Palisades Park (35 page)

“What do you mean?”

“That hole in the fence is still there, isn’t it?”

He parked off Route 5, and in winter coats they sneaked through the hole behind the free-act stage. Hand in hand they stole into the empty park, giggling. The midways had been plowed by the steady staff that maintained the park in winter, but the rides and concessions were blanketed in white. The pool was a sloping valley filled with fresh snow, the diving boards standing like bare birch trees around it. The Funhouse was an ice fortress, its two snow-covered towers standing sentinel like wintry paladins. Toni and Slim walked over to the Cyclone, which did resemble a mountain range with snowy peaks. Toni had practically grown up in Palisades Park, but she had never seen it like this—and the fact that she was seeing it with Slim made it all the more special. They walked down the main midway toward the cliffs, past shuttered concessions whose marquees were studded not with hot lights but icicles, toward the Ferris wheel looking like elaborately spun white cobwebs against the night sky.

When they approached the edge of the cliff, Toni’s stomach tightened as she recalled the last time she had been here. But the performers’ trailers were all gone, leaving only the towering letters of the Palisades sign crowned with snow and ice. If Palisades in winter was like an abandoned faerie kingdom, across the river the kingdom of Manhattan was the exact opposite, its castles and parapets of light glittering eternally in the cold, clear air.

Still holding her hand, Slim turned and kissed her. It was the deepest, longest, most passionate kiss they had shared; and even though they were bundled up like store manikins, it was more intimate contact than any of the petting and groping they had done in Slim’s car. Toni believed it was because, at that moment, she realized how much she truly loved him.

*   *   *

“So, kiddo,” Bunty said, digging into the steak Eddie had just grilled, “how’d you like to become a lifeguard?”

Even though he was staring straight at her, Toni couldn’t grasp at first that he was addressing her. “What?” she said.

Bunty took his first bite of steak, told Eddie, “Excellent cut of meat, Ten Foot. When you’re grilling steak, never buy low-grade meat.” Then he repeated to Toni, “I said, how’d you like to be a lifeguard at Palisades?”

They were sitting at the Stopkas’ kitchen table for what Toni had thought was just a friendly Sunday dinner, but appeared to be about more.

“But I’m a girl,” she said.

Bunty rolled his eyes. “Jeez-us. What’s got into you? How far across the English Channel do you think Trudy Ederle or Millie Corson would’ve gotten if they’d said, ‘But I’m a girl’? For your information, plenty of beaches these days have lady lifeguards on duty.”

“They do?”

“Sure. Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, for one. Irving Rosenthal thinks having a pretty young girl as a lifeguard at Palisades might boost attendance at the pool. I told him pretty is nice, but what counts is getting the strongest swimmer for the job. So I suggested you.”

Toni beamed. “I’m the strongest girl swimmer you know?”

“Don’t let it go to your head, you’re still just a tadpole in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, you’ve got the strongest stroke, the most stamina, and you ain’t bad to look at either. But it’s no cakewalk. Before you can be hired you’ve got to be trained and certified by the Red Cross. I’m a trainer at the Hackensack Y and I can fit you into my afternoon class, after you get out of school—two hours a day, five days a week, for three weeks. You game?”

Toni looked to Eddie. “But—don’t you need me at the stand, Dad?”

“Jack can take up the slack, honey. And I can always hire a third hand. This is a good opportunity for you.”

Jack, listening to this with incredulity, asked Toni sarcastically, “Aren’t you afraid diving in and rescuing someone will ruin your hairdo?”

“Ha, ha. You’re a panic, Jack, really you are.” But he wasn’t far wrong. She
was
excited by what Bunty was offering her, but she worried what Slim would think. Would he find it—unfeminine? She wanted to say yes, but checked the impulse: “Can I think about it and let you know tomorrow?”

“Sure, kiddo,” Bunty said. “Whatever you want to do.”

The next day at school, Toni sat down to lunch with Slim, took a deep breath, and told him about the job offer. “My dad says it’s a really great opportunity,” she said. “Lifeguards work all day, seven days a week, but just like at my dad’s stand I’d get time off for lunch and dinner and we could see each other then and”—breathlessly and nervously—“what do you think?”

