With or Without You Page 7

  I grabbed the box out of her hand and pointed to the price tag. “It’s two forty-nine,” I said.

  “Why you—” She glared at me.

  “Two forty-nine.”

  “I can read.”

  “Then ring it up. What are you waiting for?”

  She shook her head, mumbling to herself, “I just can’t see the same as always is all …” as she slowly punched the numbers on her register, dragging it out on purpose. I dug into my pocket and tossed three one-dollar bills on the counter.

  “Keep the change.”

  She didn’t look up. A few steps away I realized I was walking in public with a gigantic box of Kotex under my arm. People were staring. I ran back for a bag and hoped to find another cashier but that woman in her dumb jean shirt with the rhinestones along the collar was the only one. I imagined her picking out the shirt at the store across the way, maybe a friend telling her how adorable she looked, though her hair was thin and greasy, her face like a walnut, and she had a tick in her left eye—way past even normal-looking. And she still bought the sparkliest shirt. If I kept thinking about it I’d start bawling, and I wasn’t like that. I shoved the Kotex under my shirt and found a clothing store. In the dressing room, I broke into the box and stuck a pad in the crotch of my underwear, lining the others around my waistband like a rebel packing wads of hundreds.

  There was no garbage bin, so I left the box and skated across the mall. My grandfather was still testing antennas. He was a good tester, an electronics guy by trade. Since he retired, Radio Shack had become his second home. All the salesmen knew him by name and encouraged his experimentation. They got a kick out of him, this old man who talked like a New Yorker but called everyone “partner,” like he’d learned it in the movies.

  “Ready for lunch, little buckaroo?” Grandpa said, and we returned to the sweltering Caddy, on our own since Grandma ate lunch at the clubhouse on golf days. I wanted to go home and unload my ammo but kept quiet as we passed Palm Court and continued on a few blocks to the Old West village, an amusement park where everyone dressed like they hadn’t changed their clothes in a hundred years. You could see the outline of the Ferris wheel from the pool at Palm Court, cars decorated like covered wagons, but it was a much longer walk than it seemed. You couldn’t get anywhere around here without a car.

  At the gate, the attendant dressed like a cowboy smiled at Grandpa. “How’s it going, Mr. Cooperstein?” he asked.

  “Mighty fine, mighty fine. This here’s my kinfolk, my granddaughter. Take off your hat, Lily.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because you’re in the presence of a gentleman.”

  I took off my Mets cap and the fake cowboy bowed. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

  “Me too,” I said, though I didn’t mean it. The gatekeeper was gross, full of acne worse than mine, which tended to bunch around my nose, chin, and forehead. His tongue sloshed around his lips like a cow’s, but he let us into the park for free. Grandpa tapped his back a few times, said he was a fine young partner, and we headed for the saloon.

  Saddles and stirrups clung to the walls and there was a mechanical bull in the corner. A sign above it said no rides before five p.m. Behind a glass counter, smoke rose from the grill, spitting up grease and meaty air globules. Signs on old parchment advertised menu items: tortillas, burgers, chili, corn chowder, root beer. Grandpa ordered a bowl of chili; I got a chili burger with thick fries, and we took our trays to the woman dressed like an Indian who sat behind an antique cash register. She was oddlooking for an Indian. Her shiny black hair was molded into two long, thick braids, but her skin was pasty white, her nose tiny and thin. When she looked up to give us our total her eyes glimmered bright green. The costume made her seem less of an Indian and more an advertisement for interracial marriage, but I wasn’t sure if Indians qualified as a race. Some people said Jews did. And there was a Puerto Rican kid at school. What about him? It was all so confusing.

  “What kind of Indian are you?” I asked her.

  She raised her shoulders and smiled. “Navajo.”

  “Cool.”

  “We’re peaceful. We live on the reservation.”

  Grandpa fidgeted next to me, frantically checking his pockets.

  “Are you okay, Mr. Cooperstein?” the green-eyed Navajo said.

  “I can’t find my wallet.”

  She stared at him, cockeyed now. Grandpa apologized, said he’d had it with him just a few minutes earlier at Radio Shack.

  “Oh horses! I must have left it at the store. And it’s almost high noon!”

  “I have money, Grandpa,” I said. I always had money; my allowance was fifty a week.

  “Now, little lass, you stay out of this.”

