Lesley Kagen - Good Graces

At the breakfast table, freshly shaved and smelling like starch, Dave tells me over crispy bacon and scrambled eggs, “Good news, Sally! Alfred Molinari was spotted in a park yesterday afternoon by the Racine police.”

“I…” I desperately want to tell my father that those cops should get their eyes tested. Let him know that if I hadn’t woken up last night, Molinari would’ve slid over our windowsill, stuffed Troo under his arm and took off to someplace where he could torture her in private before I was able to scream bloody murder. But in this sunny kitchen with the smell of just-cut grass coming through the window and the birds singing their hearts out and coffee percolating, I keep my lips zipped. Troo’d never talk to me again if I give Dave a clue to Molinari’s recent whereabouts. My sister doesn’t want Detective Rasmussen to be the one to catch Greasy Al. She needs to be the one who hangs him by his thumbs.

Dave flaps open the Milwaukee Sentinel and sticks his nose in the sports section, his favorite part. “Big game tonight,” he says.

He doesn’t mean that the Braves are playing out at County Stadium. He’s talking about the one that’s going to happen over at the playground later on. The one game of the summer that nobody in the neighborhood misses.

Mother, who looks lovely in a creamy blouse, lights up a cigarette and says, “We’ll be there rootin’ for you, right, girls?”

The urge to tell Dave about Greasy Al paying us a visit last night is so powerful, but I can’t face the rest of my life with my sister not speaking to me, I just can’t. So I tell him, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Go get ’em, tiger.”

Troo doesn’t wish him good luck. She gives Dave a dirty look, stabs her fork down at her plate and doesn’t even thank him for making her French toast.

Iwill always love baseball the same way Daddy did. Unfortunately, coming to these games puts me in a pickle. I spend most of every inning thinking about how much he would love being here on a hot summer night and how bad I miss feeling his hairy arm pressed against mine, the look of his chipped-tooth smile after a really great play and how he’d jump to his feet and shout, “That’s showin’ ’em who’s boss!”

How do you make yourself forget?

It’s the Policemen (The Clobbering Coppers) versus the Feelin’ Good Cookie men (Chips Off the Old Block) under the playground’s big lights tonight. I’m sitting high up so I can get a bird’s-eye view, but not of the action out on the diamond. I’m memorizing the faces of the people coming and going. I’m looking for Greasy Al. It would be so simple for him to blend into this crowd and bide his time, especially if he was wearing a disguise like a black beard or something. After the ninth inning, he could stream out the gates with everybody else and hurry to hide between houses to follow a little girl named Troo O’Malley home. When I least expected it, that’s when he’d reach out from behind a tree and grab her. I gotta keep my eyes peeled and this is no easy job.

The bleachers around the diamond are always packed when these two teams go at each other. The last time they played it got kinda heated up and nobody talked to anybody for about a week. Mr. Jessup, who is the regular ump, is pretty strict. He got on everybody’s nerves so bad reciting the rules of the game that one of the factory men yelled out from the crowd, “Shut up already with the sermon on the mound,” and then somebody else offered Dave ten dollars to shoot Mr. Jessup and it went downhill from there.

That’s why Father Mickey is behind home plate tonight. Nobody would dare question his infallible calls. Troo is chatting up a storm with him. Usually she doesn’t like people to fidget with her, so I’m shocked when Father licks his finger and rubs it across a smudge on her cheek and she doesn’t seem to mind at all. Her religious instruction must be going really, really well, so that’s at least one thing I can like about him.

Wendy Latour comes skipping through the playground gates with the rhinestone tiara on her head and when she spots me, she spreads her legs and shouts out the same way she always does, “Thally O’Malley, hi, hi, hi!” After she throws me lots of See the USA in your Chevrolet Dinah Shore kisses, she tries to crawl up the bleachers to give me one of her enormous hugs, but she steps on somebody’s hand so Artie has to pull her back. He is really taking Charlie Fitch’s running away to heart. He looks like the “Wreck of the Hesperus,” which I have never actually seen but sounds pretty bad. All wrecks are.

Mary Lane’s mother musta given her a Toni Home Permanent Wave and left it in too long. She looks like she got struck by lightning. She is strolling alongside Fire Chief Bailey’s son, Skip, probably asking him about different and better ways to start fires. She set one last night at the empty television repair store on Lisbon Street. It’s not seeing a place burn down that she likes so much. It’s the trucks that come to put out the fire that she adores. She would like to drive a hook and ladder someday, but that will never happen because they’re called fire men and not fire women , but that’s one of the other reasons I like her so much. She holds on to her dreams even if they’re bound to go up in smoke.

I can see Willie O’Hara playing rock, paper, scissors with Debbie, the peppy counselor, and Fast Susie Fazio is leaning against one of the swing poles. She’s flirting with her boyfriend, The Mangling Meatball. Her long black hair is swishing back and forth across her bosoms that are pushing at the seams of her white blouse like they’re trying to make a break for it.

When Father Mickey shouts out, “Play ball,” I make sure to watch that Troo comes right over to sit behind me in the bleachers in the spot I saved for her. She’s kicking me in the back every two seconds, so that’s good. There’s no sign of Greasy Al, but at least I know where she is.

The police team moves ahead of the factory guys in the second inning. Mother claps and so do I when Dave makes a double play, stretching off third base to catch the ball that was fired at him by shortstop Detective Riordan, who is the man that Aunt Betty Callahan is currently going gaga over. (She mighta had a few too many breath-freshening nips of her peppermint schnapps before the game. Her old friend Father Mickey has to call a time-out when she wobbles out on the blacktop in her red high heels to give Detective Riordan a smooch after that double play.)

Our half sister Nell has come to the game to cheer for her husband, who lost his job at Fillard’s Service Station and is now working up at the factory. Nell nodded our way, but didn’t come over to sit with us. She found a spot in the bleachers on the first-base side for her and Peggy Sure. That’s the name of her baby. She was supposed to be called Peggy Sue after the Buddy Holly song, but the lady in the office at St. Joe’s who fills out the birth certificates, Mrs. Sladky, wrote the name down wrong in ink. Troo thinks Mrs. Sladky played a prank because Peggy Sure was born on April 1, but my sister’s wrong. (The woman doesn’t have a funny bone in her body. Believe me. She was my Brownie leader. That battle-ax only took the job because she likes to boss children around with scissors in her hand.)

During the fourth inning, I cross over to the factory bleachers and squeeze in next to Nell because she looks like she could use a friend and Daddy always told me, “Be nice to her, Sal. She is not the worst big sister in the world. There might be two or three worse.”

Nell doesn’t even say hello before she hands me a diaper, two pins and the baby. “I’m sick of changin’ her,” she says. “You do it.”