Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Come with me, maybe we’ll find something interesting,” Dolores said.

  “Find guys?” Virginia said.

  “Why not?”

  Virginia sucked in her breath. “Why, you’re a tramp!”

  “Sure, I am,” Dolores said.

  “We’re not going to find guys anywhere around here,” Virginia said.

  “I can,” Dolores said.

  “You could find a guy around here?”

  “Absolutely. Two of them.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “Then go ahead into the house. I’ll go myself.”

  “No, you won’t. Let me run in and tell them I’m going with you.”

  “I have to stop two places. It’ll only take forty-five minutes.”

  “Then you’re not looking for guys?” Virginia said.

  “If we see one, we’ll both grab him for you,” Dolores said. “I don’t think I want to see another man for fifty years.”

  “Be right back,” Virginia said.

  The woman who lived next door, Mrs. Kramer, now came out on the sidewalk, as she always did at this hour. “Getting my nice breath of fresh air,” she said, and Dolores answered, as always, “Are you? That’s nice,” and Mrs. Kramer immediately said, “I wish my poor Al could be taking a breath with me.” And Dolores smiled. Mrs. Kramer’s husband, Al, had been dead for four years and the widow extolled him on the sidewalk and prayed for him openly in church and both she and everybody else regarded him as the finest husband a woman could ever have. Her husband’s most memorable day in his many years on the street came one Saturday morning, with people on the sidewalk or peering out their polished windows. Kramer, who retired from his job as a soda truck driver, met the mailman on the front stoop, went through his mail, ripped open one envelope, and then came down from the stoop and stood looking up at his wife, who was at the window on the third floor. “My Medicare card just came,” Kramer called up. Mrs. Kramer looked down at him with that tight little smile that she wore, along with her car coat. “You want to see what I think of my Medicare card?” He pushed the card into his mouth, swallowed it, then called up to the wife with her nice tight smile, “There you go! Now if I get sick, you got nothing between you and the street. I hope I’m in the hospital someplace and they pull the couch from under you to pay for the bill.” When he died this was forgotten; in Glendale, once a widow, always a worshiper. Anything to disturb this memory of Kramer, a sneer, smile, or sarcastic aside, would disturb the illusion in which Mrs. Kramer and all the others on the block with departed husbands lived. Dolores, therefore, knew that she disturbed her mother’s house by placing two more people under the roof and by disturbing the illusion that if it were not for death, marriage would consist of long hours of love.

  The illusion got touched on me, too, Dolores told herself.

  When Virginia returned, Dolores walked with her up to Myrtle Avenue, which on the winter night had little clusters of people getting off buses and into the lights of small stores and then long stretches of desolate cement.

  “Do you know what you’re going to do?” Virginia said.

  “I’m starting to.”

  “What kind of a job are you looking for?”

  Dolores didn’t answer.

  “My mother told me to look around in my place. I went to the girl I know in personnel and she said if you could come in and fill out an application, then she’d start looking through what they need. She’s only an assistant but she can go through the files and at least find out what they need.”

  Dolores still didn’t answer. She stopped at a phone booth and dialed her old number and held her breath. Five rings and no Owney. She hung up, and then became apprehensive as she saw the sign for Gibby’s saloon coming at them, two corners away. When they got close to Gibby’s, Dolores told Virginia, “You walk up and see if he’s in there.”

  “Who?”

  Dolores scowled at her. “Who would I be trying to duck?”

  “Is this what you got me out for?” Virginia said.

  “Never,” Dolores said. “Just go look in the window.”

  When Virginia shook her head, Dolores walked boldly up to the window and looked in at the splendid scene. “There you go,” she said to Virginia. “All there for you.”

