Queens Noir (14 page)

They were there every day, at 3:30, in the dark, narrow
alley behind the pinsetting machines. And I saw them, saw
them plain as day while I sat just outside the machine room
on a metal stool, picking summer scabs off my knee. First time
by accident, just hiding out back there, where it was quiet and
no one came around.

Eddie'd been there a month, he and his wife Sherry, who
ran concessions with my mother over by the shoe station. He
had blue-black hair, slick like those olives in the jar at the Italian grocery store. When he walked through the joint, coming
on his shift, everyone-the waitresses, even old Jimmy, the
sweaty-faced manager-lit up like a row of sparklers because
he was a friendly guy with a lot of smiles and his uniform always finely pressed and the strong smell of limey cologne coming off him like a movie star or something.

No one could figure him and Sherry. Sherry with the
damp, faded-blond features, eyes empty as the rubber dish tub
she was always resting her dusty elbows on. Cracking gum,
staring open-mouthed at the crowds, the families, the amateur baseball team, the VFW fellas, the beery young marrieds
swinging their arms around, skidding down the lanes, collapsing into each other's laps after each crash of the pins, Sherry
never moved, except to shift her weight from one spindly leg
to the other.

Just shy of thirteen, I was at Hollywood Lanes every day
that summer. Husband three months gone, my mother was
working double shifts to keep me in shoes, to hear her tell it.
I helped the dishwashers, loading racks of cloudy glasses into
the steaming machine, the only girl they ever let do it. Some
days, I helped Georgie spray out the shoes or use Clean Strike
on the balls.

But I always beat tracks at 3:30 so I could be behind the
pin racks. Eddie and Carol, his hands spread across her waist,
leaning into her, saying things to her. What was he saying?
What was he telling her?

Sherry's face looked tired in the yellow haze of the fluorescent
pretzel carousel. "Kid," she said, "you're here all the time."

I didn't say anything. My mother was stacking cups in the
corner, squirming in her uniform, too tight across her chest.

"You know Eddie? You know him?" Sherry gestured over
to the lanes.

I nodded. My mother spun one of the waxy cups on her
finger, watching.

"I know what's what," Sherry said, looking over at my
mother. I felt something ring in my chest, like a buzzer or
school bell.

"You don't know," my mother responded, looking at the
rotating hot dogs, thick and glossy.

"I got eyes," Sherry said, gaze fixed on the lanes, on Eddie
running the floor waxer over them jauntily. He liked using the
machine. He kind of danced with it, not in a showy way, but
there was a rhythm to the way he moved it, twirled around on
it like he was ice-skating. Billy, the last guy, twice Eddie's age,
looked like he would fall asleep as he did it, weaving down
each lane, hung over from a long night at Marshall's Tavern.
His hands always shook when he handed out shoes. Then he
threw up all over the men's room during Family Night and
Jimmy fired him.

"Don't tell me I don't got eyes," Sherry was saying.

"We all got eyes," my mother said. "But there's nothing to
see." Her brow wet with grease from the grill, her eye shadow
smeared. "There's not a goddamned thing to see."

I didn't say anything. I rarely said anything. But something
was funny in the way Sherry was looking at Eddie. She always
had that blank look, but it used to seem like a little girl, a doll,
limbs soft and loose, black buttons for eyes. Now, though, it
was different. It was different, but I wasn't sure how.

Back there in that space behind the pins, it was like backstage and
no one could see even though all eyes were facing it. As soon as
you walked in a bowling alley, that was where your eyes went. You
couldn't help it. But you never imagined what could be going on
behind the pins, so tidy and white.

And each day I'd watch. It was a hundred degrees or more
back there. It was filled with noise, all the sharp cracks echoing
through the place. But I was watching the way Carol trembled.
Because she always seemed so cool and easy, with her long pane
of dark hair, her thick fringe of dark lashes pasted on in the ladies' room one by one. ("They get her tips, batting those babies like a
raccoon in heat," Myrna, the old lady who worked dayshift concessions, said. "Those and the pushup brassiere.")

