Commonwealth (10 page)

Caroline set about untwisting the wire hanger. That was the hardest part.

“You're wasting time,” Cal said.

“Whose time?” Holly said. “If you're in such a hurry then go.” She was curious, and it was plain to all of them that Cal was curious too.

Albie walked in wide circles around the car, swinging his hips from side to side and doing the boom-boom thing.

“Pipe down,” Cal said to him. “If you wake Dad up he'll take
your head off.” That was when the rest of them remembered whose room the car was parked in front of and made a point to be quiet.

Caroline picked back the rubber seal at the bottom of the window with her pointer finger and stuck the coat hanger in while the other children pressed close to watch. Caroline was a little worried that locks might be different from one car to another. The station wagon was an Oldsmobile and Aunt Bonnie's car was something else, a Dodge maybe. The tip of her tongue pushed up at the corner of her mouth while she guided the coat hanger blindly towards what her father called the sweet spot about ten inches down from the button lock. Then she felt it, the wire against the mechanism of the lock. She didn't try to hook it though the temptation was there. It was just a little bump and she pushed straight down the way she'd been taught.

The lock popped up.

It was a victory for all the girls that they remembered not to scream. Caroline pulled the coat hanger out and opened the door like it was some sort of natural act. Even Albie put his arms around her waist. “You broke the car!” he said, his loud whisper making him sound like a movie gangster.

“That's right,” she said and gave him the hanger as the morning's souvenir. Albie immediately went to the car next to theirs and began jamming the hanger down against the window. Oh, what Caroline wouldn't have given to call her father from the motel phone! She wanted him to know what a good job she'd done.

Cal took the coat hanger from his brother and studied it in light of this new potential. “You can teach me how to do this?” he said, either to Caroline or the coat hanger.

“Only police officers are allowed to do it,” Franny said. “And their children. Otherwise you're a criminal.”

“I'd be a criminal,” Cal said. He slid into the front seat of the
station wagon, opened the glove compartment. He took out a gun and a fifth of gin, the seal still on.

No one was surprised that there was a gun in the car, even though Cal was the only one who'd known it was there, and he only knew about it because he'd been nosing around in the glove compartment a few days before while Beverly was in the grocery store and he'd found it, proving yet again that sometimes a person just has to look. What surprised all of them though, Cal included, was that Bert had left it in the car. It made them think he must have another gun in his motel room. Bert liked a gun in his briefcase, in the nightstand, in the drawer of his office desk. He liked to talk about the criminals he had put away, and how a person never knew, and how he had to protect his family, and how he wasn't going to let the other guy make the first move, but really it was just that Bert liked guns.

The mesmerizing item was the gin. The parents might enjoy a drink every now and then but it wasn't like they had to take it with them. They had never seen gin in the car before. That was something special.

“You know you can't take it,” Holly said, looking back to the door of the parents' room. She was talking about both the gun and the gin.

“Just in case something happens,” Cal said. He put the gun in the brown paper sack along with the candy bars and Cokes. Jeanette had taken her Coke and two candy bars out of the bag already and put them in her purse. She took the bottle from her brother and started working on the seal, teasing it loose so gently that it finally gave itself up to her little fingernails in a single, replaceable piece. She put the seal in her coin purse and gave the bottle back to her brother. Then they set out for the lake, Caroline carrying the map.

It was hotter than they expected it to be, though no hotter than it had been the day before or the day before that. The sky was already turning white, clamping a pervasive dullness onto the landscape. Holly scratched at her arms and complained about the mosquitoes. Like her stepmother, she was particularly sensitive to mosquitoes. The grass in the field across from the motel, the field that the waitress had told them to cut through, came up to their waists and was as high as Albie's chest, but being right up in it they could see the tiny flecks of yellow flowers blooming on the stalks. “Can you see the lake?” Albie asked. He had ketchup smeared across the blue-and-yellow-striped shirt that Beverly had bought for him. His hands were sticky.

“Stop,” Cal said, and put up his hand flat to the sky. They stopped like soldiers, all at once. “Turn around,” he said, and they turned around.

“What's that building right there?” Cal was talking to his brother, pointing just across the street.

“The Pinecone,” Albie said.

“How far did she say it was from the Pinecone to the lake?”

In the quiet they could hear the cars whizzing past. Deep in the grass the crickets rubbed their wings together, the birds called out overhead. “Two miles, maybe a little less,” Franny said. She knew it wasn't her question to answer but she couldn't stop herself. There was something about standing there that was making her uneasy, the dry weeds pricking at her shins. There was no path through the field.

