What I Saw and How I Lied (2 page)

Of course, Margie had done a best friend's duty. She'd staked out my territory. Loyalty counted the most in my neighborhood. I should have felt lucky to have a best friend who would fight for me.

The door opened behind me, and Mom sat down on the stoop, her skirt billowing and then drifting down to her ankles. Unlike other moms, she wore her good clothes all the time and didn't care if she got them dirty.

My mother was beautiful. I always said that first, because it was the first thing everybody noticed. I took after my father.

You couldn't stop looking at her. She was a knockout. The way she held a cigarette, the way she danced in the kitchen, the way she could make supper with a cocktail glass in one hand — that was movie star glamour. You could almost forget she was just a housewife from Queens.

"In the dumps?" she asked me.

"I want to wear lipstick," I said.

She took a cigarette pack out of her apron pocket, then her gold lighter. She tapped out the cigarette, then placed it between her lips and lit it. She took a fleck of tobacco off her bottom lip. She was wearing Revlon's Fatal Apple lipstick —
the most tempting color since Eve winked at Adam.

"Don't be in such a hurry to grow up, baby," she said, blowing a plume of smoke out toward Mrs. Carmody, who was sweeping her porch and pretending not to spy in windows as the lights came on. "It's not all polka dots and moonbeams, you know."

"It's got to be better than this," I said.

"You think so?"

A breeze ruffled her blond hair. She stared out into the air and flicked an ash off her cigarette.

I leaned backward over the glider and looked at her upside down. Her face seemed to assemble into something foreign. Her blue eyes looked like triangles, and I could see straight up her nostrils. It was strange how a face was just eyes, nose, and a mouth. It was how they were arranged that counted. I was cheered to discover a position in which my mother was not quite so lovely.

Even though I didn't say a word, she knew. "You're too young for boys, anyway," she said.

"You got married when you were seventeen," I pointed out.

"Good Lord, Evie, you don't want to take after me. Anyway, I was a mature seventeen."

No kidding. I have one photograph of her and my father. She looked hubba-hubba even then, in a flowered dress, clutching the arm of my father, who was leaning back on his heels, like he wanted to fall backward into another life. Six months later, he did. He brought her a cup of coffee in bed, said he was going to California, and walked out. She was seventeen and already pregnant with me.

Now she looked at her watch, the one Joe had surprised her with for their anniversary last year, the one he'd bought in a fancy jewelry store on Fifth Avenue. ("You're crazy," she'd said. "We can't afford this.”

“Let me worry about it," he'd replied. "And I'm not worried.")

"Your father is late," she announced. "Again. Be prepared for a roast like a rock. I can’t wait to hear what Grandma Glad says."

My grandmother's name was Gladys, but Joe wanted us to call her Grandma Glad. Maybe it fit a vision of what he wanted her to be, the opposite of what she really was. She knew how to spread misery around.

Mom took a puff of her cigarette. "Maybe she'll break another tooth."

The living room window was open. "I'm not deaf yet!" Grandma Glad yelled.

Mom raised her eyebrows at me, and I had to slap a hand over my mouth to put the plug in my laughter.

So that's how we were: a mother and a daughter sitting on a porch, laughing as the tree shadows stretched toward the porch and lights came on in the houses. Sounds cozy. But it was just like buzz bombs—the V-2 rockets the Germans launched at London near the end of the war. You couldn't hear them, not even a whistle. Until your house blew up.

After they got married and Joe knew he was going overseas, he insisted we move in with his mother. Suddenly we had a house with a porch and a yard. Grandma Glad made us pay rent, but it was her house, after all. It must have been hard to give up two good bedrooms for the duration. But I'm guessing it was harder to say no to Joe because he was a soldier. We all felt like we had to make sacrifices on the home front. It made us — the women — feel braver, and better, if we were suffering, too, somehow. Even if it was only arguing in the kitchen.

Mom got a better job at Lord and Taylor while I was in school. She was the best saleswoman in the tie department, her manager said. She came home at 5:45 on the dot. Grandma Glad had figured out how long it took to walk from the store to the subway, and how long it would take to wait, and how long the ride was, and how long the walk was from the subway to home. If Mom was late, she wanted to hear why.

