If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (10 page)

Ramone looked like he was searching the air for solutions. He felt around in his pockets and came up with two dimes. “How much money you got?” he demanded. “Quick!” Ophelia brought forth seven cents. Julio just laughed until Ramone spoke to him sharply in Spanish; I’d never heard him speak so sharply before. Julio narrowed his eyes but he flipped a quarter out of his pocket into the air so it would fall to the sidewalk. Ramone caught it in mid-flight. He looked at me. I hung my head, feeling more tears coming up in my throat. “I don’t have any money,” I
said. I’d been in such a hurry leaving the house that I’d forgotten to take my change purse. “White people always got money,” Julio said, but Ramone was already pulling my hand, coaxing me to run with him toward the taxi stand at the train station.

At the taxi stand, we found one lone green-and-white-checkered cab; the driver was an older man with silvery hair, sitting with the window open, reading the paper. We climbed into the cab, shouting instructions. The inside of all the Elephant Beach taxis smelled of cigar smoke. The driver was unperturbed; he didn’t even lift his eyes from his newspaper as he said, “Fifty cents a head, my friends.”

“We have fifty-two cents,” Ramone said. The driver shrugged and kept reading. “I’ll leave,” I said, feeling it was only fair, since I didn’t have any money, but Ramone held my hand fast and hard. Everyone began clamoring, about the track meet, how they were waiting for us, how a photographer from the
Elephant Beach Gazette
would be there. Ophelia was pulling on her hair, shouting in Spanish. I was crying and yelling at the same time. Julio just looked out the window, snapping his gum. Finally, Ramone tugged at the driver’s elbow until he looked up. “It’s the John F. Kennedy Memorial Trophy,” he said patiently. “They’ll print our names on the sides in gold. The trophy will go in the glass case next to the principal’s office for all to see. If we win, we’ll bring glory to our families, to the school, to the entire town.” He spoke solemnly, with great dignity. I realized that he had made this speech before, somewhere, to someone, or perhaps just in front of the mirror. Perhaps that was what he did while combing the curl that fell forward onto his forehead.

The driver looked at Ramone. He turned and looked at all of us. Then he sighed, put down his paper, and started the engine.

“Please drive quickly,” Ramone said. “The meet starts at ten o’clock, and my race is first. I’m the fastest runner.”

“It’s true,” I said, in case the driver thought he was just conceited. “We can’t win without him.”

“Don’t push your luck, kids,” the driver said, but the taxi picked up
speed. When we passed the steepled clock at City Hall, it was seven minutes to ten. We squirmed on the seat. Ramone hung his head between his knees. Ophelia put her lips to her fingertips and then crossed herself. Julio turned around and looked at me with a twisted smile. “White girl rides for free,” he said. I wanted to tell him to shut up, but I didn’t. I wished he wasn’t there. He had squinty eyes and during recess he stood against the wire fence, watching everyone run with a sneering expression on his face. He had none of the grace or beauty of the rest of the Lopez clan. I didn’t understand how he’d gotten into that family in the first place.

The meet was at Rum Hill Elementary School, up in the Dunes. It was the silk stocking district of Elephant Beach, set slightly apart from the rest of the town. Whenever Uncle Manuel drove the kickball team to games there in his truck, the Rum Hill kids laughed at us, called us the nigger school, but never right in front of the Negro girls, because they were afraid of getting beat up. They were sly and wily and our sworn enemies. At the last practice before the track meet, Ramone said, “When you run against them, put in your mind that if you don’t win the race, your mother will die.” There was a collective gasp among us, and Raynelle Johnson started jumping from side to side, saying, “Don’t you be putting no bad mouth on my mama!” Ramone smiled, his dimples shining. He said patiently, “Think how afraid it makes you to think of it. That’s what will make you win the race.”

