Good Graces

Chapter Thirteen

I will always love baseball the same way Daddy did. Unfortunately, coming to these games puts me in a pickle. I spend most of every inning thinking about how much he would love being here on a hot summer night and how bad I miss feeling his hairy arm pressed against mine, the look of his chipped-tooth smile after a really great play and how he’d jump to his feet and shout, “That’s showin’ ’em who’s boss!”

How do you make yourself forget?

It’s the Policemen (The Clobbering Coppers) versus the Feelin’ Good Cookie men (Chips Off the Old Block) under the playground’s big lights tonight. I’m sitting high up so I can get a bird’s-eye view, but not of the action out on the diamond. I’m memorizing the faces of the people coming and going. I’m looking for Greasy Al. It would be so simple for him to blend into this crowd and bide his time, especially if he was wearing a disguise like a black beard or something. After the ninth inning, he could stream out the gates with everybody else and hurry to hide between houses to follow a little girl named Troo O’Malley home. When I least expected it, that’s when he’d reach out from behind a tree and grab her. I gotta keep my eyes peeled and this is no easy job.

The bleachers around the diamond are always packed when these two teams go at each other. The last time they played it got kinda heated up and nobody talked to anybody for about a week. Mr. Jessup, who is the regular ump, is pretty strict. He got on everybody’s nerves so bad reciting the rules of the game that one of the factory men yelled out from the crowd, “Shut up already with the sermon on the mound,” and then somebody else offered Dave ten dollars to shoot Mr. Jessup and it went downhill from there.

That’s why Father Mickey is behind home plate tonight. Nobody would dare question his infallible calls. Troo is chatting up a storm with him. Usually she doesn’t like people to fidget with her, so I’m shocked when Father licks his finger and rubs it across a smudge on her cheek and she doesn’t seem to mind at all. Her religious instruction must be going really, really well, so that’s at least one thing I can like about him.

Wendy Latour comes skipping through the playground gates with the rhinestone tiara on her head and when she spots me, she spreads her legs and shouts out the same way she always does, “Thally O’Malley, hi, hi, hi!” After she throws me lots of See the USA in your Chevrolet Dinah Shore kisses, she tries to crawl up the bleachers to give me one of her enormous hugs, but she steps on somebody’s hand so Artie has to pull her back. He is really taking Charlie Fitch’s running away to heart. He looks like the “Wreck of the Hesperus,” which I have never actually seen but sounds pretty bad. All wrecks are.

Mary Lane’s mother musta given her a Toni Home Permanent Wave and left it in too long. She looks like she got struck by lightning. She is strolling alongside Fire Chief Bailey’s son, Skip, probably asking him about different and better ways to start fires. She set one last night at the empty television repair store on Lisbon Street. It’s not seeing a place burn down that she likes so much. It’s the trucks that come to put out the fire that she adores. She would like to drive a hook and ladder someday, but that will never happen because they’re called firemen and not firewomen, but that’s one of the other reasons I like her so much. She holds on to her dreams even if they’re bound to go up in smoke.

I can see Willie O’Hara playing rock, paper, scissors with Debbie, the peppy counselor, and Fast Susie Fazio is leaning against one of the swing poles. She’s flirting with her boyfriend, The Mangling Meatball. Her long black hair is swishing back and forth across her bosoms that are pushing at the seams of her white blouse like they’re trying to make a break for it.

When Father Mickey shouts out, “Play ball,” I make sure to watch that Troo comes right over to sit behind me in the bleachers in the spot I saved for her. She’s kicking me in the back every two seconds, so that’s good. There’s no sign of Greasy Al, but at least I know where she is.

The police team moves ahead of the factory guys in the second inning. Mother claps and so do I when Dave makes a double play, stretching off third base to catch the ball that was fired at him by shortstop Detective Riordan, who is the man that Aunt Betty Callahan is currently going gaga over. (She mighta had a few too many breath-freshening nips of her peppermint schnapps before the game. Her old friend Father Mickey has to call a time-out when she wobbles out on the blacktop in her red high heels to give Detective Riordan a smooch after that double play.)