You could say that Grandma Glad raised me from age nine to thirteen, but usually I spent whole afternoons at the Crottys'. Mostly I remember Gladys plopped in the gold armchair, listening to
Amanda of Honeymoon Hill
on the radio and watching the clock like a factory foreman ready to dock Mom's pay. I knew she considered minding me as her patriotic duty, right up there with hoeing our Victory Garden. Tomatoes and her son's stepdaughter — we both broke her back.

Grandma Glad was always saying things to Mom like, "My, what a bright dress, Beverly" or "Maybe you need to go up a size on that sweater." I could guess Mom's reaction by how hard she stubbed her cigarettes out in the ashtrays. If you came into the room and saw them ground into little stumps, you knew that Mom and Grandma Glad had just had a chat.

Mom smashed the boiled potatoes in the pot, twisting her wrist, her bracelet jingling. Joe had brought it back from the war, and it had real rubies in it. Everything was cheap over in Europe now, he said. You could pick up stuff for practically nothing. The poor folks over there were glad to sell it. You Were doing them a favor.

She paused every once in a while, and I poured in a little milk from the bottle. We'd been making mashed potatoes together since I was four. It had been just the two of us back then, sleeping in the same bed in the little apartment over the candy store. Then Joe had walked in, with his hat on the back of his head and his eyes on Mom, and changed everything.

I stuck a spoon in the pot and took a bite. It was dark out now and steam had clouded the kitchen window. I heard Joe's car, and I ran to the window and made a circle with my fist to clear it. I saw him get out of the car, and for a minute I saw a stranger, his hat pulled over his eyes, his shoulders slumped in a way I didn't know.

That happened sometimes. He was away for so long, and even now, if he turned a certain way, or if I saw him on the street, it was like he was just another man in a suit. I let out a breath, and the window fogged up again.

I hurried out into the hallway, hoping Grandma Glad hadn't heard the car door. If she had, she'd be the first one at the door to greet him. But I saw the armchair pulled up next to the radio, and her wide back hunching forward to listen.

The door opened, and he walked in. I hadn't turned on the light, so he didn't see me at first. I saw his face, and he didn't know I was looking.

It was the war. You couldn't ask him about it. You didn't want to remind him. What every wife and daughter could give was a happy home. That was our job.

That's what the magazines said. I clipped articles for Mom and left them on her chair. Recipes and new fashions, all the things a wife could do to make herself more attractive to her husband. Mom had quit her job at Lord and Taylor the day after he came back. "Either that or get fired," she'd said. She had to make way for the veterans who needed jobs. Now she learned recipes and made Sunday suppers, rubbed Jergen's lotion on her elbows, and had time to be a wife.

"Son of a bitch," he said.

I almost stepped back into the warm steam of the kitchen. This wasn't the Joe I knew. He was a muscular man who made walking look like dancing. He had a special greeting for everyone on the block. He made up nicknames that stuck. He could flip a cigarette butt into the gutter, hail a friend, and toss a chocolate bar to a kid from the neighborhood without breaking his stride. I'd seen him do it.

So I switched on the light to make the magazine picture. The daughter welcoming the dad home, both of them so happy in the picture you could practically smell the pot roast.

I held out my hands. He punched his hat back into shape and then held it by the brim. He closed one eye, like he was aiming, and then spun the hat down the hallway toward me. I snatched it out of the air.

"The Dodgers need you, kiddo," he said. I hugged him and felt his whiskers, smelled cigarettes and the special sweet scent that came off his skin.

As I hung up his hat, Mom came out of the kitchen.

"Aw, Bev," he said, apologetic even before she spoke. "How am I going to keep you in mink and diamonds if I don't work late?"

Mom turned around, her arms out. "You see a mink here?"

Joe winked at me. "Well, maybe if you give your husband a kiss, Santa will be good to you this year."

"It's still summer. You've got to do better than that."

He walked to her and slipped an arm around her waist to draw her against him. She bent back a bit to look at his face.

"You started without me again," she murmured.

"Just a quick one."

