2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas (20 page)

Ted hangs up the phone. A couple enters the store and surveys the produce. He checks on Malcolm, who has been asleep for the past hour, head nestled between his marshmallow paws.

When Delilah arrives, Ted will tell her that they will never again be naked and clasped at the middle, thrusting toward her signed poster of Shane Victorino. He will never again have to use her cheap, cotton candy soap. He will never again have to deal with her accent: the tinned
a’
s, the sour
o’
s, the spine-splitting sound of
l’
s pronounced as
w’
s. Gina
sawl
you on South Street.

This decision fills Ted Stempel with a happy, reasonable light.

When the couple reaches the counter, he responds to the woman’s smile with an even bigger one.

“How are we tonight?” He rings the man up for his pears.

“Look at that adorable dog.” The woman cranes her neck over the counter. “What’s his name?”

“Malcolm,” says Ted.

“If I had a dog that cute, I’d take him to work with me, too,” the woman says.

“He’s got bandages on,” says the man. “Is he okay?”

Ted swells with pride. “He’s a champion. On second thought.” He voids the transaction. “The pears are free.”

“Really?” the man says.

“Free pear night,” Ted says. “Everyone gets free pears.” He hands the money back to the man.

“How nice of you,” the woman says. Then, to Malcolm, “See you later, alligator.”

Ted replies for him. “After a while, crocodile.”

“Is there anything
as satisfying as a pear?” Ben says, when they are back on the street.

“Yes,” Sarina says, “but you can’t eat it and walk.”

Ben’s eyebrows ascend. He always forgets that she is funny. That underneath her traditional exterior is the girl who wore only black in high school. “Pardon me, Miss Greene?”

Sarina’s cheeks turn the color of ham.

They walk and eat their pears. Night allows the objects of Christian Street to hide except for where the streetlights call them out.
There you are, newspaper stand. Hello
. A discarded umbrella:
Hello
. A hydrant. A chained bike. Sarina and Ben walk in and out of these salutations. A sign on a fence promises a community garden, after several false starts, is coming. Featuring basil and daffodils. For real this time.

M
adeleine waits until Miss Greene and Ben are a block away before emerging from behind a truck. She hears her teacher’s laughter unfurl like a scarf. Outside the store, produce shines. Madeleine feels around her pockets for change. Nothing. Her stomach protests. She could steal an apple. There are hundreds. She will be fast, dangerous!

Madeleine checks inside the shop, then sleeves a Rome Beauty.

“What have you got there, little girl?” a voice behind her says. It is the store’s clerk. “I have had it today,” he says. “With the drama.”

Madeleine shakes the apple out of her sleeve. “I shouldn’t have taken it.”

The clerk returns it to its stack. “It’s stealing.”

“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

“You look familiar.” He narrows his eyes. “Who are you?”

“Madeleine Altimari.”

“Come in here.” He disappears into the store. Madeleine considers escape, but she has attended too many years of Catholic school to run. She follows him. The store is unswept. Bruised canisters of tomatoes. Deflated bags of rice. Madeleine expects to see a cockroach scurry up the walls.

Behind the counter, the clerk loads a hoagie roll with meatballs. A dog at his feet whirrs at the smell. “Not for you,” the
clerk says. A television hanging in the corner is tuned to a news report about a famous actress. “Do you think it will help the city’s tourism to have famous people visit?” a reporter asks some yackamo in Fox Chase.

“I don’t have a crystal ball.” The yackamo shrugs.

Madeleine shrugs.

The clerk is satisfied with the heft and bulk of the sandwich. “You want cheese? We’ve got American and Swiss.”

“Any Locatelli?” she says.

“That’s for pasta.”

Madeleine’s voice is sad. “The saltiness brings out the flavor of the meat.”

“You’ll have to eat this one without it.” He wraps the sandwich in aluminum foil and holds it out to her. “Take it,” he says. He readjusts his tack when she balks. “I knew your mother.”

Madeleine knows she should not take food from strangers, but also that the city is a network of her mother’s promises. Hunger punches her stomach. She unwraps half of the sandwich and takes a large bite she can barely control. Her eyes move from the man to the door.

“Got somewhere to go?” he says. The phone behind the counter rings. He answers it.

Madeleine’s mouth is full. “Thank you.” Clutching the sandwich, she runs out of the store.

“Hey!” he calls.

