If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go

by Judy Chicurel

  Yet, that morning, for some reason, she thought of getting dressed and walking over to St. Michael’s Church and bringing back crumb cakes from the German bakery on Lexington Avenue, oranges from the grocery on the corner to make freshly squeezed juice in the tiny kitchen of the brownstone floor-through that her lover paid for. She looked over at the sleeping figure in the bed, wondering if he’d be able to stay for breakfast. She took a bottle of Shalimar from the dresser and idly sprayed her shoulders, the tops of her thighs, the nape of her neck. Then she lit another cigarette and turned her gaze outward, thinking of the things she’d left behind, the things she’d escaped to get here, to this window, on this street, in this life.

  FIFTEEN

  conversations with my father

  I heard he walked off Ricky Moore’s construction crew second week in.”

  “What the—what happened?”

  “Ricky says nothing. Says the guys couldn’t have been nicer, you know, ‘Welcome back, man,’ buying him coffee and shit. Then, middle of the afternoon, he just, like, started punching a wall. Ricky said it was like he wanted to kill the fucking wall, man. And then he just walked off the site. Just walked off the fucking site, you believe that?”

  “Shit, I’d give my left nut to get on Ricky’s crew. Pays top dollar, health insurance, the whole nine yards. Always has work, too, even when everybody else is slow.”

  “Yeah, well dig this: I heard he was with Christa Cutler couple weeks back, couldn’t pull the trigger, you get my drift. Left her sitting on the lifeguard chair and then went skinny-dipping at, like, three in the morning.”

  “So what? Maybe he wasn’t in the mood.”

  “How are you not in the fucking mood around Christa Cutler?”

  “She’s always been a hotbox, man. Maybe he had enough of that over in Nam. Heard those hookers are something else.”

  “Luke McCallister. Man, that guy was like my idol. Between the surfing trophies and the chicks—didn’t someone tell me he was going to Spain to surf for the winter?”

  “From what Conor says, he can barely make it down to breakfast. Told me his old lady goes to mass like every day since he got back, says novenas and shit so he’ll be normal again.”

  “Lighten up, for chrissake. It sounds like his fucking eulogy. Guy’s not dead yet.”

  “He keeps this shit up, he might as well be.”

  “He was in a war, man, not a keg party. He gets to act any way he wants to. Leave him the fuck alone.”

  • • •

  It wasn’t the biggest deal in the world, but this was the first time I had been on the Long Island Rail Road going into the city by myself. Usually, I was with my family, or with Liz and Nanny, to go shopping, have lunch, see movies, walk around the Village. Look at the holiday windows at Lord & Taylor, light candles at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Or we’d be with everyone else, heading in to see a concert at Madison Square Garden. But I had never been on the train alone before. I lit a cigarette and stared out the window as we pulled away from the station. I was glad the sky was overcast and it looked like rain. I would have felt I was missing out if it was a brilliant beach day, wasting time in the city when I could have been lying on the sand with my eyes closed, listening.

  Summer was almost over and still nothing had happened with me and Luke. Sometimes I was scared of him. I was scared of the things that Conor said, things I overheard from other people, on the beach, at Eddy’s, in the lounge at The Starlight Hotel. Almost every night that I didn’t have to work, I’d plan what I was going to say to him while I put on my mascara in front of the bathroom mirror. But when it came time to approach him, I’d get close enough that the look in his eyes would stop me from coming closer. Conor said he surfed alone, during very first light, sometimes leaving the house while it was still dark out. At night, he’d walk by himself, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched forward, as though he was trying to shake a chill. I’d watch him walking down Comanche Street and I’d want to catch up with him, but I didn’t have the nerve. I didn’t want to answer questions, either, from Liz or Nanny or even Conor. Sometimes I’d wonder why Luke bothered at all, why he didn’t just stay in his room if he wanted to be alone. Sometimes I’d get angry that he was making everything so hard. And then I’d have to remind myself that he didn’t know, he had no idea how I felt, and at times, I barely knew myself anymore.