  The owner, Gibby, resplendent in his crew cut and five hundred forty pounds, sat on a stool on the customer’s side of the bar and looked sleepily at television. He was the only person in the place. As it was time for the evening news, he of course had on Lucille Ball in a rerun. It was in this same position, a year before, that Gibby was the object of a holdup. When the gunman asked for money, Gibby never turned his head from Lucille Ball. He said out of the side of his mouth, “Fuck you.” The gunman said that he truly would blow Gibby away and said so with such fervor that Gibby deigned to turn his head and look at the gunman. He sneered at the gunman. “Go ahead and fucking shoot!” Then he turned away. The gunman promptly shot him in the face. The terrified barmaid screamed, “They shot my Gibby!” Gibby sat motionless on his stool. Then in the mirror he saw blood pouring down his neck. “This is good-bye, Lisa.” His huge head smacked the bar. Police arrived to Lisa’s screams—“He’s dead!”—but upon examining Gibby, they found him breathing like a horse. Paramedics discovered a hole in the outermost part of Gibby’s jowl, many inches of white fat separating the hole from the main frame of Gibby’s face. Police found the .45 slug deep in the bar. Now, looking at him through the window, and seeing that the rest of the place was empty, Virginia said, “How would you like to sit there, wait to meet somebody?”

  Dolores shuddered.

  “I been all over. In bars, outside of bars. I never meet anybody. Do you know my girlfriend Alice Lutzen? She went to Washington, she told me it was worse than here. She met a guard at the Smithsonian building who was married. How do you like that? How do you like going all the way to Washington to chat with a married guy?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Besides, I can’t go anyplace. I’m in love.”

  “Then what are you doing out with me? Who are you in love with?”

  “The guy in work I told you about.”

  “The one who was supposed to take you to lunch at the Chinese restaurant?”

  “I’m in love with him.”

  “Are you?”

  “I must be. I go all the way home on the LL line thinking of him.”

  “Do you talk to him at work?”

  “He asked me how I was the other day.”

  “That sounds like real love,” Dolores said. “If you keep it that way you can be in love with him forever. Just don’t talk much.”

  “That’s what you think?”

  “Yep.”

  “That means you’re not going back with Owney right away?”

  Dolores was looking toward the corner of 74th Street and did not answer.

  “You going to get a job then?”

  When Dolores kept walking, Virginia said, “Geez, you are stubborn. You got them crazy home, you’re so stubborn.”

  When they came to the corner of 74th Street, Dolores said, “Just stay out on the sidewalk and if he happens to drive up, just let me know.”

  “Is he going to kill us?”

  “He said he would. He said he has a machine gun left over from Vietnam and that he’ll shoot me and anybody I’m with. Now just shut up and make sure he doesn’t come. I don’t particularly want to talk to him. It’ll get us nowhere.”

  “That means you’re not going back?”

  “I don’t know what it means. I’m sure of one thing. I’m never going to be put in this position again.”

  “What?”

  “Sneaking like this,” Dolores said. They were at the house now and Dolores walked up to the front door and fitted the keys and opened it. As Virginia stood at the curb, Dolores bent down and picked up the mail on the vestibule floor, pecked through the junk mail and took out one brown window envelope that appeared to be a government check, and then her face
became disappointed. “Magazines,” she said. Listlessly, she went through the rest of the letters and then brightened as she found another brown envelope, this one containing Owney’s check, which she put in her pocket.

  “What do you do with that?” Virginia asked, and when Dolores didn’t answer, Virginia said, “You don’t keep his check, do you?” Dolores’s answer was to keep walking. Virginia looked back at the house. “What if he’s inside and he comes running out?”

  “He never was there when I was home waiting,” Dolores said. “What in the world would he be there for now?”

  When they got to 68th Street, there was a harsh light coming from an industrial bulb that was connected by an extension cord to the inside of a house. A man in coveralls stood at the curb and looked at two cars, both of which were jacked up. On the sidewalk was a black phone. The cord ran up the stoop and through the mail slot and into the house.

  “What’s your best buy, Alex?” Dolores said to him.

  He pointed to a two-door red Ford. The car was dented evenly on both sides. He was about to say something, but then the phone at his feet rang and he picked it up.

