Authors: Richard Russo
Having overcome her reluctance to enter Ikey Lubin’s for any purpose, my mother now worked almost as many hours as my father. In addition to handling inventory, she took Uncle Dec’s advice and started making salads—just potato and macaroni and three bean at first—to fill out the meat case, and she was pleased when Borough housewives preferred hers to the vinegary offerings at the A&P. She kept her bookkeeping clients as well, and when my father came home around midnight after closing the store, she often would be staring at a ledger, her fingers rattling over the keys of the adding machine, a pencil clenched so hard between her teeth that the bite marks pierced right down to the lead. He’d urge her to call it a day, and she’d say yes, she’d join him in a minute, though it was often another hour or more before I’d awake to the whisper of her slippered feet on the stairs. Most days she left the adding machine set up on the kitchen table, so we cleared space around it when we ate, usually just one or two of us at a time, family dinners long since a thing of the past.
Uncle Dec continued to be more of an asset than I ever would’ve predicted. He had an easy, flirtatious way with the Borough women, who stepped into the store as if determined to spend as little time there as possible, often leaving their cars running outside at the curb, but they couldn’t hurry Uncle Dec. “Janice,” he’d say, “I know you think I should cut my thumb off just because you’ve got your knickers in a twist, but I’m not going to.” To which this Janice would say, “What do you know about my knickers?” “Just what I hear,” he’d reply, “I could tell you, if you’re interested.” Well, I’m not, the woman would insist, but you could tell she enjoyed the exchange. “Slow down, Bev,” he’d tell the next impatient customer. “I know the stiff you’re married to, and there’s no reason for you to be rushing home all the while.” “You are the slowest butcher in all creation,” Bev would inform him, and then she’d be told that people in hell wanted ice water. When he finally handed these women their crown roasts, he’d say, “Thanks, beautiful,” whether she was or wasn’t, thought she was or knew damn well she wasn’t. “I live right above the store, you know. In case you want to visit me some night.” My father, overhearing such banter, wasn’t sure his brother’s behavior was appropriate here in the East End, but my mother disagreed. “He’s just making those vain, foolish women feel good. I know, because he treats me the same way, and it makes
me
feel good. I’d have him give you lessons if I thought you’d be any good at it.”
“If they tell their husbands—” he began.
“They’re not
going
to tell their husbands,” my mother said with the sort of conviction I knew he found disconcerting.
Once school let out for the summer, I worked long hours, too. My mother’s, father’s and uncle’s duties were well defined, whereas I was used as needed, according to the time of day. Late morning and early afternoon were when my uncle got busy, and sometimes he needed me to clean the slicer or tidy the meat case or replace a roll of butcher paper or the spool of string. I could handle the basics at the meat counter, a pound of ground beef or half a dozen precut pork chops, while he took care of complicated orders and difficult customers. Early mornings, it was my father who needed help, so I manned the register while he took deliveries, then, after he returned, broke down the cardboard boxes in the back room and stocked the shelves and cooler cases, pushing the dated items up front, placing the ones just delivered in back, though this didn’t prevent Borough women from reaching in up to their armpits for the half gallon of milk farthest back. Late in the afternoon, I made small neighborhood deliveries on my bike, and in the evenings I’d help my mother prepare salads. By the end of the summer I was better at these than she was, because her attention was frequently divided between her bookkeeping chores and whatever was on the stove. One evening I came in and saw our largest sauce pot glowing bright red and dancing on the stove over high heat. My mother had filled it with water and then forgotten all about it, allowing the water to boil off. “Don’t,” she warned me when I started to chide her for such dangerous inattention. “Just because you’re invaluable doesn’t mean you’re…”
“Doesn’t mean I’m what?” I said, amused that she’d begun a sentence she couldn’t complete.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, her eyes suddenly moist.
