Nobody's Family is Going to Change (2 page)

That afternoon Willie did a fast shuffle down the aisle of the school bus, then a big leap out the door. The other children laughed and waved at him. He did a time step for them until the bus roared away.

He looked up Eightieth Street. The garbage truck was standing at the corner. Charlie, the big fat guy, waved at
him and did a funny little tap. Willie did a little tap back like an answer. Nick, the skinny one, yelled, “Hey! Willie!”

Willie danced over to them, trying to wave his briefcase like a straw hat. Charlie emptied a can into the churning back of the truck, dropped it with a clatter, and started to dance like crazy, flopping around and twirling his arms like big pinwheels.

Willie kept up a fast time step, dropped his briefcase, and clapped his hands, humming “Way down upon the Swanee River.” Nick slapped down another can, ran over to Charlie, and they did an old vaudeville exit like two hoofers with canes. They were all three shouting the song, screaming and laughing.

Nick came running back from around the truck where they'd disappeared, and started shuffling like a mad thing. “That's a shag, baby, ever seen the shag?” He panted, he was going so hard.

The truck door slammed and the driver came bowling around the side. It wasn't Frank, the regular driver. It was another man, who didn't look too friendly. Nick stopped abruptly and grabbed a full can from against the building.

“What the hell is this, the Ted Mack hour? You guys pick up the garbage as fast as you dance, we get New York cleaned up in a week.” He looked angry. Charlie winked at Willie behind the driver's back. Willie picked up his briefcase.

“Who are you?” asked the driver, hands on hips, looking down from six feet.

Nick was next to him suddenly, and Charlie ran over. Nick put his hand on Willie's head. “This my boy Willie. He's going to Broadway!”

“No kidding? This your son?” The driver was smiling now.

Nick laughed. “No. I sure do wish my son could dance like that.”

Willie felt an astounding sensation. He wanted to leap, as high as he could, as high as the building. He couldn't even look at Nick.

“All right, come on, guys, let's get it moving.” The driver was bored now. He turned his back and started toward his cab.

“Don't worry about him,” said Charlie. He jumped up on the back of the truck, his balloon body moving so fast it was surprising.

Nick threw the last can against the building with a satisfactory clamor. “Give 'em hell, Willie!” he yelled as he jumped up beside Charlie. The truck started to move away. Willie stood watching.

“Give my regards to Broadway,” Nick sang above the roar of the truck. Charlie joined: “Remember me to Herald Square . . .” Together: “Tell all the gang at Forty-second Street. . .” They were turning. Now Willie couldn't see the truck. “. . . That . . . I . . . will . . . soon . . . be . . . there,” came to him ghost-like from around the corner. Silence was there. Willie felt odd. He walked toward his apartment building.

“Hi zer, Villie,” said the doorman, who was of an undetermined Baltic origin. He bore a strong resemblance to Dracula, and his doorman's cape didn't help.

Willie barely heard him. Concentrating, he walked in, smiled absently at the doorman, pushed the elevator button, and walked through the opening doors.

“Ess,” said the doorman behind him, breathing through his teeth.

Willie danced wildly, impatiently, by himself in the elevator as it was going up. He felt his feet were making angry sounds.

Old Mrs. Goldstein was waiting for the elevator as he danced out. Tapping in place, he held the door for her. “A regular Fred Astaire,” she muttered as she went past him slowly.

The door closed. Willie practiced dancing up the wall as he'd seen Donald O'Connor do in an old movie. It was hard. He went to his own door, fished around for his key, and let himself in. “I'm home!” he yelled.

“Ter-
rif
-ic,” he heard Emma say from her room in a deep, sour voice. She slammed her door.

He went into the kitchen, started looking for cookies. “Well, if it isn't Bill Robinson.” It was Martha, the maid. She was white and wildly freckled, but Willie liked her. Sometimes she had a sharp tongue that could make him feel like a worm, but she was there to come home to every day, and friendly most of the time.

She gave him a toothy grin. Her teeth stuck out. He
jammed a cookie in his mouth and started tapping down the hall to his room. “Here, now, get this book satchel out of my kitchen.”

He danced back and got it.

“Can't you even say hello?”

He stopped. He usually said hello. I am going to do something, he thought. I don't know what it is that I am going to do, but I am going to do something and I am going to do it soon.

“Hello.” He smiled, then danced out. “Helloooo,” he wailed like a ghost as he ran down the hall.

“Between you tappy-tapping and your sister the district attorney, a person could go starkers around here,” Martha called after him. Martha was always talking to herself. Martha talked all the time, whether there was anybody in the kitchen or not. He closed the door on her voice.

He flung down his briefcase and ate his cookies to a slow soft shoe in front of the mirror. “If Nick were my father” raced through his head and was stopped like a car at a light. A vision of summer stock rose in his mind, as firm and as sweet as the cookies, pictures of him and Dipsey having dinner at four o'clock because they had to go on at eight and it didn't do to be too full when you danced, pictures of backstage, pictures of footlights blinding and—suddenly he saw his father sitting in the audience, ashamed of him.

