If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (21 page)

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just—it’s just that Deirdre’s so—I mean, it was like she could have had anybody.” The Feeney sisters were all good-looking but Deirdre was truly black-Irish beautiful. Sometimes in church, if the light coming through the stained glass windows hit her face a certain way, everyone stared at her instead of whichever priest was serving mass that Sunday.

Fiona snorted. “‘She could have had anybody,’” she said. “Who? Who’s better? They’re all the same, think they can go to church on Sunday and eat the wafer and all is forgiven.” She shook her head. “And people wonder why I drink.” Her face looked softer, sadder for a moment. But when she spoke, her voice was edged with contempt. “She’s just like my mother, Deirdre. But that shit’s not for me. That’s why I’m leaving.” She turned and looked at me. “You’re smart, you’ll do the same.”

Behind us, the screen door slammed. “What’s the big gabfest down here?” Moira said, coming up behind us with a box of LPs. She looked
at me accusingly. Georgie was behind Moira, his arms full of quilts. We spent the next minutes packing the car, making room for the boxes, spreading the quilts over the back of the trunk. Finally, Fiona slammed the door shut. She turned to Georgie. “So that’s it, right?”

“Just let me go back up and do one more—”

“One more,” Fiona said, holding up one finger. “One. And Moira, you go with him, make sure he doesn’t linger.” She looked at her watch. “And then let’s get this show on the road.” She put her sunglasses back on, the crest of the bruise visible below the rim. She turned to look at me. “You’re coming with us, right?”

“Of course,” I said. I hadn’t known I was going to say that until the words were out of my mouth. I hadn’t known I wanted to go until I said the words.

“Darling!” Georgie said delightedly, clapping his hands.

“Shit!” Fiona exclaimed. “Where’s the Cold Duck? Moira, what’d we do with the Cold Duck?”

Moira opened the passenger side of the car, knelt down and began feeling around. She came back up, holding a shopping bag from Carelli’s Liquor Store and a paper bag from Godwin’s Party Supplies. “Plastic wineglasses,” she said triumphantly. “None of that Dixie cup shit. Shows we got class.”

“We should have remembered to put it in the fridge until it was time to leave,” Fiona said.

Georgie peered into the bag from Carelli’s. “Three bottles?” he asked skeptically.

“In case we hit traffic,” Moira explained.

•   •   •

A
t the exit for the Midtown Tunnel, Georgie began crying.

“Did I call it or what?” Fiona asked, looking at her sister in the rearview mirror. “I win the pool.”

“We bet that he’d start bawling,” Moira explained. “I said he’d start when we pulled away from the house, Fiona said before we hit the tunnel.” Georgie ignored them and wept. He wept all the way through the tunnel, at times drowning out the radio. We were listening to the oldies station; to the Hitters, there was no other music. They thought Jimi Hendrix was a communist because of his hair. It was like Cousin Brucie was in the car with us, playing “See You in September” and “Sealed with a Kiss”; when he played “Under the Boardwalk,” I thought we’d have to take Georgie to the hospital. “It makes me remember that summer,” he sobbed. “That summer we graduated and I was trying to fall in love with Reeny Coffin, but I just couldn’t do it.”

“Too bad, Georgina,” Fiona said, illegally changing lanes. “If she hadn’t been such a crazy bitch, it might have been a whole different life story for you.”

“Oh, what have I done? What have I done?” Georgie moaned.

“Shut up and drink,” Moira said, pouring more Cold Duck for everyone. She looked relaxed and happy. I’d never seen her look this happy before; it must have been the Cold Duck. I was feeling it myself. I didn’t like the taste of beer and I could tolerate some kinds of liquor, but this was different. I felt lighter, as though I was floating in place. I wasn’t afraid of the Feeney sisters anymore. I wasn’t afraid Moira would suddenly whip around and bash my teeth in with an empty bottle. I held my plastic wineglass out for more. Outside, the sky was sun-soaked, golden behind the buildings that lined the streets.

“Sissie’s Sunday morning pancakes,” Georgie sobbed. “How will I live without Sissie’s Sunday morning pancakes?”

“You’ll get on the fucking train and come down to the Beach for breakfast,” Fiona said. “Am I better off on Broadway or should I go across Fourteenth Street?”

“Take Broadway,” Georgie sniffled. “You can take it straight down, then turn on Houston.”

Right then “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by the Four Seasons came on, and
the Feeney sisters began hooting like deranged owls. “How perfect is this?” Moira screeched, spilling sparkling wine on the floor of the car as she poured another round.

“This one’s for you, Georgina,” Fiona said, plucking another Kleenex from the dashboard and throwing it at him, and we all began singing, “Bi-iiig girls doooon’t cri-yi-yi, they don’t cry,” and even Georgie blew his nose and joined in. At the end, we all applauded and cheered.

