I didn’t get it. But I would.
The next week I saw her again. She was walking across the Tee Hee parking lot, taking short steps in her fitted suit, her pointy-toe heels —snakeskin, I was sure. She was looking straight at me as I stood by the bus stop, shivering in my rayon coat, tapping my feet to keep warm.
“I’ll drop you. Get in,” she said, nodding toward the El Dorado.
My pop had warned me about this kind of invitation, but only from jumpy-eyed or slick-faced men, salesmen and bar patrons, barmen and kitchen help, suppliers and deliverers, custodians and busboys. Never from anyone in spiky heels with a gold-clasped clutch of creamy leather under her arm and gold button earrings and a sharp green rock balancing on one long finger, a sleek charm bracelet
swaying from one wrist, dangling like a promise.
Who was I to say no?
After all, the old man’s rule book was mum on taking lifts from
middle-aged ladies.
I started toward her car.
My, did the leather seats feel fine. And the car warmed up I so fast
and had the rich smell of good cigarettes and department store perfume.
“Where to?” she said in a low voice as we made our way down the Starlite Strip.
“Pottsville section. On Fleetwood Way.”
She nodded, eyes on the road. “Tough break, kid.”
I didn’t know what she meant. At least not for sure.
“Must be a forty-minute bus ride home,” she continued, “and all you get at the end is what? Vinyl siding and one picture window? Or
is it a walk-up that takes you for a sleigh ride every time the commuter train heads eastbound or west?”
I sat up a little straighter and looked at her from the corner of my eye. “Aluminum siding,” I murmured.
She didn’t give me any I-told-you-so, no I-got-your-number. Instead, she said, “Don’t mistake me, kid. I grew up three kids to a bed on the south side of Coal City, USA. I’m just saying, time comes and you gotta crawl your way out.”
“I’m trying.”
“With those two chumps? Fat chance.” She shook her head
wearily. “Listen. Maybe you’d like some brighter opportunities.”
“A job?” I tried to keep a measured tone.
“Something like that, Dolly Dingle. Let’s stop and I’ll buy you a cup. I think it’s time you put on your miner’s hat and headed toward the bright light.”
For two hours, we sat at the Triple R Diner on Eastern Boulevard and she did her thing. The slow-voiced, hard-eyed Mesmer routine I would come to know so well. All so logical, everything flowing like syrup off a spoon.
I’ve always known when to shut up and listen. Hands curled around my coffee cup, I said maybe five words. She was giving me the keys to the kingdom. I knew that much, even then. I just didn’t know where the kingdom was. Truth was, I didn’t care. I liked its shine even from a long distance.
She told me how her work afforded her a very comfortable lifestyle. It required significant discretion and considerable flexibility (she might, like a fireman or doctor, be called upon at a moment’s notice to attend to duties). But in return there were substantial rewards. In material things, yes, and a way of living, but also with regard to the way one was treated, viewed. Still, there was a great deal of travel, long, late hours in the car or on trains, even airplanes. Now, after coming on twenty-five years, she could use a little help. And there was more than enough work to go around, for the right kind of girl. Smart, discreet, and with some fire in the belly.
Was that how she saw me?
Sure, I wanted to ask her what exactly she did other than collect bets and protection money. But it never seemed like the right time and I didn’t want her to think I was square, that I didn’t get the whole jury-rig, that I was just some Ivory soap kid who took the bus to work and daydreamed about new dresses and dates with men who wore flowers in their lapels.
So I nodded and paid close attention as she talked. I watched how she moved (like she’d thought through every finger lift) and the way she spoke (with care, in the same even tone all the time). I knew I
was looking at the big time. I figured she might have to spend a few hours a week in this flea circus of a town, but she was big city all the way and somehow, somehow she saw something in me, something in the face like a bar of soap, plain, unshaped, ready for dirt. Made for it.
“So, kid,” she finally said, setting a ten on the table to cover the eighty-cent bill, “what’s your take? You up for a new business venture? One that’ll make real use of that stuff I know you have upstairs. You’ll learn more in a week than in a decade at the Tee Hee or two decades in the classroom.”
She rose, smoothing her skirt with a flash of the hand and looking me straight in the eye. “You want it?”
