In the Country of Queens Page 3

  No one knew how much Shirley wanted to see heaven and the Smile of the Great Spirit and sit in a blue canoe on Lake Winni Pee except for Phillie. Phillie also knew how much Shirley hated being a too-old camper at Breezy Bay Day Camp, where she would get a Clean Plate Award for eating all of her spaghetti with meat sauce that looked like blood and guts. And make unnatural nature projects from pine cones and acorn tops with sticky, runny Elmer’s glue that turned all white and hard and bumpy when it dried.

  Shirley knew that going to Lake Winni Pee was one thing she could fix if she just spoke up. “Which I plan to do one day soon,” she whispered to herself. “When my courage comes in. Or I’ll be like Pippi Longstocking, whose courage never leaves her plucky self. Ever.” Pippi Longstocking had been Shirley’s comfort book ever since she’d first read it in second grade. Comfort came from different directions in especially trying times.

  “Aunt Rosalie,” Shirley practiced, “I’ve wanted to go with you guys to Lake Winnipesaukee for a long time. But I never told you because I realize I’m not part of your immediate family and this is your annual summer vacation, and if you wanted me to come, you would have invited me yourself. But I know I’d love it and you wouldn’t have to worry about me drowning because I got a swimming award when I was eight at Breezy Bay Day Camp, which I wouldn’t have to go to this year if I went to Lake Winnipesaukee with all of you.”

  But until she worked up her courage, Shirley would have to settle for a wish—that the Barretts would invite her to go with them. That really wasn’t so bad because a person never knew when a wish would magically turn into the real thing. Like when Phillie wished for his very own pet to go along with the Barretts’ dog, Porky, who belonged to everyone in his family. Harry, the amazing and exotic Brazilian piranha, appeared a few days later in a bowl on Phillie’s doorstep. Complete with fish food and instructions from Mr. Hodges, the oil deliveryman, who had to move in with his daughter and her fierce fish-eating cat. Too bad for Mr. Hodges, but lucky for Phillie—and Harry, who got to go to Lake Winnipesaukee last year with Phillie and his family. If my wish came true, Shirley thought, then I wouldn’t have to speak up. Wouldn’t that be something!

  Then feeling especially clever and suddenly as plucky as Pippi, Shirley made up her own tile game sentence: “My name is Shir-ley Al-ice Burns, and I am in here because my moth-er thinks she knows ev-er-y-thing.” Twenty-five tiles, twenty-five syllables.

  “Shirley, are you done?” Anna called. “Fifteen minutes until we have to get ready for ballet. Are you getting excited?”

  “Almost,” Shirley called back. Was she excited about going to ballet? No way. “But I am excited about lighting up the Palace!” she whispered, reaching for some matches that Anna kept on a shelf for when she needed to smoke a Benson & Hedges.

  At first Shirley had trembled at the idea of striking a match because she was afraid she might burn her fingers, her knees, or the beauty spot on her left thigh. But after lots of practice, she was now an expert. First she opened the window so Anna wouldn’t smell anything. Then she placed six sections of White Cloud toilet paper in the sink. She took out a match and closed the matchbook cover before striking the red tip and lighting an impressive fire in the sink. Shirley quickly blew out the match and announced quietly, “Voilà!” (French for “There it is!”—say: “vwa-la”). “The fabulous Shirley Burns has worked her magic once again, transforming a dreary bathroom into a veritable Palace of Light!”

  If anyone ever discovered that I, the shy and mousy Shirley Alice Burns, lit a fire in the bathroom, Shirley thought, I would be in big trouble.

  Shirley looked down at her watch. Thirty minutes would soon be history. She found the small Phillips screwdriver that she kept hidden behind the toilet. She tightened the loose doorknob from inside the bathroom the way Luke once showed her. Then she noticed that the shower curtain was lopsided because one of the plastic rings had come apart. Standing on the edge of the bathtub, Shirley tugged up the curtain and snapped together the ends of the ring through the perfect hole-punched opening at the top. She checked the bathtub for spiders—to save Anna the trouble and to spare her own ears: Shirleeey, I need you to get this monster out of here this second before it kills me! But there were no spiders; there was only one measly moth that unfortunately turned to dust in Shirley’s fingers as she attempted to let it go free out the window.

