The Home For Wayward Ladies (19 page)

23

HUNTER

Eli and I stand frozen in the doorway of Lorna’s Kettle as we watch Tina Louise reflect the heat of the mid-day sun. It seems like hours before either of us is willing to speak. I go first. “I’m sorry,” I say. Eli’s smirk is no more self-righteous than anticipated. “You’re right. We need to remember how to be a team. Partners?” With that, I open my arms hoping to entice a hug; allowing him to touch me has always been a sure-fire way to win a fight. When he wraps me in an embrace, the humidity is so oppressive that I am certain he has left two wet handprints on the small of my back. “From here on out, we act like true Ladies and invoke the immortal words of Doris Day…”

He sings, “Once I had a secret love that lived within the heart of me…”

“I was thinking more along the lines of ‘Que Sera, Sera.’”

“Ah, yes,” he laughs, “excellent choice. ’Que Sera, Sera. Whatever will be, will be.’ I hope you know I’m going to hold you to that.”

I can feel quite clearly from our embrace that that’s not the only thing he plans to hold me to. As we un-stick ourselves, I try to look casual as I peel my gentlemen’s gems from the side of my leg. Eli, too, makes a particular rearrangement of his nether regions. I pretend not to notice. It is my preference to believe that his excitement is caused by the prospect of fried food and not by physical contact made with yours truly.  

He opens the door and the tent he’s pitching points our way inside. We are greeted by a welcomed rush of cold air that gives me gooseflesh all over. Nothing else about Lorna’s Kettle is so inviting. The woman sitting at the cashier’s counter has spaghetti-colored hair that’s piled so high on top of her head that she should use a meatball for a barrette. Her evil eye gives the impression that we have stumbled upon a speakeasy without knowing the password. After a thoroughly admonishing glare, she waves her flabby arm in the general direction of an open booth. The seat is cracked and the table wobbles. The salt and pepper shakers teeter as we worm our way in.  

“You’ll pardon me to the restroom,” I say. “I want to wash up.” In truth, our un-air-conditioned tiff has left me feeling rather unclean. I long to scour every inch of skin that is exposed. Symptoms be damned, I work to gain control. I slap some water on my face and use several dollops of pink soap that smells like my granny’s attic.

When I return, I don’t bother to look at the plastic-plated menu; every diner serves exactly the same thing and I find that people who don’t know what they want show signs of not having lived enough life. Our waitress is the shape and texture of a Crayola crayon, the peach color that was labeled “skin” back in the days before people cared about that sort of thing. Eli orders himself a plate of fried clams and I get myself a strawberry shake. All my dreams come true when she brings it to the table accompanied by its surplus in a stainless steel cup. She leaves the check and tells us, “Whenever you’re ready,” and then disappears behind the kitchen door that swings both ways. 

Large clumps of real strawberry get lodged in the bend of my straw. In order for me to set them free, I must disregard all the manners that I was ever taught in cotillion. I am like an aboriginal with a Pea Shooter as I force the bubbles through. It offsets the kilter of a mountain of whipped cream.

“Can I have your cherry?” Eli asks.

“Well, it’s certainly not the first time you’ve asked,” I reply and let him fish it out with a spoon.

He is too busy feeding his face to make conversation so I sit quietly until he’s done. Afterward, he excuses himself to the restroom claiming he has to piss so bad his eyeballs are floating. I trepidatiously make my way to the cashier with the beehive hair to settle the bill. As always, Eli ordered far more than I did, but the way I have been behaving, this one is on me. As I approach, her movements are limited to within arm’s reach of her stool. She looks captive, like she hasn’t left that spot since the stork abandoned her there some seventy years ago.

“Ten dollars, seventy-five,” she says. Her register is as much a relic as she is. I hand her a bill from my wallet that is soaked through with my rear perspiration. “Out of twenty…” She is not fazed.

“May I ask you a question?” I say while she is busying herself in the till. She looks down on me over the top of her ironically rose colored glasses. I take that to mean I may proceed. “My friend and I are on our way to the Pocono Show Barn up in Mt. Pocono and…”

“You head up PA-611 and you’ll see the signs.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” I say, spotting Eli coming toward me, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Eli, we’re not that far off. This kind woman was just telling me that if we keep on 611, we’ll see signs for the Pocono Show Barn.”

She stops her counting and huffs. “I didn’t tell you any such thing.”

“F-forgive me,” I stammer, “I must have misunderstood.” I take a step away from the counter to give the creature some room.

“Yes, you must have,” she replies, turning her shoulder to me so she can focus solely on Eli as if he was more of a man and, therefore, more worthy of addressing. “What I told your ‘friend’ was that if you keep going up PA-611, you’ll see the signs for Mt. Pocono. As for your Show Barn, well…“ She trails off for so long that I begin to wonder if she’s having a stroke. “Funny, but until you mentioned it, I was almost certain that the Show Barn had been met by the wrecking ball some years ago.”

“So you know of it?” Eli says, pressing himself against her counter. Her head nods; her hair doesn’t. He continues, “We were hired to put on a show there and we don’t know a thing about it. It would mean a lot if you could tell us what that place is like.”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you how it is, only how it was.” Her eyes shimmer from the sun pouring in through the window behind her. “My daddy used to take my mama and me to see every show that they put on. He was a very smart man, my daddy. Every time we left a show at the theater, he would remind us that appreciation of culture was ‘our town’s great equalizer.’ I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right, too. Going to that theater gave us the right to be just as special as anybody else. Our tickets sat us right next to all them pinch-faced women with their doctors for husbands and their homes up yonder in Buck Hill. But as soon as the lights went down, no one noticed that my daddy still had rust from carburetors on his chapped hands or that my mama’s dress was homemade. There, all of us were the same.” She shakes herself free from the grasp of her distant dream. “So, the two of you are actors?”

