Living Room (3 page)

In the morning, when Philip Hartman woke up, his daughter was sitting on the edge of his bed. He thought he would have an instant heart attack from the excitement. It is true that when she tried to walk any distance it was difficult because her legs had not been put to use for so long, but a young body adjusts readily, its restoratives flowing, and with just two days of practice with Mrs. Bialek in the daytime and her father in the evening, Shirley was ready to go back out into the world.

“Now,” said Shirley to her father in private, “we don’t need Mrs. Bialek any more.”

“Please, please,” said Mr. Hartman, “I have arranged for Mrs. Bialek to come every afternoon to give you milk and a cupcake. Can I allow the shame for you to come home from school to an empty house? Besides, who is to make up the beds and clean up the apartment?”

When Shirley volunteered, Hartman told her she wasn’t well enough yet to both go to school and to clean house, and besides didn’t she know that Mrs. Bialek’s husband was dead and she needed the money?

Shirley was sure of two things. That Mrs. Bialek’s husband had died of neglect, and that her father wanted her not so much for cleaning up the house as for providing an additional audience because it was with great relish that each evening he told them both of his daily adventures, wild elaborations of actuality, entertaining, not to be denied but to be enjoyed.

“Promise me,” said Shirley, “that you won’t get married again.”

“Of course I promise, foolish child,” he said, kissing her forehead and wondering what went on in the skulls of children.

*

In school the teachers were kind to her. When they asked what had been wrong, they accepted Shirley’s answer that “It’s better not to talk about it.” While she could be mysterious with her teachers, the other children presented a problem. Now a year behind, Shirley’s classmates were not the friends she had made the preceding year, but girls and boys who knew each other but not her. She was a stranger, marked for abuse. “Left back, left back,” they taunted her. “Orphan, orphan,” others said. And when Shirley proved herself a quick master of her studies, the antagonisms of her peers increased.

One day, in the schoolyard, a boy secretly got down on his hands and knees behind her, a girl came over pretending to be friendly, suddenly pushed Shirley, who tripped backwards over the
kneeling boy. When she held up her
skinned hands, the children all laughed. A week later the girl who had pushed her,
Charlotte, a tomboy of sorts, was baiting her again in the period just before lunch. Shirley chose to ignore the taunts and went off by herself. It was a sunny day, the sky was clear and blue, and Shirley was looking up, marveling at how beautiful it was compared to the clouds of yesterday; she didn’t notice Charlotte’s accomplice behind her and only saw Charlotte suddenly rushing at her across the yard, arms outstretched, and before Shirley could brace herself, Charlotte, running, hit her full force against the boy kneeling behind her. Shirley went over backward, her left elbow scraping the rough concrete, skinned raw, her dress torn even beyond Mrs. Bialek’s ability to sew it up.

Shirley, who believed in law and order, told Mrs. Smetley about the two incidents. Mrs. Smetley advised her that she must settle her own peer problems, God helps those who help themselves.

And so at the first opportunity Shirley walked coolly over to where Charlotte was chittering away with her friends. Shirley had had the experience of watching other schoolyard transactions and had observed that those who asserted their rights through force or the successful threat of it, were let alone.

She came up to within two feet of Charlotte, glancing back to make sure no one was getting behind her, and hoping that somewhere among those faces some boy or girl would get behind Charlotte so that Shirley could push her over.

No one did. She was alone.

Shirley was prepared for Charlotte to say “Left back, ha ha” or “Orphan, ha, ha” but was not prepared for what Charlotte actually said.

“Whatdya want, kike, another push?”

In one flash, Shirley appealed to heaven for strength in her right arm, and threw her entire body behind the one smashing punch to Charlotte’s face in the way she had seen the boys do when they fought, and her fist hit, hurt, and as she staggered back, Charlotte’s reddening face revealed a white area where Shirley’s fist had landed. As a teacher on schoolyard duty was striding over,
Charlotte burst out crying, which caused the tension of the surrounding children to release itself in laughter at the tomboy vanquished, the tables turned.