Our half sister Nell has come to the game to cheer for her husband, who lost his job at Fillard’s Service Station and is now working up at the factory. Nell nodded our way, but didn’t come over to sit with us. She found a spot in the bleachers on the first-base side for her and Peggy Sure. That’s the name of her baby. She was supposed to be called Peggy Sue after the Buddy Holly song, but the lady in the office at St. Joe’s who fills out the birth certificates, Mrs. Sladky, wrote the name down wrong in ink. Troo thinks Mrs. Sladky played a prank because Peggy Sure was born on April 1, but my sister’s wrong. (The woman doesn’t have a funny bone in her body. Believe me. She was my Brownie leader. That battle-ax only took the job because she likes to boss children around with scissors in her hand.)

During the fourth inning, I cross over to the factory bleachers and squeeze in next to Nell because she looks like she could use a friend and Daddy always told me, “Be nice to her, Sal. She is not the worst big sister in the world. There might be two or three worse.”

Nell doesn’t even say hello before she hands me a diaper, two pins and the baby. “I’m sick of changin’ her,” she says. “You do it.”

Things aren’t going too great for Nell these days.

Her and Eddie moved in above Delancey’s Grocery Store on 59th Street after they got married so Troo and me stop by to see her every Friday afternoon when we’re done washing out socks at Granny’s. Spending time with our half sister is something I bribed Troo to do so we can add visiting the infirmed to our “How I Spent My Charitable Summer” stories. She hasn’t stopped holding it against me for a second.

When the two of us climbed up the steps to Nell’s apartment last week, Troo groused the same way she always does, “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this. Comin’ over here is worse than bein’ one a them martyrs they’re always tellin’ us about at school. At least St. Joan of Arc burned up quick.”

We’d brought along our sleepover clothes the way Aunt Betty told us to. I’d planned out a whole speech begging Eddie and Nell to take Troo and me with them to the Bluemound Drive-in. If they said yes, I was gonna ask if we could stop for a few minutes at the new zoo so I could check to make sure Sampson was doing okay without me.

The apartment door was partly open so we could see Nell and the baby sitting on the davenport. I thought at first that I got the wrong Friday because Nell didn’t look ready for a hot date. Of course, her hair that’s the color of a brown paper bag looked good combed back into a DA, but she was wearing a nightie that was stained brown and snot was pouring out of her ski jump nose.

Troo took one look at her and said, “Holy God in heaven.”

Nell cried out, “Eddie… we aren’t goin’ to the movies… he’s been eatin’ every night at the Milky Way… and… I think he’s been feelin’ up Melinda Urbanski… there was glitter under his fingernails… and…” Nell yanked her nightie up past her bosoms and moaned, “Eddie doesn’t call them my thirty-six deelightfuls anymore. He calls them… sob… sob… sob… my old longies.”

Eddie Callahan is a big fat drip, but I understand why he’s going up to the drive-in for supper. Nell learned to cook from Mother and the Milky Way… Our Food is Out of This World has the best grub with nifty outer space names like the Giant Galaxy Burger and Uranus Fries brought to you by girls with classy chassis who wear silvery skirts, and on their heads, glittery antennae bob back and forth when they glide on their roller skates between the cars to loud rock ’n’ roll music. And since I heard that large, not long bosoms are a very big deal to boys, Nell’s probably right about her husband feeling up Melinda the skating waitress. Even I noticed that her chest is high and mighty. (If Eddie’s so nuts about outer space bosoms, I think he could give Nell a little credit. At least part of hers look like flying saucers.)

When Troo and me got back home from the apartment, I ran straight into Mother’s bedroom and told her how awful Nell looked and how she suspected Eddie was being moony over an outer space skank. Mother was perched at her dressing table, brushing her glimmering hair with her golden brush. I thought she’d be understanding and so sympathetic because the same thing happened to her. Hall Gustafson stepped out with a cocktail waitress at the Beer ’n Bowl when Mother was supposed to be dying up at St. Joe’s. But Mother didn’t take her eyes off the mirror when she said, “Your sister made her bed, Sally, now she’s got to lie in it. Let this be a lesson to you.”

The cop side goes up on their feet when Mr. Kollasch hits a high fly ball that sails over Eddie’s head in right field.

“Where do you think Dottie is right this minute?” Nell asks me, not even noticing that her husband let a run get driven in. “Out dancin’ in a new dress with her hair done up in a bow?”

Nell and Dottie Kenfield were in the same class in high school together so they knew each other, but didn’t have much in common back then. Dottie was on the honor roll, and Nell… like Troo says, most of her brain is in her bra. Nell only started bringing up Dottie all the time after she heard that she escaped from the hospital with her baby in Chicago. She’s sure that Dottie’s living the high life in some fancy supper club and wishes she could be, too.