  “Alex’s Garage,” he called out.

  Dolores walked around the red Ford and then looked inside it. When Alex hung up, she asked him how much and when he said four hundred dollars, she nodded.

  “All right,” she said. Then she said to Virginia, “We’ll go riding around looking for fellas.”

  “Where?” Virginia said.

  “Staten Island. They got big strong Italian guys.”

  “How many?” Virginia said.

  “Thousands of them.”

  Hearing Virginia blurt out the news of the car purchase at home, Dolores’s mother sniffed. “A nice new bus to ride on is good enough for me.”

  The next day, Dolores dressed and the mother looked at her in alarm. “You going for how long?” and Dolores answered, “I have something I absolutely have to do.”

  “I was going to shop by Alexander’s,” her mother said. “I got to get some clothes as long as Gracie and I aren’t going to Boynton Beach. I got to get good warm clothes.”

  “I could meet you there and drive you home,” Dolores said.

  “You don’t have to. A nice new bus ride is good enough for me.”

  “I might need some clothes too. I’m going to be starting something.”

  The mother immediately brightened, for she interpreted this as meaning that Dolores was about to get a job. The mother said that Aunt Grace would watch the baby, in fact would be delighted to. She made a date to meet Dolores at two-thirty.

  Later, seagulls squealed in the wet afternoon air, glided under a locust tree, whose bare black branches were inhospitable to webbed feet, and landed on a low cement wall. The seagulls represented nature on a school campus whose scenery consists of parking lots. The school, Queens College, rising from the banks of the Long Island Expressway, has a group of two-story buildings with red tile roofs that sit around a square of scarred grass. Once, they served as a detention center for Queens bad boys. Climbing into the dull sky behind them are buildings designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy. The auditorium, named after a dead Queens politician, Colden, is windowless in honor of the secrecy in which he lived and, probably, the bank vaults he frequented. The other feature is a gymnasium named after another dead politician, Fitzgerald, who was gifted with fast and extremely sure hands.

  Dolores walked out of the science building, also windowless, and stuffed her schedule into her purse alongside the envelope bulging with legal papers that the lawyer McNiff had sent to her two weeks earlier. Driving on the expressway service road, she stopped at a candy store and went in to make a call.

  Immediately over the phone came the voice of her aunt Grace. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, I thought something was the matter.”

  “Just because I call?”

  “You could get mugged by one of these colored guys.”

  “My mother left?” Dolores said.

  “She went by Alexander’s. You’re not going to meet her? She’s waiting there for you!”

  “I’m on my way there. I just wanted to make sure.”

  Some minutes later, Dolores found her mother standing at the front entrance to Alexander’s, another windowless brick building, this one growing out of Queens Boulevard and extending for a full block. Her mother was on the sidewalk with her arms folded across her chest, pretending to be hugging herself in the cold, but as it wasn’t that cold at all, Dolores knew that the arms were part of the defensive hand placement of the Queens woman. Stationed on alien sidewalk, unsure of who was in charge, she hugged herself in fear of being a trespasser.

  “You got a nice job?” she said.

  “Not today.”

  “Well, you went for a nice job, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do all day then?”

  “I was over at school.”

  She was unprepared for an attack from the sky by an enemy that dived so swiftly that she was able only to unfold her arms. As she walked with her daughter through the front doors, the mother, as a reflex, sniffed at the black security guard. “Talk about a fox in the chicken coop.”

  In the ladies’ department, her mother fingered velour tops and picked out a green and a burgundy and held them out on their plastic hangers. Small plastic clothespins kept the shoulders neatly arranged on the hangers. Keeping her eyes on the blouses, she said to Dolores, “You’re going to go to night school?” and Dolores said, “Day.”

  Her mother started to fit the blouses back on the rack. “Much too dear.”

  “Ma, they’re twelve ninety-five.”

  “I’m cheaper off going to Ridgewood.”

  “For what? They don’t have anything you could put on your back.”

