Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (13 page)

Phoebe swept the corner for Robbie. Satisfied that he was nowhere in sight, staying focused on the working papers in her Tibetan knapsack, and taking a deep breath, she gathered herself together and headed down Smith Street. The very least Edith owed her was a motherfucking signature. Phoebe would get it, and she'd be gone. Tomorrow, or soon, she'd have a job. And eventually, a place.

Phoebe knew the strip by heart: the Chinese variety store with its cotton Mary Janes and plastic bucket of baby turtles, this morning's
platanos
long congealed under the heat lamps at Castillo de Jagua, the acrylic fumes gushing from Elvira's Beauty Box, and the tubby Bensonhurst cops scarfing slices at the counter of Pino's, anticipating signs of criminal activity with a relaxed disgust. The nameless candy store, however, where once she and Ramona Parker had pooled their pennies for Fun Dip and Pixy Stix, was a surprise. Long shuttered behind a scrolled metal gate tagged thickly by every Basquiat in the Gowanus Houses, it had apparently since blinked open to reveal a dark socket. A small crew of young white guys in painter's pants did demo in the dimness. As Phoebe loped past, one dropped his sledgehammer heavily at his hip to watch her.

Phoebe could remember when she'd been pretty much the only white girl around. That's what had taught her to clock other white people. Still, Phoebe didn't seek white people out for comfort like she was pretty sure other white people did, especially in neighborhoods like this one. In fact, Phoebe
preferred
to be the only white girl, and quite truthfully felt she was a better representative of white people everywhere than most of the white people she'd known.

A crooked figure twitched into Phoebe's sight line. “Hey, girl,” he croaked, ashier than ever. Benny Crackers, the block's most vivacious crackhead.

“What's up, Benny,” Phoebe offered in reply. This neighborhood had taught her that a simple “What's up” would do in response to just about anything. That offering an easy “How's it goin'” to your neighbors before being spoken to, over time, forged loose alliances.

Still, as Phoebe neared Hector's Hardware, her worry began to mess with her cool. Hector's was Robbie's joint. Robbie liked to load his suede fanny pack with chump change, shrug on the fur-collared parka that Edith had chosen for him from the Eddie Bauer catalog, and light a Pall Mall for the trek to the corner, where he'd regularly spend his allowance from Edith on an addition to his hand ax collection before returning home to fry a triumphant baloney sandwich and rest up for his noonday NA meeting.

Phoebe really, really,
really
did not want to see Robbie. So, before turning the corner onto her former block, she pulled the favorite move of frightened white people everywhere.

She crossed the street.

This deceptively simple adjustment to her usual route angled Phoebe differently to the past. Walking along the tall chain-link fence that Darleen Parker had long ago taught her to vault, Phoebe was curious whether she could see her mother's house and not feel anything.

Turns out, she couldn't.

Too anxious, Phoebe cruised straight past the tilted little building, then jaywalked to the corner of Hoyt. She pushed open the glass door collaged with stickers for Coco Lopez and Utz chips, and with the clatter of bells sewn to a leather thong, ducked into Mickey's. The dry wooden floorboards creaked as her racing heart slowed to a jog. Tina, one of Mickey's myriad nieces, perched, as always, on her cashier's stool behind an elaborate candy and notions counter displaying the competing cassette tapes of local emcees. Engrossed in the 4:30 movie on the tiny black and white TV, with a bulky cordless phone tucked into her shoulder, she bickered vehemently with her married boyfriend in Spanglish, while cracking her gum spectacularly and acknowledging Phoebe with a tough-love chuck of her dainty chin.

Phoebe arrived at the back wall of humming, leaking fridges, wherein every flavor of Yoo-Hoo chilled, even banana, and reached for a grape Fanta.

“Where the school bus at?”

Darleen Parker, in her tracksuit, Triple FAT, and wraparound plastic shades, leaned against a stretch of paneled wall. Due to persistent winter hat head, she'd traded her Jheri curl for tight cornrows that tugged her eyebrows scalp-ward. Presidente posters hung behind her, featuring glistening girls in hot pants and knotted soccer jerseys. Tucked among the high rumps, a small square had been punched in the wall and fitted with a sliding window.

“What's up, Darleen.” Despite the utterly chill delivery that Darleen had taught her by example long ago, Phoebe had never been happier to see anybody.

