by Anne Valente
“Is Dad ever coming back?” I finally asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, Kevin. Probably not. But you’ll still see him.”
I looked over at the tea, the giant mound of it like a small home.
“Why tea, Mom? I mean, really?”
She didn’t say anything, and I thought her hand still patting mine was all the response I’d ever get. But then she looked over at me, and there was that sadness again, the kind she hid like a diary.
“Because I can.” She sighed. “Because it’s mine.”
I thought of Helen then, what was hers, what was never mine. The tea sat like a ghost between my mother and me, silent, almost floating. A light breeze blew past, scattering a few leaves, pulling the scent of dandelion and apples through the yard. I reached over and touched it and the leaves stuck to my fingers.
“You should try it,” my mother said. “It’s pretty good. It calms.”
I touched a tea leaf to my tongue, expecting the same sugared scent. But there was no calm, no sweetness. There was only the sourness of the leaves, a taste too bitter to take.
EVERYTHING THAT WAS OURS
When the World’s Fair came to Queens, we watched the flags slowly rise. We watched trucks haul in the Sinclair dinosaurs, the Pepsi pavilion, the Magic Skyway that would move us through the past to comprehend the future. We watched the steady construction of the Unisphere, twelve stories high, a stainless-steel globe tilted on its axis, a testament to the peace through understanding that the fair promised. We watched Flushing Meadows Park become another world entirely, from the other side of the Long Island Expressway where we all worked then, from the panoramic windows of Albertson’s Ladies’ Shoes.
Stan pressed his face to the glass between customers, watched the exhibition emerge and swore that these were the promises LBJ would break, now that Kennedy had left us all behind. He shook his head and turned away, while Breslin stayed and stared off toward the park, watched the signs roll up for the new Ford Mustang the fair would introduce, a car we knew he had the money to afford. Jim watched the General Motors ride materialize, a glide through the future that maybe reminded him of his dad, who worked for GM, whose blackened nails and oil-smudged fingerprints told a different story, a future apart from undersea vacations and desert irrigation. And me, I hung back and worked, fit sandals to high arches, slipped shoehorns beneath heels.
Stan was the one who got us jobs. We’d all met in college algebra, some core requirement at Nassau Community College where we sat in the back of the classroom and shared what minimal notes we took on polynomials, binaries. Stan’s dad owned the shoe store in Queens, and we all needed the money. I was the one who took the job first—working mornings before class, then some Saturdays and Sundays—and then Jim signed on, then finally Breslin, for nothing better to do. Breslin’s parents paid his tuition. We all knew that. He also had a Ford Falcon, and once Stan’s dad hired him we all stopped taking the Long Island Rail Road and piled into the Falcon instead, on the days we could coordinate our shifts right, which was most of them.
Jim had been my best friend in high school, the only person I knew at Nassau when we enrolled, which was maybe strange for Levittown High being so close to the college, but then again, a million people lived on Long Island. We went to school, we worked. We fit women with shoes. Stan peeked up ladies’ skirts when his dad wasn’t looking. Breslin did the same, carried a magnifying glass in his back pocket for just that purpose, no matter how indiscreet he looked tilting the lens while women hovered above. Me, I once sold a pair of purple suede pumps to Peggy Lee.
We’d dicked around for two years. We’d smoked, we’d huffed, we’d bashed the mailboxes of every neighborhood we knew, until all of Long Island was only broken splinters of wood, a scatter of lost letters. We would graduate in May, less than a month away, over the staggering precipice of what, none of us knew, though for me it would be far, someplace so far away my mother’s dull gaze wouldn’t follow me—the plains of the Midwest, or maybe the other side of the Atlantic entirely.
It wasn’t that I disappointed her. I would have traded my life for that, for the way Stan and Jim complained about their parents, their nagging questions about jobs and college. My mother no longer looked at me—only me, the me I was before we lost what we did. I saw it in her face, in the way her eyes shifted down, or to the side, or just past me when I spoke: that for her my shape carried a double, my presence would always imply an absence, the same eyes and hands and mouth and voice, the hint of Anthony in every movement and word.
