Shepherd Avenue. Charlie CarilloЧитать онлайн книгу.
hand over the rough pile of food, then chopped it into dust. After that the contents went into a mixing bowl. She dripped oil into it and mixed it up with a wooden spoon.
Raw, the stuff looked like wet cardboard. Fried, it became “meat.”
In warm weather the store fan blew out through the screen door toward Shepherd Avenue. By noon the smell of those patties would lure day laborers from all over the area, including the men working at the hamburger-joint site.
Connie threw a fit when she learned I’d eaten a patty. Angie protested his innocence, having been under the sink when Grace fed me.
“Never eat anything they make there,” she warned me. “You don’t know what they put in it.”
I did know, but I didn’t make a point of it. “It’s delicious,” I answered, but Connie waved me off.
“Never mind. Lots of stuff tastes good but it’s crap. Learn to schieve.”
“What’s that?”
“It means look out for germs. Wait till you get home, where you can eat without gettin’ poisoned.”
“What about lemon ice?” I said, knowing she loved the stuff.
She hesitated. “Willie’s okay, but that’s all.”
“Okay, but sometimes I get hungry.”
“You ain’t gonna starve. If you get hungry, come home.”
Home! Was it fair to call it that?
Seconds later she was on the phone to Grace, speaking in a shrill dialect she used only when she was truly frantic. The only thing I caught from the conversation was the English sign-off: “If you give him something, at least let it be wrapped!”
The rules were different for stuff Grace made at home. I once held a starfish-shaped cookie she made, studying it before gobbling it. She had brought over a tin of such cookies to enjoy with coffee: reindeer, bows, bunny rabbits. The cookie I held was glazed yellow with egg yolk and pebbled with dots of colored sugar. When the light caught it right it gleamed like crystal.
It looked like the creation of a fairy godmother working with a magic wand instead of an oven and a cookie sheet. I sat across the table from Grace and held the cookie up to her face, closing one eye so I could see the woman and the cookie in the same dimension.
It seemed impossible for a woman who looked like that to have made such a thing of beauty. She caught me looking.
“Hey. What are you starin’ at?”
I opened my other eye. “This cookie is pretty, Grace.”
She blushed to the salt-and-pepper roots of her hair. “I like pretty things,” she said, so softly that only I heard her. “Thank you, sonny.”
* * *
Mel was visiting an aunt on Long Island. Angie was working with Freddie. I sat in the basement, watching Connie make pasta.
She beat flour and eggs into dough, rolled it into thin sheets, and sliced them into noodles. These she laid on the table edges. If she was in the right mood and I washed my hands three times, I was allowed to lay them in place.
Grace came in, a bag under her arm. She took out a cookie filled with crushed figs and raisins.
“For the bowels,” she announced, handing it to me. It was oven-warm. I bit into it, the fruits swirling on my tongue in a sticky sweet mess.
I was about to compliment her when she said, “That mother of yours never fixed you nothin’ like that.”
The cookie went sour in my mouth. What brought this on? Hadn’t I been nice to her? “She was too sick to cook,” I said.
“Shut up, Grace,” Connie said, though not harshly. She’d probably been thinking the same thing.
“I guess your father had to cook a lot, huh?” Grace asked.
A vulture of a memory landed on my brain, those greasy diners we went to after visits to the hospital. “We did fine.”
“Yeah?” Grace wouldn’t let it go. “Tell me what you ate.”
“Lots of stuff. What do you care?”
Connie grinned. I’d done all right, hadn’t betrayed either parent. “Eh, he’s restless today, with the girl gone,” she said. “Take him to the store.”
The A & P was a few blocks away. We passed Zip Aiello going the other way, a Santa Claus–sized burlap sack of soda bottles on his back. He was on his way to redeem them someplace on Atlantic Avenue.
“Howard Hughes!” Grace called out. “A millionaire in nickels and dimes!”
Zip wrinkled his face as if he smelled something bad, hitched his sack higher on his shoulder, and clinked away.
“What a nut. He never stands straight. Always bending down to pick up shit on the street. Bottles. Pieces o’ metal. You watch, they’re gonna have to bury him in a curved coffin.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause he’s always bent over. Slow down, this ain’t the Kentucky Derby.”
She kept calling me back, the way a person would summon a puppy. One of the wheels of her cart was bent, so Grace had to give the thing a straightening yank every fifteen feet or so because it kept bearing away from her.
We passed under the elevated tracks just in time to meet a train roaring overhead. It made the ground tremble and then it was gone, striped sunlight back on the street. Grace reached for the back of her head.
“Madonna, my hair.” She grabbed at the blond snakes of her hair. The train breeze faded, diminishing to the puff of a child’s breath on birthday candles.
“That train scared you,” Grace said when we were in the store. She hefted packages of chicken, poked her finger through the cellophane, and sniffed the flesh.
“I wasn’t scared,” I lied.
“Hey, lady, don’t do that!” a man in a bloody apron said. “We spend all morning wrapping and you make holes?”
Grace pointed a bony finger at him. “You sold me a rotten bird last time. Don’t threaten me. This is the only way I know it’s good.”
She moved like a general to the freezer case, dug around, and yanked out a TV dinner. “I bet your mother used to buy these.”
“She did not,” I said hotly. Why was Grace doing this? Because my mother threw crumbs to sparrows instead of turning them into ersatz meatballs? Because her salads were lettuce and tomatoes instead of spinach and exotic greens? Because she’d died young and had no chance to grow as ugly as Grace?
The air conditioning seemed arctic. Sawdust under my feet felt like snow. I followed Grace around, watching her cart fill with groceries. Cracked eggs topped the pile.
“They’re cheaper, why pay more when they’re good for baking?”
When we got to the checkout line I said, “The only time we ever had TV dinners was when she was in the hospital.”
Grace’s eyes glowed with triumph. “So you did have ’em.”
“Yeah. What are you gonna do, put it in the newspaper?”
“You lied before.”
“She never bought them. My father bought them.”
Grace ignored the technicality. “Pass me the eggs. Be careful you don’t break them.”
“They’re already busted.” The people behind us laughed. Grace looked as if she meant to spit at me. I knew she wasn’t through with me.
We turned right when we came out of the A & P.
“We live the other way,” I said.