Bridge of Sighs (19 page)

What I didn’t understand at the time was
her
strategy, too, was doomed to failure. She couldn’t teach him this particular lesson, not really, for the simple reason that if
he
failed, we all failed. Even his suffering—and he did suffer, waiting for her to share her solution with him—was not his alone. Anxious for it to be over, we
all
became depressed. What was she waiting for, a sign from God? From my father himself? It seemed so to me, which was why I resented her so. Just as he was clearly waiting for her to tell him how to fix things, she appeared to be waiting for him to say some magic word, like the one that made the fake bird come down on the Groucho Marx show. He would say it, eventually, but it troubled me that I’d never know what that word was, because there were no bells and whistles, no descending bird.

Whatever the magic word was, it got said one Sunday afternoon a good two months later. He and I were sitting on the front porch while my mother worked on the market’s books inside, receipts and invoices spread out all over the kitchen table. I was reading while he sat on the top step, staring morosely at the store, which was closed, this being the Sabbath. When my mother finally came out on the porch, she sat down beside him holding open the ledger, but he just looked away. “I guess people like Tommy Flynn more than me,” he said with a sweeping gesture that took in the whole street.

“Oh, Lou,” my mother said, her voice less harsh than it had been of late. “Why do you have to be so…?” Her voice trailed off, like it always did. After a while, she tried again. “Look, it’s bad, but not the way you think. Tommy Flynn’s a little ferret. People like you lots better than Tommy.”

“Then how come they shop down to his store and not mine?”

My mother rubbed her temples. “Lou,” she said. “Try to understand. Tommy Flynn’s not your problem. The new A&P’s your problem. It’s going to bury you and Tommy Flynn in the same unmarked grave unless we can prevent it. Can’t you see that?”

He couldn’t. I could tell that much just by looking at him, though I wasn’t sure what she was driving at either.

“How we gonna compete with superdoop prices?” he said, using his word for all supermarkets. “They buy in quantity. The vendors don’t give us the same breaks.”

“I know that. You aren’t going to beat the A&P at what they do well, Lou. You’re never going to be big like they are. You’re never going to have wide aisles, and you won’t be able to offer people lots of choices. Your only chance is to beat them at what
you
do well.”

Suddenly, I found myself sitting up straight. I had no idea what we might be good at over at Ikey’s, and I could tell my father didn’t either, but he was listening carefully to find out, and so was I.

“You’re small, Lou. You’ve got to find out how to make
small
a good thing.”

My father glanced over at me. This was making sense to him, and he wondered if it was making sense to me, too. “How do we do that?”

I closed my book, got up from my porch chair and joined them on the steps and listened to my mother talk for the next hour. As she spoke, I found my anger at her leaking away. It occurred to me that what she’d been doing all these weeks, probably since the moment my father had announced his purchase, was figuring out how this foolish thing that he’d done could be made to work. In her initial fear she’d let it be known that the folly was his and his alone, but of course she’d known all along it wasn’t, and so, perhaps without admitting it, even to herself, she’d devised a plan that she was now, finally, ready to share.

As she spoke, it became clear that while she was ostensibly addressing my father, she was also talking to me, his chief ally and helper, and every now and then she’d fix me with a look that suggested she was counting on
me
in this regard, usually concerning something she believed he’d forget or not be very good at. I recognized these gestures as votes of confidence in me, sure, but they also seemed like small betrayals of him, and I found myself looking down at the step I was perched on, ashamed, unwilling to acknowledge my father’s shortcomings. I was embarrassed, too, of my suspicion that a mere boy might possess a deeper understanding of what she was explaining than he did, even though he obliged her by nodding enthusiastically at everything she said, occasionally even winking or grinning at me, as if to suggest that
this
was what we’d been waiting for, pardner, this right here, your mother figuring it all out. Now there’d be no holding us back.