My brother, Anthony, who gave me his trunk of baseball cards when he moved on to poker, who taught Jim and me to crack a bat against leather so we both made the varsity team before our junior year. Anthony, who slept in my room for two weeks when our father died, back when the shadows on my walls made monsters and I still sometimes wet the bed. Anthony, who came home from college upstate last Christmas, who slammed his car into a tree when it slipped on black ice, who left every one of us irrevocably behind.
My mother, she meant well. She cooked the roast chicken I loved and hugged me each time I left the house, the caked residue of her lipstick imprinted on my cheek, the ghosts of her fingers leaving hollows in my shirts, following me across Queens. But we watched the fair emerge through the palpable lack the holidays brought, through the embittered winds across the Long Island peninsula in January, and through the slow melt to spring, a thaw that left puddles in grandstands and pavilions.
Stan watched with disdain, his head in perpetual quake, his eyes cast down like fire to burn it all away. And though I worked through the slow build, ignored its formation like a city beyond the windows for the curve of women’s heels, I considered it anyway, what potential we were promised, a future no Skyway could comprehend.
On the Wednesday in April when the fair opened its gates, Grandpa met me at Hartley’s Diner, which he did sometimes on my lunch breaks from Albertson’s.
“Did you know most heart attacks happen on Mondays?” he said, fork suspended above a plate of beef chili. “Mondays I eat my vegetables mostly, but life’s short, Mike. You better eat every goddamn thing you want.”
I sipped my coffee, nodded down into the black. He’d had heart problems since his fifties, but who were we to tell him what he could and couldn’t eat.
“How’s your mom, son? Still doing all right?” He speared his chili again, a dish that seemed better eaten with a spoon, but there again I couldn’t tell him a better way to do all the things he’d done for years.
“Fine. Her job’s going well.”
My mother worked as a seamstress for a tailoring shop she’d opened herself, not long after my dad died. All of this Grandpa already knew. Sometimes he checked on her still, in the roundabout ways he knew how.
“And yours? You kids behaving yourselves around all those ladies?”
Though my mother had surely told him at some point to keep an eye out for me, in a way a father no longer could, Grandpa never asked about my future. He only asked about Albertson’s, stopping his questions at the bounds of what existed, not what might be.
“We’ve been watching that fair go up, out there across the expressway.”
Grandpa’s eyes widened. “Oh, yes. The grandest fair of all! Your mother wasn’t much younger than you when the first one rolled around.”
My mother had told me all about the 1939 World’s Fair over dinners the past few weeks, as if remembering made her young again. She mentioned the planetarium, the color photography and air conditioning, the Westinghouse Time Capsule whose copy of Life Magazine had likely disintegrated to dust. The lines near her eyes softened, those memories smoothed them out, but then she’d look at me and they’d harden again, as though I’d lurched her back to a relentless march of moments that bore her away from the past.
“They rolled out the new Mustang at the fair.” I knew Grandpa loved cars.
“Jesus, boy. News like that will give a man a heart attack.” He grinned and leaned in like we were conspiring. “What
do you say we skip over there, just check it out? Come on. You’ve got time.”
I looked at my watch. A half-hour left of lunch, though even if I made it back late, Stan’s dad never cared. He always told us he chose selling shoes over stock brokering so he could maintain his hair color through middle age without the wiry tinges of gray.
On our walk to the fair, Grandpa told me his weekly trip to the store had ended in disaster earlier that morning when he made it through three aisles of food before realizing that he’d accidentally taken someone else’s cart back in the produce section.
“It was the peas I noticed.” He shook his head. “Who buys fresh peas? From there I saw the sweet pickles, the walnuts, all things I’d never eat. The walnut skins, they stick to my teeth. I left the cart there, walked right out of the store.”
I nodded and kept walking. I never knew what to say when Grandpa told me his weird stories. The week before, he’d caught his neighbor sunbathing in the nude and had thrown a towel out his window, told her to cover up before any kids saw.