By the end of the afternoon the whole school knew. Eyes watched Shirley in a different way. A touch of respect? Shirley, who had the habit of reflecting on her experiences, had learned that a free man carries his fist in readiness if he wants to be let alone.

From that day, Philip Hartman sensed something about his daughter and himself. When they walked together, or talked, he did not seem her protector any more. This nine-year-old was beginning to take charge not only of her own life, but of all those in her environment. She had begun her long siege in bed as his little girl. She had gotten up metamorphosed somehow, a stranger prepared to deal with the world.

CHAPTER TWO

IN 1956, SHIRLEY, a quick-developing thirteen going on fourteen, had reached her full height. Her five-foot-three body was constantly in motion; her short-of-shoulder-length blond hair framed restless eyes; her brows needed eyebrow pencil to be noticeable; and her mouth had lately taken to staccato sentences, exclamation points and an occasional four-letter word Philip Hartman pretended not to hear. She gobbled food, books, records and new acquaintances. “Shirley,” Hartman said, “how can you read a book, listen to a record and be on the telephone to a friend at the same time?”

“You got to cram,” said Shirley.

“Cram what?!”

“Everything!”

“It’s okay,” said Mrs. Bialek, “it’s a phase.”

Though Shirley was zipping through her days like a stream of tracer bullets, when it came to sexual matters she was inexperienced and unprepared for the nature of her first encounter.

She had asked and received permission from her father to attend a school dance. Shirley was embarrassed by the fact that dancing didn’t interest her; she had learned how, she had danced with girls and danced with boys. A year earlier, at twelve, her figure had blossomed (“You look beautiful, cover yourself up!” said her father, coming upon her getting out of the shower) and she knew she looked attractive as her jitterbugging partners flung her away and pulled her back; when she stood on the sidelines watching her friends do the same dance they seemed like savages in a tribal ritual. Shirley once dared her opinion of that kind of dancing to Harry, a boy she liked more than most. Harry had said to her, “Shirley, you’re a snob.”

His remark had hurt. Unless you did what everyone else did the way they did it, you had best shut up. It was not Shirley’s nature to keep her mouth shut in or out of class, and so she experienced the falling off of friends, and a sudden sense of complete loneliness.

On the occasion of this particular dance, she had no date, and so she sat, the only pretty girl among a group of seven or eight, watching the boys and girls on the dance floor. It was surprise that made her heart jump when Harry—she hadn’t seen him come over—asked her to dance. The music blared through amplifiers. Though you could not carry on a conversation, you could shout an occasional short phrase at your partner, who might hear.

Shirley, who loved conversation more than dancing, tried the simplest expedient, a short question.

“How’ve you been?”

“What?”

She repeated the question to her gyrating partner.

“Oh,” Harry said. “Not bad.”

She would have welcomed a chance to be off in a corner somewhere with Harry, a quiet place, talking. Harry was smart, fifteen, a grabbag of ideas for subduing the world. He was running for class president.

“I’m going to vote
for
you” would sound like buttering up. What could she ask him—shout at him through the din—in a short sentence that wouldn’t sound idiotic?

It was Harry who said, “What do you think of this number?”

It was her mother’s voice she heard leaning into her ear:
Don’t be smart-ass.

“What’d you think?” repeated Harry.

Unfortunately the music came to a stop just as she said too loudly, “It’s aboriginal,” and the word lay there on the dance floor between Harry and herself, heard by others around him. Harry came up very close to her and she thought he might be suggesting they go off somewhere to talk.

“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he said, turned his back, and walked off into the crowd.

She wanted to yell after him, “I didn’t mean it that way,” but she found her bewildered way back in silence to the group of girls, unreduced in number.

To Caroline, who had been watching Shirley, though the words exchanged on the dance floor had been inaudible, the scenario was clear. She took Shirley’s hand and stroked it.

