Teen Angel (4 page)

“Dues are a quarter a month and that goes towards parties,” Hansy said. She was the social secretary.

Sonny went around and gave everyone the handshake. Dot was so eager she almost twisted her arm off. The Gooch only glared at her, saying under her breath, “That wasn’t real come. You better watch your step, girl.” And refused to shake Sonny’s hand.

“Hey, you wanna walk home together?” Dot asked. “I voted for you.”
How come the rejects always fell in love with her?

“People,” Marilyn announced as everyone was about to split. “Orbach’s at Thirty-fourth Street tomorrow. We all meet outside after school.” Then she looked at Sonny and added, “Don’t worry. It’s a cinch. Just bring a big bag and wear a coat with pockets.”

Sonny nodded.
They sounded like they really meant it. Like it was for real
. The closest she ever came to stealing anything was the time when the black crayon of her birthday box of sixty-four Crayolas broke and then all she wanted to do was exchange it for a new box. And she got caught.

So far Sonny had: smoked twelve cigarettes (three Salems, two Kents, seven Kools), drank three-and-a-half cans of Budweiser and a Colt 45, lifted “Johnny Mathis’ Greatest Hits” from Sam Goody’s and a pair of earrings from Alexander’s on Fordham Road. But the greatest excitement was riding between cars of the IRT while D.B. sprayed TEEN ANGEL everywhere. The wind blew like a hurricane and tiny lights flashed red, green, and yellow in the dark tunnel. She could yell “YOUR MOTHER PICKS HER NOSE!” and no one heard. She had been a Teen Angel for exactly two months, sixty-two days. And it was even spelled in the constellation of her bedroom.

She had spent one entire Friday evening when she could have been watching Kookie “Lend me your Comb” Byrnes to make the banner that announced her Teen Angelhood to the world. Beginning with a red piece of felt which she cut into an isosceles triangle, and then using a cardboard Old Gothic stencil, she traced
the letters in pencil and covered them with the thinnest trickle of Elmer’s Glue. When the glue was almost dry, she sprinkled glitter like fairy dust. T-E-E-N-A-N-G … A vagrant drop of glue attracted glitter on the side of the G. Using her father’s razor blade, she lifted it up and continued … E-L. It was incredibly impressive, like she was a Ronette or a Chantell. Not that anyone in her family could appieciate it.

A typical lousy morning. Sonny raced into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. It was the only place she could have some privacy. Besides, she wanted to check it all out. Maybe there had been some changes during the night.
Please
. She began to unbutton her pajama top.
You never knew, right?
Her breasts might have blossomed into golden apples.
Retards!
She was a study in concavity, with nipples that looked like ingrown toenails, ribs that stuck out the way tits were supposed to, and a road map of veins. She pinched and pulled at them a couple of times because D.B. told her that helped loosen them in their cavity so they’d grow. Judging from her set, once D.B. started growing, she never stopped. She wore a D cup and if she kept it up, she’d need a shopping cart to tote them.

BECUZ MINE ARE ALL FULL GROWN THE GUYS JUST WON’T LEAVE ME ALONE.

Sonny cupped her own-or, rather, the circumference where they were supposed to be, trying to imagine what cleavage would look like.
Sort of a crack, like two grapefruit halves back to back
. D.B. could hold a pen between hers and sign her name. Even the Gooch looked like Jayne Mansfield next to her.
Wasn’t she eligible for welfare?

WELL, MINE ARE KIND OF IN BETWEEN BUT MY BOYFRIEND SUCKS ’EM LIKE A FIEND.

She looked inside of her pajama pants and discovered that while nothing was cooking upstairs, downstairs there was a regular garden party. But no one knew about that but her and her underpants.
Thank God
.

A loud knock on the door made her jump. She grabbed for her pajama bottoms. “SONNY! What are you doing in there?” her mother called, turning the doorknob. She ran to the door, grateful to discover that she had remembered to lock it. “Your father is waiting to get in. You can’t hog the bathroom all the time!”

“Just a minute!” Sonny called back, turning on the water faucets.

“Hurry! Your father’s going to be late!” she screamed. “Do you hear me?” She stamped her feet as she walked away from the door, cursing to herself in Polish.

Sonny sat on the pot.
Two old Jewish ladies were talking as they sat on toilets in adjacent stalls. ‘My son, he’s a doctor.’ ‘Yes?’ The other one says, ‘Well, my daughter married a pianist.’ ‘Oh, that’s good. Very nice. What does he play?’ ‘Tschaikowsky’s Concerto.’ ‘Oy!’ she cried, making a loud plop, ‘that’s a hard piece.’

