Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  On the kitchen table, in morning sunlight coming through the windows over the sink, she saw a wad of money folded in half. The sunlight only reminded her of where he would be in the late afternoon and she accepted the money on the table as an insult.

  “Why don’t you bring your money in a check like everybody else?” she said.

  “Because I cashed it,” he said from the bedroom.

  “Where? At some bar?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Terrific. We start out with most of the money gone over the bar.”

  “Not most.”

  “I thought you said you stopped drinking.”

  Again, he was silent.

  “I’m your wife and I’m sitting home with your daughter. And you’re at the bar with our money, I said our money, all over the place. Buying drinks for strangers. Talking away.”

  When he still said nothing, her level of annoyance rose.

  “Speaking of talking to somebody, did you think about who you intend to talk to? Did you get the names of some decent Catholic therapists?”

  She was standing with her back to the doorway, seeing nothing in front of her but her anger.

  “No? You can’t find a Catholic. Well, then, you just better get yourself to a nice Jewish therapist. Because you need one.”

  “I’m going nowhere,” he said, finally.

  She happened to glance up at the top of the refrigerator, where the brown window envelope containing his check for the Medal of Honor was unopened. She took it, folded it, and stuck it into her bathrobe pocket, then went into the shower.

  When she stepped out of the bathroom, she looked at the clock.

  “Owney.”

  “What?” The voice was drowsy.

  “Six-fifteen.”

  “I can’t make it today.”

  “Just get up.”

  “Call the job.”

  “Me?”

  “You got to call for me. I can’t move.”

  “And say what?”

  “Tell them I got the flu.”

  “The flu? This is like calling grammar school.”

  “You got to do it.”

  She stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at him. He had the cover up over the cheek on one side of his face, but not so much that a small snaking red line on his cheek couldn’t be seen. The eye above it was closed, but there was a suggestion of gray under it.

  “Call,” he murmured.

  “I thought you hated weak people,” she said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “That’s just what you’re turning into.”

  He kept his eyes shut.

  In the kitchen, she dialed the number pasted under the phone and asked for the foreman, Delaney. When he came on, she said, “This is Owen Morrison’s wife.”

  “She don’t work here.”

  “I’m calling for my husband.”

  “Then put him on. He’s the one that works.”

  “He can’t make it today.”

  “What happened?”

  “He just isn’t up to it.”

  “Then the man must have cholera. This is his third day out in the last ten. Tell him I said so.”

  She strode into the bedroom and hit his leg. “You don’t even go to work? What do you do when you leave here?”

  His hand came out from under the blankets. “Come here,” he murmured.

  “What are you saying to me?”

  “You talk too much,” he said. “Come to bed like you’re supposed to.”

  “You never talked like that to me in your life.”

  “I am now. Come here.”

  She clutched at clothes and left the room, slamming the door. She got dressed, made coffee, and at nine-thirty she put the baby in the stroller and walked up Myrtle Avenue to the Ridgewood Savings Bank. His government check was in her purse. At the bank, she stood at a glass counter in the somber light that came through cathedral windows that were on either side of the centerpiece of the bank, a mural that reached the ceiling, two stories high. The mural consisted of a deity bathed in light and looking down upon a pot of gold surrounded by baled wheat. The title of the mural called out to the German women of Ridgewood, and their machinist husbands: “Savings Is the Secret of Wealth.” Dolores signed Owney’s name on the back of his Medal of Honor check and made out a deposit slip for her checking account. Ahead of her on line, a woman with long, worn fingers nervously touched the deposit slips and bills that she kept inside her book. She turned her head and looked at Dolores. The woman was in her late sixties, with a long, scrubbed face that was framed by a somber kerchief.

  “I don’t know whether to put this all in or keep some out,” the woman said.

  “If you save it, you won’t spend it,” Dolores said.

  “Oh, I know that, dear,” the woman said.

  “Then save it,” Dolores said.

  “I don’t leave myself anything to eat,” the woman said.

  “Well, you keep out enough money to live on, don’t you?” Dolores said.

  The woman answered with an uncertain look.

  “You must have food in the house,” Dolores said.

  “I know. That’s why I’m so mixed up all morning. I’m all alone. I lived through having nothing once. Then I had a husband. Now I got no husband. You got a husband, dear? Me, if anything happens to me, all I’ll have is what I got here in the bank. Who knows what could happen ten years from now?”

  “You better worry about dinner tonight,” Dolores said.

  “You go to the store, dear, buy chuck chopped. Three dollars eighty cents a package. I swear on God, three dollars eighty cents. You bring it home, it cooks down to the size of a half dollar. I can’t afford to buy.”

  “It’s ridiculous you don’t,” Dolores said.

  The nervous fingers made a scratching sound against the deposit slips. “I got no husband no more,” the woman said. “I’m all alone. I got to worry.”

  Dolores went off the line. She pushed her stroller over to a low partition and spoke to a bank officer, who was unsurprised. “We had a woman two months ago who was living with no heat in her house,” he said, “and she got pneumonia. They put her in Wyckoff Heights. She had eleven thousand on deposit here. It’s no fortune, but she could have spent two hundred dollars on oil. What was she saving for? Unfortunately, it’s very common. Always the widows. Here, let me see this woman. Thank you very much.”

