She felt their gazes scrape over her body like a trio of razor blades, peeling away her white Jantzen from the top of its argyle-plumped bosom to the bottom of its modesty-paneled skirt. She gritted her teeth, froze her smile, and stared way, way up at the Ferris wheel. It turned slowly against a sky blackening with carbuncle clouds, lumpy and rumbling with muted thunder.
She looked down. Behind the three huddling judges was Delia, waving at her with her cast, giving her the okay sign with her good hand, thumb and forefinger joined in a circle. Delia—corkscrew curls escaping from a wide headband, soft round bosom mounding over her bathing suit like generous scoops of ice cream over a cone—Delia, Lorena thought, should be up here, not I. And she felt a sudden rush of love for her friend who was smiling and waving bravely, cheering her on.
Lorena’s frozen smile broke into a grin; her whole face beamed and melted. In that instant the three judges looked at Lorena, her eyes soft with affection, her mouth wide with love, and they knew who would be Miss Buckroe Beach of 1938.
When they called her name and she teetered out from the line of girls with their quivering smiles to slide under the shiny redwinner’s sash, her grin was genuine, a twin to the grin of Delia, who stood on tiptoe to applaud, her cast swinging wildly. And when the crown of paste and glitter was placed upon her head, Lorena felt as though time had stopped and she had been transported to another dimension, a realm of singular adoration where she would reign as queen.
Big bullying clouds eclipsed the sun as Lorena shone in all her royal splendor. It took the cosmic crack of thunder to startle her back to reality. Judges and audience disappeared in a rumbling stampede for shelter as a curtain of rain closed the show. Lorena remained alone on the platform, staring numbly at the suddenly vacant arena where just a moment ago she had been the star.
She felt the crown crumble like a cookie in her hair, now streaming water and sticking to her face. She looked down and thought she was bleeding. The red sash hung limply from one shoulder, the color leaching onto her new white bathing suit, mottling it with pink. The argyle socks bunched into multicolored lumps visible through the soaked-through fabric of the suit. Her golden moment had been reduced to a flash of glory, now just a memory seen through mascara-tarnished tears.
Later that summer, she relived her crowning moment when she saw The Wizard of Oz. Forever after, she identified with the good witch Glinda, who, glitter crown and all, ascended to the heavens in a bubble. In the theater, Lorena wept as she longed to recapture that feeling of enchantment, that magical moment that had eluded her ever since.
LORENA PULLS THE blanket over her head, blocking out the light from Pete’s side of the bed. He’s studying a worn newspaper clipping he keeps in his night-table drawer. He takes it out sometimes when he’s feeling blue, rereads the account of the home run he hit during his junior year of high school, the bases-loaded run that won the league championship. Lucky hit, he once confessed to Lorena. Lucky hit. Never got a hit before, usually warmed thebench, but for some reason the coach put him in that day and pow, he smacked it right into the stands.
Never did that again. But there was the proof he did do it once, right there in the paper, Palmer drives in winning run. His picture, too, sliding into home, kinda cute he was, straining, tongue out to one side, legs reaching like a pair of tongs for the plate. He didn’t have to slide, he told Lorena when he first showed her the clipping. It being a home run he coulda just trotted in, but when he heard the crowd’s cheers he got so excited he just slud in there, riding in on a red cloud of dust.
Never got another hit. The next few times he got up to bat he was so nervous he whiffed, swung so hard he spun. The coach had mercy and put him back on the bench. He didn’t even go out for the team his senior year. He could tell his daddy was disappointed he was just a one-shot fluke, but, he told Lorena, “Like my daddy said, You can’t make a living offa baseball anyway. He said anybody can hit a ball, but there’s only a few of us strong enough and brave enough to weld a big ol’ hunka metal into a ship that floats.”
So Pete started hanging out at the shipyard after school, rode up on the elevator behind his daddy like a shadow, not really all that scared, not really, the side of the ship dropping sheer as a cliff beneath them. He’d stand off at a safe distance on the metal grid of the platform, watch his daddy clamp on his face shield, pull on his leather gloves, then hook the torch up to the generator chugging and panting like some prehistoric beast.
