The club manager is named Mr. Heck. His slogan is “Heck sure runs a heckuva club.” He’s tall and wiry and has a gold tooth that glitters in the light, and he always wears a puff of red silk in the front pocket of his pinstriped suit.
“So long as you’re both older than eighteen, I don’t care,” he says.
“We are,” Rocky lies. “I’m nineteen and my sister is twenty.”
He looks them both up and down. “Don’t look it to me.”
Rocky cups her breasts in both hands and practically shoves them in Mr. Heck’s face. “You ever seen melons like this on somebody under eighteen?”
The manager’s gold tooth sparkles. “Awright, awright, just be here at nine o’clock and I’ll put you on.”
“Thirty dollars?”
“I said twenty-five.”
Rocky glowers in at him. “How can you split twenty-five between two girls? Make it an even thirty. Two tens, two fives, so we can each take our share.”
Heck frowns. “You gonna show some cleavage?”
“Of course,” Rocky says, cupping her breasts again and pushing them in close together.
Regina sees that look in Mr. Heck’s eyes, the kind of look men always get when Rocky makes up her mind to go after them. “Okay,” Mr. Heck says, staring. “Thirty. Just don’t be late.”
At night, even here in the city, Regina still dreams about Papa. She dreams about him all night long, but in the morning, she can’t remember the details of her dreams, which is a good thing, Rocky tells her. In fact, Regina can hardly remember anything about her life before she and Rocky came to the city, even though it’s only been a month. Brown’s Mill is a vague, obscure memory. It’s as if the city, their new home, with all its bleating taxicabs and towering buildings and flashing neon had just rushed right in and filled up her brain, obliterating everything else that had been in there.
Except, of course, when she dreams.
“We’re okay,” Rocky says into the telephone. “Really, Aunt Selma, we’re fine.”
Regina watches as her sister talks to their aunt. They’re standing on the street, using a pay phone, and all sorts of crazy street people are walking past them, singing songs, talking to themselves, trying to beg a couple of nickels.
“No, I am not telling you where we are so that Uncle Axel can come down to get us,” Rocky says. “We’re fine.”
Rocky makes a face, moving her lips to mock Aunt Selma’s scolding voice on the other end of the phone. Regina laughs and covers her mouth with her hand.
“I’ve gotta go now, Aunt Selma. I’ve run out of coins. I just wanted to let you know we’re okay. We’ll send you lots of money when we become famous. See ya!”
She hangs up the phone.
Regina grabs her sister’s arm as they walk down the street, past all the nightclubs and theater marquees. Pert Kelton in Lady Behave. Patty Pope in Slightly Married. Mary Martin in One Touch of Venus.
“Do you think we’ll really become famous?” Regina asks.
“Sure we will,” Rocky says.
“Famous like the Andrews Sisters?”
“Even more.”
“Even more,” Regina breathes.
They had run away on the night of Regina’s fifteenth birthday, just about a month ago, and already they’re getting famous. Mr. Heck put them on the regular bill after they did their tryout and the soldiers started asking when “the little ladies” would be coming back. “Okay, so Friday nights at nine,” Mr. Heck told them. “Don’t be late.”
“Thirty-five dollars,” Rocky insisted.
“What? Who d’you think you are, Maxene and Laverne?”
“You paid us thirty to try us out, now you’ve gotta pay thirty-five to keep us.”
“Go on, get outta here!”
Rocky pulled down her blouse to expose more cleavage. “And what will you have when your GIs start calling for these little ladies?”
“I’m telling you, sister, you better show a lotta tit,” Mr. Heck warned.
“Rocky,” Regina said, after the manager had disappeared, “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“You want to sing, Gina?”
“Yes.”
“You want to stay in the city?”
“Of course.”
“Then you’d better get used to showing some tit, too.”
