The Penny (2 page)

That’s when the streetcar clanged its bell and pulled away behind us.

That’s the very moment I first saw the penny.

And that’s the moment where this story really begins.

The penny lay wheat-side-up on the ground, so dirty as to almost be invisible. Like I said, I wasn’t accustomed to picking up pennies at that point. A penny is such a little thing—it’s never been worth much. I stared at it, stepped over it, and headed toward my sister waiting outside the theater.

Then the noise of Grand Avenue went silent.
Go back,
something inside me insisted.
Don’t miss this chance
.

To this day I have to wonder: What if I’d stepped over that penny and left it where it was? Or what if I’d knelt to the ground and grabbed the penny the first time around without stopping to think, if Jean hadn’t turned toward me from the box office to holler, if she hadn’t bossed me (“Okay, Jenny. Jenny, come on—
don’t.
That’s disgusting, picking things up in the street. You’re washing your hands before you’re getting anything from the snack bar!”), would everything have happened the same?

But I
did
walk past the penny at first. When something whispered,
Pick it up, Jenny—little things make a big difference,
my heart almost paused in my chest. And I knew it without a doubt. As surely as if someone well trusted had whispered it in my ear.

This moment has something to do with your destiny.

It was only a matter of seconds before I went back. Seconds, I found out later, that would change everything.

The copper had melted its way clear into the asphalt. I bent over—I still see it in my mind’s eye—and used my fingernails to pry the hot coin out of the roadbed. I remember straightening up, the penny branding my palm right there in the middle of Grand Avenue. And that’s when the mystifying chain of events began.

It started simply enough when the Pevely Dairy truck braked to keep from hitting me, which sent bottles, full and empty both, toppling sideways. A dozen or so dashed to the street and shattered with sharp cracks.

Glass flew. Daisies of milk splattered on the street. The door of the five-and-dime opened, and a woman lugging her baby in a car bed stepped outside just as the last three bottles fell. “Oh my word,” the woman said, swinging the car bed toward the building, shielding her child from what must have sounded like the Attack of the Killer Shards from Space. When she swung, she blindsided Bennett Mahaffey, who happened to be headed home with his favorite record, Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right (Mama),” tucked beneath his arm.

The blow struck Bennett hard enough to knock the record from its jacket. When the disk hit the sidewalk, it wobbled on its edge and headed downhill toward everybody waiting in line at the Fox box office.

Bennett took off after his record.

He wasn’t running exactly, because you can’t run after something that’s doing the platter thing—rolling in a complete circle, then a smaller circle, until it starts to clatter to the ground. He loped after it with his arms widespread and his knees bent, making a tentative grab every time it came close, as if “That’s All Right (Mama)” could actually go wheeling around like that and not get a scratch on it.

Now here’s something about Miss Shaw that I didn’t know—I didn’t find it out until much later. Each Wednesday just after five in the evening, no matter whether it was snowing in St. Louis or blowing up a gale or hot as a skillet, Miss Shaw rearranged her display windows. Shaw Jewelers stood two doors to the north of the theater, its front door shaded by a green awning with silver letters, the awning’s scalloped edges lifting in the slight event of a breeze. Anyone who cared to watch could see Miss Shaw’s gloved hands working, removing a necklace here, a bracelet there, angling a set of earbobs, pushing a ring closer to the center.

Miss Shaw worked dutifully for some length of time, arranging gems, aligning chains, matching colors. Occasionally she would step out to gaze at the displays herself, tilting her head, assessing her artistry. Each time Miss Shaw stepped outside, she carried a polish rag in her pocket and necklaces draped across her gloves, often glancing to see if one of them would make the display more appealing.

On this particular day, Pete Mason happened to see Miss Shaw eyeing her windows from where he sat on a bench across the street. Indeed, he would say later, he had watched everything: the dairy truck, the swinging of the car bed, the crowd buying tickets for the picture show. He watched the stranger step off the curb, making a beeline for Miss Shaw. He watched the planned sleight of hand, the lifting of the necklaces from Miss Shaw’s glove, and the bolting for cover into the box-office crowd.

“Hey!” Miss Shaw cried, too surprised for anything else.

That’s how it happened that Pete Mason went into the crowd after the thief. That’s how it happened that Bennett Mahaffey, who delivered appliances after school for Stix, Bauer and Fuller and who was the size of a small icebox himself, made a successful grab for his record just as the fleeing looter, glancing back to gauge Pete’s distance, tripped over Bennett instead. Bennett let out an “oomph” of breath that sounded like a tire going flat. The looter somersaulted to the ground. Miss Shaw raced toward the Fox Theater box office in her slender-heeled pumps. The man behind the window shouted, “Any more for
Rear Window
?”

