had to step down a stair when she opened the door. “Oh, my goodness, look at you, you’re froze to death. Get on in here and get yourself warmed up in the kitchen. We’re playing cards.”
Preamble was unknown to Miss Maurice, as was conjecture about past and future. In this, she and Carmen were strangers to the other.
Miss Maurice and Carmella, for whom Carmen had been named, had had in their years together a peculiar way of keeping the Sabbath holy, and that was to go to the earliest Mass at St. Peter Claver and then to spend the rest of the day cooking, eating, playing cards, and drinking fruit wine and beer. They kept a poker game going from about noon until everyone left sometime between eight and ten at night, and then played canasta together with a dummy hand until midnight promptly. They shut the cards down, checked all the stoves in the kitchen and the locks on the front and back doors, and went to bed, most often separately but sometimes together, “Just for a little cuddle,” Miss Maurice would put it, raising her eyebrows at Carmella.
“Just a little one,” she’d say back and wink, “right after I soak my dentures.”
Since Carmella’s death, Sundays had remained poker day, but a canasta game now seemed to go on perpetually every other day of the week. “Hey, Olivia, look what I got,” Miss Maurice had said to Carmen’s mother, shoving Carmen like a little girl into the door of the parlor where six ladies were hunched over the card table or leaning back in their chairs. “She looks like she’s about to expire from chill. I’m going to set her in the kitchen and get her some tea and something to eat.”
“Don’t give her no money,” Olivia said, not looking up from her hand.
“Lord, that woman is hard,” Miss Maurice muttered, pulling Carmen by the elbow. “There’s days I miss your grandmother so much I could spit.”
Carmen didn’t touch the plate of cookies Miss Maurice set down in front of her. She looked around the kitchen, scratching one arm. The fixtures and paint and molding were more dated than most. There was a small open fireplace along one wall that had been adjusted for a gas appliance (the whole house was kept hot, but the kitchen especially hotter than Carmen could usually stand for very long), and the stove an old iron one converted from wood to coal, but wood could still be burned in it if wood was all you had. The ladies kept this stove going from first thing in the morning until they were ready to head to bed at night, and next to it was an oil-fueled range they used to boil water for tea and so on with a kettle that was boiling on it now.
Miss Maurice came in then. “Near forgot,” she said, and went, turned the oil stove off, which went out with a whoosh of flame, and took the kettle and filled a large brown clay water bottle with it. She wrapped it in a thick piece of old blanket, and handed it to Carmen. It was the exact degree of heat she had been needing all day and hadn’t known it. She leaned her abdomen into it.
“Stay put for one more hand, maybe two,” Miss Maurice said to her. “I’m on a winning streak.”
Thursday Evening: Bump Miss Susie
The three two-bit pieces Miss Maurice had finally won and handed over to Carmen lay heavy in the pocket of her skirt. They would come in handy in a little while, but right now she was standing by the drinking fountain in Union Square, looking up at her front windows, wondering. Mr. Morris must have already gone, and Donna and Lucille might be getting into trouble. Two days ago Donna had covered Lucille’s face in lipstick and yesterday it still hadn’t come off, but Carmen didn’t have money for cold cream. Mr. Morris had gotten some lunch things from Hollins Market, but he hadn’t eaten all of it when she’d left. What she was wondering was whether she ought to go in first and make sure the girls still had something to eat. They could put themselves to bed.
She had put herself to bed often enough, sometimes too early, sometimes before the sun went down, and she’d lie awake for hours, wearing her little bloomers and the under-blouse that tied with a faded ribbon she’d twirl between the fingers of one hand, over and over, while she told herself stories, mostly about living where girls flocked over the streets in their boots and short dresses and the enormous bows in their bobbed hair. Or she would listen to adult noises coming from downstairs, or the back yard, or the next room. When she was ten, she had to go with her grandmother to the clothing factory where Carmella swept buttons and thread off the floor, and it was Carmen’s job to pick out the threads and sort through the buttons by color. That was fun for an hour, tolerable for about another hour after that, and then it had crushed her, sitting alone on a stool with a big wooden box cutting into her knees, pushing the buttons into piles around the bottom of that box. Nowhere in her imagination had anybody ever had to do anything as crushing as that. The morning after the first day, she cried she didn’t want to go, but her mother, who was lying in bed, looking for the umpteenth time at an old magazine full of illustrated white people that she kept next to her, had gotten up and given Carmen a shake and a good slap. “Don’t you tell me what you don’t want to do, girl,” she said.
So after a while, she had gotten used to it, and often ended the long days amusing and comforting herself by climbing into the lap of whatever man had been at home when she got there, often too tired to eat anything, and putting her arms up around the man’s neck. She’d say, “Hello, Daddy,” to him just before falling asleep into his shirt. The middle of one night she had wakened to find the man on top of her, not penetrating but rubbing himself into her legs, she had opened her eyes wide and gasped, and he had laughed and said, “Why, hello, Baby!” She was frightened but she laughed right back up at him. What he was doing didn’t hurt, in fact it didn’t feel too bad, and when he was done he had wiped her off very gently and spent the rest of the night until she fell back to sleep again telling her stories of working on one of the big ships during the war, down in the hole, singing to her the song that he had sung to himself at sea, and she fell asleep humming it into his warm, sweet-smelling chest. Later there were others, and all of them hurt her but who her mother said she must let them be, but when she did, she would think of that man, and look up into the face of the rough one, wink, and chuckle, “Why, hello, Baby!” and then thought would disappear back into night, and often she wouldn’t remember another thing.
Oh! That’s right, she thought now, there were crackers and butter in the icebox, too. So that was all right, then. The girls had plenty. She turned and walked in the other direction, to a tavern she knew where the men were also plenty and the cigarettes went around well, and there might even be a shot or two of something that wasn’t to drink. She clicked her heels, humming “Bump Miss Susie” as she walked.
Friday Night: You Get What You Get
Carmen opened the door and found Paddy Dolan there. He was filthy, and he smelled like the last day of the dead. She pinched her nose.
“Where in hell you been? What you want?” she asked him.
“Just shut up and let me in,” he said. “I know your boyfriend ain’t in there, I seen him leave.”
“Well, he’s coming back.”
“Sure he is.”
She spit in his face, and watched as he wiped the spit off with his broken hand, looking her straight in the eyes all the while. She opened the door wider, and stepped back, and he went in. The landing was dark, and smelled sour and brown, like a nursing home, and all the doors were shut.
“Up here,” Carmen said, and he followed her swaying backside up the stairs.
She woke up a few hours later to the sound of a record player needle being scratched over a record. Lucille was standing next to the long wooden console with her hand in the interior, apparently simply sliding the record player arm back and forth over the surface of a record, and she was staring at Carmen without blinking. There was a jelly stain on her undershirt and she was wearing some old pair of summer pajama bottoms that barely fit over her bottom and legs. Her hair was a mess of rats’ nests, and her eyeglasses down low over her nose. Carmen was enraged at the sight of her.
“Goddamn you, you stupid little thing,” she said, as she thought, under her breath, and tried to leap up from the sofa to smack her out of the room, but the sex and needle hangover she didn’t know she had slammed