Ten Cents a Dance (19 page)

"Be sweet to me," he whispered. "Are you gonna be sweet to me?"

"I love you, Paulie. I love you more than anything . . ."

"Show me. Show me you love me." He kneaded the girdle at my hip, then slid a finger underneath, pulling at it. He groaned, a long, deep rumble of frustration. "Come on," he said. He pushed himself away from me. "Button up, quick," he said. I did.

"Where are we going?"

"The car. Come on." He pulled me along, stumbling over the grass tufts, and then we were on the path again, lights and screams and laughter all around us, the smell of hot dogs, waltz music lilting over everything. The car, parked all the way at the end of the lot. More alone than we'd ever been anywhere.

My steps slowed. My weight dragged against Paulie's arm like an anchor. "Paulie, wait. Can't we just . . ."

"Just what?" He stopped and turned to face me. "Just what, Ruby? Make out at the movies? Feel you up through your damn clothes?" Startled glances from the people around us. I ducked my head so they couldn't see my face.

No more kid stuff. This was what I wanted. Wasn't it?

Paulie leaned close. His breath was soft in my ear. "Look, don't worry. You won't get caught," and at first I thought he meant Ma, but then he said, "I have protection. You'll be all right."

Ma's face and mine, side by side in the mirror.
You're a good daughter.
But I wasn't, because every time I saw her, every time I talked to her, I lied. I wasn't who she thought I was.

Paulie slid his arm around my shoulder. "Ruby. Come on. It'll be all right, I promise."

I shook my head. His face tightened, the pale brows drawn down. I opened my mouth to explain, but no words came. I wanted him. And I wanted one thing that my mother believed about me still to be true. How was I supposed to explain that?

"I've waited, Ruby. A long time. Haven't I?"

"I know, Paulie, it's just . . ."

His voice rose. "Why do you think I keep leaving, huh? You think this is fun for me, your little games?" He stepped back, hands jammed in his pockets. Guilt twisted inside me. He was making me choose. How was I supposed to choose?

"I'm not playing games," I whispered.

"Not anymore, you're not," he said. "I'm done waiting. You say you love me, you better prove it."

You've played that hand out. . . . I'm through talking.
Tom's voice, mocking. A sliver of anger cut through the guilt. I lifted my chin. "Do you love
me?"

He stared like I'd asked him to climb into the dip cages with the Negroes. "Look around! Am I here with another girl, or with you?" He held out his hand, palm up. "You want to be with me, then come on. You want to play with babies, go back to the sandbox."

He waited. One heartbeat. Then he walked away.

I should have run after him. But I thought he'd come back. An hour later, when I went to the parking lot to look for him, the kelly green convertible was gone.

. . .

I got home a little after eleven. I hadn't thought to bring money for a cab—why would I?—so I'd had to take the el and the streetcar. Almost an hour to get home, the whole time thinking,
He left you. He left you.

How could I have been so stupid?
You should have gone with him. You love him, don't you? You should have proved it.

This time, I knew, I wouldn't get another chance.

As I walked up Honore Street to our flat, I saw the kitchen light was on. Ma must still be up. Of all nights . . . Please, God, let her not ask any questions. It'd been all I could do not to bust up sobbing on the el. If I had to start making up stories, I'd lose it for sure, and then God only knew what I'd say.

At least I could walk in and look her in the face. An hour ago, that had seemed like everything. Now Paulie was gone and I didn't know anything anymore.

I expected Ma to be in the kitchen, in her housecoat. But as I stepped inside she was coming into the parlor and she was still dressed to the nines. A curl had come undone over her ear. Her bare lips were as pale as her cheeks; the lipstick I'd put on her earlier was gone. Betty was following behind her, yawning in her nightgown, as if she'd just woken up.

"Ruby, it is you!" Ma said. She laughed a strange, gusting laugh. Like wind blowing through her throat, not reaching deep. "I thought I heard someone in the hall. Don't worry about your coat, sit down. Betty, come sit next to your sister."

She was radiant. "You must have had a good time," I said.

She laughed again. "I . . . well, I did. Shall I tell you?"

From the sofa, Betty and I stared up at her like a couple of lambs. Ma pulled off her gloves. First the right, then the left. She held out her left hand, draped downward at the wrist, fingers pointing toward the floor.

My first thought was, She's cured. There was a miracle at the church, and she's cured.

Ma wiggled her fingers. That was when I saw the scrapes over her knuckle. And the ring. Not her wedding ring. A different one, with a flashing diamond.