The cab driver made the turn up the long driveway to Rum Hill Elementary. He drove the length and then curved around back to the parking lot. We could see the crowds in the bleachers, see Mr. Farnsworth in his striped gym pants and lucky red bow tie pacing the field, looking at his watch. He was waiting for Ramone. The first race was the boys’ hundred-yard dash; the relay would follow. From the windows of the cab, we saw Mr. Farnsworth shake his head and throw up his hands. We saw the runners for the hundred-yard dash line up at the starting line. From the distance they looked like toy soldiers waiting to get shot. “Pull up!”
Ramone shouted. “Pull up to the line! You can go through the grass, that way, pull up,
pull up
!”
Caught by the urgency in his voice, the driver obeyed. Before the cab had even rolled to a complete stop, Ramone shot out of the seat so quickly it was as though he vaporized. “Jesus,” the driver said, getting out of the cab. The other runners had just taken off in their lanes when Ramone came up behind them. The photographer from
The Elephant Beach Gazette
said he had never seen anything like it in his life. “The kid comes out of nowhere,” he said, afterward, “nowhere! And the race already started! And he’s running like the furies of hell are chasing him, right? And there’s one point, one instant, where I swear on my mother’s life, he was airborne. He was running so fast, his feet weren’t touching the ground. I tried, but the camera couldn’t catch it. I wanted everyone to see it, but—Jesus! Would that have made a great front page, or what?” Still, Ramone made the paper; we all did.
The Gazette
dedicated an entire page to Central District Elementary, a photomontage with Ramone at the center, smiling, his arms around the John F. Kennedy Memorial Trophy.

•   •   •

R
amone never came back out of the forsaken Pancake Heaven. He disappeared, just like in junior high school, where we all got swallowed up whole and spit back out again. That first year, in seventh grade, I was rudderless; all the things that had served me well at Central District Elementary went down the toilet. There were cliques and hierarchies that I didn’t understand. Suddenly, it mattered where you lived, where you bought your clothes, how you wore your hair. In gym class, there were too many sniggering girls waiting to laugh at the way your legs looked in your gym uniform. I became self-conscious about things that had never occurred to me before. I would walk to school with my stomach clenched and knotted with dread, homesick for the mornings at Central District Elementary when we would run with abandon around the school
playground before the first bell. My mother saw how it was with me; she was concerned, but distracted. That fall, my brother had contracted pneumonia, running such a high fever he’d become delirious, and on the way to the doctor’s office we thought we’d lost him. He was hospitalized for several weeks and couldn’t go to school for a month afterward, so the household revolved around him and his weekly blood tests and trying to keep him quietly entertained. My mother would sit by his bed while he slept, watching him breathe, and if I asked her something as simple as if she’d ironed my navy blue skirt, she either didn’t answer or snapped at me impatiently. I missed the times she’d come into my room to say good night, and we’d end up talking until my father called for her to turn out the lights. Now at night, I would lie in bed, staring into darkness, wondering what was to become of me.

I had not seen any of the Lopez clan in junior high. The building was huge, resting on the bay in a more secluded part of town, and instead of six classes to one grade, there were eighteen. There was also tracking that kept us separated from one another: Academic, Vocational, Industrial. I looked for Ophelia’s shiny tresses, for Ramone’s raging dimples, but could never seem to find them in the carefully monitored hallways. I was afraid to go searching for them, because like everyone else at Elephant Beach Junior High School, I lived in fear of walking down the wrong corridor and meeting up with the principal, Miss Sullivan, who had a glass eye and walked the halls with a wooden stick she used to whack kids who misbehaved. She was rumored to have the ability to make ninth-grade boys cry.

Finally, in November of that horrible year, while walking down the school steps at the end of the day, I saw them, clustered in the corner of a sealed-off entrance that nobody used. It was a cold, sunny day, blue skies, waves lapping gently against the stained seawall. The Spanish kids were standing in the darkened shade, waiting for their bus. My heart leaped a little in my chest; I began walking toward them, a big smile blooming on my face, the first smile I could feel with my body
since arriving at this dismal place in September. I got closer and saw Ramone and Julio and another boy I didn’t know huddled together, wearing white socks with pointy black shoes and dark pants that didn’t quite cover their ankles. They wore thin black jackets with the collars turned up and their hair was slick with oil. Ophelia looked different now; maybe it was her tight skirt, or the long silver hoops dangling from her ears. They all looked much older than the last time I’d seen them. Olga was standing at the top of the steps, her eyes narrowed with black eyeliner, her lips purple, her legs bare despite the temperature. I wondered if she’d recognize me, but she was draped all over some boy wearing a battered leather jacket, smoking a cigarette.

