If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (17 page)

Desmond was trying to ignore Evil Eye, the way he tried to ignore all customer complaints, by hunkering down in the small wooden booth so that the top of his head was barely visible. Desmond didn’t like the customers, who he referred to as pain-in-the-ass carping harpies, convinced their sole mission in life was to make his life miserable. But when Evil Eye began bellowing, “I see you in there! You can’t hide from me!” what could he do? Sighing, he walked over to register five, the same one Martha used every day that she worked. “What seems to be the trouble, ma’am?” he asked, like he really cared.

“Here’s the trouble,” Evil Eye said, pointing at Martha. “This woman gave that woman”—her finger swung in Sugar Lady’s direction—“two free bags of sugar!”

“And exactly how do you—”

“I saw her! I saw her make out one of those little slips they do whenever they overcharge somebody, which happens way too often, in my opinion, and put it in the bottom of that drawer. Go on, look! Look in there and see if I’m right!” Evil Eye’s breasts swelled underneath her cotton housedress until the polka dots looked like balloons.

Desmond looked from Martha to Sugar Lady and back to Martha again. Everything else had come to a standstill in the register area; it was only two o’clock in the afternoon and there weren’t a great many customers in the store. Everyone was quiet, watching the scene at register five.

“What? What she saying about sugar?” Sugar Lady looked honestly confused.

“Look in her grocery bags! Go on, look! What are you waiting for?” Evil Eye was practically foaming at the mouth. “It’s pilfering, plain and simple!”

“Ain’t nobody pilfered nothing,” Sugar Lady said firmly, holding out her receipt to Desmond. “See that right there, says I bought and paid for one bag of sugar. What she making all this fuss about?”

“Look inside her grocery bags!” Evil Eye said sharply, loudly. “Look inside the cash drawer for that little slip! What on earth are you waiting for?”

Desmond reached past Martha and opened the register drawer. Martha hadn’t said a word through the entire encounter. She just stood there, straight as stone, staring out the window. There were two bright spots on both of her cheeks, hectic splotches of color that matched her pink smock. Desmond pulled out the void slip, then stared at Martha. He didn’t like her; he thought she was a pain in the ass as well, the way she ran to him with every little thing. Desmond had started out as a bag boy himself; he didn’t care if you were a few minutes late coming back from break unless you were stupid enough to do it during the Friday night or Saturday afternoon rush. But now he looked at Martha, concerned, while Evil Eye screamed in exasperated triumph, “I told you! Now look in this one’s grocery bags! Why on earth are you being so slow? I should think you’d be glad to catch a common thief, giving away merchandise that other people pay for!”

“Who you calling a thief, heifer?” Sugar Lady bridled indignantly. She began rustling through her grocery bags, peering into their
contents, and then, slowly, her expression changed, and she looked back at Martha, understanding finally flooding her face. She kept looking at Martha and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh baby,” she said softly, shaking her head. “You didn’t need to do that. I could have waited until it gone on sale.”

•   •   •

D
esmond claimed later that he’d had no choice. What was he supposed to do, with that harpy hag screaming in his ear, threatening to call the police, the main office, and she was the type to do it, too. Besides, if he hadn’t fired Martha, what kind of message would it send to the rest of the employees, let alone the customers? Should we be giving free sugar away to everyone just because the price had tripled? Letting Martha off the hook would be setting a precedent, and the next thing you knew, customers would be demanding freebies on everything, we’d have no choice but to capitulate, and it was only a matter of time before the main office found out and one way or another, we’d all be out of a job.

“It’s not right, man,” Good-Looking Freddy said when we were all out in the alley, smoking, after closing time. “She was trying to help someone out and—”

“It serves her right,” Cathy said. “Running to Desmond every time someone takes a damned cherry without paying. What goes around comes around.”

“Come on, Cathy,” Meghan said. “It could have been any one of us, man. And she’s got that mother to support.”

“You come on,” Cathy said, stamping out her cigarette. “You hated her more than anyone. And how do you know she wasn’t cutting down the price for everybody all along?”

Good-Looking Freddy shook his head sadly. He felt guilty for the part he’d played, though we tried telling him that it had been Martha’s decision to give the sugar away. All he’d done was bag it up. He’d been
protecting her, really, by keeping quiet. It wasn’t his fault that Evil Eye was a crazy bitch who was still threatening to call the main office, even as Martha handed Desmond her pink smock and employee ID card and walked out the door, clutching her purse in one hand, her aluminum lunch box in the other.