  Dolores walked onto another line and watched as the bank officer took the woman back to his desk and began talking to her. When Dolores saw the officer reach for new deposit slips, she stopped looking. She deposited her check. The amount, $250, was her first deposit since she had taken his last check to the bank. She pushed the baby home, where she walked into the house with feet striking the floor firmly, to awaken Owney, and found the bedroom empty and the sheets and blankets on the floor.

  Glancing at the money on the kitchen table, she guessed that Owney had taken about half of what he had left the night before. She did not touch the money.

  She gave Christine a couple of crackers and then sat at the table in the discomfort of an anger that came through her on a bitter, freezing wind. In front of her, Christine turned a cracker into crumbs on the high-chair tray, then ran a hand back and forth and swept the crumbs onto the floor. Dolores thought for a moment about the woman in the bank: spent her life in a box of a room like this, and now at the end she’s afraid to buy food. Dolores walked out into the hallway again and looked into the bedroom, at the sheets and blankets on the floor. She stepped back into the kitchen and absently tried to guide the baby into putting the cracker into her mouth, instead of breaking it up. As Dolores did this, the baby’s soft blue eyes became angry stones. The lips pouted and the hand threw the cracker onto the floor.

  You said it, Dolores said to herself. She went out to the front door, opened it, and looked out onto the street, as if its familiarity would have an influence on her. Then a gust, which rattled the dried leaves of the maple tree
at the curb, caused her to shut the door.

  Walking back through the house, she glanced into the living room, which had the stillness and gloom of a place unused. Anybody I know here is gone, she told herself.

  In the bedroom, she took her gray plaid bathrobe from the hook behind the door. Might forget it later. She took a canvas tote bag from the closet and inspected the dresser. The hair dryer, its presence on the dresser signifying the size of the bathroom, was in front of the framed wedding picture. Holding hands with Owney and walking back up the aisle at St. Pancras, eyes very wide, smiling, walking at a time when wisdom consisted of commenting on the quality of the sunlight. She regarded the picture now as she did the wallpaper. She dropped the hair dryer into the tote bag, then pulled open her top drawer. She took out her underwear and put it on the bed, went into the other top drawer for her pantyhose. Costume jewelry from a tray and then into the bottom drawers for blouses and sweaters. She thought for a moment. The large blue suitcase was in the basement. Might as well get that now, she told herself.

  Downstairs, which was free of dust and clutter—the landlady, Mrs. Schweitzer, would scrub the foundation walls if she could get through the floor—she picked up the blue suitcase from a table. Her coats hung from hangers on hooks and she threw her dark blue winter coat, a corduroy car coat, and a lined raincoat over her arm. Upstairs, she looked in at the baby’s room. She decided that the crib was too big for her to take today. The portable one in the dining room would do for a while. She went into the bedroom, put the suitcase on the bed, opened it, then stepped over to the closet, got one arm behind her dresses and pants, and took the hangers off the rail until her arm was full and she barely could see over it.

  She thought of him once. That was when she had the baby in her arm and she was watching the driver from Four One’s Car Service struggle with plastic garbage bags that were filled with boxes of disposable diapers. Her thought was basic: if he had lived another kind of life, then I would have my own car now instead of this cab. The rest of her life with him produced only emptiness as far as she could see in her mind, a prairie with nothing growing on it, and dust rising with each move of the air.

  “You going on a trip?” the driver, who had a body of mashed potatoes, said.

  “Twenty blocks,” Dolores said.

  “Looks to me like this is a walkout,” the driver said. “A complete walkout.”

  “Any walking out around here was done by somebody else,” Dolores said.

  She walked through the house, and then came back to the kitchen and thought about whether to leave a note or not. Yes, I’ll do that, she told herself. She sat with the baby twisting in her arm and took a sheet of paper from the pad atop the refrigerator and wrote, “Went to my mother’s.” She put it on the refrigerator handle. Then she opened the refrigerator, whose insides were dominated by six bottles of beer, which he had brought home deep in one of the last couple of nights, but had obviously been in no condition to get one of them open. She stuffed the six bottles into the tote bag that was over the same arm holding the baby. She left the house, shutting the front door without feeling anything. On her way to the cab, a battered station wagon, she dropped the bottles into the garbage can in the alley.

  “What do you call that?” the cab driver said.

  She said nothing and slammed the top back on the garbage can.

  “You can’t do that around me,” the cab driver said. He went to the can and took out the six bottles.

  “They’re filthy,” she said. “They have coffee grounds all over them.”

  He stood with his arms folded around the six bottles. “So I’ll wash them off,” he said.

  Dolores made a face.

  “I’ll take them to the Board of Health and ask if it’s all right to drink them.”

  She got in the front seat of the station wagon.

  “You married to Morrison?” the cab driver asked, placing the bottles on the floor.

  “Do you know him?” Dolores said.

  “Sure, I see him around.”

