Black Ice Read online

  I waited through the day for his bosses to come in. They were an Italian couple, a big, fatherly man named Jerry and a tiny, sharp-faced beauty who wore long dresses and acted as the hostess for the fancy DeVille side of the restaurant. It was the wife who chided us and insisted that we hem our dresses so high that none of us could bend over to wipe a table properly. But it was Jerry who came up with practical solutions to the daily whining and squabbling. He switched day schedules for a woman who needed to take care of a sick child. He moved the toaster to a separate table so that there would be enough room for us to work during the breakfast rush.

  I found a way to get Jerry alone. He looked at me with his face troubled, annoyed, and sympathetic. He asked me whether the cook and I had ever dated. He asked me whether or not I had messed around with any of the other men. I did not feel indignant when he asked me these questions, so intent was I on telling my story and making him listen. I answered no solemnly to his questions and swore allegiance to my boyfriend (who I said was in college).

  The next day the broiler man was fired. No one in the kitchen spoke about it. No one switched my orders. No one spoke one word more to me than necessary. In a few days the waitresses began to ask me questions. I answered them honestly, but briefly. Then one day, when we were particularly busy, and two kitchen helpers had called in sick, Booker cursed at a new woman (she didn’t last long) who had made a mistake. He took the plate of food he had prepared according to her check, but that she now wanted changed, and he threw it in the garbage. “Now I tell you what you do. You go over there and write it like you want it, and then you put your check right here at the end of the line and wait for it, just like everybody had to wait while you were in here fucking up the program.

  “Shit!” he said to no one in particular as he grabbed the next check. “I’m burning the fuck up back here. Got no help whatsoever. Fifty pounds of rotten potatoes stinking me out. She’s in and out like to drive a man crazy, and I can’t even sit down for a drink of water.”

  I poured a large glass of soda and ice as I had seen Elaine do, and reached over the steam table to put it on the cutting board. Booker turned around in time to see me, and he took the glass from my hand. He drank the entire glass down noisily, and stood for a moment with his head tipped back.

  “Why’d you get the man fired?” he said, looking up at the ceiling.

  “He got himself fired. I didn’t get him fired.”

  “Nah, don’t give me that. You went in there and talked to the Man.”

  “So I talked to him.”

  “Hey, well, check it out. The man’s gone, ain’t he? He was only playin’ around.”

  “No, Booker. You play around. He wasn’t playing. Do you go around locking people in freezers?”

  “Hell, no, and I guess, from the looks of things around here, I better not start or I’ll be out of a job.” He laughed to himself. “He was an evil brother anyway. Hey,” he called as I turned to go. “You can do that—” he said pointing to the empty glass—“whenever you like.” For a brief moment, he grinned, with no irony, mischief, sarcasm, or boredom. He looked at his checks and moved mine to the front of the line.

  “Oh, Booker,” I said, “don’t do that.”

  “Why not?” he asked. “I’ve moved it to the back plenty enough.”

  I visited Ricky that summer in Schenectady. I met his family. We took the usual photos. I played with his younger brothers and talked to his mother, who welcomed me warmly and made us banana pudding for dessert.

  Ricky and I had the familiar tussle about sex. He gave me instructions to leave the door to his brother’s room unlocked, and I insisted that I did not want to be sneaking around in his parents’ house at night. We visited Niagara Falls and climbed to the top of the hill over the falls. There Ricky gave me a tiny diamond pendant necklace. He asked me to marry him, and I agreed, but all I could think about was that somewhere in his neighborhood, somewhere in the store where his mother shopped, a young woman was buying diapers while we planned smugly for medical school. Somewhere in the park where he wanted to kiss and I let him, because there seemed no way not to, a girl my age would be rolling a stroller while I was filling out my applications to a careful selection of Ivies.

  I returned home dispirited by my lack of integrity. I had no intention of marrying Ricky; I had no intention of dating him anymore, but I had not had the guts to tell myself while I was there in Schenectady eating his mother’s banana pudding, and I’d certainly not had the guts to tell him. Soon after I got home I threw the pendant into the trashcan.