“You
got
to be on some kind of class trip. Come over from Park Slope for the
anthropology,
right?” The window slid open. La Mega played quietly from whatever lay inside. “Come on, gal,” Darleen chuckled. “You know I'm just messin'.” She cocked her voice in the direction of the little window. “Not you,” she clarified edgily to the unseen clerk. “Lemme get a dime of Violet Crumble.” The window slid closed, taking La India and the timbales with it. Darleen cocked an already-taut eyebrow at Phoebe. “You back home now?” she asked.

“Nah.”

“You wanna smoke?”

“I gotta see my moms,” Phoebe demurred.

As the little window opened, Darleen exchanged a faded ten-dollar bill for a small ziplock Baggie. The window closed.

It used to be that Phoebe let herself into her mother's house with a key hung on a tooled-leather key chain shaped like a strawberry. But on the recent November afternoon when Darleen and Ramona had escorted her back into Claudia's life, she had left her key behind, smack in the middle of Edith's dining room table. The gesture was a fuck-you parting gift that also guaranteed she would be unable, even in a moment of punk-assed weakness, to return. Darleen now slipped the dime bag into the coin pocket of her track pants and retied the drawstring. “Shit,” she mused, sympathetically. “If I was gonna hang with your moms, I need to bake me an entire dime
pie.
”

“Yeah,” Phoebe agreed, picturing Darleen sitting next to her in Paolo Crespi's office at Image Model Management, telling Paolo she was Phoebe's mother, even though she was only eight years older, the wrong color, and possibly didn't like boys.

The clang of Mickey's homemade doorbell ushered Phoebe and Darleen back to the sidewalk. Phoebe pocketed the Fanta cap she'd popped on the door frame, took a brief purple gulp, then belched neatly.

“Nice,” Darleen praised.

“Thank you, Obi-Wan.” Scanning the corner, Phoebe observed the pulse of the Gowanus Houses at their main artery. Up the wide front steps at the entrance to 211 Hoyt, young mothers bumped granny carts of damp laundry as the men, in Gazelle glasses and bulky leather jackets, ignored them en route to the night shift. Thanks to Darleen's various lectures over the years, Phoebe could tell the difference between this, the
real
business of life, and the jumpy, manufactured daily grind of the crack trade. As she always had, Phoebe felt safe next to Darleen, who came to her shoulder. Darleen was both the gatekeeper and the gate itself.

“You ever have working papers, Darleen?”

“
Working papers?
Shit. I was born with 'em. My moms ain't never
forgave
me for the paper cuts.”

Staring straight at Edith's house, Phoebe took a longer pull on her Fanta, then let rip a stunning belch, wet this time, during which she recited the first few letters of the alphabet, getting all the way through
g
.

“Damn,” Darleen marveled. “We
got
to get you on
Star Search
.”

“All right,” Phoebe declared. “I'm going in.”

 

“What was that all about?” Paul asked. He held open Claudia Silver's bomber jacket, with her big black scarf draped over his arm. Had a man ever held a jacket for Claudia? No, he had not. Not to mention that in Claudia's former life, one she'd occupied until this very second, Claudia would have found the gesture skin-crawlingly twee. Paul watched Claudia wind her scarf around her neck, then deftly helped her on with her jacket.

“What was
what?
” she feigned, awkwardly thrusting her arm about.

“If that reaction was for a fellow you only ‘sort of' know,” Paul explained, referring to Garth's turn through their lunch, “what happens when there's history?”

Suddenly, Paul was touching her, from behind. Well, not
her,
exactly, but her hair. Slowly, gently, lifting her hair out from where her scarf had bound it. The ends of her hair dragged along her shoulders like Paul's fingertips. He then placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. She was limp now, a doll.

“Is it chestnut?” Paul's voice sounded like it had grown thick. And maybe other aspects of himself had grown thick as well. But Claudia wasn't sure of anything, including the placement of the floor in regards to the ceiling. She felt herself swimming, her ears clogged, no idea what he was saying, rededicating herself with every passing millisecond to her posture, erect, and her hands, to herself. “Your hair,” Paul explained. “The color.”

“I don't know. Yeah. Maybe.” Somehow, she was speaking.

“Postprandial perambulation?” Paul asked. Claudia stared at him woozily. “An after-meal stroll, for digestion,” he translated.

“Let's call it ‘an after-meal stroll for digestion,'” Claudia replied, finding her footing. “That other thing sounds like a Whiffenpoofs medley.”

