"Ain't too shabby," Emily said, proudly wiping her hands on her skirt. The
bar had been closed almost a week. Em couldn't afford to fix the smaller
bar completely or stay closed for longer than a week. She had some of it
cleaned up and an old tapestry draped over it that had been in the cellar
since God knows when.
She, Sonny, George and I had spent the whole morning getting Joe's ready for reopening.
"Where in the hell did you get that?" George complimented her on her interior decorating.
"Oh, this old thing?" laughed Emily, "been in the family for years or since Dad bought the place English hunting dogs," she said admiring the scene covered the burnt overhang, "always wondered where or when I'd use this ain't no place from here to the Tenderloin that's got something like this."
Emily turned heel and swung open the front door of Joe's, ready to leave. "And just where do you think you're going?" I folded my arms. We had been roommates for over a week now and we were past the grace period.
"I have a special appointment if you don't mind," she said, slipping her arms through a black trench coat and likewise slipping out the door.
"I bet it's ta see that Irving chump," Sonny sneered.
"Irving who-what?" George shot, confused and angrily uninformed.
"New boyfriend," Sonny shook his head.
"Not so much of boyfriend really," I said, "more of friend friend of sorts that fulfills only certain stations of that one would call a boyfriend."
"Do you mean she's just "George said, "for no good reason "
"Well, sometimes like men, women are only attracted to mates for one reason, at least Emily's being honest," I defended.
"I knew I didn't like the look of him when I first saw him," Sonny shook his head.
"She's twenty and she's a very big girl." So she wasn't exactly playing Miss Morals and I knew she had some sort of ulterior motive for this little fiasco, but I decided to play the sisterhood card and defend the girl's liaisons.
"Can her taste in men get any worse?!" George folded his arms.
"Hey!" Sonny spat indignantly.
"Please," George said, "how many times did you cheat on her or screw her over in some other way when you were together?"
"Which time we were together?"
"Exactly what I mean."
"Sonny, scoot," I ordered.
"What?" he asked.
"I need to talk to Calvert alone," I said, " I'll represent all of your misogynist view points while you're gone I swear."
Not knowing quite what "misogynist" meant, Sonny nodded and left for the kitchen.
"Damn fool," George shook his head.
"Who?" I asked.
"All of them," he said, "Sonny for cheating, Emily for fooling around with dirt bags, this Irving guy for being a dirt bag," he pointed to me, "you for defending them."
"Just Emily," I corrected.
"Why ?"
"Because right or wrong, you've got to let her grow up, she runs her own business, and she's lived through a lot and come out with brain intact I think we both know what that feels like." "Don't play the wise one with me, this Irving guy, he's a criminal. She's using him for fun and shtupping him for information," George said matter-of- factly.
"Is he dangerous?" I asked cautiously.
"No, no yet, not as far as I know. He's got friends in the Irish mob, ya know. Thinking they'll see a profit in this whole prohibition thing. But he isn't dangerous so far as I know. I don't think he's very involved. At least not directly. He seems to have a little hand in it."
"Then what are you worrying about?"
"I'm a Jew. It's what I do best."
"So tell me about this Irving fellow." "That's all I know."
"Liar," I nailed him.
"I'm just saying I don't need any crazy mick mobsters trafficking illegal substances through Joe's because my best friend thinks she's doing me a favor." He adjusted himself against the bar, arms still folded.
"How is she 'doing you a favor'?"
"She hooks Irving, she might have access to information about where all the city's major bootleggers are and where they do business."
"And you really care so much about alcohol trafficking?"
"No, but I do care about criminals that are using it to take over the city. Could you imagine a Tammany Hall with mobsters?" He moved away from the counter and toward me, "I was born and raised just outside of it, I live here now, and it's also part of my job." He was serious, but he wasn't angry yet.
"Then why keep Emily out of it? I know, she's almost like your little sister, but you have got to let her a little of that go. She's a full-grown woman; she was half way to it when you met her. Maybe she really can help. If you stop protecting her she'll act like the adult she is. And I know this isn't about Emily."
"It's not all about Mary."
"Well, then humor me."
"It's about you."
"Me?" I exclaimed, louder than I expected.