I wasn’t officially on the payroll, but the tips I received for deliveries gave me walking-around money, and my mother had opened an account at Thomaston Savings and Loan in my name—my college fund, she called it—into which she deposited, every Friday afternoon, the money I would’ve earned if I’d been an actual employee. She wrote all of Ikey Lubin’s checks, paying not just the vendors but also my uncle, my father and, when we could afford it, herself. “God only knows what the IRS will make of this,” she’d say after writing them out each week. “If they ever take us to court and put you on the stand,” she told me, “you
don’t
work for us.”
“What if they make me swear?” I asked.
“Call ’em any names you want,” she said. “Just don’t tell the truth.”
T
HOMASTON
C
ONGREGATIONAL’S HALL
was located on upper Division Street. The church itself had been razed a decade earlier, but its bell tower, deemed to be of historical significance, still stood. Ironically, it was the bell that had caused the church itself to be condemned when the rotting timber that held it collapsed one Sunday at the conclusion of services, the bell crashing down with a sound so richly horrifying that several parishioners were converted in that ringing moment to Catholicism. A subsequent inspection concluded that the entire structure was unsound, so the Congregationalists found a site across town and immediately broke ground for a new church. Now permanently padlocked to prevent high school kids from climbing up into the belfry for drinking and sex, the tower stood alone on the lot, looking every bit as foolish as people had predicted it would. Though the Congregationalists planned to build a hall next to their new church, they’d run out of funds and were still using the old one for church-related socials and renting it for civic functions like the annual art show.
The latter always occupied both levels of the hall. Upstairs featured the work of the adult artists of greater Thomaston County, while the basement exhibited student artists, grades one through twelve, who’d been coerced into submission by their teachers. That year, my last in junior high, I’d submitted a pencil drawing of Ikey’s that I’d slaved over for the better part of a week. I’d started out thinking it was going to be good, but the more I worked on it, carefully shading, darker here, lighter there, the worse it had gotten, though I couldn’t say how or why. My father said it looked just like the store, which made me feel good, and my mother agreed, but I could tell she harbored misgivings she couldn’t put into words either, which made me resentful. I’d hoped to be present when the awards were handed out, but I’d been needed at the actual store, so the following day was my first chance to see if the judges had given my drawing a prize.
The sign on the door of the church hall said the student exhibit would remain up for the rest of the month, and I expected plenty of curious people would be milling around admiring our efforts, but the room I entered was empty. A few paper plates with cake crumbs and plastic Dixie cups from yesterday’s festivities remained on folding metal chairs. The room, windowless and low ceilinged, was lit by bright fluorescent bulbs. The outer walls, along with several temporary cork partitions set up in the center of the room, were crowded with first-, second-and third-place winners, plus honorable mentions for all twelve grades. I could see at a glance that my drawing of Ikey Lubin’s hadn’t placed in the eighth grade, and I probably would’ve left right then if I hadn’t noticed the bins marked
OTHER
along the far wall. These, too, were arranged by grade, and I found my drawing halfway down the stack. In the harsh fluorescent light it looked smudgy, and all at once I was sick with embarrassment.
Technically the drawing wasn’t that bad, especially compared with those done by other boys in my class, most of whom had drawn New York Giant football players or stock cars. But there was something “normal” about their efforts that I envied. After all, what kind of thirteen-year-old boy drew a picture of his family’s corner market? I remembered Karen Cirillo’s remark—“You’re
weird,
Lou. You know that?”—and felt the full force of her judgment. Worse, I’d made our store look exhausted and drab. It was as if, without meaning to, I’d managed to document why more people didn’t shop there. Suddenly grateful it hadn’t won, I wanted desperately to remove the evidence from public view. The
OTHER
bin wasn’t going to attract a lot of attention, but even so I was about to fold up the drawing and put it in my pocket when a voice at my elbow said, “It’s good.”
I hadn’t heard her come in but immediately recognized the speaker as Sarah Berg, the girl who’d been sitting with Gabriel Mock the Third at the movie. In the weeks that followed the incident I’d seen her in the corridors at school, always alone and frightened looking, as she was now. The elbow to the nose she’d taken in the scuffle had resulted in two black eyes, and now, over a month later, one cheekbone was still a faint, greenish yellow.
