Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m throwing up.”

  “Come right home.”

  “If I can. I swear. I was over the shaft myself.”

  “Just come home. Please don’t drink.”

  “Right away.”

  He hung up and grabbed for the bottle. He was elated that he was out of trouble with her. As he drank the Jim Beam, he thought of Eddie Meagher. I’m sorry, but I needed you.

  She opened the door with wide, worried eyes. He went into his shirt pocket for the piece of muscovite and handed it to her.

  “That’s beautiful,” she said.

  “Hold it up.”

  She murmured as she looked through it.

  “That’s stone,” Owney said.

  “It’s the same as stained glass.”

  “That’s exactly what they used to do in Moscow. They put it in the church windows. While I was driving here, I was thinking of how you’d look standing in light from a window like that. You’d look beautiful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Standing in church in faint light.”

  “What was I doing in church?” she asked.

  “Praying. You looked beautiful.”

  “And what was the occasion?”

  “You were getting married to me,”

  When he got out of the shower, she said to him. “Are you all right?”

  “Unnerved.”

  There was something about the way he said the word that caused her eyes to change from open sympathy to inquisitive. She looked at the pouchiness of his eyes. The shower had not taken the weight out of his eyelids.

  When he fell asleep, she took the baby over to her mother’s.

  6

  I JUST HEARD THEM talking about it by the wallpaper store,” Aunt Grace said.

  “Oh, it was on the television last night,” Dolores’s mother said.

  “Imagine putting a subway station in this neighborhood?” Aunt Grace said. “I said to myself, I swear on God, I don’t believe this.”

  “You didn’t see any of it on the news?”

  “I never watch the news. I just told you, I heard them talking in the wallpaper store.”

  “You should keep up with the news.”

  “All they got on television is a big black man telling you about car accidents.”

  Dolores fidgeted with the usual mixture of embarrassment, resignation, and guilt. She sat in her aunt’s kitchen and looked through its open door and through the open door of her mother’s apartment across the hall and saw her baby, who was asleep in a playpen on the kitchen floor. Among those things with which she had been forced to live, and which she swore to her soul that her child never would know, was the amount of inexperience that caused this sort of conversation.

  Because now her mother said, adding to the discomfort, “I guess they got a lot of them on television.”

  “I’m looking this one night,” Aunt Grace said, “and here they have this Black Muslim or something talking to this pretty girl that does the Channel Five news. You should have seen him leering at her like she was stark bare naked. I said to myself, I swear on God, somebody should be there, put handcuffs on this big Muslim because any second, he’s going to molest her. Really molest her right on television. Then you know what he does? He turns around and starts to give the weather.”

  “I bet you he said a storm was coming,” Dolores’s mother said.

  “Ma!” Dolores said. “Now that sounds really stupid.”

  “I guess you’re right,” the mother said. “I was trying to be funny.”

  “You sounded about as dumb as you can get.”

  “Any dumber than putting a subway stop in Glendale?” Aunt Grace said.

  Dolores stood up and went to the stove. “Putting a subway stop out here wouldn’t help us? Want coffee?”

  “I do, but don’t give me so much milk this time. I don’t want any subway in my Glendale,” the mother said.

  “Give me, too,” Aunt Grace said. “Nice cup of coffee. Course, no subway is going to do anything but ruin the lives of the people living around here.”

  “Putting a subway here wouldn’t help us?” Dolores repeated.

  “It would help me get to Boynton Beach, Florida,” Aunt Grace said. “I’d go live there by Jewel Feeney. She says in the supermarket in the shopping center they let you push the cart all the way out to the car. You just leave it there in the parking lot and a boy comes running out of the store and takes it back into the supermarket. They don’t let you do that in the Pathmark on Myrtle Avenue. They got concentration camp poles sticking up so you can’t push the basket outside. I don’t have to tell you, that’s all I need to put me in Boynton Beach, Florida. A subway stop to Glendale. You’ll see my shopping cart sitting out there in the sun, all right.”

