Cobwebs
K
AREN
R
OMANO
Y
OUNG
I
N
G
RANNY’S MEMORY
“Anything new?” Mama Rachel and Granny Tina had been asking Nancy too often lately (for the last three years or so). Rachel said she had begun to become what she was at around thirteen. Ned began a little later, as boys do. Nancy was older than both.
“Same old beautiful me,” she told them, though it made a sharp hurt inside her to say it.
Her mother and grandmother turned away to hide their faces. It was Grandpa Joke who stroked the hair back from her forehead and said, “That’s fine.” But lately she thought he was the one who looked most worried of them all. There was no special spiderness coming from anywhere inside her, no matter how hard Nancy listened for it, watched for it, waited for it. It seemed that so far Rachel and Ned’s genes had canceled each other out in Nancy.
There was an old woman tossed up in a basket
Seventeen times as high as the moon.
Where she was going, I couldn’t quite ask it
But in her hand she carried a broom.
“Old woman, old woman, old woman,” quoth I.
“Where are you going to, up so high?”
“To sweep the cobwebs from the sky.”
“May I go with you?”
“Aye, by and by.”
-Mother Goose
O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell,
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams.
—William Shakespeare,
Hamlet
T
he first time Nancy saw Dion he was balancing on the rail of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Manhattan shimmered across the river. Annette was telling Nancy again how much she wanted a boyfriend, and Nancy was pretending to listen.
Nancy saw him first. He looked like he wanted to scale the skyscrapers. But the rail was only as wide as—
“Hello,
excuse me,
just what do you think you’re doing?” yelled Annette.
Nancy grabbed her arm to make her stop. She thought Annette would startle the boy with her great big mouth, make him fall.
“I’m standing on the rail,” he answered. He wore a
flopping, flapping coat of no particular color and had sticking-out ears attached to a bald head. Circles under his eyes made him look like he hadn’t slept. He stood steadily on the rail, the cars whizzing by below on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. They didn’t even honk. New Yorkers. They’d seen it all.
“Are you deaf?” screamed Annette. “Get down off there!” Annette’s hands reached as if she were going to catch him or push him.
He didn’t waver. “Are you blind?” he asked. “Can’t you see I don’t need your opinion?”
“I can see that you need your head examined!”
“Annette, you’ll distract him,” Nancy said quietly. Years of watching her dad, Ned, do this stuff (though not over an expressway—“You never should endanger others with your dangerous activities,” Ned would say) made her still and calm on the outside. But she couldn’t help thinking how scary things would look from up there. She walked smoothly closer and rested her hand on the boy’s foot. His shoes were black boots of a softer leather than her shiny hard Doc Martens.
He looked down. “I won’t fall,” he said. He focused on Nancy’s thin brown face, wild dark hair, solemn
green eyes, and he didn’t move his foot away. He might have kicked at Annette if she’d come near him. She was so freaked out, she freaked
him
out.
“Why don’t you get down?” Nancy asked, wondering more than questioning.
His eyes were blue, with the whites so white they looked blue, too. Or maybe it was the sky, all blue with clouds, that made them look so blue. He said, “What do you care?” to Nancy, not Annette.
Annette snapped, “You could kill someone else with your stupid behavior.”
He said, “They’d never even know what hit them.”
“Retard!” she said furiously.
“Reject!” he spat back.
Fair’s fair,
Nancy thought. Both seemed right
and
wrong, being stupid and insulting each other that way. She had never felt torn between Annette and anyone else before.
Annette made a snarling exasperated sound. The boy made claw-fingers at her, like a cat would. Nancy hooked her arm through Annette’s and dragged her away. “Forget him!” she said, knowing that she herself could not.
“What’s
your
name?” the boy called behind them.
“Don’t tell him!” said Annette.
Nancy looked back. The boy was still watching her. She would never forget his face as it softened, as he smiled and jumped down onto the Promenade.
Don’t follow us,
Nancy said in her head. They kept walking away, Annette hugging Nancy’s arm. “Did you see how he looked when he flapped his arms?” Annette asked.
“So?”
Don’t do it again,
Nancy said to the boy in her head.
I never fall,
she imagined he said back. Or maybe she could tell that he never fell.
Annette said, “His sleeves were like wings. Like he thought he could fly.”
“What wings? Just too-big clothes.”
“You know how people see things, hallucinating. Like those people who say they’ve seen that Angel of Brooklyn they’ve got in the paper.”