  “Sorry, buddy,” said Shirley.

  Shirley wished she could fix everything. But some things were just not fixable. “I understand that,” she whispered. “Like I can’t fix my father so he isn’t dead. Or the photo of my mother dancing without him because I don’t have the missing piece. Or Anna so she isn’t so stormy. Or myself because I am a perennial chicken like Grandma’s perennial sweet william that comes back every year in her flower garden.”

  Shirley could hear Anna crooning like Frank Sinatra this time: “Do dooo doooo, do doo do do do do doooo…”

  She stuck her feet into her bunny slippers, which were the same soft, fuzzy material as the bath mat and the toilet seat cover, and tied her robe around her pink kitten pajamas, sewn by Grandma. Then she closed the window, wiped up what was left of the ashy fire with some downy White Cloud, dumped the toilet-paper-and-ash lump into the toilet, flushed, opened the door, and told Anna that it completely slipped her mind to call her in to inspect.

  “Are you sure you did something, Shirley?” Anna asked, sounding concerned.

  “Yes, Mom. I did lots of things,” said Shirley, sounding confident.

  It’s too bad that I’m only brave in the Palace of Light, she thought. But now I have to get ready to catch the first of two buses to Madame Makarova’s Royal Academy of Ballet for unaspiring ballerinas like moi. (French for “me”—say: “mwah.”)

  “You’re so lucky, Shirley,” said Anna as Shirley pulled on her black leotard. “I wish my mother had given me ballet lessons.” She handed Shirley her round patent-leather case with the perfect pink ballerina stenciled on the front.

  Grandma, hugging Shirley goodbye, had clearly heard Anna’s lament but didn’t say a word. Nobody messed with Hurricane Anna. Not even Hurricane Grandma.

  Chapter 4

  DANCE, BALLERINA, DANCE

  If Shirley had her way, the round black patent-leather case with the butter-soft Capezio ballet slippers inside would roll into the aisle of the bus toward the fancy lady with the Barricini chocolate shopping bag who was patiently waiting by the door to get off.

  The fancy lady would try to stop the ballet case from rolling with her foot, but would just miss. Anna would cry for help as if a thief had run off with the secondhand designer purse that she had gotten on layaway at Mr. Joseph’s. Shirley would ask, “How could that have happened?” and pump her heel up and down to give Anna the impression that she was trying her hardest to free her shoe from a mound of gum on the floor. But actually, Shirley would chase after the case when and only when she looked out the window and saw it lying in the street, flattened like one of Grandma’s potato pancakes.

  “It was a freak accident,” Shirley would tell Anna, once she was back on the bus.

  When they arrived at the bus stop where the next bus would be waiting to take them to Madame Makarova’s Royal Academy of Ballet, Anna would tell the driver sadly, “We are not going to ballet class today, Vince.” Then Shirley and Anna would have to go all the way home again. Can’t do ballet without my Capezio slippers. How perfect would that be? Shirley asked herself smugly.

  Truthfully, Shirley dreaded her Saturday ballet classes so much that to make herself feel less anxious, she had secretly taken to calling her teacher Madame Macaroni. A name much more fitting, since Shirley had absolutely no aspirations to prima ballerina–dom. But try to explain that to Anna, Shirley would not, not in a million years. In fact, that very ballet case with the pink ballerina stenciled on the front was securely positioned between Shirley’s feet. She looked out the window. “Blech,” she mumbled. “We’re almost there.”

  “You
know,” said Anna, pointing with her chin to the ballerina on the case, “I could have been like her. Look at these long arms, skinny legs, and strong toes.” Anna gracefully extended her extremities.

  Shirley looked over even though she’d seen Anna’s extremities and witnessed their boundless grace many times a day for almost twelve years.

  “If I couldn’t be a ballerina,” Anna said, sighing wistfully, “then I wanted my little girl to be one.”

