How High the Moon (34 page)

The Dusty Rose was a supper club, which I figured meant it would be nicer than the bar we used to live above. And it was. It had stools with backs on them, not just those metal ones with red seats that wobbled like they were going to tip over when you spinned on them. And folks didn’t have to eat their burgers or fish fry at the bar, their elbows crowded, because they had round tables with
plastic tablecloths scattered through the whole place, a short red candle in bubbly glass on each.

The place was filled with people when we got there, half at the bar and half at the tables. Cigarette smoke and the smell of fried food hung above the bar and tables like umbrellas.

“Speak of the devil,” a guy with ears like Dumbo Doug’s at the corner of the bar yelled, lifting his glass like he was giving Ma a toast. The guys sitting on both sides of him, and the big one standing behind them, called out a few hoots.

Star quality. That’s what Jay called it when someone had the ability to light up a stage just by walking across it. Ma wasn’t on a stage, and she wasn’t screaming like a starlet, but still most every head in The Dusty Rose turned to look at her as she
sashayed
behind the line of stools to get to the guys who were calling her.

“And who’s this pretty little thing?” the guy with the big ears asked when we reached the corner of the horseshoe bar.

Ma pulled me in front of her, her hands hooking together like popper beads. “This is my baby girl. Teaspoon,” she said.

The guys laughed at my name, so Ma started explaining how I got it. I stopped her, though. “I want to tell it!” I said, and she let me.

“She got her big lungs from her mama, though,” Ma said when they were done laughing. As I watched Ma talk to the guys, turning her attention from one to the next, I thought about how that brassiere she had on should be renamed an “arrow bra.”

“You gonna treat us to a song later, little lady?” a guy big as Paul Bunyan asked.

“She might if you’re good, but how can she sing when her throat is as dry as dust, just like her Mama’s?” Paul—it turned out, his name
was
Paul—ordered Ma a brandy old-fashion sweet, like she asked for, and me a root beer.

“What you got there?” he asked, looking down at the rolled poster I’d brought along because Ma said maybe I’d like showing it around. I was holding it in front of me like wedding flowers.

“It’s my ma’s movie poster,” I said. “Want to see it?”

They did, so I stepped back to the empty table behind us and unrolled it, spreading it flat as I could, while they crowded around. Oooh, did those guys stink like beer!

“Is that really you, Catty?” one of the guys behind me asked.

“Course it’s Catty,” the Paul Bunyan guy said. “Don’t you recognize her?” In one swoosh he picked Ma up and tossed her over his shoulder, then turned to the guys so that he was standing at the same angle as the lake monster. He gave Ma’s behind a swat. “Now can you tell it’s her?”

“Hey, put me down,” Ma screamed. She laughed and beat at his back, but not hard, more like she was just acting.

Everybody chuckled like crazy. Well, except for some older ladies eating at a nearby table, and a few of the ladies at the bar.

I was trying to spot the piano Ma used to play as I rolled the poster back up, when my hand felt a gob of grease stuck on the back. I took a napkin from the table and wiped it off, then hurried the poster over to a lamp hanging from a chain. Sure enough, that grease had soaked through, making a gray splotch that covered Ma’s whole face. I rolled it quick and put the rubber band back on, then ran it out to the car.

Being at The Dusty Rose was a lot different than I remembered it being at the bar in Peoria. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because I was too big to run in circles going nowhere, just for the sake of running. Or maybe it was because they didn’t have a pool table so I couldn’t roll the white ball into pockets, and there was no jukebox to sing to while Ma drank and smoked and laughed at the bar. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t the same.

I circled the room, staying close to the walls so I wouldn’t be in the way of the waitresses carrying trays of food on their shoulders, running my hand across the folds in the thick red-plaid curtains when I came to a window. Curtains that didn’t quite reach the sill,
so on my second lap around I counted the flies that were lying belly-up on the sills. There was thirty-one of them total.

My ankles were pinching in my patent leathers, and I didn’t want new blisters, so I went over to stand by Ma.

“You want another soda pop?” Ma asked. “A bag of chips?” My supper was still napping in my stomach, so I shook my head. But Paul got me a bag of potato chips anyway. And a Baby Ruth candy bar to go with it.

“There’s a piano back in the corner,” I told Ma. “Maybe we could do a number together.”

