Stony River (38 page)

At Penn Station she was itching to dive into the crowd as if she lived there. But with one hand on her back and the other cupping her elbow, Buddy steered her to the escalator and all the way to street level where people lined up for taxis and a thousand horns honked. The air was heavy with bus fumes, scorched onions and hot dogs.

“I could do that,” she said, pointing to the hot-dog vendor.

“Yeah, but why?” He gripped her hand again, making her wince. “Where to first?”

“The Automat. Herman gave me directions to one near Radio City.”

Herman had bought them reserved seats for the show so they wouldn't have to stand in line. Dearie said it was because he was thinking of selling and felt guilty. Businesses had been abandoning Newark. People weren't lining up for the restaurant like they used to. Dearie said she'd retire before any new owners could give her the bum's rush and Tereza should start looking for something else to do. Tereza hoped she'd find that something else in New York.

She'd wanted to eat at an Automat from the time she saw it advertised on
The Horn & Hardart Children's Hour
. Being able to drop coins in a slot, open a little door and take out a baloney sandwich or a slice of huckleberry pie seemed like magic. She wished she'd been a kiddie star on that show, getting to eat at the Automat whenever she wanted. If she ever had a kid she'd make sure it got tap-dancing lessons or learned to play something cool, like the xylophone.

The Automat was twelve blocks away at Broadway and Fortysixth. Broadway! Seeing it on the map Herman had marked up gave her goose bumps. They took a meandering path there, Tereza carried along by a wild energy. New York was Newark gone mutant. Radioactive with a jillion lights. Exploding with life. A land of glass and metal buildings tall enough for giants to live in. You could get lost here but never feel alone.

It had been seven months since Buddy smashed up the mirror
and desk chair. Right now he was laughing at her bouncing around, twisting her head like a periscope. Where to look first?

Over here: a blind couple with a seeing-eye dog, him squeezing out notes from an accordion, her holding a cup. Down there: a shop window with dead, plucked chickens hanging by their feet. Over here: smoke rings from a painted mouth on a billboard. Down there: a marquee shouting
THE MUSIC MAN
.

They found the restaurant where actors sat around a big table after opening night, waiting for newspaper reviews. Tereza sized up the doorman under the purple awning and thought
I could do that
. “Go in,” Herman had urged. “Order coffee and visit the ladies' room, I'd be interested.” But the place wasn't open yet. Even if it had been, Buddy wouldn't have wanted to spend what they'd want for a cup of joe. He had the day all budgeted out: the train ride, lunch at the Automat and a surprise he wouldn't tell her about. She thought about all that money behind the cinder block, not doing them any good.

After the show, they'd check out an A&P not far from Radio City. Tereza pretended to be enthusiastic because managers-in-training needed supportive wives. She almost hadn't gone to the Christmas party, not wanting to hobnob with yoyos that might look down on her for working in a john, but Buddy said his success depended on her going. So she'd bopped around the Legion Hall, a regular Loretta Young, thrusting out her hand and saying, “Ladonna Jukes. Pleased to meet you.” Turned out nobody asked what she did. Before the party she'd spent some of Miranda's money on a black chemise and a string of fake pearls, telling Buddy she'd saved for them out of her weekly allowance and the grocery money. At the party, Mr. Hinkley, the fat-cheeked store manager, had said, “You got a real doll here, fella. Hold onto her.”

Buddy had said, “Yes, sir.”

After that, he started calling her Ladonna all the time, like Dearie had done from the start. She liked it. Ladonna was someone you
wanted to screw. Buddy didn't lose himself like the guys in the cars had. She remembered how good it felt to get somebody that horny. Still, it was weird what you could get used to. Buddy said the devil got into people most easily when they were surrendering to passion. When he stuck himself in her he got it over with as soon as possible. She figured it was what most married people did. Lenora from cash at Herman's said sex was overrated and Tereza had to agree.

Tereza was wearing the black Christmas party dress and pearls today underneath her coat in case they went someplace a talent scout might be lurking. Buddy had dressed for work—black pants, white shirt and clip-on bow tie under his leather jacket—to make a good impression at the Manhattan A&P. She'd gotten her hair cut short so it wouldn't be so flyaway. Catching their reflection in a restaurant window, Tereza thought they looked good together. Somewhere along the way the Jukes had seeped into her and worn away the Dobra edges. No more Reenie Dobra's daughter, only Buddy Jukes's wife.

