SANFORD CHERNOFF
She had always, for some reason, found trouble with my name.
That didn't bother me. But she had a way, at times now, of not
looking at me. I don't know how else I can describe it. We might be
talking or whatever, and suddenly her eyes would narrow and appear
to turn on something inside her. It was then as if she were not there.
And yet it was not so much her I felt out of reach then, but myself.
About the time we moved that spring, I had a letter from my
brother. He was sorry, he said, but as much as I went over that letter,
I couldn't figure out what he was sorry for. I wrote and asked him
but he never answered me. I went on writing though. I wrote him
about the apartment and the work mother had begun taking in. She
sewed ornaments on dresses. I would pick them up for her. The shop
was one of a number I had to pass on my way from school anyway.
It
had been a drug store before that, and another, a few blocks south,
still had a barber's pole outside. They were blunt, impatient places.
But I liked them. I liked the closeness, the noise, and the open way
the girls walked around. I used to wonder about those girls and
what went on behind the painted glass of those store fronts. One of
the guys in the old neighborhood claimed that they were places where
ladies who weren't married went to have their babies. I tried to tell
them, whenever I got around there, what it was really like. But they
seemed not to want to know. Or maybe it was not something they
could know. Anyway I stopped trying. And finally, I stopped going
back. There were things that had to be done and, after all, some
distance now between us.
For a while then, there were nights I would wake to voices and
a bed unfamiliar to me. Once I screamed and they laughed at me.
The man lived in the apartment below ours. He had no thumb and
was always trying to get me to box with him. He came with eight–
ounce gloves for me once, and my mother got sore when I refused
them. She sent me to my room. And later she came in and said that
it was not him I had refused but her. "Don't you see that?" She
came to the edge of the bed, where I was, and asked me to go in
and accept the gloves. "For me," she said, "take it for me."
It
was
[or her, I tried to explain, that I couldn't.
It
was summer before she was talking to me again. She was
fat by then. You wouldn't believe all the weight that woman put on.
She couldn't get into any of her clothes and went around in a house-