  “Where does that leave me?” Dolores said. “I have to take two buses to get to the Eighth Avenue line.”

  “Well, you can just imagine what comes up the subway steps if we ever got a station here,” Aunt Grace said.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Dolores’s mother said.

  “You’re waiting at the top of the stairs for your husband and all of a sudd——”

  “The two of us wish we had husbands. See what I’m saying, Dolores?” Her mother’s chin stuck out smugly.

  “I’m going to go out buy a husband when I go to the store,” Aunt Grace said.

  “You’ll find the shelf empty,” Dolores’s mother said.

  “So I’ll come home with Clorox again. I’m saying that you’re standing there looking down the steps, the whole thing at the bottom as dark as the ace of spades, and you hear somebody coming up and you’re waiting to see the husband and here it comes. The ace of spades himself!”

  As this form of conversation had been a part of Glendale life since Dolores was old enough to understand what she was hearing, she attempted to change neither direction nor focus. In the life surrounding Dolores, the language of Glendale women as they ruminated in front of the television set usually approximated that of cave women before an afternoon fire. It was only when the talk of the feared and frightful blacks came up that the women of Glendale demonstrated that they were so consumed by the subject that their vocabulary bristled rather than bored. Beyond the streets of Glendale, Dolores knew, her mother thought that Martin Luther King was fine and so was Muhammad Ali, although Aunt Grace never would call the fighter anything but Cassius Clay. The two women, her mother and aunt, also liked Sammy Davis, Jr., on the Tonight Show and Harry Belafonte, as long as he just sang. Dolores’s mother did not like Autherine Lucy because she showed up to integrate the University of Alabama while wearing a fur coat.

  Dolores always felt guilty while she listened to them, as she was of the younger years, although she was not ready to depart from the white centuries of her past and move in next door to an apartment house full of them, with the men in undershirts sitting on car fenders and the women leaning out the windows and the young boys walking around in unlaced sneakers, the idleness in their faces more prominent than their nose widths; that was the thing to fear, their not working. Perhaps if they all had jobs it would be a horse of a different color—aha, that sounds like my aunt Grace—but they don’t and I can’t fix that for everyone. The sandhogs give them jobs; I don’t know what else I can do. Still, out of some duty to her age and the future, she told these two women at the table, whose vision had extended to what they thought was the fullest upon their respective thirtieth birthdays, all that she felt she could pack together at the moment:

  “Ma.” She said it in a firm, sour voice.

  “Oh, no,” her mother said. “What’s right is right. If they put a subway car out here in our neighborhood, all they have to do in Harlem is get on it like it’s a train to Heaven and ride until the station says Glendale. Walk right up the stairs.”

  “Put the station right by Sacred Heart,” Aunt Grace said.

  “That’s right.”

  “At least you could
look at the church, remind yourself to pray for your life,” Aunt Grace said.

  Dolores stood up and decided to walk across the hall to her mother’s apartment to check on the baby as a pretext for leaving the table when there was the sound of slippers shuffling in the hallway and Aunt Grace’s daughter, Virginia, walked in. A cigarette hung from her thin lips. She bent over the stove and lit the cigarette on a burner. Then she poured a cup of coffee.

  “What’s it like out?”

  “Going to be warm,” Dolores said.

  “You leaving the baby here?”

  “For a while.”

  “Maybe I’ll help mind her. I got the week off. Got nothing to do today, really.”

  Aunt Grace said, “My daughter could use a rest. She made out a cable the other day for you know how much? A hundred million dollars. It was a loan to Argentina. She knew that because that’s what she had to type.”

  Dolores’s mother blessed herself. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, to think of that kind of money.”

  The aunt said, “You know what else they got? They got a good cafeteria.”

  “You could meet a lot of people there?” Dolores’s mother said.

  “She better,” Aunt Grace said.

