The Girl Is Murder

Table of Contents

Title Page
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Copyright Page

For G & G and all the fathers

CHAPTER

1

September 1942

POP’S LEG WAS ACROSS THE ROOM when I came downstairs. I didn’t ask him how it got there. Its location made it clear that the prosthetic had been hurled at some point, with enough force to bring down the photo of Mama that used to sit on the Philco radio.

“Morning, Pop,” I said as I came into the room just off the parlor that he used as an office. He flashed me an index finger and pointed at the telephone receiver cradled against his ear. I got it; he was busy. He was always busy. This was how it was with him and me; he tried to be a private detective, I tried to pretend like I no longer existed. So far, I was the more successful of the two of us.

The minute passed and it was clear he wasn’t going to be getting off the phone anytime soon. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “If you’re going out, you might want to see if Mrs. Mrozenski needs anything at the grocer’s.”

He returned to his call before I could correct him. I wasn’t going
out
, I was going to school, my first day of public school, which he would’ve known if he ever listened to anything I said. I trudged across the parlor and out the front door. Mrs. Mrozenski was sitting on the stoop drinking coffee from a dented tin cup. Beside her head hung a small sign that read AA INVESTIGATIONS
.

“Good morning, Mrs. Mrozenski,” I said.

“Good morning, Iris. Don’t you look nice today?”

I smiled halfheartedly. I’d worried half the night about what to wear to school. Gone was my private school uniform. In its place was a uniform of my own making: my mother’s pearls, a Peter Pan blouse, a plaid skirt, bobby socks, and saddle shoes.

“You have breakfast?” she asked. Mrs. Mrozenski was technically our landlady. She owned the whole house, but usually limited herself to two rooms: the kitchen and her bedroom. The rest she had given over to Pop and me, only interfering when one of us committed the unforgivable sin of moving one of her knickknacks from a table to a bookshelf or entering the house from the kitchen door.

“Not exactly.”

“You cannot start school on an empty stomach.” She got up like she was going back into the house. I could see what was coming: pots and pans, eggs and toast, a feast that on any other day I might’ve welcomed. But this was my first day at a new school. I would be lucky if I could stomach water.

“I’m all right,” I told her.

She gave me a look that told me she knew what I was going through even if she was kind enough not to say it aloud. “What about lunch? You pack food?”

It hadn’t occurred to me to do so. I never carried a lunch at Chapin. “I’ll get something there.”

“With what money?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. She dug into her pocket and produced a handful of change. “You get something at the cafeteria. Promise?”

I slipped the money into my pocketbook. “I promise.” “Your father, he is good?”

I shrugged in response. Who knew how Pop was?

“He’s trying to do the right thing by you, Iris. It is hard.” Again, I didn’t respond. What was the point? “I make pierogi tonight. Maybe some pork, too.”

“Thank you. That sounds delicious.”

Mrs. Mrozenski cooked dinner for us every night, asking nothing in return except for clean plates and our ration tickets. Pop was always reminding me to say thank you to her, as though Mama hadn’t drilled common decency into me. But then how was he to know what I did and didn’t learn in those years he was gone?

“Maybe I invite my daughter,” she said.

“I don’t know if Pop’s going to be home tonight,” I said. She was always trying to pair her daughter, Betty, with Pop. In her mind, my mother was nine months dead and it was time for Pop to move on. It was funny how nine months could seem like an eternity to one person and the blink of an eye to another. I don’t need to tell you which one was my experience.

“Another time maybe. Have a good day, Iris,” she said.

“You, too.” As I started down the walk, I turned and waved at her. Mrs. Mrozenski waved back, and from the front window a flag with a single star waved along with her. It commemorated her son, a marine who’d been at sea since February.

It was drizzling as I trudged down the street from our house to Public School 110. The scenery matched the dull gray sky: garbage cans awaiting pickup lined the road, filling the air with the sweet scent of rotting vegetables. A pile of steaming manure lay in the cobblestone street where one of the horse-drawn delivery trucks that still operated in this area had paused in its mission.

Pop had tried to sell our move to Orchard Street as an adventure. With everything else that had happened, a fresh start would be good for us. At first I tried to be cheerful about the whole thing, but as weeks turned to months, I could no longer see the move as a change for the better. To my eyes the Lower East Side wasn’t just a different neighborhood from the one we’d come from. Its name and its surroundings made it clear that we had experienced a downfall, slipping from the good end of town to the bad, descending from the top of the mountain to somewhere near its bottom. Not
the
bottom. After all, we were on the Lower East Side, not the
last
of the East Side. That, I thought, was yet to come.