Ramone had his back to me, but just then, Ophelia turned around. I started moving toward her, but stopped when I saw the look on her face. Her eyes had the same coldness as her cousin Olga’s had on that day so long ago, when we’d stood in the hallway outside Mrs. Myer’s classroom. Just then, Julio spotted me, and Ramone turned around as well. I caught the tail end of a dimple, but Ramone didn’t speak. He made no move toward me. It was Julio, Julio of the squinty, shifting eyes and sneering smile, who looked at me and laughed. “White girl rides for free, right?” he said. I wanted to remind him that we’d all ended up riding for free that day, that the cab driver had been cheering so hard for Ramone to win the race that he’d forgotten to collect the fifty-two cents we owed for his fare. But I didn’t say anything. I turned around quickly so that no one could see my face. I could hear Julio still laughing behind me. “Yeah,” he said. “White girl always rides for free.”

•   •   •

K
atie, man. You ready?” Bennie, Voodoo and Nanny were behind me. I looked one last time toward the loose panels, where I had watched Ramone disappear.

“Yeah,” I said. We walked out of the alley, onto the street, past the rotting boards of abandoned construction, where a tall, thin man stood with one foot propped against a crumbling wall. In the flare of the match he was using to light his cigarette, I saw his face for a split second. He looked old to be Eddie Lopez, but it could have been. It probably was. I watched him lean his head back against the building and blow smoke up toward the sky. I thought about going over to say something, but he would never remember me. I hadn’t stood out from any of the other little girls crowded into the back of his father’s truck, subdued into silence by his impossible beauty. He had loved the song “Brown Eyed Girl.” Whenever it came on the radio, he’d yell back to us, “
Chicas!
Come on, sing along with me!” But none of us ever did.

When we got back to the car, Bennie fumbled with his keys. “Now everybody be cool,” he said. “I’m heavy.” We laughed again. Bennie always said that. He was the only one of us who was always either high or heavy or both.

“‘Be cool, I’m heavy,’” Voodoo mimicked. “We get busted, it’s gonna be on you, not anyone else. You and this fucking car. Christ, you could hear that muffler in New Jersey. Let Katie drive. She’s clean, the least likely to attract attention.” He turned to me. “Katie, you cool with that?”

“Yeah,” I said. I usually ended up driving, wherever we were. I liked driving on the parkway at night and thought about taking us for a spin. No lights to stop at, just pure road and beach grass lining the lanes. Nanny was nodding, her head resting on Voodoo’s shoulder. Voodoo’s eyes were closed, his hands still. A slight smile played on his lips. Bennie was sitting beside me, his eyelids practically dragging down to his cheekbones. He turned his stoned, sorrowful gaze on me. “So what, you couldn’t ask your buddy back there for a discount?” he slurred.

I snorted, lit a cigarette, and rolled down the window. A slight breeze was finally stirring, lifting the smell of the ocean into the air. I pulled
out of the parking space and took off in the direction of the parkway. Everyone was too stoned to notice we were driving away from the Trunk and by the time they did we’d probably be on our way back.

“Katie, man, where’d you know that guy from again?” Voodoo asked, his voice drowsy. Bennie was trying to light a cigarette. When it dropped to the floor, he left it there. He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. “Yeah, what was that about, man? How the fuck does someone like you know someone like him?”

“We used to run together,” I said. “When we were kids in elementary school.” When Ramone would run like his feet had wings.

for better or worse

M
aggie all but tore the paisley gown off the hanger and thrust it into Nanny’s hands. “Here,” she said. “You can cut it down, wear it to school, to work, wear it to hang out at Eddy’s for all I care.” The rusted lily stains on the bodice of the dress were faded, but still noticeable.

“That’s your wedding dress,” Nanny said, appalled.

“Not any more, cuz,” Maggie said, whipping through her closet. “Doesn’t fit since I had the baby. And I don’t ever plan on getting married again. Once was enough.”

