The Evening News (10 page)

She would be foolish to expect better, Bobbi thought, hiding down beneath her sheet, because her stepfather was a disgusting man. Unlike her father, who was dead now. Her stepfather was common: he chewed his food with an open mouth; his fingers were short and thick and always filthy from the dingy little shop where he repaired broken radios and clocks
that ran too slowly and rusting toasters that were too tired to pop up. He boasted regularly that he could fix anything. The house was littered with things he claimed he'd fixed, things abandoned by their original owners, things with retaped wires, soldered cracks.

She turned her face to the wall. She wouldn't end up like her mother, a middle-aged woman whose flesh sagged from her body and whose teeth were made of plastic. Was that what false teeth were made from? Bobbi thought. She ran her tongue along her own teeth. Her mother's mistake was that she'd married again; she'd settled for a second-rate, common man. Bobbi shivered. If there was one thing she had learned, she thought, it was that she must never settle for anything less than the absolute best. She believed her father had understood this. He had been born in Europe and was a gentleman. He was a Lithuanian. He came from the aristocracy. He had the best of blood. And that blood ran in her veins too.

Beneath the thin sheet Bobbi stretched her body. It was young and lithe. Her Baltic ancestry had given her fair skin and hair that was light brown, and her features were slight and rounded. She was proud of herself and her body. She was fifteen, and she knew that when she wanted to she could be beautiful.

That would be her escape. Bobbi had a boyfriend, a boy named Tom, a good and reasonable boy from Granville Avenue far up on the North Side, a much better section of the city. Tom was straight and dark and tall. And he didn't go to Lake View, the public school where she went, where the swarthy Uptown greasers and the dumb bucktoothed hillbillies and the Mexicans and all the Puerto Ricans went. Tom went to Holy Cross College Prep, out in the suburbs, and he was in the upper fifth of his senior class and co-captain of the boxing team. He was the nicest boy Bobbi had ever known. It made her feel so important and so proud to wear his ring on a chain around her neck to Lake View; she could ignore all the vile
city boys—she could look down on them—and all the girls she knew were jealous of her.

She heard water in the sink. Her mother rinsing the dishes, leaving them for her to wash. Bobbi had her duties. Her stepfather said that as long as she lived under his roof and ate his bread she would have her duties. Of course her mother agreed with him. She said work was good for a young girl. Sometimes Bobbi hated them.

She moved onto her stomach and reached beneath the bed. The dress and the needles and thread were still there. She would wear the dress today. Soon her mother and her stepfather would leave for the shop, and then Tom would sneak over, and before that she would carefully shave her legs and bathe. Bobbi had planned it for so long. She wanted everything to be perfect. She had fixed the dress's hem so that it just brushed the tops of her thighs, and she hoped that when Tom saw her he would think her beautiful and sexy. Bobbi had rehearsed her movements and lines. Acting blasé and nonchalant, she would tell Tom that she wore the dress all the time, even to school sometimes, sometimes even when she had to give a class report; then she would show him how she had looked when she sat up on her teacher's desk in the dress—she would smile and sit demurely on the dining room table—and all of this plus the new perfume she would wear and the expressions she'd put on her face and in her eyes would make Tom jealous and excited and he would love her. They would
do it.
And then Tom would never leave her, ever, because he was such a clean, decent Catholic boy and because she would have given him what all the boys wanted. No, he would never leave her. And then he would finish school and she would finish school and they would be married—maybe on her birthday—and she would wear a veil and a white dress, and she would never have to live another day with her mother and her stepfather. Tom would never regret anything. She
would make a perfect wife. And then for the remainder of her life, for the first time in her life, she would be happy.

There was a pounding on her door. Quickly Bobbi turned to face it. She called out, “Yes?”

“We're leaving,” her mother called. “It's eight o'clock. Wake up, or were you planning on sleeping all morning?”

“No,” Bobbi called back, slipping out of bed. She hadn't realized it was so late. “Good-bye,” she said. “I'm wide awake.”

“Well,” Tom said, “who was it?”