FROM THE MOMENT I entered the doors of P.S. 110, I was dodging, ducking, and holding my breath, hoping that whatever I just saw would pass by without doing me harm. The kids were rough in the way that feral cats were rough; it was like they were fighting to survive and didn’t give a damn what it took to make that happen. Public school was exactly what I imagined trench warfare was like. More than once one of them locked eyes with me and I got the feeling that if I didn’t move NOW they would pounce on me and eat me for lunch. I stayed close to the tan-colored walls, my hand always on the plaster, like a mouse looking for a hole I could disappear into.

“Outta the way, meat.” A girl in a too-tight cardigan cut across my path, sending me toward a row of lockers. Two boys holding each other in a headlock forced me in the other direction, until I bumped into a box set aside to collect tin cans. I pictured myself tumbling headfirst into the metal scraps, but I was lucky. Not only did I stay on my feet, but the box was empty. Apparently, nobody here had time to collect aluminum and tin for the war.

I backed away from the box and checked to see who had witnessed my stumble. Only the poster above the empty collection bin acknowledged my presence. WANTED FOR VICTORY, it announced in bold type. WASTE PAPER, OLD RAGS, SCRAP METAL, OLD RUBBER. GET IN THE SCRAP! Only someone had altered the last line with a pencil, so that the wanted items now included bloody rags. Conveniently, they’d also drawn a picture indicating what part of the female anatomy those rags might come from, just in case you were confused.

I tried to hide my shock and ducked into the girls’ bathroom, hoping to catch my breath in the privacy of a stall. The doors were missing, though. A blonde in a sloppy joe sweater sat on the radiator by the window, smoking a cigarette. She didn’t even shift her position when I came in. If anything, she seemed annoyed that I had interrupted her.

“What?” she said as I stared dumbly at the sight of someone smoking—
smoking
—on school property.

“Nothing,” I said. “I have to … use the facilities.”

“The
facilities
? You in the wrong place, meat?”

At first I misunderstood her—was she saying that the bathroom was not in fact the place where one relieved herself? But then I realized that her question had a different purpose: why was I in this school to begin with?

“No,” I said. “I’m new.”

Her eyes tracked me from the top of my pin-curled head to the toes of my scuffed saddle shoes. They lingered at my gored plaid skirt, the one I’d made after seeing the pattern in
McCall’s
(years of wearing uniforms and a sudden summertime growth spurt hadn’t left me with much of a wardrobe). She condemned my homemade sense of fashion with a shake of her head.

“Why did you call me
meat
?” I asked.

She crossed her legs and pointed a spectator pump toward the ceiling. “It’s meat as in
fresh.
Fresh meat.”

Oh. “But I’m a sophomore.”

“Doesn’t matter. Fresh is fresh.”

“I’m Iris, by the way.”

“And I’m busy. You’re here to pee? So pee,” she said.

Her gaze didn’t leave me. I wanted to turn around and go, but those brown eyes issued a challenge that I knew in my heart I had to take. So I entered a stall, hiked up my skirt, and sat on the toilet even though it was the last thing I wanted to do.

She kept watching me. I offered the toilet a trickle and then continued sitting there, hoping to die.

“I’m Suze,” she said.

“Nice to meet you,” I said from my perch.

“You want a gasper?”

It must’ve been clear that I didn’t know what she was offering me, because she produced a pack of Lucky Strikes and wiggled them my way.

“No, thanks.”

Her Indian bracelets rattled as she returned the pack to her purse. “Why you want to leave the Upper East Side and come here?”

“How do you know where I’m from?”

“You got your glasses on.” What was she talking about? I didn’t wear glasses. “Those pearls real?”

They were, but I wasn’t sure I’d win any favors by telling her so. “I don’t know.”

She huffed at my answer. “So what’s your story, morning glory?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why you want to come here?”

I almost laughed at the question. Did she honestly think I was here by choice?

She seemed to recognize that she’d made an error. “Your pop overseas?”

“Something like that.” I wiped, flushed, reassembled myself. I was going to be late for my first class. Not that I knew where it was.

“What branch?”

“Navy,” I said.

“Bet he’s an officer.”

“He was.”

“My man’s in the Air Corps.”

Did she mean her father? I didn’t think so. With the paint and the clothes, Suze could pass for eighteen easy. It wasn’t hard to imagine that she had a boyfriend who’d joined up.

I went to the sink and washed my hands. What should I say now? Usually, I had a gift for gab, but in this new place, with all these new people, my former self didn’t have enough air to breathe.

“You think he’s going to make it home safe?” she asked.

“Sure.” And he had. Pop, who had never expected to fight in a war but got caught in the beginnings of one anyway, had made it home safe and sound. Except for the leg.