"Yeah, you." He stopped, and I fixed my gaze on him and widened my eyes, as if to say 'care to elaborate?' He breathed. "Eight years ago, when I picked you off the street. You woke up as soon as a lifted your head." I didn't remember anything that day until I was lying, indiscriminately pumped full of sedatives, on a hospital bed. Oh, medical practices just are not what they used to be. "You're eyes " he continued, somehow I didn't feel this was a compliment on how beautiful they were, "they were manic. I'd seen shit before, but there, there was someone who had seen the edge. You didn't see something that was just part of your job, it was if someone reached down inside of you and ripped it all out. I knew I never wanted that to be me. Emily's been walking closer to the edge her whole life. She gets in too deep this time, she may never come out. Even if she lives."
"Jesus Christ, Calvert, she's not going to die!" I would have absolutely speechless if it weren't for that last comment. "When did you get so morbid?"
"Oh, I think a few of us have had a morbid couple of years."
"When are you going to tell what's going on with you?"
"As soon as you tell me what's going on with you."
"I'm a little less shell shocked."
"On the outside what are your parents' names?"
"What?"
"What are your parents' names?"
"Hank and Ruth." He wasn't going to catch me off my guard that easily.
"Hank and Ruth Dawson?"
"Yes,." I lied.
"Both dead."
"Yes, both dead, thanks," I lied again.
"What did they do? Where did you grow up?"
"I'm from Philadelphia, Jersey boy." I said as a bit of insult.
"Where? Where in Philly did you grow up? Hi, my name's George. I was born to rich Jews in Bergen County. I have two little brothers, they're names are Richard and David. Ricky's an accountant in California. Davey is a pain in the ass that enjoys dropping in and out of Princeton. My parents' names are Sophie and Tevyia. My mother's name was Kaminsky. My father's name was Meisels before he changed it in America. My father is a large insurance broker, my mother is a typical old Jewish lady that calls anyone she doesn't like a Cosack " I folded my arms. I was losing the argument. And I was not happy. George, however, cheered up as he continued down the list. "My first love was Susie Smith from down the road, but she moved away when we were nine. First real girl that I went with was Beth McGee: she ditched me and married a jackass." His eyes popped on the word 'jackass.' No, he wasn't bitter about that one. "Then I went to NYU where I got a bachelor's degree in English bet you didn't see that one coming." He stuck out his tongue and gave me a raspberry. "Instead of becoming a teacher as I had planned, I was suddenly inspired the summer after graduation to join the NYPD, enrolled in the police academy and you know the rest from there." George paused and smiled at me. "Your turn."
"It's a long story."
"Where do we have to go? I'm off for the night and you're taking a little furlough from working, Miss Hollywood."
"Okay, it's several long stories." I had but one mission: get out of this.
"How long does it have to be for a friend?" he said with seriousness, but with a small spark of emotion.
I looked around for anything anything at all to get me out of this. If anybody was to know, it was Emily Dawson. But George was the friend I knew. We'd both seen Argonne, we'd both lost people. I had more in common with him than with anyone else I knew. Holden was the only person that knew for sure my real name and that another man was involved, but giving just that up was enough after he jilted me.
"Rose." George focused my attention back.
"I promise," I said with meaning, "I will tell you one day. I'll tell you everything."
"You promise?"
"I promise." I held up my hand, elbow bent, in front of my own face. George grabbed it and pulled me to him for a hug. He had strong arms, the kind you feel indefinitely safe in. I had the sudden urge to kiss him, but resisted it. The only friendship that survived that was Manny. Besides, wasn't I still in love with Holden?
"So now what, Freud?" he said, still holding me.
"I didn't bring up any Freudian logic today."
"Good thing too. He's a cocaine addict that's much too obsessed with people's mothers."
"He has some good theories!" I defended, but smiling this time. I pulled away a little bit to look at him.
"Yeah, which he came up with when he was doing cocaine and thinking about people's mothers." "Quiet, you!" I hit him gently in the arm and walked behind the counter, heading for the kitchen. George followed.
"Very bad things about people's mothers!" he shouted after me as push open the swinging doors.
***
Even the City can get monotonous. After only three weeks the whole neighborhood felt so stuffed and overwhelming. True, I lived there when I was seventeen all those years ago, but Lower Manhattan is far less oppressive. I still favor it to Midtown West, of which my memories cross between nostalgia and horror.
Emily decided that as her new friend and roommate, and the only other woman she'd had around in a few years, that we should go out into the country for a day. She was Jack's cousin, his last living relative of any importance. Emily Dawson was no longer a name that haunted me, no longer a girl I saw only as her cousin's essence, no longer the brash, unladylike broad though she still was in a way, but now she was full person to me. She the exciting and infectious new friend. I often forgot she was the woman I kept a horrifying secret from.