“Will you call me up and sing to me sometime?” Georgie implored us all, twisting around to look at me and Moira. “So I don’t get too lonely?”

“Sing to you? What did we just spend two hours packing that Goddamned stereo in towels for?” Moira asked. “Fi, pull over for a second.”

Fiona swerved into the next lane, leaving behind an echo of madly honking horns.

“Careful,” Georgie warned. “This is the big city. We don’t know the entire police force here.”

“Don’t be such a fucking worrywart,” Fiona said.

“Pull over, Fi,” Moira said, trying to a light a cigarette.

“I’m trying, for chrissake,” Fiona said, careening across the next two lanes, then making a right turn.

“I won’t make it to the apartment alive,” Georgie moaned.

Fiona parked in front of a deli with a neon Miller sign. She put her sunglasses on top of her head. We rolled down the windows and blasts of hot air wove around us. The street looked sad and sinister. A young Puerto Rican boy with Ring Ding frosting around his mouth stared at us from the doorway of the deli. I smiled at him and he ran inside.

Moira topped us all off with the last of the Cold Duck. She clinked her plastic wineglass with Georgie’s first, then Fiona’s, then mine. She raised it high in the air. “The Feeney sisters forever,” she said.

“And their friends,” said Fiona. We all toasted and drank, and when I caught Fiona’s face in the rearview mirror, she winked at me with her good eye and then threw her plastic wineglass out the window and started
putting the car in drive for the last lap of the journey to Georgie’s new home.

“Let’s take a picture,” Moira said suddenly.

Georgie groaned.

“Fiona? The light’s so good now. Where’s the camera?”

“I have to meet the landlord by seven,” Georgie said, anxiously. “I don’t want to miss him, he’s got the keys.”

“We can take a picture when we get there,” Fiona told her sister. “In front of the building. Or in the apartment, for that matter.”

“No,” Moira said stubbornly. “Let’s take it now.”

“What’s the big fucking deal?” Fiona asked.

“Now,” Moira said, and suddenly her face contorted and then she was weeping, violently, her whole body heaving. She turned away from us so that she was facing the street. No one said a word. Moira wrapped her arms around herself, clutching her shaking shoulders. “Once we get there, it’s too fucking final,” she said, her voice low and raspy.

Georgie put his hand on Moira’s shoulder. She reached around and grabbed it, holding tightly. Georgie sighed. “Where’s the camera?” he asked.

Fiona, still staring at her sister’s back, put the car in park, then reached into the glove compartment and took out a Polaroid Land Camera. She handed it to Georgie.

“C’mon,” he said resignedly, opening the car door. “But let’s make it snappy so I’m not locked out of my own apartment. And we need to find someone to take the picture.”

Moira took the camera from Georgie. Her face looked pale and raw from all the crying; the tears had left white streaks on her skin that looked like runs in a silk stocking. We got out and stood in the space between the car and the deli. The sun was lower now, and the street was empty. Then the Puerto Rican boy came out of the deli, his face wiped free of frosting. Moira walked over to him and began talking. She knelt
down in front of him, flipping open the camera, showing him how it worked. She spoke sharply, the way she had in the smoking bathroom at school that day, when Debbie Maurer had taken an extra drag of her cigarette. “You see what I mean?” she asked impatiently. “Do you get what I’m saying?”

The boy looked doubtful, his dark eyes troubled. I walked over and knelt in front of him. I felt I should just take the camera from him and offer to take a picture of Georgie and the Feeney sisters; they’d known each other forever and hung out all the time together, and I was outside the frame. But the Cold Duck and the sunshine and the way we had sung together in the car and even Moira’s sob storm turned me away from that thought. I showed the boy how to focus through the little window, how to click the button when the picture looked ready. I looked into his beautiful eyes.
“Por favor?”
I asked. His face broke into a smile. He grabbed the camera and put it right up against his eye.

“Watch out he doesn’t steal it,” Fiona called from the curb, and I put out my hand and the boy took it and we walked to the empty center of the street. The air was smoke-stained and steamy, and the heat shimmered up from the pavement like a separate layer you could almost walk on. The boy put the camera to his face, and Fiona said, “Okay, on three!” and the boy looked puzzled, and I began chanting,
“Uno, dos, tres,”
and he smiled again and clicked the camera, and Fiona said, “Shit, my eyes were closed,” and Moira said, “Do it again, one more time,” and the boy, eager now, took another picture and then another and then another. He had to take four pictures before we found one that wasn’t too light or too dark, where no shadows lay across our faces, where nobody’s eyes were closed and everyone remembered to smile and we finally looked the way we wanted to and would never look again. Once we were satisfied, Moira gave the boy three dollars and he stood there clutching the bills, beaming up at us as the sun melted further into the sky. Then he turned and ran back into the deli.

