Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Now,” Rocky said after the broadcast, “it’s time for a cocktail, and I am invited.” He had his arm around Miriam’s waist. Twenty years ago they would have looked nothing alike, a dark-haired exotic beauty and a pie-faced, snub-nosed Irish comedian. But, boy, she did look like his sister now. “Where shall we go? The Mocambo?”

“I need to go home,” I said, yawning. “Promised the kids. Rock? Could I talk to you a second? Business?”

“Now?”

“Now,” I said. I backed off the stage, beckoning him with one hand, waving good-bye to Miriam with the other. I could see her face change when she realized that this was our farewell; she lifted one hand and gave a toodling wave with the ends of her fingers, like the little girl she once pretended to be. I kept backing away till we turned the corner into a hallway and we couldn’t see her.

“Not bad, huh?” said Rock. “She’ll be a regular, I think. There she was, walking out of the pancake house, and I almost told you a million times, but—”

“She’s fired,” I said.

“What? She was great. Did you hear those laughs?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “My heart can’t take it. I guess I’m lucky you didn’t bring her over to the house, but Rock, listen: I can’t do this.”

“But why ?”

I shrugged. It was sadness over what seemed to me her ruin. Fear over turning into the kid she’d dumped in Madison, Wisconsin, someone so completely abandoned he’d forget all the people who hadn’t left him. A little bit of habitual desperate lust. Years ago, I’d convinced myself that I’d only wanted to be friends with her, but I didn’t know how to do that now. I’d never had even a day’s practice.

“Okay,” said Rock, pulling at his ear. “I think it’s mean —”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Kiss her for me.”

When I got home, the kids were already asleep. “I put them to bed early,” said Jessica. “Too much of Daddy’s girlfriend on the show tonight.” She was sitting on the floor in her usual spot, her back against the sofa. I sat down next to her.

“They would have understood.”

“Maybe.” She turned and gave me a kiss on the cheek, an impersonation of our sound guy’s drawn-out ultrasuction pucker. Then she said, “You do have a girlfriend! Lipstick on your collar.”

I pulled up my collar to see. Pink. A guy in the movies could always say, “Can’t you tell? It’s my own shade.”

“I must have bumped the actress,” I said.

“Who was she?” she asked. “She was awfully good. You know me, I don’t laugh for just anyone. She really had you going, though. I mean, you were awfully good too.”

“Thanks,” I said. “The actress was just someone Rocky dug up.”

She mussed my hair fondly. “They have credits on your show, you know, at the end. ‘Playing the part of Ida Carter, Miriam Veblen.’ It’s all right.” She got up — she always stood up from the floor like she was levitating, as though it took nothing — and then pulled me to my feet. “She scared the hell out of you, huh? Come on, Romeo. I’ll fix you a snack.”

My Platinum Blonde

Children, like all of us, are sensitive to class differences. They love two kinds of grown-ups: those who address children as genuine equals, and those who act like large children themselves. Rocky was the second sort. Children could wrestle him to the ground in seconds. My own kids adored him. The rest of our sophisticated friends would say to Jake, now age five, “Are you married?” Jake was the kind of serious boy who took this kind of joking for what it was, a polite but preposterous lie. “Not yet,” he’d say. “Maybe when I’m thirty .” That left his inquisitor with nothing to do with his next line. (“Handsome guy like you? Got a girl, at least?”)

Jake’s seriousness evaporated at the first sight of Rock. He flat-out loved the guy. He even stole chocolates from his mother’s supply (she noticed, of course), to press, only slightly melted, into Rocky’s pocket. Rocky in turn brought firecrackers and comic books.

“For me?” said Jake, hopeful.

Rocky flopped on the ground and tiredly pushed his hair off his forehead so it would flop right back down, juvenile-delinquent style. “I dunno. You like these things?”

Jake nodded cautiously.

“Whattya got to trade?”

“Hey,” I said. “Are you gambling with my child?”

“I am bartering, ” said Rock. “I am trading away these very fine, hardly thumbed comic books for your house . There is no gambling involved.”

“The house is pretty big,” Jake offered. “You don’t have too many comics.”

“I’ll just take your bed,” Rocky told him, “and I’ll throw in the fireworks. The kid owns his bed, right?” he asked me.

Rock sat in the front row for all of Jessie’s recitals — usually just our kids clowning around for our friends — and applauded loudest. I couldn’t figure out how he could have been so often married without kids of his own. When we went to visit Tansy and his wife and children — talk about a fertile crescent! they had seven — Rocky brought individual presents. It took some talking to wrangle an invite, though.

“Why are you keeping your kids from us?” Rocky asked.

“Who says I’m keeping them from you ?”

If Tansy himself was small, Mrs. Tansy could hardly be seen with the naked eye. Rocky said that Jessica and I looked ready to stand on top of a wedding cake for a full-sized couple; the Tansys could have stood on ours .

Small, small people, Mr. and Mrs. T. A screen door wouldn’t keep them out of your kitchen. The children seemed normal sized, though there were so many of them it was hard to keep track of ages.

“How do you manage?” I asked Mrs. T., a good-humored, slouch-shouldered woman who loved to feign grumpiness and absentmindedness.

“Who manages?” she said. “I just figure we keep production at this level, we’re bound to turn a profit eventually.”

“Aren’t there seven kids in your family?” Tansy asked me.

“Sure, but that’s different.”

“Why? We like children. They keep showing up. We should send them to the pound?”

“I’ll take your surplus,” Rocky said. There was a set of twin Tansy girls, and they were riding around on Rocky’s feet, one twin per shoe, holding on to his belt.

“When are you going to have your own?” said Tansy.

“These’re good. They match each other, and I think they’ll spruce up the living room. I’ll take them. Fifty cents a pound sound okay?”

“We’re using those,” said Mrs. Tansy.

“We all have to pitch in, Mrs. T. I have no kids, you have extras.”

“Stop bothering Tansy’s wife,” I told him. “Bother your own wife. That’s where babies come from.”

“You better not bother me,” said Mrs. Tansy.

Later, when Mrs. Tansy had gone to put the kids to bed, which involved rounding them up as though she were a Border collie, Rocky and Tansy and I went to their dining room to smoke. The table was covered with white rings from the kids’ milk glasses, burn marks from hot dishes — the Tansys took everything casually. We sat at one end. Rocky poured himself a glass from a decanter that wore a little nameplate that said Gin , though the liquid was brown.

“Don’t think I don’t want kids,” he said. “It’s just not working out that way for Lillian.”

“Oh,” said Tansy.

“She gets pregnant, but then. .” He sighed with the hopeless mystery of it. “Four times. Probably we should—”

“You leave that poor girl alone!” said Tansy. His passion surprised both of us, probably the way Rocky’s casual confession had surprised him, and me. Rocky and I stared at him, and finally I cleared my throat and said, “You’re a fine one to talk, Mr. T.”