They didn't move. She was bent back in his arms, one hand on his chest. Suddenly I was just like the chair, or the hat rack — just a stick of furniture in the room. Back then they were everything I knew about glamour. Everything I knew about love.

Grandma Glad poked her head out into the hallway. "Someone called for you, Joe."

My mother's mouth turned down. It was funny, how the two of them competed, even for the telephone. It made Grandma Glad happy to be able to give Joe his messages, like she outranked Mom.

"It's the same man who called before," Grandma Glad said. She folded her arms over one of the dark blue dresses she always wore. Some of them had flowers and some of them had dots, but they all looked the same. "The one who asked about you, were you the Joe Spooner from the Forty-second."

"Oh, for crying out loud! Next time he calls, tell him I'm not home," Joe said. "Another ex-GI looking for a job. I'm home now — I want to eat dinner and relax."

This wasn't like Joe. Usually he was happy to talk on the phone. He'd bellow into the receiver while he crossed his ankles and leaned against the wall. He'd say, "Hello, Al," or "Bill, how do?" And then, "Terrible, how are you?"

Joe had what
Every Young Girl's Guide to Popularity
called "easy charm." I didn't have it. It didn't seem to be something you could learn from a book, either. When girls at school called out, "Evie, how do?" I wished I could yell back, "Terrible, how are you?"

Grandma Glad disappeared back into the living room.

"I wouldn't look so forward to dinner if I were you,"

Mom said. "The potatoes are glue and the roast is overdone."

She said it like a challenge. Joe only grinned. "Whatever you cook, I'll eat, Gorgeous."

In the kitchen, Mom shoved the roast onto a platter. Joe poured himself his drink, Canadian Club on the rocks, and mixed Mom a Manhattan. He sat at the kitchen table. We heard the phone ring, and he took a long sip. He bared his teeth, sucking in the liquor, and then began rolling up his shirtsleeves.

Grandma Glad appeared in the doorway. The kitchen light flashed on the lenses of her rimless glasses, and I couldn't see her eyes. Her hands were folded over her shelf of a bust, like she was already apologizing for interrupting, even though she never apologized for anything.

Mom looked annoyed. She liked Grandma Glad to stay in the living room before dinner so she and Joe could have a drink and a cigarette together. If Grandma Glad came in early, she let her know it, down to the second.

Mom said the house was too small now. I knew that she and Joe kept arguing about moving, and whether they had to take Grandma Glad. When they got tired of that, they argued about where to move. My mother wanted an apartment in the city, but Joe kept reminding her of the housing shortage. He wanted to move out to Long Island or New Jersey.

"We've got the American Dream, Bev," he said. "But there's more of it out there."

"Not in New Jersey," my mom replied.

Now Mom banged the spoon on the pot, flicking off a dollop of potato. "Dinners not ready yet, Grandma Glad," she said.

"I can see that," Grandma Glad said. "It's the same man on the phone, Joe — he says he must speak to you. Or he'll drop by later, if you're busy now."

Joe's fingers curled around his whiskey glass. He stood up. "Christ, can't a man in his own house —"

"Joe!" Grandma Glad's hand flew to her mouth, as if she was the one who'd let the Lord's name escape her in vain and was trying to stuff it back in.

"Enough, Ma," Joe said, and pushed past her.

"Well, he's in a mood," Mom said.

"Probably he's hungry," Grandma Glad said, with a long glance at the kitchen stove. Then she clomped out in her red slippers.

"And it's my fault the dinner is late," Mom muttered, banging a pot lid on the stove.

She reached over to take a sip of the cocktail Joe had made her. "Did you set the table?"
Yes,
ma am.

She nodded, still frowning, as if she was sorry I'd done it, because otherwise she could have yelled at me.

She scooped the mashed potatoes into the bowl, metal spoon against china,
snap, snap.
I heard the burp of the gravy as it was poured in. Then the ladle, clattering against the gravy boat.

It seemed like a good idea to disappear before she thought of a chore I hadn't done. I edged out of the kitchen into the hall. Grandma Glad was standing right outside the doorway, so intent on eavesdropping that she didn't see me. She always eavesdropped when you were on the phone, even if I was just talking to Margie about homework.