Cal pointed at his brother. It was funny the way he could be so much like his father while being nothing like him at all. “Albie?”

“Two miles,” Albie said. He started chopping at the grass with his open hand, and then began swinging his arm back and forth like a scythe.

“So now you know we're not there and you know I can't see the lake.” Cal started walking again and the rest of them pushed ahead. The field was bigger than it had looked from a distance, and after a while they couldn't see the Pinecone anymore and they couldn't see anything else either, just the grass and the washed-out sky. Several members of the party wondered if they were still going in the right direction.

“Are we there now?” Albie said.

“Shut up,” Holly said. A grasshopper the size of a baby's fist jumped up from the dry grass and attached itself to her shirt and she screamed. Franny and Jeanette moved to the left of the pack, and when they ducked down they were pretty sure no one could see them. They were very close, almost nose to nose, and Jeanette smiled at her before they popped back up again.

“
Now
are we there?” Albie hopped forward, both feet together, but his progress was thwarted by the density of the grass. He looked back at his brother. “
Now
are we there?”

Cal stopped again. “I can send you back.” He looked behind them. There was still the beaten-down vestige of the trail they had made in the grass.

“Where are we?” Albie asked.

“Virginia,” Cal said, his voice as tired as an adult's. “Shut up.”

“I want to carry the gun,” Albie said.

“People in hell want ice water,” Caroline said. It was an expression of her father's.

“Cal's got a gun,” Albie sang, his voice surprisingly loud in the open landscape.
“Cal's got a gun!”

They stopped again. Cal moved the brown bag higher up under his arm. Two swallows came from nowhere and shot past them. Albie wouldn't stop singing. Jeanette pulled the can of Coke out of her purse.

“It's too early to drink it,” Holly said. She was in her first year of Girl Scouts and she had read the chapter about survival tactics in the handbook. “You have to make it last.”

Jeanette cracked the can open anyway. Watching her drink, they all decided they were thirsty. There would be more Cokes once they got to the lake.

“Cal's got a gun,” Albie called, though with less interest.

Holly looked up at the sky. It was a complete blank. There wasn't a single cloud to offer them protection. “I wish I had a Tic Tac,” she said.

Cal thought for a minute and then nodded his head. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a tiny plastic bag about the size of three postage stamps where he kept the Benadryl tablets his mother made him carry for his allergy. They all sat down, pushing back the grass, and Caroline opened up the brown bag. She was very formal about the way she picked up the gun and set it beside her, and then she handed out the Cokes. Cal came behind her and gave everyone two garish pink pills. “I shouldn't give you any,” he said to Albie. “You're annoying the hell out of me today.”

But Albie kept his palm up in silent demand until finally Cal sighed and gave him his two.

“This is what I needed,” Holly said, having brought the pills up to her mouth and then brought them down again, pressed beneath her thumb. She took the bottle of gin out of the bag and swigged it like Coke, but it surprised her. For a second she almost spit it out but she managed to keep her lips pressed together. She handed the bottle to her sister and then stretched out on her back. “Now I won't mind walking to the lake,” Holly said.

Jeanette took a hit of the gin and coughed, then she leaned over and gave her pills to Albie. “You can have mine.”

He looked at the two extra pills in his palm. Now he had four.
They were so pink in the bright light, in a background of so much colorless grass. “Why?” he said, maybe suspicious and maybe not.

Jeanette shrugged. “Tic Tacs give me a stomachache.” This was possible. Everything gave Jeanette a stomachache. That's why she was so thin.

Franny watched Caroline, how she pushed the pills into her palm with her thumb and threw back her head as if to swallow them with a big slug of Coke. Caroline was always convincing. Franny could see she didn't really drink the gin either. Her mouth wasn't open when she tilted the bottle back. But when the bottle came to her, Franny decided she would compromise—swallow the gin and palm the pills. The gin could not have surprised her more. She followed the burning sensation as it went down her throat and through her chest and stomach. It was as hot and bright as the sun, settling between her legs—a beautiful sensation, as if the burning had brought about a sort of physical clarity. She took a second mouthful before handing the bottle to Albie. Albie drank the most of all.

The children didn't mind waiting. Waiting was all part of it. It was hot outside and the Coke was still cold. It was nice just to lie there for a while and stare up into the emptiness of the sky, to not have to listen to Albie go on and on about nothing. When they finally got up Cal put his empty Coke can next to Albie's leg.

“That's littering,” Franny said.

“We'll pick them up later,” he said. “We'll have to come back for him.”