They saw the Automat sign way before they got to it, the neon letters on top of each other like a tower of alphabet blocks. Buddy opened the door for her to the smell of coffee and tomato soup. The place was immense and the Christmas tree sparkly, with light bouncing off a long wall of small glass windows, each holding a plate or dish, like it was a food museum. Not even noon and dozens of people shuffled trays down the counter in front of the little windows.

Buddy went to a glass booth and came back with a fistful of coins.

“I could do that,” she said, nodding toward the women in the booth dispensing nickels and quarters with rubber tips on their fingers.

“You'd be better off at the A&P,” Buddy said. “Of course you'd have to pass math and English tests and be working on your high-school diploma.”

Tereza grabbed two trays, cups, napkins and silverware. Real cups, real silverware. Fancy letters above the windows screamed
PIES,
SANDWICHES, SALADS, PASTRIES, CAKES
. She dropped three nickels into a slot and turned a chrome-plated knob with a porcelain center— click! A slice of lemon meringue pie. She couldn't find huckleberry. She shuffled down the line and snagged a ham sandwich on a long bun. Buddy got a fruit salad and a Parker House roll.

She poured herself coffee from a spigot in the wall that looked like a dolphin. “I didn't even finish seventh grade, you know that. I'm not gonna sit in a classroom with little kids.” She followed Buddy to an empty round table. Marble-topped. A lazy Susan on it with sugar, ketchup, mustard and Worcestershire sauce. The place kept getting better and better.

They sat across from each other.

“You could take a high-school equivalency test. I'd help you study for it.”

She took off her coat and hung it over her chair back. “How's that work?”

“You get credit for everything you already know.”

“That ain't much.” She took a bite of pie and winced.

“Isn't. You okay?”

“Too much lemon. Got me right in the tonsils.” She scanned the room, looking for stars dressed like regular schmoes. Buddy tucked into his fruit salad.

“Wouldn't it be cool if you could get transferred here?”

He swallowed, swiped a napkin across his mouth. “What would you do in New York?”

“Are you kidding? Eat here every day. Work at something I love.” She shifted into her dahlink accent. “I've gazed into zee crystal ball and see no future in ladies' johns.”

Buddy laughed from his gut. To be able to do that for him warmed her insides, like an actor must feel after an audience applauds when it doesn't have to.

“Why can't you find something to love closer to home?”

“Name one star who was discovered in Linden or even Newark.”

Buddy leaned over the lazy Susan and spoke softly but sharply. “Ladonna, name one thing you've done to prepare yourself to be discovered.”

She gnawed off a piece of ham sandwich and glared at him.

“I wish you'd known my grandfather,” he said.

“Alfie?”

“Yeah. He used to say there's no such thing as too prepared.” Buddy spun the lazy Susan absentmindedly. “We never ate in the dining room when he was alive. It was his office, stacked high with boxes of old sales receipts. He wanted to be able to look up everything his six hundred customers had ever bought, when and why. It made me mad he spent so much time in there and on the road. I gave Dearie a hard time over it. Didn't understand it was his way of loving me. He didn't want me to go without anything I needed.” Buddy's voice went wobbly and tears pooled in his eyes. “He was a good man. My father was, too, and brave. I've got the blood of good men in me, don't I?”

Tereza wanted to make him laugh again but she couldn't come up with anything. She scraped her chair around to his side of the table, patted his arm and said, “Yeah, sure you do.”

“God sees I have more good blood than bad, doesn't he?”

Tereza had no idea but she said, “No sweat. He sees everything, right?”

God the Peeping Tom.

THEY APPROACHED
Radio City Music Hall from Sixth Avenue. The line for losers without tickets zigzagged along Fiftieth and into Rockefeller Plaza. Tereza couldn't believe it when she was actually under the marquee that wrapped around the building. It gave off heat like a giant chicken incubator.

“The equivalent of the U.S. population has visited Radio City
Music Hall,” Buddy said, reading from a brochure Herman had given them. Buddy liked learning shit like that.