“Sonny!” her mother returned, knocking loudly on the door. “You’re not the only one who wants to use the bathroom. Now, get out of there already. Everyone’s waiting!”

She flushed the toilet several times. Now it was time for her exercises. Sonny hooked the fingers of both hands with her elbows extended and began, as she did every morning, chanting softly, “A big chest is best, a big chest is best.” She pulled her arms in opposite directions across her chest. “I must, I must, I must increase my bust …”

She continued, interrupting to flush the toilet again. “It’s better, it’s better, it’s better for my sweater. I will, I will, I will increase my bust …” She splashed water on her face and hands, dried herself, and opened the door, meeting her mother face to face, only Sonny stood six inches taller than her.

Her mother was sort of pretty for a mother. At least that’s what the guy at the checkout counter at Pioneer and the dentist said. She had short brown hair which she curled with bobbypins when she was going out. Her eyes changed from blue to green to the saddest grey, and she always wore iridescent eye shadow to match
whatever color they happened to be. Sometimes Sonny thought she was so beautiful she couldn’t bear to look at her. “You’re so ugly!” Sonny would scream, punching her with her fists. And her mother thought she was so smart when she answered, “Sonny, you’re going to be a beautiful young woman one of these days.” Then Sonny might start crying for no reason. Her mother loved to sing and had one of those soprano voices that sounded like a bird. The only time she wasn’t humming or whistling or singing a Frank Sinatra song was when she was screaming at her, which was most of the time, lately. But Sonny used to like her so much. Her mother would be boiling meat, which made the kitchen windows steam. And Sonny did steam paintings, mostly of pretty girls with upturned noses and ponytails, which disappeared when the oven was turned off. And they went to Radio City to see the Rockettes, and Times Square where there was a Camel billboard with a man who blew smoke rings.

“Would you mind telling me what you do in there?” she demanded. “You stay in the bathroom for hours. Everyone else has to wait until the Tsarina finishes. You don’t have bowel problems, do you?”

“No, Mom,” she said as her mother eyed her suspiciously.

“You’re always such a
kalecka
,” her mother said, shaking her head. That was the same thing as a
klutz
, which was someone who marched down in the assembly color guard trailing toilet paper on her shoe. “Such a skinny-minny. Maybe your father should take you to Dr. Stern and see if you’re still anemic. If only you’d eat, everything would be okay. Why can’t you eat? Am I such a bad cook?” She attempted to kiss Sonny, who fled into her room and slammed the door.

“How come people are always slamming doors around here?” she said to the wall as her husband rushed past her. “Genia, move!” he screamed. “I’ve got to hurry. Is breakfast ready?” he shouted as he slammed the bathroom door.

“There are some families where people have manners. It doesn’t take much to say, ‘Good morning. How are you? Did you sleep well?’ It only takes a minute. But not here. No, no one has any time. Not for me. I’m just the
shmata
.”

That was Yiddish for rag. She was always saying things like that. Sometimes Sonny thought her mother was the loneliest person in the world. But she didn’t used to be that way. She drew outlines of animals so Sonny could color them and dressed her up as a gypsy for Purim. They had had such fun. That was before Michael was born, and she had to go to school. She knew her mother wasn’t a bad person but she made her feel so
low
. Lately whenever they were in the same room, Sonny wanted to open a window, turn the television on, and really, just run out as fast as she could. Then her mother’s eyes filled with tears sometimes, and she felt mean and stinky.

“Where do you think you’re going looking like that?” she demanded when, fifteen minutes later, Sonny walked into the kitchen wearing a green satin shirt tucked into a skin-tight black skirt with a wide leather belt around her waist. And the earrings she lifted from Alexander’s. “Are you going to school or to be a Las Vegas showgirl?”

“I bought it with my own baby-sitting money,” Sonny said, sitting down next to her eight-year-old brother.

“It’s the bride of Frankenstein!” Mike jeered.

“Shut up, postnasal drip,” she said, pouring milk into her cereal.

Mike took every opportunity to bug her. If he wasn’t such a mental cripple, she’d mutilate him. But he was always sick, coughing up his food and crying. At night, Sonny could hear him ramming his head against the headboard of his bed until he fell asleep. They used to share a room until she got too big. They played bicycle with their legs. Now he wore a little yarmulka that her mother crocheted for him.
Poor shmuck
.