I forgot all day while we walked through rolling hills and trees past vacation homes for city dwellers. Little cottages lined the street while we walked from the Park Ridge train station in Bergen County New Jersey, one town over from where George grew up.
It wasn't so much the country anymore. Year by year permanent families moved in and the towns grew up around the train stations. In all my time in and out of Manhattan as a girl and the year I lived there as a teenager, I had never seen New York's suburbs.
"I can't say I see your interest here," I said to Emily, "it doesn't look like there's anything here." I knew she had some sort of plan this time. She made me bring roller skates.
"Exactly," she paused and looked around at the rolling green and tall trees, "nothing happens here. No gang fights, no brawls, no murders, beatings, rapes. Not to say that doesn't happen everywhere eventually. But not everyday. I used to live in a place like this when I was a kid, you know? Only Midwesterners...they're perpetually five years behind the times but very polite...except maybe me. I fit in better in places like this, wide open spaces, but if you forget you're right outside New York City, they remind you. They've got they're slightly different brand of attitude though. I can't say I can immediately tell the difference. Just like accents, they're all different, but around here they're all a little related."
"So George is, in a way, like you're cousin across the river?"
"Yes, but I like to pretend I don't associate with anything in Jersey."
"Don't tell George that."
"Yeah, and don't tell him I was close to the Calvert abode either. The whole family. They get on me. Mrs. Calvert says she would want me to marry their youngest son if I wasn't out of the faith. But then again, she liked Mary. That and Mrs. C's convinced I'll convert. I'm practically his little sister. He needs a kid to keep him entertained."
"I think children are a bit more than entertainment. You know one day..."
"I'll have children just like me. Punishment. I know. Besides, I'm getting a little old to marry. Or maybe I'm at the ripe age, but I ain't got any prospects."
"Irving?" I asked, wondering if the man on the side had grown on her.
"No," she said, "Sonny used to propose once a year since I was sixteen or seventeen, but I was only stupid enough to go back with him after every time he wandered or did something else completely damn stupid. Infatuation goes so far, right? I knew I wasn't spending the rest of my life with that. I don't wanna get married anyway, I don't think. Got my own business that I run just fine. And I couldn't live the way I do now, and hell, it's not perfect, but I like it."
"What about your mother?"
"My family was different. We were a team. It started about love and it stayed that way." "You're not a..." Yes, it was a stupid thing to think knowing full well the men she'd gone with. But didn't seem interested in anything long term anymore and even cut Sonny off for good. I adjusted my long, black coat awkwardly. It was still March and a bit brisk.
"No," she said without the slightest offense, "wouldn't it be awful though?" she sighed ruefully, and uncharacteristically sympathetic, "living in the shadows like that? People calling you an abomination just for getting you're kicks...and worse yet, when you fall in love. It's terrible."
To a more contemporary audience Emily's opinions may not seem terribly odd. But then, even among suffragettes and feminists, I'd never heard anything so striking as Emily said.
"You know," I laughed as I remembered, "when I was fourteen my mother told me there was no such thing as homosexuality."
Emily laughed. "Don't worry, my family never mentioned it either." We two had lived a little too much to deny the ways of the world and all it's people, even if it was taboo for the rest of society. "I like men," Emily said bluntly. "As women we have to ultimate advantage in the bedroom."
"Oh, do we?"
"Men can't fake anything," I loved Em sometimes, so blunt and so crass. So damn honest. "Whether you're doing alright is a simple matter of up or down."
"Jesus, Em!" Sometimes she flabbergasted me as well.
"Tell me the little something solid between your legs isn't a good comforting thing."
"I like to think of it with a little more umph than simple 'comfort.'" I said awkwardly.
"Ha! Knew you were just as vulgar as I was. Well, maybe not 'comfort' but damn I like it so much I can't explain." I didn't say that I'd agreed, but I did. I just smiled inwardly. Emily galloped victoriously. "Now we're gonna go roller skating." She pulled my hand. "Because I like that too!"
"Where?" I asked as she dragged me up the street.
"Here."
"Where here?"
"Just put your God damn skates on and I'll show you."
The last time someone from this family dragged to do something against my will it had gotten awkward, not to say I regretted it. But why did I have a feeling it was going to be dangerous this time?