  “Not again, Mr. Cooperstein.”

  “Where is that doggoned wallet?”

  Grandpa looked distraught. He kept slapping his hands against his body hoping the wallet might appear. “It’s okay, Grandpa, I can pay,” I said. “We’ll get your wallet after lunch.” I dug the money roll out of my pocket, peeled off a ten, and handed it to the Indian. Grandpa’s eyes sunk lower than I’d ever seen. He leaned back against the counter while I collected the change. The fake Navajo said have a nice day, and we walked outside to the picnic tables.

  “How could this have happened?” Grandpa said, and stared at his bowl of chili. Not knowing what to say, I bit into my burger. Chili plunked from the patty to the wax paper covering my plate. Another bite and my fingers were bathing in it. I went to get more napkins from the counter, where a few tourists in street clothes were ordering food. Others mingled about with the Old West people.

  I asked a cowboy how long he’d been in town and he said he came with the miners after the Civil War. They’d been battling the Apaches and the outlaws ever since. In fact, he said, there was a bad guy on the loose right now, the outlaw Edmond Cleve. I said I’d look out for him. “You do that, son,” he said, “but you’d do better to trade in that cap of yours for a real cowboy hat.”

  My hat confused the Old West people. Cutoffs frayed just below my knees, leather high-tops, and the large, baggy T-shirt didn’t help, but my baseball cap with its perfectly worn-in arch and faded orange lettering closed the deal. In the 1800s the men wore one kind of hat, the women another, although even now people thought I was a boy whenever I wore the Mets cap Jack had bought me. We used to go to games together when I was really young. My favorite player was Tom Seaver, with his iron arm and dusty knees. The greatest pitcher ever. I had his number on my Slugger pajamas.

  Back at our table, a woman in a flowery bonnet and dress that hooped out at her ankles came by with a basket full of rock candy. “It’s from the mines—diamonds,” she said. I took a piece, Grandpa didn’t. He looked like he was going to cry.

  Suddenly (I don’t like the word suddenly, by the way, and have been skeptical of it since my eleventh-grade English teacher, Mr. Belgrave, criticized it in an essay of mine—one that I’d actually written myself—saying, “Nothing happens suddenly! “ but sometimes things do occur without warning, right away, quick as wink, as these Old West imposters might say and thus) shots pealed through the air and everyone jumped out of their seats, crowding the dirt road in front of the saloon. A few women in fancy dresses shrieked and fainted. “High noon, Lil!” Grandpa shouted. “It’s high noon!”

  We crammed in next to an old shopkeeper in a white apron. “It’s Edmond Cleve!” he shouted. “The outlaw Edmond Cleve.”

  Cleve galloped in, a black figure on a black horse, even the dusty bandanna across his nose and mouth was black. He turned every so often to fire at the sheriff who trailed a few feet behind him. The sheriff let go of the reins with his right hand and scooped up his lasso. Spiraling above the sheriff’s head, a braided cotton halo, the rope took on a life of its own. It leaped in Cleve’s direction and caught his gun. The crowd cheered. The cowboy I’d spoken to earlier stepped closer to Cleve’s horse and forced him down. Cleve turned toward the sheriff, right hand
on his holster. The two were headed for a shoot-out.

  “So we meet again, Cleve,” the sheriff said. “This time I’m going to run you out of town for good.”

  “We’ll see about that, sheriff.”

  “This is your last chance,” the sheriff said, and I noticed my grandfather mumbling his lines with him. “You’ve got ten seconds to turn and walk on out of here or I’ll blow your head off.”

  “Not if I get you first!” Cleve drew his remaining gun and fired, but the sheriff ducked and grabbed his weapon. Shots flew; we all shouted. The woman with the rock candy dropped her basket. Cleve and the sheriff missed each other, dragging out the duel until, finally, the sheriff hit Cleve. Blood exploded in his chest, he tripped backwards. The sheriff shot him again and this time he went down in a flurry of cheers.

  A saloon girl dressed in a snug, frilly bodysuit with a tiny silver gun tucked into the red satin ring holding up her stockings kissed the sheriff on the cheek, leaving a red lip print on his face. Then she turned to the crowd. “Give it up for the sheriff, isn’t he just scrumptious?” The sheriff bowed. “And how about a cheer for the nastiest outlaw in the land, Edmond Cleve!” The woman sauntered over to him and, eyebrows fluttering, offered him her hand. Accepting it, he bounced up, bloodied neck and all. Back from the dead. He pulled the saloon girl into a serious kiss. People clapped and whistled. He was much cooler than the sheriff. Bad guys always are.