Slim considered a moment, then said with a smile, “I’ve been wondering what you’d look like in a swimsuit. Guess now I’ll find out.”

Happy and relieved, she threw her arms around him and kissed him, ignoring the catcalls of “Hubba hubba!” from surrounding tables. After school she hurried home, phoned Bunty, and told him she wanted the job.

She was fairly bursting with excitement. To think—her, a lifeguard at Palisades! What could be more delish? Other than Slim, of course?

That week she began training with Bunty, the only girl in a class with a dozen young men. Bunty gave each of them a copy of the American Red Cross’s book
Life Saving & Water Safety.
“This is your Bible,” he told them, “and that’s how you treat it—like the Gospel, you got that?”

Bunty hadn’t exaggerated: this was no cakewalk. Toni went home each night bone-tired, every muscle aching. The worst came when they practiced the “fireman’s carry,” the rescuer emerging from the water with the victim draped across his shoulders. Since the male students outweighed Toni by a good thirty or forty pounds, she felt like she was carrying a hundred-and-fifty-pound bag of cement on her shoulders, and though she managed it without complaint, her back ached for hours.

This was followed by intensive training in artificial respiration, kneeling astride a “victim” and pumping air back into his lungs.

She was working harder than she ever had in her life, but she was holding her own with full-grown men bigger and stronger than she was, and she could sense Bunty’s satisfaction in her performance—expressed more in his twinkling blue eyes than his words, which were usually on the order of, “Okay, kid, not too terrible. Try not to screw up this next one.”

At the end of the course, when Bunty handed her a certificate in senior lifesaving, he finally awarded her a smile: “Congratulations, you’re a lifeguard. Now for God’s sake try not to let anyone die in your first week.”

She was given a patch on which her
LIFE SAVING—SENIOR
rank was embroidered in a circle around the Red Cross insignia. Toni proudly sewed it onto the new bathing suit Eddie had bought her. Palisades issued her a whistle, a kind of white pith helmet to shield her from the relentless summer sun, and her very own lifeguarding station—a red enameled chair sitting on a raised platform, the same as Bunty, the head lifeguard, sat on.

There were four lifeguards on duty this season—Bunty, Toni, the deceptively slim Hugh O’Neill, and a big, tanned side of beef named Al Soyaty—stationed around the pool like the points of a compass. They all had their individual “zones” of responsibility; when on duty they had to scan those zones at all times for possible hazards or bathers in distress. It did not escape Toni’s notice that she was given a station in the southeast corner, overlooking the shallow end of the pool—but she chose to interpret that not as a comment on her gender as much as her experience.

The pool opened on Decoration Day, May 30, and as the ticket booth opened, Toni climbed onto her lifeguard station and took a deep breath of the briny air. The roar of the waterfalls nearly drowned out the calliope from the Carousel across the midway as well as the light popular music piped in from WGYN, New York’s first full-time FM radio station, that issued from the park loudspeakers. Despite somewhat cool weather, hordes of bathers swept through the gate, onto the beach, and into the pool.

She had never felt as proud. She was a lifeguard at Palisades Park—for now, at least, her soul could not possibly aspire to anything better.

Making her day even sweeter was seeing her father watching proudly from the other side of the fence—and a few minutes later, when Slim unexpectedly showed up with his family. He looked up at Toni on her lifeguard station … and his jaw dropped. The gape turned quickly to a smile, and as he wandered over he said, “Damn, you sure fill out that suit nicely.”

Toni blushed to the same deep red as her chair, or so she feared. “Thanks. I’ll see you on my break, okay?” And she blew him a kiss.

She took her job seriously, scanning her zone of responsibility constantly—taking in the toddlers wading in as they held their parents’ hands; the grade-school kids leaping into the water as if they had been waiting all their lives for this day; the show-offy teenager who cannonballed off the lowest diving board, hitting the water like a depth charge. But the minute they moved out of her zone into Bunty’s or Hugh’s or Al’s, her gaze swept back to her own zone, as uneventful as it was.

All at once the smell of maple syrup from the waffle stand made her mouth water, and the sharp tang of lemonade made her thirsty. She even caught a whiff of French fries, carried across the midway from her dad’s stand. These were all familiar smells she had grown up with at the pool; but they seemed somehow different at this altitude, just three or four feet above the provinces of her youth. The whole pool looked different, as though she were seeing everything at once, all charged with the urgency of her attention to every detail. Just three or four feet, that’s all it was—but it was the difference, thrillingly, between being a child and being an adult.