Regina had blushed deeply. But it was true: she did want to sing. Ever since they were little, the girls have loved to sing. Mama taught them little ditties like “My little baby loves shortnin’, shortnin’, my little baby loves shortnin’ bread.” When Regina was ten and Rocky was nine, Aunt Selma brought them to sing at the Lutheran Church holiday party and everyone had said they had voices so sweet that they had made the Lord very happy. “Yes, Jesus loves me, yes, Jesus loves me, yes, Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so …”
And then they’d sung it in Swedish: “Ja, Jesus ålskar, ja, Jesus ålskar …”
“Get up, Regina. Get up now.”
It’s black. Utter darkness.
They’re back in their room at Papa’s house.
Regina’s having a dream.
“Why?” Her voice sounds strange to her ears, as if she’s underwater. “Rocky, what’s wrong?”
“We’re leaving,” her sister tells her. “I’ve packed your bag. We’re getting out of here.”
Regina looks at herself. She’s not in bed. How long has she been lying here on the floor, curled up into a little ball?
“Where’s Papa?”
“He’s asleep,” Rocky tells her. “Come on.”
“Are we going to Aunt Selma’s and Uncle Axel’s?” Many times before, they’d gone there at times like this, hiking down the long dirt road that led to the farms south of town.
“No,” Rocky says, and her voice is hard. “We’re leaving Brown’s Mill. Forever.”
“Forever?”
“You want to be a singer, don’t you? You want to be as famous as Dinah Shore, don’t you?”
“Now the rain’s a-fallin’, hear the train a-callin’ …” Regina sings.
“Come on, get up.”
Their father is sleeping like a bear on the couch. Earlier there had been a birthday party. Her own, Regina thinks, but she can’t quite remember. Papa had been drinking, and she has an image of a birthday cake smashed on the floor, but she can’t be sure. Now he lies there stretched ungainly across the couch.
“Don’t look, Gina. I want you to forget him. Promise me you’ll forget him.”
“No man will want me now,” Regina says, almost not even sure why she says it.
“I said, forget him, Gina! Forget him!”
Where had Rocky gotten train tickets? And when? Regina doesn’t know. The night is cold and their breath clouds up in front of their faces. On the platform, Regina starts to sing again.
“Hear that lonesome whistle, blowin’ cross the trestle …”
“My Mama done tol’ me,” sing the Gunderson Sisters, “whoo-ee, whoo-ee …”
“Swing it, sister!”
“… there’s blues in the night …”
The soldiers applaud. Hank and Buzz are out front, whistling with their fingers in their mouths. Regina and Rocky take their bows, with Rocky making sure she leans way over so her cleavage is exposed, dark and deep.
It’s time for a break. They wipe off their brows backstage, then sit with the boys at their table. “Hey,” says Hank, shaking his finger at Rocky, “Heck’s gonna have your ass if he sees you drinking scotch.”
“Who says he hasn’t already had her ass?” Buzz cracks.
Rocky throws her drink at him and snaps her fingers at the waitress to order another. Buzz looks crestfallen at his wet uniform but Hank thinks it’s hilarious, cracking up, slapping his thigh.
“Here,” Regina says, offering Buzz her napkin.
“Thanks, Gina,” he says quietly.
“I’ve got Heck eating out of my hand,” Rocky tells them, taking a sip of her newly freshened drink. “I just talked him into g
iving us forty dollars a pop.”
“Next stop, a recording contract from RCA Victor,” says Hank.
“I’m working on it,” Rocky says. “Believe me, I’m working on it.”
Buzz has returned Regina’s napkin to her lap. He lets his hand remain on her knee under the table. She tenses up but doesn’t move. Somehow Rocky can tell what he’s doing. Regina sees the cold glare come into her sister’s eyes.
“Leave her alone, Buzz. I’ve told you. You want something worse than a drink thrown at you?”
Regina feels his hand withdraw.
“Hank and me are going out for a walk,” Rocky says, standing with her soldier beau. “You behave, Buzz, you hear me?”
“Rocky, it’s so cold outside,” Regina says, reaching up to place her hand on her sister’s arm.
“We’ll be in his car,” Rocky tells her.
Buzz snorts.
Regina watches them go, shouldering through the crowd toward the door.
Later, Regina would tell Aunt Selma, “We were almost famous.” Her aunt would just snort. “Really, we were,” Regina insisted. “We were getting more famous every day.”