  “She looks like Mae West!” Grandpa said, smiling, and though I didn’t know Mae West, that underwear said everything. Sexy. Like Blair in her uniform. Kiss finished, Cleve and the woman raised their hands in the air. For a minute you couldn’t tell the tourists from the actors, there was so much commotion. Grandpa whooped and hollered, “Bravo! Bravo!” He loved the whole song and dance; everyone did. But it was weird imitating people from another time. This gone world resurrected. I felt like an intruder, phonier than the Indian girl with her sparkling green eyes—alive at their expense. Palm Court with its shiny white walls and tennis courts was ages away.

  Grandpa stayed in a good mood as we set off for Radio Shack to retrieve his wallet. It was a short drive but felt like a trek, especially since we’d made it a few blocks from the Old West town before realizing he didn’t have his glasses. I ran back and found them on the table where we’d been sitting and returned hyperventilating. The sun was too strong, the air dry and dizzying. I was starting to think we’d never make it back to Palm Court and wondered if that was what Grandpa feared. That one day he’d forget himself and be the man who never returned. There was a song he loved by the Kingston Trio about the man who never returned. One day he gets stuck on the MTA when a fare strike hits and can’t get off the train. He spends his days riding back and forth along the suburban lines and every day his wife comes by and chucks him a sandwich. That made no sense, I told Grandpa. Why didn’t she just give him a nickel so he could get off the train? Grandpa said he wouldn’t have taken it because that would mean he’d accepted the fare hike and it was a protest song like songs in the sixties but it came earlier on. When workers were the thing.

  Hours later, it seemed, we returned the Caddy to its spot and walked through the pool area, where Grandma sat with her girlfriends underneath a large tent. As soon as she saw us, she checked her watch and stretched up out of her chair like a cat. A very tan woman wearing a sun visor and matching yellow tennis outfit caught her. “Cocktail time?” she said, and Grandma nodded. Every day, like high noon in the Old West town, Grandma and Grandpa marched inside for drinks at three. Occasionally people joined them, but Grandma hated entertaining and liked watching her soap while she sipped her bourbon.

  “You ready, Hog?” Grandma said.

  “At your service, my dear.” Grandpa winked, and all the ladies by the pool said, “Ahhh.”

  The walk inside took forever. I was lightheaded and bloated, and no matter how deeply I inhaled I couldn’t fill my lungs. Like I imagined you in your compound.

  I went directly to the bathroom and stuck on a new pad, rolling the other one the way a girl at camp had demonstrated for another one. Roll it like a big fat joint, she’d said. I hid the bloody wad in my beach bag, along with the clean ones I’d liberated from my waistband. Later, after they’d gone to bed, I’d toss the dirties in the garbage outside. Nobody’d ever know.

  I found my grandparents in the kitchen preparing the cocktail cart. Grandma opened a Tupperware container full of peanuts in the shell and poured them into a bowl, then lifted a Ziploc bag of pretzels from the cabinet next to the sink. “Ew!” she shrieked. “Termites!”

  “Let me see.” Grandpa left the freezer where he’d been filling an ice bucket. I followed him. “Those aren’t termites, they’re ants,” he said.

  “Everyone’s been talking about the termites.”

  “Have you ever seen a termite? They’re straight and narrow. An ant’s got a figure like the gal outside the saloon. Remember, Lil?” He moved his hands in the shape of an hourglass.

  “Mae West.”

  “Look, look at those curves. What you’ve got here, Rosie, are good old-fashioned ants.”

  “So do something!” Grandma said.

  “I will,” he replied, and we stood waiting. “Go and watch your show, go on. I can’t work with you looking at me.”

  Grandma and I paraded into the living room. She turned on the TV set, adjusting the antenna to temper the static. “Saul!” she shouted. “What about that new antenna?” He called out a few garbled words from the kitchen, the ant-slayer. Even bugs were straight or curvy. I’d rather be a termite, tough as steel. Eat through wood like a professional wrestler. But I’d started anting out long before the bitch, just like the stupid movie in health class said I would. The film was grainy black and white, and full of cartoon diagrams of the reproductive system. The narrator said virgina, sneaking the word virgin into vagina on purpose. Jack would have loved that, but I was too grossed out to mention it.

