He turned and I saw him under the moon. My breath stopped. He was not just handsome, he was movie star handsome. Dark blond hair, a straight nose. A hunk of heaven, Margie would say.
“I was only a private,” he said. “Disappointed?”
I shook my head, because how could I be disappointed in anything about him?
“But I do know,” he continued, “how to salvage an evening for a girl in a party dress.”
He stood up, bowed. Held out his hand. “May I have this dance?”
“Here?”
He frowned. “Oh, wait.” He sat back down, and I felt disappointment thud inside me, even though I wasn’t about to dance with him—that would be crazy. I didn’t even know his name. He bent over, and I saw that he was untying his shoes. He dropped them and then stripped off his socks. His feet gleamed white in the moonlight. It seemed awfully forward to stare at them, so I looked away.
“I don’t want to break your toes,” he said. “I’m not a very good dancer.”
He stood there with his hand out. I was too embarrassed to take it.
“And they danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon.” I blurted this out, and my cheeks flared with heat. What a stupid thing to have said, to have quoted a nonsense poem! “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Now he’d really think I was a child.
But his grin was slow and easy. “So come on, pussycat,” he said.
This time I took his hand.
It wasn’t as awkward as I thought it would be. Not after a minute. My dress crackled as we moved slowly around the deep end of the pool. He hummed. I recognized the tune.
For all we know, we may never meet again.
I wished Mom and Mrs. Grayson could see me now.
But then I didn’t. This was better if no one saw. Better if it was my secret.
Every so often, our ankles brushed against each other, our toes. It felt like the most real thing that had ever happened to me. I was part of the hot, dark night. The night was all breath and air. I was all skin.
I had to remember every detail. His ankles. His fingers. The golden stubble on his cheek.
And then I forgot everything except the dance. I was able to dance for the first time in my life, really dance, and understand why it worked, one body against another body.
This may only be a dream…
Chapter 8
The next morning, I sat at the small round table on the patio, so I could see the pool where we met. I forced myself not to look up every time someone came through the door.
He had walked me to my door last night. He had bent over my hand but hadn’t kissed it. He’d said, solemnly, “Thank you for the dance.” He had handed me my wet shoes, the shoes he had fished out of the pool with a net he’d found by the lifeguard chair. He’d never asked my name. Instead, he’d called me pussycat.
“Good night, pussycat,” he’d said.
The usual people came to breakfast, the same guests I saw every day. Crabby Couple always ordered poached eggs, and I had to look away because, really, the sight of that runny yolk and the way they dipped their toast and didn’t talk to each other made me feel so sad. Honeymoon Husband always ate alone. Nice Fat Man was on his way to Miami, he kept saying, but he still hadn’t left. If you got up early for breakfast in this hotel, it could be the loneliest place in the world.
I looked at myself in my spoon. I felt like the girl I saw, upside down and fun-house looking, all stretched out of shape and foolish, just from holding so much want inside.
Then the door opened and he walked in.
He stood next to my table and smiled down at me. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a white shirt with the cuffs rolled up.
Forearms. Who knew they could be so beautiful? I looked at the worn leather of his watch strap. Everything else faded away but the blond hair on his arm against that strap.
“I was hoping you’d be here,” he said. “I forgot to ask your name.”
If only, if only, if only, I had a pair of sunglasses. Then I could have tilted my head back and looked at him, and he wouldn’t have been able to see my eyes. I could have pretended to be mysterious—something I couldn’t do with my naked, freckled face.
“Evelyn,” I told him. “Evie.”
“Good morning, Evie. How are your eggs?”
“Cold.”
“Well, at least something’s cold here. May I join you?”
He was sliding into a chair even as I was nodding. He picked up a napkin and shook it out. “Peter Coleridge. Glad to meet you.” He signaled the waiter. “Bring another plate of eggs for my companion—”
“No, really—”
“Toast and coffee for me, as hot as you’ve got, and orange juice, cold as you can make it,” he said. Once again, I admired how he talked, not ordering the waiter, exactly, but there was an undertone that made the waiter say “Yes, sir” very snappily and hurry off.
Top drawer. That’s what my mother would call it.
“I drove in last night,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep, it was too hot. So I went outside. I was feeling melancholy. Then I danced with a beautiful girl, and I felt better. What’s your story?”
He looked at me expectantly, as if I was the kind of girl who had a story.
What would Barbara Stanwyck say? She always played a tough-talking dame. “It’s no fairy tale, mister,” she’d shoot back, and Dana Andrews or Ray Milland would say “That’s okay, baby, ’cause I’m no prince.”