Emma trudged home heavily, her books seeming to weigh more than the day before. She was having a running argument with herself about the consumption of a cream horn, an additional, unnecessary cream horn, at lunch that day. The argument went through her head like this:

THE STATE OF NEW YORK AGAINST EMANCIPATION SHERIDAN

       
DISTRICT ATTORNEY:
Your name is Emancipation Sheridan, otherwise known to your friends and family as Emma Sheridan?

       
EMMA:
Yes.

       
D.A.:
Yes, sir.

       
EMMA:
Yes, sir.

       
D.A.:
Now, Emma, tell the jury what you had for lunch today.

       
EMMA:
Hot dogs and sauerkraut.

       
D.A.
(snidely):
And what else, Emma?

       
EMMA:
Chocolate milk.

       
D.A.
(insinuating):
And?

       
EMMA
(looking down and whispering):
A roll.

       
D.A.:
Now, Emma, you're evading the question. You realize that you're under oath. Are you going to swear under oath to the honest, upstanding ladies and gentlemen of the jury that that's
all
you had for lunch?

       
EMMA
(whispering even lower):
A cream horn.

       
D.A.:
What? Speak up. We can't hear you.

       
EMMA
(a bit louder):
A cream horn.

       
D.A.
(greatly irritated):
Your honor, will you please direct this witness to answer my questions loudly and clearly so that the court and the jury can understand her?

       
JUDGE:
Miss Sheridan, will you please try to speak up?

       
EMMA:
Yes, sir.

       
JUDGE:
What?

       
EMMA:
Yes, sir.

       
D.A.
(swaggering around):
Now, Miss Sheridan, will you please tell the jury what else you ate for lunch.

       
EMMA:
A cream horn.

       
D.A.
(slyly):
Do you want to leave it at that?

       
EMMA
(yelling):
Oh, all right,
two
cream horns.

Emma almost walked into a parking meter. She stopped herself just in time and trudged along, back in the real world now. Oh, the shame of it. Two cream horns.

Still, when she finally passed her bar exam and she finally had a case and she was cross-examining the school dietitian, it would go like this:

       
EMMA
(prominent young New York trial lawyer):
Did you or did you not put out a tray of forty cream horns—and don't say there weren't forty, because
there were, because I counted them—did you or did you not put that tray out there to tempt and lead astray and in particular to ravage the diet of one Emma Sheridan?

       
DIETITIAN
(meekly):
I did.

       
EMMA:
If it please the court, this witness refuses to speak up and I have failed in all my efforts to get her to speak louder.

       
JUDGE:
We will have no more of that. Dietitian of the Gregory School, you
will
speak up.

Emma gave a smile of satisfaction. She watched the dietitian cringe and wiggle around for a minute, then own up to her crime. Her mother's voice broke through her dream: Just because there were forty, that didn't mean that you had to eat forty, Emma. It didn't mean that you even had to eat
one.

The shame of it. It was nobody's fault but her own that she ate like a horse and looked like a pig, so much so that everybody called her Piggy. At first she hadn't minded. There was a friendly sound to the name. As she got fatter and fatter, however, she realized that there wasn't anything friendly about it. It was merely a descriptive term for that most shameful of all things, a
FATGIRL.

Emma gave a little shudder. Rounding the corner, she saw Willie up the block dancing around the garbage men.

How my father ever thinks he can make a lawyer out of that dancing faggot, I can't imagine. Here I am, with one
of the best legal minds in the state . . . She drifted toward another courtroom scene but was stopped by her rage as she stood like a lump watching Willie shuffle around with the garbage men.

As she watched, Emma was remembering the conversation with her father that had taken place the night before. Mr. Sheridan had been sitting in the living room reading the paper. Mrs. Sheridan was knitting and watching television, with the sound turned so low that Emma could barely hear it even when she was in the room, standing in front of her father's chair.

“May I discuss something with you?” she asked abruptly. Emma had a fairly deep voice. It made almost everything she said abrupt.

Mr. Sheridan put down the newspaper. “Certainly, certainly,” he said jovially. He folded the paper, took his feet off the ottoman, and indicated that she sit down. “What have you got there? History? Algebra?” He was smiling.

“Torts.”

He stopped smiling. He didn't look angry, just paler.

“Have you finished your homework?” he asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“Where did you get this book?”

“From the library.”

“What is your question?”

“In New York State, do you feel there is adequate legal protection of women in cases of rape?”

“Emma!” Mrs. Sheridan put down her knitting.

Mr. Sheridan ignored his wife. “What are you asking?” He looked at Emma.

“The burden of proof seems to be on the woman. She has to have a witness. How many people are going to rape somebody when witnesses are around?”

“That law has been repealed.”

“Oh?”

“Didn't know that, did you?” Mr. Sheridan looked immensely satisfied. “At any rate, there was a good reason for that law. The accusation of rape is very grave. A man is being accused of a heinous crime. It cannot be done lightly.”

“But he'd have to do it in broad daylight in the middle of the street to get enough witnesses to say—Anyway,
rape
is very grave.”

“As I said before, that law has been repealed. Any other questions?” His voice was cold.

“Yes. If a woman is raped by an
FBI
man, does it come under federal law?”

“I don't believe the question has ever come up. You would have to look up the law on that.”

“Thank you.” Emma had said this politely, had picked up her book and thumped away. She had heard her parents' short exchange as she went down the hall to her room.