When I saw him later, the lipstick was gone, collar slightly damp. I pictured him in the men’s room scrubbing it off, scrubbing her off. Looking in the mirror and thinking about what he’d done and what he couldn’t help but keep doing.
The kids from Forest Hills High School were all over the place that afternoon, all in their summer clothes, girls with tan legs and boys freshly showered and gleaming. The rain had sent them, some straight from lounge chairs at the club, others from lifeguarding or the tennis courts. I always noticed the fuzzy edges of my summer Keds around them. I always wondered how the girls got their hair so shiny, their clothes so crisp, their eyes so bright.
I had a feeling it was going to happen that day. I couldn’t say why. Before Sherry even got there. But when she did, I knew for sure.
She looked like she’d been running a fever. There was this gritty film all over her skin and red blotches at her temples. Her uniform was unwashed from the day before, a ring of grease circling her belly.
She was late and I’d just left my post, just left the two of them. They never took their clothes off, ever, but sometimes he’d lift her skirt so high I could see flashes of her skin. I was searching for the scar, but I never saw it.
Her fingers pinched around his neck, the rushed pitch to her voice... it felt different this time. It felt like something was turning. Maybe it was something in the way his hands moved, more quiet, more careful. Maybe something in her that made her move looser, almost still.
I got it then. And I knew for sure when I saw them break apart and each look the other way. She dropped her skirt down with a snap of one wrist. He was already walking away.
I flicked off the last piece of the strawberried scar on my knee. The skin underneath was still tender, puckered.
And now there was Sherry. I was coming from the back and she was right in front of me, talking at me, her voice funny, toneless.
“I saw you sitting over there yesterday. By the machine room.”
“No one’s at concessions,” I said, wondering where my mother had gone.
“It was the same time. I saw you come out from there at the same time yesterday.”
“I guess,” I said.
It was ten minutes later, no more, when we all heard the shouting. Jimmy, Myrna, Eddie, two guys putting on their bowling shoes — we all followed the sounds to the ladies’ room.
Carol was hunched over, hair hanging in long panels in front of her. She seemed surprised, her mouth a small “o.” It looked like Sherry’d just punched her in the stomach.
But then I saw it in her hand. The blade was short and Sherry held it so close to her, elbows at her waist. The blade was short enough that it couldn’t have gone deep.
Jimmy backhanded Sherry. She cracked her head on the stall door and slid slowly to the floor, one hand reaching out for Jimmy’s shirt.
The knife fell and I saw it was one of those plastic-handled ones they used to open the hot dog packages at concessions.
Eddie pushed past Jimmy and knelt down beside Sherry. She had a surprised look on her face. He was whispering to her, “Sherry, Sherry...”
Carol was watching Eddie. Then she looked down at her stomach and a tiny blotch of red against the banner-blue.
“That ain’t nothing,” Myrna said, birthmark twitching. “That ain’t nothing at all.”
Myrna taped up Carol with the first-aid kit. Then Jimmy took all three of them to his office. I walked over to concessions, but no one was there.
That was when Diane came running in, shouting for someone to call an ambulance.
“We don’t need no ambulance,” Myrna said. “I hurt myself worse getting out of bed.”
But Diane was already on the phone at the shoe rental desk.
We all ran down the long hallway and up the stairs to the boulevard. Someone must have already called because the ambulance was there.
At first, it was like my mother had just lain down on the street. But the way her neck was turned looked funny. Like her head had been put on wrong.
Diane grabbed me from behind and pulled me back.
That was when I saw a middle-aged man in a gray suit sitting on the curb, his face in his hands. His car door was open like he’d stumbled out to the sidewalk. He was crying loudly, his whole body shaking. I’d never heard a man cry like that.
Diane was telling everyone who would listen, “She said she saw him. She said she saw Fred Upton pass by on the 4:08 yesterday. But he’d never take a bus, would he? That’s what she said. So she wanted to watch for it at the same time today. See if it was him. You know how she always thought she was seeing him somewhere. No one must’ve hit the bell because the bus didn’t stop. And she just ran out onto the street after it. That car didn’t have time to stop.”
She looked over at the man, who started sobbing even louder.
“Hit her like a paper doll,” Diane continued. “Nothing but a paper doll going up in the wind and then coming down.”
Later, I would figure it out. My mother, nights spent looking out diner windows, uniform steeped in smoke, thinking of the stretch of her thirty years filled with glazy-eyed men stumbling into her life — all with the promise of four decades of union wages like her old man, repairing refrigerators, freezers in private homes, restaurants, country clubs, office buildings — for her whole life never stopping for more than one Rheingold at the corner bar before coming home for pot roast at the table with the kids.
Those men came but never for long, or they came and then turned, during the first or second night in her bed, into something else altogether, something that needed her, sure, but also needed the countergirl at Peter Pan bakery, or four nights a week betting horses at the parking garage on Austin Street, or a night watching the fights at Sunnyside Garden even when it was her birthday, and, yeah, maybe he needed the roundcard girl he met there too.
There was a dream of something and maybe it wasn’t even a guy like her old man or the one in the Arrow Shirt ad or the doctor she met at the diner, the one with the big apartment in the new high-rises, the view from the bedroom so great that she’d have to see it to believe it, he’d said. Maybe it wasn’t a man dream at all. But it was something. It was something and it was there and then it was gone.
Only the strong survive
by Mary Byrne
It wasn’t the boys from Carrickmacross
Or the boys from Ballybay
But the dealin’ men from Crossmaglen
Put whiskey in me tae
Astoria
My father announced this from a comfortable armchair by a window. Clad in good pajamas, he had “showered, shat, and shaved,” as he put it himself. In fact, this had been engineered and executed by an obese but energetic Polish lady of some thirty-eight years who was now about to leave after the graveyard shift. An old phonograph exuded Johnny Mathis or Andy Williams, I don’t know which. Or care. Schmaltzy music kept my dad quiet. It was almost as important as the nurses.
The Pole bustled back into the room, sweating already, and hung about with bags and baskets.
“A proper scavenger,” said Dad.
“You can talk,” the Pole shot back.
“Live where you’d die. Build a nest in your ear.” He eyed me crossly. We exchanged stares.
“I weel not take much more of thees,” said the Pole. “He’s gotta be put in a home. Those opiates are bedd for his hedd. Hallucinations again last night, squirrels climbing the bedroom vall and someone up a ladder—”