"On!" I gestured to my feet as we stood atop the empty, tree-lined street. I noticed a single green leaf on one tree on the sidewalk. Spring was coming.
"Okay," she said as she held my firmly and skated out into the street. "Now."
"Now what?" I asked, feeling unsteady atop the hill standing in roller skates...on pavement. She couldn't be serious.
"Hold on tight," she said with mounting glee. Then she kicked her right leg and we were nearly airborne.
We sped faster and faster down the hill and I lost myself screaming in perfect jubilance with my new friend. The wind ripped my and kissed my face all over. I was back to being in Sunny New Mexico, swimming in the Schuykill in my backyard, running through the bowels of Titanic in those few delicious hours.
You might say we were a bit old for this, Em and I. She was twenty and I twenty-five, a spinster for my time. I spent eight years doing anything to take back my childhood or little moments of happiness. I thought I'd found that in Columbus for the most and for brief moments here and there. I saw Emily's face after racing down that hill. She hadn't won anything, she wasn't in love. She lived through a lot in just two decades and I never saw that kind of crazed joy in anyone's face than Emily's at that moment. Emily wasn't taking back anything. She was just living it.
When I met Jack eight years earlier he had the same attitude I'd been trying to live my life by. I found myself failing there over the past few years. Yes, Jack had been separated from his family. Yes, Jack had been there when his parents died. Yes, Jack had seen the world and her ups and downs and poverty and suffering. He still held face and never lost himself to depression.
But simple fact was that he was a kid. I was no kid anymore. I'd also spent months during the war swallowed by death. He'd never seen war. He wasn't the one who had to live with Titanic. I'd lost my father, Jack, Mary, and Tobey to untimely and often gruesome death. The only happy and long term attachment I had was happily married to someone else. The childhood friend I'd fallen in love with left me when I needed him most. I spent the last year among, for the most part, false friends and drugs and booze. Somehow, for all his vision, I doubt young Mr. Dawson saw this in my future.
And Emily. The young cousin. The last of her family left alive. My Holy Grail of the Dawson Family. She wasn't a child anymore. Her future had been grimmer. And her immediate future: horrifying. A violent home and violent emotions threatened to tear her apart in every way possible.
But for now all that mattered was that single moment, that rush down the hill. Laughter.
She, Sonny, George and I had spent the whole morning getting Joe's ready for reopening.
"Where in the hell did you get that?" George complimented her on her interior decorating.
"Oh, this old thing?" laughed Emily, "been in the family for years or since Dad bought the place English hunting dogs," she said admiring the scene covered the burnt overhang, "always wondered where or when I'd use this ain't no place from here to the Tenderloin that's got something like this."
Emily turned heel and swung open the front door of Joe's, ready to leave. "And just where do you think you're going?" I folded my arms. We had been roommates for over a week now and we were past the grace period.
"I have a special appointment if you don't mind," she said, slipping her arms through a black trench coat and likewise slipping out the door.
"I bet it's ta see that Irving chump," Sonny sneered.
"Irving who-what?" George shot, confused and angrily uninformed.
"New boyfriend," Sonny shook his head.
"Not so much of boyfriend really," I said, "more of friend friend of sorts that fulfills only certain stations of that one would call a boyfriend."
"Do you mean she's just "George said, "for no good reason "
"Well, sometimes like men, women are only attracted to mates for one reason, at least Emily's being honest," I defended.
"I knew I didn't like the look of him when I first saw him," Sonny shook his head.
"She's twenty and she's a very big girl." So she wasn't exactly playing Miss Morals and I knew she had some sort of ulterior motive for this little fiasco, but I decided to play the sisterhood card and defend the girl's liaisons.
"Can her taste in men get any worse?!" George folded his arms.
"Hey!" Sonny spat indignantly.
"Please," George said, "how many times did you cheat on her or screw her over in some other way when you were together?"
"Which time we were together?"
"Exactly what I mean."
"Sonny, scoot," I ordered.
"What?" he asked.
"I need to talk to Calvert alone," I said, " I'll represent all of your misogynist view points while you're gone I swear."
Not knowing quite what "misogynist" meant, Sonny nodded and left for the kitchen.
"Damn fool," George shook his head.
"Who?" I asked.
"All of them," he said, "Sonny for cheating, Emily for fooling around with dirt bags, this Irving guy for being a dirt bag," he pointed to me, "you for defending them."
