never imagine myself shopping at Hutzler’s. It’s ten stories tall, there’s so much to buy there that it runs over into another building. But Hochschild Kohn isn’t as scary. I push through the revolving doors and march over to the perfume counter because it’s the first thing I see.

Perfume is wasted on me. I pretty much smell like bacon and French fries all the time, no matter how often I wash my hair. Not that anyone’s around to notice. When Sammy started school, I decided to forget about men. I’ll be all of thirty-five when he goes to college. That’s not too old to have some fun. The woman at lunch, she smelled good. I’d like to smell like that.

“May I show you something?” asks a salesgirl. Pretty dress, nice hair, gorgeous hands that make me want to thrust my own into my pockets.

Instead, I ask to try a sample of Joy, but only because I remember the ads that say it’s the costliest perfume in the world. The salesgirl grudgingly hands me a piece of scented paper, won’t even give me so much as a dab on my wrist. I sniff it. No, that wasn’t the scent on the woman at lunch with Mr. B. Guessing wildly, I point at a bottle with a dove on top of it. L’Air du Temps. I don’t dare say the name. Even if I could speak French, my accent would make it sound ridiculous. Until two years ago, I didn’t even know I have an accent, then Sammy brought a friend home and I heard them talking in the kitchen. “Why does your mom talk like that?” “Like what?” asked Sammy, my good boy, my darling boy. “Like she’s one of the Beverly Hillbillies.” Unfair, because I don’t sound like them at all. My West Virginia drawl has been eaten up by the Baltimore accents around me. My accent’s kind of like Sammy, a nice result from an ill-advised collision. People like my voice. They like me, my regulars, their faces light up when I come to take their order. I am loved and beloved. I’m sure not going to try to say L’Air du Temps in front of some salesgirl just so she can mock me.

“The cologne is cheaper,” the girl says. “But the bottle isn’t as grand.”

“I wouldn’t buy perfume for the bottle,” I assure her. I want her to know I’m no rube.

But the cost—jeez, Louise. Who could pay that just to smell good? Why not just dab some vanilla extract behind your ears and call it a day?

Yet I am sure, when I inhale it, that this is the scent on the woman at lunch with Mr. B. And I know this is something I can never afford, no matter how many miles I glide up and down the New Orleans Diner, no matter how many times newcomers look at the menu and make the joke, “What, no gumbo?” I always laugh as if I’ve never heard that one before, no sirree. I am as pretty as that woman, or could be. I’m prettier than the girl at the perfume counter, with her pointy nose practically touching the ceiling. My legs are shapely, my skin has good color. I have a great kid, we’re doing okay. But I’ll never have a bottle of perfume with a dove on top and it is probably just one of many bottles on that woman’s bureau, sitting on one of those mirrored trays that fancy women have for their perfume.