“I don’t know, man,” Freddy mourned. “She should have gotten a warning or something. I mean, eighteen years in and you’re out just like that?” He snapped his fingers. “And that health insurance carried her mother, too. I think we should protest, man. Threaten Desmond with a work stoppage or something.”

But in the end, we did nothing. It wasn’t just that Martha failed to arouse sufficient sympathy, even with tears streaming down her cheeks as she’d gathered her things, causing her old-fashioned face powder to crack and crater so that she looked even stiffer and less lovely than usual. Times were hard, see, and nobody wanted to be out of work. Good-Looking Freddy went to see her, though, in the ground-floor apartment she shared with her mother on lower Lighthouse Avenue. She served him tap water and oatmeal cookies. He learned that she’d gotten another job at the Quick 8 Super Market up by the parkway. She had to take two buses to get to work and back, but nobody there knew her or anything about her. They hadn’t witnessed her shame. She could make a fresh start. Her secret was safe.

claudine

W
ith her forefinger, Claudine drew a straight line down the center of the kitchen table. “This,” she said, her finger resting at the table’s silver rim, “is his life, eh? No adventures. No detours. Nothing. Nothing!” She paused to light one of her Kent 100’s. “This is not what I want for my daughter, eh?”

“I don’t know about that,” Charlie said mildly, twirling his squat glass filled with ice. “He’s in the service. He’s seen things, been around.”

Claudine swung him a withering look. “He sees nothing,” she said. Charlie shrugged and stood up, holding the glass with the tips of his fingers. After a few minutes, we heard the front door close, the car start. We heard him take off to the Treasure Chest Bar and Grill, right over the bridge. Usually he took a taxi. I sat with Claudine at the table, not knowing what to say. I had stopped by on my way down to Comanche Street to see if Marcel was back from the Cape yet, and found Charlie sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, and Claudine screaming into the telephone receiver, her eyeliner running in black circles down her face.

Marcel had gone and done it. She had married James without telling anyone, not her mother or father, not even me, her closest friend.

Claudine looked at me accusingly. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know about this,” she said. “She tells you everything. You know everything about us. How does she not tell you this?”

“Well, she didn’t,” I said. “I swear on my mother’s life.” Of course I’d known that Marcel was visiting James up on Cape Cod, where he was stationed, but she hadn’t said anything about getting married this weekend. (“I couldn’t risk it,” Marcel told me later. “If my mother started crying—if my father started crying! I knew you’d tell them. I knew you’d say something.”)

We sat smoking for a while, and then I said, “Claudine, what is it about James? I mean, he loves her, he’s good to her, it’s not like he’s—”

“When I met Charlie,” she said. “When I first met Charlie. The medals, the uniform, my God . . . I was seventeen when they came marching. After I brought him home the first time, my mother said, ‘Claudine, he’s a good man. But he is not the man for you. You need physical affection, someone to hold you, and he is not the man to give these things.’ And I said . . .” Claudine dragged deeply, exhaling through her nostrils. “I said, ‘But Ama, I can change that.’” She threw her head back and blew smoke up at the ceiling. “And you see us now, eh? You see how it is with us now.” She shook her head. “Every day for a month, I used to take a little girl to church with me to light a candle, to make him marry me. It was the custom in my village.” She stubbed out her cigarette and made a small steeple of her fingertips, held them to her lips.

Claudine was beautiful. She had wide black eyes that slanted in the corners and dirty blond hair that turned glamorous when she wound it up in a knot at the top of her head. “She looks typically European,” my mother said, though how she would know that was a mystery, since she’d never been to Europe. “But she should learn how to dress,” my mother sniffed. “Who wears a turban to a PTA meeting? She looks like a—a fortune-teller!” It was true, Claudine didn’t look like the typical Elephant Beach mother. And she was a fortune-teller of sorts, not like Madame Rhia on the boardwalk, who had a crystal ball and read palms and
had a fifty-cent special during the week. Claudine read regular black and red playing cards at the Formica kitchen table, after school or sometimes when I spent the night. Those times were best because she would light candles all around the kitchen and we would laugh and talk until Charlie yelled from his bedroom at the front of the house, “Claudine, for chrissake, enough already! Come to bed before you burn the Goddamned house down!” My readings were always about Luke. He was the Jack of Diamonds, sharp and steady, and that card would show up inverted as often as not. Inverted cards meant there would be obstacles. At the last reading, Claudine said he had a troubled heart. It hurt me to think of it. But maybe the war had been the problem. A war was bound to bring on a troubled heart.