So they all left their cans beside Albie, who was sleeping the sleep of four Benadryls and a big slug of gin in the hot morning sun. Cal took back the other pills from Holly and his stepsisters and put them in the baggie and put the baggie back in his pocket. The
candy bars were starting to melt and the gun was hot from being out in the sun and they put them all together back in the bag and headed for the lake.

When they got there, the five of them swam out farther than they would ever have been allowed to had the parents been with them. Franny and Jeanette went to look for caves and were taught to fish by two men they met standing off by themselves in a grove of trees on the shore. Cal stole a package of Ho-Ho's from the bait shop and had no need to use the gun in the paper bag because no one saw him do it. Caroline and Holly climbed to the top of a high rock and leapt into the lake below again and again and again until they were too tired to climb anymore, too tired to swim. All of them were sunburned but they lay in the grass to dry because none of them had thought to bring a towel, but the drying-off bored them and so they decided to head back.

Their timing turned out to be perfect. Albie was awake but he was just sitting there in the field, quiet and confused amid the Coke cans, trying hard not to cry. He didn't ask them where they had been or where he was, he just got up and followed in the line behind them as they passed. He was sunburned as well. It was just past two o'clock in the afternoon. The most amazing thing of all was that minutes after they came back to the Pinecone and stretched across the beds in the girls' room in their damp swimsuits to watch television, the parents knocked on their door, bashful and apologetic. They couldn't believe how long they'd slept. They had no idea how tired they must have been. They would take everyone to the movies and out for pizza in order to make it up to them. The parents seemed not to notice the swimsuits, the sunburns, the mosquito bites. The Cousins children and the Keating children smiled up with beatific forgiveness. They had done everything they had
ever wanted to do, they had had the most wonderful day, and no one even knew they were gone.

It was like that for the rest of the summer. It was like that every summer the six of them were together. Not that the days were always fun, most of them weren't, but they did things, real things, and they never got caught.

4

The music didn't change. The tape churned out the same two-hour loop again and again. The management figured that either the customer would have paid up and left or be too drunk to notice before the songs began to repeat. A person would have to stay in the bar, sober and attentive, for more than two hours before realizing that George Benson was singing “This Masquerade” for a second time. That meant the only people who could be troubled by the repetition were the people who worked in the bar, and the standard of sobriety and attention knocked several of them out of the running. During the course of an eight-hour shift an employee could expect to hear the tape four times in its entirety, four and a half for whoever was closing. Franny spoke to Fred about it at the end of her first month. Fred, the better of the two night managers, oversaw the bar and the larger, busier, and less profitable hotel restaurant. He told her it didn't matter.

“It does matter,” Franny said. “It's driving me batshit.” She was wearing a slim black dress, sleeveless and short, over a fitted white blouse. She was wearing black high-heeled shoes. With her straight blond hair in a single loose braid, she looked like the music-video
version of the Catholic schoolgirl she'd once been. Before she took the job she wasn't sure if she'd be able to bear the indignity of the uniform, but it turned out the uniform didn't actually bother her. It was the music. It was Sinatra singing “It Was a Very Good Year” that made her feel like she might step into the revolving door at the front of the lobby, a tray of cocktails balanced on her open hand, and swing out into the dark winter night.

Fred gave her a nod. He was not paternalistic or dismissive, though he looked like somebody's father and gave her an answer that was in no way helpful. “Trust me. I've been here almost five years. You get used to it.”

“But I don't want to be here in five years. I don't want to get used to it.” The smallest flash of discomfort registered in the night manager's eyes. Franny tried again. “Couldn't you just get a couple different tapes? It could be the same people. I'm not complaining about the kind of music. I mean, different music would be appreciated but that's not my problem. The repetition is my problem. Those people sang other songs.”

“We have more tapes somewhere,” Fred said, glancing around the tiny windowless office, “but no one ever changes them.”

“I could change them.”

He pushed up from his cluttered desk and gave her shoulder a small, conciliatory squeeze. Everyone in this place was a toucher: the waitresses kissed at the end of their shifts, the managers rested their hands on your shoulders, a busboy, not correctly tipped, could deliver a forceful hip check when squeezing past you at the dishwash station. And the customers, Jesus, the customers liked to touch. Two years in law school and not a single person had put a finger on her, but that was law school, where everyone who had made it through the first two weeks understood the concept of liability. Standing this close, she could catch just the smallest trace of
vodka in the air around Fred and was surprised that she could still register the smell of alcohol. “Just wait,” he said, his voice full of reassurance. “It goes away.”