Ma turned around. “What, Teaspoon?” I repeated it. Louder this time, because the folks at the bar were all talking at once. “Hey, you cheap bastard,” Ma yelled to the guy behind the bar. “You get that piano tuned
yet
?”

“Now, why would I have bothered after you left?” he said. “You should know that the music just went out of our world after that.”

“Smart-ass,” Ma said, and some of the guys laughed.

“How come you don’t have a jubox?” I asked.

“Folks like to hear each other talk when they eat.”

Ma looked at me and she shrugged, making her mouth frown like a sad clown’s.

I think Ma didn’t remember that I could sing
Acapolka
, and I didn’t remind her. Not after I looked down the bar at everybody talking loud at once—like they were all singing a different song, in different keys.

I wandered off again, stopping to watch the water falling in the land of sky-blue waters on the Hamm’s beer clock, then studying the bubbles in a candleholder, until a lady Mrs.-Fry-old, who stunk like beer and smoke and old, stopped to tell me to be careful so I didn’t light my “pretty curls” on fire. She touched my hair with yellowed fingers, and I hurried back to the empty stool next to Ma.

The Paul Bunyan guy got up to “drain” something (I think he meant his wee-er) and Ma’s attention floated over to the lady and man who had been hidden by mountain-big Paul. “Oh, Betty,” she said. “This is my little girl.”

Ma tugged me off my stool and pulled me to stand close to her crossed legs. “Say hi to Betty and Dale, Teaspoon,” she said.

Betty Rains. The one Mrs. Delaney pointed out to Mrs. Perkins after Betty left The Pop Shop. The one who stole Mrs. Carlton’s husband. I’d have recognized her anywhere. She was wearing a blouse that showed a long crack between her balloons—
breasts
—and glittery wings on her glasses. The guy had his head turned toward Betty, but when Ma introduced me, he turned around. If that was Mr. Carlton, he looked a whole lot different than when I saw him at our Christmas program last year. His hair was different. Darker, and combed into a do that I think was suppose to be a Duck’s Ass, though it looked more like the bottom of a duck that had either been sitting too long or had gotten it kicked in a fight.

While Betty Rains oooed and ahhhed over me, saying Ma wasn’t kidding when she said I was a real beauty, I looked at the man. “You’re Mr. Carlton, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

“I thought so. Your wife was my schoolteacher. She’s a real nice lady. Pretty, too, even with her lips painted out of the lines. She could have made me a flunky, but she didn’t. I told her she should sing on more days than Sunday, because singing makes you feel happier, and that I figured she could use some happy since you ran off with—”

Ma grabbed my arm and swung me back to my stool. She changed the subject fast. I suppose because she didn’t have anything to add to the conversation, seeing that she didn’t know Mrs. Carlton.

The Paul-Bunyan-big guy came back, and Betty Rains said, “My turn.” She was wobbly when she got up, so she stood still for a minute, hanging on to Mr. Carlton’s shoulder. She smiled at me when she noticed I was staring at her, so I asked, “Miss Rains? How old were you when you filled out?” She smiled, her head tilting. “Aw, precious, don’t you worry. You’ll fill out soon enough.”

“Oh,” I said as I stared at her legs, which, if they were tree trunks, Charlie could have climbed without snapping them, “I’m not in any hurry. I was just wondering.”

After Betty Rains zigzagged to the bathrooms, I didn’t have anyone to talk to, so I just leaned against Ma’s back and listened to her words hum through the side of my head.

I didn’t even know I fell asleep until Ma did her movie-audition scream, horror-movie loud, and her friend with big ears caught me midair. “Whoa, little lady,” he said as I shook with startle. “You were ready to take a nosedive there.” He set me back upright on my stool.

“Oh, honey, did Mama scare you?” Ma laughed and cuddled me.

I wiped the bit of spit oozing out of the side of my mouth and blinked. “Can we go home now?” My eyes were already wanting to float shut again, and I couldn’t stop them.

“Aw, my baby’s tired,” Ma said. “We’ll leave in a minute, Teaspoon.”

But we didn’t leave in a minute. So after I almost fell off the stool the second time, I got up and wandered across the room, past the empty tables, some of them cleaned off, some not, and I went to the dark corner where the piano sat. One of the ivories was busted off and I dipped my finger in the ridge where it used to be. Then I stretched out on the bench, using my arm for a pillow.