“These yours?” Pete scooped up necklaces from where they’d flown to the sidewalk. He wiped them off with his monogrammed hanky.

“They are.” Miss Shaw held out a gloved hand. “Thank you so much.” It all happened in front of me, unfolding like a dream, where nothing’s tied together but, in the end, the pieces make sense some way.

“Did you see that?” I ran to my sister’s side, knowing she must have noticed something.

“What?”

“The truck.” I pointed in the direction of the shattered bottles in the street. “Miss Shaw and her necklaces.” I pointed in the opposite direction toward the green awning. I closed my fingers over the penny, which had cooled in my hand.
A moment to define my destiny.
That’s when I saw Pete Mason nod his head toward me. Miss Shaw glanced in my direction and shot a warm, curious smile.

“Jenny Blake,” Jean ordered, having missed the whole thing, “if you don’t come on, we’re going to miss the newsreels again.” She sounded just as dour as always.

Chapter Two

G
race Kelly is in love with Jimmy Stewart when
Rear Window
starts. Jimmy Stewart, playing a photographer, is stuck in his apartment for eight weeks because he broke his leg—flying metal smacked him while he took shots of a car wreck at the race track. Jimmy’s got time to think about marrying Grace and he gets rankled over the dumbest things. She wears thousand-dollar dresses, and he’s worried she won’t survive as she follows him from one far-removed photography shoot to another, living out of one lone suitcase and dining on native delicacies that include everything from snails to sour berries to snakes for dinner.

“I wish I could be creative,” Grace tells Jimmy.

“Oh, sweetie, you are,” Jimmy tells Grace. “You have a great talent for creating difficult situations.”

I balanced on the edge of my seat at the Fox that afternoon, penny in hand. I couldn’t stop thinking that Jimmy Stewart got it backward.
He
was the one who made everything difficult. I wanted to shout at him,
Just give her a chance!

I perched on the edge of the chair, the stiff plush indenting my legs. The cool, dry air felt magnificent. When Jean passed the popcorn, I dug in and wadded a fistful into my mouth.

On screen, Jimmy spied on everybody through their windows and noticed when a woman disappeared. “This is murder!” Jimmy insisted, only there wasn’t a body. The police said the woman left early that morning by train.

In spite of how sick I was of hearing about Grace Kelly, I found myself rooting for her during this scene. She was the only one in the whole picture who believed in him. My breath caught in my throat when Grace climbed the fire escape to search for evidence that would prove him right.

Grace swung her skirts so she could climb inside the murderer’s window and Jimmy realized, as he watched the murderer return to his apartment and apprehend her, that there was nothing he could do to help . . . and she mattered more than anything to him. I wondered how it must feel to have somebody believe in you the way Grace believed in Jimmy, when nobody else did.

When the lights came up in the Fox, and Jimmy and Grace had gotten together at last, we filed out, stunned and pleased again, shocked out of one storybook world and swept into another. The sun still smoldered in the sky, and walking from the cool darkness into the throbbing heat made me feel misplaced. Jean held her head at the same angle as the Lady Justice statue in front of the courthouse, her blue eyes pensive, her lips in a wry, slight smile, and I knew she pictured herself wearing those dresses, with hair in ripples like silk and a voice that sank lower to make everyone listen.

“You’re not
her,
” I said. “You’ll never be.”

Jean removed her tortoiseshell sunglasses from her purse. “I wasn’t thinking I
was
.” She sent me a withering look and slid her dark shades up her nose.

Oh, for glasses just like my sister’s! I wanted to lace my statements with drama, too. “You want to come back tomorrow and watch again? I’ll come with you
,
” I said to the clouds above.

Just as we were stepping off the sidewalk, the box-office man, flat round hat, gold double-breasted buttons, came running after us.

“Hey!”

I glanced up at Jean, but she acted like she didn’t hear him.

“I think he’s talking to you.” But Jean paid me no mind. “Maybe we left something.” Jean checked her purse.

His shoes clattered on the pavement. “Hey! Wait a minute!”

I saw Jean touch her bruised cheek and leave her fingers there as if to hide it. “You mean us?”

“You.” Mr. Box-Office pointed at me.

Jean dropped her hand from her face. I jutted my head partridge-like in disbelief.

He looked at me with such intense admiration that I didn’t think I could bear it. I’d never had anybody look at me like that before.