"Girls," Ma said, "I'm getting married."

Three days later, she did.

We'd met our new stepfather once by then, on Tuesday, when he took us out for dinner at a steakhouse in the Loop. Before he arrived at the flat, Ma made Betty wash off her Peach Blossom lipstick and me my new Victory Red, and she insisted I change my Cuban heels for saddle shoes. I didn't even own saddle shoes anymore. So I wore the brown oxfords with the chunky heels instead. Ma frowned, but she didn't say anything.

"He looks like an icebox," Betty whispered to me as Ma ushered Chester Nolan into our parlor. I felt too numb to laugh, even though it was true. Square shoulders dropping straight down to short legs. A flat, square face. Not ugly, not handsome. He could've been a customer at the Starlight. For a panicked second, I wondered if he was. Then he doffed his hat, showing gingery hair, combed straight back, a white streak over his right eye. I let out my breath, relieved. I'd remember that hair.

He kissed Ma on the cheek—he didn't have to bend far to do it, he was only half a head taller than she was—then stood with his hands folded in front of him while Ma introduced us. His hands were broad, spangled with fine gold hairs. His palm moist when he gripped mine.

"Shall we go?" he said. He offered Ma his arm. She smiled and slipped her hand over his bent elbow, as though she'd been walking with him for years.

At the restaurant, Chester told us bus driver stories. No different from the Starlight. I knew how to pretend to listen without hearing a word. I watched him pick up his fork and knife and, with hardly a hitch in his story, begin cutting Ma's steak. He sprinkled salt and pepper for her; he broke her roll in half and buttered it. Through everything, Ma beamed at him.

"Thank you, Chester." Again and again. "Thank you so much."

"You bet, sweetheart," he answered her. "Sure I cut those small enough?"

Like they'd done it a hundred times before. Ma smiling and frail and brave, Chester hovering and protecting.

Ma touched the glinting gold hairs on the back of his hand. "Tell the girls about the blind woman. Remember that radio story about the Seeing Eye, girls? Chester had one of those wonderful dogs on his bus last week!"

She was trying too hard. I tried to catch Betty's eye, to see if she'd noticed, but her gaze kept flicking between her menu and the other diners and the waiters carrying plates back and forth. I realized with a start that this dumpy steakhouse must be her first real restaurant. I wondered if my eyes had been as big in that little Chinese dive with Tom and Jack and Peggy. It embarrassed me to think they must have been.

I interrupted Chester in the middle of his Seeing Eye dog story. "So how did you meet, anyway?" I asked Ma. Beside me, I felt Betty snap to attention.

They fidgeted and threw little glances at each other. Ma laughed her new gusty laugh. Two months ago, she said, she'd been on her way to see a new doctor in Avondale. (Ma had been to a doctor? How come she hadn't told me?) She'd stumbled getting on the bus, and Chester had jumped up and taken her arm. He settled her in the seat closest to the front, and they chatted all the way up Western Avenue. Her next appointment, the next week, was at the same time, and Chester was the driver again. Over the next few bus rides, she'd told him everything there was to know about her, and us, and the Yards. Chester turned to Ma and, as though cradling the finest, most delicate porcelain, took her hand in both of his. "I guess that's why I fell for your mother, here. All she's been through, brave little thing, and still she can smile like that!"

She was beaming at him, all right. But her eyes were nervous, and suddenly I knew why she was talking too loud and laughing too much, why she'd insisted on little-girl saddle shoes and made us wash off our lipstick. She was afraid. And I realized something else: all those hours in the fitting room at Goldblatt's, running the salesgirl off her feet, Ma had been thinking of Chester Nolan. I'd helped her pick out the pale yellow dress. I'd done her hair, her makeup. And it'd worked. She'd hooked her fish. No wonder he knew chapter and verse about her arthritis.
Brave little thing!
But she was scared to death he'd drop the bait.

I felt something breaking apart the numbness inside. Pressure around my heart, pushing its way out.

I scraped my chair back. "I have to go."

"But you haven't touched your steak," Chester said.

Ma must have seen something in my face, because she laid a hand on his arm and said, "It's all right. We'll wrap it up and take it home." Then, to me, "You should get moving. You don't want to be late." I understood. Better for me to leave than queer the deal.

Half a block from the restaurant was a pay phone. I took the garage matchbook out of my pocketbook and called the number. No answer. It was six thirty. I had to be at the Starlight ready to dance by eight. I took the el to the Yards and headed down Fiftieth Street to the poolroom where, months and months ago, Betty's classmate had seen Paulie.

