He was wrong, though. The brothers evidently got the message, because they began working with renewed energy, lugging the last of the waterlogged mattresses and furniture up the side staircase. Half an hour later they all thundered back down again, hopped into their vehicles and careened away from the curb, their tires screeching and horns blaring, lobbing more empties at the store and hooting a drunken retreat at the top of their lungs.
MY FATHER HAD TAKEN my mother’s advice on running the store, which now stayed open until ten o’clock on weeknights and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. This meant, in effect, that our family no longer ate meals together. Some evenings, after my mother and I finished, she’d fix a plate for me to take over to my father, and he’d eat it standing up at the register. Other times, after he grew more confident of my abilities, he’d come home to eat in the kitchen while I minded the store. Early evenings were generally slow—it got busy again later—and sometimes during the half hour he allowed himself to be absent, I’d see no business at all.
For instance, the day the brothers moved Nancy Salvatore in upstairs, I had the place to myself. There was plenty of work to do, restocking and tidying the shelves, but my father had instructed me never to leave the register untended, so I usually brought a book along to help pass the time. I’ve always been the kind of reader who enters a trance, and that evening, when the bell jingled, I came up and out of my book drunkenly, reluctantly, until I saw who it was. She had on the same angora sweater she wore to the Friday night dances, and I caught a whiff of her perfume on the draft from the open door. Karen Cirillo, I thought, and right on the heels of this another thought: Jerzy’s girl.
She seemed to take in both the market and me in one deft, appraising glance that suggested she had time to kill and no other choices. Sighing deeply, she came over to the register and picked a TV Guide off the rack, riffling its pages quickly and looking disappointed to discover they were mostly full of words. “Hey,” she said, as if to the magazine.
When the magazine didn’t respond, I said hi, my voice cracking, though she didn’t seem to notice. She did look me over again, though, her close attention filling me with pride and fear. Karen Cirillo didn’t look at boys twice. It was hard to know whether this was because she wasn’t allowed to, being Jerzy’s girl, or had no desire to, for the same reason.
“I know you?”
The answer was yes and no. We were in the same grade, and we saw each other every day, but there was no particular reason for her to have noticed me. “I’m in seventh, too,” I told her. “We aren’t in any of the same classes.”
“You must be smart,” she said, then, “That any good?”
This confused me. Did she want to know if being smart was all it was cracked up to be? Only when she held out her hand did I realize she was asking about the book I was reading, H. Rider Haggard’s She. I handed it over, and she riffled through the pages with the same efficient lack of interest with which she’d examined the TV Guide. “Yeah, pretty good,” I said, unable to tamp down my enthusiasm completely. What would she think if she knew I’d mentally cast her in the title role? “It’s about this—”
“Don’t tell me,” she said, handing the book back. “I might read it someday.”
I wanted to say she really should and to explain why, but realized this would involve telling her all about the book, which she’d just asked me not to do.
She noticed my hesitation. “What,” she said, “you think I don’t read? I read a lot.”
That she cared in the slightest what I thought couldn’t have surprised me more. “Like what?” I asked, genuinely thrilled by the possibility that I might have something in common with Karen Cirillo.
She shrugged. “Books,” she said, her tone a challenge.
I stifled a laugh, realizing she was serious. “They’re good…books,” I said, inwardly cringing at how stupid this sounded.
“They’re okay,” she allowed, no longer much interested in pretending to be a reader and seeming to suggest there were other, better things than books that I wouldn’t know anything about.
“How about a pack of Parliaments?” she said, nodding at the cigarette counter behind me. Again I hesitated. She wasn’t old enough to buy cigarettes any more than I was old enough to sell them, and my father was strict about minors.
“It’s okay,” she assured me, her tone making it clear that she wouldn’t rat me out, that we wouldn’t get caught, that so far as she was concerned it was no big deal whether I did or didn’t, that she knew plenty of places where she could get cigarettes, that nobody cared if she smoked, that I’d be a dork if I refused. I handed her a pack of Parliaments, and she peeled the ribbon off right there, thumbing the foil top open. “Want one?” When I shook my head no, she put them in her purse. “You don’t smoke?”