  “Four of us sitting here in a kitchen with nobody,” Dolores’s mother said.

  “Not Dolores,” Virginia said.

  “She’s trying,” Dolores’s mother said. “She got a husband, now she says she don’t like him anymore.”

  “Ma!”

  “That’s what you tell me,” the mother said.

  “You and Owney fighting?” Virginia said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Dolores said. “I’d rather talk about the subway.”

  “Owney didn’t even come home for two straight nights,” her mother said.

  “Whose fault is that?” Dolores said.

  “He didn’t come home.”

  “I kept him out of the house?”

  “You tell me he didn’t come. The wife’s responsibility, keep a nice house, have the man there.”

  “That’s insanity.”

  “I don’t call it that.”

  “I’d rather work in a knitting mill than live like you say.”

  “You could get a job in my place,” Virginia said.

  “As what?”

  “In my section. Federal funds section.”

  “Sounds all right to me,” Dolores said.

  “Bite your tongue,” her mother said.

  “What’s the matter with where I work?” Virginia said.

  “Nothing. But she don’t work anymore. She got a husband and a baby to take care of. You better go to your cafeteria at work and get yourself the same thing.”

  “I’ll say,” Aunt Grace said.

  “Get yourself what, a husband doesn’t come at night?” Dolores said.

  “All I know,” her mother said, “was I went away on a honeymoon and all I did was cry I missed my family. My sister-in-law heard about it, she said, ‘You must hate my brother. I’m going to tell him to leave you.’ That stopped my crying.”

  Virginia watched the smoke she exhaled as it lazed in the sunlight coming through the kitchen windows. “You’re probably right,” she said.

  “You bet I’m right,” Dolores’s mother said.

  “Cafeteria,” Virginia said as much to herself as to anyone in the room.

  “It’s on the same floor where she works,” Aunt Grace said. “Doesn’t even have to go on the elevator.”

  “It’s great,” Virginia said slowly.

  “Rains, don’t even get her clothes wet.”

  “One guy in the cafeteria since I’ve been there,” Virginia said, “he sat with me at lunch a couple of times. I made sure he wasn’t married. That’s all we got around the rest of the place, married men looking to take you out. Well, this one wasn’t married. He sat with me at lunch a couple of times. One day he said, ‘Aren’t you tired of eating here?’ I wanted to say, ‘Not as long as you keep showing up.’ Then I thought about it and I told myself, Go ahead, Virginia, and I said to him, ‘It’s no fun with every day the same. Why don’t you do something about it?’ So he says, ‘Tomorrow, we’ll go out for Chinese.’ I was up six o’clock in the morning getting dressed. I tried on five tops until I felt good in my new blue top from Ohrbach’s. I got to work and I’m at my desk, right in my federal funds section, and I don’t see him all morning. I go looking for him when the coffee wagon comes around; they don’t have the cafeteria open until lunchtime and they send a wagon around with the coffee. Well, I look for him by the coffee wagon. Nothing. By lunchtime, I’m so aggravated, the papers are rattling in my hands. He doesn’t come. What do I do? I go out for a walk at lunch, instead of eating in. Like a klutz, I go right past the China Song on Nassau Street. Here he is sitting right inside the door with this girl from the trust division, up on the thirty-second floor. They’re lookin’ at menus so they can order. If you want to know why I took this week off from work, that’s why.”

  “You hear that?” her mother said to Dolores.

  “What’s that supposed to mean to me?”

  “Of all people, you should know that a baby needs a mother and father. I don’t know what would have happened to you if your father didn’t come along and pick you up when the people that really had you, the real parents if that’s what you call them, whatever kind of people they were, walked off on you.”

  “I never thought of that,” Dolores said dryly.

  Her mother walked her downstairs. On the stoop, as Dolores was about to leave, the mother turned around and inspected the front door. The two glass panels, polished furiously with vinegar, blazed in the sunlight. The twin window shades were drawn evenly; a difference of half an inch would have sent the mother into the vestibule with a ruler.

