Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

Give Him the Business

In all our years together, I never told Rocky what killed Hattie. Sometimes it almost felt as though he planned to win her away from me, he asked so many questions. He wanted every detail. I’d shrug as though I hadn’t heard the doctor’s diagnosis.

I told him everything else, just not that.

When I was exhausted with wishing that Hattie was still alive, I wished at least she’d had a different death. I wished she had spent some time dying, in other words: I wished I could have sat on the edge of her sickbed, that I could have climbed the roof—

No. Even if I try, make myself over into Harold Lloyd or Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., my fantasy self puts one knee on my bedroom windowsill, looks down, and climbs back inside. Okay, I would sneak past Annie, then, into Hattie’s room, ready to risk some killing germ, weighed down with a board game and bagfuls of candy from the dime store. Her arms would worm out from under Annie’s fierce tucking, ready for presents.

I believed then — part of me still believes — that I had killed Hattie. I had called out, knowing she would always answer me. It must have been windy up on the roof, said Annie; it must have been slick; she must not have known how tricky it was to walk on slanted shingles. I never explained that she had plenty of practice. When Rocky asked what Hattie had died of, I wouldn’t say, because I believed that if I put it into words, it would be true. But my version of her death, the one in which I killed her, became true anyhow. Secrecy turns the slightest worry into your deepest fearful belief; over time, it builds up, a pearl inside an oyster, and that’s how carefully you guard it.

Now it seems to me that Hattie was never quite a Sharp, though I know that any of my sisters, magnified under the glass of time and regret, might seem so. Each one, you might have said: the youngest, the oldest, the kindest, the best mother, the middle girl of all those girls — she was the one we couldn’t spare.

Or me. Years later, if it had been me, someone would have said, The only boy. Surely his father’s favorite. Look, here he is among the girls in his Battenberg lace collar. He was going to go into vaudeville, you know. Uncle Mose could dance like a dream.

In all of my memories of Hattie, forever and ever, I’m looking up at her chin and dreaming of the day I’ll be tall enough to look down on the curve of her nose. (I never would have been.) She looks like an allegorical figure, like Liberty, or Grace, or the Pride of the Rock Island Line, or the Woman at Home for Whom You Fight.

She’s Hattie, though. She’s a long-nosed, curly-headed, acid-tongued, too-smart-for-her-own-good Jewish girl from Iowa, and every day I wish she were still here to boss me around.

The morning after Hattie died, my father helped me dress. That was a dance in itself, Pop holding out first my pants, then my shirt. I hopped as solemnly as I could, tried to sneak the casts on my wrists down sleeves without touching the fabric. Then I tipped up my chin to make room for his buttoning fingers.

“Sad life, sad life,” said Papa. “Sad life, Mose.”

And I thought, I am the ruined one.

Two steps closer, and I would have caught her. I was certain of this. She fell into my hands, and then my wrists gave way. I tried to remember the feel of her silk dress rushing past my palms, but I couldn’t.

That afternoon, my family sat in the sanctuary of the temple, nearly braided together on our bench: Rose lay across my lap, my father had his hand on my back beneath my jacket, Annie leaned on his shoulder, Fannie had her arm linked with Annie, then Sadie, then Ida: there was no air between us at all. My sisters’ wise husbands kept their distance: when a mother dies, a husband can comfort, can present himself and your life with him as a kind of substitute, but after the death of a sibling, a husband and children seem skimpy compared to the grief. The rabbi recited the Twenty-third Psalm, the one that told you not to be afraid of death because God walked with you always.

It wasn’t God’s company I wanted.

At home, my living sisters fussed till I had to run up the stairs and slam the door and roll in my bed with guilt for hating their kindness. You’ll miss her most, they said to me. I didn’t want that job all to myself. I fell asleep and dreamed of Hattie’s weight landing in my cradling arms, my knees bent to cushion my sudden burden, the flourish I took to display her to the neighbors: you will note that the young lady is completely unharmed . On the sidewalk, a crowd applauded. Then I dreamt that she landed right on top of me, safe, and I was the one who was killed, and I thought, as I woke, I’m happy to die .

This is how it starts, I thought: your dreams are smashed and so you stay at home and accept only what life hands over. You might as well become a shopkeeper. So I tried to take my father’s cure. I worked afternoons at the store. Men came in, a little shy over how shabbily life had treated Old Man Sharp. They shook his hand, they shook their heads, and then they conducted their business. They did not even look at me, the boy who’d failed to save his sister. I held a feather duster between my forearms and pushed stock around. The doctor had set my wrists so my hands tipped back, as though I was about to applaud.

At home, I set my wrists on my knees and stared at the casts. I’d loved my hands, though I’d never said that aloud. I’d thought them heroic. They’d rested at the small of Hattie’s back when we danced; they rose in front of me when I delivered a monologue. When I sang I let them point at my invisible and adored audience, to let them know who had broken my heart: that woman there, and that one three rows behind, and you, the blonde in lavender in the balcony. Now, locked away in plaster, they seemed small people I’d let down, friends of Hattie’s who’d always preferred her company to mine.

These things take time , I heard my sisters whisper to each other. He’ll come around , Ed Dubuque told my father. Shows what they know , I thought to myself. I did not plan on coming around. I did not plan on letting time change me at all. I spent the whole summer this way, a silent, shattered kid, three months of bad thoughts and grieving for Hattie.

In August, just before school started, I sat in my usual spot in the parlor, on the edge of our elderly horsehair sofa, the curtains shut against the afternoon sun. Rose came in and switched on the radio. She was strange, a little miniature Annie except more cheerful, and she loved the radio more than anything.

“Turn that off,” I told her. “I have a headache.”

She sat cross-legged on the carpet in front of the radio cabinet and fiddled with the knobs. “It’s time for the Fitch Shampoo Hour.”

“I don’t care.”

“ I do,” said Rose. She turned and looked at me, squint-eyed. Somewhere she owned a pair of eyeglasses that she hated. “I’m going to have my own radio program,” she said.

“No kidding,” I sighed.

She said, grandly, “I am going to introduce great musicians. Some will be live, and some will be on records. If you make it big as a singer, you can be a guest.”

Hadn’t anyone told her? I wasn’t a singer. I was a sixteen-year-old shopkeeper’s assistant. It irked me, as if she was really going to be in show business while I stayed in Vee Jay to man Sharp’s Gents’. “That’s great, Rose,” I said. “You’ll be a success. You’ve got a face for radio.”

She was almost pleased before the insult hit. Then she just stared at me, and I realized who she was: our audience. My audience. Whenever Hattie and I danced or sang or tumbled, there was Rose, watching. Sometimes she asked to join in, but mostly she listened and applauded and called for encores. She might have been good on the radio. The live musicians I wasn’t so sure of; Rose was not so awfully good with people. But the records themselves — I could see her. There’s Rose, in her hands a record as black and slick and grooved as a bandleader’s brilliantined head. She’s by herself in the studio; maybe there’s someone else on the other side of the glass, but she can’t see him for the glare. She holds the record flat between her palms, as if it’s a face she’s about to dreamily kiss. (Maybe she does kiss it, just off center of the label. If it’s French, she kisses it twice. She can almost smell the pomade.) Then she sets the record on the player. Then she sets the tone arm on the record. Then in homes across the city, maybe across America, living rooms and kitchens and Hollywood bathrooms with starlets in bubbly tubs, Rose’s one action takes place.