Til the Real Thing Comes Along (29 page)

“Arj, I have to see him,” Francie said, and R.J. knew when she looked at her friend at that moment, that Francie was picturing
herself as Ingrid Bergman in
Indiscreet,
so in love that she couldn’t control herself. She also knew that though Francie was hurting, she loved herself in that grown-up
role so much that she would play it out. But for Francie, unlike” Ingrid, the ending would be real bad.

* * *

Mona Feldstein Friedman was a travel agent who wanted to be a stand-up comic, and the truth of the matter was that she was
very funny at parties when she told stories about crazy things that happened to her clients. But she knew that if she wanted
to be serious about being funny onstage, she had to do more than just tell stories about people she knew. She needed ideas.
She needed jokes. She needed songs. Pearl Goldman, Francie’s mother, who had booked the New York trip and several of her trips
to Florida through Mona’s travel agency, suggested that Mona make an appointment with “my genius daughter Francie, who when
she graduates will follow in her brother’s footsteps to Juilliard, and her girlfriend from the grocery store.” So she did.
And when the two sixteen-year-old girls arrived at her apartment and she saw how nervous they were, Mona Feldstein Friedman
had to hold back her look of disappointment.

“I’ll tell you right now, I have very little money,” Mona Feldstein Friedman said as the two girls sat down on the orange
crushed-velvet sofa in her living room. “So I’ll pay you what I think the material is worth.”

Neither Francie nor R.J. had any idea what that meant so they both nodded. Then they told her about the songs they had written
for the Follies. R J, described some sketches, and when they finished, Mona Feldstein Friedman was giddy with excitement because
these girls were good, but she tried to conceal it because she didn’t want them to get too pushy.

They wrote her a parody to the tune of “Dancing in the Dark,” called “Pittsburgh After Dark.” They wrote her a monologue about
a Jewish immigrant who tries to hide the fact by becoming a nightclub singer, only her cover is blown when she sings the song
“Getting to Know You,” because when she gets to the line in the song where she’s supposed to sing “you are precisely my cup
of tea,” she sings, “you are precisely my
glass
of tea.”

Most nights at nine, when R.J. came up from working in the grocery store, Francie would come over and stay until midnight.
Every Sunday, Francie would get there very early in the morning and they would work all day on the words. Some days when the
songs were ready they would go to Francie’s and try them out on Steinberg. On those
days Pearl Goldman would come in and listen and beam at her daughter.

“I’m Kvelling,” she would say, meaning that she was very proud.

When Mona Feldstein Friedman’s show opened at Weinstein’s Back Room, Pearl and Sam Goldman and Rifke and Louie Rabinowitz
were invited to sit at a front table free. The show was a hit. And while the audience was still applauding, backstage—which
in this case meant behind a screen at the rear of the platform—Mona Feldstein Friedman handed Frande an envelope containing
fifty dollars, and another one to R.J. Cash. R.J. was flying. After packing grocery bags and carrying them out to people’s
cars, and unpacking merchandise and dusting shelves, and sweeping the sidewalk outside the grocery store in the warm seasons
and shoveling the snow in the cold seasons, she couldn’t believe that this could be called
working.
Laughing with Frande, her best friend, making up songs, something they both loved to do together, and they were getting paid
to do it.

“Thank you, Mona,” R.J. said, grinning.

“This will help,” Frande said mysteriously and put the envelope in her purse. R.J. held hers in her hand, elated. Especially
when Mona, heady from the cries of
bravo
(though they were from her brother-in-law Harvey, who sat in the back row), said, “This is only the beginning.” And it was.
Mona got great reviews. R.J. and Francie were mentioned by name in the
Pittsburgh Press
and the
Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
Mona called the girls constantly, needing new ideas for her show, and she paid them in cash each time. The Weinsteins had
plans to remodel the restaurant so the back room could accommodate a larger audience, and R.J. was making enough money to
stop working in Uncle Shulke’s grocery store.

One Saturday night just before she went to sleep she was making some notes for herself about things she wanted to tell Francie,
when she heard the telephone ringing in the hallway. It was late. Her parents were both asleep. Who could be calling at this
hour?

“Hello, Rosie Jane.” It was Pearl Goldman, and R.J. knew immediately from the tone in Francie’s mother’s voice that the trouble
she’d anticipated about Frande and Avery was starting now. “Is my daughter there?”

