"Come on down and give them a thrill."
She reached over to his pack of cigarettes on the table and extracted one slowly. She tapped it on the table while she gave him a long look. She placed it between her lips and he leaned over to light it, cupping the flame against a nonexistent breeze.
In that gesture, in the way they leaned together, and how she took a drag and leaned back — it was like a dance I didn't know. Right at that moment, I decided to learn.
Mom blew out the smoke and crossed her legs. She swung one foot in her platform sandal.
"You can ask your husband, too," Peter said.
"Ask him yourself," she replied, and lifted her hand to wave.
And there he was, coming through the door. He was wearing a wrinkled shirt and a grumpy expression.
"I woke up and you were gone," Joe said to her. He was so crabby he didn't seem to care that Peter was sitting there. He didn't even give him a glance.
"I had a headache. Joe, this is ..." She started to turn, but Peter suddenly stood up, the metal chair scraping against concrete.
"For crying out loud, it's Joe Spooner!" Peter said. "How are you, Sarge?"
Peter put out his hand, and Joe just looked at it. He gave him a hard stare, like he was trying to put together who he was. Peter withdrew his hand and put both hands in his pockets.
"Peter Coleridge," Peter said. "I was only a private, but surely you remember me. I was just sitting here with your wife and daughter — isn't this such a coincidence? I drove down from Long Island. What are the odds of this?"
Joe squinted at him in a sour way. "You'd be surprised how many GIs from my old outfit I run into. They come out of the woodwork."
"Joe doesn't talk about the war," Mom said.
"What's the point?" Peter said, nodding. "The thing we remember is the buddies we made. That's it."
"Some of the buddies I'd prefer to forget," Joe said.
"Say, I'm with you there. Some of them, sure. But you make a buddy in the army, you have one for life. I remember how you talked about your wife all the time." Peter turned back to Mom. "Guys, they exaggerate. They describe Betty Grable and you see their snapshot and she looks like Olive Oyl." Mom laughed, but Joe yanked out a chair so hard it squealed against the concrete. I'd never seen him in such a bad mood. "But Joe here, he didn't exaggerate, not a bit. I can see why he made it home in one piece. And it's clear he's a successful man."
"He has three appliance stores," I said.
"We all talked about what to do after the war," Peter said. "Joe always had the big ideas."
"What about you, Coleridge?" Joe asked. "What are you doing down here?"
He shrugged. "My old man has some business interests down here. I was going to take care of that, maybe go down to Miami. But I'll be here for a while."
"Peter was just telling us about a place in Delray that's a good time," Mom said. "He wants to take a run down there."
"You're invited, too, of course," Peter said.
I crossed my fingers underneath my skirt like a kid. Please. Please, please, please. Say yes. Fathers got the last word. If he said no, we didn't go.
"Come on, Sarge," Peter said. "We've been through some times together. You know I'm on the up and up. Just like I know you are. Right?"
Joe's thumb flicked against the room key in his hand. "Why don't you girls run on upstairs?" he suggested. "I'll have a cup of coffee with Pete here."
I took the fact that Joe called him Pete, not Peter, as a good sign. I didn't hear then how Joe smacked his lips against the P and made it sound like an insult. I only heard the familiarity.
I followed Mom to the door of the hotel. My old blue
skirt swished flirtatiously against my legs as I copied the sway of her walk. We walked out together like two Lana Turners, leaving the men at the table watching us go. We could feel their gazes. We didn't even have to turn around to know it.
This could be the worst thing, even worse than everything that came after: Even now, if I could go back to that moment — I wouldn't change a thing.
Chapter 9
My life was always screwy compared to other kids' because my mother worked. She had to, from the time she was fourteen and her parents died after a subway train derailed at Times Square. They were on their way to the movies. She was taken in by her uncle Bill; there was nobody else. She worked in his Sweet Shop 'N Luncheonette every day after school, and that's where she met my father. She got married at seventeen, and after my father took off, Uncle Bill would slip her an extra dollar or two on rent day. Then he died, and Aunt Vivian never gave us an extra penny. Mom said we should be grateful the witch let her keep the job.
I always wanted a father. Any kind. A strict one, a funny one, one who bought me pink dresses, one who wished I was a boy. One who traveled, one who never got up out of his Morris chair. Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. I wanted shaving cream in the sink and whistling on the stairs. I wanted pants hung by their cuffs from a dresser drawer. I wanted change jingling in a pocket and the sound of ice cracking in a cocktail glass at five thirty. I wanted to hear my mother laugh behind a closed door.
If I could choose a father, I would have chosen someone exactly like Joe. I fell for him, same as her. I was a pushover. I dressed up when he was coming. I laughed at his jokes and made sure we had beer in the fridge, even if we had to do without milk to buy it.
Joe and Mom had a date every Wednesday and Saturday for a year. Plenty of Sunday afternoons he'd take us for an outing, Rockaway Beach or even the city, just to get a soda at a drugstore. We waited forever, both of us, for him to propose. Christmas was coming, and Mom wanted a ring, or at least a promise. Joe couldn't afford a ring. He'd lost his job at the hardware store during the hard times and did a little of this, a little of that, to stay flush. A couple of nights pumping gas, three afternoons a week delivering seltzer and soda.
Mom was beginning to lose hope, and on Sunday mornings, after her date with Joe, she was starting to slam the coffeepot around something awful instead of humming to herself.
Then came Pearl Harbor, and we listened to the president's speech like everybody else, staring at the radio like we'd miss a word if we looked anywhere else. I was only nine, so I knew that something terrible had happened but at least it wasn't my fault. Later that night we heard feet pounding up the stairs, and it was Joe. He said we were in for it now, and everybody was saying Germany would be next. He said he was going to enlist, and asked her to marry him on the spot. My memory of his proposal is all mixed up with the voices on the radio talking about death and fire and lost ships in a place I'd never heard of, and Mom sobbing into Joe's shoulder.
Everybody seemed to die or disappear on us, so you could see how Mom and I lived through the war years with our fingers crossed, waiting for Joe to return. I stood over her on Saturday nights when she wrote him, telling her things to put in that I'd thought up all week, things to make him miss home so he'd fight stronger. I knew he wouldn't die. Not with us to come home to.
Four years went by. He had furloughs, when he'd show up handsome in his uniform and we got to parade him around, each of us holding on to an arm. Then he went back, and we got to worry and study the newspapers and his V-mail, just like everybody else. He felt even farther away when we got that mail, as if his personality had been squashed into the letters that were photographed and shrunk by Uncle Sam.
Joe didn't come home until a year after the war ended.
"Just a bit of mopping up to do," he wrote to us. He was stationed in Salzburg, Austria. I knew right where Salzburg was, because we'd stuck a big map on the wall in the kitchen. Everybody's geography got better during the war. I knew where Normandy was, and the Philippines, and Anzio, Italy. I could stick a pin in them right now without hardly looking. Pin the tail on the battle, Mom used to say. And pray Joe's not in it.