Baker Towers (27 page)

I
n the spring Lucy began to disappear.

She was still a big girl, but no longer a fat one. Food tasted wrong now, or didn’t taste at all: Dorothy’s oatmeal, the cafeteria slop, Joyce’s bland casseroles. The daily trek to St. Joe’s was a brisk half hour each way. Lucy walked in all weather, in rainstorms, in snow. It was better than riding with Joyce.

The weather warmed, and she returned to her spot on the school steps, joined, now, by a junior named Marcia Dickey, a freckled girl who smoked menthol cigarettes. Marcia talked, and the two girls smoked.

Marcia was a farm girl. Her father raised dairy cows on a tract west of Moss Creek. Lucy had seen the name stamped on neat aluminum boxes on porches all over town—
DICKEY’S DAIRY
—and felt as though she were meeting a celebrity. The Dickeys’ farm was so remote the school bus didn’t come near it, so every morning Marcia rode into town on one of the milk trucks. For two hours she sat in the cafeteria with the other farm kids, waiting for the classrooms to open. After school she rode home with her
boyfriend Davis, in his father’s car. Davis played on teams: baseball in the spring, football in the fall. While the teams practiced, Marcia waited on the steps.

Lucy had seen Davis around school, a lanky boy with hair like an Irish setter. He was as quiet as Marcia was talkative; they looked so alike they appeared to be related. Once he’d walked by the steps when the girls were smoking, and Marcia had introduced him to Lucy. It was as close as she had come all year to talking with a boy. At St. Joe’s the classes were segregated by gender. Boys and girls saw one another only in the halls. They were permitted to sit together in the cafeteria, though only the steady couples did. Couples like Connie Kukla and Steven Fleck, a senior with comically large shoulders. Connie wore his class ring on her engagement finger, heavy as a penance on her tiny hand.

The cafeteria was as large as a train station. Girls filled the tables at the front of the room, while the boys gravitated toward the back. Lucy liked the noise of it, the bustling anonymity. She and Marcia Dickey sat with their backs to the wall, watching. One by one the students filed through the line, holding their trays, looking for a place to sit. In that moment, they all wore a panicked, baffled expression. In that moment they were all the same.

Sometimes boys stared at Lucy. She had not noticed this herself; Marcia had pointed it out one day in the cafeteria line. The school uniform, a plaid jumper, was designed for petite girls like Connie Kukla. The snug fit, the busy pattern, made Lucy’s chest look enormous.

“It’s not my fault,” Lucy said, her cheeks reddening.

“Who said fault?” Marcia smiled. “I’d kill for a figure like yours.” For a moment Lucy heard her mother’s voice.
Lucy is beautiful. She’ll always be beautiful.

“This lunch is disgusting,” she said, covering her meat loaf with a napkin. She busied herself with not eating, afraid she was about to cry.

T
HEY WERE SITTING
on the steps when Davis pulled up in his car. Music on the radio, a song Lucy recognized.

“Ready?” Davis called out the window.

Marcia looked up at the sky. “It looks like rain. Can we give Lucy a ride?”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” she said quickly. Two boys were already sitting in the backseat. “I don’t want to take you out of your way.”

“You won’t,” said Davis. “I’m already taking these jokers into town. Hop in.”

The back passenger door opened and a tall boy stepped out, wearing gym shorts and a damp white T-shirt. Lucy recognized his broad shoulders, his shiny black hair. He was Connie Kukla’s boyfriend, Steven Fleck.

He nodded toward the car, and Lucy slid over to the middle of the seat, next to a small, blond boy she didn’t know. Marcia got into the front seat, leaned in close to Davis, and kissed him on the mouth.

They peeled away from the curb, and Davis turned up the radio. Frankie Avalon backed by hushed female voices, a song Lucy heard everywhere that spring:
Venus, make her fair/A lovely girl with sunlight in her hair.

Oh, brother,
Lucy thought. Even Frankie Avalon was in love with Connie Kukla.

“Whew. It stinks in here.” Marcia rolled down her window. “Carful of sweaty guys. Ew.”

Steven Fleck laughed, so Lucy did, too. His face and neck and arms looked moist and flushed, as though he had been running hard. In the gym shorts his legs looked thick and muscular. She was relieved to see that his thighs were wider than hers.

