Bridge of Sighs (26 page)

“Shithole,” Karen Cirillo repeated, her tone even more bored and offhanded, her conviction apparently unshakable. So, I was surprised to discover, was my own contrary opinion. In the face of her insistence, I felt a sudden welling up of loyalty to my town and, in particular, our East End neighborhood—to the Spinnarkles and the Gunthers and the Bishops and, mostly, my own small family. Before I could offer anything in defense, though, the bell above the door jingled again, and I looked up, expecting, almost hoping, it would be my father, but it was Jerzy Quinn himself, and when he entered, the world wobbled even more dangerously than it had when Karen Cirillo intruded on H. Rider Haggard a few minutes earlier. About the only way I can explain this wobbling is to cite my profound sense that the presence of these two West Enders at the corner of Third and Rawley was not permitted. I had no concrete idea who or what governed what was permitted, simply that this wasn’t allowed. A violation had occurred. A rule abrogated. A perimeter breached. Whatever immutable law kept Jerzy and his gang out of the YMCA dances until the last half hour, that kept West End kids out of the high-track classes made up of the Jewish kids and Borough kids and a few “gifted” East End kids, the same elemental force that caused everyone to cut a wide swath around Jerzy’s bunch both in the school corridors and outside on the grounds—all of this was called into question by their mere presence in our little store, a dislocation of reality so profound that it left me mute. And as Jerzy came toward me with his signature little jig step, I was amazed that he had just sauntered through all the invisible barriers as if they didn’t exist, when the three of us knew for certain that they did.

Since Jerzy almost never showed Karen any affection in public, I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t take her hand or anything. For her part, she seemed to know who’d entered the store without having to look. “Hey,” she said, looking straight at me, but meaning, I understood, him. It was now, suddenly, two against one. That’s what I remember thinking. A minute before, however improbable it might have seemed, I’d been on the verge of making a friend. Now I was alone again.

“Who’s this?” Jerzy said, also looking at me. If he recognized me as a boy he’d once imprisoned in a trunk and pretended to saw in half, he gave no sign. What would I have done if he
had
recognized me? Sadly, I knew the answer to his question, for in the second or two it took him to join his girlfriend at the counter, I’d already begun to formulate a little speech about how, no, there weren’t any hard feelings, it was a long time ago and hadn’t been that big a deal anyway, that it wasn’t like I still had nightmares or anything, or that when I came out of my occasional spells I sometimes imagined I was again locked in the trunk, a sensation so strong I could actually smell the urine. I even remember feeling guilty that he might’ve been worried about me all these years. Far from holding a grudge, I was anxious to set his mind at ease.

“This? This is Lou,” Karen told him, surprising me with the news that I could be who I wanted. “He’s a friend of Bobby’s.”

I felt the blood drain out of my face.

“Bobby who?” her boyfriend said, appraising the store like a potential buyer.

“Bobby who,” she repeated with a snort. “The Bobby who kicked your ass. My cousin Bobby.
That
Bobby who.”

My heart pounded in my throat and I felt my knees buckle, but then Jerzy did the strangest thing. He let out a nasty little chuckle and gave an almost imperceptible nod in Karen’s direction as if to say
Girls. What’re you gonna do?
As if the two of us—Jerzy Quinn and Lucy Lynch—were fellow sufferers. As if I had a girlfriend just like Karen Cirillo in the back room. As if I knew the score.

They were both regarding me now, curious, perhaps, to see whose side I would take, and if there’d been a trunk there behind the counter I’d have voluntarily crawled inside and pulled the lid shut over me.

“Lou’s nice. He gave me a pack of cigs,” Karen said, smiling at me now, challenging me to say the cigarettes hadn’t been a gift, that in my father’s store we didn’t hand out free cigarettes or free anything. This, I intuited, was the price of being Lou and not Lucy, which meant the cigarettes
would
be free, just this once.

“Let’s go,” Jerzy said, then hooked his index finger into the waistband of Karen’s slacks and gave it a gentle tug. When the material stretched, I could see that his finger was between her bare skin and her underpants—a gesture made even more staggering by the fact that she didn’t seem to object. Sex, I thought, just that one word. That slender finger slipped down between her bare skin and panties meant sex. And during all of this she never once took her eyes off me.

“See you around, neighbor,” she said, though I only half heard. Jerzy had pivoted, letting go of her waistband—the snap was audible—and was heading for the door. Karen followed, saying, over her shoulder. “Thanks for the cigs, Lou. You’re a prince.”

The front of Ikey Lubin’s was all glass, and from behind the register I had a clear view of our house. At the precise instant Jerzy put his hand on the knob and pulled the door toward him, our front door opened and my father emerged, as if the two events were connected by a single cause, and I had the eerie sense that until the moment Jerzy opened the door, my father had been trapped inside our house, unable to come out onto the porch. Was it my imagination, or was there some urgency to his step as he came across the intersection?

“Who was that?” he wanted to know, shutting the door behind him.

“Who?” I said, lamely.

“Them two that just left,” he said, glancing at the cigarette rack where the single packs were kept. For an instant I wondered if he’d counted them before leaving for dinner and now was counting them again. But a second later he was looking only at me.

“A couple kids from school,” I said, meeting his gaze before looking down. If I told him their names, would he recognize Jerzy Quinn’s? Had my father ever learned the names of the boys who’d locked me in that trunk so long ago? And what would he do if he made the connection across the intervening years?

He seemed about to say something else, but just then, on the other side of the wall, we heard the sound of feet pounding up the stairs to the apartment above. “They’re back,” I said, meaning the brothers, but I knew it wasn’t them. No pickup trucks had pulled up outside, and though the noise of tramping feet was loud, it wasn’t nearly as loud as they’d been all afternoon, big, heavy men pushing and shoving one another into the walls, pounding the uncarpeted stairs with their boot heels. Suddenly I understood what Karen had meant by calling me neighbor.