“I’ve been waiting to talk to you for the whole length of the movie,” he said. “Let me tell you, I stand in this box office all day watching folks go by, and I saw what happened out there. Does that happen to you often? I never saw anything like that before. You started off a whole string of events when you picked up that penny.”

So I hadn’t been the only one to notice it.

“It was uncanny, don’t you think? Things like that just don’t happen all the time.”

I fingered the penny in my pocket, gloating that he would say this stuff in front of Jean. Maybe someday she’d have to admit that I occasionally knew what I was talking about.

“I’ve been standing in front of this theater for fifteen years and I’ve never seen a chain reaction like that before.” He shrugged. “The Good Lord has a way of nudging me when I need to notice something. Let me tell you, I noticed
that.
You must be one special young lady.”

Nobody had ever called me
special
or
young lady
before. There was nothing special about me. I stood at average height, a little overweight, with curly hair I didn’t like and plain brown eyes that wouldn’t make anybody look twice. But at his words, I felt like the world had tipped slightly beneath my feet. I straightened my back, stood a little taller. “My name’s Jenny Blake.”

“Nice to meet you, Jenny Blake. I’m Mr. Witt. You ever come back to the Fox, you ask for me, okay? I’ll take care of you with tickets.”

“You’d do that?”

“Sure, I would.”

Aside from the Good Lord nudging his heart, his compliments and offer of free tickets made me skeptical. I couldn’t accept he would offer me something purely out of kindness. “Why?”

“At the end of it all, you helped Miss Shaw. There’s those of us on this street who place a lot of stock in things like that.”

“You do?”

Jean was fumbling in her purse, searching for lipstick again. She snapped her pocketbook shut with an exasperated
humph.
Here I was, having the moment of a lifetime, and I’ll bet all she wanted to do was get home and poke her nose into a
Picture Play
magazine again.

“Absolutely, I do.”

I stared at him. “I don’t know what to say.”

That’s when he extended his hand to me. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jenny Blake.”

I allowed him to grasp my hand, although I didn’t really grasp his back. “Thank you.” And later I thought how I should have said,
It
’
s a pleasure to meet you
,
too.

“You don’t make yourself scarce around here, okay?”

“I won’t make myself scarce,” I assured him, daring my sister with my eyes to keep pretending that none of this mattered. “We come to see Grace Kelly movies all the time.”

He touched the edge of his hat as we boarded the streetcar. I couldn’t stop watching him from the window. The streetcar bell clanged and we started off and the last thing I saw as we rounded the corner was the glint of the gold buttons on his sleeve as Mr. Box-Office Witt waved us good-bye.

The sun was a low, gold circle in the sky when we returned home, and our apartment was still sweltering. The aroma of ground-round and onion and ketchup seeped down the stairwell to meet us. Mama was making meatloaf for supper.

Jean had to set out the mashed potatoes the minute we entered the kitchen, and I had to bring the butter and the salt-and-pepper shakers and pour the milk into glasses. Mama worked with us in rapid, sharp movements to get the meal on the table, her apron knotted around a waist as slender as a dogwood limb.

We didn’t talk much during the meal. We dined to the hum of the oscillating fan in the corner, which lifted the edges of our napkins, and the persistent
clink clink clink
of Daddy stabbing peas off his plate with his fork.

I couldn’t get away until the dishes were washed and dried and Daddy turned on the television to watch
The Milton Berle Show.
I dug around inside Mama’s sewing drawer and found the perfect box. I flicked open the tiny catch, spit-shined the clear plastic lid. Once I’d emptied the box of pins and padded the bottom with a cotton ball, I scrubbed and polished the penny with Ivory soap and a wash rag in the sink. Some of the grime came off and, with no small amount of pride, I saw I’d almost worked it to a gleam. I perched on the edge of my single bed, fingering the box, thinking,
I don’t understand what happened today, but this penny had something to do with it.

I wondered what could be behind all those things happening in a row.

Mr. Witt from the box office had said, “You must be one special young lady.”

I stared at myself in the mirror, dissatisfied with my unruly hair and my eyes the color of the stale coffee Daddy always left at the bottom of his cup. I sat there for a long time, until Mama came up carrying a basketful of wet laundry and dropped it on the bed.

“Where’s your sister?”

I slipped the box inside my pillowcase.

“I’ve got an idea to help cool you off. Lay down.”