Davis drove fast and carelessly, like her brother Sandy. The first time he made a left turn, Lucy lurched to the right, directly into Steven Fleck’s lap.

“Sorry,” she said.

“That’s okay,” he said, laughing.

It was amazing what you could learn about a person without talking, just by sitting close. His hands were large, the nails bitten low. (She bit her nails, too.) His legs were dirty, the skin scraped raw and bleeding a little at the knees. You had to take a game seriously to slide that hard at practice. Lucy had played the same way: kickball, dodgeball, she had always wanted to win. Baby games, she knew; that was a long time ago. She hadn’t played anything in years.

Davis stopped at a traffic light. “Where to, Lucy?”

“Polish Hill,” she said.

The blond boy piped up. “Fleck’s girlfriend lives up there.”

Lucy had forgotten he was there; she looked at him now with intense dislike. She often felt this way toward small, blond people: Connie Kukla, her sister Joyce. Steven Fleck was big and dark—like her mother, like Angelo Bernardi, like Lucy herself.

Davis looked over his shoulder. “Fleck, you want me to let you off at Connie’s?”

“Nah, that’s okay.” He glanced sideways at Lucy. “I just saw her at school. That’s enough for one day.”

In the front seat Marcia burst out laughing. Lucy, too, started to laugh. They were still laughing when Davis pulled in front of her house. Steven Fleck stepped out of the car and Lucy slid out, holding down her skirt
with her hand. The seat was warm where he had sat. The vinyl stuck to her bare thighs.

“See you in school,” said Steven Fleck.

“Sure,” said Lucy. “See you.”

She stood in front of her house a moment, watching the car drive away. Then Leonard Stusick rode up on his bike, his book bag and lunch box tied to the rear fender. He wore his navy blue pants and sweater, the grammar school uniform. He was twelve but looked ten. “Who was that?” he asked.

“You wouldn’t know them.”

“How do you know?” Leonard squinted, shielding his eyes from the sun peeking through the clouds. “The big one is Steven Fleck. He plays in the Pony League, for Reilly Trucking.”

“He does?”

“Watch this.” Leonard spun a fast circle in the road, wheeling up on his back tire.

Lucy ignored him. “How’d you know that?”

“You didn’t even watch.” Leonard stopped suddenly, spraying gravel. “What? Is he your boyfriend now?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“That’s guy’s an idiot,” said Leonard. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Trust me.” Leonard popped a wheelie and pedaled into his driveway. “I know what I’m talking about.”

I
N THE KITCHEN
Joyce stood at the sink, rinsing lettuce for salad. “You beat the storm,” she said. “I was about to come and get you.”

“I got a ride home.”

“I see that.” Joyce shut off the water. “Who are your friends? I didn’t recognize the car.”

Lucy’s cheeks heated. “Nobody. Just some kids from school.”

“Well, I figured that much.”

Joyce waited.

“Marcia Dickey,” Lucy said finally.

“What about all those boys?”

“You were
watching
?”

“I heard a car come up the hill.” Joyce dried her hands on a towel. “The radio was playing full blast. I’m sure the whole neighborhood heard it.”

“It wasn’t that loud.”

“Lucy, who were the boys?”

Am I under arrest?
Lucy thought. She wished she had the nerve to say it.

“Davis somebody,” she said instead. “He’s Marcia’s boyfriend. And Steven Fleck. The other boy I didn’t know.”

“You don’t
know
him?” Joyce crossed her arms. “Lucy, do you think that’s wise? Getting into a car with a boy you don’t know?”

It was just like Joyce: asking questions when she didn’t really want to hear the answers.
Obviously,
Lucy thought.
Obviously I think it’s wise.

“I know the others,” she said. Her face felt hot.

“David
somebody
?”

“Davis. He’s Marcia’s
boyfriend,
” Lucy said, exasperated. “She’s my
best friend.
”

“Well, excuse me, Lucy, but I’ve never met this Marcia, or heard a word about her, as far as I can remember. And I’ll thank you not to take that tone with me.”

Lucy dropped her books loudly on the table. Without another word, she went upstairs to her room.