His daddy pulled a stick from the bunch of electrodes stuck in the back pocket of his coveralls, clamped it into the torch, and lit it with a striker. Pete knew at the sudden hiss to look away. The blue flame touched steel, exploded into a blinding shower of sparks that filled the sky with a thousand stars too bright for unshielded eyes. Metal joined metal until it all flowed sweet and pure, a river of steel that glittered bright as silver in the sunlight.
The first time his daddy let him use the torch, Pete almost passed out, he confessed to Lorena. His daddy thought it wasfrom the excitement. Pete wasn’t sure himself, but from the moment the helmet was placed on his head and tightened with a twist of a knob, he felt funny. He pulled on the gauntlet gloves and leather bib, flipped the face shield down with a jerk of his head like he saw his daddy do.
Then his daddy fired up the torch. It looked like a green tornado through the black glass window of the face shield. Pete touched the flame to steel. He didn’t know if it was the rush of heavy metal fumes trapped beneath the face shield or the banging, clanging noise of the generator that swelled between his ears, but he felt himself grow giddy, then dizzy, then felt the cold metal grid of the platform pressing into his knees.
“You’ll get used to it, kid,” his daddy had said as he helped him up, and his daddy was right. Once he had the proper training, he did get used to it, but he never felt he came close to his daddy’s talent.
“He was an artist, my daddy was,” Pete would tell Lorena. “He loved what he did. That’s why I know he died happy.”
Lorena didn’t know how anybody who fell ten stories off a platform to land headfirst in a slipway could be said to die happy. Every time Pete retells the story of his daddy’s skill and daring, and then the accident, she says the same thing she said the first time she heard it, shortly after they met: “How do you know he was happy?” And every time she asks that, his answer is the same: stony silence.
She figures Pete’s silence is a manly trait, a stoic acceptance that the possibility of stepping into air off a very high place is real but worth it when your work is noble and true. But Lorena has noticed that Pete’s pride in his job has soured. He’s been coming home from work all crabby, grumping about his new foreman, talking about how the shipyard has changed now that Korea’s over and done with, studying the editorials in the Daily Press about how there might be layoffs.
“How we gonna protect ourselves from the Commies,” he wants to know, “if all we build is ocean liners like that S.S. United
States? S.S.,” he snorts. “That stands for sissy ships. Sissy ships for fancy people.”
Sure, they’re still building aircraft carriers like the Forrestal, and don’t think he’s not proud to be part of that, part of creating what’s going to be the biggest warship in the world, but then what? There’s talk of layoffs, too many workers, not enough work. Not that he’s worried they’ll lay him off, he’s proven his skill, his value, his loyalty. It’s clear he’d give his life for the shipyard, just like his daddy did.
But these days, when he talks about the shipyard, he seems deflated, like some of his innards were sucked out. Sometimes, Lorena thinks, Pete seems shorter at the end of the day than he was when he left for work.
Aside from Pete’s problems at work, they hardly talk about what they’ve done all day. Used to be, when they were first married, they’d share silly stories about things that happened and people they knew, but now all they talk about is what’s on TV. Pete never asks about what she’s thinking or doing. He doesn’t know that
Lorena tried out for the Community Theater and didn’t make it. He doesn’t even know she has a tap costume.
Well, she thinks, maybe she can perk him up by telling him about her plans. After all, Binky was interested, even offered to introduce her to his cousin Wally the talent scout. Surely her own husband would want to know about her new ambition. She’d leave out the part about Binky and Wally.
“You know,” she begins, “I think I can make a career with my talent.”
“Talent?”
“I dance, remember?” She pouts. “Don’t you remember how much I like to dance?”
He shrugs. “So? I like to eat. I’m not making a career of it.”
“Well,” she says, ignoring that. “I’ve been getting up a routine. So I can try out for Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” Excited now, she goes to the closet and pulls out her costume and tap
shoes. “Don’tcha love this?” she says, holding the red satin tap pants and tuxedo top up to her body, turning this way and that.