“There’s no such thing,” Nancy told Annette.
“It’s in the paper,” Annette said, wishing it to be true.
“You ought to be in the paper. GIRL BELIEVES ANYTHING.”
The real headlines were almost as silly: MUGGER GETS NAILED was a story about a mugger hit on the head with a falling box of nails. SCUMBAG OUT TO LUNCH told how a woman breaking a window to rob an apartment had been beaned by a lunchbox lobbed from the roof. The reporters hardly seemed to notice that potentially violent crimes had been averted. They were more excited by the violence that had done the averting. They were even
more
excited by the idea that someone on the roofs was acting like some sort of guardian angel for the unholy citizens of Brooklyn.
“You believe it, too, Nancy,” Annette protested.
The trouble was, Annette was right. Nancy had seen a picture on the library wall that some little kid had drawn, a drawing of an actual angel stopping a bad guy on the Brooklyn Bridge. No doubt, if the believes-anything reporters from the papers saw the drawing, they’d want to interview the dreamy kid. Ridiculous.
There was a reporter in Nancy and Dion’s story, too, a hard-nosed, deep-digging one, not a dizzy dreamer like the ones who wrote about the Angel.
It wasn’t until the spring Nancy met Dion that the
reporter began to zero in on the truth. It was Dion and Nancy who would lead him to the Angel of Brooklyn, if they didn’t watch out, if they weren’t careful. But only Nancy was a careful person.
A
nnette recited one of her corny poems:
“I need love
Like a hand needs a glove
Like push needs shove
Like below needs above.”
“Woe is me,” said Nancy.
“I want a boyfriend,” cried Annette from the balcony of her apartment, where she and Nancy sat. Annette didn’t like being home without her mother; Nancy would stay until Mrs. Li came whistling up
Pierrepont Street from the subway.
“Oh, woe,” said Nancy again. “Shut up, Annette.”
Annette used to be a Tolkien freak who wrote Nancy notes in Elvish and wore glitter on her ears where the teachers couldn’t see (it was against dress code), who collaged her notebooks with one word cut out from a hundred different magazine ads (the word was
word),
who wore plastic hobbit feet for Halloween. “A short, squat, Korean hobbit girl lived in a hobbit house under a hill. One room was all she needed,” Annette said. “And a weeny refrigerator with room enough for
pie.”
Annette was still all those things, Nancy knew. But they weren’t what Annette talked about anymore; she tuned them out and toned them down and pretended she didn’t care (or maybe she didn’t).
There were several different boyfriend candidates, all nicknamed little names that had to do with what they liked or did, such as Joe Vespa, the guy with the motor scooter, or Vinnie Video, the one with the Game Boy surgically attached to his hand.
It was as if, instead of picking a real person, Annette was choosing someone out of a catalog. Nancy herself,
conscious that not just anyone off the street would fit into her peculiar family, had yet to notice anyone who interested her in any way, before the Promenade boy. She was a one-person person, and so far Annette had felt like plenty for her. But Nancy was not enough for Annette anymore. Annette wanted a boyfriend so she wouldn’t be alone. Since she didn’t know her father, and therefore didn’t understand how marriage worked, she wanted to know all about Nancy’s parents.
This created a problem. Nancy could talk about the
theory
of marriage, getting along and helping each other and not criticizing and all that, but in practice she wasn’t sure her parents’ marriage worked on any level but one. It was easy to see why Ned’s moving out this spring—and every spring in memory—could be interpreted as a bad sign.
“Is he going to move back again in the fall?” Annette asked.
Nancy shrugged. She never knew. He always had before. “It’s different this year,” she said. This year Ned had moved out in March, before the clocks changed forward. “He said he needed to get up on the roofs,” Nancy explained.
“It’s been such an uncold winter,” Annette said. “I guess that helps.”
Nancy wondered. “He’s happy, though,” she told Annette. “You should see how happy he is. He doesn’t need Mama in the spring.”
“You know what you need?” said Annette. “Your own place.”
“I need ice cream,” said Nancy, fed up with choosing between two places, two people, and dragged Annette to the Kustard King truck playing its silly music on the corner.
Ned tangoed Nancy across his roof, his new roof, which gave out over Brooklyn and clear across to Manhattan. He had put the new roof there himself, to stop the rain leaking into the apartments below, just last week and the week before. He’d found out the little house on the roof was available, which meant nobody else wanted it. Instead of just renting or subletting, he’d bought the place. Nancy didn’t like the permanence of the arrangement.