  “I never would have guessed,” Dolores said.

  They drove down Central Avenue to 66th Street and stopped in front of her mother’s building. Dolores carried the baby and tote bag up to the glass front door, which was open. She took out her keys and opened the inside door. She left this open for the cab driver. She walked into the dark hallway and put the key into the door to her mother’s apartment. The top half of the door was made of frosted glass.

  “You’ve got guests,” Dolores called out as she stepped into the house in which she had been raised.

  Her mother, smiling, stood in the hallway at the kitchen door.

  “Why didn’t you call? Suppose I was out.”

  “It wasn’t necessary for you to be here.”

  Her mother took the baby and sat on a kitchen chair. “How long you here for?”

  “For a while.”

  Dolores stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at her old bedroom, the small one in the back.

  “Well, I got to five o’clock here. Then my sister and I are going out to a show,” her mother said.

  “That’s fine with me,” Dolores said.

  Now there was the sound of the cab driver struggling up the staircase. He came into the apartment with the portable crib and the blue suitcase.

  “What do I do with these?”

  “Back in the small bedroom,” Dolores said.

  Her mother’s eyes widened, and her voice was high. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m going to be back here for a while,” Dolores said.

  “How can you do that?”

  “You’re seeing me do it.”

  “How do you leave your husband and your own house?”

  “By taxi.”

  “What did you say to Owney?”

  “Who sees him to tell him anything?”

  “You’re going to stay here?”

  “Where else should I go?”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What if I ever decided to go with my sister Grace to Boynton Beach?”

  That night, her cousin Virginia walked in and sat with Dolores during the last fifteen minutes of the six o’clock news. A black reporter was walking down a hallway of a public housing project and pointing to the spot where somebody had been stabbed.

  “He knows it so well, account of he did the stabbing himself last night,” Virginia said.

  Dolores didn’t answer.

  “You want a cigarette?” Virginia said.

  “Thanks.”

  “My mother told me,” Virginia said.

  “What’s so secret?” Dolores said.

  “She thinks it’s only for a couple of days.”

  “She might be thinking wrong,” Dolores said.

  “What would you do?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got some ideas. But I know that I’m not going back right now.”

  “You know that?” Virginia said.

  “I know that.”

  “You know yourself; I know that,” Virginia said. “If you tell me you’re not going back, I know you’re not.”

  They sat in silence. Then Virginia said, “What would you do?”

  “I haven’t thought it all out yet,” Dolores said.

  “You want a job?”

  Dolores shook her head. “School is what I’m thinking of.”

  “Then you think,” Virginia said. “I can offer you a show next week. I got two tickets to Applause from the office pool. You want to go?”

  “I can’t even think of going out now.”

  “It’s all the way to next week.”

  “I’ll see then. Right now I have to think.”

  Her cousin’s fingernails caused the cigarette cellophane to rattle, just a slight sound, but one that filled Dolores’s ears. In the kitchen, her mother put spoon to pot and to Dolores this sounded as if her mother were straightening a fender. Alongside her in the living room, Virginia’s fingers dug more into the cigarette pack, and as she talked on, Dolore
s tried to find a chamber of her mind that held out all sound.

  All the while, moving through her thoughts, light-footed, laughing, clear eyes promising, was Owney. Her instinct was to reach out and hold him as he walked up to her, to revel in the sudden ending of this emptiness and anxiety within her. And to apologize for not being home. Of course, she found herself saying that she was sorry; her first reaction to her positive act of leaving was to consider herself a defendant. Then she thought of the blanket and sheet thrown on the floor and she smelled the beer and tobacco that always signified his arrival in a bedroom dark in the middle of the night. The hell with him, she thought.

  Now, she decided that she should have been smart enough before they were married to understand what was happening to him.

  She thought of the night at the Arena Disco, on Fresh Pond Road, when Owney was on the dance floor with a bottle of beer and the manager walked over and said, “If you’re going to drink, could you please go over to one of the corners of the dance floor?”

  “I’m all right,” Owney had said.

  “If you spill any on the floor, people won’t be able to dance,” the guy said.

  “I don’t want to go in the corner,” Owney said.

  “Go there. Drink. Smoke dope. We don’t care what you do in the corner. But you can’t smoke on the dance floor. You’d set somebody’s spandex on fire. And you can’t drink here in the middle. Spill it and nobody can dance.”

  “The corner is too far from the bar,” Owney said. He took a long swig of beer, then he spun and went a couple of steps to the bar, was given another bottle and returned with it held to his mouth.

  “I guess I can’t tell you what to do,” the disco manager said.

  “I won’t spill any on the floor.”

  “I wish you’d go to the corner.”

  “I won’t spill any.”

  That night, Dolores thought he was being outrageous and stubborn and plain mad from where he had been and what he had done, and she was excited by all of it. She never considered that he had been telling the exact truth, that he didn’t want to go into a corner of the big disco room because he would have been too far from the magic of the bar. All she knew that night was that he made her laugh, that he was the only person on the dance floor with a bottle of beer, and that he kept his promise and spilled nothing.