I met her gaze for the first time. “Yes,” I blurted, standing too, if shakily. “I’m ready. I’m all yours.”
She nodded and I got the feeling that nod was her version of a smile. “Good, kid. You did good.”
∞◊
∞
It was early, maybe seven A.M. I was putting on my stockings, getting ready for my eight o’clock class. Two hours of blackboard staring in a lecture hall filled with yawning bean counters in training. My old man was already out on the route his egg-daubed breakfast plate waiting for me to scrub.
I picked up the ringing phone, tugging a curler out of my hair.
“Do you know who this is?” The voice like a slither.
“Yes,” I said. It’d been three days since our talk and I’d thought of
nothing but. “Yes. I was hoping—”
“Call in sick. You’re not working today.”
“Not working? But I—”
But she’d hung up.
Between accounting and business writing, I called the Tee Hee from a pay phone and told Arthur I wouldn’t be in that day. I played it real regular, but when I got off the phone, I felt a funny buzzing in my chest. I tried to ignore it, and after classes I went home and cleaned the house, polished Pop’s shoes, scrubbed the toilet basin, anything to keep busy, record player blaring to drown out the buzzing, which was loud and, yeah, kind of exciting. Exciting in a way that threw me. I didn’t want to think about it. I did two hours of homework and made chops and creamed spinach for the old man.
It was in the morning papers. When the Clarion hit the front porch at the crack of dawn, I knew what it would say. It had happened around four o’clock, and only Jerome and Arthur were there, along with a J&B sales rep. Arthur had to go to County for third-degree burns on his face, neck, and left arm. The sales rep was standing near the front window when the bottle came careering in and had to have a couple dozen pieces of glass removed, including one from his eye, which, in the end, they also removed. Lucky Jerome, sleeping one off on the couch in the back office, came out with nothing more than a bad cough.
(But he wasn’t so dumb. Later, I heard he left town within forty-eight hours, family in tow. Thirty-five years living in this town and gone in a flash. But hell, he got off easy.)
Later that evening, while Pops was at his regular Benevolent Committee meeting at Saint Lucy’s, a police detective came by my house. He had owlish eyes and round shoulders and a wry smile like he’d long ago stopped being surprised by anything. I was ready for him, thought someone might come. I told him I was washing dishes and would he mind if I kept at it while we talked because if they weren’t done by the time the old man came home, I’d get a beating. This was a lie—my dad had never raised his hand in all his days, didn’t have the brass—but I wanted to keep my hands busy, wanted to have something to do while I lied.
“You’ve worked at Club Tee Hee for how long?”
“Two months.”
“Like it?”
“It’s all right. I’m in school. I’m going to be a secretary.”
“So you didn’t see a long future there?”
“I was planning to stay a while, sure. It was good with my school
schedule.”
“You’re a real scholar, huh?”
“What?” I said, scrubbing steak sauce from the prongs of a fork.
“Skip it. You called in sick yesterday,” he said, leaning against the
kitchen counter.
“Yeah,” I said, crossing myself with one soapy gloved hand. It was a flashy move, but I took a shot. “Someone was looking out for me.”
“So what’s wrong with you? You look okay to me,” he said, with a
vague smile as he wrote on his pad.
I paused, shaking suds off my gloves. “Feminine troubles,” I said.
He looked up at me. I gave him the stare right back. I had already
learned that stare from her. Even then.
He looked down again and wrote something on his pad. “Can’t argue with that, can I?”
She called me later that afternoon. I told her about the cop and what I said.
“Feminine troubles, huh? That what you use to get out of speeding tickets?”
“I don’t have a car.”
“Not yet,” she said. “So I guess you’re looking for a new job.”
“I guess.”
“Meet me at fifteen-oh-one North Branston Drive tonight. Apartment 9-G. Nine o’clock.”
It was a tall, pistachio-colored building along the scenic ridge outside of town. The lobby was covered with mirrors and tall, potted plants. There was an automatic elevator with a carpet in it and when the doors opened on the ninth floor, I couldn’t hear even one radio, crying baby, or arguing couple. It wasn’t like any apartment building I’d ever set foot in.