We approached the fair’s gates and moseyed inside. Crowds were still minimal—more people would surely flood the pavilions after work—and we moved inside with ease, walked past the flags of every nation and on toward the Unisphere, towering ahead. A middle-aged woman walked past us with a sheepdog, which bounded up to Grandpa and licked his hand before the woman pulled it away.
“Doesn’t he look like a Dusty?” Grandpa stared after the dog. “It’s a shame they can’t tell us their own names.”
We advanced toward the Ford exhibition, a large building with a line of people snaking out the front door. One Ford Mustang sat on a pillar outside, surrounded by a display of newly planted geraniums, a white convertible with red leather interior and chrome wheels.
“Now, that’s a beauty of a vehicle.” Grandpa whistled, stood back on his heels so his belly protruded. “A fine piece of metal indeed.”
He was right. The car looked like an escape across the West, a wind-whipped joyride through the Badlands, some cross-country voyage to bear me away from Long Island.
“You know, your brother’d have loved to see this,” Grandpa said, and then he stopped himself, looked down toward the tips of his shoes. I stared at the car. The sunlight glinted from every surface, puckered in diamond-shaped points that pierced my eyes.
“Your mother, Mikey.” Nobody called me that but Grandpa. “I hope she’s doing all right.”
I told him I needed to get back, that Stan’s dad would be waiting for me and we had sneaker orders to fill. Grandpa squinted and looked away, and I couldn’t tell if the light hurt his eyes too, or if the car simply radiated something else for him, some shining sun he could have sat beneath all afternoon.
After work, and after Breslin took us all to the Burger Barn for shakes and fries, we drove past the fair on our way to the expressway, watched people milling like bees in a hive, the wind blowing past the windows as we accelerated up the merge lane.
“What a bunch of fucking morons.” Stan flicked a cigarette out the passenger side and rolled up the window. “Like a fair will make a goddamn bit of difference.”
Breslin laughed. “LBJ sends us all to Vietnam, slowly and steadily, but a brand-new Mustang is going to change everything, sure.”
Jim rolled his eyes in the backseat, kicked the back of Breslin’s chair. “Yeah, and you’ll surely be the first to go. With Mommy and Daddy paying tuition, you can send us postcards from NYU, you jackass.”
“From Harvard, Jim.” Breslin grinned into the rearview mirror. “And food instead of postcards. Gold Mine Gum might be hard to find in the jungle.”
At home, my mother had already gone to bed. A roast chicken sat on the kitchen counter with a note that the oven was still half-warm, I could heat it up if I wanted. I slid the chicken into the fridge and headed upstairs.
In my bedroom, I unbuttoned my Albertson’s shirt and removed the undershirt beneath, one of a dozen white tees I’d gotten from Anthony when he outgrew them and then again when my mother finally cleaned out his closet. I’d hated hand-me-downs before, had yelled at my mom that I deserved new clothes too. Now, I’d wear them until holes poked through the sleeves, until no more hand-me-downs were left.
On top of my dresser sat a framed photo of Anthony, a gift my mother had placed in my room without words sometime after the funeral, as though it had appeared on its own. The photo had been taken at our last Fourth of July celebration together, after Anthony’s high school graduation and just before he left for Albany. We’d lit a bonfire in the backyard like we always did, and there were hamburgers and hot dogs and Black Cats and cherry bombs. In the photo Anthony held a Roman candle out toward the sky, his other hand covering his eyes as he turned away from the blast. Grandpa smiled and looked on, out of focus in the background, which meant my mother must have taken the picture. She’d snapped it just as the candle burst open, a flash of sparks and light burning hot into the night.
I lay in bed and watched the ceiling, the puckered ridges of flecked paint. Though Grandpa never asked about the future, I thought about it anyway, how far away I could go, and where and what for. I hadn’t applied to college, at least not back in the fall when I should have. My mother said SUNY would take me, in the moments we ever talked about the future, when she pushed her dinner around her plate and mentioned the possibility of rolling deadlines.
Breslin would go to college—his parents would see to that. We joked about the war, as uncertain as everyone else whether it was inevitable or not, but if the war came, we all knew with certainty that Jim and I would go. Stan, he might just work forever with his dad, until his draft number either arrived or failed to show.