Third time was the charm. Halfway there, I spotted him, sitting on a stoop with two other guys.

"Paulie!" I started to walk toward him but he threw out his hand—
Stay there
—and said something to his friends that made them laugh. He grinned at them, but as soon as he turned toward me, his face went cold. He sauntered across the street, glancing this way and that, as if his coming this way had nothing to do with me.

He stopped a good six feet away. Beautiful as a statue. He reared his head a little when I went up to him, but he didn't back away. I knew he wouldn't. Not with his friends watching. I stepped close enough to feel his warmth on my bare skin—my neck, my face. I didn't touch him with my hands. Instead I leaned up, and I kissed him on the mouth.

Behind us, his friends hooted and whistled. I didn't care. Last night, I'd watched Paulie walk away. I'd lost him, just so that one thing Ma believed about me would still be true.

She didn't know anything about me. And, it turned out, I didn't know anything about her.

I swayed on my tiptoes. A touch on my elbow— Paulie's touch—steadied me. I looked into his eyes, rain-gray and wary.

"I want to be sweet to you," I whispered.

That night, when I left the Starlight, he was waiting in the kelly green convertible.

Three days later, Chester piled us and our few trunks into his old-fashioned black Ford, and we left the Back of the Yards and its slaughterhouse stench behind forever.

SEVENTEEN

"Now, don't you girls get your hopes up about the inside," Chester said, pulling up in front of a checkerboard brick house. "It's just a little bungalow, as plain-Jane as they come." He said that after having seen our flat, after he'd carried our few things out past all our staring neighbors. He said it knowing we would be dazzled.

No more mopping up floods when we forgot to drain the icebox pan; Chester's house had an electric refrigerator. No more scrubbing painted pine boards on our hands and knees; Chester's waxed oak floors shone a smooth reddish gold. No more running to Mrs. Hirsch's in rain and snow to use the phone; a telephone hung in the hallway. Chester's house had a sleek gas stove, not a speck of coal soot anywhere. A real bathroom, all white tile, and a porcelain tub. No more washing our hair bent over the kitchen sink, or shivering crouched in the galvanized washtub. And thank you, God, no more hall toilet, with its smell, and buzzing flies in the summer, and icy drafts in the winter.

Chester had grown up poor in Canaryville. But he'd worked and saved his money, and ten years ago he'd bought this bungalow for himself and his mother. Last year his mother had passed away, and he'd lived here alone. Until—at this part of the story he took Ma's hand—we came along.

"Look at this!" Betty cried. "Look at this!" I followed her through the arched doorway to the stained-glass windows in the living room. The brick fireplace. Betty begged Chester to build a fire for her. He laughed. His voice rattled like a truck on gravel, and when he laughed, the truck revved speed. No fires until winter, he told her, when she'd appreciate it more.

He took Betty on a tour of the house. I stayed in old lady Nolan's room, which Betty and I were going to share. Wondering if Ma had helped Chester pick out the brand-new furniture. Two white dressers with gold trim, two matching bedstands and headboards. A pink and green tufted floral rug. It smelled of paint and clean wood.

Ma came in behind me. I knew it was her from the unevenness of her steps. I crossed to the window and looked outside, pretending I didn't know she was there.

"Do you like it?" she asked.

I didn't know if she meant the house or this room or the neighborhood or the fact that she was married to a man she hadn't told us existed until a few days ago. Even as I'd watched Chester carry our trunks inside, I couldn't believe this was where we lived now. I still had my hat on, and my gloves, as if the cab that would take me back to the Yards would arrive any minute.

But that wasn't why I didn't answer her. After what Paulie and I had done in the the kelly green convertible, I felt entirely changed, as if the old me was our dark, dingy flat, and the new me this airy, light-filled house. Before, I thought I'd loved Paulie. I'd had no idea, then, how love could seize you so absolutely. In the shock and flurry of the past few days, I'd closed my eyes again and again, imagining his arms around me, crushing me close, feeling every time a jolt of joy zag through me, holding it tight as if that feeling in my body could conjure his actual, solid self. I missed him so much, at moments I thought my heart might stop. Surely Ma could see it. She'd read what had happened in my face, my eyes, in the way I stood, or walked, or breathed. And then she would never look at me the same way again.

You're not my daughter anymore.

Ma came close, stood just behind my shoulder. "I know what's going on," she said. My heart lurched, my fingers tightened on the windowsill. Of course she knew. What could I tell her, what could I possibly . . .