She was there, ushered me in. The place was big, with a thick band of windows, but there was nothing in it except for a lamp plugged in on the floor.
“Your new digs?” I asked, resisting the urge to take my shoes off and sink my feet into deep-pile carpeting.
“Yours,” she said. “You can’t live all the way over in Potts-ville for your new job.”
“I’m going to be able to lay out rent for this?”
“There is no rent. It’s part of the job.”
I looked at her. “What is the job?” Thoughts of men in hotel suites came into my mind. Men in town for conventions with bottles of rye on the nightstand and loose suspenders. I squinted at her hard in the low light.
“Working for me.”
“Doing what,” I said.
“You don’t have to jut your chin out for me, kid,” she said, stepping
to my left and looking me up and down. “Your virtue is your own business.”
She walked behind me, circling me. I felt like a rump roast hanging in Gus’s Butcher Shop.
“You’re not ready yet,” she said, still looking at me, arms folded across her chest. “But you will be.”
I didn’t say anything. And that was how I started.
The next day, four men from Drucker’s Movers showed up with a living room set in maple and glass and a bedroom set in satin blond. As for me, I packed a wicker suitcase and my favorite pillow and bid a dry-eyed adieu to the family manor. The old man wouldn’t come out of his bedroom when I left. My sisters came over and gave me a hard time, guessed I was being set up by some married man, called me a whore. I didn’t care. I knew I had my ticket.
The first week, I drove. She gave me the keys to a bubble-top Impala and directions first to a locking dock in Deacon City and then, as the week went on, across the state line to a series of warehouses.
“If you get pulled over,” she said, “you’re visiting your sister in Titusville. Her name is Fern Waxman. If they ask to search your car, which they won’t if you’re worth a plug nickel, then say, Sure, officer, but I’m going to be late and my sister just had a baby.”
No one pulled me over. I watched the speedometer the whole way. I never drove so careful in my life.
I didn’t know what I was delivering, not from her at least. Each time I got to my destination, there were always two or three men there. One would ask for the keys and they’d open the trunk. I never opened it, not once.
At the beginning, the stuff was already in there when she gave me the car keys. Once, I snuck a peak when the fellas were unloading. They were lifting a false bottom and pulling out small sacks. After a few trips, I got to see more of the action, cartons of cigarettes, prescription medicine stuffed in long tubes. Once it was tins of Russian caviar, another time, box after box of Star of David pendants.
By week two, I was going to a bank with an ID that said Coral Meeker and emptying a safe-deposit box filled with sparklers like I’d never seen: big, chunky sapphire stickpins, ropes of glossy pearls, an opal ring the size of a golf ball. That time, she had me wrap the pieces in a bag of diapers and baby clothes “for my sister’s newborn.” Other times, I’d use the phony bottom. Once, she had me tuck a stack of passports into the lining of a suitcase. Another time, it was some kind of foreign currency packed tight in a bag attached to a new vacuum I was bringing for this same sister, the luckiest sister in three states.
I did it all just like she wanted. Soon, she saw I was simon-pure and no fool either. I was ready for more. I wanted more.
I was going to the track.
“For this, you gotta look the part,” she said. I looked down at my off-the-rack acid green rayon number, shiny with wear. “You can’t look like a kid eating dinner off a hot plate. You can’t look like a table-hopping pickup either. We gotta believe there’s nothing funny
about big money in your hand.”
“Big money?”
She nodded. “You ready for soap, kid? ‘Cause you’re going to be elbow deep in it now.”
I ran a hand over my dress and looked over at her. I smiled for her. I think she wanted me to. I said. Yes. Yes.
Maybe you think during all this I must have felt some pangs of guilt, some doubt. It’s true, this wasn’t the way I was brought up. It wasn’t most families’ idea of good girl behavior. Sometimes I even tried to talk myself into feeling bad, into thinking for a second about the regular joes and why should I get away with nice things without working an honest job. But the second always passed and then the seconds stopped coming at all. Truth was, who was getting hurt by my doings, except those who chose to buy cigarettes and booze without sales tax, gamble away their paychecks, skimp their wife by paying back-of-the-truck prices for an anniversary string of pearls? They took their chances and I got the sweet butter skimmed off their bad luck.