It was ironic, though, that Claudine should be so bitter and sad about Marcel’s marriage, because James had come to the Brennan household through old friends of hers that lived in New Hampshire. It wasn’t like he was some sleazy stranger Marcel picked up in a bar or something. He was in the Coast Guard, and had a job and an apartment on Cape Cod. Marcel said the apartment was really nice, surrounded by trees, and you could glimpse a ragged edge of the bay from the kitchen window. That’s where she was living now, instead of here in the bedroom next to the kitchen.

The Brennans had had a difficult time before this. Two years ago, during our first year of high school, I learned that Charlie was a drinker. One night, I was going with Marcel to keep her company babysitting. Charlie was supposed to drive us, but at the last minute Claudine gave us money for a taxi. While we waited outside, Marcel began crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said, “Katie, don’t you realize my father’s a drunk?” The thing was, I really hadn’t. When I thought of alkies, I thought of Nanny’s grandfather, rheumy-eyed, slow-gaited, who once hid all the liquor bottles in the oven so that no one could snatch them away and the house almost blew up when Mrs. Devlin went to cook dinner. Charlie would sit in his leather recliner in the corner of the living
room, quietly watching television, or he’d tell stories about growing up in Baltimore, which sounded like an exciting place. He would crack jokes all through dinner, unlike my father, who ate silently and expected us to be quiet at mealtimes. The Brennans ate later than most people, European style, sometimes as late as nine o’clock, even on school nights. True, Charlie’s hand was always curled around a glass of clear liquid, but since he never raised his voice, slurred his words or punched anyone in the face, behaviors I associated with drunkards, I never thought to ask what he was drinking. Watching Marcel cry as we waited outside for the taxi, I was about to ask her “Are you sure?” when I realized how stupid that would sound. I loved Charlie and Claudine, and most of all Marcel, who lived only a block away, closer than any of my other friends, and who knew all my secrets, things I never even told Liz and Nanny. I didn’t want there to be trouble.

One day during the winter of that year, Claudine brought home a purebred English cocker spaniel that cost three hundred dollars. They named it Coco. “Every time I turn my back,” Charlie complained, as the dog knelt by his club chair, tail wagging, trying to charm him. “What about you?” he asked me. “Do you have a mutt in your house?”

“Uh-uh,” I replied. “My father put his foot down.”

“So did I,” Charlie said, rubbing Coco between the ears. “And I stepped on a dog.” That was the Brennan family, though; three-hundred-dollar dogs and festive dinners that took hours to prepare and featured exotic dishes from the Basque region, where Claudine had lived until she married Charlie and came to America: roast duck with figs, shrimp in hot sauce, white bean stew. Claudine was always picking apart crab legs and lobster tails, simmering something in wine and shallots that filled the house with a rich fragrance so that you didn’t really notice the sparsely furnished living room, the mattresses on the floor of Marcel’s and her brother John Paul’s bedrooms, the lack of wall-to-wall carpeting. I would never have thought of them as poor, even though they rented their house by the month instead of owning like everyone else.

Then in our junior year, John Paul went to jail and Marcel went blind for five months. John Paul was three years older than us and so drop-dead gorgeous his beauty transcended the hierarchies at school; he walked easily between the Trunk kids and the crowd from the Dunes, the snotty part of town. He went out with those tall, silky girls we all hated, but would still drive me and Marcel wherever we wanted to go and take us for rides up the parkway, stopping on the way back to treat us to chocolate cones from Carvel. He always walked me home from their house, even though I lived only one block away, and would kiss me good night on both cheeks, something the Brennans always did without thinking. He was Claudine’s favorite, the bond between them a pure, strong thing that existed on its own, separate from the rest of the family. Claudine always pronounced his name “Jean Paul,” but Charlie insisted on calling him John; “I don’t want my son answering to one of those faggoty French names,” he said.

John Paul was nineteen and the girl was sixteen, a respectable age difference, but because she was underage it was considered statutory rape. The girl was not from Elephant Beach; she and John Paul had met at a party in the Dunes, one of those things that starts out local and ends up attracting hundreds of people. The general feeling was that either she was miffed at John Paul because he wasn’t madly in love with her afterward, or her parents had found out they’d been having sex and went nuts. At first, no one who knew John Paul thought him capable of committing such a horrible crime. He’d never flaunted his looks and he genuinely liked women, you could see it in the way his face lit up, his dimples like starbursts in his face. When the police came and cuffed him and dragged him to the squad car, his cries of “Ama! Ama!” were so bereft that the younger of the two cops passed a hand over his own face in distress. Charlie stood at the curb, weaving, weeping as the car pulled away. “I told him,” he wept, wiping his eyes with his sleeve, “I always told him, ‘Be careful, be careful.’”