On South Street, clusters of people smoke on the sidewalk. In a church that’s not Saint Anthony’s, a bell chimes. Madeleine catches up to Miss Greene and Ben and follows a gasp behind.

A
church bell chimes. Ben and Sarina finish their pears. They take Second until they reach the dead yards of Fishtown. “You’re a good teacher,” he says. “I can tell by that girl’s face when she looked at you.”

“She’s been through the mill. Her mother died, and her father isn’t the best.” Sarina worries that this heavy thought will tip the ship of the night. “She has people, though,” she adds, “who help.”

“Like you had people.” His tone is suddenly charmless. “Not me, though. I wasn’t there for you.”

“You were a boy, Ben.”

“I was an asshole,” he says.

“Way to make it about you.”

“Just let me say I’m sorry, Miss Greene.”

A smattering of laughter on a rooftop settles on them. The street is filled with warehouses and crack houses, jazz clubs and people having tough conversations. “You’d be surprised by how much it hurts that he didn’t say good-bye.” They have reached the club. Sarina’s expression is a mixture of relief (she is cold) and happiness (they have made it) and pain (she has spoken about her father) when she turns to Ben.

“Do you know,” he says, “I think about you every single day?”

“How could I know that?”

“I’m telling you.”

“We’re here,” she says. “Let’s go in.”

He doesn’t move. “Do you think about me?”

Bundled skinny boys, one whistling off tune, scuffle through the door into the club.

“I’m cold,” Sarina says. “I forget the question.”

“You do not.”

“I think that you’re not free. Even if you are going to be. You’ll lose a year, at least. At the end of it, you’ll be a different person who wants different things. I’ve been through it.”

For the first time, Ben feels the chill anesthetizing his elbows and toes. In one of the warehouses, someone opens a window to clear a stinking room.

“What am I supposed to do,” she says. “Wait?” She wants him to say,
Yes, wait. I will be home as soon as I run this one errand
. Ben perceives disgust in her tone. Why would anyone wait for him? A boy who didn’t know how to be a prom date, a man who knows what he needs, but too late.

He releases her arm. His voice is professional with sorrow. “You certainly couldn’t do that.” He means because she is precious. Sarina hears that she is snotty and unkind. He means because he is not that lucky; she hears: he is bored.

No one says
I want you to wait
and no one says
I’ll wait
.

Ben enters the club and Sarina follows. A concussion of guitar and drums pauses them. “I’m going to …” He points to the bar. She points to the ladies’ room.

In front of the bathroom mirrors, women administer to themselves. One draws her eyebrows on. One bemoans a botched waxing. One says into her phone that she is out of
here if he doesn’t show.
The hoops I’ve jumped through
, she says, balancing the phone and washing her hands. Another woman combs and recombs her bangs. A vase of fake flowers brightens up an old bureau. Sarina slumps against it, sees herself unglossed in the mirror. She removes her coat, her sweater. She finds a compact and tube of lipstick in her bag. She takes down her hair. She puts it back up. She takes it back down.

Do you know I think about you every single day?

“Down,” the woman who has jumped through hoops says to Sarina about her hair.

“You think?”

The woman stabs at her pucker with a shade of peach. “I know.”

Sarina locks herself in a stall and plans. She will find him at the bar. He will be angry—drinking a scotch, neat. She will say his name and pause for the amount of time it takes to unsnap a bra, so he can process her lips, her hair, before she moves into him. She will open his mouth with hers. She will lead him through the club, into the men’s room. He will lift her onto the sink’s counter and slide his hands down her thighs. She will catch glimpses of him in the mirror. Her mind will be her childhood road in early morning; the breeze in the weeping willow.

Back in the club, musicians play on a blue stage. Sarina has never heard music like this. A quick guitar and a bank of drumming. Black coats and red lipstick. The crowd at the bar is three deep. The floor beneath Sarina’s heels pulses.

When she finds him at the bar, Ben is talking to Marcos
and a redheaded girl. The night has contained so many chasms it has achieved an echo. An overcologned reprise.
This is fucking bullshit
, Madeleine had screamed in the principal’s office, and she was right.

My God
, Sarina thinks,
this terrible night
.

T
his goose-pimply, gold star of a night!