Bobbi slowly looked up from a spot near her knee where the new razor had nicked her skin and a dark clot of blood had formed. Her hand moved to cover the spot. Her legs were crossed. She was sitting on the table in the dining room. Tom was standing in the front room facing her. The late morning light from the windows behind him framed him.

“I'm sorry,” Bobbi said. “Tom, what was what?”

“Whose desk did you sit on?” Tom blinked several times, and his Adam's apple jumped as he swallowed.

Bobbi put her hand over her mouth and laughed. She thought quickly. “Oh,” she said, “it was Mr. Percy, he teaches algebra.” She didn't know why she chose Mr. Percy; he was short and drab, and she disliked math. There was something in Tom's voice as well that she did not like. Her fingers picked at the scab near her knee. Maybe, she thought, she could tell Tom she did it for a better grade if he asked why. She waited for him to ask why.

“I thought you didn't like math,” he said instead.

“I don't,” she answered. She was irritated. Sometimes Tom could be so stupid; he couldn't even tell when she was lying.
Now the lie was becoming more of a problem than it was worth. But there was still plenty of time in which to mend things, she thought. Her mother and her stepfather wouldn't return for hours.

“Then why did you do it?” Tom asked. He stared at her, then folded his thick arms.

He was still at it. Couldn't he see? Boys
were
stupid. She wanted to get down from the table. She wanted to sit with him on the sofa and be held by him, but she felt unable to move; she felt pinned. She looked at the vase of plastic flowers on the end table. Shaking her head she finally said, “I don't know, Tom. I just did it.”

“You just did it?” he said. He sounded like he was spitting.

“Yeah,” Bobbi shouted, “I just did it.” The tone of her voice frightened her. She felt like she wanted to cry. “Look at me,” she said. “Tom, please look at me.”

He had turned toward the windows. She slid off the table, smoothing her dress down across her thighs with her hands. Tom turned around and she put out her arms to him, and when he didn't move she said, “Please come here and hold me, Tom. Please hold me. I'm cold.”

“Then maybe you should put on some decent clothes.” He turned once again toward the front windows, then stretched his arms and back.

“You're a bastard,” Bobbi said, and she hoped that it would make him angry because now she was angry and because everything she had so carefully planned was now going astray. She thought about how long it had taken her to shorten the dress, and how she had had to hide it and the thread and needles from her mother, who never left anything private in her room. Her mother sometimes even opened her personal letters and listened on the extension when she talked on the phone. Her mother treated her like she was an infant. It was unbearable. Bobbi was furious.

She glared at Tom's broad back. “Did you hear me?” she
shouted. “I just called you a bastard. Aren't you going to say anything to me, you damn bastard?”

He looked at her and laughed. Bobbi realized then that she had gone about this entirely wrong, and she felt ridiculous.

“You did it for a grade, didn't you?” Tom was saying. “You dressed yourself up like a cheap damn tramp so you could get a better grade.” He shook his head and made a hissing sound. “You could have come to me, you know. I'm good at math. I could have helped you.”

Frustration rose from Bobbi's stomach and burned up through her chest and in back of her throat and her eyes, and before she was aware of what she was doing she had clenched her fists so tightly that her fingernails sliced into her palms, and then she began crying. She felt suddenly blinded and fiercely angry. Then she was aware that Tom had come over to her and was putting his arms around her and drawing her close to him, and she put her arms up around his neck and relaxed, all at once grateful that he was holding her. She felt relieved; she was crying less bitterly; and it was then that she recognized what Tom was doing, that instead of comforting her and forgiving her and understanding her he was trying to unzip the back of her insulting and ridiculous dress.

Her father, her real father, had been a tall dark man, thin, with large hands and an easy smile, an indolent laugh. By trade he was a salesman. His name was Constantine Tzeruvctis, and even as he emigrated from the lush expanse of Lithuania he was willing to make a deal: the stony immigration officer stamped Constantine's papers but shortened his last name to Tzeruf; the exchange seemed fair enough. It was a big, new country. Constantine worked his way west to Chicago, sweeping floors, washing dishes, even polishing brass spittoons, and then for the
next thirty years or so of his life he peddled Dr. Cheeseman's Liquid Wonder, a patent medicine. From door to door to door to door on Chicago's North Side the immigrant tradesman worked: knocking, smiling, selling.