  “Oh, my Lord. Well, I guess that one’s over,” my mother said. She fished the pendant out of the trashcan and told me there was no need to take my anger out on a harmless little diamond.

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  “Well, you can keep it. It’s just a piece of jewelry.”

  “It’s not a piece of jewelry. It’s an engagement necklace. It’s like those rings they put around pigeons’ legs to identify them.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, it’s just a necklace. Where do you get that kind of talk? It’s a perfectly lovely little necklace.”

  “I don’t want it. And I don’t want these around.” On the kitchen counter was a double frame with the pictures that Ricky and I had taken of each other on that first, fateful weekend at St. Paul’s. He had sent the framed photos to my mother for Mother’s Day—a far more impressive present than I had sent her myself.

  “Now wait a minute, wait a minute,” my mother said, laughing. “Just because you’re through with that boy doesn’t mean you have the right to go throwing away my pictures. If you don’t want the necklace, fine. I’ll wear it. It’s cute. But I can’t just change up in an instant. You bring the boy here, and tell me this is it, he’s the one. You get me to love him, too, and then a few months later, you’re through and I’m hurt.”

  I told her about the girl in Schenectady who’d had his child. I told her that he’d called her a whore.

  “Well, now, that’s a shame,” my mother said. “You just can’t tell, can you? Seems like you just can’t trust ’em sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  In time she moved the pictures upstairs to the third floor.

  Soon after, as if he had radar to detect it, Booker asked me how my “college boy” was doing.

  “All right,” I said as I loaded my arm with plates and pivoted toward the swinging door. I placed my heel on the threshold with my foot at a forty-five-degree angle to the door as I had a thousand times before, and pressed my foot down against the door to flip it open. For the first time since the beginning of the summer, I slipped. My old-lady shoes with the built-in arch supports, on which I had spent fifty of my waitressing dollars—I had never imagined that shoes so ugly could cost so much—were slick on the bottom from a spot of grease on the floor. I recovered myself, but just barely, and as I lunged through the door, I heard the calls behind me for a mop.

  I stayed out on the floor a long time, since all my customers, it seemed, had come in at the same time, and all of them needed their orders taken at once. When I came back in with my several checks, I was ready with a line of patter. The fact was that Booker hated to read, but he could keep a restaurant full of orders in his head. Usually when he saw us lining up several orders at once, he’d shout: “Talk to me.”

  This time he did not, so I began, “I’m ordering: This looks like a bunch, but they’re all nice and easy.…” Then I told him what the customers had ordered in the order in which I wanted to receive the food. Uncharacteristically, Booker said nothing. When I came back to pick up the plates, he asked me whether or not I would like to go out with him that weekend on a night we both had off. Each of us was surprised when I said yes.

  My mother understood more quickly than I that I wanted a date, a normal, local, friendly, working-class date. I disputed, almost by reflex, that my date with Booker had anything to do with my unilateral breakup with Ricky. She smiled her crooked smile. Then she asked me how old B
ooker was and told me that I still had to be home by midnight, prep school or no prep school. My father, who seldom had anything to say about my boyfriends, made it clear that he did not approve. I could not figure out why.

  Booker did not have a car, and I was not allowed, by state or family law, to drive at night, so we arranged our dates according to the schedule of the bus to Philadelphia.

  Once he took me to a card game in a house in West Philly. We proceeded through the first floor, through small groups of watchful people, to the basement, where the game was in progress. Booker played poker. I watched and helped him bet. At some point in the evening, someone pulled a gun and put it back again. We left soon afterward to find safer amusement and ended up at a bar downtown.

  “I don’t want to get carded,” I said at the doorway.

  Booker scanned my face and body with his small, quick eyes. I was sixteen, and I felt it. I had told him and everyone at work that I was eighteen. The drinking age in Pennsylvania was twenty-one.