"Just Emily," I corrected.
"Why ?"
"Because right or wrong, you've got to let her grow up, she runs her own business, and she's lived through a lot and come out with brain intact I think we both know what that feels like." "Don't play the wise one with me, this Irving guy, he's a criminal. She's using him for fun and shtupping him for information," George said matter-of- factly.
"Is he dangerous?" I asked cautiously.
"No, no yet, not as far as I know. He's got friends in the Irish mob, ya know. Thinking they'll see a profit in this whole prohibition thing. But he isn't dangerous so far as I know. I don't think he's very involved. At least not directly. He seems to have a little hand in it."
"Then what are you worrying about?"
"I'm a Jew. It's what I do best."
"So tell me about this Irving fellow." "That's all I know."
"Liar," I nailed him.
"I'm just saying I don't need any crazy mick mobsters trafficking illegal substances through Joe's because my best friend thinks she's doing me a favor." He adjusted himself against the bar, arms still folded.
"How is she 'doing you a favor'?"
"She hooks Irving, she might have access to information about where all the city's major bootleggers are and where they do business."
"And you really care so much about alcohol trafficking?"
"No, but I do care about criminals that are using it to take over the city. Could you imagine a Tammany Hall with mobsters?" He moved away from the counter and toward me, "I was born and raised just outside of it, I live here now, and it's also part of my job." He was serious, but he wasn't angry yet.
"Then why keep Emily out of it? I know, she's almost like your little sister, but you have got to let her a little of that go. She's a full-grown woman; she was half way to it when you met her. Maybe she really can help. If you stop protecting her she'll act like the adult she is. And I know this isn't about Emily."
"It's not all about Mary."
"Well, then humor me."
"It's about you."
"Me?" I exclaimed, louder than I expected.
"Yeah, you." He stopped, and I fixed my gaze on him and widened my eyes, as if to say 'care to elaborate?' He breathed. "Eight years ago, when I picked you off the street. You woke up as soon as a lifted your head." I didn't remember anything that day until I was lying, indiscriminately pumped full of sedatives, on a hospital bed. Oh, medical practices just are not what they used to be. "You're eyes " he continued, somehow I didn't feel this was a compliment on how beautiful they were, "they were manic. I'd seen shit before, but there, there was someone who had seen the edge. You didn't see something that was just part of your job, it was if someone reached down inside of you and ripped it all out. I knew I never wanted that to be me. Emily's been walking closer to the edge her whole life. She gets in too deep this time, she may never come out. Even if she lives."
"Jesus Christ, Calvert, she's not going to die!" I would have absolutely speechless if it weren't for that last comment. "When did you get so morbid?"
"Oh, I think a few of us have had a morbid couple of years."
"When are you going to tell what's going on with you?"
"As soon as you tell me what's going on with you."
"I'm a little less shell shocked."
"On the outside what are your parents' names?"
"What?"
"What are your parents' names?"
"Hank and Ruth." He wasn't going to catch me off my guard that easily.
"Hank and Ruth Dawson?"
"Yes,." I lied.
"Both dead."
"Yes, both dead, thanks," I lied again.
"What did they do? Where did you grow up?"
"I'm from Philadelphia, Jersey boy." I said as a bit of insult.
"Where? Where in Philly did you grow up? Hi, my name's George. I was born to rich Jews in Bergen County. I have two little brothers, they're names are Richard and David. Ricky's an accountant in California. Davey is a pain in the ass that enjoys dropping in and out of Princeton. My parents' names are Sophie and Tevyia. My mother's name was Kaminsky. My father's name was Meisels before he changed it in America. My father is a large insurance broker, my mother is a typical old Jewish lady that calls anyone she doesn't like a Cosack " I folded my arms. I was losing the argument. And I was not happy. George, however, cheered up as he continued down the list. "My first love was Susie Smith from down the road, but she moved away when we were nine. First real girl that I went with was Beth McGee: she ditched me and married a jackass." His eyes popped on the word 'jackass.' No, he wasn't bitter about that one. "Then I went to NYU where I got a bachelor's degree in English bet you didn't see that one coming." He stuck out his tongue and gave me a raspberry. "Instead of becoming a teacher as I had planned, I was suddenly inspired the summer after graduation to join the NYPD, enrolled in the police academy and you know the rest from there." George paused and smiled at me. "Your turn."
