Car Trouble Read online

  “Hail, Caesar,” said Vinnie from the back of the classroom.

  Brian nodded. “Wrong play, but thanks anyway. You know, if any of you want to try out for a play I’ll be directing at school after the holidays, let me know. I’m gonna need lots of guys and girls. There’ll be an open invitation sent to the girls’ high schools, but you can spread the word now.”

  “What’s the play?” Dominic asked.

  “Bye Bye Birdie. It should be fun. You did a good job today, Dominic.”

  The bell rang. Brian reminded us to put the desks back into rows before we left. Everyone pushed their chairs across the floor, making a huge groaning sound, and left them in a series of jagged lines. I helped Brian straighten out the rows and walked down the hall with him, on the way to geometry class. I had to speed-walk to keep up with him. “You mean you’re doing the Bye Bye Birdie with Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell? They’re always showing that on The 4:30 Movie.”

  “Yeah? Well, next time it’s on, take a look and see if there’s a part you’d like to play,” he said.

  We passed the bursar’s office and the school’s main entrance, with its statue of St. Michael, complete with wings and halo, guarding the entrance to the gym.

  “I really wanted to do Hair, but there was some kind of royalty problem,” Brian said.

  Like that was gonna happen. Hair was the play where all the actors were naked on stage. Maybe Brian was crazy. “So you think you might want to try out?” Brian asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, suddenly not wanting to disappoint him. “I’ve never done anything like that. Let me think about it.”

  “Fair enough. You read well today.”

  We stood at the entrance to the faculty lounge. “I’ve got to check on my messages,” Brian said. “I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”

  The rest of my classes sagged in comparison, and at three thirty, I was itching to get out of there. I always left school by the back entrance, where the track team circled a small green track. I didn’t belong to any of the clubs or teams at St. Mike’s. I was present, but not engaged. As I walked the four long blocks to the bus stop, I thought maybe that should change. Maybe Brian’s notice to the girls’ high schools would attract some who were right for me.

  * * *

  Every time I got off the bus, turned the corner at Church Avenue, and saw our house, I winced. It had been a while since it was painted, outside or inside, but outside was what I noticed. How could Himself not see it and do something about it? The stucco was the color of old loose leaf and the cinder blocks around the basement windows were definitely peeling, showing two older coats of paint beneath. The garden still had a few roses left on the bushes, and the last of the marigolds braved the autumn weather. And you would have thought Himself would get around to fixing the front stoop by now after tripping on his way up or down the steps. A couple were cracked, and one of the flowerpots had fallen into the garden after being loose for years. I had carried it into the garage thinking one day it might get reattached, but it was still there, next to the tires that once rolled underneath the Green Hornet.

  I also wondered when he would get around to painting the front door. The paint, green on the trim and white on the recessed panels, had peeled so much that the bare wood was showing on the panels. I had volunteered to fix it, with a box of wood putty I had found in the garage, but Dad said no, so I hadn’t mentioned it again.

  Mom had to see what the rest of us saw but something held her back from saying anything about it.

  I made it home in time for Dark Shadows. I didn’t watch it as much as I used to when it was all the rage, but one look at the screen and I knew the show was doing a complete rip-off of Rebecca, with the actress who usually played Dr. Julia Hoffman, one of the strangest-looking people I’d ever seen, with a flat face and blinking turtle eyes, dressed in a black maid’s uniform and doing a character modeled exactly on Mrs. Danvers—but not nearly as good, of course. Not even close. She was talking to a woman’s portrait, head tilted back on her neck, her mouth stretched in whispering agony.

  I dropped my school books on the dining room table and sat next to Maureen on the living room couch.

  “What’d I miss?”

  Maureen was a freshman at St. Edmund’s and she was still wearing her school uniform, a blue-and-gray plaid skirt and a long-sleeved white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. “Not much. This old bat’s talking to herself again. And Barnabas just came out of his coffin.”

  “What else is new? Where’s Mom?”

  Maureen pointed to the kitchen and the open door to the basement. “Laundry.”