It’s a great picture. The way Fiona’s hair waves out in the sudden
breeze makes her look like a model in a magazine, and you would never know that minutes before it was taken, Moira had cried her heart out in the backseat of the car. I’m kneeling on the hood behind Georgie, with my arms clasped around his neck just like I’m in love with him, and Georgie’s smile is so wide, he looks so handsome and happy, that you just want to reach into the photo and kiss him right on the lips. It’s a great picture, and if you look at it long enough, in a certain way, you can almost hear us laughing, hear the laughter floating out behind us until it grows fainter and further away, like the memory of a faded scar.

those girls from the dunes

I
n seventh grade, they came to school in cashmere sweaters and silk stockings, wearing suede shoes from Bloomingdale’s in the city. Their clothes were never too big, their teeth never crooked; it was as though they lived at the orthodontist and their blinding smiles made you want to bloody their lips. They thought who the hell they were and seemed to exist only to make everyone else feel like shit. Because of them, junior high was brutal, a nightmare, and everything you’d ever believed to be good about yourself got erased, like you were starting life all over again in a gray swamp. “If I had to live those three years over again, I’d kill myself,” Liz said. “I’d kill somebody, that’s for sure.”

But in high school, everything changed. Those girls from the Dunes stopped shaving their legs and wearing bras. They stopped wearing makeup and, instead of cunning little outfits from Lord & Taylor, with sweaters and kneesocks that matched, they wore ragged jeans and flannel shirts in winter, and cutoffs and flip-flops in summer. They wore red and blue bandannas around their long, shiny hair. They smoked Kools instead of Marlboros and slept with boys, lots of boys, and everyone
talked about it but nobody wrote their names on the bathroom wall at the bus station, like they did with Sheila Mooney, who lived in the Trunk and wore her mother’s leopard coat to school so that she looked forty instead of sixteen. Nobody called them “cow” or “slut” except for us, and even with underarm hair hanging down to their knees, they still ruled the roost. Even when they spouted stupid shit like “Free Angela!” and “Power to the People!” and everyone else laughed scornfully, they held their heads high and believed in their words.

Those girls from the Dunes! We envied them, hated them, and wanted to be them, isn’t that always the way? It’s an old song, because those girls are everywhere, in every story, in every life; fairy-tale princesses living in castles waiting for the prince to come rescue them (and he always does), carried to school by six shining horses and a gilt-edged carriage, or their mothers’ Cadillac Coupe DeVilles. Prettier, brighter, lovelier than everyone else, or at least they think so, and they are never fearful of ridicule or laughter or life.

They tried to befriend us, and publicly we cursed them and threatened them in gym class, but at night when they called us, we’d take the phone into the bathroom or the linen closet and speak in whispers, as though talking to an illicit lover. We were jealous over who called whom, and then began fighting over their attention, and finally, because they’d been clever and we hadn’t suspected, we realized it was never us they wanted at all, but the boys, our freckled, blue-eyed, shaggy-haired boys, so different from what they were used to, those boys from the Dunes with their soft, pudgy hands, and their juvenile jokes and girlish giggles, who’d never quite lost their baby fat and wore braces well into their teens. Who were polite and respectful and predictably successful as student council presidents and honor roll students, but still their girls turned away, lowering their sights to strong-limbed boys who held after-school jobs instead of attending SAT prep classes and had to buy their own wheels during senior year instead of getting the keys to a Corvette convertible for their eighteenth birthdays. The boys we hung out with,
Voodoo and Billy and Conor and them, made rude remarks and raspberries whenever they walked by, but their eyes followed those girls from the school bus windows as the bus pulled away from the curb. They secretly yearned to put their arms around them, to pin them against the brick wall in back of the high school gymnasium, where they could drop their eyes and stammer something that sounded like surrender. We were furious, enraged at those girls for seducing us into submission, then at our boys for defecting to the enemy, and, finally, at ourselves, for our own stupidity. “How did we not see this coming?” we asked one another in dismay. The answer was so simple it made us want to cry: we wanted to believe they liked us, that they wanted to be our friends.

Those girls from the Dunes! They were used to being the best, even when they weren’t, like the time Michele Apton got a D in Algebra and her mother came to school to talk to Miss Fland, who ended up changing Michele’s grade to a C+, not like when Gin O’Connor got a D in Home Ec and her father called her onto the enclosed porch and boomed so loud you could have heard him in New Jersey, “Dumb ass! Who the hell fails Home Ec? You better straighten up and fly right and stop embarrassing your mother.” When Connie Bescht stole Tommy Malone from Edie Cartwright, we all surrounded Edie in the smoking bathroom, saying comforting things like, “When we get through with her she’ll really be singing those bell-bottom blues.” But Edie begged us not to, not to do anything, please,
please
, it would only make things worse. “They’ll just start that ‘crazy girls from the Trunk’ shit again,” she said, her voice hoarse with smoke and tears. “Trying to make us look like animals next to them.”