“You mean Frande?” R.J. asked, stalling for time to think, knowing that was a stupid thing to say because Francie was Mis.
Goldman’s only daughter. “Uh, no, she’s not.”

“She’s not,” Mrs. Goldman said, repeating R.J.’s words, and she didn’t sound surprised, just as if she was repeating what
R.J. said so that Mr. Goldman could hear. “Well, you see, I thought she might be there, since she sleeps at your house every
Saturday night to work on Mona’s show. Isn’t that right?”

R.J.’s heart was pounding. It had started pounding when the phone rang, but now she could feel it against her rib cage. Francie
may have slept at her house once or twice in the last several months, but certainly not every Saturday night. Why did her
mother think so? Should she lie? Where was Francie? R.J. loved Francie. Wherever she was, she would have to protect her. She
would lie.

“Don’t lie, Rosie Jane,” Mrs. Goldman said before Rosie could open her mouth. “Don’t lie or I’ll tell your parents and your
school and everyone who knows you.” Mrs. Goldman’s voice had gotten higher and higher and was now verging on hysteria.

“Where is my Francie, goddammit? Is she with that
sheygets,
my daughter? Is she in a motel someplace with that goyishe son of a bitch? Where is she? I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her. I’ll
die.” And then big heaving sobs came.

“I don’t know,” R.J. said, sure that Mrs. Goldman didn’t even hear her. She was afraid that her parents had heard the phone
or would hear her talking and come out to see what was wrong.

“Oy,
God,” Mrs. Goldman cried. Then R.J. heard her say, away from the phone, “Sam, she’s not there. Call the police.” And then
there was a click and R.J. stood holding the dead phone.

R.J. went back into her room and sat on her bed. She never turned the light off. Just sat waiting and dreading what would
happen next. All night. She remembered the times she’d sat on the floor of Francie’s bedroom, laughing and playing Scrabble
and smoking Parliaments, which Frande called “my brand” even though she had the same pack in her purse for two months because
both she and R.J. only smoked when they played Scrabble together. Frande. The day they each took five dollars of the money
they’d earned
from Mona’s show, caught the bus downtown, and bought friendship rings. The rings were a circle of gold-plated hearts. Frande
bought a size four for R.J., and R.J. bought a size six for Francie, and over a cheeseburger in the Sun Drugstore, they exchanged
them.

“Who’s your best?” Frande asked.

“You are. Who’s yours?” R.J. wanted to know.

“You are,” Frande said as she licked some ketchup from her fingers. Frande.

At nine o’clock in the morning, R.J.’s eyes were stinging and bloated, and she was shaking with exhaustion when she heard
Francie’s familiar knock, and she ran downstairs to the door and threw it open. Frande stood grinning in the doorway.

“I got a great idea called ‘Mona in Miami.’ We use the ‘Miami Beach Rhumba,’ and Mona comes out wearing this outfit—”

“Francie, your mother knows,” R.J. said. “She called last night. She knows you haven’t been—”

“Sleeping here.” Frande finished the sentence, and grabbed on to the door jamb, as though if she didn’t hold it tightly she
would collapse.

“She thinks you were with Avery,” R.J. said, hoping, praying Frande would laugh at that and have some explanation of where
she’d been that would make everything okay. Take away the picture that had been in R.J.’s mind all night of Frande and Avery.

“Avery and I are getting married, Arj. I’ve saved every penny of Mona’s money, and Avery’s gonna marry me. I mean, see the
thing is… we’ll never starve, because if Mona quits needing you and me, I can always play cocktail piano somewhere.” When
she said that last part, R.J. knew it was something Frande had probably repeated over and over to reassure Avery, so she didn’t
mention that sixteen was too young to get a job playing cocktail piano. “Anyway, let’s get to work,” Frande said, moving forward
so R.J. would have to walk back up the stairs. “I’m gonna need the money.”