  “You won’t get carded,” Booker said. “Besides, you don’t have to worry about nothin’. You’re with Booker.”

  Men, I was discovering, had a habit of saying such things, as if their saying them made them so. I laughed at him, and he took my laughter—with what feelings I do not know. I did know, however, that I had a ten-dollar bill shoved in my bra, as my mother advised. “Take your carfare. No matter who you’re with, take your carfare—and a dime.” Since I had no pockets, the dime rested in my shoe. I felt it slip underneath my toes as we stepped into the portal.

  At the bar, Booker remarked on how short I was sitting down. He was six feet tall and long-waisted. I was five-five and short-waisted. He liked women with long legs, he said. The only problem with them was that you could hardly see their heads when they sat down at a bar. Booker bantered on. I remember that I did not talk much—he commented on it—because I had so much to do to watch. The bar made me wary.

  I had no idea what to order when the bartender came to us. “CC and water” came to mind. That’s what Jane had ordered the night when her father had taken us out to dinner at a restaurant in Concord. The waiter had asked for our drinks, and he’d turned to us. “What would you girls like?” I was deciding between ginger ale and Coke when she’d let fly with “CC and water.” Jesus, God, I thought. Bad enough we were happily smoking up a storm right in front of the man’s face, but drinks!

  Booker ordered a beer and shot of something and proceeded to tell me about boilermakers. He stoked his boiler. One after another of the neat little combos came, the amber liquid in the thick shotglass, and the big, sweating mug of beer. Booker was showing off for me. He asked about my college boy, and I evaded. He asked about my college, and I described St. Paul’s, concerned at first to omit any telling secondary-school details, and then realizing that there were none that he would recognize. He told me about getting high in Vietnam, and about how a buddy of his, a guy who was blind in one eye and had lied about his blindness to accompany Booker into the service, had carried him a mile and a half to safety. Neither of us knew how far to believe the other. He stoked his boiler some more, and I gulped down the CC and water, trying to pass the stinking liquid over my tastebuds and into my throat, where it was warm and cool at the same time. I told Booker about the black ice on the pond in winter, and he replied that we ought to go roller skating next time.

  We caught a cab to my house. It would be a long, expensive ride, but it was clear that there was no other way to get me back to Yeadon by twelve. It was also becoming clear that Booker’s boiler was boiling over. He had been fine at the bar. He had walked out and hailed a cab. Then, he leaned on me heavily to get in and slumped on the seat. His speech slurred in the middle of a sentence. “Oh, Christ,” he said, “it’s hitting me.”

  It was indeed as if he had been hit. One minute he was walking and talking, and the next he was like a fighter who’d been slugged. We’d been told at school about the dangers of ingesting too much alcohol too fast. My friends told stories about students who had died in fraternity drinking bouts, suicidal show-off rounds that left strapping young men stone dead.

  “You all right?” the driver asked.

  “Fine.” Booker wheezed the word. “I need a smoke,” he told me.

  I lit a cigarette and gave it to him. I watched each time he brought it, with excruciating concentration, to his lips to make sure that he did not burn himself or me. He opened the window to get some air and panted at the breeze like a sick dog on his last ride to the veterinarian’s. The taxi sped through the night toward Yeadon. We neared the graveyard where the word FERNWOOD grew in ragged topiary on a green hill. The taxi stopped at the light just before a narrow bridge over Cobbs Creek.

  “I’ma be sick,” Booker said.

  The light turned green. The taxi began to move.

  “Wait! Stop!” I called to the driver. I reached across to help Booker unlatch the door. He leaned over, and I held onto his waist with all my strength. Booker was reed thin, but six feet tall is six feet tall, and gravity was pulling him toward the ground. He vomited onto the street, for what seemed a long time.

  “You all right? He all right?” the driver asked.

  What could I answer?

  “All right,” Booker bawled it out. He flung his upper body upright, back into the taxi, and slammed the door.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said to me.