Pete blinks. “Where do you think you’re going to wear that?”
“For my audition, silly.” She feels flirtatious now. Just the sight of the flippy pants puts her in a dancing mood. “Wanna see my routine?”
“No. No, I do not want to see your routine.” He falls silent, scrutinizes her as if she were a mutant. “You’re nuts,” he concludes. “I don’t know what’s happened to you lately, but I swear you’re getting as crazy as your aunt Lula.”
“Crazy? Because I have plans? Lula didn’t have plans. She just saw things that weren’t there, flying saucers, stuff like that. That’s different.”
“Crazy is crazy. Lula. You. Sometimes I think your whole family is nuts.”
“Are you calling my mother a nut?”
“You’re all a buncha nuts.”
Lorena slams the bedroom door, takes her costume to the bathroom. The silky slide of the tap pants soothes her as they shimmy over her hips; the crisp tuxedo top makes her feel perky and proud. She stares at herself in the mirror, adjusts the top hat to a sassy tilt.
She’ll show him. Crazy? Nuts? Someday he’ll eat those words.
11
CASSIE
MISS FRITZI WAS once a Rockette. There’s a picture of her in a long line with other Rockettes on the wall of her dance studio, kicking really high like the June Taylor dancers. The Rockettes all look alike with tall fluffy feathers sticking up out of these sparkly caps they wear, so Miss Fritzi put a big red arrow pointing to herself in the picture so you’d know which one she was. She’s about halfway up the line that goes from the stubbiest Rockette to the real tall one in the center.
She’s not a Rockette anymore because she got married. Her husband is an officer stationed at Fort Eustis. Mom said, “Can you believe she gave up dancing in Radio City Music Hall to get married?” Sometimes I think Miss Fritzi feels the same way.
Like today. She has us all in a row and she’s demonstrating a new step. “Cassie,” she chirps in her parakeet voice, “wake up!” because it’s my turn and I’m looking out the window thinking about stuff.
“I’m up,” I say, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, so
Miss Fritzi shows me, hop-shuffle-hop-step-heel-toe, but my tap shoes won’t do that, they feel heavy and clunky like my feet belong to somebody else. The tops of Miss Fritzi’s ears go purple, which happens when she gets upset.
“You must pay attention,” she peeps. “Think of dancing as teamwork. Now,” she says, shaking herself like a ruffled-up bird that’s smoothing its feathers, “all together now, and a one-and-a-two-and-a-hop-shuffle-hop-step-heel-toe.”
The other five girls do that, sort of, but I’m a step behind because I watch to see what Melanie, the girl next to me does, and then I do it. “Cassie,” Miss Fritzi caws, really frazzled now, “if you don’t pay attention, you won’t be ready for recital.”
Recital?
“You mean we have to do this in front of people?” I ask.
The girls in line with me twitter nervously except for Melanie, who wears her hair like Miss Fritzi, pulled back into a tight bun like a ballerina. “We get to wear costumes,” Melanie announces. “Flower costumes.”
Not me.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Well, of course you can.” Miss Fritzi’s shoes tap impatiently on the scarred wooden floor. “Everybody gets to wear a costume.”
“I want to be a rose,” says Melanie.
“I don’t want to be anything,” I say.
Miss Fritzi holds her head with both hands like it’s going to come off. “Please God not now,” she says to the ceiling. To me she says, “Your mother has already paid for your costume.” She leans her birdy body over my head. I can hear her teeth scritching together. “All you have to do is … dance.” The word comes out like a squawk. Day-ance.
So I dance. One step behind Melanie, shuffle-hop-step, I dance without caring because it’s my very last dance. I won’t be a rose, I won’t be a dope. And now I know for sure that I won’t be back.
I STARE OUT the open window of the bus as it carries me home, away from Miss Fritzi and Melanie and dancing forever. The window rattles like maybe it’ll clonk down any second on my elbow but I don’t care because if it breaks my arm it’ll be a perfect excuse to never dance again.