“Not that often,” I said, trying not to sound like the dork we both knew I was.
“You shouldn’t,” she said, surprising me. “Cigs are expensive. Also bad for your lungs.” She touched a place on her sweater under her left breast, where she apparently believed her own lungs were. Why I shouldn’t do what she herself did she didn’t explain. “So,” she said, looking me over yet again, squinting this time, as if I’d managed somehow to go out of focus. “Your name is what?”
“Lou,” I said, and then, when she kept squinting at me, I added, “Lynch.”
“Nuh-uh,” she said, squinting harder. “It’s Lucy, right?”
“Right,” I admitted, feeling the blood rush to my cheeks.
“How come?” she wondered. “How’d that happen?”
“Louis Charles Lynch,” I explained. “In kindergarten, the teacher read my name as Lou C. Lynch.”
“That’s rough,” she admitted, after carefully considering the matter. “You used to be Bobby’s friend, right?”
I nodded, proud. Also a little nervous, unsure of what the consequences for such an admission might be if she reported back to her boyfriend. I hoped she’d remember the exact words she’d used—that I “used to be” Bobby Marconi’s friend, which was all I’d admitted to. “You know him?”
“He’s my second cousin, or some shit like that,” she shrugged. “I guess we’ll never see him again. Too bad. He was okay.”
She was studying me intently now. I took her comment about never seeing him again to be a reference to Jerzy Quinn’s threat to kill Bobby if he ever returned to Thomaston, a subject I thought it wise to navigate carefully, though I would’ve liked to agree with her that it was too bad and that Bobby was indeed okay. “They used to live over there,” I said, pointing at the Spinnarkle house. But instead of turning around to look, she continued to stare at me, and I could feel myself glowing under her scrutiny. My knees were about to give out when I realized she wasn’t looking at me at all, only at some unfocused point in the rear of the store. There seemed to be nothing to do but to continue talking, so I did. “I heard his mom’s sick.”
“Sick of living in this shithole, you mean.” Karen snorted. “She tried running away, but they caught up with her.”
That someone should express such an outrageous opinion so casually took my breath away. I’d never known anybody who didn’t consider Thomaston a fine place to live. True, my mother often lamented that it didn’t offer more opportunities, as well as the lack of what she called culture. But still, it was shocking that anybody could conclude it was a “shithole.” Worse, the way Karen Cirillo was surveying Ikey Lubin’s suggested that, in her opinion, if anybody needed additional evidence in support of her opinion, they need look no farther. What, I wondered, could possibly be the source of such a misguided opinion? The only explanation I could imagine was that as a West Ender, she was generalizing about Thomaston from her limited experience of its least prosperous sector. Which was what I tried to suggest, tentatively, by saying, “Yeah, but they live in the Borough now, the Marconis.”
“Shithole,” Karen Cirillo repeated, her tone even more bored and offhanded, her conviction apparently unshakabl
e. So, I was surprised to discover, was my own contrary opinion. In the face of her insistence, I felt a sudden welling up of loyalty to my town and, in particular, our East End neighborhood—to the Spinnarkles and the Gunthers and the Bishops and, mostly, my own small family. Before I could offer anything in defense, though, the bell above the door jingled again, and I looked up, expecting, almost hoping, it would be my father, but it was Jerzy Quinn himself, and when he entered, the world wobbled even more dangerously than it had when Karen Cirillo intruded on H. Rider Haggard a few minutes earlier. About the only way I can explain this wobbling is to cite my profound sense that the presence of these two West Enders at the corner of Third and Rawley was not permitted. I had no concrete idea who or what governed what was permitted, simply that this wasn’t allowed. A violation had occurred. A rule abrogated. A perimeter breached. Whatever immutable law kept Jerzy and his gang out of the YMCA dances until the last half hour, that kept West End kids out of the high-track classes made up of the Jewish kids and Borough kids and a few “gifted” East End kids, the same elemental force that caused everyone to cut a wide swath around Jerzy’s bunch both in the school corridors and outside on the grounds—all of this was called into question by their mere presence in our little store, a dislocation of reality so profound that it left me mute. And as Jerzy came toward me with his signature little jig step, I was amazed that he had just sauntered through all the invisible barriers as if they didn’t exist, when the three of us knew for certain that they did.