  The taxi lurched forward, laboring up the hill past the cemetery. The cicadas sent up waves of racket, their curious dry sound borne along the moist, grass-scented summer air that blew in the windows.

  “Call myself taking the girl out for a good time and end up puking on the street like a bum,” Booker said. “Ain’t that a bitch?” Then he dozed.

  “You want to take him home first?” the driver asked me.

  “No.” Booker revived. “No. We take the lady home first. Said I’d get you home by midnight. I’ma get you home by midnight.”

  I directed the driver to my house. Booker, who had seemed himself again, could not move his long legs to let me out. I climbed over him and felt him grabbing at my hands.

  “What?” My sympathy for him threatened to evaporate in a moment. If he touched me, I thought, I’d slug him.

  “Here. Will you wait a minute? Please! Here.” He was trying to hand me a wad of money. He waved toward the driver. “Pay him.”

  I exhaled relief. “How much is the fare?” I asked the driver.

  He did not tell me. Instead, he began to shout that he needed to know he was going to get paid for the whole trip, the whole trip. “Where the hell am I going? I got to get paid.”

  “You will get paid,” I said to him. I spoke clearly and precisely, conscious, as the smell of vomit wafted sweet and sour off Booker’s breath through the open window, of the confident speech St. Paul’s had given me. I asked the driver to estimate the fare back to Booker’s address. Then I rounded up his liberal guess and gave him a ten-dollar tip as well. “Thank you for your patience,” I said as if his job were finished.

  “How’m I going to get him out of the car?”

  “He’ll get out of the car,” I said as if I knew what I was talking about. I tried to give Booker the rest of his money. I was holding a bunch of wadded-up twenties.

  “Keep it. You keep it,” he said. “You deserve it.”

  I heard my mother, who was still awake, calling me from the front door. I told Booker good-night and told the taxi driver to roll. Then I walked up the front path, past the yew bushes, to the porch.

  “Where’s your date?” My mother asked this as we two watched the taxi cab make his U-turn and speed away. “Don’t young men walk girls to the door anymore?”

  “Well, Mama, we saw you at the front door, so we knew I was safe,” I joked, trying to hold in my CC-and-water breath until she turned to go in.

  “You’re lucky your father’s not home yet,” she said. “ ‘Cause you are late, and you know he’s not crazy about that boy or old man or whatever h
e is.”

  I tiptoed up the stairs in order not to wake my sister. I went directly to bed with the excuse that I had to work the seven-to-eleven shift the next day.

  “Seems like you should have thought of that earlier.” The dog came into my room and settled on the bed with a disgruntled sigh. It took a long time for me to go to sleep.

  I awoke late, rushed to wake my father, and drove too fast to the diner. Daddy rapped on the dashboard with his knuckles to tell me to slow down. We knocked our way to work. Booker was there when I arrived.

  I poured a cup of coffee and a glass of grapefruit juice as I always did, and went right to work. The day manager raised his eyebrows at me, and the waitress who had covered for me for fifteen minutes made a great show of handing over the checks on the tables she had served. Later, when I had a minute free, I went behind the steam tables and handed Booker the rest of his money, sixty or seventy dollars. He looked at it with bloodshot eyes. “You know you didn’t have to give this back to me,” he said. “I didn’t even remember.”

  “It’s your money,” I said.

  He said that I had class, even if I was just a kid, and that the next time he was going to take me out to some class spots, but he never did. We acted as if our schedules wouldn’t jibe, but the truth was that we’d both seen enough. When the summer was gone, we said that we’d missed our chance until Christmas break.

  By then I had saved money and taken my driving test in my mother’s old station wagon. My parents trusted me to drive alone with my sister. I took her on outings to fast-food restaurants and playgrounds. I played at being the older sister I had always wanted. Carole rewarded me by copying my movements, my inflections, my idioms. I combed her hair—gently, because she was tenderheaded, as we said. I drew pictures with her and played dress-up with our mother’s party gowns. They smelled of closet dust when we pulled them over our heads.