Aunt Selma glowered at her. “Why did you run away from your father, Regina?”
The question was absurd. Regina couldn’t believe her aunt would ask a question so absurd.
“Because we wanted to be famous,” she said. “We wanted to be singers. And we would have been, too, if—”
If. If what? If what happened to Rocky had never happened? Would they really have gone on to become famous, the way Rocky had predicted? Would they have become world-renowned singers like the Andrews Sisters, or Dinah Shore, or Peggy Lee, or Rosemary Clooney?
“Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me,” the girls had sung, “with anyone else but me, with anyone else but me …”
At night, for the rest of her life, Regina would close her eyes and hear the soldiers cheering for them. The hoots, the hollers, the whistles. She’d remember the lights shining up into their eyes, the pretty dresses they wore, the corsages made out of gardenias that the soldiers gave them. She’d remember the exhilarating taste of scotch whenever she’d sneak a sip of Rocky’s drink.
“What happened to Hank and Buzz?” she would ask Rocky, much later, when the cheering was gone, the pretty dresses a memory, the corsages withered and brown.
“Why are you bringing them up? Are you trying to taunt me, Gina?”
“No, Rocky. Of course I’m not.”
Rocky just stared out the window. “Hank got killed in the war. I don’t know about Buzz. He probably got his arms blown off like that guy in The Best Years of Our Lives.”
“Oh, don’t say that, Rocky.”
But that’s how Regina would always think thereafter of the handsome, redhaired soldier who’d wanted to kiss her so bad: mutilated, armless, his limbs blown off for daring to touch Regina’s skin.
“Gina, you’ve got to help me. I’m hurt.”
It’s Rocky’s voice. Regina wakes to see her sister standing over her.
“What is it, Rocky? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I’m bleeding.”
“Did you cut yourself?”
“No. I’m bleeding down there.”
Regina reaches over and flicks on her lamp. She gasps. Rocky is standing there naked in front of her, a trickle of blood running down the inside of her leg.
“Oh, my God, Rocky!”
Rocky is crying. “I think I’m losing my baby.”
“Tour baby?”
“You’ve got to go down the hall and call Aunt Selma. I don’t want to lose my baby.”
“Your baby? Rocky, what baby?”
“Please, Regina! Call her and ask her what I should do.”
Rocky’s crying like a little girl. But that’s what she is, Regina suddenly thinks. A scared little fourteen-year-old girl with breasts prematurely large and a taste for scotch. Regina wants to wrap her arms around her baby sister and tell her it will all be okay.
But she’s never done anything like that before. Rocky’s always been the one to take care of things, and now Rocky is crying. And bleeding.
“Go call Aunt Selma,” Rocky tells her again.
“She’ll make us come back to Brown’s Mill.”
“No, she won’t. And if she does, it’ll just be for a short while. Please, Regina, hurry! I don’t want to lose my baby!”
So Regina runs. She runs down the hall and places the call to Brown’s Mill.
The next day Uncle Axel is outside their rooming house in his battered old pickup truck stinking of cow manure, waiting to take them home.
“Tonight we have a special surprise,” Mr. Heck had said—when was it? Just two nights before? Just two nights before it all ended, the whole mad crazy adventure of the Gunderson Sisters in the city.
The hoots of the crowd died down. “Miss Regina Gunderson is stepping out,” Mr. Heck said, “just this one time, as a solo. Join me in welcoming the quiet sister, ladies and gentlemen. Regina Gunderson!”
“Go ahead, Gina,” Rocky urged her backstage, as the applause reached a roar. “Go on. Listen to them. They love you!”
“I can’t. I can’t do a solo. Why are you making me? I can’t sing without you.”
“Of course you can. I do it all the time. Go on, Gina. Show ’em what you’ve got.”