The slender advantage we had at Ikey Lubin’s, she explained, was that people could get in and out quickly, and time, she claimed, was just another form of money. When people went to the A&P out by the highway, they had to
spend
thirty minutes, whereas they could
save
twenty-five of them by darting into our little store. They wouldn’t do it if Ikey’s was a lot more expensive, so the trick was to convince them that the time they were saving more than made up for the marginally higher prices. Part of the brain, she admitted, would know this wasn’t true, but this wasn’t the part that counted. Also, it was imperative to remember that all items sold at our store were not equal. People would mostly go to Ikey’s for things they’d run out of—milk, bread, toilet paper—and so these had to be priced within a few pennies of what the supermarket charged, even if that meant we didn’t make any money on them. What we’d mark up were the things they
didn’t
need and wouldn’t make a special trip for, things they’d buy on impulse since, what the hell, they were already there. The entire store, she maintained, should be arranged so that whatever people needed most was located in the rear and they’d have to pass everything they didn’t need both going in and coming out. The most overpriced items—candy, batteries—should be placed as near the register as possible.

It was also important to remember, she continued, that men and women were different. Women had money to spend but little time to waste spending it. No woman would want to enter Ikey Lubin’s if she had to run a gantlet of indolent old farts lounging around the cash register swapping lies. She looked meaningfully at my father when she said this, knowing how much he liked having the Elite Coffee Club fellows in his store, even though they never spent any money to speak of. He felt they lent the place an air of commerce. If my mother hadn’t suggested it now, it would never have occurred to him that they might actually be preventing commerce. “The Coffee Club don’t hurt nobody,” he said, defending their communal character. “If a woman came in, they wouldn’t say nothing.”

“I know that, Lou,” my mother said. “They’d just stop telling their off-color jokes and stand there looking gutshot and wait for her to leave so they could start talking again.” Which
was
pretty much what happened on those rare occasions a woman stopped at Ikey’s.

“What do I do? Tell ’em they can’t come in no more?”

My mother looked like she considered this an elegant solution, but instead she said, “Move them around to the other side of the center island. Put a coffeepot over there on the counter and make them buy
that,
at least.”

“Charge them for coffee?”

“Don’t put it that way. Say the first refill’s free. The main thing is to keep them away from the door.”

Across the street a mangy dog trotted by the market, stopping to lift a leg and pee into the produce bin where the cantaloupes would’ve been if the market were open. When he finished, the mutt glanced over at us with what, if I hadn’t known better, I’d have sworn was a grin before trotting off up the hill. I watched him go while my mother explained the rest of it—how we were going to have to stay open later, maybe until ten or eleven at night, and after church on Sundays.

“I ain’t afraid of hard work, Tessa,” he said. “You know that. And Louie here’s a darn good worker, too.”

“After school only,” my mother reiterated, before I could volunteer for greater servitude. “He’s got his homework after supper. And only Saturday or Sunday, not both. This child needs to have a childhood.”

“I’m not a child,” I said.

“Says who?” she asked, smiling at me for the first time in forever. Telling us how everything had to be from now on out seemed to have cheered her up a little.

“Says me,” I told her, smiling too, glad we were a family again and that I didn’t have to be mad at her anymore.

“I almost forgot,” she said, turning back to my father. “I bought you a present.” She got up and went inside, returning a moment later with a black handgun, the long barrel of which she pointed at my father, who went pale. “I
should
shoot you for buying that store,” she said, suddenly serious again. “You know that, don’t you?” Then she flipped the gun in the air, catching it by the barrel and holding it out to my father, who regarded the thing as if it might be rigged to explode if he touched it.

“I don’t think nobody’s gonna rob us, Tessa,” he said weakly.

I stared at the weapon, fascinated by how small the hole was that the bullet would have to squeeze out of.

“That’s not what it’s for,” she told him.

My father and I stared at each other.

“It’s an air gun,” she explained. “It only shoots pellets.”