“I don’t have a story,” I said. “I’m still waiting for one.”
“Well,” he said, “that can be a very interesting place to be.” His long fingers reached out for his coffee cup, which the waiter had just filled. “I’m thinking of going down to Delray for lunch today,” he said.
Delray. The offhand way he said it made it sound like the nightclub El Morocco in Manhattan. I was sure that it had to be the most stylish place in Florida.
“Where is that?” I asked.
“Just a bit south of here. It’s a town where people actually live, as opposed to here. People only live here in the winter. So Delray is a bit more lively.”
“Oh.”
“My point being, would you like to join me?”
I had two thoughts, and they didn’t match. The first was how green his eyes were. That was a good thought. The second was, I must have heard wrong.
Of course it was a no-go. My parents would never let me go off with a strange man—because Peter (the name! perfect!) was a man, not a boy—and if he knew I was only fifteen he would take back the invitation, pronto. But didn’t I look fifteen, sitting there in my blue skirt and brown sandals?
I was saved from answering when the waiter put a plate of eggs in front of me and brought him toast and juice. The juice glass sat in a little metal dish surrounded by ice. The steam clouded up from my eggs. I took a bite and burned my mouth.
He took a sip of coffee. He looked at me over the rim. “Any girl who throws her shoes into a pool is someone I’d like to get to know.”
I was sure that if he knew me better, I’d bore him. Girls like me bored young men. I’d been known to bore twelve-year-old Tommy Heckleman, from down the block.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m fifteen.”
He took his spoon and scooped out marmalade onto his toast. “Don’t fifteen-year-olds eat lunch?”
“I’d have to ask my parents.”
“Then ask them.”
“They’ll say no.”
“Then don’t ask them. It’s an old army trick.”
A page turned in my mind. It had never occurred to me before that I could do something without permission. “May I” was a way of life for a girl like me.
“Think fast!” Tommy Heckleman would yell as he’d fire a baseball at my head.
But I didn’t have to make a decision, because right at that moment my mother walked out onto the patio. I didn’t have time to prepare; she saw us immediately and headed over. She had her dark glasses on, and her blond hair was
still a little tangled from sleep, as if she’d just barely passed a brush over it. Just my luck—she was never up this early.
Peter stood. He said good morning.
She said good morning and arched an eyebrow at me.
“This is Peter Coleridge,” I said. “Peter, this is my mom.”
This was wrong, somehow, and I knew it. This was the way I introduced friends to my mom in Queens. Surely there was a more polite way to do it now, a way I’d never learned.
She sank into the empty chair at our table.
“Pleased to meet you,” Peter said. Then he explained, “I met Evie last night,” as he sat down.
Mom twisted around, looking for the waiter. “I came down for coffee,” she said. Her voice sounded thick, as if she wasn’t quite awake.
He was all business then, raising a hand for the waiter, who instantly appeared. “Another cup,” he said, “and make it hot.” Then he turned back to Mom and said, “I come here in the winter. This is the first time I’ve been in the fall. They weren’t open during the war.”
“Nothing was open during the war,” Mom replied. The waiter brought her coffee and she dunked three cubes of sugar in it. Sugar rationing had just ended that summer and we still weren’t used to having as much as we wanted. She stirred it, her spoon clanking, and then took a long sip. She closed her eyes briefly, then regarded Peter again. “You look too young to have served.”
“Should I be pleased or insulted?”
“Take your pick.”
“I’m twenty-three. I was just telling Evie that there’s more to see down here than Palm Beach.”
“I’ve been to West Palm.” Mom shrugged her tanned shoulders. “We bought a pineapple.”
“There’s a place down in Delray that will cure what ails you.”
“What makes you think you know what ails me?”
“I can only guess. I was just telling Evie about Delray, about taking a run down there. Why don’t you join us?”
The conversation swiveled back to me. Mom regarded me for a moment, as if she’d just noticed I was there. “Where?” she asked.
“A place called the Tap Room. Ever been there?”
“The world is full of places I haven’t been,” Mom said.
“Gets a good crowd. Locals, the airmen from the base. Though I warn you—if you do come, you just might start a rumor that Lana Turner came in.”
“Lana Turner…” Mom rolled her eyes, but you could tell she was sucking that compliment down with her coffee. Lana Turner was every man’s dream, sultry and blond. It was Lana filling out a sweater at a drugstore that got her a Hollywood contract.
“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.