  Grandpa wheeled out the cart with bottles of alcohol and soda, an ice bucket, the peanuts and pretzels. He mixed a drink for Grandma, then one for himself, clinging to the formality though the nuts were stale and his fingers shook around the glass. Grandma stuck her hand in the peanuts and, without looking up from the TV, cracked one open with her fingernails. “What are you drinking, Lil?” Grandpa asked. “Ginger ale? Coke? Or I could make you an egg cream?”

  “Okay.”

  He dangled his fingers in my face. “Poof, you’re an egg cream.”

  “Very funny.”

  Grandma shushed us from the couch. The World Without End theme song was playing. Grandpa trod into the kitchen and returned with a glass of milk. A glob of chocolate layered the bottom like a sand sculpture. He unscrewed the bottle of seltzer and poured. In the Bronx, the beverage man delivered crystal fire extinguishers that squirted soda in laserlike streams. Jack and I once had a seltzer fight, dousing each other in the front yard. You couldn’t do that with a screw-off bottle, and the egg creams in flat Arizona were never as foamy as I remembered them.

  Grandpa handed me my egg cream, picked up his cowboy hat, and walked through the sliding-glass doors to the terrace. He liked to sit in his ratty reclining chair and listen to talk radio, the horizon set out in front of him, a never-ending canvas. Within minutes, he would slide the hat down over his nose and fall asleep. Grandma and I settled in to wait for you.

  But the rebels came first. They asked for ten million dollars to help fund their maneuvers. We saw them circling in the sand, fingers worrying their beardless chins. It didn’t matter if we saw their faces. They were hiding from you.

  The one who’d spoken to you pulled another one aside, closer to us. “What if he doesn’t come?”

  “Oh, he’ll come,” said the other, both of their accents gone. “Life has been good to him, but he’s been marked by sorrow. He never had another child. Never remarried. Everyone thought his wife was crazy, but he believed her when she said it wasn’t their baby, that their child was out there
somewhere. He kept on believing it even after she poisoned herself.”

  “But the money … it’s a lot of money to ask for.”

  “This man owns three diamond mines! He has ten houses, a fleet of jet planes. The only thing he doesn’t have is his child …” This smarter, taller, tidier rebel put his hand on his partner’s shoulder. “Never underestimate what a father will do for his daughter.”

  “I know,” said the darker, long-haired, more muscular one. “But what if he doesn’t believe us … or … he’s trying to trick us. Anything can happen, and the girl, you see …” His voice trailed off.

  “Oh my god, you’ve fallen in love!”

  The two men stared at each other. One angry, the other exposed. My heart was in my throat.

  “Have some peanuts.” Grandma pushed the bowl in front of me, but I waved it away. Not hungry. Of course the fake rebel was in love. Grandma said that’s why he joined their plotting in the first place, and she would know. She’d been watching the show for years and could tell you the history of every character. I’ve since learned that female elephants absorb massive amounts of information during their lifetime, remembering grazing locations, enemy territory, dead relatives. I’m not sure how researchers figured this out—I mean, you can’t really ask an elephant what she remembers—but they swear that’s the way it is, the great matriarch a memory keeper for the entire tribe. I like seeing my grandmother this way.

  “Don’t tell me you’re on a diet.” Grandma held out a peanut for me. “Your mother’s always on a diet, trying to get rid of those curves. But some girls just got ’em. That’s the way it is. We used to be so ashamed to be thin, it meant you were poor. You sure you don’t want this?” I took the peanut, which looked like an ant or Mae West or you in your torn kidnapped jeans. Curves everywhere, in everything, bombarding my frontal lobe like the word virgina.

  “Why don’t you take your hat off?” Grandma said, cracking into a busty shell and munching on the peanuts inside. She was working for the ant people, trying to get me to be a “lady,” although her own curves were exiled to frayed black-and-white photos. I envied her. No more worries about ants or termites, no more stinking pads, she could just be herself. I stuck the hat in my back pocket. “There, that’s it,” Grandma said. “You have such beautiful hair.” She patted my knotty head and it felt almost as good as Blair’s comforter wrapping around me as we stared at the TV screen with its stormy lines.