*   *   *

Jack and Irving Rosenthal, determined to surpass even last season’s record take, increased the park’s promotion budget, opened a day nursery where parents could “park” their youngsters for a time, and geared prices for volume business. Adding to attendance that summer were two thousand children—white, Negro, Puerto Rican—from tenements in New York City, who on July 2 were brought to Palisades by the
New York Tribune
’s Fresh Air Fund and given full run of all the rides as well as free refreshments.

Thousands visited the Palisades pool each day, and in her first month on the job Toni was witness to the usual run of accidents and near-accidents: kids running, tripping, and taking a header on the sundeck; swimmers with stomach cramps, usually from a greasy lunch of hot dogs, French fries, and ice cream; and both children and adults who, having exhausted themselves on a dozen rides, jumped into the pool and wore themselves out faster than they had anticipated. There was only one serious rescue: a man in his forties who belly flopped off a diving board, the shock of hitting the water triggering a heart attack. Bunty saw him sinking, leapt in, and dragged him to shore, where he performed artificial respiration while Toni ran to the phone and called for an ambulance to take him to Englewood Hospital.

But Toni’s most satisfying moment came when the young mother of a six-year-old boy came up to her asked, “Could you teach my son how to swim?” Toni was flattered and pleased, instructing the boy in the basics of swimming even as Bunty had done for her … and for the rest of that day she sat a little straighter in her lifeguard’s chair, feeling on top of the world.

She was still happily sitting there—the only deficiency in her life being the absence of Slim, who was on vacation in the Poconos with his family for the week—on the morning of Sunday, July 13, when shortly after opening she heard some raised voices coming from the nearby ticket booth. It was only 9:30
A.M.
and there were relatively few people in the pool, so Toni wandered over to the main gate of the pool to see what was going on.

What she found was a young, pretty Negro woman in her twenties, holding a pool ticket and saying to one of the ticket takers, “I don’t understand. This is a perfectly good ticket, it was just purchased—”

“Did
you
purchase this ticket?” the man asked.

“No, a friend bought it for me.”

“Are you a member of the Palisades Sun and Surf Club?”

“I—no, I’ve never heard of it.”

“Well, that’s the problem,” the man explained. “The pool is operated as a private club, you have to be a member to use it. A ticket’s not enough.”

The young woman sighed and said, “So how do I become a member?”

“Just go to the administration office, they’ll give you an application to fill out.” He gave her directions to the administration building, and the woman nodded, thanked him, and headed down the midway.

Thinking that was the end of it, Toni headed back to her chair.

Twenty minutes later, the same young Negro woman was once again standing outside the pool grounds, waiting patiently in the rising heat.

And waiting. And waiting. Another twenty minutes crept by, and occasionally a ticket taker would come up to her, saying something like, “Why don’t you just go enjoy some of the other rides?”—but the woman just smiled politely, shook her head, and said, “I’ll wait here, thanks.”

Toni told Bunty she was taking her morning break, walked to the lemonade stand and bought two lemonades, then walked back to the pool and up to the Negro woman.

“Hi, I’m Toni,” she said. The woman looked up at her, puzzled. “It’s pretty hot, I thought you might like something to drink.”

The woman smiled, surprised. “Why, thank you. That’s very thoughtful.” She took the lemonade. “My name is Melba. Melba Valle.”

“Nice to meet you. Are you still having trouble getting into the pool?”

Melba took a sip of lemonade and nodded. “Oh, yes. They had me go to the administration office and fill out an application to join their ‘Sun and Surf Club,’ then when I did that they said, ‘We’ll notify you by mail.’ I said, ‘I came all the way from New York City. I want to swim in the pool
today.
’ They told me, ‘We’ll notify you by mail. Why don’t you enjoy some of the other rides in the meantime?’ I said, ‘I’ll save you the cost of a stamp. I’ll go wait by the pool.’ So here I am.”

“Well, I’m sure they’ll be along any minute with your membership,” Toni assured her. “You live in the city?”