At that moment, right on cue, the same dog came trotting back down the hill, flanked now by two other mangy curs. They trotted in formation right down the middle of the street, paying no attention when my mother rose from the steps and headed across the intersection to meet them. The lead mutt trotted right up to the same fruit bin, but when he lifted his hind leg this time, there was a muffled pop and he leapt like a circus animal, hanging there in the air, contorted, for a full beat. He returned to the sidewalk no wiser, though, frantically chasing his haunch and growling frightfully, as if whatever had bitten him might still be there with its mouth open. The other two dogs were surprised, but neither seemed to connect this sudden fit of madness to the object my mother held in her hand, now pointed at them. One of them watched curiously as the first continued to growl and chase his tail, then grew bored and lifted his own hind leg, whereupon there was another discrete pop and then there were two dogs dancing and spinning and yelping in front of Ikey Lubin’s.

The third dog now regarded my mother and the gun with genuine suspicion. You could almost see the animal’s thoughts scrolling slowly across his feeble, conflicted brain. On the one hand there was the very real need to pee, not to mention the deep and abiding habit of doing so in our fruit bin. On the other there was the fear born of recent, albeit secondhand, experience. He looked back and forth between his suddenly lunatic companions and my mother, started to cock his leg, then reconsidered, staring at this woman for a long time before trotting off down the block, checking over his shoulder every so often to see where she was. His companions followed along, deeply resentful at this inexplicable turn of events.

When they were gone, my mother returned to where my father and I sat on the porch regarding her, at least in my case, with new eyes. “Don’t let anybody pee on your melons, Lou,” she said. “That’s my last bit of advice for today.”

And with that she went inside.

A
FTER DINNER
that night we all watched Ed Sullivan together, like the family we used to be. When it was over, my father grew restless and took the transistor radio out on the porch to listen to the country music he favored. After a while we heard him turn the radio off, and then the porch steps groaned under his weight. I went over to the window and peered out through the blinds and saw him pass beneath the streetlamp on the corner, fishing his keys out of his pocket and letting himself into Ikey Lubin’s. I waited for the lights to come on and was surprised when they didn’t. I could tell my mother knew exactly where he’d gone without having to look.

“What’s he doing?” I wondered out loud.

She continued to stare at the television screen. “Just looking at it,” she said. “I suspect he’s really seeing that store for the first time.”

I didn’t like her implication that my father didn’t really see what was in front of him, and I felt some of my recently surrendered resentment return. I did want to know more about what she was thinking, though. “Will it be okay now? The store?”

“No,” she said without hesitating. “It just won’t fail as fast.”

“I think it’ll be a success,” I said stubbornly.

“I hope you’re right,” she said, sounding like she meant it. “He doesn’t know what else to do, anyhow, so I guess he’ll have to do this.”

“You could help,” I said.

She looked at me hard, then. “I
am
helping,” she said. “You must know that much.”

“I mean help him,” I said, knowing exactly what she was getting at, “at the store.”

“I can’t help him, Lou,” she said. “I have to help
us.
”

“What’s the difference?”

“Please don’t ask me to explain what you already understand,” she said, meeting my eye. I was the one who looked away.

That night, in bed, I heard my father return, and shortly thereafter my parents’ voices began to filter up through the heat register. I heard only part of what was said, but enough to know that their conversation meant the end to the worst of their recent conflict. Their new covenant came at a price, though. Above the store was an apartment that Ikey had always rented to the sort of people who, according to my mother, belonged in the West End, people who saw nothing wrong with sitting out on their rickety porch shirtless on hot summer nights, who hung over the railing and hollered down to people who pulled up at the curb below, honking the horns of their ancient, rusted-out Buicks and Pontiacs. The flat was vacant now, unrentable to decent people until we could find the money to make repairs. “I’m not leaving this house, Lou. It was bought with my parents’ money. They knew better than to give it to us, but they did anyway. I’m not moving in above that store. Not ever.” When my father started to protest that he had no such intention, she stopped him cold. “Don’t ever tell me it might be fixed up nice. That living above the store would be more convenient. That we could be happy there. Don’t ever do that.”