“We used to be,” Eli says.

“We still are,” I correct him in an attempt to remind him of his roots, “but that’s not what we’re focusing on this summer. I’m a choreographer and he’s a director.”

“That sounds nice,” she replies vaguely. A simple rule of thumb for those who are considering a life in the theater: typically, people have no idea what it is you do in this industry if they don’t see you up onstage. This woman is no exception.

“Well, if the Pocono Show Barn is sill standing when we get there, we would love for you to come see our new musical revue. It’s based on the works of Rodgers & Hart and called
I’ll Take Manhattan.
” It hasn’t taken Eli long to remember the finely tuned art of self-promotion.

The cashier clasps her hands. As she does, her leathery skin makes a suction sound. “I haven’t seen a show there for years. Not since Miss Ginny passed on.”

“Miss Ginny?” I ask.

“Miss Ginny,” the woman says so deliberately that anyone within earshot would assume I was disabled. “Miss Ginny was the original owner of the Pocono Show Barn.”

“An interesting development,” I say toward Eli. “We were told that the owner is called Mr. Vallenzino. Perhaps he’s of relation to Miss Ginny?”

“No such thing,” the cashier replies. “Miss Ginny had no relations.” She raps her knuckles on the counter which shows wear from decades of similar perplexity. “Although that name does ring a bell. Vallenzino, did you say?” She looks out her window as she has done some millions of times before. “Oh, yes, I remember. I’m almost certain that I read that name in the Chronicle. Teddy Vallenzino. I can’t say I recall his having been mentioned in relation to the old Show Barn. If memory serves, it had something to do with tax evasion.”

Eli and I become stars on the vaudeville stage as I dig my heel into his foot and he jabs me with an elbow in my ribs. This information is the only evidence I need to strap Eli to the roof of Tina Louise and drive us all back home. As far as I’m concerned, every additional mile we drive is an approach toward pending doom.

Eli, on the other hand, fancies himself the new Studs Terkel, that this woman’s entire oral history shall not be forgotten. “So, who was this Miss Ginny?” he says.

“She was known to us forever and always as just ‘Miss Ginny.’ I recall my daddy saying to me that she came into her money during the second World War. Something to do with the manufacturing of nylon. You see, back then, Uncle Sam had to supply our boys with plenty of parachutes and, with an embargo on silk from the Japs, Miss Ginny’s nylon made her a pretty penny. As the story goes, she always had a love of theater. When the war was done, she built the Pocono Show Barn as her own personal playground. Well, the town was tickled pink. We never did have a theater in these parts. I remember how she would advertise in the Chronicle featuring the faces of all the old contract players from MGM. Ginny herself didn’t have any talent to speak of, but that theater made her a celebrity in her own right.”

“Before every performance, you would find her standing out front of the Show Barn wearing a long string of pearls and welcoming each member of the audience by name. It was a lot easier to know everyone’s name back in those days, back when every face was familiar. She knew all of us as well as we knew her.”

“But Miss Ginny got old, as people are wont to do. And as her health declined, the doctors put her under strict orders to stay in bed. She refused to abide; mind you, that woman never spent a whole day in bed throughout her entire lifetime. Miss Ginny stood there every night saying hello for thirty years in all. Each time I saw her she looked more like a statue collecting cobwebs. People kept asking the old gal if she was planning to retire. That’s all it would take for her to spring back to life, as if that question wound her key. ‘When this place goes, I go,’ she would tell them. Sadly, as her prophesy foretold, when Miss Ginny died, the curtain came down for good. With no kin to pass her legacy to, the authorities had to get involved. The feds took hold of the property and barred the doors. The community rallied, but with red tape as thick as it can be, the townsfolk lost interest as soon as Lester Evans built a roller rink up by the bowling alley. It’s a shame how quickly she was forgotten. Like my Daddy used to say, ‘That woman taught generations of our own a new way to dream.’”

The cashier looks through her cataracts and down at my change. Her fingers are gnarled around the wad of crumpled bills. I reach out to take them from her, but she turns away, back to the register where she produces my sweaty twenty-dollar bill.

“This one is on me,” she says, sliding my money across the counter.

“No,” Eli replies, “I can’t let you do that,” which is easy for him to say considering I had paid. Don’t get me wrong- it’s not as if I want to take the money from this old woman either. Looking around, I’m sure that it could come in handy, that is if she ever had the notion to replace the curtains that have been stained by bacon grease for thirty years. And, furthermore, our lunch was already half the price of what it would have cost in Manhattan- a pittance, really.

“I insist,” she says. “Artists eat for free.”

Eli makes an overt display of gratitude, shaking the woman’s hand until her arm jiggles. It is yet another demonstration of his appreciable talent for hearing only what he wants to hear. To Eli, the story of Miss Ginny is one for the ages. It’s clear from his ebullience that he has already done away with what his friend, the cashier, has told us about Teddy Vallenzino being wanted for dirty dealing by the IRS. To Eli, that information is already gone with the wind.  

“Thank you so much,” he gushes like he’s just won an award. “I don’t believe I caught your name.”

“I’m Lorna. This is my place: Lorna’s Kettle. Now you two run along. You mustn’t keep your audience waiting.”

24

ELI

Hunter shrieks like someone tried to fuck him without lube, “Tax evasion? Eli, I wont do it. Absolutely not.” I light a cigarette to ease myself into his histrionics. “That would explain why Mr. Vallenzino has been so elusive in regard to our contracts. It’s hard to sign your name to a legal document when you’re wanted by the FBI!” The vein in his forehead is pulsing with the rhythm of a rhapsody. “That is the straw that broke this mammal’s back. We are going home.”