While every other girl in the fifth grade is asleep, Madeleine is finishing a hoagie in the electric air across the street from The Cat’s Pajamas, meeting place of witches and ice cream men. The club is nondescript in a row of warehouses the color of potato sacks. A gust from the river. A couple pushes through the club’s doors, choking with laughter, and bounds toward Girard. Gypsies, thinks Madeleine. She crosses the street and stands in front of the club. She places her hand against the door. Wood. Her bed is made out of wood. So is her mother’s recipe box. Wood is not scary. She uses both hands to open the heavy door, hears music, and slips inside. The vestibule smells like cinnamon gum. There is a stack of phone books and another door, this one quilted and red. She peeks through it for the length of a glimpse: a red room with tables and chairs, each of them filled with people. A woman sneezes. Madeleine says, “God bless you.” She lets the door close and is once again a secret in the vestibule.

Two men enter from outside. One of them wears a stiff-looking suit lined in sequins. They seem to want to get to the main room as fast as they can. Madeleine tells herself—
go!
She uses their current to enter the club unseen.

Coats bulge out from an overworked rack near the door. A bar runs along the wall on her right, lit at the top by twinkle lights. The ceiling is tin with designs punched into it. At the
end of the bar the room swells into the dome of a stage where a young man with a red scarf plays a guitar pointed forward on his knee. His fingers move so quickly the sound seems delayed. If anyone notices her, she will disappear like Clarence through a crack. Hidden in the coats, Madeleine’s heart does the rumba.

T
he girl, introduced as Cassidy, can’t be more than eighteen, Sarina thinks. In the crook of Marcos’s elbow, she looks like a niece corralled into an affectionate hug during a family football game.

“I work here!” the girl yells. “We’re going to dance!”

It is too loud to talk. Ben avoids Sarina’s eyes as Cassidy says something into his ear. Sarina assumes it is a general bar request, a napkin or more ice; however, Ben slides off his stool. Holding her hand, he leads her into the crowd of people on the dance floor.

“She likes to make me jealous!” Marcos says, taking Ben’s place on the stool.

“How thoughtful of her!” Sarina recrosses her legs. Ben doesn’t dance, she thinks. At their prom, at every wedding they’ve suffered through at different tables, she doesn’t remember him dancing. Sarina had to live through fifteen years of friendship to dance with him in a fountain, but this girl did it with a quick message delivered to the vicinity of his collar. No matter. It will be a clumsy display. The song is Latin, demanding passion and hips. The girl will get frustrated. People will become uncomfortable. The sprinklers will turn on.

The musicians sweat. The song changes without stopping to one that’s more urgent. Ben and Cassidy reach the middle of the floor. Sarina takes absentminded sips of her whiskey and waits to see what they will do.

Cassidy begins a textbook salsa she returns to after spinning or completing a controlled slide. Sarina can see her bra winking from under a low-backed tank top. Par-rum-rum. Slide. Flashing gold charm near her collarbone. Par-rum-rum. Slide. Strands of hair plastered against her neck. Her gummy smile.

“She’s hot, right?” Marcos says.

“Ben can’t dance!” It is the only thing Sarina can think of to say that isn’t a lie. Though it appears to be a lie tonight. When the girl spins, he catches her and moves his feet in time with hers. He does his own spin. He hits appropriate postures. He laughs because he is having fun.

“Sometimes it’s about having the right partner!” Marcos moves his feet in time. “You look like you swallowed a rat!”

“I’m having a ball!” Sarina yells. “Your chest hair is distracting!”

He emancipates another button on his shirt. “Be a bitch!” he says.

The guitarist introduces a slow, gritty segue. The percussion simmers. Ben and the girl transition into an almost dirge: both of their arms are slack, his head buried in her neck.

Sarina removes her glasses and places them on the bar. She calls for another whiskey. An invisible god with strong hands squeezes her head. It is the senior prom again, only now she’s wearing natural fibers.

Ben: Be cool. Coca cola. Be cool.
What am I doing? Be cool. Coca cola. Plug her in! Step, step. Tell her no! What am I doing (missed one, catch it up, parry step ([for the love of]!) Tell her no! Everything is—plug her in! Everything is. Step, step. What am I doing, think about it, date her cousin, mix it up and don’t get boring (this girl smells like Comet cleanser)—pelvis jut! Coca cola. Pelvis jut! Everything is. Comet cleanser. Tell her no. Everything is. Plug her in. For the love of. Sarina, Sarina, Sarina, Sarina.