Since Jerzy almost never showed Karen any affection in public, I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t take her hand or anything. For her part, she seemed to know who’d entered the store without having to look. “Hey,” she said, looking straight at me, but meaning, I understood, him. It was now, suddenly, two against one. That’s what I remember thinking. A minute before, however improbable it might have seemed, I’d been on the verge of making a friend. Now I was alone again.
“Who’s this?” Jerzy said, also looking at me. If he recognized me as a boy he’d once imprisoned in a trunk and pretended to saw in half, he gave no sign. What would I have done if he had recognized me? Sadly, I knew the answer to his question, for in the second or two it took him to join his girlfriend at the counter, I’d already begun to formulate a little speech about how, no, there weren’t any hard feelings, it was a long time ago and hadn’t been that big a deal anyway, that it wasn’t like I still had nightmares or anything, or that when I came out of my occasional spells I sometimes imagined I was again locked in the trunk, a sensation so strong I could actually smell the urine. I even remember feeling guilty that he might’ve been worried about me all these years. Far from holding a grudge, I was anxious to set his mind at ease.
“This? This is Lou,” Karen told him, surprising me with the news that I could be who I wanted. “He’s a friend of Bobby’s.”
I felt the blood drain out of my face.
“Bobby who?” her boyfriend said, appraising the store like a potential buyer.
“Bobby who,” she repeated with a snort. “The Bobby who kicked your ass. My cousin Bobby. That Bobby who.”
My heart pounded in my throat and I felt my knees buckle, but then Jerzy did the strangest thing. He let out a nasty little chuckle and gave an almost imperceptible nod in Karen’s direction as if to say Girls. What’re you gonna do? As if the two of us—Jerzy Quinn and Lucy Lynch—were fellow sufferers. As if I had a girlfriend just like Karen Cirillo in the back room. As if I knew the score.
They were both regarding me now, curious, perhaps, to see whose side I would take, and if there’d been a trunk there behind the counter I’d have voluntarily crawled inside and pulled the lid shut over me.
“Lou’s nice. He gave me a pack of cigs,” Karen said, smiling at me now, challenging me to say the cigarettes hadn’t been a gift, that in my father’s store we didn’t hand out free cigarettes or free anything. This, I intuited, was the price of being Lou and not Lucy, which meant the cigarettes would be free, just this once.
“Let’s go,” Jerzy said, then hooked his index finger into the waistband of Karen’s slacks and gave it a gentle tug. When the material stretched, I could see that his finger was between her bare skin and her underpants—a gesture made even more staggering by the fact that she didn’t seem to object. Sex, I thought, just that one word. That slender finger slipped down between her bare skin and panties meant sex. And during all of this she never once took her eyes off me.
“See you around, neighbor,” she said, though I only half heard. Jerzy had pivoted, letting go of her waistband—the snap was audible—and was heading for the door. Karen followed, saying, over her shoulder. “Thanks for the cigs, Lou. You’re a prince.”
The front of Ikey Lubin’s was all glass, and from behind the register I had a clear view of our house. At the precise instant Jerzy put his hand on the knob and pulled the door toward him, our front door opened and my father emerged, as if the two events were connected by a single cause, and I had the eerie sense that until the moment Jerzy opened the door, my father had been trapped inside our house, unable to come out onto the porch. Was it my imagination, or was there some urgency to his step as he came across the intersection?
“Who was that?” he wanted to know, shutting the door behind him.
“Who?” I said, lamely.
“Them two that just left,” he said, glancing at the cigarette rack where the single packs were kept. For an instant I wondered if he’d counted them before leaving for dinner and now was counting them again. But a second later he was looking only at me.
