I knew Margie was right. That's the way our neighborhood worked. But Ruthie was so pretty that anything could happen. I knew from just looking at him that Jeff was in love with her. I could tell by the back of his head, which I knew like clockwork. I'd stared at it all through geometry last year. If I could tell when he suddenly understood the isosceles triangle, I could get this.
It was almost worse that he couldn't have her. It was all Romeo and Juliet and balconies. Ruthie had European cousins who disappeared into camps during the war. She was so lucky — tragedy and curly hair.
"C'mon," Margie said, and she began to walk faster. I followed, because when somebody expects you to follow them, you have to go ahead and do it.
We were just behind Jeff and Ruthie, close enough that I could see the fraying on the collar of her white shirt, which she tried to cover with a polka-dotted scarf. Ruthie was always well pressed. She had the cleanest fingernails I'd ever seen, even after a whole day of school. I felt better seeing that flaw.
"Je-eff..." Margie sang out his name like a tune.
Jeff half-turned but didn't stop walking. "Hey, Margie. Hey, Evie."
"Aren't you supposed to be at the altar boy meeting? I just saw Father Owen going into the church."
Jeff stopped. "Aw, get out. There's no altar boy meeting."
"Wanna bet? Frank was just going." Frank was Margie's older brother. We'd just seen him taking off to play baseball. I looked at Margie. Why was she telling such a whopper?
"Sorry, Ruthie," Margie said. "I guess your people don't know about altar boys."
Jeff looked down the block to the Virgin Mary, whose hands were outstretched, palms out, as if to say What gives?
Ruthie slipped her books out from underneath Jeff's arm.
"You'd better go, Jeff," she said. She didn't look at him. She looked at us.
He had a chance to say no. But he mumbled "See you" to all of us and headed back toward the church.
Ruthie turned and began to walk.
"Do you believe the nerve?" Margie whispered to me. "Did you see the way she looked at us? I'll show her."
"Let's just go home."
"Come on, Sister Mary Evelyn," Margie said. She called me that when she thought I was being a goody-goody.
Margie speeded up until she was right behind Ruthie. She stepped on the back of her loafer and gave her a flat tire, flattening the back of the worn leather so that Ruthie's foot came out of the shoe.
"Sorry!" Margie chirped out the word like she was in glee club, smug because she had the solo. Fat chance. I
had a much better voice than she did. So did Ruthie. She stood next to me in glee club because we were both tall.
Ruthie reached back to fix her shoe but couldn't do it without stopping. She hopped for a few steps, trying to hook her fingers behind the heel. Then she gave up and walked on the back of her shoe. Her gait had a hitch to it now, but she only went faster, scuffing one foot along the pavement to keep her shoe on.
Margie tried to speed up to follow her, but I yanked on her shirt. Ruthie lurched along, faster and faster. She turned the corner and disappeared.
"We sure showed her," Margie said.
"Yeah," I said. "I guess we did."
Chapter 3
When I got home, I slumped down on the glider on the porch, hoping my stepfather, Joe, would be there. I wanted someone to tell me I was beautiful, even if he was lying. I wanted to forget that picture of Ruthie walking away, dragging her foot along so she wouldn't lose her shoe.
Of course, Margie had done a best friend's duty. She'd staked out my territory. Loyalty counted the most in my neighborhood. I should have felt lucky to have a best friend who would fight for me.
The door opened behind me, and Mom sat down on the stoop, her skirt billowing and then drifting down to her ankles. Unlike other moms, she wore her good clothes all the time and didn't care if she got them dirty.
My mother was beautiful. I always said that first, because it was the first thing everybody noticed. I took after my father.
You couldn't stop looking at her. She was a knockout. The way she held a cigarette, the way she danced in the kitchen, the way she could make supper with a cocktail glass in one hand — that was movie star glamour. You could almost forget she was just a housewife from Queens.
"In the dumps?" she asked me.
"I want to wear lipstick," I said.
She took a cigarette pack out of her apron pocket, then her gold lighter. She tapped out the cigarette, then placed it between her lips and lit it. She took a fleck of tobacco off her bottom lip. She was wearing Revlon's Fatal Apple lipstick — the most tempting color since Eve winked at Adam.
"Don't be in such a hurry to grow up, baby," she said, blowing a plume of smoke out toward Mrs. Carmody, who was sweeping her porch and pretending not to spy in windows as the lights came on. "It's not all polka dots and moonbeams, you know."
"It's got to be better than this," I said.
"You think so?"
A breeze ruffled her blond hair. She stared out into the air and flicked an ash off her cigarette.
I leaned backward over the glider and looked at her upside down. Her face seemed to assemble into something foreign. Her blue eyes looked like triangles, and I could see straight up her nostrils. It was strange how a face was just eyes, nose, and a mouth. It was how they were arranged that counted. I was cheered to discover a position in which my mother was not quite so lovely.
Even though I didn't say a word, she knew. "You're too young for boys, anyway," she said.
"You got married when you were seventeen," I pointed out.
"Good Lord, Evie, you don't want to take after me. Anyway, I was a mature seventeen."
No kidding. I have one photograph of her and my father. She looked hubba-hubba even then, in a flowered dress, clutching the arm of my father, who was leaning back on his heels, like he wanted to fall backward into another life. Six months later, he did. He brought her a cup of coffee in bed, said he was going to California, and walked out. She was seventeen and already pregnant with me.
Now she looked at her watch, the one Joe had surprised her with for their anniversary last year, the one he'd bought in a fancy jewelry store on Fifth Avenue. ("You're crazy," she'd said. "We can't afford this.”
“Let me worry about it," he'd replied. "And I'm not worried.")
"Your father is late," she announced. "Again. Be prepared for a roast like a rock. I can’t wait to hear what Grandma Glad says."
My grandmother's name was Gladys, but Joe wanted us to call her Grandma Glad. Maybe it fit a vision of what he wanted her to be, the opposite of what she really was. She knew how to spread misery around.
Mom took a puff of her cigarette. "Maybe she'll break another tooth."
The living room window was open. "I'm not deaf yet!" Grandma Glad yelled.
Mom raised her eyebrows at me, and I had to slap a hand over my mouth to put the plug in my laughter.
So that's how we were: a mother and a daughter sitting on a porch, laughing as the tree shadows stretched toward the porch and lights came on in the houses. Sounds cozy. But it was just like buzz bombs—the V-2 rockets the Germans launched at London near the end of the war. You couldn't hear them, not even a whistle. Until your house blew up.
Chapter 4
After they got married and Joe knew he was going overseas, he insisted we move in with his mother. Suddenly we had a house with a porch and a yard. Grandma Glad made us pay rent, but it was her house, after all. It must have been hard to give up two good bedrooms for the duration. But I'm guessing it was harder to say no to Joe because he was a soldier. We all felt like we had to make sacrifices on the home front. It made us — the women — feel braver, and better, if we were suffering, too, somehow. Even if it was only arguing in the kitchen.