The bus is hot. The black plastic seat is torn and itchy and sticks to my skin. I’m sitting right behind the bus driver, looking at the dark splotch of sweat on the back of his gray bus-driver shirt. I can see his eyes in the mirror above him, just his eyes, nothing else, sly and shadowy. Every now and then they look at me.
Usually I sit in the back of the bus when I ride to school with Molly, even though that’s where the colored people sit. We like to ride there because it’s fun to kneel on the long backseat and make faces out the rear window at the cars behind us. One day Molly asked, “Why can’t the colored people sit up front?” I had never thought about that before but after that I thought about it a lot.
Even when the bus isn’t crowded, colored people have to scrunch together in the back seats. Like now, the front of the bus is pretty empty, just me and a couple of ladies in flowered dresses carrying shopping bags from Nachman’s and this old guy who’s sleeping. But in the back the seats are full, mostly colored ladies who must be maids. Once when the back of the bus was really full, I saw a colored lady standing up, so I pointed at the empty seat next to me for her to sit down and she just looked at me funny, shook her head no, and watched the ceiling of the bus the rest of the way.
Something else I don’t understand is why colored kids go to a different school. I never thought much about that, either, even though our bus passes right by their school on the way to ours. I used to look out the window at the colored kids walking to school, wonder things like How did the girls get their hair allbraided like that, what kind of houses did they live in over in colored town, did they have to list the products of Brazil like we did in geography, stuff like that.
Then one day Molly asked, “How come they go to a school that’s closer to where we live, and we go a school that’s closer to them?” And then I started thinking, Yeah. Why is that? Molly said that in New York, colored and white kids are allowed to go to the same school. Of course, I wouldn’t want to go to their school, being as how it’s all falling apart. It’s just this old wood building with broken windows and flaky paint, instead of brick like ours.
When I asked Mom why we go to a different school from the colored kids, she said, Well, it’s the law. That’s the way things have always been, and that’s just the way things are. But a couple of weeks ago I saw on test-pattern TV where the Supreme Court made a new law that said white and colored kids were going to have to go to school together. When I mentioned it to Mr. Finkelstein, he looked surprised and said, Well, it’s about time, but then he asked How did I know that? because he hadn’t heard it on TV or read it in the paper. When I told him I saw it on the test pattern, he looked at me funny like he did when I told him abou
t the Los Angeles Dodgers.
And then yesterday it was big news on regular TV: the Supreme Court said that from now on we’d go to school with colored kids, and it was the law of the land. I asked Dad if that meant I’d have to go to that broken-down old colored school, and he said, “No way is that ever going to happen.” And Mom agreed with him for once. I didn’t even try to tell them about the colored guy I saw on the test pattern who is running for president.
Late last night I saw on the test pattern that a bunch of colored kids were trying to go to a white school in this town called Little Rock. I remembered the name because the white people there were throwing rocks at the colored kids. When I told Mom that it was true about colored and white going to the same school, that there were even soldiers with bayonets to protect the colored kids, she looked at me like I was crazy and said I was making it up. She thinks I make everything up. She never listens when I try to tell her things.
She doesn’t listen when I tell her I hate dance class, that I don’t want to dance in front of everybody, and that I want to quit. She just says I can’t because “I already paid for your lessons through June and I paid for your costume for the recital and you are not quitting.” When I ask for a real reason, she tells me the same thing she said when I asked why colored kids have to go to a different school: “That’s just the way things are.”
But now I know that just because she says it, it doesn’t mean it’s true. There’s no law that says I have to dance, or wear a flower costume, or make a fool of myself in front of people again. It’s not the way things are.
12
LORENA
PETE IS BURNING the hot dogs. He always burns the hot dogs but he doesn’t care because that’s the way he likes them, coal black and splitting on the outside, pink and frigid on the inside. Nobody wants to eat them, but since he’s in charge of cooking the dogs for Cassie’s birthday party, there isn’t much choice. He’s planned Cassie’s birthdays since her first one, when his mother baked the cake and he dressed up like a clown. One of their few family rituals, Pete’s beloved, silly clown had made its appearance every year until this one.
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