Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

But he didn’t die. Over and over he didn’t die.

Now Rocky shook his flask at me. “I’ve already cabled them,” he said. “I signed your name. It’s all set.”

“Oy vey, ” I said. My hands and feet began to prickle with fear. “No—”

“You’ve already said yes. You can’t just change your mind. You promised me.”

“When did I ever—”

“We were thirty-two miles southeast of Chicago, sitting in the dining car of the Wolverine. You said, ‘Next time. I promise.’ It’s next time. You promised . Me, and now the rest of the Sharenskys.”

“Goddamn your memory.” I massaged my eyebrows, which for some reason usually calmed me. “Rocky. Rocky. I’ll—”

“Don’t break our hearts, Mosey,” he said quietly.

I sighed. He had me. It was one thing not to go home; it was another thing to say I would and then not show up, even though I hadn’t said I would. I sat down on the sofa. Something broke beneath the cushion — a plate, maybe. I held out my hand for the flask. “Okay. Good God. Why on earth? I guess we could.”

“Sure!” said Rock. “And I’ll stay in a nice hotel — the Corn Cob Arms, that the best one?”

“The Fort Des Moines,” I said.

“The Fort Des Moines. And maybe you can invite poor goyishe me over for dinner so I can meet your sisters. I’ve been dreaming about those sisters for a while now. I mean, I’d never be unfaithful to Rose, but I’d like to get a gander at the whole sorority. How many are there? Thirty-six?”

“Five,” I said.

He said, “Annie-Ida-Fannie-Sadie-Hattie-Rose.”

“Five living sisters,” I said, “and three of those are married.”

He took back his flask and toasted. “Many a fine woman is.”

Rocky and I got separate sleepers for our trip West. “No more berths for us!” he declared. In Chicago, we’d change for the the Rock Island Rocket.

“You’ll get off in Des Moines,” I said, consulting the timetable in the dining car. “And I’ll—”

“We’ll both get off in West Des Moines,” Rock said.

“There is no West Des Moines,” I explained, but there it was in print, the next stop after Rock Island Station, right where Valley Junction should be.

“Annie wrote you,” said Rocky. “They changed the name last year. And I’m coming with you.”

“That’s not—”

“Yes, it is. First West Des Moines née Valley Junction. Then I’ll investigate the fleshpots of Des Moines, and you’ll reconvene with your sisters.” He thought I’d bolt. I’d keep going west till I got to Nebraska.

You would have thought he was the one going to meet his family, whom he loved. In the dining car he wondered what Annie would cook.

“Green beans,” I said. “And cookies that taste like pencil drawings of cookies.”

“I can’t wait.” He sighed. “And to see little Rose, all grown up. Do you think she’ll remember me? Do you think she’s been true?”

“Rocky.”

“Little Rose Sharensky. I do love that girl. . ”

“Why did you do this to me?” I asked. I swiveled to sit sideways in the booth, then got a little motion sick and swiveled back.

“You’re not mad, are you? You’re going home a hero!”

“Of course I’m mad,” I said. “I don’t want to do this. You’re making me.”

“You know what I’ve never understood about you?” said Rocky. “I’m being serious now. Tell me why you left home.”

“You know why,” I said.

“Okay, so let me tell you why I left home. My father once beat me because I left my homework on the sofa.”

My father, a shopkeeper, wanted me to inherit his store.

“My mother once refused to talk to me for three weeks because she thought I’d taken more than my share of sugar. I was eleven,” said Rocky.

My father wanted me to work beside him every day, to be his right-hand man.

“My parents once went on a research trip to Ontario. They left me at home with a list of things not to touch. I was nine.”

My sisters wanted to see me become, like my father, a pillar of the community. They wanted me to marry a nice Jewish girl and have children and never leave Iowa.

“My mother told me I had ruined her education. My father told me I had ruined my mother. My mother said she hated the sight of me. My father said he despised my voice.”

My family worried, worried, worried about me, until I couldn’t breathe.

“And you know what? We write. We talk on the phone. They can’t stand me and I love them, and what’s kept me on the road is that someday they’ll go into a movie theater and see my face and maybe for a moment think, Look at the kid! Who wouldn’t love him? But you,” he said.

“Me.”

“You ran away from home because your family loves you too much!”

I tried to smile at every single person in the dining car: Nothing wrong here, folks. An olive-skinned girl in a violet blouse gave me a sympathetic look before turning to gossip with her friends. I wanted to go and join them. “Sshh. That’s not it.”

“Right, right, right, your sister died and she would have been a star and you made a promise and you’ll kill yourself to keep it. But she never would have made it in vaudeville, you know that.”

“Rocky—”

“Look, I’ll leave Hattie alone. She’s dead, she’s wonderful — I’m sorry, it’s just that your cowardice on this subject, it gives me a headache. I don’t understand it. And the reason I sent that cable was because I knew — don’t fool yourself, I know everything about you, I know every stupid secret — is that once you see your sisters and your father and that store, which, I assure you, you have escaped for all time, you will be happier and less fearful. And that will make me happier. And possibly less fearful. For Christ’s sake,” he said bitterly, “I’m tired of your moods.”

He pushed away his china dinner plate and glared at me. There was a trail of grease down his shirt from where he’d dropped a piece of ham steak. Then he got up from the table. “Please, Professor,” he said. “Don’t fuck this up for me.” He turned and left for his sleeper.

I didn’t know this before, but it is comparatively easy to pick up a girl in a dining car if she sees you being bullied by a fat man, even if she doesn’t speak English.

In the morning he was contrite. He knocked on the door of my room — the sympathetic Portuguese girl (I think she was Portuguese) had gone back to her friends before dawn — with a plate of scrambled eggs in his hands, which he managed to eat standing up, despite the train’s shimmying. “I got things on my mind,” he said. “I don’t mean to take them out on you.”

“What things?” I asked.

He waved his fork dismissively in the air. “You know. Everything. I just don’t want you to worry. You’ll see your family. We’ll have a nice meal. Rose and I will make our wedding plans. Then we’ll all go out to California and make movies.”

“All of us?”

“Sure. Annie play the oboe or something? We’ll find a spot for her. She’ll give ZaSu Pitts a run for the money. We’ll invite all the Sharps into the act.”

That’s what I was afraid of.

We stepped off the train into an ice-blue afternoon. There would have been frost on the ground that morning. West Des Moines, huh? It was as though Valley Junction had been forced into a bad marriage, and decided to put on a brave face. I was wearing one of my old Sharp’s Gents’ suits out of nostalgia and realized, for the first time, that I’d gotten a little taller and a little wider since I’d left. My wrists hung out of the sleeves and the wind bit at them.