  Now it was the second week in August and I felt like the world was moving too quickly away from me. Some days I felt so jumpy that once at work Good-Looking Freddy asked me was I on black beauties, and did I know where he could get some. I’d always been a sleeper, good until at least noon on weekend mornings, but now I’d begun waking in early darkness, my stomach churning. I couldn’t remember the dreams I had, but it seemed like my insides were clamoring for something. Sometimes if I lay still long enough, I would fall back to sleep for a while. Other times, I got up very quietly and went out the back door to the porch, careful not to wake my brother when I walked past his room. I would smoke a cigarette while gazing up at the stars, and the breeze coming off the ocean would soothe me. Once, I fell asleep on the porch, right in the lounge chair, and stayed there until morning, when I woke to the sound of my brother’s laughter and my mother standing over me, shaking her head.

  “Katie, man, hey.” I looked up to find Luanne Miller smiling down at me. She was wearing a cotton skirt that looked like she’d taken an old sheet and sewn on a ruffled hem, and light blue flip-flops that matched the embroidery on the neck and cuffs of her Indian blouse, much the way her kneesocks used to match her cashmere sweaters and pleated skirts back in seventh grade. She was smiling as though she couldn’t believe her luck, finding me on the train, like she’d just been waiting to see me her whole entire life. That’s the way Luanne was now, but she hadn’t always been that way. She’d been queen of the Dunes girls since forever, and she was still beautiful and had been for as long as anyone could remember and probably always would be.

  Luanne had taken the seat right across from me. As the train ground away from the station, she lit up a Kool and I wrinkled my nose. I didn’t see how anyone smoked menthol cigarettes; it was like lighting an ice cube on fire and throwing it down your throat. She French-exhaled, crossed her legs, and smiled again. “So. Where you headed in the big, bad city?”

  “I’m meeting Georgie Dugan. He was a senior when we were sophomores. Some bar, Jimmy Day’s, in the Village. Then we’re going to see his new apartment. He just moved in about a month ago.” I didn’t tell her that before I met Georgie I’d be meeting my father for lunch at his request. He was taking me to Luchow’s and had insisted on picking me up at Penn Station.

  “Don’t know him. Don’t remember him,” she said. “But I love Jimmy Day’s. Outasight jukebox, man. Great burgers! I’ll be spending a lot of time there once I move in.”

  “You’re moving into the city?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I’m starting at New York University in the fall. Going in today to find some things for the apartment.”

  “Are you—will you be living in the dorms?” I wondered how Luanne could always make me feel like she was much older, even though we were the same age and had been in the same algebra class in ninth grade.

  She shook her head. “My family has a place in the city,” she said. “On East Fifty-seventh Street. I’ll be staying there while I go to school, thank God. I am so ready, man. I am so looking for a change.” She leaned her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. “What are your plans?” she asked. “You graduated, right?”

  “Yeah, Luanne, I graduated,” I said, trying to sound tough and snotty, like Liz. “I don’t know what I’m doing in the fall, yet.” I didn’t want to tell her I was going to Carver Community College. I just didn’t want to tell her that right now.

  “Keeping your options open, that’s cool,” she said approvingly. “Way cool. I kind of wish I hadn’t locked myself in s
o early, but the whole backpacking through Europe thing is so clichéd, you know? And my sister lives in California and I’ve been there a ton of times, I can go anytime I want. And I was desperate to get out of town, so . . .”

  “How’s Tyrone? You still seeing him?”

  Luanne sighed heavily and opened her eyes. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that.” She took another cigarette from her little fringed shoulder purse and tamped it down before lighting up. She leaned back again and I thought her eyes looked wet but with Luanne you could never tell. “Ty and I are over,” she said, staring up at the train ceiling.

  “Really,” I said, like I was surprised. I had known Tyrone Dancer since we were kids at Central District Elementary, when he came up from Alabama in the third grade. He was always a nice kid, with one of those great Pepsodent smiles. Junior high did a number on everyone, but by the time we were in high school, Tyrone had grown a soft, springy Afro and had founded the Soul Brother Society. All the black boys still in school wore black-and-yellow satin jackets with the letters “SBS” embossed on their backs and marched through the halls with their shoulders jutting forward and wouldn’t talk to white people. When we were sophomores, they got into it with the Hitters and school was suspended for three days while the school board held meeting after meeting with furious parents and had the carnage cleaned up, all the smashed desks and broken cafeteria tables and shattered glass doors. Tyrone was always called to the table as one of the community youth leaders, along with Jimmy Murphy from the Trunk and Raymie Cortez from the Brothers Hispanica.