  We could watch a little bit of television before supper; then, no more TV until homework was done. If there was something good on The 4:30 Movie, we could watch the whole thing while Mom got everything ready in the kitchen. She was always doing something, loading the washing machine or hanging the wash out or cooking. She was the most efficient person I ever knew. She made my sisters’ clothes, the same outfit in different sizes from Simplicity patterns, sitting at the kitchen table with the plastic tablecloth bunched up under the Singer, basting pins between her lips and pieces of fabric, bobbins, and strips of rickrack everywhere. She unclogged sinks, checked on homework, and only sat down once or twice a day to watch her “stories,” the afternoon soaps, tales of temptation, betrayal, and regret, and love withheld. Later, when she unexpectedly went back to work and I was in charge of the housework on Saturdays, I gave myself and the sisters all the chores Mom used to do and wondered how she kept on top of it all.

  After Dark Shadows, I did my homework, geometry and history, before dinner. We ate chicken à la king, which came in plastic pouches that Mom boiled on the stove and served on toast. She would broil a steak for Himself, frying sliced white canned potatoes and onions in a cast-iron pan. Sometimes he came home right after work and ate with my mother in the living room. They put their dinner plates on snack tables and watched television while we carried on in the kitchen. If he went out for drinks with his work buddies, Mom ate with us. That seemed to be what was happening tonight. She sat at the head of the table, I knew, in case the phone rang and it was Himself saying he was on his way home. Then she would stop what she was doing and start his dinner. The steak, thick and red with a few streaks of fat, was waiting on a platter next to the cast-iron skillet.

  The phone did ring, a pleasantly jarring jingle, and Mom answered in the middle of one of Maureen’s stories about her old teacher, Sister Rose Carmel, and the fact that she was becoming stone-deaf. I could tell from my mother’s surprised tone, her voice light and airy, that the caller was not Himself.

  We all stopped eating to eavesdrop.

  Mom was chuckling. “Well, I’ll have Pat call you when he gets in. Yes. Any minute now.”

  “Who was it?” Patty asked when Mom sat down at the table again, her expression slightly pensive.

  She ate a forkful of chicken. “That was your grandfather. It seems that they have bought a place in Florida.”

  “Wow.”

  Mom sipped her ginger ale. “First your uncle, now your grandparents. Soon, you guys will be the only Flynns left in Brooklyn.” In little ways like this, she did not include herself as a member of the extended family.

  “Stranded,” said Maureen.

  “Why can’t we move to Florida?” Mary Ellen asked at her end of the table.

  Mom pushed her plate away. She ate like a bird. She took off her glasses and wiped a smudged lens with the hem of her blouse. “Why do you want to go to Florida?”

  “Disneyland,” Dee Dee said.

  “That’s in California,” Maureen said. “Can you pass the milk?”

  I handed her the carton of Borden’s.

  “I wish your father would come home, so he can get all the details. Your grandfather said he wants to be down there by the end of the year.”

  We didn’t learn any more specifics that night because Himself never came home. The phone didn’t ring, and we didn’t hear the d
istant rumble of the Black Beauty as he backed it into the driveway. When the uncooked steak still lay on the platter next to the frying pan after we did the dishes, Maureen asked Mom what to do with it.

  “Stick it in the refrigerator until Himself comes home,” she said from the living room.

  That’s what she called Dad when she was annoyed with him or he was being unusually stubborn and I guess that’s where I picked it up. The shot of sarcasm made it more than a nickname and less than an insult. And I’m not sure if he ever knew we called him that.

  Six

  One Sunday morning a few weeks later, we came down to breakfast and found Himself slumped on the kitchen floor, back against the white enameled oven door. Mom leaned against the sink, sipping a cup of coffee in her pink flannel nightgown, and looked down at him, as if trying to figure out how she was going to lift him—or if she was just going to leave him there.

