Sacred Time (3 page)

Great-Aunt Camilla's pool was in the basement, across the hall from the trash room, and the lockers were rusty and stank of chlorine and rotting swimsuits that people had forgotten. Riptide and I would dive into the murky green water, chase each other's toes, shriek with joy when we'd startle each other by surfacing unexpectedly.

My father laughed when I figured out one day that, by swimming one mile a day, Riptide could swim to Italy in nine years.

“She's the kind of woman who might just do that,” my mother said.

“I'd rather take an ocean liner,” Great-Aunt Camilla said.

Now and then Great-Aunt Camilla and Mrs. Feinstein would join us in their pool and swim like real grown-ups, their bodies long and narrow, so that they looked more like sisters than Riptide and Great-Aunt Camilla. Together, they'd do smooth and fast laps at the far side of the pool so that our splashing wouldn't frizz their curls.

I'd try to prolong our swim because I dreaded the men's locker room, where roaches and silverfish scurried when you turned on the light. According to Mrs. Feinstein, silverfish ate anything, even the glue in book bindings; and she'd point out dead silverfish in the light of her elevator when we took it up to the apartment for lunch.

The brim of my father's hat filled the rearview mirror. “At least instruct me how I am depriving my own and getting my feet wet at the same time, Leonora. Have you and the boy ever gone hungry? Without coats? Without crossword puzzles, God forbid?”

“Without the damn car heater.”

I tugged the brim of my hat forward, then back. Forward again. Still, its rustling against my ears was not enough to smother my parents quarrel. They often fought about money. About not being poor. About not looking poor. Which meant keeping things clean and mended, saving scraps of leftovers for another day.

“I said I'll get the heater fixed.”

“When?”

“When, she wants to know.”

“Don't talk about me in the third person.”

“Sorry.”

I wound a piece of wilted lettuce around a button of my wool coat. We always had a few lettuce leaves or shriveled string beans on the seats, since my father used the Studebaker to transport crates with carrots and beets and lettuce and beans from the Bronx Terminal Market to Festa Liguria on East Tremont Avenue.

“People can get frostbite in this car.” When my mother raised her thin shoulders, her back seemed half the width of my father's.

“I'll get the heater fixed once those chiropractors pay me for their convention.”

“I rest my case.”

“A lawyer in the family. All our troubles are over now.”

“I promise not to use much of the wax,” I said.

Why did the grown-ups always get to decide what was bought? Why should a car heater be more important than a stencil kit? Or a frying pan when the old one wasn't broken? I folded my hands and prayed to St. Anthony, my namesake saint, to let me live with the television girl and her parents. They never argued. I pictured the glass-wax girl, the glass-wax mother on the screen,
shown from outside their window as they decorate it while someone high up in a tree—maybe an angel—is pointing a camera at them. In their living room is a fireplace, ready for Santa to arrive.

“We don't even have a fireplace,” I said.

“Santa knows the route down our fire escape.” My mother drummed the tip of her silver crossword pencil against her front teeth. “Light. Seven letters. A word for light…”

“I don't enjoy fighting with you,” my father said.

“Now you want to fight and enjoy it, too?”

He let out an exasperated laugh.

I pulled off my itchy wool mittens and let them dangle from my sleeves on the cord Riptide Grandma had crocheted between them. The last time I'd heard my father laugh like that was when my mother had wanted to yank me out of Catholic school. She said it was bad practice to mix religion and school. But my father and grandparents said the nuns gave a better education, and I wanted to stay at St. Simon Stock because Kevin and my other friends were there.

Though I was sure I'd filled Frogman's leg with baking soda, I popped the metal cap off his leg. Some days, being sure only meant you had to double-check, because if you didn't, everything else would come undone. And I wanted to show my cousins how Frogman swam up and down when baking soda bubbled into water.

“Seven letters. Glow…too short.” My mother reached up to fluff the speckled feathers on her red hat.

“Are you quite settled?” my father asked.

“Flicker…No, the fourth letter has to be
M.
…”

“If my sister hadn't married Malcolm,” my father said, “we wouldn't even know the bastard.”

I sat there, stunned, and for years from then on I would believe that—without marriage—men simply were not there. My father certainly proved that, because my mother kept him real during his absences by cooking his favorite meals, washing and ironing and mending his clothes, and, above all, talking about him when she picked me up from St. Simon's after school, so that, when my father came home at night, I'd feel surprised he'd been away at all because all day he'd felt nearby. Women were there without marriage, even Great-Aunt Camilla, who didn't have a husband. Women I saw all the time. In my mother's kitchen; at the beauty parlor, where the stink of permanents tickled my nostrils; at the Hebrew National Deli; at Joy Drugs; or in Ce'Bon, where a sprayer above the window filled the air with perfume. But men I only encountered when they were married to women I knew. What would happen if I couldn't get someone to marry me? Would I just disappear? And where would I be then?

I sat up tall. “Can I marry the twins?”