Franny trudged down the narrow hallway from the office to the kitchen where the cooks played bootlegged cassettes of NWA on a boom box coated in grease, the volume so low it barely whispered above the clanging of pots,
fuck da police
. The men mouthed the words and bobbed their heads, all within the low limits of the management's tolerance.

“Little House,” Jerrell called out to her from the line. “Be sweet and get me some lemonade.” He reached across the searing cooktop and through the pickup window to hand her his jumbo Styrofoam 7-Eleven cup with lid and straw.

“Sure,” Franny said. She took the cup. The cooks, every one of them a large black man, were reliant on the waitresses, every one of them a small white woman, to bring drinks back from the bar to keep them from dying in the Sahara of the fry station.

“I count on you,” Jerrell said, and pointed at her with a raw steak before dropping the meat on the incandescent surface in front of him.

But Franny never forgot the lemonade, nor how many extra packets of sugar he liked, nor the bar pretzels needed to make up for the body's lost salt, flushed away in the rivers of sweat that dropped onto the cooktop with an explosive sizzle and vanished. She knew what every man in the kitchen wanted in his cup. Franny was a professional. She remembered orders for tables of ten, who got the Ketel One, who got the Absolut. She could soothe a single businessman without letting him monopolize her time. Stepping out into the frozen slap of Chicago in the small hours of the morning, it was not lost on her how much better it would have been to be a bad cocktail waitress and a good law student. She had dropped out of law school in the middle (though closer to the
beginning) of the first semester of her third year. She had racked up an enormous debt predicated on the salary of the partnership she would never obtain. For someone who had no skills and no idea what she wanted to do with her life other than read, cocktail waitressing was the most money she could make while keeping her clothes on. Those were her only two criteria at this point: not to be a lawyer and to keep her clothes on. She had tried regular waitressing, wearing black sneakers and hoisting trays of food, but there wasn't enough money in it to cover the minimum payments in her coupon book. In the dark, velvety plush of the Palmer House bar, men regularly, inexplicably, left two twenties sitting on top of an eighteen-dollar check.

She filled up the Styrofoam cup with crushed ice and lemonade and, seeing that Heinrich the bartender was listening to a customer outline the seven sorrows of the world, laced the frozen slush with Cointreau. Cointreau was the bottle at the very end of the bar near the soda station and was therefore the easiest to snatch, plus she thought it made a certain sense with lemonade. She would have paid for the shot but employees were not allowed to buy alcohol during their shift, and they were especially not allowed to buy alcohol for the men who operated the knives and heated surfaces. Jerrell had told her he'd give her ten bucks any time she could get something extra in the cup, but she wouldn't take his money. This, too, made her a sort of mythical creature among the members of the kitchen staff, because while the other waitresses would take drink orders from the cooks, they often forgot to fill them, and when they did remember, they never turned down a tip.

Franny ran tort law in her head in an effort to block out the music, covering the thing she hated with the thing she despised. The elements of assault: the act was intended to cause apprehension of harmful or offensive contact; and the act indeed caused
apprehension in the victim that harmful or offensive contact would occur. The night was winding down. The high tide of gin and tonics had receded into the quiet ebb of after-dinner drinks: snifters of brandy and small, syrupy glasses of Frangelico purchased by customers who realized they weren't quite drunk enough to go up to their rooms. It was Franny's night to close, and for the moment she'd been left alone to oversee the room: two tables of two and one lone soul at the bar. Both of the other cocktail waitresses clocked out, one to pick up her sleeping child from her ex-husband's couch, the other to have drinks with a Palmer House waiter in some less-expensive bar. They had both kissed Franny before they left, and then they kissed each other. She guessed that Heinrich had gone to smoke in the hallway outside the kitchen, which gave Franny the chance to slip around to the other side of the bar and step out of her shoes. She flexed her toes back before grinding them down against the damp honeycomb of the black rubber bar mat, then she ate three maraschino cherries from the garnish bins along with an orange slice because they were best when chewed up together. That was what she was doing when she saw Leon Posen, her mouth full of chemically altered fruit. She should only have had a glimpse of him but when he looked up she had neither the opportunity nor the will to turn away.

“Hello,” he said. Leon Posen, sitting two seats away from her. He was wearing a dark-gray suit and a white shirt with only the top button of his collar undone. He may well have had a tie folded in his pocket. Had he reached out his hand and she reached out her hand their fingers very easily could have touched. As a rule Franny didn't pay attention to the people at the bar. They were people who had chosen not to take a table and therefore were not her responsibility. She had no idea how long he'd been sitting there. Ten minutes? An hour?