“Why can’t you be neat and clean like Michael?” her mother
said. “I knew we should have sent you to Yeshiva too. Then you wouldn’t go around looking like this.”

Sonny groaned. They had tried to enroll her in Yeshiva Soleveichik but she deliberately failed the Hebrew test. She would have killed herself before she would go there. It was bad enough having her own brother look like a Jew boy.

Mike stuck his tongue out at her. Sonny grabbed the butter knife and threatened to cut it off. He started screaming, “Look what Sonny did! She tried to cut me with a knife!” He was also a stool pigeon.

“Sonny, you’re getting to be just too much lately. I don’t know what’s happened to you. These last few weeks, I’ve had to see your teacher Mrs. King twice. Do you think I like that? Why can’t I have some peace?”

She tried to ignore her mother and swallow her cereal.

“Heniek, look at your daughter. This is the way she goes to school. The big shot. Heniek, look at her!”

Her father ate silently, not looking up from the financial page of the
Times
. That’s all he ever did, read the newspaper. If he looked up from it, someone was in trouble. As he sat there wearing one of her mother’s old stockings on his head to flatten his curly hair, Sonny could crack up, he looked like a grandmother in one of those hairnets. But she didn’t dare.

“Heniek, do you see what your daughter is wearing? This makeup, her hair. Earrings? Where did you get these? Huh?” She tried to pull one off of Sonny’s ear. “You’d think she was a Puerto Rican by the way she dresses … Don’t play with your food, Michael.”

Her father’s right arm began to form a fist. Sonny leaned away from him. “PLEASE!” He shouted, pounding the table with his fist. Egg yolk dripped down his chin. He did not look up from the newspaper.

Even when he was in a good mood, her father was weird. He’d
rub his stubbled face against hers and tickle under her arms until she started crying. Then he’d laugh, calling her a crybaby. When she was little, he dropped her into the deep end of a swimming pool so she’d learn to swim. And he was always screaming. If she came in to watch television in her pajamas and he was there, he’d tell her to put on a bathrobe. But he’d be sitting there in his
gotkas
, which were underwear, letting
it
hang out. And she couldn’t stand it, so even if there was a movie she really wanted to see, she’d go to her room.

“Finish your cereal, Sonny. If you didn’t play with your food and ate it instead, you wouldn’t be such a skinny bone … More tea, Heniek? … Why aren’t you eating, Sonny?”

She could not continue eating. There was a bomb in her stomach that was about to explode. Her brother looked from her to their parents. Sonny dropped her spoon noisily into her bowl.

“I want you to change your clothes before you leave the house,” her mother repeated. “Now finish your breakfast.”

“I can’t,” Sonny said.

“Please …” her father said, his voice dangerously low. He folded his newspaper.

“I’m not hungry,” Sonny said, standing up to leave the table. “I think I’ll leave a little early …”

“So will I,” Mike said, following her.

“NO! NO!” her father yelled, banging his fist on the table so violently that all the plates and silverware shook. “You finish eating. What, we should throw this away? This food is not good enough for you?”

Now he would begin about how he didn’t have any food in the camps. Sonny knew this scene by heart. How they had to skin dogs and eat them. She took a step away from the table.

He yanked her roughly by the arm and tried to wipe her lipstick off with his hand. “CHEAP! You look cheap! Do you understand me? CHEAP! Take that junk off your face. That’s no way for a
Jewish girl to look!” As his yelling grew louder, her mother turned on the radio. “A TRAMP! THAT’S WHAT YOU ARE! A TRAMP!”

She found WQXR and turned up the volume. Then she reached over and tried to touch his arm gently. “Henushka, the neighbors … they can hear you … quietly … That’s how all the girls dress in this country. Go on, Sonny, finish eating.”

“IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!” he yelled at her mother. “You let her dress like this. She can come home when she feels like it. Do you know her friends? Where she goes? NOT IN MY HOUSE! SHE CAN GO WALK THE STREETS!” He banged the table again, and this time an
egg
cup dropped. It shattered on the floor.

“Now do you see what you’ve done!” her mother screamed. “Are you happy!” She picked up the pieces of white china with hand-painted flowers and a gold border, cradling them in the palms of her hands. “This was my family’s. I went back to Poland to dig this up after the war. It was still there … Where will I find another one?” she said, beginning to sob softly. “In my grave.”