Casino Moon

24

THE STATION WAGON PULLED up in front of a brownish red-brick housing project on Virginia Avenue. Rosemary climbed out and kissed Anthony once on the lips.

“Call me,” she said.

She walked across the sidewalk and in through the steel gate entrance. The project was four square buildings arranged around a vast open courtyard. Drug dealers lingered in doorways along the inner periphery, hidden from the street and passing police cars. When cops did bother stopping by, tenants rained garbage and beer cans down on them.

As Rosemary took out her keys and headed for her building on the north side, she passed a young black man by the sprinkler wearing a gray Georgetown T-shirt and a beeper on the waistband of his jeans.

“All right, I like them titties!!” he called out.

She flipped him the finger and prayed for the day she could move out of this hellhole with her daughter. She entered her building, leaving the awful wavering heat of the afternoon outside. The elevator was broken again and she began to climb up through the steep, graffiti-smeared stairwell.

It was all a matter of what you were willing to accept, she reminded herself. If you could turn tricks for your junkie husband and wrestle other women to support your daughter, what was the big deal about going for a ride with a mob guy’s son? After all, it wasn’t like Anthony was really a killer. Hadn’t he just got through telling her that? He was too gentle and solicitous to hurt anybody. The wild-man act last night was a fluke, she told herself. He was probably upset after hearing that someone else in his family had bumped off that chinless man.

It wasn’t that she was one of these women who always made excuses for her man. She was just trying to get aheadand find a safe haven. She could do worse than to hitch her star to Anthony’s wagon, she reasoned. So what if he was already married and would never be serious about her? She was getting something out of it too. If he did make this boxing promotion come off, maybe there’d be a little money in it for her. Perhaps she could go back to school and get a teacher’s degree. Even if it was just to be a phys ed instructor, at least she could make a living with her clothes on. What was a little sacrifice and discomfort? It was all a matter of what you could endure to change your life.

Anyway, she was in control. That’s what she reminded herself. Now all she had to do was ignore that flashing signal warning her that she’d always been attracted to men who were no good.

She paused on the second-floor landing to massage her sore back and listen to the sound of children laughing down the hall. Through the grimy stairwell window, she could see the gleaming casino towers rising above the low-slung tenements and shacks.

Someday all this would be a memory. And she’d be living out west with Kimmy. Somewhere like Seattle. She’d never been there, hadn’t even seen that many pictures of it, but she liked the sound. Seattle. It sounded like “settle.” She could picture herself in a quaint ranch-style house with Kimmy. With a Chrysler in the driveway and sprinklers and a wading pool in the backyard. And clean-scrubbed kindergarten classmates for Kimmy. Their mothers would invite Rosemary to after-school teas in bright solariums, where they’d sit and laugh and commiserate about the suffering the men in their lives put them through.

And with time, she might even forget being here in A.C. A woman’s blue espadrille was lying sideways near the third-floor landing. A couple of steps up, there was a torn pair ofpanties and brownish-red splatter on the wall.

Rosemary continued on to the fifth floor and took off the red shoes Anthony had given her the week before. They were not quite the right size. Her feet were cut and swollen. No one would ever use them in a J.C. Penney catalog now.

She pulled open the steel door and walked down the long, narrow hallway to her apartment. Anthony. He was a funnymix. He could go from smooth to coarse in the time it took to strike a match. Last night had been an eye-opener. He’d started off drunk, but sweet and nice, the way he usually was. Sometimes he reminded her of a little boy who’d wandered off and gotten lost in the park. He haunted her. But then they went to bed and all of a sudden he caught fire. Not in a good way, either. There was something desperate and relentless about how he’d been making love. He could learn a thing or two from Terry, that fighter she’d slept with a month back. One of these days she’d have to sit Anthony down and tell him about that. She hoped he wouldn’t be too hurt.

She put her key in the door and went into the apartment, feeling sweat mat down the front of her shirt. The TV was on in the living room. She peered around the corner and saw Kimmy sprawled out in front of the set with her butt in the air like a little hill. With the whitish drapes drawn, everything in the apartment looked old and broken. On the TV screen, a blond talk-show host was interviewing a panel of women who said they’d been sexually molested by ghosts. Four years old and she was watching this. Rosemary’s mother sat at the kitchen table in the background, wearing her formal white blouse with the high collar and her stiff dark skirt. She was sewing a shirt for Kimmy and looking stern, though she had contrived this scene herself to demonstrate Rosemary’s lack of fitness as a mother.