  Luanne was what Rita and Raven and the rest of the city people called a Saks Fifth Avenue hippie, someone who would spend sixty dollars on a peasant shirt in the window at Bloomingdale’s while screaming about the oppression of the masses. “Oppression” was one of Luanne’s favorite words during high school, along with “revolutionary” and “Free Bobby.” She was a picture of radical chic in her strategically patched bell-bottoms and hand-tooled Apache leather belt and perfectly faded blue work shirt, and it was a testimony to her holy aura that when she and Tyrone walked the halls with their arms wrapped around each other no one, not even the most hardened Hitter, sneered at them publicly, or made obscene gestures when they were out on the quad, sharing a cigarette. When Jeannette Trevino, who lived in subsidized housing, began dating a black guy from Lefferton, they stoned her right out of the Trunk, standing outside the naked ugly cinder-block apartment house, throwing rocks at her windows. Not pebbles; rocks. Like that might ever happen to Luanne Miller, queen of the Dunes. No one would stand outside the house she lived in and write epithets on the two-car garage door while chanting racial slurs through her bedroom window.

  “Since June,” Luanne was saying. “We split up right after graduation.” I knew she was dying for me to ask what had happened. I lit another cigarette and stared out the murky window as we passed tract houses, developments in other towns, where other lives were being lived. She leaned her forehead against the window. “He did it for me,” she said. “Because he knew how hard it was, how much I had to go through because we were together. My parents, the way they treated him when he would come over.” Her eyes widened slightly. “It was just like that song, ‘Society’s Child,’ like Janis Ian wrote it just for us, you know?” She started singing softly, rocking back and forth on the seat. “‘Come to my door, baby . . .’”

  “What did his mother have to say about it?” I asked. During his Central District days, Tyrone hadn’t had a father, but his mother used to walk him and his sister, Tanya, to school in the morning, carrying her youngest baby boy on her hip. She was very black and looked more like their older sister than their mother.

  Luanne sighed dramatically. “It was fraught, man,” she said. “Way fraught. She had such a deep history of oppression. You know, raising five kids by herself, and then Tanya’s baby. Working for the man, that total distrust of los ojos claros, you know, the light-eyed ones.”

  “Why are you speaking Spanish?” I asked.

  Luanne shrugged. “It fit, man, that’s all. It expressed what I was thinking better than English could. I mean, the way Ty’s mother looked at me, she looked into my face, man, and all she could see was the plantation mistress. Could I blame her, man? Could you?” She shook her head. “The things I saw down there, you wouldn’t believe it,” she said. “All the white people in Elephant Beach should have to live in the projects for a—a week, man. Maybe a month, even. See what it’s like, what that burden does to you. Trying to rise above it with the man’s foot up your ass.” She leaned forward, whispering. “I used to beg Tyrone to beat me. On those days when I saw the rage building. I could feel the rage in his bones, man, beneath my fingers. ‘Hit me,’ I used to tell him, ‘go on, hit me, I can take it. I can take anything, if it saves you a beating from the fascist pigs.’” Her eyes shone with tears. “But he wouldn’t.” She leaned farther toward me, her hands on her knees. You could see the lines of her underwear through her skirt. “I would have had his baby,” she whispered. “I would have had his little black baby, kinky hair and all.”

  I nodded, not wanting to look around at who else was sitting in the smoking car. I hoped there weren’t any black people. Most of the Dunes girls had spent hours in ninth grade ironing their thorny tresses; in high school, their irons went the way of their bras and the razors they’d used to shave their legs. They let their hair frizz out naturally, like kinky weeds trailing down the path of their spines. Luanne’s hair never frizzed; it wasn’t naturally straight but it waved around her shoulders and rippled down her back like a cornflower sheath.

  The conductor came around and punched our tickets. “Change at Jamaica,” he said, and moved on. Luanne watched him walk away. “‘I can’t see you anymore, baby,’” she sang in a whisper. She probably thought she looked sad, but really she just looked as bored as she used to in algebra class when Mr. Contini droned on about fractions. She leaned back against the seat and rolled her eyes upward, trying to look years and years older. “It was a beautiful part of my life, man,” she said solemnly. “But some things just aren’t meant to last.” She closed her eyes and I thought that I wanted to lose Luanne before I met my father in the waiting room at Penn Station. It was just so typical of him to insist on picking me up, like I was still a child. He was always doing stuff like that: coming to basketball games even after I told him there wouldn’t be any other parents there; waiting outside in the car after dropping me off at the church dances, even after I’d gone inside and the music started. Showing up places I didn’t want him to. Where he wasn’t supposed to be.