My mother turned and smiled at me as if I were still in first grade. “Both of them?”

“Maybe just Bianca. Belinda is funny, but I don't like her ugly boogers.”

“I have asked you not to say ‘ugly boogers,'” my father said, though he, too, knew to get away from Belinda when she sneezed because chunks of snot burst from her. “It is called a sinus problem.”

“Marrying one's cousin is not a good idea,” my mother said.

But if I married Bianca, she would have to let me wear her Superman cape. She used to leap off furniture with a bedsheet knotted around her neck, shouting, “Suuu-per-mannnn,” until Aunt Floria sewed a cape from satin remnants with straps for Bianca's arms to fit through so she wouldn't strangle herself.

“Why is it not a good idea to marry a cousin?”

“Last week you wanted to be a bishop,” my father reminded me.

“I can be a bishop first and then get married.”

“You can't do both.”

“Besides,” my mother added, “you're too young to think about marriage.”

My father slowed our car at the corner of Southern Boulevard, where the orange roof of the Howard Johnson glistened in the downpour, and the neon boy pointed to the tray of neon pies that the neon pieman offered him.

“Twenty-eight flavors,” I read aloud.

“Always out of season,” my mother said.

“Coffee is their most disgusting flavor.” Whenever we went there, they'd just have vanilla, chocolate, coffee, and strawberry. Any other flavor we'd ask for was out of season.

“It's disgusting, all right.”

My father glanced at her. “Malcolm probably considered those stamps another fringe benefit.”

Fringe was the slinky stuff around the edges of my Ossining Grandma's piano shawl. She was my mom's mother. Rough and loving, she was sorry as soon as she slapped me or yelled at me, and she'd pull me into her arms; but it was the sting of her palm that lasted—not the kiss on my forehead. We didn't see her often, but when we did, I liked driving past Sing Sing, where my Ossining Grandpa had worked as a guard till he died from a burst appendix when my mother was ten. My Ossining Grandma prayed a lot for her dead husband. Each prayer, she said, was a parking voucher for God. She got one extra parking voucher for each votive candle she burned in the red glass by the picture of Mother Cabrini, a new saint who got to be a saint by working with emigrants from Italy.

But ever since last summer, my parents hadn't driven past Sing Sing. Because of the Rosenbergs, my mother said. She felt sorry for the Rosenbergs' little boys, who were orphans now. “I'm not that sure the Rosenbergs really were Russian spies,” she'd say. “The one thing I
am
sure of is that McCarthy is a liar, a bully. Even President Eisenhower is scared of him.”

“Malcolm considers the world his very own fringe benefit,” my father said.

I couldn't imagine the world with a fringe. My second-grade teacher, Sister Lucille, had a map of the world above the boys' coat rack, and my hook was beneath Africa, with the most crosses for missions. During one of our air-raid drills, Maria Donez had cried, and Sister Lucille had told us Maria was sad because her family was going home to Guatemala. I forgot the name of her country, and when I told my mother that Maria was going back to Palmolive, she said Palmolive was soap, not a country. The following morning I'd asked Sister and she'd shown me Guatemala on her map.

“What's fringe benefit?” I asked my parents.

“Remember now, Anthony—” my father said, “—whatever the Amedeo family talks about in the car, stays in the car. And whatever the Amedeo family talks about in the house, stays in the house.”

I mouthed the words along with him. I certainly heard them often enough.

“Fringe benefits,” my mother explained, “is what people get in addition to their pay when they work. Like vacations. Or paid holidays.”

“Or stamps?”

“Never stamps. Never office equipment. Never tires or—”

“And never shingles?”

She started coughing, but it sounded fake.

“You're fake-coughing,” I said. “You're really laughing.”

She winked at me.

“Didn't I tell you the boy hears too much?” my father asked.

My mother leaned toward him to whisper into his ear, her lips as red as her hat.

Last summer Uncle Malcolm had been in trouble—“deep-shit trouble,” my mother had called it—for selling a shipment of asbestos shingles he'd stolen from Quality Roofing, where he worked. The two brothers who owned Quality had waited for him one evening after dark in an alley off Webster Avenue, near Papa John's Diner. Both arms and hands in casts, Uncle Malcolm did much of his healing on the striped couch, opening his mouth for the pasta e fagioli and linguine that Aunt Floria fed him fork by fork, hunkering over him like a black-feathered mother bird.

One Sunday, while we visited, he made the twins stand in front of the couch and hold his bulky accordion between them. It glittered like the mother-of-pearl crucifix that Kevin's father had tied to the rearview mirror of his cab. Kevin's father used to drive a bus until he was blacklisted.

“Those Quality crooks stole the music away from your dear papa,” Uncle Malcolm said. “Forever. Now the accordion is your legacy, girls.” Usually he talked like the rest of us, but when he got dramatic, his British accent expanded, though he'd left England when he was sixteen and got fired from his apprenticeship with a roofing company.