Amy Bloom - Lucky Us

Dorothy pulled Coca-Cola bottles out of a red chest and they all drank their sodas, silently. Danny thought the visit seemed so likely to go bad. The gold hinges. The frosty bottles of Coca-Cola. The privacy. In Ruthie’s house, which was more like a normal house, there was always a mother or an aunt swinging by purposefully to see that there was no nonsense and no scuffing of the floor and no eating of things meant for dinner. It was like the Berman house was empty.

Dorothy cleared her throat and went back to the soda fountain. She indicated with her chin and Ruthie and Danny sat down at their bistro table, with the red-and-white leather seats. Dorothy put her hand to her heart.

“Good morning, heartache, what’s new?… I’ve got those Monday blues, straight through Sunday blues …,” she sang. “Sit down.”

It was worse than before. It was beautiful and breathtaking, the kind of performance Clara Williams talked about sometimes. It was giving voice to the heartache of being Dorothy Berman, which Danny thought was a lot. Dorothy was the apple of no one’s eye. Her mother drove her to school every day in a clean dark-blue Caddy, and dressed her as if she were a fairy-tale princess, in wide pink skirts with a petticoat and party shoes, and it only made her look worse.

Danny leaned toward Ruthie, so they’d be in it together, and Ruthie, who usually pulled away, leaned toward him. Dorothy threw her head back, showing her fat little neck, and the pink neon letters behind the soda fountain lit up the tiny hairs on her jaw and her gold locket and she sang blue and low and slow. She sang like Billie Holiday. Clara said that Billie Holiday woke up crying. Clara said that if you sing the blues, you know that if you can’t make friends with grief, you’ve got to at least make way for it.

Dorothy curtsied and joined them at their table.

“I’m pretty good,” she said, and she was so pleased with herself, Danny felt better. “How about a game?”

Danny and Ruthie knew dodgeball. Ruthie was good at double Dutch and Danny was very good at shooting marbles. He relaxed. He knew how to play games.

“Let’s go over here,” Dorothy said.

“Over here” was the storeroom, beyond the soda fountain (Dorothy called it the lounge). It was stocked with cases of soda, boxes of crackers, tins of sardines, plastic boxes of drink stirrers and frilled toothpicks, little glass jars of curled anchovies.

“Each one of us will go in and then come out and do something … surprising. Danny, you come out and surprise me and Ruthie first.”

Ruthie and Danny looked at each other. Ruthie liked to scare Danny because he was easy to scare, and once she fried his hair flat and steaming with a hot comb and once Danny picked a handful of honeysuckles and stuck the bunch under Ruthie’s nose, which did surprise her. This wasn’t that.

Dorothy turned on the light and pushed Danny in and shut the door. Danny rested his forehead on a case of crackers, sweating, until Dorothy finally opened the door. She looked disappointed. Ruthie looked at Danny and said, “Dorothy, you go. You’re the one who knows how to do this. We’re just guests.” She said “guests” like it was code for idiots and Dorothy smiled and pushed them both out.

Danny and Ruthie sat with their empty Coca-Cola bottles. Dorothy came out in her underpants, with a serious look, holding a big blue box of matches.

Danny put his hand on top of Ruthie’s. Ruthie said, “Thankyouforhavingus.” Danny said, “SeeyouMonday.” They ran past the old lady who had let them in and past the little black dogs with the bows on their heads, past the gold clocks in the front hall and the gold faucets in the front hall bathroom, and they walked, very quickly, to the corner.

The corner was no help. The corner was a thick green carpet of lawn and another big house with columns set far back from the lawn. You could see water past the house.

Ruthie said, “I’ll sit over there and you ring the doorbell and you ask can you call home for someone to come get us now.” Ruthie was very careful to say someone and Danny appreciated it. Ruthie didn’t say a thing when his mother died, because it was too terrible to even talk about and when he and his aunt Eva moved from the Torellis’ to Old Tree Lane, just three blocks from Ruthie’s, surrounded by other small houses, with nothing but a picnic table and their rusty tetherball set instead of the Torelli pool, all Ruthie said was, “It’s nice.”

Eva would be at work, telling people’s fortunes. Eva would say, Oh, big guy, is there any way you can take the bus?

Danny said, “You ring the doorbell and call your mother. I’ll sit here.”

They had been secret best friends for a long time. Danny knew that Ruthie would be better at bell-ringing because she had a way about her, but he knew that this was not a neighborhood with Negro girls in it. Danny knew that he should offer to go to the door, because he was white, but he was almost pissing himself already and when the lady of the house asked him why he was standing on her doorstep, he knew he would throw up on her black pumps. They walked back to Dorothy Berman’s house, where Dorothy sat on a stone bench, in the middle of her vast front lawn, fully dressed, her bare feet on a granite tortoise, sipping a Coke.

“You guys,” she said fondly. “Where’d ya go?”

DOROTHY TOOK THEM UPSTAIRS. They trooped past the old lady, who opened and closed her mouth while she slept in the library. Dorothy Berman’s room was the most beautiful thing Danny had ever seen. It gleamed. It shimmered. The silver centers of the embroidered pink daisies on her bedspread shone. She had her own pink velveteen couch, which Ruthie was edging toward, and she had a pink-and-white desk, with a white wood desk chair. The cushion on the chair matched the pink and silver and white pillows on her bed. There were eight pillows for nothing but decoration, two of them shaped like stars.

Danny wanted to sprawl out on the bed. He would take his shoes off and his belt, and then he would stretch his arms under the covers and feel the silk all over him. He would roll off his socks, where the girls couldn’t see him. It was very hard to just stand there and not touch any of the pretty, pointless, expensive things. He wanted to chase Dorothy Berman out of the house and tear through the rooms, ripping and running, and then set it all on fire. Fire trucks would roar up, Dorothy Berman and her stupid dogs would sit on the big front lawn and eight firemen in their black-and-yellow coats would pull out their hoses and there’d be nothing left of the Bermans’ house but black wood and wet grass. It was good luck, Danny thought, that Joey Torelli hadn’t had a room like this. Joey had a nice room, with a carved headboard and curtains with sailboats on them and fancy lights with sailboats painted on them, but he didn’t have anything like this, so Danny had never wanted to kill Joey.

DOROTHY OPENED HER TOY chest. She had Monopoly and Sorry! and Chutes and Ladders. Ruthie said, Let’s play Sorry. Monopoly can take all day, she said.

They played through a game of Chutes and Ladders. “Some people call it ‘Snakes and Ladders,’ ” Dorothy said, and Ruthie and Danny nodded. With another girl, Ruthie might have rolled her eyes and Danny would have shrugged, but the image of cheerful, saucy Dorothy in her blue-sprigged underpants and the big blue box of matches, Dorothy’s smooth white chest, her two chubby little mounds and her rosy nipples, and all of these very disturbing things together rose up in front of him when Dorothy spoke. Danny saw her sailing down a chute, brown curls gleaming in the sun. She climbed the ladder and Danny could see her bottom in her underpants. Dorothy smiled when Ruthie beat her and when Ruthie eyed the four gold lockets lying on Dorothy’s pink dresser, Dorothy put one in Ruthie’s hand. “ ’Til butter flies,” Dorothy said. “I can give you one too,” Dorothy said, and Danny put his hands in his pockets.