I wondered about the war sometimes, if maybe this was best—that if Anthony had to go, he may as well have gone here at home and not far away in some tropical forest we’d never be able to envision or understand. My mother watched the news; I caught her watching the troops boarding planes sometimes, waving out to the camera with their young faces, their skin the same as Anthony’s. She must have thought it too: that if she were to lose him, at least she hadn’t lost him in the way so many other mothers would, with a telegram or a note, and without the physical confirmation of a wake and a proper funeral, no tangible evidence to make us let go.
The fair grew as we worked through April, people ogling the IBM films and the Bell System rides, the great moments of Abraham Lincoln delivered through simulated speech. The Long Island Expressway flooded gradually with cars, so steadily that Breslin began rounding us up early, pulling into our driveways well before eight in the morning.
On smoke breaks, we stood on the rooftops of Albertson’s, Breslin gazing off toward the fair with disdain and sometimes pulling out his magnifying glass to try and burn the tops of people’s heads below. I watched the flags, the Unisphere, the Sinclair dinosaurs lined up like a prehistoric parade. For a focus on the future they seemed out of place, ancient, their primitive size eclipsed by machinery and engines, the same objects Sinclair fueled. My mother had read in the Daily News that kids under eight considered Dinoland the greatest exhibit at the fair, and from Albertson’s I could see children staring up at the brontosaurus, its head surely obscured by the blinding afternoon sun. My mother hadn’t mentioned the other news, that our troops were increasing overseas. By August, nearly one million were expected to have embarked in steady, silent progression.
Grandpa came over for dinner on the last Thursday in April, since our lunch that week conflicted with his monthly bridge club meeting. My mother made a pot roast, breaking her steady diet of chicken, and filled the pan with carrots and celery hoping Grandpa would eat them.
“Isn’t it crazy that chairs don’t have seatbelts?” Grandpa picked at a carrot, then speared his beef instead. “Sometimes I think, good God, the Earth spins and spins, we could fall right out of our seats.”
My mother watched Grandpa push his carrots under a slice of bread. “I finished the last bridesmaid dress today for th
at wedding in May. Burgundy dresses. Who chooses wine colors for spring?”
I pulled another piece of bread from the basket and ate my pot roast. There was never anything to report about my own job, only pumps and heels and cigarette breaks, and sometimes Stan mouthing off about his dad, both at the store and in the car on the ride home.
After dinner we sat in front of the television, watching the six o’clock newscast with the rhubarb pie my mother had made. She pretended not to notice when Grandpa got up to use the bathroom and came back with another slice.
“Yep, it’s about that season,” Grandpa said when the news turned to schools preparing for graduation ceremonies. “We’ll be attending Mikey’s here in a couple of weeks.”
“I’ve made myself a tweed skirt for the occasion.” My mother shifted her glance toward me, I saw her from the corner of my eye. “What comes after graduation, we’re still not sure.”
“He’ll figure it out.” Grandpa set his empty plate on the coffee table and gave my mother a look. “Mikey’s got a good head on his shoulders.”
She turned away, took his plate into the kitchen.
Later, after Grandpa had gone home with half the pot roast and three pieces of pie, I came down from my room where I’d been studying for my last American history exam. Silence filled the house, Grandpa’s chatter gone, and my mother sat at the kitchen table alone sorting through sewing patterns.
“I’m starting to think I stitched that last dress wrong.” She dropped the patterns in her hands. “Things have been too busy. That bride won’t be happy.”
I sat down next to her. She’d already cleaned the entire kitchen, pots and silverware washed and dried.
She looked up at me. “What are you going to do?”
“Maybe study. Watch some television.”
“No, I mean, you.” She squeezed the bridge of her nose, shut her eyes. “You, Michael. What are you going to do?”
Her eyes opened, hollow and tired, dark circles shading their undersides. The question and her face and the imploring tone of her voice, all of it pierced a flash of anger through me. I pushed myself away from the table, stood up so I was looking down at her.