"You miss your father," she went on. "It's not as hard for Betty, she doesn't remember him. But you . . . " She laid her hand on mine. Her voice anxious. "This is a good thing, Ruby. You can see that, can't you? Chester is a good man. He'll be able to give you everything you deserve. You and Betty both."

She was so wrong, she might as well have been talking to someone else. I swallowed, closed my eyes. I should've been relieved. I supposed I was.

Mostly what I felt was that my mother was a complete stranger.

She was waiting for me to say something. I didn't know what to say. I nodded my head.

"Good." She patted my hand. She was almost at the door when she added, "Now you can quit your job." Not a question.

"What?" I said, surprised. But the room was empty.

I found out what she meant at dinner.

"Shame you've lost this year," Chester said to me, as he divvied up the roast chicken. "But the nuns at St. Casimir's will get you up to speed quick enough, come September."

Nuns? St. Casimir's? Betty gawped at me from across the table. "You mean she's set back a year? But that means we'll be in the same class! I don't want her in my class!"

"Well, we tried to get your sister into school now, like you. But they said Ruby would have to wait until fall." Chester passed me a plate.

"I can't go to school. I have a job." I handed the plate to Betty. I wasn't hungry.

Chester shook his head. "School's the proper place for a sixteen-year-old girl, not cooped up behind a switchboard. I tell you, what I wouldn't give sometimes to have somebody tell me I could skip on back to classes! Nothing to worry about the livelong day, huh?" He winked at Betty. To my disgust, she winked back. I stared at her, but she just stared back, cool as you please, and took a big bite of chicken.

"I have a job," I repeated. "I'm not going back to school." Chester stopped carving and blinked at me, his flat, square face perplexed, as if I'd said I'd seen pigs fly.

"That's enough, Ruby," Ma said. "We'll talk about it later. Pass the gravy, please, dear."

She didn't say anything that night when I left for work, so I forgot about it. A couple of servicemen clocked me and Peggy out and took us to a supper club. I had two rum and Cokes and taught my guy to dance the boogie-woogie, and on the way home in the cab, I let him kiss me. Dreaming the whole time of Paulie. Tomorrow, after work, he'd be waiting for me again outside the Starlight . . . Letting myself into Chester's house, I realized I'd forgotten the mouthwash back in the hall toilet at our old flat. I tiptoed to the white tile bathroom, searched through the medicine cabinet. Bingo. I topped the bottle up with water, after, so no one could tell I'd used it.

The smells in Chester's house were different. No hot metal of coal stove, no naptha soap. No smoke plumes rising in the air outside, and instead of a dead animal and incinerator reek from the packinghouses, when the wind was right we could smell Oreos baking at the Nabisco factory nearby. No packinghouse whistles, no trains rumbling past at all hours. We couldn't even hear the streetcar. The strangeness made me feel unsettled. And every day Ma got after me about quitting, until I was ready to scream.

"Then what am I supposed to do?" I asked her. "Mop Chester's floors? Iron his shirts?"

"What's wrong with that? After all he's done to make you feel welcome, you can't show the slightest gratitude? Any other girl would be jumping for joy!"

In no time we were fighting. Worse than we ever had in the Yards, because now Ma wouldn't back down, not one inch. She searched my dresser and my pocketbook and took away my lipsticks and mascara and rouge. When I yelled that she had no right, she said, "I'm your mother. I may have let things go before, but from now on, this family's going to be the way it ought to be."

Meaning me.

Betty slipped into Chester's house and her new school like they were a dress made just for her. Not two days had gone by before she was helping organize a scrap drive for the war and going with her new friends down to Sixty-third and Central Park to wave at soldiers on the troop trains. If she wore makeup, she was smart enough to get rid of the evidence before she came home.

As for Ma, since we'd moved her nerves had disappeared like smoke. Still frail, still hurting, but more like her old self than she'd been in almost two years, before the rheumatoid. She'd made up her mind I should quit, and that was that. She had Chester, and Chester's house, and Chester's money. Betty was toeing the line, so all Ma had left to get straight was me.

The funny thing was, I half wanted to quit the Starlight. Del always said without illusion, we didn't have anything. Ever since I'd fallen in love,
real
love, with Paulie, I couldn't see the illusion anymore. All I saw was a bunch of men who couldn't get a girl to dance unless they paid her, and a bunch of girls out for every nickel they could charm, fish, or scam. I was sick of acting peppy, sashaying around for dances, laughing at the same joke I'd heard a million times before. Bruises on my toes from clumsy galoots stepping on them, those same galoots pinching my keister whenever they thought they could get away with it.

