When we slammed into our apartment, Anne-Marie knew things had gone badly. She shot me a scared look and begged Mother to get back into bed and rest so she wouldn't get sick again. Mother started on the 'I'll be goddamned if my kids...' routine, but I interrupted her, saying that she didn't have to worry about the damned tube anymore. I had a plan for getting the money. She wondered what I had in mind, but I told her it was a secret. With one of her sudden mood lurches, she took Anne-Marie onto her lap and started rebraiding her hair. I went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, the only place in our little apartment that I could be alone to think. Now that I had succeeded in shutting Mother up, all I had to do was figure out some way to get the money.
When I came back into our kitchen I had a plan... well, sort of. Pretty soon Mother and I were playing pinochle while on the floor beside the bed Anne-Marie, dressmaker-to-the-stars, murmured soothing assurances to a flustered movie star who needed something really spectacular to wear that night. Mother's rages were brief, and I think she knew how stomach-wrenching they were for us because afterward she always tried to be light-hearted and fun. That night she told us about the wild stunts she'd got up to when she was a kid, and Anne-Marie and I laughed harder than the stories deserved, because we were so relieved.
A red-and-gold sign above the new store read: The Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, which called up images from books I had read about the South Seas and planters and dangerous natives and tall-masted sailing ships. The new A & P was what they called a 'neighborhood store', not much bigger than an ordinary corner store, but its prices were a little lower and you were allowed to walk around and pick out your own cans and fruit and everything, which was novel and interesting at that time. Also, there were intriguing new foods, like maple syrup that came in a can shaped like a log cabin. You poured it out of the chimney and when it was empty you could use the cabin as a toy or a bank. And there were three kinds of coffee that they let you grind for yourself in machines where you could choose between drip grind and 'regular' and that coffee gave off so delicious an aroma that you closed your eyes and just breathed it in. The most expensive coffee was called Bokar, a name redolent of Africa so it was right that the bag should be black; the middle-priced one, Red Dot, came in a yellow bag with a red dot; we always bought the cheapest coffee, Eight O'Clock, which came in a red bag. I used to wonder if the Bokar tasted as good as it smelled. But then, no coffee tastes as good as it smells, an apt metaphor for the gap between anticipation and realization. The cheaper prices and wider selection attracted everyone for blocks around, but you couldn't charge things there so, in the end, Mr Kane's slate won out over the A & P's novelty and economy, and it closed within the year.
The morning after our Emerson blew its tube, I was standing outside the A & P with my sister's battered old cart and a cardboard sign with red crayon letters that informed shoppers of my willingness to bring their groceries home for a nickel. That first day and the next, half a dozen old ladies used my services. I walked home beside them, pulling their bags of groceries in Anne-Marie's cart, chatting in the polite, cheerful way I thought might inspire them to tip me a couple of cents in addition to my nickel, but none of them did. And every one of those women lived blocks and blocks away from the A & P, and I had to lug their bags up to apartments on the upper floors, leaving the cart in the first-floor hallway so nobody would steal it. I pondered the rotten luck of
Oh, shut up, why don't you?
You shut up!
Copy cat, eat my hat!
Oh, shut up!
No, you shut up!
(From the bedroom)
The next morning I arrived at the A & P to find another boy standing there with a wagon and sign—a bigger boy with a bigger wagon and a bigger sign. And he wasn't even from our block! Well... we had words. He said he had as much right as I did to be there because I didn't own the sidewalk, so who the hell did I think I was to...
I hit him while he was still blabbing and got two more shots in while he was wondering if this was a fight or not, and then we really went to Fistcity, rolling around on the pavement, him mostly on top because he was bigger, but me getting some pretty good face shots in from below, but the manager of the A & P came out and snatched us around by our collars for a while, then he told us that if we didn't behave ourselves he'd send for the cops. When I tried to explain that I had been there first, he told me that he'd seen me start the fight. Of course I started the fight! A smaller kid has to get his shots in first or he doesn't stand a chance. Jeez! But I promised not to fight anymore, so this copy-cat interloper and I ended up standing on opposite sides of the store's door, glowering at one another until some old lady came out carrying groceries, then we'd try to out-smile and out-nice one another. I was at a disadvantage because my smile was sort of one-sided because I had a split lip. It was a scorcher of a day, and time passed slowly standing there in the sun, especially since I got only one customer that day, and that only because this other kid was away on a delivery. I could see what was going on in the women's heads. They didn't like having to pick one kid and leave the other behind, so most of them carried their own bags home, and the others chose this bigger kid because they didn't want to make a skinny little kid lug those bags all that way. Yeah, sure! Give money to the big healthy kid, and let the skinny little one go without! That makes lots of sense, you stupid old...
That night as I walked home, hot and sticky, dragging the wagon behind me, I was too tired and disheartened to remember to avoid the shortcut through the back alley. I knew I should go straight home, but I wanted desperately to play some kind of story game for a little while because without my nightly dose of radio, there was nothing to carry me away me from my life and refresh my soul. Then too, I wasn't all that eager to arrive at home with a split lip and only a nickel to show for a day's work. I was always a lot better at playing the modest hero than the brave failure.
There was only one old-fashioned streetlight in the back alley that hadn't been slingshot out. Its dim, dirty light fell at a sharp angle over the facades of the abandoned stables, texturing them and leaving pockets of deep shadow in the entranceways... a perfect setting for scary games. I slipped into a space between a shed and a stable, one side of my face lit and the other in shadow, knowing how scary I must look as I whispered to my followers that there just
...I just about pissed myself when that sharp tap-tap-tap on the window made my voice squeak and sent my followers vanishing into the darkness, leaving me to face the danger alone. I looked up to see Mrs McGivney beckoning to me, and her husband silhouetted in the other window by the soft gaslight of their parlor. I
With an edge of grievance in her voice, Mrs McGivney asked me where I'd been the last few days, and I explained that our radio had blown a tube and I had been trying to earn money to replace it. She made a tight little nasal sound, like that was no excuse, so I curtly asked what she wanted. It was late and Mr Kane's was closed. But it turned out that she just wanted to give me a glass of milk and some of those cookies that 'little boys love so