Carol was talking to Diane, the other cocktail waitress. Diane used to work at the Stratton, but to hear her tell it, the
minute her tits dropped a half-inch, they put her out on her
can. She hated the Lanes. "How much tips can I get from
these Knights of Columbus types?" she always groaned. She
worked at Whitestone Lanes too and had plenty to say about
the customers there.

I was sitting at a table in the cocktail lounge, looking at
pictures of Princess Grace in someone's leftover Life magazine.
I wasn't supposed to be in there, but no one ever bothered me
until happy hour.

"She can jaw all she wants," Carol said, eating green cherries from the dish on the bar. "It's all noise to me." She was
talking about Sherry.

"She should take it up with her man, she has something to
say about things," Diane said.

"I don't care what she does."

"What I hear, she can't show her face in Ozone Park. They
all remember her family. Trash from trash."

"I'm going to haul bills tonight, I can tell. Look at 'em,"
Carol said, surveying the softball team swarming in like bright
bumblebees.

"Yeah, good luck," Diane added, then nodded at Carol's
neckline. "Bend, bend, bend."

In the bathroom once, right after, I pretended to be fixing my hair,
snapping and resnapping a rubber band around my slack ponytail. I knew Carol would be in there, she always went in there after. When she came out of the stall, I looked at her in the mirror.
Her face steaming pink, she brushed her shiny hair in long strokes,
swooping her arm up and down and swiveling a little like she was
dancing or something. She was watching her own face in the mirror. I wondered what she was watching for.

I saw the dust on her back, between her shoulder blades. I
wanted to reach my hand out and brush it away.

Eddie was oiling the lanes and saw me watching, eating french
fries off a paper plate at the head of lane 3. "And there's my
girl." He said it like we talked all the time, but it was the first
time he'd ever said anything to me. "Stuck inside every day.
Don't you like to go to the Y or something? Go to the city
pool?"

"I don't like to swim," I answered. Which was true, but
my mother didn't want me to go there by myself. When summer started, she let me go once to a pool day with the kids
at school, but when I got home, she was sitting on the front
steps of our building like she'd been waiting for me for hours.
Her face was red and puffy and I never saw her so glad to see
me. That was the only time I went. Besides, she'd never liked
it. Mr. Upton, before he left, was always telling her I'd get diseases at the public pool.

"All kids like to swim, don't they?" Eddie was saying. He
tilted his head and smiled. "Don't girls like to show off their
swimming suits?"

I ate another fry, even though it was too hot and made my
mouth burn, lips stinging with salt.

"I always liked to go, just splash around and stuff," he said.
"You got no one to take you, huh?"

"I don't really swim much," I said.

He nodded with a grin, like he was figuring something out. "I get it. Well, I'd take you, but I guess your daddy wouldn't
like it."

I felt my thigh slide on the plastic seat. I looked at the far
end of the lanes. I felt my leg come unstuck and slide off the
edge of the seat and it was shaking. "He's gone," I said.

Eddie paused for a flickering second before he smiled.
"Then I guess I got a chance."

Fred Upton was my mother's husband. My real old man died
when I was a baby. He had some kind of infection that went
to his brain.

There were some guys in between, but two years ago it
was all about Mr. Upton. We moved from Kew Gardens when
she got tangled up with him and quit her job at Leona Pick
selling dresses. She'd met Mr. Upton working there, sold him
a billowy nightgown for his fiancee, and he took her out for
spaghetti with clams at LaStella on Queens Boulevard that
very night. They got hitched at City Hall three weeks later.

Before he left, times were pretty good. It was always trips
to Austin Street to buy new shoes with t-straps and lunch at
the Hamburger Train and going in the women's clothing store
with the soft carpet, running our hands through the linen and
seersucker dresses-with names like buttercup yellow, grasshopper green, goldenrod, strawberry punch. One day he bought
her three dresses, soft summer sheaths with boatneck collars
like a woman you'd see on TV or the movies. The sales lady
wrapped them in tissue for her even when my mother told her
they weren't a gift.

"They're a gift for you, aren't they?" the lady had said, her
pink-cake-icing lips doing something like a smile.