 

“Fuck it,” Phoebe said to herself as she rang Edith's bell. Hearing the metallic shriek reverberating through Edith's lower duplex, she grabbed her knapsack straps. The police lock scraped and the front door opened, answering Phoebe's prayers, sort of. It was Edith at the door, not Robbie. Phoebe always forgot how much taller she was than her mother.

“Phoebe,” Edith said, matter-of-factly, after a brief pause.

“Mother.”

Edith cocked her head, piled precipitously with its dark, wavy mane shot with gray. Loose silver strands clung to her pilled navy turtleneck, on which her reading glasses, hung from a tortoiseshell chain, rested at chest level. “What winter wind has blown you this way?”

“I . . . I'm not sure which one,” Phoebe answered. She hadn't exactly been expecting a bear hug and freshly baked snickerdoodles . . . but
damn.

“I was just making tea,” Edith relayed, opening the door wider as she stepped aside. “Would you care to join?” Teatime was
the
civilized ritual of Edith Mendelssohn's household. Unlike supper, when Edith usually seemed to be faking it at gunpoint, teatime was assured. Her little trays of crackers and dates were charming, whereas crackers and dates for supper were sad.

Edith closed the brownstone's front door behind her, revealing Robbie's collection of axes and baseball bats arranged in a white plastic bucket. She crossed the building's foyer and padded into her parlor in her old boiled-wool clogs, embroidered with springs of dingy edelweiss, and Phoebe, more nervous than she wanted to be, followed. The absence of cigarette smoke, jangling, and throat clearing confirmed Robbie's absence. Only the teakettle whistled.

“Are you alone?” Phoebe asked anyway. She had never told Edith what Robbie had put her through, because she suspected that telling her mother would make things worse, not better.

“We are
all
alone, darling,” Edith replied, donning her glasses to pour boiling water into a heated brown teapot, “especially at birth and death.” She peered over the top of her glasses at Phoebe, who hovered by the apartment door. “But at the moment, you and I have privacy. Robert's at a job fair.”

In your dreams,
Phoebe considered replying, as she closed the apartment door with a clank of the police lock.

Phoebe decided she'd ask Edith to sign her working papers as soon as the quilted tea cozy had been removed from the teapot and the PG tips poured. Maybe she could slip the paperwork from Image Model Management in front of her mother without even an explanation, and Edith would sign her autograph blindly, with a dreamy smile. Or maybe Ziggy Marley would ask her to prom.

“Take off your coat and stay awhile,” Edith demanded, mashing tinned sardines into a paste with Dijon mustard.

“I'm cool,” Phoebe replied.

“No, you must be overheated,” Edith countered.

The doorbell rang, and Phoebe jumped slightly, glancing quickly at the parlor windows. Through the lace curtains she made out a familiar figure jittering at the top step. Of course, Robbie wouldn't ring the bell. “It's Benny Crackers,” she announced, assuming that seeing her up on Smith Street had put the idea in his head to stop by.

Edith wiped her hands on a linen towel. “Another country heard from,” she commented, retracing her steps to the front door as Phoebe shrugged off her knapsack, sank into the shredded Victorian wing chair flanked by a magazine rack stuffed with scholarly rags, and splayed her long legs in front.

The parlor windows were cracked an inch or two, and Edith's voice floated in from the stoop. “Yes, Benjamin,” Edith said, benevolently.

“You got any handyman-type stuff you need done?”

“Not today, I'm afraid.”

Street angel, house devil.
Claudia had once described Edith thusly, and Phoebe thought that shit was true enough. There was a way in which Edith loved and respected all humanity, while remaining unlikely to pee on you in a firestorm.

“How about the stoop?” Benny Crackers was insisting. “It need sweeping? I see you got some leaves down there, and whatnot. Them kids, throwing they bottle caps all over th'place. You let me get all that mess picked up for you.”

Briefly alone in her mother's apartment, Phoebe could help herself to anything she wanted. She surveyed the faded cotton bedspread over the futon sofa that became Edith and Robbie's bed at night, the tilted standing ashtray mounded with Pall Mall butts, the red lightbulbs that Robbie had screwed into the parlor's ceiling fixture, the busy formation of fruit flies hanging low over the mottled bananas. But there was no object in sight for which Phoebe
felt
anything, not even the wooden animal napkin rings of her youth, still on their bed of dust in their pewter bowl set in the middle of the old dining room table.