"It's a long story."
"Where do we have to go? I'm off for the night and you're taking a little furlough from working, Miss Hollywood."
"Okay, it's several long stories." I had but one mission: get out of this.
"How long does it have to be for a friend?" he said with seriousness, but with a small spark of emotion.
I looked around for anything anything at all to get me out of this. If anybody was to know, it was Emily Dawson. But George was the friend I knew. We'd both seen Argonne, we'd both lost people. I had more in common with him than with anyone else I knew. Holden was the only person that knew for sure my real name and that another man was involved, but giving just that up was enough after he jilted me.
"Rose." George focused my attention back.
"I promise," I said with meaning, "I will tell you one day. I'll tell you everything."
"You promise?"
"I promise." I held up my hand, elbow bent, in front of my own face. George grabbed it and pulled me to him for a hug. He had strong arms, the kind you feel indefinitely safe in. I had the sudden urge to kiss him, but resisted it. The only friendship that survived that was Manny. Besides, wasn't I still in love with Holden?
"So now what, Freud?" he said, still holding me.
"I didn't bring up any Freudian logic today."
"Good thing too. He's a cocaine addict that's much too obsessed with people's mothers."
"He has some good theories!" I defended, but smiling this time. I pulled away a little bit to look at him.
"Yeah, which he came up with when he was doing cocaine and thinking about people's mothers." "Quiet, you!" I hit him gently in the arm and walked behind the counter, heading for the kitchen. George followed.
"Very bad things about people's mothers!" he shouted after me as push open the swinging doors.
***
Even the City can get monotonous. After only three weeks the whole neighborhood felt so stuffed and overwhelming. True, I lived there when I was seventeen all those years ago, but Lower Manhattan is far less oppressive. I still favor it to Midtown West, of which my memories cross between nostalgia and horror.
Emily decided that as her new friend and roommate, and the only other woman she'd had around in a few years, that we should go out into the country for a day. She was Jack's cousin, his last living relative of any importance. Emily Dawson was no longer a name that haunted me, no longer a girl I saw only as her cousin's essence, no longer the brash, unladylike broad though she still was in a way, but now she was full person to me. She the exciting and infectious new friend. I often forgot she was the woman I kept a horrifying secret from.
I forgot all day while we walked through rolling hills and trees past vacation homes for city dwellers. Little cottages lined the street while we walked from the Park Ridge train station in Bergen County New Jersey, one town over from where George grew up.
It wasn't so much the country anymore. Year by year permanent families moved in and the towns grew up around the train stations. In all my time in and out of Manhattan as a girl and the year I lived there as a teenager, I had never seen New York's suburbs.
"I can't say I see your interest here," I said to Emily, "it doesn't look like there's anything here." I knew she had some sort of plan this time. She made me bring roller skates.
"Exactly," she paused and looked around at the rolling green and tall trees, "nothing happens here. No gang fights, no brawls, no murders, beatings, rapes. Not to say that doesn't happen everywhere eventually. But not everyday. I used to live in a place like this when I was a kid, you know? Only Midwesterners...they're perpetually five years behind the times but very polite...except maybe me. I fit in better in places like this, wide open spaces, but if you forget you're right outside New York City, they remind you. They've got they're slightly different brand of attitude though. I can't say I can immediately tell the difference. Just like accents, they're all different, but around here they're all a little related."
"So George is, in a way, like you're cousin across the river?"
"Yes, but I like to pretend I don't associate with anything in Jersey."
"Don't tell George that."
"Yeah, and don't tell him I was close to the Calvert abode either. The whole family. They get on me. Mrs. Calvert says she would want me to marry their youngest son if I wasn't out of the faith. But then again, she liked Mary. That and Mrs. C's convinced I'll convert. I'm practically his little sister. He needs a kid to keep him entertained."
"I think children are a bit more than entertainment. You know one day..."
"I'll have children just like me. Punishment. I know. Besides, I'm getting a little old to marry. Or maybe I'm at the ripe age, but I ain't got any prospects."
"Irving?" I asked, wondering if the man on the side had grown on her.
"No," she said, "Sonny used to propose once a year since I was sixteen or seventeen, but I was only stupid enough to go back with him after every time he wandered or did something else completely damn stupid. Infatuation goes so far, right? I knew I wasn't spending the rest of my life with that. I don't wanna get married anyway, I don't think. Got my own business that I run just fine. And I couldn't live the way I do now, and hell, it's not perfect, but I like it."