  Whether I like it or not, Shirley thought, remembering how, since she was five, Anna had coached her to stand as straight as an arrow, stretch her knees like a rubber band, be as floaty as a feather on her feet, and make her hands wavy like wings instead of stiff like wires.

  * * *

  When the class began, Madame Makarova pounded out chords on an old upright piano as she bellowed, “First position, second position, all with grace.”

  First base, second base is where I want to be, Shirley told herself, longing for the No Ball Playing field at Sparrowood Gardens. Shirley stifled a laugh, but she had to be careful. If Madame Macaroni didn’t catch her chortling, Anna would, watching every choppy pirouette through the one-way mirror. Some handy person like Luke had installed it so that parents paying a lot of money could watch a class of mostly ungraceful children trying to appear graceful.

  Shirley would have traded places with Anna in two wags of a dog’s tail. She pulled her leotard out in the back. The elastic made a loud snapping sound that caught the attention of Madame Macaroni, who was adjusting someone’s arabesque. Shirley looked sheepishly away.

  As she went up-down, up-down, holding on to the rigid ballet barre, she promised herself she would not fail her mother. After all, if Anna could walk over the bridge to the subway on workday mornings instead of taking the bus, if she could bring her lunch and not buy it at the automat downtown, and if she could resist the alluring Marcella Borghese lipsticks in the window of Woolworth’s just to pay for ballet lessons, then Shirley felt she had no right to be a spoiled brat and complain.

  Shirley’s dance classes were the only things Anna managed to save her money for. Anna was forever laying away one thing or another from Mr. Joseph’s to make their crummy apartment into a mini museum. This month’s purchases included a big jade ashtray with wooden legs and a ceramic statue of a smiling Bambi whose head Anna’s friend Hal decided was the perfect place to hang his hat whenever he and his cigar came for a visit—which was way too often, in Shirley’s opinion.

  The thought of Hal made Shirley’s blood boil. She did deeper knee bends, held her legs extra-straight, jumped higher than she’d ever jumped before, and sweated.

  “Good hard work today, Shirley, my ballerina girl!” praised Anna when they met in the waiting room after class. Shirley beamed.

  As she and Anna walked to the Stationhouse Diner for lunch, Shirley daydreamed about the attached house she was saving for her and Anna and Grandma to live in. There would be plenty of room for Anna’s layaways, Grandma’s sewing stuff, and her own dioramas, which at the moment were lined up under her bed due to a serious lack of private space in the bedroom that she shared with Hurricane Anna.

  In the meantime, Anna was forever short of money and Shirley usually had to lend her some till payday. Shirley had the money to lend because she saved the two-dollar allowance she got each week from Hal. The trouble was that if Shirley didn’t thank Hal profusely, Anna would poke her under the Sunday dinner table to remind her. Shirley tried not to let that happen, even though she didn’t want to talk to Hal about anything—much less thank him.

  “Don’t you adore ballet?” Hurricane Anna asked at the Stationhouse Diner, having just blown away a lady who tried to sit next to her at the counter because Shirley hadn’t been nervy enough to put her rear on the seat first.

  “I like ballet,” Shirley answered, blushing raspberry red at the sound of her untruth. She couldn’t quite bring herself to utter the word adore but had to admit she was pleased at Anna’s smile.

  “Don’t forget that Hal’s coming over for Father’s Day dinner tomorrow,” Anna said.

  Hal’s job was to fill store windows from Brooklyn to Bridgeport with props to lure people in to buy new shoes, samples of which he generously brought on his Sunday visits. The back of Hal’s van was strewn with creepy mannequin parts: a leg here, an arm there, a head that rolled whenever Hal took a turn on three wheels, which he did all the time. Pails, shovels, sand, and beach umbrellas also abounded. The summer season was upon Hal.

  Every time Shirley thought about Hal, she wished he would keep driving. Maybe to Boston or to Burlington. Or even to Bismarck. Without ever stopping in Queens.

  “How can I forget?” mumbled Shirley.