What good had any of it been, anyway? All my grand plans—moving us out of the Yards into a nice neighborhood, where Ma didn't have to pinch every penny, where Betty could go to a good school—were for nothing. Chester had swooped in and taken care of everything. All those months I'd spent hoarding one damn nickel at a time, and Chester just snapped his fingers.

But if I quit, then what? St. Casimir's and the nuns? I tried to imagine wearing a drab plaid uniform, like Betty, not a sequin or bow anywhere. Making Welsh rarebit in home-ec class, watching other girls swap issues of
Romance Weekly
and swoon over their friends' older brothers. Girls who'd never heard of black-and-tan clubs or policy kings or Reinhard's. Girls who thought a wonderful evening was a dance at the high school gym.

No more wild swing at Lily's. No more silk and satin, or dishing with Peggy over milkshakes at the all-night diner, or cabs whooshing through the streets in the black hours of the morning. No more listening to Ozzie dream about New York and Kansas City; I'd never again hear his music first, before anybody else in the world.

No more money of my own, to spend how I liked. I would get an allowance from Chester, same as Betty. Fifty cents a week. She thought it was a fortune.

"Ma's done good for us," Betty told me, "and you're ruining it." Whispered fights back and forth in old lady Nolan's room. "Chester's an okay guy. You don't have to work anymore, so why don't you just quit?" The makeup I'd given her, the clothes I'd bought her, the coal, the Rice Krispies: all of it forgotten.

I couldn't quit. Because even if I could live without everything else, I couldn't live without Paulie. And if I didn't have the Starlight, I'd never see him at all. Ma wouldn't let me skip out to movie houses in the afternoon anymore, so he and I had worked out a system: he called Chester's house, let it ring twice, then hung up. Then I knew he'd be at the Starlight when it closed, waiting.

That whole first week, me and Ma, nothing but fights. Never in front of Chester, though. Ma insisted on that. He's never lived with a family before, she said. He's not used to this sort of thing.

But the tension in the evenings, before I left for work, was thick enough to choke a horse. Chester skulked like a hangdog and shot me baffled looks over the top of his newspaper. One evening, just before dinner, he came across me crying in the hallway. Took one look and rushed away. Big baby, scared of a few tears, I thought, and snuffled my way into the bedroom. Less than a minute later, two hesitating taps at the door. I opened it. There he stood with a glass of milk and two Oreos on a plate, the red turkeyish skin around his eyes crinkled in worry, the white streak in his hair like an exclamation point.

If he'd started lecturing me or yelling about my ingratitude, I would've given as good as I got. But I didn't know how to fight Oreos.

I took the plate and the glass. He looked down at the floor.

"It's not my place to step between you and your mother," he said, "but . . . this job, it's pretty important to you, huh?" He darted a look up at me, as if he was unsure whether I'd burst into tears or throw the milk at him or kiss him on the cheek. He was wearing his jacket with the Civil Defense arm patch Betty had sewed on for him. Chester was air raid warden for the block; this must be one of the nights he was scheduled to walk house to house, looking for chinks of light through the neighbors' blackout curtains.

I stared at that arm patch. "It is important," I said slowly. "It's . . . we're vital to the war effort. I mean, if you think about it, without operators to put the calls through . . ."

"Sure, sure," Chester said. Enthusiasm growing in his voice. Just tonight, we'd listened to a radio story about women building warplanes in a factory in San Diego. Ma remarked that sort of thing turned girls' heads, but Chester said anything that freed up more men for the fighting might be a darned good idea. Chester believed in the war effort. He'd dug a victory garden in the backyard; he even had Ma saving cooking grease to take back to the butcher. The government was supposed to collect it, make it into explosives.

Hope rose like a butterfly inside me. "So you can explain to Ma. Tell her I can't quit."

He raised his hands. "Like I said. I'm not going to
get
between you and your mother. But what I'm thinking is . . ."

It was only right, Chester told Ma, that I give fair notice. Especially since the telephone company was shorthanded and I was still working all that overtime. Ma was suspicious, but Chester had peace in his sights, and she had to give in.

I got a two-week reprieve. And then I had other problems to worry about.

Manny and Alonso joined the U.S. Navy. Although, Manny told me, before they could fight the Japanese, it looked like they might have to fight the navy first. Lots of Pinoys were assigned work as stewards, but Manny wasn't enlisting to peel potatoes and swab decks.