Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

Marry Me, Barry came out the first week of 1946, my favorite year ever. Rocky arrived at Jake’s second birthday party with a bottom-heavy dishwater-blond woman in a Chinese dress that made her look more Ming vase than Suzie Wong. “This is Lillian,” he said. Lillian cleared her throat and raised a set of eyebrows so plucked they looked like two columns of marching ants. Rocky slapped her shoulder. She cleared her throat again. “Oh!” said Rocky. “Of course. My current wife.” Current, Lillian mouthed to herself, and hooked her arm through his arm. He’d married the interior decorator he’d hired to spiff up his now obsolete bachelor pad. I put out my hand for my money, and Rock obliged.

The war was over, and Carter and Sharp — like everyone else — were out of uniform and full of optimism. I was a father in peacetime: I’d won the war for them, hadn’t I? A father of three — in May, we brought home our postwar boom baby, Betty. Okay, then: three kids, just right.

I loved my sons, no mistake, but I’d never longed for an heir. What I wanted was a girl baby, a baby girl, and that’s what we called her: the baby. Where’s the baby? How are you, baby? Hey, over there, you know who you are? The baby.

“I want one of those,” Rocky said, when he came to meet her, bringing with him a box of chocolates and a giant, scowling teddy bear that looked like Lon Chaney, Jr.

“Not this one.” The baby was cuddled into the crook of my arm. Already I’d decided we were each other’s favorite. She liked to slip her fingers between my shirt buttons, and she had a luxurious sigh when she was happy. In her crib, she’d sob; all she wanted was to be held, all the time, round the clock, and I obliged her. “Let her cry it out,” Jessie suggested. “Your mother’s heartless,” I told the baby, rescuing her from her misery.

I bought Jess a fur coat to celebrate. I hadn’t planned to: I’d just gone to the Wilshire Bullock’s, looking for a present, and I was assured that any woman’s dearest wish was a fur. “Really?” I said.

“Sir,” said the salesgirl. That was all she said, but she made it sound significant.

Who knew? I was out of the habit of women, so maybe I’d once known this fact and forgotten. The salesgirl offered me a pink-upholstered chair, and then she had other girls — models? store employees? aspiring actresses who’d happened by and heard I was there? — don the coats in the dressing room and then parade in front of my chair. Well, I’d have to shop for women’s clothing more often. Who knew the merchandise would have actual women in it? Pretty girls in fur coats, trying their best to act rich and privileged.

I knew, at least, that Jessica would not wear a full-length fur coat. She’d want something a little more eccentric, something you could use as a prop. Out came a blond girl in a short white coat, ermine, I think, though it could have been Samoyed.

“Let me see that one on a brunette,” I asked. So the girl turned around and left. They thought it more elegant not to let me see them put the furs on, and I couldn’t think of a way to ask without sounding filthy. They merely walked out of the dressing room as though they’d been born wearing fur, and opened one wing of the coat to display the satin lining: camel or black or silvery white. Just one wing: a woman in a fur coat did not fly, she was chauffered. I would have loved to have seen the blond girl take off that pale fur made of whatever unfortunate animal, careful not to let her ring snag the satin, and hand it over to the brunette, help her on with it, let the weight and the leftover warmth settle.

But I couldn’t ask. I just bought the coat.

When Jessica lifted the lid off the box, she said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

“What?” I said.

She saw how she’d hurt my feelings, and said, softly, “A fur coat? We live in California. It’s summer.”

“So?”

“I can’t.” She pulled the coat from its box and laid it on her lap, as though it were a dead beloved pet. Several of them. She stroked the fur. My wife was not someone who made nice over unsuccessful gifts: she believed that was both dishonest and wasteful. “We’ll send it to Annie. Iowa winters are cold.” We’d visited Des Moines summers since the end of the war, and Jessie, an older sister herself, was particularly fond of the oldest Sharp girl.

“Do you recall how many sisters I have? If I send one to her, I have to send one to everybody.”

“Then return it,” she said. “The store will take it back.”

She knew I never would.

“Okay,” I told her. “We’ll send it to Annie. I’ll swing by Bullock’s and buy out the department. You work on commission, or something?”

I imagined my oldest sister, by then in her fifties, in this coat that had been modeled that very day by two pretty girls. Annie would wear it to Friday-night services at the temple, explaining that it was a gift from her brother. She’d offer up an arm to any interested party: go ahead, feel . Annie had, as she had aged, developed a weakness for foolishness and grandeur. Her roommate, Bessie Mackintosh, an old school chum, was foolish and grand herself. She’d moved in after Rose had married Ed, and now Annie and Bessie lived in my childhood home, two plump midwestern ladies who had pooled their money and their family china.

“It’s so practical of Annie,” my sister Ida wrote; we were all glad that Annie did not have to live alone. Practical, yes, I agreed. Our last visit home, when I kissed Annie — who’d always seemed perfumed by boiled parsnips — I noticed that she smelled wonderful, like hot spice. Then I kissed Bessie, who did too. Annie told me, looking fondly at her friend, “Bessie is my best girl.” I knew that she would not believe that they smelled the same, that she was in any way like Bessie: who, Annie would say to me, was anything like Bessie?

I sent Annie the original fur, and my other sisters near duplicates. “Thank you for the beautiful coat,” Annie wrote back to me. “We take turns wearing it.” And so I went back to the store — I must have been a running joke by then, it’s amazing my habits didn’t turn up in the gossip columns — and bought the same style in a different, darker animal, and sent it to Bessie. I wasn’t thinking, of course: taking turns was part of the pleasure of the fur, the settling weight, the leftover warmth.

I Will Be a Sister to You

Tuesday nights I kissed my kids and wife and then drove down to the radio studio for the Carter and Sharp Show. A show-business father has access to all kinds of magic working stiffs don’t: my family turned on the radio and — though they’d seen me walk out the door minutes before! — heard my voice in the playroom (or living room, or kitchen, or dance studio; our house was crazy for radios). There he is, plain as day: Daddy.

Jessica tried to explain it to them. Jake, at three, was scientifically inclined and understood how my voice could make it through a bramble of electrical wires and atmosphere and arrive at our house, but was puzzled by the things I said; Nate, two, knew I was pretending but figured I must be hiding in a closet as a joke. As for the baby, she crawled across the floor and tried to turn up the volume, smart girl. Jessica was never sure about letting them listen to their old man talking such nonsense with their uncle Rocky — at home we all got along, so why did I always sound so angry with him Tuesday nights at seven? Sometimes when I got home, they’d grill me.

“How come, Daddy, did you do that?” Jake asked.

“Do what, sweetheart?”

“Hit him?”

“I didn’t,” I said, and he, the literal kid, gave me a dirty look, and said, “I heard .”