“Like fucking Amazons,” we all agreed.

“Besides,” Edie said, blowing her nose, “Tommy’ll come back. He doesn’t know it yet, but he will.” And weeks later Tommy did, meekly following Edie through the halls to class, through the streets of the Trunk to her after-school babysitting job, until she finally turned around and shouted, “What?” And after she’d tortured him sufficiently and
finally asked him what made him return (“though I should be asking what made you leave in the first place, asshole”), Tommy answered, “Because every time I kissed her, afterward I always ended up wanting to punch her in the face.”

And in their senior year, Tina Kravitz took Tootie Malloy away from Vera Maddox, and Tina was brazen about it, bold, stepping right up next to Vera in the smoking bathroom, running her hands through the long, golden tresses that Tootie seemed so crazy about compared to Vera’s kinky red mess, like a devil’s halo around her head. Everyone expected Vera to flip out, because she and Tootie had been together since ninth grade. But by then, Vera had an eye to the future; “No kid of mine’s going to end up a beer-drinking, glue-sniffing Trunker,” she would say, yanking a comb through her hair in front of the mirror, her cool green eyes shaded and knowing.

While everyone else sat in the back of Mrs. Doulin’s Bookkeeping class, making paper airplanes out of the weekly quizzes, Vera sailed through Merchandise Purchasing, earning an A for her efforts. Her steno and typing were so impeccable that she bypassed the traditional Katie Gibbs secretarial training and skipped school one day to ride the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan and interview at one of the big insurance firms through a contact of her uncle’s. She secured a job as junior assistant to one of the vice presidents at a higher salary than anyone had ever heard of, slated to begin a week after graduation. “You should see this place,” she said excitedly, her face vibrant, her hair gathered in a knot at the nape of her neck that we thought made her look so sophisticated. “And the men! God, my new boss is so handsome, if he wasn’t married I’d be jumping his bones in the supply closet, which, by the way, is bigger than my whole freakin’ bedroom.” We laughed, and Tina Kravitz, standing nearby, smirked and kept playing with her hair, her tiny tits bouncing underneath her tee shirt as she flung herself this way and that. She and her friends were talking about some kind of game, tennis or something, and Tina said in a loud asking-for-trouble voice, “Sore
losing, that’s all it was, end of story.” And then, smiling at herself in the mirror, she said, “I just love winning, man. I mean, when you get right down to it, what else is there in life?”

Vera turned toward her, her huge green eyes blazing, but then she turned back to her own reflection in the bathroom mirror and began rearranging the tendrils that had escaped from the knot at the nape of her neck. When we asked her later why she didn’t just deck Tina right there, she told us she was thinking of the wedding picture on the credenza at Tootie’s tiny shotgun house in the Trunk, of how beautiful Tootie’s mother and father had been at nineteen and twenty, and how now Mr. Malloy sat in front of the television, bleary and gut-blown, speaking only to bark orders at Tootie’s mother or yell at Tootie for taking his last beer.

“That depends,” she said finally, staring straight into Tina’s face. “On what you think you won.”

•   •   •

Y
ears later, Vera would wake up next to her married boss in the one-bedroom apartment on East Sixty-eighth Street and walk over to the window where she could touch the tops of the lantana plants and sweet-potato vines, courtesy of the classy florist shop on the ground floor. She would stand there, naked, smoking a cigarette, listening to the church bells peal out over the neighborhood. The sound of the bells would remind her of St. Timothy’s and Sunday mornings in Elephant Beach, when her father would stop at Renzi’s Bakery and pick up crusty semolina rolls and jelly donuts for breakfast after mass; they never ate before, so that everyone could receive Communion. Vera couldn’t remember the last time she’d tasted the wafer, and now she only went to church for midnight mass on Christmas Eve, when she was home visiting her family.

Yet, that morning, for some reason, she thought of getting dressed and walking over to St. Michael’s Church and bringing back crumb cakes from the German bakery on Lexington Avenue, oranges from the
grocery on the corner to make freshly squeezed juice in the tiny kitchen of the brownstone floor-through that her lover paid for. She looked over at the sleeping figure in the bed, wondering if he’d be able to stay for breakfast. She took a bottle of Shalimar from the dresser and idly sprayed her shoulders, the tops of her thighs, the nape of her neck. Then she lit another cigarette and turned her gaze outward, thinking of the things she’d left behind, the things she’d escaped to get here, to this window, on this street, in this life.