"What about your mother?"
"My family was different. We were a team. It started about love and it stayed that way." "You're not a..." Yes, it was a stupid thing to think knowing full well the men she'd gone with. But didn't seem interested in anything long term anymore and even cut Sonny off for good. I adjusted my long, black coat awkwardly. It was still March and a bit brisk.
"No," she said without the slightest offense, "wouldn't it be awful though?" she sighed ruefully, and uncharacteristically sympathetic, "living in the shadows like that? People calling you an abomination just for getting you're kicks...and worse yet, when you fall in love. It's terrible."
To a more contemporary audience Emily's opinions may not seem terribly odd. But then, even among suffragettes and feminists, I'd never heard anything so striking as Emily said.
"You know," I laughed as I remembered, "when I was fourteen my mother told me there was no such thing as homosexuality."
Emily laughed. "Don't worry, my family never mentioned it either." We two had lived a little too much to deny the ways of the world and all it's people, even if it was taboo for the rest of society. "I like men," Emily said bluntly. "As women we have to ultimate advantage in the bedroom."
"Oh, do we?"
"Men can't fake anything," I loved Em sometimes, so blunt and so crass. So damn honest. "Whether you're doing alright is a simple matter of up or down."
"Jesus, Em!" Sometimes she flabbergasted me as well.
"Tell me the little something solid between your legs isn't a good comforting thing."
"I like to think of it with a little more umph than simple 'comfort.'" I said awkwardly.
"Ha! Knew you were just as vulgar as I was. Well, maybe not 'comfort' but damn I like it so much I can't explain." I didn't say that I'd agreed, but I did. I just smiled inwardly. Emily galloped victoriously. "Now we're gonna go roller skating." She pulled my hand. "Because I like that too!"
"Where?" I asked as she dragged me up the street.
"Here."
"Where here?"
"Just put your God damn skates on and I'll show you."
The last time someone from this family dragged to do something against my will it had gotten awkward, not to say I regretted it. But why did I have a feeling it was going to be dangerous this time?
"On!" I gestured to my feet as we stood atop the empty, tree-lined street. I noticed a single green leaf on one tree on the sidewalk. Spring was coming.
"Okay," she said as she held my firmly and skated out into the street. "Now."
"Now what?" I asked, feeling unsteady atop the hill standing in roller skates...on pavement. She couldn't be serious.
"Hold on tight," she said with mounting glee. Then she kicked her right leg and we were nearly airborne.
We sped faster and faster down the hill and I lost myself screaming in perfect jubilance with my new friend. The wind ripped my and kissed my face all over. I was back to being in Sunny New Mexico, swimming in the Schuykill in my backyard, running through the bowels of Titanic in those few delicious hours.
You might say we were a bit old for this, Em and I. She was twenty and I twenty-five, a spinster for my time. I spent eight years doing anything to take back my childhood or little moments of happiness. I thought I'd found that in Columbus for the most and for brief moments here and there. I saw Emily's face after racing down that hill. She hadn't won anything, she wasn't in love. She lived through a lot in just two decades and I never saw that kind of crazed joy in anyone's face than Emily's at that moment. Emily wasn't taking back anything. She was just living it.
When I met Jack eight years earlier he had the same attitude I'd been trying to live my life by. I found myself failing there over the past few years. Yes, Jack had been separated from his family. Yes, Jack had been there when his parents died. Yes, Jack had seen the world and her ups and downs and poverty and suffering. He still held face and never lost himself to depression.
But simple fact was that he was a kid. I was no kid anymore. I'd also spent months during the war swallowed by death. He'd never seen war. He wasn't the one who had to live with Titanic. I'd lost my father, Jack, Mary, and Tobey to untimely and often gruesome death. The only happy and long term attachment I had was happily married to someone else. The childhood friend I'd fallen in love with left me when I needed him most. I spent the last year among, for the most part, false friends and drugs and booze. Somehow, for all his vision, I doubt young Mr. Dawson saw this in my future.
And Emily. The young cousin. The last of her family left alive. My Holy Grail of the Dawson Family. She wasn't a child anymore. Her future had been grimmer. And her immediate future: horrifying. A violent home and violent emotions threatened to tear her apart in every way possible.
But for now all that mattered was that single moment, that rush down the hill. Laughter.