J
OYCE LISTENED
to her go, her tread heavy on the stairs.
If I’d stomped around that way when I was fifteen,
she thought,
Daddy would have had my head.
She often had such thoughts about her sister, who balked at even the gentlest sort of correction. The older Novaks—Georgie, Dorothy, and Joyce—had been scolded, lectured and worse; Georgie in particular had been slapped and swatted and, on one memorable occasion, chased around the backyard with their father’s belt. Lucy had never had so much as a spanking, as far as Joyce knew. She’d never been sent to pick scrap coal at the Number One tipple, never slipped a coat over her nightgown on a winter night and trudged through the snow to the outhouse. It was as if she and Sandy had been raised in another family entirely.

Joyce dried the lettuce and shredded it for salad. Her questions, she knew, had been perfectly reasonable. She tried to picture herself at fifteen, riding home from school in a car full of boys. It was hard to imagine. Few families had had cars back then, and those who did would never have entrusted them to teenagers. Even at school she had seldom spoken to a boy. Her nervousness had made her timid—a problem Lucy seemed not to have.

She stood over the sink peeling a cucumber, thinking of a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, when she’d taken Lucy shopping for an Easter dress. Since her weight loss, none of her old clothes fit properly; twice her school uniform had been taken in at the waist. The day had been unseasonably
warm, a blast of summer in late March. They’d left their coats in the car and walked a few blocks to the store, the sun warm on their bare arms. Joyce wore a crisp white blouse, Lucy a cotton sweater borrowed from Dorothy; later Joyce noticed that it fit her snugly across the chest. As they walked past a building under construction, a chorus of wolf whistles followed them down the block. The realization had hit Joyce like a physical blow: the men were whistling at her little sister.

“Ignore them,” she said, her cheeks flaming.

Lucy said nothing, but a tiny smile pulled at her lips. Later, as she waited outside the changing room, Joyce remembered that smile. Lucy wasn’t embarrassed by the crude attention. She had actually enjoyed it.

T
hat summer, men campaigned for president. Joyce and Ed scrambled to register voters. They canvassed Polish Hill and Little Italy, the new developments of West Branch and East Branch, nearby Coalport and Fallentree. From house to house, Ed expressed his enthusiasm for Kennedy’s Peace Corps. Joyce’s approach had more success: Elect the first Catholic president.

Another presidency was also at stake: Bakerton Local 1450, United Mineworkers of America. For twelve years the incumbent, Regis Devlin, had run unopposed. Regis was silver-haired and silver-tongued, ready with a joke, trusted by the Bakers and well liked by the men. On his watch the union had demanded little of management. His few requests were promptly granted: bonuses at Christmas, hot coffee at the tipple, an on-site shower room at the Twelve. The men felt appreciated; their jobs were secure. For the first time in their working lives, they went home clean.

Everyone was surprised when Gene Stusick declared himself a
candidate—sheepishly at first, with apologies to Regis; then with increasing confidence. Gene was a poor politician; he lacked Regis’s quick wit, his Irish charm. What he did have were numbers.

He outlined his position in a mimeographed letter, as blunt and unappealing, as thorough and informative, as Gene himself. The miners’ contract was up for renewal that spring. Except for an annual cost-of-living adjustment, the men hadn’t had a raise in six years. In the same period, profits had grown 40 percent. The Twelve was the largest bituminous mine in the state, and the company still hadn’t touched the ten thousand acres to its north. If, as planned, the reserves were tapped the following year, Baker would make money hand over fist. Meanwhile the miners would be locked into another meager contract, the same sweetheart deal Regis Devlin had given Baker Brothers for years.

N
EITHER OF THESE
elections interested Lucy. All summer she brooded over another race, the contest for Fire Queen.

She hadn’t entered, herself; she was too aware of the potential for humiliation. Years of name-calling, of Joyce taking her shopping in the Chubbette Department, had taught her that much.

Dozens of girls competed for Fire Queen. The contest happened behind closed doors; the firemen themselves judged. From a window booth at Keener’s Diner, Lucy and Marcia Dickey watched the girls arrive at the hall. Clare Ann Baran and Connie Kukla in pale pink gowns, their blond hair teased into identical flips. Girls in strapless shifts, in satin, in tulle.

“Look at that one,” said Marcia Dickey. Two streams of smoke shot out her nostrils. “The strapless. A padded bra would have been a good idea.”