That night my mother regarded me suspiciously when I announced my intention to go to bed early, wanting to know if maybe I was coming down with something or felt one of my spells coming on. What I wanted was to be alone in the dark. For hours I lay awake, thinking it all through. Karen Cirillo and I would be neighbors. I would likely see Jerzy Quinn every day. If she became my friend, did it follow that he would? The idea was almost too thrilling to contemplate. Of course it troubled me that I’d betrayed my father by giving away a pack of cigarettes. In doing so, was I not hastening my family toward financial ruin? Mostly, though, I lay there thinking of how casually Jerzy had slipped his finger into Karen’s waistband, and I tried to imagine myself doing something equally brazen and confident.

I don’t know what time it was when I finally fell asleep, but I remember no longer minding so much that Bobby had moved away. If he and his family still lived above the Spinnarkle sisters, then I’d have to share Karen and Jerzy. And they now represented to me the embodiment of the mystery I’d come to feel was at the heart of everything, a mystery as deep and profound as why my parents loved each other, as why some people had to pay the footbridge toll while others did not, as why a woman like Mrs. Marconi felt the need to run away from her own family, all as inexplicable as the mystery of my own suddenly fluid identity. If I played my cards right, I could be Lou Lynch, like my father, not a boy with a girl’s name. Wasn’t that what Karen had implied when she introduced me as Lou? I considered again the possibility that my destiny wasn’t etched in stone. The door to the future was suddenly wide open, and the light pouring through it, there in the darkness of my room, was blinding.

I could choose who to be.

F
OR A WHILE
it looked like things would work out as I’d hoped they might. Every night, when my father left me in charge of the store, Karen would appear and we’d talk, usually about school. Her belief was that all our teachers were idiots, an opinion I allowed her to imagine I shared. She was convinced they had it in for the school’s dumb kids just because they were stupid. This wasn’t an argument I’d ever encountered before, so it took me a while to get a grip on it. “Take us,” she explained. “You’re smart, I’m dumb. So they like you and hate me.” When I protested, saying I wasn’t that smart, she would have none of it. “Okay,” she conceded, “you’re not like a Jew or anything, but you’re not dumb like me. And you’re
way
smarter than Jerz,” she added, apparently feeling no need to be loyal to her boyfriend. When I said that maybe the fact that I did my homework might have something to do with our teachers’ unfairly high opinion of kids like me, she brushed this suggestion aside as well. She’d tried shit like doing her homework for a while, but it was counterproductive since she always did it wrong. Doing homework wrong, to her, was worse than not doing it at all, because doing it required time and effort and yielded the same result as not doing it, which required neither. Besides, our teachers had it all figured out in advance, she said, like who was going to get good grades and who’d flunk. “Ask Jerz,” she concluded, without giving me to understand why I should value the opinion of someone she’d just admitted wasn’t nearly as smart as I was.

That was the most curious thing about Karen’s always curious logic. The way she saw it, stupidity didn’t mean that a person’s conclusions were necessarily unsound. She saw no reason to distrust her boyfriend’s wisdom on most subjects, any more than she considered his being held back two grades indicative of anything. “Jerz knows stuff,” she insisted, then added, “All
kinds
of shit,” her rhetorical clincher.

I kept expecting him to join us, but after that first evening he didn’t appear again, and I gathered from Karen that he’d recently come under some sort of house arrest, at least on weeknights. “He promised his old lady” was how she explained it. Karen was full of West End expressions like “old lady” for “mother.” Apparently Jerzy’s “old man” was dead, so it was just him and her and his brothers. Her own father wasn’t in the picture either, which was why her last name wasn’t the same as her mother’s, and she seemed to have concluded that this, too, was normal. Jerzy’s old lady was okay, Karen went on. She was just trying to keep him on the straight and narrow, because one more screwup and he’d be back in reform school for good and, after that, prison. So except for school and weekends, Jerzy was grounded. “You’re my only friend, Lou,” she concluded sadly. “How about a pack of those Parliaments?”

Though I continued to give Karen cigarettes, she was good about not lighting up in the store, for which I was grateful, because my father wouldn’t have liked that, even if they’d been come by honestly. Nobody was allowed to smoke in the store except Uncle Dec, who did as he pleased in all circumstances, though he rarely visited us. When I casually let it drop that I was thinking about taking up smoking “again,” Karen was adamant that I not. “Cigs give you cancer. Especially girls. They’ll probably have to cut my tits off by the time I’m thirty.” When she said this, she cupped a hand under each breast so I’d know which ones she was referring to. The word “tits,” coming from Karen Cirillo’s mouth, was nearly enough to make me faint, and when she cupped them, I don’t know what kept me on my feet.

If I was, as Karen claimed, her only friend, you wouldn’t have guessed it by school. Our paths crossed only in the hallways or on the property outside, but I quickly learned that our early evening friendship was something she had no intention of acknowledging publicly. I smiled a few times, maybe even waved, but though I was sure she saw me, her expression never changed. Karen possessed a special talent that I’ve seen in only one or two other people, the uncanny ability to look right at you and then, without appearing to shift her gaze, at some point over your shoulder. The change was so subtle that the only conclusion you could come to was that she’d never been looking at you in the first place, either that or you’d been there for a time and then disappeared.

At school Jerzy sometimes would be with her, but he never acknowledged me either. From being thus ignored, I learned a lesson: it might be true that I could choose who to be, but that didn’t necessarily make me memorable.