She gawked at the bronze-bordered glass display cases, lit from behind, with movie posters and photos of stars. A doorman tore their tickets. They entered a black and gray and glass lobby, the ceiling covered in diamond-shaped lights, white diamonds on the black carpet, and then a bigger lobby that had to have been the most beautiful place in the world, all gold and rusty red, marble, gold foil, cork and wood.

They took the staircase to the first mezzanine, Tereza sliding her hand along the banister's curved polished edge. The windy rumble of an organ vibrated through her body and caught her in the throat. She was finally here!

“It has over four thousand pipes,” Buddy said.

“Knock it off.”

Months ago Tereza wouldn't have dared say that, but something had shifted between them. She used to think he was better than her; she felt more equal now. He didn't schedule her days anymore and seemed okay with whatever she wanted to do. He used the schedule board for what he called inspirational reminders. Weird stuff, like Make It Stop. Temptation Has Many Guises. He Can Be In Only One Place At One Time. When she asked what
guises
meant he'd stared at the word as if someone else had written it. He'd turned his “Most Improved Charles Atlas Student 1954” trophy to face the wall on the shelf above his desk, he explained, because he was no longer worthy of any award. When she'd asked why he didn't just throw it out he said she was too young to understand penance. That pissed her off; he had only three years on her.

A girl with great posture in black jacket and slacks, white dickey and black bow tie opened the door to a monster stage (“the biggest in the world,” Buddy said) under a gold ceiling, arches behind it like sunbursts. They were in a hoity-toity section. Tereza was glad she'd
dressed up. The usher led them to their seats. I could do that, Tereza thought, straightening her spine.

“There's night school for adults, you know,” Buddy whispered.

“I work at night, remember?” she whispered back.

Thousands oohed as the orchestra emerged from the floor. The giant gold curtain rose in scalloped folds, like a fat lady lifting her skirts, revealing a cathedral with stained-glass windows up to the ceiling. The Glory of Easter, the program called it. So many people on one stage! Priests in sparkly gold robes and skullcaps, nuns in white with tall headdresses bright as the moon, women in gowns holding flowers, the choir forming a cross. So much to take in you could end up seeing nothing, so Tereza focused on a single nun, imagining how hard it would be to keep that headdress from wobbling.

The second half of the show was called “In the Spring.” Microphones rose, curtains closed and opened, act after act followed including the Rockettes, at long last, looking kind of goofy as Girly Birds, to be honest. Tereza was thinking there had to be behind-the-scenes jobs up the wazoo at Radio City, and then it struck her like flipping a switch in a dark room: she could do what the people on stage were doing. Buddy was right: she hadn't done a damn thing to be what she wanted to be except daydream. She could learn what she needed to just like Buddy was learning to be a store manager.

THE A&P LOOKED
almost exactly like Buddy's, except bigger: the same gray and canned-salmon-colored vinyl tiles on the floor, the same harsh fluorescent lights, the same cigarette display at the checkout counters. After the Automat and Radio City, it was a letdown. The manager, a tall man with a high forehead and big round glasses, pumped her hand and slapped Buddy on the back like they were old friends. “Call me Bert,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Buddy said.

“Jack has nothing but good things to say about you, son.” Bert led them around the store, pointing out an expanded meats/poultry and cold cuts section. Buddy perked right up at the sight of marshmallows at the end of an aisle. “Exactly where we put ours,” he said.

Bert said, “Part of the master plan. Say a man working in a company like Proctor & Gamble gets transferred from Chicago to Manhattan. His wife should be able to come in here, first time, and know exactly where to find her favorite products.”

“Genius,” Buddy said.

Leaning forward, hands laced behind his back, Bert escorted them up and down the aisles with their displays of canned soup, beans, spaghetti, candy, nuts, tea, coffee, sauces, Chinese food (“much bigger selection than we have in Linden,” Buddy said), preserves, jellies, peanut butter, baby food, canned juice. He told them he'd started in a store with one cashier and delivered groceries on a bicycle. He led them through swinging doors to a windowless room with a red Formica-topped table and four metal chairs, a counter with a coffee pot and doors leading to men's and ladies' lounges. “We're here!” Bert sang out, winking at Buddy who winked back.