Regina had never known such fear. Two days later, all this will be just a memory, a moment in time, as she rattles home in Uncle Axel’s smelly old truck, squished in between him and Rocky, who sniffles all the way back to Brown’s Mill. Why couldn’t Rocky have been stronger? Why couldn’t she have found someone else to help her so they might have stayed in the city? Regina had always thought Rocky was so strong, that she wasn’t scared of anything. But a little trickle of blood and she was terrified. And so they had to go home.
Regina stepped out onto the stage.
“Way to go, baby!” The soldiers whistled, hooted.
She placed her lips close to the microphone.
She began to sing.
“I guess I’ll have …”
Her voice was shaky and off key. She stopped, cleared her throat, and began again. The band restarted with her.
“I guess I’ll have to dream the rest …”
Her voice became fuller, richer, more confident as she went on. The crowd cheered. Buzz winked up at her, lifting his beer to her in salute.
“If you can’t remember the things that you said, the night that my shoulder held your sleepy head …”
Yes, standing there, she was sure of it: she would be famous. Famous like Dinah Shore.
More famous even.
“If you believe that parting’s best …”
The crowd was on its feet.
“I guess I’ll have to dream the rest.”
9
BRINGING THE DIRT
“Over there, Walter. Put it over there.”
He and Dee each have two bags of top soil hoisted over their shoulders. Wally notices the muscles of the boy’s arms, straining against his torn white ribbed tank top as he jostles the bags to keep them from slipping. Strong little monkey, Wally thinks. Meanwhile his mother, even more anxious than before, is directing them to a spot in the backyard beside the poplar trees. She tells them to dump the soil there.
“Here?” Dee asks, grunting under the weight of the bags.
“Yes,” she says. “Next year, I’ll have a rock garden again.”
The boy lets first one bag, then another, fall to the ground.
Wally’s mother is stepping all over the place. “Oh, wait,” she says. “No. Over here more.” She is getting flustered. “No. I mean here.”
Dee sighs and lifts the bags back into his arms. Again Wally notices the sinews of the boy’s back.
“Actually,” Wally’s mother says, reconsidering yet again, “I think … I’m not sure … further over here. It’s over here more.”
“Goddamn it, Mother,” Wally growls. �
��Make up your mind.”
She’s studying the ground carefully, as if she’s looking for something. The grass is sparse and gray here, old earth already hardening for winter.
“I’m sure it was here,” she’s mumbling to herself.
“It was right here, Mother,” Wally tells her, the impatience chipping away at his voice. “Your rock garden. It was right here until you stopped tending to it and let the grass grow over it. Crabgrass crowded out whatever was left. Daffodils and tulips kept pushing up anyway but you had me cut them down with the lawnmower.” He glares at her. “Remember?”
He throws his bags of soil at her feet. He’s pissed at her for making him do this ridiculous errand. Pissed at her for being so crazy. Pissed at her for giving up on her rock garden all those years ago. But most of all he’s pissed at her for making him cut down those plucky flowers that kept on rising through the grass, determined to bloom even if she had stopped tending to them, stopped caring about them, indifferent to their future.
I’m not like him, Mommy. I’m like you.
Watching from a distance away are a dark-haired, wide-eyed girl who clutches her little retarded brother in front of her. Kyle’s girlfriend. Barely out of high school by the look of her. Wally didn’t ask why she was still hanging around. He didn’t want to get dragged into any more of his mother’s life than he already had.
Dee’s opening up the bags of dirt with his hands. “Where do you want it, Mrs. Day?” he asks.
“Oh, spread it out, all over this area,” she says, near tears, wringing her hands. “Just cover this entire area heavy with soil.”
Wally stares over at her. “Mother, this isn’t for any rock garden, is it?”
“Oh, Walter, I almost forgot. There’s one more favor I need.”
“What now?”
“Your Uncle Axel. He’s dying. Would you take me by the hospital so I can say good-bye?”
Wally’s momentarily speechless. “Mother,” he finally says, “you really have lost all sense, haven’t you? I have no desire to go see that goddamn son of a—”
“Here?” Dee is calling, dragging in the last bag of dirt.
“Oh, yes, dear, right there.” Wally’s mother smiles. “What a nice young man, he is, Walter. Is he a friend of yours from the city?”
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