It was a bad time. Charlie made home deliveries for a local oil
company and because of the economy things were slow despite the cold weather. More often than not, when Marcel got home from school, Charlie would be sitting at the kitchen table, the squat glass on one side of him, an ashtray on the other. “Hi honey,” he’d say tiredly, but then he’d say nothing and after a while there was nothing to say that didn’t revolve around John Paul and what was to become of him. Charlie picked up a few nights bartending at the Shipwreck, a divey bar on the boardwalk, but things were slow there, too, and he usually ended up drinking the end of his shift away. It was Claudine who sprang into action, who found an attorney that specialized in these types of cases. Claudine, who loved her sleep, and often resembled a curled-up cat on the couch, now woke at dawn, sometimes earlier, Marcel said, and would sit in the kitchen, poring over papers the lawyer had given her, laying out aces and sevens and queens and kings to see what the day would bring. She visited John Paul at the Nassau County Jail every day, and would come back with mascara stains on her cheeks from crying the whole way home. She wouldn’t let Marcel come with her, and Charlie wouldn’t go; he said it would kill him to see his son in jail, but he was usually too drunk to drive over during evening visiting hours.

Marcel and I wrote John Paul long letters. “Keep the faith,” we wrote him. “We are with you, no matter what.” Both of us believed absolutely in his innocence, but rape wasn’t like breaking and entering or even assault. Now there were whispers at school, at Sal’s Pizza Parlor in the center of town, at Eddy’s in the Trunk, that John Paul had been too good-looking for his own good, that his good looks and sunny demeanor may have covered up some crazed and savage beast within, waiting to spring out at something or someone. It seemed that nobody could be that gorgeous and nice and not have something to hide.

There were no more sumptuous dinners at the Brennans’ house and everyone, even Charlie, wept when they had to sell Coco, but they were all too distracted to properly care for her, and now even dog food was something of a luxury. Claudine looked for a job and couldn’t find one
that would accommodate her schedule. She had frequent appointments with the attorney, whose office was in Devon Place, several exits up the parkway, and she dressed for these appointments in slim black dresses and pencil pants with tunics and high heels and tangerine lipstick. Once, she even got her hair done at Antoine’s beforehand. “Chrissake,” Charlie complained, “you want this guy to think we’re millionaires? You look that good, he’ll start raising his rates and we can barely afford him now.” But Claudine was busy checking her makeup, daubing her wrists and throat with White Shoulders perfume. “At times like these,” she said, rubbing her wrists together, “it’s important to keep up appearances, eh?” The look on her face reminded me of when Marcel and I were in eighth grade, before John Paul went to jail, before I started hanging around Comanche Street with Liz and Nanny. We’d be doing our homework at the dining room table, or playing jacks in the hallway, knowing we were too old to be playing but homesick for being young. Claudine would be hurrying out the front door, dressed in her Persian lamb coat and leather gloves, her high heels clicking against the bare floor. Her perfume was sharp and biting, like a wave hitting you in the face. She’d be jangling her car keys. “Going to see your boyfriend?” we’d ask her, giggling. She’d smile, checking her lipstick in the hallway mirror. “Of course,” she’d say.

•   •   •

O
ne morning, in January, two months after John Paul had been arrested, Marcel woke up and couldn’t see. She kept blinking and blinking but everything stayed black. She touched her face, her eyelids, her lashes, and blinked a final time before screaming out loud in terror, a scream that brought Claudine and Charlie running from the opposite end of the house. She screamed so loudly that Mrs. Kennelly, their neighbor, came running from across the driveway. The night they’d taken John Paul away, she’d come over with a franks-and-beans casserole, as if he’d
died instead of being locked up in Nassau County Jail. John Paul always carried her trash cans back from the curb along with the Brennans’. “So what,” she said to Claudine. “Plenty of folks should be locked up that aren’t, you can bet on it. Don’t tell me that sweet boy had anything to do with this.” She was the one who drove Claudine and Marcel to the hospital. They kept Marcel there for several days. They kept her until she’d been seen by the doctors, the specialists, the psychiatrist. When he asked if Marcel had suffered a recent trauma, Claudine told him yes, it involved her brother, and that they’d been especially close. The psychiatrist thought that was what might be causing the hysterical blindness. That’s what he called it, hysterical blindness. “It’s a conversion disorder,” he explained. The doctors could find nothing wrong with Marcel physically and thought that her anguish over John Paul’s predicament had manifested itself in this way. They recommended counseling. They sent Claudine and Marcel home with a list of therapists that the insurance wouldn’t cover.