  The yellow brick six-family house, three stories high, was attached to identical yellow brick houses that ran the length of the Queens street. The opposite side of the street was the same: the same stoops, with the same black railings leading up to the same polished glass doors. The houses were old, but had been built with buttered bricks—the mortar slapped on each brick as if it were toast being buttered—and with the bricks baked to order on the street in front of the houses as they were being built. Brickwork now is done with premixed mortar that is slapped into a common ditch, three-eighths of an inch thick, between rows of unbuttered bricks; a driving rainstorm hitting new houses leaves the sidewalks covered with pieces of mortar washed out from between the bricks. Watching the houses as she walked past them, Dolores wondered if her life would take on the sameness of the houses.

  He stood in the doorway and smiled as he watched the baby. A Glendale housewife’s eye knew that a man who gazes away from his baby, or if he does watch, does so with the body fidgeting, is someone who feels deprived and jealous. Owney looked steadily at the baby. Smiling, he seemed unaware of anything else.

  “Owney.” Dolores stood next to him.

  “Yeah.” He kept looking at his daughter.

  “How could you go out and forget her two whole nights?”

  “I won’t do it again.”

  “You don’t feel the need to run around drinking like that, do you?”

  “No.”

  “There isn’t something making you do it?”

  “Not me.”

  “I keep thinking of the night we had dinner with your father. The waiter brought a drink and when he started to go away your father was positively terrified. He thought the waiter wasn’t coming back.”

  “My father wasn’t serious.”

  “I think he was. You’re not like that, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  “I don’t remember my father ever drinking at home. But I told you what my mother says about her family. The Kearnses always had so many rings on the dining room table that it looked like a design. Never any people sitting there. They were all in bed before the dinner even came. Just rings from glasses on the table.”

  “I had trouble once. It
won’t happen again.”

  She walked into the kitchen and took a can of asparagus down from the shelf. She held it and thought for a moment. “Owney, look at this.”

  He stepped into the kitchen. “Look at what?”

  She held up the can of asparagus. “Could you give this up for two months?”

  “Easy.”

  “For six months?”

  “I could go without it forever.”

  “Could you give up beer for two months?”

  He tried not to swallow. “Yes.”

  “Then we don’t need this,” she said. She opened the refrigerator and with each hand took out a bottle of Piels. She dropped them in the garbage and was about to reach into the refrigerator again when his arm blocked her.

  “They cost money.”

  “But you don’t need them. And I certainly don’t.” She patted her stomach.

  He reached into the garbage for the two bottles. “Stop wasting money like this. I got to work too hard to throw it away like this. What do you prove?”

  “That you don’t have to drink them all.”

  “All right,” Owney said. “You want to test me? You want to test a guy can do anything, we’ll put them in there and see how long they stay there.” He put back the two bottles.

  “They’ll be gone by ten o’clock,” Dolores said, half smiling.

  “If I say it, that means they’ll be here forever.” As he spoke, he swung his shoulders cockily.

  She gave a full smile. “I know what you’ll do. You’ll have twenty bottles of beer on the way home and come in here so filled up that you won’t be able to look in the refrigerator without becoming ill.”

  “Forget about it. See those bottles? Look at them. They’ll be in this family for centuries. We’re leaving them for Christine and her children and the children that come after that. We’ll put a note on every bottle. ‘Don’t ever drink this. Not ever.’ The bottles will turn to rock. They’ll have to get a miner to come in and drill them out.”

  He leaned over and kissed her on the neck. For part of an instant, her chin began to rise. All she really wanted was to hug him and have him put his arms around her and curl his legs around her and fit his body close to hers so she could feel him get hard. Then maybe he would slowly caress her, holding her face in his hands and then slowly run his hands all over her body, slowly and lightly, telling her all the time how much he loved her.