“You should trust your lines, though,” she said, taking my drawing from me and studying it critically. Perhaps because I didn’t understand what she meant by “trust your lines,” the remark irritated me, and I wished I’d been quicker about hiding the drawing. “You shade everything. It’s as if you’re afraid of the white.”
Her index finger traveled over the surface without quite touching the paper, pausing here and there so I could see what she meant. And it was true. I
had
shaded everything right out to the edges, and this was responsible for what I’d earlier identified as the drawing’s smudginess. Strange, too, because when I’d been working on it, the subtle variations of the shadings, rendered so carefully with the side of my pencil, were what I’d been most proud of. What I’d thought of as the drawing’s principal strength I now saw was its primary weakness. I’d been blaming myself for not working on it harder, for somehow betraying Ikey’s, but I suddenly realized another hour or two or four would only have made it worse. That this should be true was disconcerting. Working hard at something, I’d learned in school, usually paid dividends.
“It’s not cheating to leave some white,” Sarah Berg explained. “It shows where the light’s coming from. Some drawings can be mostly white, if the lines are good.”
“It’s my dad’s store,” I said, apropos of nothing.
“Ikey Lubin’s,” she said. “I recognized it.”
Of course that’s what the sign above the door said, so…
“I mean I
would
have recognized it, even without the sign,” she said, flushing bright red. “That was stupid.
I’m
stupid.”
“No,” I said urgently, surprising myself. “It’s the drawing that’s dumb.”
“The judge gave it two checks,” she said, pointing out two pencil markings in the upper-right-hand corner that I hadn’t noticed.
“Is that good?”
She nodded. “Three checks is highest. Most have just one.”
We went through the trough again, and she was right. The majority had just one check. Four or five, like my drawing of Ikey’s, had two. I couldn’t find any with three. “I guess our class isn’t very talented,” I said, annoyed that the judges should’ve reached so unflattering a conclusion.
“Two of the winners got three checks,” she said, indicating the cork wall across the room. “Third place and honorable mention got two checks, which means yours was as good as those…” That would have cheered me up if she hadn’t added, as if compelled by scrupulous honesty, “Almost.”
It occurred to me that she had a lot of knowledge. “Did you…?”
She shrugged apologetically. “It’s the only thing I’m any good at,” she assured me, lest I peg her for a braggart. After an awkward pause she said, “I could show you mine.”
“Sure,” I said, and to my astonishment she took my hand and led me across the room, as if I might not be able to find her drawing otherwise. Her hand was slender and warm, and it fit into my own like it belonged there. I remembered how Jerzy had slid his index finger into the waistband of Karen’s slacks, how thrilling that gesture had been to observe and interpret. This was less suggestive of sex, but it was also better in some way I couldn’t define, and I could feel myself flush with a heady mix of pleasure, surprise and affection. Was this what Karen’s mother had meant when she said my father hadn’t known what hit him? Was what my mother had done this simple? Had she just taken my father by the hand, led him across a room and placed him before something she wanted him to look at? Had the frailty and warmth of her hand opened something in my father’s heart that he hadn’t known was there?
Sarah’s entry was a pen-and-ink drawing of a boy who looked to be six or seven years old, and you could see why it got three bold checks in the upper-right-hand corner. True, it looked like there might be something wrong with the proportion of the boy’s features. One eye seemed slightly larger than the other, and they appeared not equidistant from his nose. But they were alive, those eyes. She wasn’t drawing how the boy’s eyes looked. It was like they were real, that he was using them to see with. They made you wonder what he was looking at. You could tell right away that it was located just off the edge of the drawing and also that it worried him. And you could tell where the light was coming from. Sarah’s name appeared in the lower-right-hand corner, printed impossibly small, as if whatever confidence she’d had went into the drawing itself, with none left over for a signature.