By the Rivers of Brooklyn (26 page)

“No, I know it wasn't,” says her friend, her loyal supporter. Diane is surprised by how soft the blond woman's voice is. She sounds wistful. “When me and Frank was married first–”

“Same story, I know it, the very same story,” says the dark-haired woman. “Back when we were married first, George was on the road then, and when he came home, he couldn't wait to get me into the bedroom. I kid you not, one time – this was before the kids of course – he
couldn't
wait. Right there on the living room carpet. I swear.”

Diane feels her toes curl inside her saddle shoes. Quickly she raises her own voice, tries to make it hard and bright like that of her shadow-self in the next booth. “I shoulda gone to Dad for money. Dad's a soft touch, and if he gave me money, it would make Mom crazy.”

Carol giggled lightly. “She still doesn't talk to him?” Giggle, giggle. Diane's crazy family.

“I swear, not a word. She won't even give me a message for him. She'll stand in the middle of the kitchen and look up at the ceiling like she's talking to God. ‘I don't suppose your father even knows the gas bill is due this week.'” She puts on Ethel's voice, with the faint traces of her Newfoundland accent that Diane can imitate and always crack up her friends, the same way Levi Liebowitz can make people laugh when he pretends to be his mother, crooning,
Ah, mein leetle
Levi.
Mothers with funny accents, funny habits like not talking to your father for at least two years. If you can get a laugh, use it.

Does anyone else notice that Levi makes them laugh with how much his mother loves him, how embarrassing her love is, and Diane gets a laugh with how much her mother hates her, hates Diane's father, hates the whole world? No joke, no fast words for Carol could ever capture the heavy silence of that apartment, where her mother sits at one end of the table and her father at the other behind a newspaper, never saying a word. Diane and Jimmy marooned in the middle, drowning in a sea of silence.

But who cares? School five days a week, choir and Young People's on Sunday no matter how boring it gets, and out all day Saturday with Carol and the gang. Only home long enough to pick up new material for her routines, funny-funny Diane and her funny family.

The girls take the subway downtown, wedged in among crowds of Saturday shoppers. At Macy's, they try on dresses and talk about the junior prom. They are sophomores, but hoping for prom invites from junior boys. Mickey Malone is a junior, if he stays in school for the rest of the year. Diane holds up a pink dress – New Look – and stares at her reflection in the mirror.

Carol holds up something she really can buy: a green scarf that shines like emeralds against her blond hair. Or like Diane imagines emeralds would shine, not having seen any in real life. The scarf looks expensive – it's fifty cents – and Carol is going to buy it.

On the rack next to it is a red one with a gold thread running through it. It slips through Diane's fingers like water. Wraps around her hand while she watches Carol try on the green scarf and take it to the checkout.

Outside, Diane is almost surprised to feel the red scarf still in her pocket. It weighs almost nothing there, does not seem to take up space. Instead, the weight is in her stomach, something cold about the size and shape of a potato. She imagines her mother, Ethel, saying sorrowfully,
I'm so disappointed, Diane. I didn't
raise you to be this kind of a girl. Your brother Ralphie died for his country, what would
he think of you now?

Diane stops in front of a store window on Fulton Street and pulls out the red scarf, winds it around her hair, rubies against her dark curls. Carol turns sharply. “Where'd you get that?”

“At Macy's.”

“I didn't see you buy it.” Carol frowns, suspicious.

“I got it at another checkout. While you were getting yours.” She can see Carol doesn't believe her. “I had more money than I thought.”

She doesn't, of course. With the subway fare back to Flatbush she has exactly enough left for the movie. But it's worth it, to see the shock in Carol's eyes and know, or imagine, that it's half envy. And the money works out okay after all, because Davy Ryan and Mickey Malone and some other guys are hanging around outside the Loew's Kings, and the girls go up and talk to them.

“So, you going in to see the movie?” Mickey growls, in that voice that makes Diane's toes curl.

“I guess so, unless something better comes along,” she says.

Mickey gives a quick jerk of his head. “Come on,” he says, putting a hand on Diane's arm, and steers her to the ticket booth, laying down enough money for both of them. Diane knows it's important to have something to say, not too much but a few quick, light, funny words. She looks up at Mickey with his brown hair lit by faint gold streaks and his green eyes with the golden flecks in them. A few childish freckles are still caught on his nose, as if they haven't noticed the rest of his face is a man's face now. Diane feels cold in her stomach, hot in her throat, and in between, on her breast where Mickey is looking, the glowing imprint of his hand.

“Well let's not stand here all day,” she says, to Mickey and the others. “I don't wanna miss the feature.” And she steps a little ahead, to lead the way into the show.

ANNIE
 
ST. JOHN'S, OCTOBER 1947

T
HE MATTRESS ON
B
ILL
and Annie's bed was an old one that sagged in the middle. It was Mom and Pop's mattress and got passed down to Annie. She'd never noticed the sag in it when she slept alone, but now, with Bill in the bed, she found herself rolling into the middle, pressed uncomfortably against his warm back. When she tried to roll back to her own side of the bed it was like crawling uphill.

Maybe, Annie thought, forty was too old to start sleeping with someone else. Not like she'd always had a room to herself. When she was a girl she used to share the bed with Rose, then she had a few years on her own. Then for ages she slept on the front room couch while Pop was on the daybed, in case he'd wake at night and need anything. During the war, when Harold and Frances and all their crowd moved in, and afterwards when they rented out the front room, she shared the bed with her mother. These past couple of years she'd gone back to sleeping alone and loved it. No fighting over the bedclothes. No great lump of body in the bed with you, putting out heat like you were sleeping next to the furnace. No-one always trying to tuck in her feet when she liked them cool, sticking out from under the covers on all but the coldest nights. When they were children, she remembered, her mother would send them to bed in winter with a hot-water bottle and Rose would hug it all night like a lover. Annie only wanted to get as far from the thing as possible. That one thing, at least, Annie and Rose never fought over.