We were at Maggie’s because Nanny needed something to wear to the formal orientation tea at Sacred Heart Secretarial School, which she’d be attending in the fall, and Maggie said she was welcome to stop by and browse her closet. The paisley gown had a yellow silk sash that tied in the back and matched the streamers in the bouquet that Maggie had carried down the aisle at St. Timothy’s Church on her wedding day.

“Shit!” Maggie stomped over to the crib, where the baby was crying. She picked him up and cradled him and walked into the living room. “Let’s split,” Liz mouthed, as Nanny carefully folded the dress and put
it in the Macy’s shopping bag she’d brought from home. We walked past Maggie, who had the baby at her breast, rocking him. Ringlets of hair rushed down her back like greasy waterfalls; she smelled faintly of milk and perspiration. She gave us a tight-lipped smile as Nanny kissed her cheek and whispered, “Thank you.”

“You think Matty’s stepping out on her?” Liz asked, her eyes narrowed with interest, as we walked up the block to Eddy’s. I looked at her. It was inconceivable to me that Matty would be cheating on Maggie; they’d just gotten married last year and he’d always seemed so crazy about her.

Nanny shook her head. “I don’t think that’s his thing,” she said. “Besides, if it was someone around here we would have heard about it by now.” Nanny was big on family loyalty, but she’d told me in private that a couple weeks back Matty had stayed out all night and came stumbling home just as the streetlights went off. She’d sworn me to secrecy, especially in front of Liz, who would tell the earth if she knew.

“Still, he’s out a lot without her—”

“With the guys,” Nanny said, a light sharpness to her tone. “My mother says it’s the way with Irish men, always in the bars, no women around. She says you didn’t know any better, you’d think they were all a bunch of fags.”

“That’s what Mitch says, all talk and no action,” I said. I imitated Mitch’s lazy drawl. “‘Half the cats around here are too stiff to get stiff, you dig my meaning.’” Me and Nanny laughed, but Liz said, in a mimicking voice, “Mitch says, Mitch says. You and ol’ Mitch seem pretty tight lately. Pretty chummy with a rummy.”

“Don’t call him that,” I said.

“Why the hell not?” Liz asked. “It’s not like he’s hiding it.”

“Nobody’s ever only one thing, man,” I said, and even in my own ears I sounded solemn and priggish.

“Wow, Katie, man. That’s intense,” Nanny said.

“What are you, into him?” Liz asked. She laughed and shook her head. “That would be just like you, Katie. Digging a one-legged drunk.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. Usually I shut up when Liz got this way, but she’d been this way a lot lately and it was working my nerves.

“The Katie Hanson sick puppy syndrome,” Liz said. “Bennie Esposito, too stoned to walk, Georgie the faggot—”

“At least I see them,” I said. “Maybe if you spent more time with Cory, you wouldn’t be such a bitch.”

Even Nanny turned to look at me. I was surprised myself; usually I kept still and waited until Liz ran down on one of her moods, but it was hot and I was frustrated over Luke and the way the summer was going. Besides, Mitch and Georgie were my friends.

Liz didn’t say anything. She just waved her hand, as if pushing me backward, and turned and walked in the opposite direction.

“Do you, Katie?” Nanny said softly. “Dig Mitch?”

“No,” I said. “No, man, we’re just—he’s a good friend. Just don’t tell Liz, she’s always on me about being friends with guys instead of—”

“I know, I know,” Nanny said wearily. “Maybe you’re just smarter than the rest of us, not losing your shit over some asshole.” I knew she was talking about Tony Fury; she hadn’t heard from him since the night he’d stood outside her window, throwing rocks.

“Maybe not,” I said. I had that hollow feeling inside I got whenever I had words with someone, which wasn’t often. I usually backed out of fights; I didn’t like for people to be mad at me. Suddenly, I missed Marcel, even though I’d gone up to Cape Cod to visit right before Fourth of July. I missed how it had been when it was just the two of us, before she met James and I started hanging out in the Trunk. Marcel was like me, she didn’t like harsh words and never saw the need for them. We’d been friends since seventh grade and had never had one fight. “I feel bad,” I said now, holding my arms across my stomach.

Nanny snorted. “Don’t start kicking your own ass,” she said. “She had it coming.”