That’s the way it always was with Mama. She never would say anything straight on to Daddy, but she would try to make things better behind his back. She did things that let us know she felt for us even though she wouldn’t dare come over on our side. “It’s not the Ambassador Hotel, but—” She held up one of my wet jumpers and laid it over the top of me. She followed with one of her slips on my bare legs, then a pair of pedal pushers. “Better?”

Just last fall, when Jean had begged Daddy to buy her senior pictures, Daddy said no. He had never let us buy school pictures, he told her, so why start now? What good would it do to have so many little rectangle photos of us when nobody cared what we looked like anyway? Jean knew good-and-well she would’ve gotten hit if she’d spoken up. For all the times I ached for her to keep her mouth shut, this time I wished she would risk the bodily harm. If it had been me I would have shouted,
I want something to trade, Daddy. If I don’t have pictures to trade for other pictures, I won’t remember what my friends look like.

Five days later Mama came to Jean’s room, slipped a Rexall Drug sack across the bedspread toward Jean, and out slid photo sheets—two dozen copies of my sister with shadows on her face, taken by a neighbor at the South St. Louis Easter egg hunt last spring.

“I wanted you to have these.” Mama’s expectant air didn’t change as she waited to see what Jean would say. Jean stared at the photos, and I saw her throat working. The hope on Mama’s face was so set that it looked like it had been chipped out of Missouri limestone.

I found the package just after Jean graduated, without one photo missing, hidden beneath her tangle of garters and nylons.

“What are you doing?” Jean stood in the doorway now, staring at us with that look on her face that let me know she was expecting something. As if in answer, Mama plastered me with another jumper and a wet blouse. Here she was again, covering up Daddy’s contentiousness just as sure as she was covering up my arms and legs with soggy clothes.

The phone rang in the kitchen then, even though it was way too late for anybody to be getting a call. When Daddy answered and the person on the other end asked for somebody, that somebody was going to get it. Besides, any phone call wasn’t ordinary, and Daddy didn’t like out-of-the-ordinary things. We heard his heels strike the floor as he stood up. Mama yanked up two undershirts, a pair of boxers, and my white cotton skirt. Jean looked sick; I could tell she figured the phone was for her.

“Jenny?”

“Yes, sir?”

“You come take this phone call, and then we’re going to have a talk with my belt.”

When I held the heavy receiver to my head, I couldn’t stop shivering. I leaned my ear into my shoulder and my voice scraped like a roller skate on pavement.

“Hello?”

“Jenny?” A woman’s voice. A gentle voice.

“Yes?”

“You came to the movies this afternoon, didn’t you? There was a girl who stepped off a streetcar. She witnessed someone trying to steal from my store. Could that have been you?”

Miss Shaw.
I knew it immediately.

“It could have been.” But that’s all I would say. Daddy was standing there, drumming his large fingers on the Formica counter, and I knew if this took much longer, he would rip the line out of the wall. He’d done that plenty of times when he’d disapproved of Jean talking.

“It
might
have been.”

“I wanted to thank you for being the person responsible for stopping the robbery at my store.”

“But I didn’t do it.”

“Pete Mason and Mr. Witt said you did.”

I don’t know; it just didn’t feel right taking credit for this. But Miss Shaw’s voice was full of soft, warm light. I thought her voice was lovely—just listening to her made me feel good inside.

“I wouldn’t have come to the movies if not for my sister. Her name is Jean Blake. You could talk to
her.
”

Suddenly I discerned what sounded like uncertainty in her voice. “I don’t know if you—”

I waited, as uncertain as she must have been about where she planned to take this conversation.
Why would Miss Shaw be calling me?

“This may be a crazy question. But I kept asking myself all evening:
How are you going to know if you don’t ask?
I don’t know a thing about you, not really, but I was wondering—would you like a job in my store?”

I didn’t know a thing about her, either.
Do you wear your white Sunday gloves all the time because you’re afraid to touch anything?
That’s what I’d heard Mama say
she’d
really like to find out about Miss Shaw.

“You want me to work in your store?”

“Would you be available to work for me maybe two days a week at the jewelers?”

I’d twisted my thumb tight inside the coils of the phone cord. I yanked hard, couldn’t get it out. The idea of Miss Shaw offering such a thing made her immediately suspect. Why would a person who was practically a celebrity in St. Louis pay me any mind at all? I’d never dreamed Miss Shaw would offer me a
job.

Jean loved bragging about her occasional lucrative baby-sitting engagements. If I had a way to make money, too, maybe my sister would stop lording her superiority over me. If I had a way to make money, maybe I could get away from this place.