“A couple kids from school,” I said, meeting his gaze before looking down. If I told him their names, would he recognize Jerzy Quinn’s? Had my father ever learned the names of the boys who’d locked me in that trunk so long ago? And what would he do if he made the connection across the intervening years?
He seemed about to say something else, but just then, on the other side of the wall, we heard the sound of feet pounding up the stairs to the apartment above. “They’re back,” I said, meaning the brothers, but I knew it wasn’t them. No pickup trucks had pulled up outside, and though the noise of tramping feet was loud, it wasn’t nearly as loud as they’d been all afternoon, big, heavy men pushing and shoving one another into the walls, pounding the uncarpeted stairs with their boot heels. Suddenly I understood what Karen had meant by calling me neighbor.
That night my mother regarded me suspiciously when I announced my intention to go to bed early, wanting to know if maybe I was coming down with something or felt one of my spells coming on. What I wanted was to be alone in the dark. For hours I lay awake, thinking it all through. Karen Cirillo and I would be neighbors. I would likely see Jerzy Quinn every day. If she became my friend, did it follow that he would? The idea was almost too thrilling to contemplate. Of course it troubled me that I’d betrayed my father by giving away a pack of cigarettes. In doing so, was I not hastening my family toward financial ruin? Mostly, though, I lay there thinking of how casually Jerzy had slipped his finger into Karen’s waistband, and I tried to imagine myself doing something equally brazen and confident.
I don’t know what time it was when I finally fell asleep, but I remember no longer minding so much that Bobby had moved away. If he and his family still lived above the Spinnarkle sisters, then I’d have to share Karen and Jerzy. And they now represented to me the embodiment of the mystery I’d come to feel was at the heart of everything, a mystery as deep and profound as why my parents loved each other, as why some people had to pay the footbridge toll while others did not, as why a woman like Mrs. Marconi felt the need to run away from her own family, all as inexplicable as the mystery of my own suddenly fluid identity. If I played my cards right, I could be Lou Lynch, like my father, not a boy with a girl’s name. Wasn’t that what Karen had implied when she introduced me as Lou? I considered again the possibility that my destiny wasn’t etched in stone. The door to the future was suddenly wide open, and the light pouring throug
h it, there in the darkness of my room, was blinding.
I could choose who to be.
FOR A WHILE it looked like things would work out as I’d hoped they might. Every night, when my father left me in charge of the store, Karen would appear and we’d talk, usually about school. Her belief was that all our teachers were idiots, an opinion I allowed her to imagine I shared. She was convinced they had it in for the school’s dumb kids just because they were stupid. This wasn’t an argument I’d ever encountered before, so it took me a while to get a grip on it. “Take us,” she explained. “You’re smart, I’m dumb. So they like you and hate me.” When I protested, saying I wasn’t that smart, she would have none of it. “Okay,” she conceded, “you’re not like a Jew or anything, but you’re not dumb like me. And you’re way smarter than Jerz,” she added, apparently feeling no need to be loyal to her boyfriend. When I said that maybe the fact that I did my homework might have something to do with our teachers’ unfairly high opinion of kids like me, she brushed this suggestion aside as well. She’d tried shit like doing her homework for a while, but it was counterproductive since she always did it wrong. Doing homework wrong, to her, was worse than not doing it at all, because doing it required time and effort and yielded the same result as not doing it, which required neither. Besides, our teachers had it all figured out in advance, she said, like who was going to get good grades and who’d flunk. “Ask Jerz,” she concluded, without giving me to understand why I should value the opinion of someone she’d just admitted wasn’t nearly as smart as I was.
That was the most curious thing about Karen’s always curious logic. The way she saw it, stupidity didn’t mean that a person’s conclusions were necessarily unsound. She saw no reason to distrust her boyfriend’s wisdom on most subjects, any more than she considered his being held back two grades indicative of anything. “Jerz knows stuff,” she insisted, then added, “All kinds of shit,” her rhetorical clincher.