  • • •

  I saw my father standing in the waiting room beneath the little television when I came out of the bathroom. Before the train pulled all the way into the station, I’d told Luanne I had to run and use the bathroom and she’d wrinkled her nose and said, “That place is totally gross, man. And that bathroom lady attendant they have there totally freaks me out. Talk about oppression of the masses, right? I mean, can you imagine? She’s like the poster girl, man. Poster woman. Sitting there, day after day, smelling everyone’s bodily waste. It’s like I want to say to her, ‘Lady, lady, liberate yourself from this smelly bondage, man! Go live in a world where the piss runs free!’”

  “I have to go,” I said. I made sure I went in the opposite direction from where Luanne looked like she was headed. I had always felt sorry for the bathroom attendant, actually, but there was something reassuring about her. She looked like somebody’s grandmother. I knew it was a crummy job, sitting, staring at those dirty pink tiles all day. Handing people rolls of dry toilet paper, change for the sanitary napkin machine. But then, one time when we were coming home from the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall, my father told me that hers was a union job with raises and benefits and at least she wasn’t on her feet all day, working her fingers to the bone in some dingy factory. I felt better about the bathroom lady after that, and thought her smile might be
real at least some of the time. I always made sure to tip her a quarter.

  I watched my father watching television in the waiting room. It was what he did most nights at home, after dinner. He was looking up at the picture, some boring news show, and I walked over and touched his arm. It took him a minute to look away. “There she is,” he said, and gave me his cheek to kiss. He didn’t kiss me back. He didn’t like affectionate demonstrations; it wasn’t his way. I started walking toward the escalator and he pulled me back. “Where do you think you’re going?” he said sharply. I felt the familiar sinking inside me, like something had come loose and was floating to the floor. It was always like this with my father. “Come this way,” he said, and began walking toward the subway entrance. It turned out they were doing construction and we had to go up to street level after all. “Ha! Told you,” I said, and then I felt like an idiot. My father walked a bit ahead of me, more in tune to the rhythms of the city. I was still working on beach time.

  On Seventh Avenue, the streets were wet and dripping, though it had stopped raining. There was light coming from the sky, but you couldn’t see the sun. “Over there,” my father said, pointing to the IRT kiosk across the street, but right before we crossed, several police cars screamed up to the curb and a bunch of cops came storming out and ran up behind us, up the steps of Penn Plaza. My father and I turned to watch. There was a small group of people in the middle of the plaza, holding signs and marching around in a circle. The signs said “Make Love, Not War,” “Draft Beer, Not Boys,” “Eighteen Today, Dead Tomorrow.” The people were chanting, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war,” over and over. Their voices were loud but they didn’t sound strong. They sounded tired. It wasn’t a big group. The cops stood watching for a minute and then one of them pulled out a bullhorn, even though the crowd was about a hundred yards away. His voice was garbled through the bullhorn, so we couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying. The people kept marching around, chanting. The cops went among them, pulling on their arms, pulling them away from the circle. Most of them began walking away, but a few started struggling. “Take your hands off me, pig!” one woman cried, trying to wrench her arm free. She pushed the cop away with her other hand and then two-three-four police were on her and she was on the ground, and another guy was trying to get her away from the cops and then he, too, was on the ground, and some of the other marchers began shouting at the cops but they didn’t move forward from where they were standing and then the cops cuffed the man and the woman and began dragging them toward the squad cars. The woman was writhing around like a long, elegant snake; when they passed us to get to the car I could see she was older than I’d thought. Her long, dark mane was shot through with strands of silver. “Fucking fascist pigs!” she snarled, twisting and turning. “Establishment pawns!” the man hollered. The cops wrestled him into the backseat of the squad car. One of the cops put his hand on the woman’s head and pushed it down until she cried out in pain. “Police brutality!” she shrieked. What was left of the small crowd of protesters took it up. “Police brutality!” they howled from the steps of the plaza. “Yeah, baby,” a barefoot black man wearing red earmuffs said as he walked by, pumping his fist in the air. The squad cars sped away, lights flashing, sirens blaring. My father touched my arm and began walking toward the subway. “Fucking pigs,” I muttered beneath my breath, loud enough for him to hear. I watched his lips tighten, but he said nothing, did nothing, except hand me a token for the subway ride downtown.