Shirley, reconstructing the last few minutes, thinking what she ought to have said, tried to invent a dialogue with a more pleasant outcome. Caroline had, by now, taken her arm, and Shirley suddenly became aware of the tenderness with which her hand was being held.

Caroline put her lips to Shirley’s ear and said gently, “Never you mind.”

Shirley felt alarm. Is this what being made love to was like? “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” said Caroline, letting her hands drop.

Shirley, confused, knew one thing: it was not nothing.

Although she had told her father she would be home at ten-thirty, she arrived home an hour earlier, let herself in with her key, and wanting a human being to talk to, and not finding him in the living room, quietly went to the door of his bedroom, tapping on it ever so lightly in the hope that if he had gone to sleep early, as he sometimes did, he would not hear, and otherwise he would come out and talk.

“What is it?” said her father’s voice, a strange tremor in it.

“It’s me,” said Shirley, carefully pushing the door open and seeing in the light from the hallway, not her father but Mrs. Bialek sitting up in bed, the blanket gathered up to her chin, her face a fury.

Shirley said, “Where is he?” and only then noticed the hump under the bedclothes and realized her father was in the same bed, hiding.

“I’m sorry,” said Shirley, her unsteady hand closing the door.

*

Now Mrs. Bialek, who never slept over because it would be an admission of culpability, remonstrated with Hartman for not having a lock on the bedroom door.

“She was not coming back till ten-thirty!”

Further lovemaking was useless. Though the last person either of them wanted to see was Shirley, they had no choice but to dress in silence. Afterward, they looked in the living room and kitchen and then in Shirley’s bedroom. She wasn’t anywhere in the house. By this time, it was very nearly ten-thirty, she couldn’t have gone back to the dance, she didn’t stay over at friends’ houses, she had no one close friend he could call, so Mr. Hartman put on his overcoat and went down into the street, expecting to find his waif sulking under a street lamp.

She wasn’t anywhere that he looked. At midnight, he called the police and reported Shirley as a missing person.

“Do you have a recent photograph?” the desk sergeant asked. How could he tell this policeman, a stranger, that he had no photograph of Shirley because it was Rosalie who had taken the snapshots until Shirley was seven, and none had been taken since. “Didn’t I describe her good?”

“A photograph would be a big help.”

Hartman’s chest felt like it was bursting, what could he say? “Will you send someone to look for her?”

“We’ll send out a teletype.”

“How will a teletype find her?” said Hartman in alarm.

“I have to ask this question,” said the sergeant. “Is your girl on drugs?”

“She’s thirteen years old!”

“Please tell us if she’s on drugs.”

In despair, Hartman hung up without a further word. Mrs. Bialek put her arms around his heaving shoulders, trying to stop him from thinking when would they find the corpse.

In fact, Shirley at the moment was miles away, at the Brooklyn terminus of the subway. At the end of the line, she got off when everyone else got off, and then, seeing a bum on the station, she got back on the train just as the doors closed. But the train did not move. The bum was watching her through the window. He took a slurp from the head of a bottle sticking out of a paper bag. Shirley ran through the empty train to the front, hoping to find the motorman in the first car.

There was no motorman. The train was not going anywhere. And when she looked out on the platform for help, all she saw was the breathless bum, who had run along the platform, laughing.

Suddenly the doors all opened, the bum stepped in, but so did a motorman, who looked surprised to see a thirteen-year-old girl alone at that time of night, but not too surprised, since anything can happen on the New York subways. He went into his cab and the bum sat down opposite Shirley.

The train roared off into the darkness of the tunnel. Why had she not behaved with Harry the way he had expected? Why had she returned home early and poked her head into her father’s bedroom? Had God, in retribution, provided the impulse to flee on a subway train so that at the end of the line, this bum who relished young girls would be waiting to tear her legs apart like a wishbone? Would his stiff thing look like the picture in the hygiene book, curving for better aim? Would it matter if he knew she had the curse and had not changed the Kotex since before leaving for the dance?