Not that she had any ideas or any alternatives to Rosemary working the two jobs, at the club and at the diner out on Route 30.

“You are late,” her mother sighed.

Rosemary recognized the world-weary tone and the slowly raised eyebrows. Her mother glorying in her suffering again. Rosemary was starting to do it herself these days.

“So I’m late. So what else is new?”

Her whole life she’d either been too early or too late. When she’d developed tits two years too soon at Catholic school, the nuns acted as if puberty was God’s swift and terrible judgment; she was destined to be a whore. After graduation, she’d traveled out to San Francisco ten years too late for the Summer of Love and hung around just long enough to miss most of the good entry-level jobs at the casinos back in Atlantic City.

“Your father, rest his soul, would take a belt to you if he saw how you were running around,” Rosemary’s mother said.

“Then I’m glad he’s not here.”

His timing was less than wonderful also. He’d come down from Brooklyn and worked like a dog for twenty years to open his own dress shop on Pacific Avenue. Two months later, Caesar’s opened a shop in its hotel lobby across the street and wiped him out. He died two and a half years later, a month after his insurance ran out.

“There’s no food in the house,” her mother scolded her. “Your daughter is starving.”

“I left a twenty for you in the petty-cash drawer.” Rosemary stopped and rubbed her thigh, noticing there was a little bit less of it than there used to be. Maybe the Slim-Fast was helping. “You could’ve just taken Kimmy to the market around the corner.”

“You know how I hate to leave the house in the morning.”

Or the afternoon, or the evening, Rosemary thought. It was another one of those arguments. The kind that always started because there wasn’t enough money. To buy new shoes for Kimmy. Or an air conditioner. Or more to the point, a hair appointment for her mother. Her mother was used to the finer things. She still saw herself as part of some distant pre-Castro Cuban aristocracy, entitled to rights and privileges not granted to the common people. She refused to recognize that all of them had slipped down life’s greasy pole and there was no easy way up.

“Ma, I cannot do everything,” Rosemary began to complain.

But before she could go any further, Kimmy ran up from behind her and threw a bear hug around her knees. Rosemary looked down and saw the little brown eyes shining and pleading with her not to leave again. She was turning into a clingy child, afraid to go to sleep with the lights off. And it was getting harder and harder to leave her at home with her mother. Rosemary had been having nightmares about the other baby lately. Melissa—a little, fragile, feminine name. Not strong enough to survive in this world. The name Kimmy sounded more compact, more robust.

“I waited all morning for you,” Kimmy said in a practiced heartbreaker’s voice. “You told me you would take me to see Lucy the elephant today.”

Lucy was a rotting sixty-five-foot-tall plastic replica just to the south of the casinos. Who knew what a little girl saw in it? Maybe the elephant made her feel secure. Which was probably more than Rosemary did for her sometimes.

“I know I told you, sweetheart. But I have to go to work.”

“But you promised.”

Rosemary heard her mother clucking her tongue in disapproval. This was what she wanted. For Rosemary to see her own inadequacies in the cold light of day.

“I heard you didn’t have breakfast yet,” Rosemary said brightly, trying to change the subject.

Kimmy stuck out her lip and rubbed her stomach. “I’m hungry,” she said, forgetting about the elephant.

Sometimes distraction was two-thirds of parenthood, Rosemary thought. “Maybe we can make two eggs in a special way. With the onions and peppers we have in the refrigerator.

Rosemary saw her mother flinch and knew she had not even noticed the egg carton on the side door. As a daughter of the aristocracy, her mother considered the task of actually cooking something to be beneath her. Cooking was for servants. No wonder they were always hungry.

“Come on,” said Rosemary, hoisting her daughter onto a chair by the counter. “You can help me break the eggs.”

“Yeeeaaa!” Kimmy threw her head back and gave Rosemary another of those helpless little gap-toothed smiles that made it seem worthwhile going on with the day.

As Rosemary turned to get the eggs from the refrigerator, she happened to glance out the window and see Anthony’s station wagon still idling outside. He looked lost in thought behind the wheel, but from this high up it was hard to tell. Something had definitely been bothering him all morning. Strange boy.

When he finally pulled away, a blue Toyota was following him. She hoped he wasn’t in any real trouble. She was just starting to really like him.