•   •   •

D
runk, drunk, drunk!” Maggie railed, whipping around the small living room of the bungalow, waving her arms. “Matty! My brothers! Just like my father, just like him! Jesus!” From the crib in the corner, the baby began squalling.

“Christ,” Maggie whispered wearily. There were violet stains under her eyes. Her breasts were bursting out of her tee shirt. She picked up the baby, hoisted him on her shoulder. His whimpering tapered to a low mewling, sounding like a lost kitten.

It was my day off from the A&P. Me and Nanny were heading for the beach, and she wanted to stop in and see how Maggie was doing, since it was right on the way. It had been several days since we’d last seen her, but it seemed like we had never left.

“You know, sometimes I forget,” she whispered, her eyes closed. “I forget he’s here, you know? When he’s sleeping . . . the other day, right, I actually started getting dressed to go to the beach. You know, Thursday, it was one of those days, makes you feel like—like someone gave you a present, right? So pretty—and I swear to God, I was almost out the door, man, with my towel and the baby oil . . . If he hadn’t woken up just then, if I hadn’t heard him crying, I would have been, like, gone, man. And he would have been . . .” She trailed off. Tears started leaking from her eyes, running down her face.

“Maggie.” Nanny walked over, patted her arm in sympathy.

I felt awkward, standing there watching, not knowing what to do. I wasn’t close to Maggie; our association was through Nanny, but I’d always envied her, so sure, so secure, with her cool, good-looking brothers, and Matty Mayhew, with his killer blue eyes, who she’d been with
forever. I had a sudden flashback of a hot day several summers ago, watching Matty riding her on the handlebars of a Sting-Ray bicycle, Maggie squealing as he circled curbs and cars, the two of them laughing in the late afternoon sunlight.

The baby was almost quiet now, rocking gently against Maggie’s skin.

“It’s all right,” Maggie whispered. “Shhh, shhh. It’s all right.”

•   •   •

B
y the first week in August they were gone, headed to Colorado in the blue-and-white Volkswagen van that Matty had purchased secondhand from the Sunoco station on Buoy Boulevard. Nanny told us how it had come about, what she’d pieced together from overheard phone conversations between her mother and Aunt Francie, and what Maggie had told her. What happened was, one night, “fed up to the teeth and sick to death of this shit,” Maggie had wrapped Donovan in his blue-and-white blanket and gone to stay at her mother’s. The next day, when Matty came around demanding to see Maggie and the baby, Aunt Francie met him at the door with her arms folded over her chest, refusing to let him in. The second day he stayed away, figuring Maggie would come around in good time, call him to come get her, or just show up at home, recovered from her snit. “Just wait it out, man,” Raven advised him. “She’ll get sick of listening to my mother run you down sooner or later.” The fourth day he went over to Aunt Francie’s house and became belligerent. “I got a right to see my own kid,” he said. “Maybe when you start acting like a father,” Aunt Francie said, slamming the door in his face. He went out and got drunk that night, tried calling Maggie at her mother’s house from the pay phone at The Starlight Lounge, but either or both of them hung up on him every time. By the end of the week he was a wreck, too upset to even get high. When he showed up at Aunt Francie’s, meek and sober, she barred
the doorway. Behind her, he could see Donovan’s playpen in the middle of the living room. Tears came to his eyes.

“You ready to cut the shit?” Aunt Francie asked, fixing him with that steely look that had made her husband quit drinking during the last years they were together.

“Please let me see them, Francie,” he said humbly, and only when Maggie called from the living room, “Let him in, Ma,” did Aunt Francie finally step aside.

Maggie had her own arms folded, though, and the Scully steel was in her voice as she told him she wasn’t going back to the way things had been. “I’m done with that bullshit,” she said, and Matty heard the steel and knew that he’d better start listening if he wanted to see his son again. She said she’d thought it out and the only way that made sense was for them to leave Elephant Beach and start someplace new, “away from the Beach and the bars and my asshole brothers.” She thought even the city was too close, because folks were always breezing in and out on the Long Island Rail Road and besides, it was no place to raise a kid nowadays.

“No arguments there,” said Matty, whose grandparents had been among the first residents of Elephant Beach, back when the boardwalk was being built and Buoy Boulevard was mostly sand.