“Hello,” she said.

“You're shorter than you were,” he said.

“Am I?”

“You've taken off your shoes.”

Franny looked down at the sore red curve bitten into the top of either foot, clearly visible through her stockings. It was an impression that stayed for hours after she was home. “Yes.”

He nodded. His hair was iron gray, sheeplike. Effort must have gone into combing it down. “It's a nice effect but I'd think it would destroy your feet after a while.”

“You get used to it,” Franny said, and thought of Fred, and how he had told her she'd get used to it. She made herself listen now as a way of orienting herself in the world, in the bar where she stood across from Leon Posen. Lou Rawls was singing “Nobody But Me,” which was funny because that was the one song in the rotation she never got tired of, the perfect union of nouns and verbs.
I've got no chauffeur to chauffeur me. I've got no servant to serve my tea.

Leon Posen nodded, his fingertips resting on a drained glass of ice. Franny was shaping the story in her head even as he was sitting in front of her. She was thinking of how she would pull out her copies of
First City
and
Septimus Porter
as soon as she got home. She would go back over the parts she had underlined in college and read them again. Then she would wake Kumar up and tell him she had talked to Leon Posen in the bar, and how he had asked her about her shoes. Kumar, who was a genius when it came to not being interested in anything, would want to hear every detail, and when she was finished he would tell her to start again. Even as it was happening, she knew that the story of meeting Leon Posen at the Palmer House was one she was going to tell for a long time.
If I hadn't gone to law school in Chicago and then dropped out, I wouldn't even have been working in the bar.
She would tell that to her father and to Bert.

But Leon Posen hadn't finished. He was still in front of her, waiting for her attention while she imagined him. “Why get used to it?”

“What?” She had lost her place in the conversation.

“The shoes.” He looked like his pictures, the nose taking up all the real estate, and then the soft, hooded eyes. His face was a caricature of his face, a face that was meant to be sketched beside a book review in
The New Yorker
.

“Well, you have to, the shoes are part of the uniform, and you wear the uniform because you make more money.” And though she wouldn't mention it, the uniform was polyester, which you can laugh at all you want but it washed really well and didn't need to be ironed. Franny never had to figure out what she was supposed to wear to work, which had also been the great thing about Catholic school.

“You mean I'll tip you more for wearing uncomfortable shoes?”

“You will,” she said, because she'd been there long enough to know how things work. “You do.”

He looked at her sadly, or maybe that was just the way he looked, as if he felt the pain of every woman who had ever crammed her feet into heels. It was a beguiling effect. “Well, I haven't tipped you yet so if that's the reason you might as well put your shoes back on. We could see what happens.”

“I'm not your waitress,” she said, regretting it deeply.
Leon Posen, step away from the bar! Come and sit at one of the little tables with the flickering candles. Make yourself comfortable in the rounded, red leather chairs.

“You could be if I ordered another drink.” He held up his glass, rattled the lonesome ice. “What's your name?”

She told him her name.

“I never meet Frannys.” He said it like her name was a favor to him. “Franny, I'd like another scotch.”

It was her job to get him a drink if he was sitting at a table but not if he was sitting at the bar. They were not union workers at the Palmer House but the division of labor was ironclad. She knew her place. “What kind of scotch?”

He smiled at her again. Two smiles! “Dealer's choice,” he said. “And remember, I may be that rare individual who tips off the percentage of the bill instead of your heel height so knock yourself out.”

She had just worked her left foot back into the shoe when Heinrich, fresh from his cigarette and breath mint, rounded the edge of the bar and came towards them. He was raising two fingers to Leon Posen, a gesture that asked if he was ready for another without troubling himself to form the question into words, as if theirs was a relationship so sacred it had transcended language. Franny, stepping out of her left shoe as she rushed to cut him off, all but threw herself into the bartender, who in turn was forced to catch her. He looked down at her stocking feet. Heinrich was a man of Leon Posen's age, her father's age, which was to say somewhere in the dark woods past fifty. He came from a more decorous time. She had no business being behind the bar in the first place, she knew that. It was his country.

“I need a favor,” she said. It was easy to be quiet. She was in his arms.

Heinrich turned to Leon Posen and raised his eyebrows slightly, formally, asking the question. Leon Posen nodded.

“Come with me,” Heinrich said. He steered Franny down to the end of the long bar where the curaçao and the Vandermint sat on high glass shelves, waiting to be dusted.

“That's Leon
Po
sen,” Franny said, keeping her voice low.