Those dresses were sitting in the closet now, unworn for
months, yellowing, smelling like stale perfume, old smoke. Never saw my mother out of one of her two uniforms these
days, except when she slept in the foldout couch, usually in her
slip. Some days I tugged off her pantyhose while she slept.

"He said he was going to Aqueduct," I heard my mother
say on the telephone to a girlfriend soon after he left. "But his
sister tells me he's in Miami Beach."

It had been three months now, and wherever Mr. Upton
went, he wasn't in Queens. Someone my mother met in a bar
told her he'd heard Mr. Upton was dead, killed in a hotel fire
in Atlantic City the same night he'd left. That was the last I
knew. I didn't ask. I could tell she didn't want me to. I hoped
she'd forget about Mr. Upton and marry a mailman or a guy
who worked in an office. As it was, I figured us for six more
weeks of this and we'd be moving in with my grandmother in
Flushing.

"She's got ants in her pants, that one," Myrna was saying to
Sherry. Myrna had a big birthmark on her cheek that twitched
whenever she disapproved of something, which was a lot. She
was talking about Carol, who she called "Lane 30," because
that was where the cocktail lounge was. "Thinks she's got it
coming and going."

"Don't I know. She better watch where she shakes that,"
Sherry said, face tight and sallow under the fluorescent light.
She looked like a sickly yellow bird, a pinched lemon.

"You got ideas."

"Sure I got ideas. And I'm no rabbit. Maybe she needs to
hear that."

"I'll see she does."

Sherry nodded. Those flat eyes were jumping. That
slack lip now drawn tight. Her face all moving, all jigsawing
around. She looked different, more interesting. Not pretty. It was all too much for pretty. But you couldn't take your
eyes off it.

I wasn't supposed to be back there at all. Once, years before, some
kid, not even fifteen years old, was working at the Lanes. He got
stuck in the pinsetter machine and died. There were a million different stories of how it happened, and ever since, no one under
twenty one was supposed to be back there. But I never got near
the clanging machine. I stayed in the alcove where they kept the
cleaning equipment.

From there, I could see them and they never saw me. They
never even looked around.

Sometimes, Eddie would be whispering to Carol, but I couldn't
hear.

They were just pressed together, and when the machine wasn't
going, when no one was bowling, you could hear the rustle of their
uniforms brushing against each other.

The more he moved, the more she did, and I could hear her
breathing faster and faster. He covered her and I couldn't see her
except her long hair and her long legs wound round. I was too far
to see her eyes. I wanted to see her eyes. It was like he was shaking
her into life.

"Things are getting interesting," Mrs. Schwartz said to my
mother, who was resting against the counter, slapping a rag
around tiredly. You can lean, you can clean, Jimmy always said.

"Don't count on it," my mother replied.

"Sherry might try harder, wants to keep a man like that,"
Mrs. Schwartz said. She was the head of one of the women's
leagues. She was always there early to gossip with Diane. I
think she knew Diane from the Stratton, where Mrs. Schwartz
met her second husband. They liked to talk about everybody they knew and the terrible things they were doing. "Looks like
a singer or something," she added, twisting in her capris. "A
television personality. Even his teeth. He's got fine teeth."

"I never noticed his teeth," my mother said.

"Take note." Mrs. Schwartz nodded gravely.

Diane walked up, clipping her name tag on her uniform.
No one said anything for a minute. They were watching Sherry
walk into the ladies' room, cigarette pack in hand.

"She can't even be bothered to put on lipstick," Mrs.
Schwartz said, shaking her head. "Comb her hair more than
twice a day."

"Her skin smells like grill," Diane commented under her
breath. The two women laughed without making any noise,
hands passing in front of their faces.

Mrs. Schwartz left to meet her teammates surging into the
place with their shocks of bright hair and matching shirts the
color of creamsicles.

Diane was watching Sherry come out of the bathroom.
"Trash," she said to my mother. Then, in a lower voice, "They
used to live upstate. Her father's doing a hitch in Auburn. Got
in a fight at a stoplight, beat a man with a tire iron. Man lost
an eye.

"How do you know?" my mother asked.

"Jimmy told me. He gave her hell for making a call to
State Corrections on his dime." Diane shook her head again.
"Mark my words, she's trouble. Trash from trash."