Bill snored, too. Pop used to snore. She'd hear the sound of it coming through the walls and wonder how Mom could sleep through it.

Taken all in all, Annie liked being married. But it took some getting used to, no denying that.

She was forty years old, and a good girl, though not as sheltered as her mother still seemed to think. She knew what men and women did together in bed, but there was a difference between knowing and – well, knowing. She had washed the bodies of little boys –
Ralphie
, she thought, and tried not to picture him bloody and dying on a battlefield far away – and of old men, Pop and her grandfather before him. She knew what a man's body was like, but not how it felt to have one, alive and vigorous, on top of her. Nothing had prepared her for that.

It struck her as strange, sometimes, that all she would ever know of marital relations would be with a one-legged man, that she'd never know how it might have been with a man who had two good legs. Bill seemed apologetic about that, and she did not remind him that she had nothing to compare it to.

All her life she'd heard women talk about the marriage bed, about having relations, in hushed tones. Their eyes slid away from each other's faces when they discussed it. They curbed themselves if she was there. In the last ten years they'd been less guarded, forgetting perhaps that Annie was still a spinster, or more likely, taking her spinsterhood as so much of a fact it didn't even give them pause. “Well, us married women have our cross to bear too, my dear,” Mrs. Captain Avery had told her, patting her on the shoulder.

“Sure, the mister don't want it no more at all now, not since he took that bad fall last year, and that's a blessing, I don't mind saying,” Mrs. Stokes had once told Annie's mother.

“You should be on your knees thanking the Lord,” her mother had replied.

But in spite of all that, it wasn't so bad. Not painful at all, except for the first time, and she'd been warned about that so she was prepared. After that it was fine. Not as pleasant as sitting with your feet in a basin of hot water after being on them all day, but nice enough. Lately, though, she'd begun to wonder about the point of it. They'd been at it for a year and no sign of a baby at all. And she was forty on her birthday.

Lots of women, of course, had babies after forty; Mom was forty-one when Harold was born. But a first baby? Annie couldn't think of any woman she'd ever heard of who'd had a first baby after she was forty, except for poor Christina Tucker down in Little Catalina, forty-five when she finally got pregnant, and neither her nor the baby lived.

So she hadn't held out too much hope. But oh, she wanted a baby of her own. She remembered bathing Claire when she was tiny, lathering up the soap to make one big curl at the top of her head. Claire would squint her eyes to keep out the soap bubbles. Then Annie would wrap her in a big towel and lift her out of the sink and carry her into the kitchen, to dry her off in front of the stove where it was nice and warm. Ralphie would be there then too, curled up half-asleep on the daybed by the stove, thumb in his mouth.

Last month, Annie had missed her monthlies. She used to be real regular, never skipping it or even being late a day, though in the last year that had changed and she was sometimes late. That was why she didn't think much at first, when it didn't come. But the whole of September went by without getting it, and now they were well into October, up to when she should be having it again. If it didn't come this month…

Well, she wouldn't get her hopes up. Wouldn't tell Bill, not yet anyway. And who else could she tell? She didn't think of telling Frances, who still went to business not because she needed to but because she liked to. Frances seemed to have become somehow – unwomanly. As if house and home were the least of her concerns.

Yet it was Frances, the next evening, who broached a very womanly subject as the two of them sat at Annie's kitchen table. She sipped her tea and said with characteristic briskness, “Annie, has Claire started having her periods yet?”

Annie was startled, though she couldn't think why she should be. Claire was fifteen, nearly sixteen. “No, she hasn't started yet,” Annie said.

“Have you talked to her about it?” Frances' nails, shiny with a clear polish, clicked on the tabletop.

“No, I haven't said anything…” Annie's voice trailed off. If she hadn't told Claire, then what did Claire know? What she'd heard from other girls, no doubt. Who else did she have to go to, other than her Aunt Annie?

“Well, Valerie started last year, and I told her all about it, so I imagine she's told Claire the basics. And when she does start, I suppose she'll come to you, so you can give her the sanitary napkins, show her how to use them, that sort of thing.” Annie said nothing, feeling the great gulf between herself and Frances. Annie knew what sanitary napkins were, of course, but she used the old-fashioned flannels, washing them out each month. Should she learn the newfangled way, for Claire's sake?

“And one of us will have to have a little talk with her,” Frances went on. “I mean, when a girl gets to that age…well, there are things she needs to know. And Claire has no mother to tell her.”

Annie nodded. Claire had a mother who wasn't here to tell her, and that was the very reason she needed to know. To be warned. Annie couldn't imagine what she might say to Claire, who at fifteen was already so sensible, so cool, so contained. She'd never said a saucy word that Annie could remember, but she kept her own distance. A private person, something Annie approved of.

“I can speak to her, if you'd rather,” Frances said, lifting her eyebrows just a little. Her eyebrows were so shapely, so carefully plucked. Annie just let hers grow in, any which way. It was Frances who taught Claire to pluck her eyebrows. It would be easier to let Frances – a real married woman, a mother, a woman of the world – handle this, too.

But no. Annie laid her teacup down in the saucer and looked at its faded pattern of blue flowers and green leaves. “No, by rights I'm the one should do it, Frances. I'm the one has stood in place of her mother all these years. And anyway, I don't say Claire will need much telling. She's a good girl.”