“Don’t tell me I don’t got eyes,” Sherry was saying.
“We all got eyes,” my mother said. “But there’s nothing to see.” Her brow wet with grease from the grill, her eye shadow smeared. “There’s not a goddamned thing to see.”
I didn’t say anything. I rarely said anything. But something was funny in the way Sherry was looking at Eddie. She always had that blank look, but it used to seem like a little girl, a doll, limbs soft and loose, black buttons for eyes. Now, though, it was different. It was different, but I wasn’t sure how.
Back there in that space behind the pins, it was like backstage and no one could see even though all eyes were facing it. As soon as you walked in a bowling alley, that was where your eyes went. You couldn’t help it. But you never imagined what could be going on behind the pins, so tidy and white.
And each day I’d watch. It was a hundred degrees or more back there. It was filled with noise, all the sharp cracks echoing through the place. But I was watching the way Carol trembled. Because she always seemed so cool and easy, with her long pane of dark hair, her thick fringe of dark lashes pasted on in the ladies’ room one by one. (“They get her tips, batting those babies like a raccoon in heat,” Myrna, the old lady who worked dayshift concessions, said. “Those and the pushup brassiere.”)
Carol was talking to Diane, the other cocktail waitress. Diane used to work at the Stratton, but to hear her tell it, the minute her tits dropped a half-inch, they put her out on her can. She hated the Lanes. “How much tips can I get from these Knights of Columbus types?” she always groaned. She worked at Whitestone Lanes too and had plenty to say about the customers there.
I was sitting at a table in the cocktail lounge, looking at pictures of Princess Grace in someone’s leftover Life magazine. I wasn’t supposed to be in there, but no one ever bothered me until happy hour.
“She can jaw all she wants,” Carol said, eating green cherries from the dish on the bar. “It’s all noise to me.” She was talking about Sherry.
“She should take it up with her man, she has something to say about things,” Diane said.
“I don’t care what she does.”
“What I hear, she can’t show her face in Ozone Park. They all remember her family. Trash from trash.”
“I’m going to haul bills tonight, I can tell. Look at ’em,” Carol said, surveying the softball team swarming in like bright bumblebees.
“Yeah, good luck,” Diane added, then nodded at Carol’s neckline. “Bend, bend, bend.”
In the bathroom once, right after, I pretended to be fixing my hair, snapping and resnapping a rubber band around my slack ponytail. I knew Carol would be in there, she always went in there after. When she came out of the stall, I looked at her in the mirror. Her face steaming pink, she brushed her shiny hair in long strokes, swooping her arm up and down and swiveling a little like she was dancing or something. She was watching her own face in the mirror. I wondered what she was watching for.
I saw the dust on her back, between her shoulder blades. I wanted to reach my hand out and brush it away.
Eddie was oiling the lanes and saw me watching, eating french fries off a paper plate at the head of lane 3. “And there’s my girl.” He said it like we talked all the time, but it was the first time he’d ever said anything to me. “Stuck inside every day. Don’t you like to go to the Y or something? Go to the city pool?”
“I don’t like to swim,” I answered. Which was true, but my mother didn’t want me to go there by myself. When summer started, she let me go once to a pool day with the kids at school, but when I got home, she was sitting on the front steps of our building like she’d been waiting for me for hours. Her face was red and puffy and I never saw her so glad to see me. That was the only time I went. Besides, she’d never liked it. Mr. Upton, before he left, was always telling her I’d get diseases at the public pool.
“All kids like to swim, don’t they?” Eddie was saying. He tilted his head and smiled. “Don’t girls like to show off their swimming suits?”
I ate another fry, even though it was too hot and made my mouth burn, lips stinging with salt.
“I always liked to go, just splash around and stuff,” he said. “You got no one to take you, huh?”
“I don’t really swim much,” I said.
He nodded with a grin, like he was figuring something out. “I get it. Well, I’d take you, but I guess your daddy wouldn’t like it.”
I felt my thigh slide on the plastic seat. I looked at the far end of the lanes. I felt my leg come unstuck and slide off the edge of the seat and it was shaking. “He’s gone,” I said.
Eddie paused for a flickering second before he smiled. “Then I guess I got a chance.”
Fred Upton was my mother’s husband. My real old man died when I was a baby. He had some kind of infection that went to his brain.
There were some guys in between, but two years ago it was all about Mr. Upton. We moved from Kew Gardens when she got tangled up with him and quit her job at Leona Pick selling dresses. She’d met Mr. Upton working there, sold him a billowy nightgown for his fiancée, and he took her out for spaghetti with clams at LaStella on Queens Boulevard that very night. They got hitched at City Hall three weeks later.
Before he left, times were pretty good. It was always trips to Austin Street to buy new shoes with t-straps and lunch at the Hamburger Train and going in the women’s clothing store with the soft carpet, running our hands through the linen and seersucker dresses — with names like buttercup yellow, grasshopper green, goldenrod, strawberry punch. One day he bought her three dresses, soft summer sheaths with boatneck collars like a woman you’d see on TV or the movies. The sales lady wrapped them in tissue for her even when my mother told her they weren’t a gift.
“They’re a gift for you, aren’t they?” the lady had said, her pink — cake-icing lips doing something like a smile.
Those dresses were sitting in the closet now, unworn for months, yellowing, smelling like stale perfume, old smoke. Never saw my mother out of one of her two uniforms these days, except when she slept in the foldout couch, usually in her slip. Some days I tugged off her pantyhose while she slept.
“He said he was going to Aqueduct,” I heard my mother say on the telephone to a girlfriend soon after he left. “But his sister tells me he’s in Miami Beach.”
It had been three months now, and wherever Mr. Upton went, he wasn’t in Queens. Someone my mother met in a bar told her he’d heard Mr. Upton was dead, killed in a hotel fire in Atlantic City the same night he’d left. That was the last I knew. I didn’t ask. I could tell she didn’t want me to. I hoped she’d forget about Mr. Upton and marry a mailman or a guy who worked in an office. As it was, I figured us for six more weeks of this and we’d be moving in with my grandmother in Flushing.
“She’s got ants in her pants, that one,” Myrna was saying to Sherry. Myrna had a big birthmark on her cheek that twitched whenever she disapproved of something, which was a lot. She was talking about Carol, who she called “Lane 30,” because that was where the cocktail lounge was. “Thinks she’s got it coming and going.”