All of this Bobbi learned from her mother, from the few photographs, from the yellowed newspaper clippings that described her real father's death. And like a detective in the paperbacks she had read and the late-night movies she had seen, Bobbi had attempted to piece everything together. More than anything, she wanted to know, to understand. But of course that was impossible. There were pictures missing from the stiff album. There were questions her mother refused her the answers to. And the musty clippings from the newspaper dumbly reported only the
what
that had happened.

The girl knew facts about her father. That he drank. That occasionally he attended baseball games, preferring Charlie Grimm's Cubs. That he wasn't religious. That both his birth and his death days fell in September. In the oldest photos her father smiled and sported a mustache. His discharge papers from the First World War listed his vocation as Tradesman and his character as Excellent. His complexion had been Ruddy. Next to
signature of soldier
was a neat, curly
X,
and beneath it was printed “His Mark.” Bobbi kept the papers in her top dresser drawer with her jewelry, her letters from Tom, and her cosmetics.

In her parents' wedding photograph Constantine sat, her mother stood. As a child Bobbi thought that her father was sitting because he was dead in Heaven. Later she realized it was custom. Her mother's hand gripped the back of the chair. Her father's eyes looked down. Neither smiled.

The first child, a girl, had been stillborn. She was not named. The gray tombstone in the cemetery read B
ELOVED
B
ABY
T
ZERUF
. Bobbi saw it once. Green lichen grew inside the letters. She was born eleven years later, eleven years after her
parents' marriage, and was named for Robert, her mother's grandfather.

By then Constantine was nearly sixty. But when he was younger, oh, he had been quite a fellow. Bobbi's favorite story about him took place one warm summer evening on the Near North Side in an area then known as Bucktown. Bucktown was a tough, tooth-and-nail Polish neighborhood, so named because so many of its residents owned goats. Constantine was young and ambitious, knocking on doors, the dark bottle of Dr. Cheeseman's Liquid Wonder in his hand, when suddenly from the street a shotgun roared. Constantine shielded his head with his suitcase. The pellets were meant for him. He was not hit, but a lantern hanging from the frame house was, and there was a small fire. Constantine began to beat the flames with his jacket. Then the door of the house opened, ever so cautiously, and the barrels of another shotgun looked out at the tradesman's face, and he raised his hands and started to explain. He showed them the contents of his suitcase. He pointed to his now-smoldering jacket. He placed blame for the incident on the Italians or the Negroes. The men then summoned him inside. While the women tended to his jacket Constantine took out his wares, and before he left Bucktown that hot, humid evening he had made over a week's worth of sales.

Bobbi liked the story because in it her father was such a wonderful liar. Only a Lithuanian gentleman could lie so boldly and get away with it, she thought. She didn't realize the patent medicine her father sold for nearly half his life was so worthless that men would try to kill him out of anger for having bought it, for their families having used it. Bobbi's mother agreed that it was a fine story. She said it showed how clever Constantine was—he could turn tragedy into success—and how quickly he had learned to do whatever was necessary to get ahead and make a profit in America.

The newspaper clippings described a
dark deranged foreigner
on the downtown Washington Street subway platform
waving his arms and suitcase
and
causing a general disturbance.
The police were promptly called. There was
shoving
and
a great deal of noise and confusion.
The man
appeared to have been drinking
and
did not speak in English. It happened quickly,
one witness said.
The foreigner struck a policeman. Sergeant F. Mahoney, on the side of the head with a suitcase full of bottles, and then, when a second officer withdrew his revolver, the foreigner screamed and leaped onto the tracks directly into the path of a southbound Elevated “B” train. The conductor, Calvin Jefferson, testified he could not stop his train in time. The police have launched a complete investigation. The body was later identified.