The lights were turned on bright and they stung my eyes when Ma woke me up at closing time. “Come on, baby. We’ve gotta go home now.” Ma’s voice was all slushy.

She drove weavy down the streets, singing a bit of this song and that, microphone-loud. I had my head leaned against the door, half sleeping. That is until Ma hit a curb going around a corner and made a bump—which made me glad that there wasn’t any Charlies on the street this time of night.

“You sure were cute, showing off my poster to everyone like you did.”

I squinted my sleepy eyes at Ma, who was trying to look at the street and the cigarette she was lighting at the same time. “Nobody believed that you were going to become a star, Ma. But I believed it. Every day I believed it.”

Ma reached over and patted my bare leg, dropping a speck of orange ash down to sting my skin. But just for a split second. “Awwwwww,” she said. “I appreciate that, Teaspoon.”

“I’m going to make my dream come true one day, too, Ma. Just like you did. One day, everybody’s going to have an album by Isabella Marlene in their collection. And radios all over the country are going to play me. You just wait and see.”

“Of course you will. You’re cut from the same cloth as me. And people like us, we don’t let anyone or anything keep us from getting what we want.”

“Yeah. It’s like an affliction we both have. But maybe a good one, huh?”

“Shit!” Ma yelled as she swished her hand across her lap. I saw her cigarette move like a shooting star to the floorboard. Ma lifted her foot so I could pick it up, then she tossed it out the window.

I was waking up, but I think Ma was getting more sleepy. She yawned as we pulled onto Washington Avenue, and quieted so all I could hear was the air whomping in through her cracked window. I looked outside at the empty streets as quiet as us, and started humming a little bit of “How High the Moon.” Soon Ma was singing the words. So I turned my humming into singing, because tired or not, it was a good opportunity to practice my harmony.

We were finishing the last verse as we swayed up the front steps, then we turned, like the porch was our stage, and took a bow. We were giggling. So loud Ma had to shush me before she opened the door.

Teddy wasn’t on the couch, and the kitchen light was on. Ma steered me to my room then helped me spill into my bed. Dress, shoes, and all.

Me and Charlie
were on our way to The Pop Shop with the last of my payday, our almost empty Pez dispensers in our pockets, me riding my scooter as Charlie played Kick the Rock by himself. Charlie was moving slow-Moe chasing that rock, but with me still tired from my late night at The Dusty Rose, I wasn’t exactly breaking any speed records, either.

“I got up because I had a bellyache last night,” Charlie told me. “I was in the bathroom and I could hear your ma and Teddy fighting. Cause the window was open and there wasn’t even a wind. I could see them, too. In your kitchen. Before I sat down, anyway.”

“They were fighting? I didn’t hear them fighting.”

“They were, though. Teddy was mad because your ma took you to a bar. He wasn’t yelling. But talking real crabby.”

My scooter slowed even more. “Was Ma talking crabby, too?”

“I dunno. I don’t think so, cause she was kind of laughing. Yet her words were crabby ones.

“She said you were her kid, and she could take you anywhere she wanted.” Charlie stopped, and I turned around to see what the holdup was, thinking maybe he was busy putting another row of Pez under Mickey Mouse’s head because I swear, that kid couldn’t walk and take out a Pez at the same time. But he wasn’t. He was just standing there, his fat arms curved like half-moons over his
puffy sides. “Teaspoon? Is your ma gonna take you anywhere she wants?” Even his mouth looked like a half-moon. One turned upside down.

“Charlie, I told you a hundred times already. My Ma isn’t taking me anyplace. She’s back in Mill Town now, and she’s here for good.”

“I don’t think so,” Charlie said.

“You’re just talking worrywarty now.”

“Well, your ma told Teddy that he wasn’t exactly making her feel welcome. And that maybe she should just move on.”

“Oh man. That’s what I’ve been afraid of, Charlie. I don’t know what’s wrong with Teddy, but he’s not treating Ma like a girlfriend. They aren’t doing the Juicy Jitterbug. I don’t think that’s a good sign, do you, Charlie? What did Teddy say when she said maybe she should just move on?”

“I don’t know. I had to flush the toilet then. I didn’t hear.”

“Geez, Charlie. What did you go and do that for?”

“Because Grandma G gets upset if I don’t flush.”

“I meant
then
, Charlie. Why did you have to do it
then
?”