“Matty,” Maggie said gently, with no trace of anger, “I love you, but let’s face it. We had to get married. We don’t have to stay married.”

They ended up talking all night and, by mid-morning of the next day, they’d decided to move to Boulder, Colorado, where Matty’s cousin Kevin worked in construction and had told Matty that any time he wanted to come out, he’d have a job and a place to stay; that the people were beautiful and the mountains “magnificent, man, like un-fucking-real.” It was worth a shot, they agreed, and within weeks they were packed and ready to depart. Nanny’s mother, Mrs. Devlin, threw the first of the farewell parties for the Scully side of the family, which was big and so different from my own; Liz and I were invited because we were over there so
much, Nanny’s parents called us their other daughters. When we turned eighteen in our senior year, Mrs. Devlin included us in the cocktail hour, mixing up a blender full of Kahlúa sombreros made with vodka and real cream. I’d always gargle with Listerine before I went home, because my mother still hadn’t gotten over that Mrs. Devlin served us all a glass of champagne before going to midnight mass two Christmases ago.

We were upstairs on the tiny sunporch outside Nanny’s bedroom, smoking a joint with her cousin Cha-Cha. We could hear the laughing babble downstairs almost as if it was in the next room. A glass broke, a baby cried. We had drinks and cigarettes and the air smelled of ocean and sunshine.

“I’m sure gonna miss my little sis,” Cha-Cha said, tapping the joint. “But hey, it’s what she wants, man. Since she was a little girl, right? She always wanted her own family, took my old man’s leaving harder than the rest of us. Even my mother.” He laughed, his voice scratchy and shuddering from the smoke. I liked Cha-Cha; he was long-haired and lanky and fine in his flannel shirts and jeans, not as wired as Raven or as vivacious as Maggie, but funny and friendly and a terrible flirt. All the city people had a kind of wildness about them though, something smoky and sinister that made you pause before moving forward.

“I can see that, man,” Liz said in her all-knowing voice. Behind her back, me and Nanny covered our mouths to keep from laughing. “I can, like, definitely see Maggie as a daddy’s little girl.”

“When he was around,” Cha-Cha said, laughing. “When he quit drinking, everything was cool for a while, until one day he just, like, vanished, man. Went to the hardware store for some lightbulbs and never came back.”

“I remember,” Nanny said. “That’s when you all came to stay with us at the Beach.”

“And my mother was wailing, wailing, man, the whole way down here on the train,” Cha-Cha recalled. “And then we got to your house and your mother was all, ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish. Lie down with dogs,
you get up with fleas.’” He laughed again. “But Maggie, she was always waiting on him to come home. Used to sit by the window, watching for him to come walking up Dyckman Street. Even at the wedding. I mean, dig it, man, we don’t even know if he’s still alive, right? But she thought he’d like, magically appear to walk her down the aisle.” It was Raven who’d walked her down the aisle instead, being the oldest. I thought about Maggie, sitting in the apartment in Washington Heights, waiting for her father to come through the door. I’d never thought of her as someone with her face pressed against a window. She’d always seemed to be one of those girls to whom gifts came quickly, in abundance.

“But it’ll be cool, man,” Cha-Cha said. “Boulder’s very cool. All those fucking mountains, man! It’s a far-out place to start a new life.” Suddenly he turned to me, grinning, and said, “You want to ride shotgun?” I was so startled that I nodded, yes, and he hit heavily on the joint, sucking the smoke all the way in like it was oxygen. Then his lips were on mine and the smoke dipped and curled around my tongue to the back of my throat, and I held it as though I was underwater, seeing how long I could go before my lungs exploded. Then my breath burst from me, the sweet stench of weed filling the air.

“Nice,” Cha-Cha said approvingly. “Very nice.” Then he patted his stomach. “I’m going back down, get some more of your mother’s baked ziti,” he told Nanny. “Damn, the woman can cook! She got all the cooking genes in this family. I love my mother, man, but she can barely open a can of Spam. You coming, cuz?”

“In a bit,” Nanny said dreamily. She was staring across the bungalow roofs that lined the street below. I knew she was thinking about Tony Fury. I could hear it in her voice.