  “These are too dear.”

  This time, Dolores sighed and this sound from someone else took the mother by surprise. She again held out the velour blouses and walked around a wall, on the other side of which was the dressing room. Dolores inspected the rack for a tan blouse, intending to take at least one more blouse back to her mother, and then there was a sound and her mother was back. “Nothing fit right.” The plastic clothespins were in the same position on the velour tops.

  Dolores, pretending not to notice, kept looking through a rack for clothes for herself.

  “You didn’t even ask me what I was taking in school,” she said to her mother.

  “What?”

  “Organic chemistry.”

  “What do you take a thing like that for?”

  “That’s what you have to take if you think you want to be a doctor.”

  Dolores wouldn’t look at her but she was sure her mother’s mouth had dropped open.

  “A doctor.” Now when Dolores looked at her, she stood with her hand over her mouth as if the notion of any daughter of hers attempting such a thing, or even mentioning the word, would be offensive to someone. Her hand placement was as common to Queens women as a broom. At times when she was in close proximity to any authority, and that meant a male—the women of the Kearns family all blessed themselves before so much as taking up business with the man behind the dry cleaning counter—Dolores’s mother kept her hand flat against her lips and the ear had to strain to hear. Realizing this, Dolores always spoke with her chin up, her shoulders square, and her hands either at her sides or out in front of her, gesturing boldly to indicate coherence.

  “How long does this take?” her mother said.

  “It takes.”

  Her mother looked across the racks of blouses and saw years that she couldn’t understand starting to stretch far down to the end of the store and then, at the point where the ceiling and the walls and the racks and the floors all came together and turned watery, she saw these two doors, at this distance the size of windows, and she realized that there was no end to anything that she was saying
in her mind, and as she heard a baby’s cry, she became tense, for she considered this to be fooling with eternity.

  “How long?” she said to Dolores.

  “But then you’ll have somebody in the house to take care of Aunt Grace.”

  The mother’s eyes flickered. “You could learn how to take care of Aunt Grace’s arthritis?”

  “Why not?”

  “How fast could you learn? Aunt Grace got it coming down from the bottom of her neck. It’s into her whole shoulder already. Remember when it was only a little crick in her neck?”

  “I sure do.”

  “You don’t hurry, she’ll have it all through her arm,” her mother said. “I’ll do it as quick as it can be done,” Dolores said.

  “Will you be able to sell neck braces?”

  “You prescribe them. You don’t sell them.”

  “Aunt Grace says so many people need neck braces that a smart doctor selling them could get rich with that alone.”

  The mother suddenly brightened more. “We wouldn’t have to call nobody, either.”

  “Of course not. You call me. I’m liable to be in the next room.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. That’s perfectly all right with your aunt Grace and I. You’ll be there to take care of her.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Wait’ll I tell her. And she’s been sitting there worried about what you’re going to do.”

  There was a clicking sound as her mother took the blouses back off the hanger.

  “You better learn about prostrates, too. Your uncle Matty got terrible prostrate trouble. For such a young man.”

  She walked swiftly into the dressing room to try on the blouses.

  11

  SEATED IN THE BACK of the hall, Owney rocked on a gray metal folding chair and looked directly up at the basketball net. He could throw it right from the floor, he thought, except that he was directly under the net and he would have to loop it out. Tough shot from this low. Then he decided that he would gather himself for an instant and then go straight for a lay-up. For sure, he would be fouled in the act of shooting and the shot would drop in and the place would explode into cheers, which would grow only louder when he made the foul shot. He looked down from the net and up at the front of the hall, where a priest was running the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. This was at St. Stanislaus Church way over in Ozone Park, and it was something new for the parish, which had run successful anti-crime meetings and drug education nights, but never had considered there was any great problem with alcohol, except the possible shortage of it at a major function. The priest was explaining to the crowded hall that the form of these meetings was for a person to stand up, give his first name, admit that he’s an alcoholic, and say what’s on his mind.