  He was conked out. If you screamed in his ear, he wouldn’t have heard you. We’d found him passed out before, usually at the kitchen table, but never on the floor. Did he fall off the kitchen chair? He looked like the guys you saw on the Bowery. How do you come home like that, so drunk you just collapse? I didn’t want to see him like that and almost went back to my room until Mom hustled him upstairs.

  I waited with my sisters in the dining room for the okay to walk in. Mom put the coffee cup down and waved us over. I went first.

  Mom lit a cigarette on the gas burner and took a long drag on it. “She’s all yours,” she said, pointing.

  As shocked as we were to see Himself in such bad shape, the bigger surprise was the dog. She was reclining next to his bent left leg, a tricolor collie blinking at us in the most bewildered way, as if she were waiting for us to tell her what she was doing here, in our kitchen. She was really very striking, even beautiful. Her coat was mainly black. Her forelegs were brown, her paws and chest white. Her snout was longer and narrower than most collies, with a thin stripe of white in the brown. It gave her a slightly aristocratic air. In this house she was going to need it.

  Like me, my sisters were half-asleep. Ringlets of damp hair stuck to their necks and temples.

  Maureen immediately knelt to pet the dog. “Look at you,” she said into the dog’s confused, melancholy face. She looked up at Mom. “Where’d she come from?”

  “Your father brought her home from a bar. Where else? Who wants coffee?”

  The aroma of a freshly perked pot filled the kitchen. I raised my hand. “I do.”

  Maureen glanced at Dad. “He’s really smelly, Mom.”

  I didn’t plan to get that close. A thread of drool hung from his lip, a pack of Pall Malls crushed in his shirt pocket. I checked the clock over the kitchen window. Eight a.m.

  Maureen gently unbent his leg to free the animal. Now Dad was sitting with his legs spread out in front of him, blocking the way to the sink. Standing on his other side, Mom poured coffee into cups that she took from the drainboard and passed them over Dad’s head to Dee Dee, who put them on the table.

  “Let’s get her some water,” Maureen said. Mom filled a Tupperware cereal bowl and passed it to Maureen. The collie lapped up half of it and then reclined on the floor next to Himself, crossing her front paws. Master and pet, in repose.

  “Ooh, she’s such a lady,” I said. “Definitely not the saloon sort. What did he say when he brought her in?”

  “What was there to say?” Mom said, flustered. “He opened the door and said, ‘I got something here for the kids.’ I looked out at the front porch and there she was.”

  Having the dog there made it possible to overlook Himself, as if he were a sofa too cumbersome to move.

  “Well, she’s pretty and that’s nice,” Patty said. “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t know if she has one,” Mom said, wiping her glasses on a hand towel. “I think that’s up to you kids.”

  We all looked at her.

  “Well, we could name her after the bar where he found her,” I said.

  Maureen shot me a rueful look. “Like what? Dew Drop.”

  “We are not naming her Dew Drop,” said Patty. “Don’t be such an ass.”

  “No, I think we’ll name her Queenie,” Maureen said.

  She was always so pushy. “Hey, who says you get to decide?” I asked.

  Mom took a ratty leather harness off the closet doorknob and handed it to Maureen. “Before you worry about giving her a name, why don’t you get dressed and take her out for a walk? Your father swore she was house-trained.”

  We threw our clothes on and walked the dog together, the five of us. Me, Maureen, Patty, and our two youngest sisters, Dee Dee and Mary Ellen. I found my sneakers under the couch in the living room and helped Maureen put the harness on the dog. I felt the hairless skin under her coat. Himself was grumbling on the kitchen floor.

  “Go on now, while I get him up to bed,” Mom said.

  Except for other dog walkers, our block was empty. It was a cloudy day with a raw, wet breeze. The Black Beauty struck a lopsided pose in the driveway, its luxurious back end nudging the orange berries on our neighbor Mrs. Garrett’s firethorn bush, its grille breathing on the alyssum plants around the border of our garden. Maureen held the leash and guided the collie into the street. The dog trotted along and Maureen kept her eyes peeled toward Snyder Avenue for oncoming cars. It was uncanny how she just seemed to know which way the animal was going to move. She pulled the leash to her, stopping the dog when a car approached or even if another animal appeared in her path. You would have thought she had been doing this for years. When I tried, I held the leash too loosely, and the dog almost walked into a passing Dodge.