That night when Frande got home from R.J.’s, Pearl and Sam Goldman had a suitcase packed with her clothes in it. After screaming
at her and calling her a liar and a prostitute they made her leave, and she moved in with Avery’s married sister to wait until
the wedding. After that,
Avery would work in the gas station full time and they would get a small apartment in Hazelwood. R.J. knew all the details
because Francie, elated but edgy, still came to work in the evenings with her. Sometimes it made R.J. uncomfortable to think
that Francie, her best friend, went home and slept with a man. Maybe naked. And had sex. There were times when she wanted
to stop in the middle of their writing and ask, “What does sex feel like? Does it hurt? Is it wonderful?” But she never did.
Never asked questions. Just let Francie give her whatever information she felt like giving.

“They’ll take me back some day, Arj,” she said about her parents one night while she and R.J. were working on a song for Mona
about how she wished she looked like Jackie Kennedy. “They’ll miss me and they’ll take me back no matter what I do,”

Two weeks later, on a Saturday night, when Mona Feldstein Friedman tried out the “Mona in Miami” number, Francie and Avery
drove to Maryland to get married. R.J. sat alone at a table in the back of Weinstein’s Back Room. The audience was laughing
at Mona, who was complaining that all the men in Miami Beach were so old that it should be called God’s waiting room. R.J.
took a sip of the Coca-Cola one of the waiters regularly brought her while she watched Mona. She imagined Francie and Avery
driving on the turnpike in Avery’s Nash Rambler with the radio on. Francie with her arm around Avery, who was telling htr
how much he loved her. For a moment R.J. wished she were in France’s place. Except for the part about her parents.

Francie had tried over and over to call Sam and Pearl Goldman, but she’d only get as far as saying, “Ma, please,” or “Daddy,
listen,” and when they heard her voice they would hang up. She put letters in their mailbox, and she got no response from
them. She stood outside the beauty parlor where her mother went every Tuesday, and when her mother came out she ran to her
and tried to get her to talk to her. But her mother kept walking and got into her car and drove away, even when Francie stood
there and begged.

R.J. could hear Mona saying words, and the audience laughing, but now it was all just loud noises to her. She had tears in
her eyes that made Mona a blurry picture on the stage. Before Mona got to the part about all the women
wearing mink stoles even though the temperature was in the nineties, R.J. stood and walked out the door to the bus stop. A
light rain had started to fall, but R.J. didn’t bother to stand under the bus-stop shelter. She stood at the edge of the curb,
watching the street become slick and wet until it reflected the purplish glow of the streetlights. When the Murray Avenue
bus came she got on it and stayed on it past her own stop, to Lilac Street, and got off. But now the rain was coming down
hard, and she quickened her pace as she headed up the hill to the duplex where the Goldmans lived, up the steps to their porch,
and knocked on the door.

After a few minutes Francie’s brother Marshall opened the door. Marshall was very handsome. R.J. was surprised to see him
home from New York, but Marshall, on the other hand, only said, “Wet out there, Rosie Jane?” as if he’d been expecting her,
and when she walked into the living room she realized why. Pearl and Sam Goldman, and Francie’s aunt Blossom and her uncle
Marvin Fishmann, and Hy and Bessie Heft from the hardware store, and Francie’s grandfather, the one who called the piano Steinberg,
were all sitting there, on the same kind of wooden folding chairs Rifke had rented so relatives and friends could sit shiva
when Bubbe died. The chairs were all in a kind of circle around the closed baby grand piano, as if it were a coffin. As if
Francie was in it.

“Mrs. Goldman,” R.J. said. For the first time, in the heat of the living room, she could feel how wet her clothes were. She
was surprised by the loudness of her own voice, and the others must have been, too, because the conversations they’d been
having when she walked in all stopped while they looked at her. Pearl Goldman didn’t have any look of recognition on her face.

“I came here to tell you that Francie loves you and I thought that maybe if you heard it coming from me, you would understand
that—”

Pearl Goldman never let R.J. finish. She jumped to her feet and screamed, “Francie’s dead. There is no Francie, and you get
out of here.”

“She’s your daughter,” R.J. said, “and she loves you and you have to—”

“No. Dead. She’s goddamned dead,” Pearl Goldman screamed.

Francie’s brother Marshall walked over to R.J. now and took her arm.

“Rosie Jane, you’d better go,” he said.

“But I can’t go. Someday they’ll be sorry they did this,” R.J. said, reaching out a hand to Mrs. Goldman, who turned away
from her. Mr. Goldman stood now, too, his hands in his pockets.

“Someday you’ll wish you could be with her. Someday there’ll be grandchildren.”