“How am I supposed to know where Dottie is?” I feel sorry for Nell, but I am getting as tired as Troo is of her asking us what we think has become of Dottie, so I answer her the same way she does minus her special f word. “Do I look like a map?”

“Ya know, being a mother isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Nell spits back. “Tell your sister that. I see those looks she’s been givin’ me.”

Just like her, I can easily see Troo sticking out in the crowd. There’s other redheads in the neighborhood, but none like my sister. She’s giving Nell dagger eyes. She’s never liked her and she hates it when I go outta my way to be nice to her. She’s also giving me the c’mere finger.

“Well, nice chattin’ with you. I gotta go,” I say, kissing freshly diapered Peggy Sure on her nose and handing her back to Nell, who takes all that pinkness back into her arms like she’s a piece of Dubble-Bubble I clawed out from underneath the bleachers.

“Oh, where oh where has my little Dot gone, oh where oh where could she be?” Nell starts singing, not to Peggy Sure.

She’s been acting like this since she got home from St. Joe’s with her bundle of joy. I think she caught a disease in the hospital that is making bats fly out of her belfry. That is not just my opinion, I know something about this. Troo reminds me all the time that people who have big imaginations can go off their rockers the same way Virginia Cunningham did in The Snake Pit movie, so I have memorized the signs to watch out for:

1. Talking to objects or singing to yourself.

2. Not brushing your teeth regularly.

3. Smiling or laughing at times or places when you’re not supposed to.

It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if somebody told me tomorrow that they saw Nell running down the street chortling at dead birds on the sidewalk with her tan teeth. Mark my words, one of these days the men in the white jackets will be coming to move her out of her apartment and over to the county loony bin.

Stepping over feet on my way back to my bleacher seat, I catch a glimpse of Mr. Kenfield. He hasn’t come across the street to cheer with the rest of us, but is watching the game from his porch swing. The tip of his cigarette is glowing in the dark. I’d like to head over there to have a visit with him after the ninth inning the way I woulda last summer, but I just don’t know anymore if my old friend would be happy to have me rocking next to him. He told me once during one of our visits that he loved children and wished he coulda had a whole houseful, but I think he mighta changed his mind. I heard he’s been chasing kids outta his yard.

His wife, Mrs. Kenfield, is sitting ramrod straight on the other side of Mother, who looks particularly pretty tonight in gold hoop earrings and a sleeveless white blouse that shows off her summer brown-sugar skin. I can hear the two of them talking, but not what they’re saying. I scoot closer, afraid that Mrs. Kenfield might be ratting Troo out for stealing from the Five and Dime, but the only thing I catch her saying is “… so upsetting about Charlie Fitch. I asked Father Mickey to say a novena for Lorraine and Ted. To lose that boy…”

I could tell she was trying to hold back tears. And not just for the Honeywells. Mrs. Kenfield had to be thinking about what she’s lost. She must miss her disappeared daughter and her granddaughter, and her husband, who is still here, but not really, not the way he used to be anyway, which in some ways I think has gotta be worse.

Seeing that awful lonely look on Mrs. Kenfield’s face makes me want to go sit next to Henry in the worst way. He’s two rows in front of me in the bleachers, keeping his mother company. Maybe he’s not so special to a girl like my sister, but there’s something about the way he listens to me without rolling his eyes and sometimes when he looks at me in a certain kind of way, I wish Henry could bottle himself. I would buy him by the case.

Troo uses her mental telepathy on me and says, “Well, lookee-lookee. Onree got a fancy new haircut.”

She’s right. Since I saw him last, he got it cut short and is making it stand up straight from his skull with butch wax. I already adore it and I’m sure that my sister does, too. She likes all things modern.

“I love him… I mean… it. The flattop,” I tell her, hoping I can find some time soon to meet him at the drugstore and run my hand across the top. It’s gotta tickle.

“Ya know what I think… Peaches ’n Cream?” Troo leans down and says with so much snide. “I think he looks like the Kenfields’ hedge. Hunh… hunh… hunh.”

Hearing her wild French laugh makes me remember that I forgot to do what I was supposed to be doing. I got caught up thinking about Daddy and Nell and Peggy Sure and Mother and Dave’s third base playing and the Kenfields and adorable Henry that I forgot to pay attention to the details. During my flight of imagination, I betcha any money Greasy Al slunk right past me.