  We took the collie down to the dirt path along Holy Cross Cemetery. Gina Martinucci was already there, walking her dog, a camel-colored mutt named Muffin. She was wearing a bright green raincoat, her wavy brown hair cascading to her shoulders. Not one pimple on her face. I’d known her for as long as we lived on the block, but she’d never looked so pretty. Next to her, I felt grubby in my blue corduroy pants and sweatshirt. And I wished I’d combed my mop of hair.

  Gina was obviously ready for church. She sang and played lead acoustic guitar at the ten o’clock folk mass at St. Maria Goretti (I hadn’t been to church since starting high school; maybe I needed to go back). There were almost as many girls in the Martinucci house as there were in mine, and one son, also the eldest child. The big difference was that her whole family was involved in the church: her mother sang in the choir, her father was in the Holy Name Society. Rumor had it that the Martinuccis said the rosary together—something we would not do in a million years.

  “My god, is that your dog?” Gina said. “She’s beautiful. When did you get her?”

  “This morning,” I said. My sweatshirt wasn’t warm enough for the crisp air.

  Gina gave me a strange look. “This morning? You’re kidding me. Wow.”

  “It was a surprise.”

  She bent down to pet our new pet. “How old is she?”

  I shrugged. “We don’t really know.” I sounded like a first-class doofus.

  “What?” Gina said. “Well, she’s not a puppy. Where’d you get her?”

  This encounter was getting more awkward every minute. I glanced at the flower arrangements on the graves through the cemetery’s wrought-iron fence. Piles of unraked red, yellow, and brown leaves colored the dying grass.

  “Our father brought her home,” Patty said finally.

  Gina looked confused. “Really? I mean, was she a stray?”

  “The dog belonged to a friend of my father’s who couldn’t take care of her anymore,” said Maureen, standing next to me.

  Gina was beginning to catch on, her knit brow registering the weirdness of this morning. “Oh, that’s too bad. So I guess you didn’t get to name her. It’s more fun when they don’t have a name.”

  “You’re right,” Maureen said. “We were told her name was Queenie.”

  I wanted to step on her feet. It was such
a frigging stupid name.

  “Queenie,” Gina said, trying it out. “Well, I guess there are enough Princesses around.”

  “And they’re all German shepherds,” I said.

  Muffin and Queenie were sniffing each other out, the collie ever so standoffish. Maureen didn’t even grip the leash. Gina ran her fingers through the collie’s thick coat. “She must be shedding everywhere. I know I’m constantly picking up hair.”

  “Yeah, it’s a real drag,” Maureen said, rolling her eyes at me. She thought Gina was stuck up and started to lead the dog away. “Come on, Queenie.”

  “Her coat’s a little dull,” Gina told me when my sisters were out of earshot. “You should give her a raw egg. Makes it shiny.”

  I caught up with my sisters after Gina left. “Why did you tell her we got the dog from Daddy’s friend, of all things?”

  “Why do you have to broadcast our business all over the place?” Maureen said, letting the dog drag her ahead as she sniffed the ground.

  “What did I say? We have a dog. We don’t know how old she is, and we don’t know where she came from—except some bar. Which I didn’t say.”

  Maureen remained stone-faced. “You didn’t have to tell Gina Martinucci anything. She thinks who she is.”

  Finally, the dog squatted and peed.

  Even though they met under the most unlikely circumstances, Queenie seemed to like Himself most of all. Whenever he sat in his chair, the rust-colored recliner, the dog ran over to him and leapt into his lap, offering her neck for a good rubbing. He always obliged and the dog moaned appreciatively.

  “Daddy, why doesn’t she ever bark?” Dee Dee asked. That was Queenie’s thing: to almost bark, moaning when she became excited but never really opening her mouth to let the full sound out. “It’s like she wants to but doesn’t know how.”