  Lunch—grilled cheese sandwiches with dill pickles and potato chips—arrived in an open-top hopper car, third in the long line of Lionel trains that circled the perimeter of the Stationhouse Diner’s counter. It was Shirley’s very favorite place to go after ballet. The trains were like the ones Shirley’s dad had brought her, only much bigger.

  After lunch, Anna and Shirley took the two buses home to Sparrowood Gardens. Grandma was outside reading her Russian newspaper. Shirley bent to kiss her. Anna wiggled her fingers in a dramatic wave hello.

  When they got inside the apartment, Anna went into the kitchen to call Aunt Claire to confirm what time everyone—the Barretts included—should gather for their usual Saturday dinner.

  Shirley went into the bedroom. She dragged the stepladder over to Anna’s tall dresser, climbed up, and with great care lifted a big brown box from the top of it. With greater difficulty, she carried it down the rickety steps, putting two feet together on each step like Markie, her baby neighbor, did when he first learned to walk.

  Inside the box were the cars of her Lionel train set, the cardboard tunnel, the sections of track, the transformer, and the tiny metal figures that waited on the platform for the train. Shirley smiled. She was always happy to see them; it was as if they were her long-lost family: mother, father, brother, sister, grandma, grandpa, dog.

  Even though Shirley had had a very easy time setting up the trains with her father on Wednesdays, it was touch and go for her on her own to connect the track sections so that electricity would flow through, to get the cars to stay coupled together, and to place the tunnel exactly right so it wouldn’t topple over. Shirley had been fearful of electricity ever since she was four, when she’d put the other end of the cord to Anna’s plugged-in Gillette shaver in her mouth to see what would happen—and felt her entire body buzz all over. So now, after she’d set up the train, Shirley plugged the transformer into the outlet with her eyes closed. But the train did not start.

  The last time she’d wanted to play train, Shirley had had to call Phillie to come over and help her get everything going. But she didn’t want to call him today because she was still mad that he hadn’t told her that her father was dead. She wasn’t 100 percent sure he knew, but she was 99.9 percent sure. Why else had Phillie once said that his mother, Aunt Rosalie, thought Shirley was a poor girl? Now it made sense.

  When her mother had finished talking to Aunt Claire, Shirley decided she would call Maury instead. He might smell like tuna fish, but Shirley didn’t care. Maury was good at putting train tracks together, and he was cute. Most important, she didn’t think he knew her father was dead—at least, he never acted like he knew; he never felt sorry for her.

  “I just have to finish my tuna sandwich,” Maury said when Shirley called, “and I’ll be right over.”

  Once he got there, they took turns being the conductor and the whistle-blower.

  “We can go to Lake Winnipesaukee for a swim and a huge sundae,” said Shirley, drawing out the u in huge. “One of those make-it-yourself sundaes you can get at Kellerhaus. Everything costs the same there no matter what it weighs,” she added with authority, since she’d heard it all from Phillie. “I’m making a giant dish with pistachio ice cream, strawberries, chocolate chips, bananas, pineapple, coconut flakes, and b
utterscotch syrup.”

  Maury said, “I’m having chocolate with chocolate sprinkles, Bosco syrup, and lots of marshmallows.”

  Then they got so hungry for real ice cream that they made a mad dash to the refrigerator.

  “I am pleased to say that we have two delicious flavors to choose from today: cherry vanilla and butter pecan,” Shirley said, looking into the freezer.

  She got out two bowls, an ice cream scoop, and two spoons, then dropped two generous balls of ice cream into each bowl.

  “Mmmm,” Maury said, his mouth full of butter pecan.

  “Yummm,” Shirley said, her mouth full, too, but with cherry vanilla.

  Feeling especially happy, Shirley asked Maury about Sharon Levitt’s party.

  “I didn’t go,” said Maury, “because you didn’t go.”

  Shirley was delighted.

  Then Beryl Abbie knocked on the screen door and Shirley invited her in to play train, too. At first Beryl Abbie wanted to toot the whistle, but then she wanted to be the conductor.

  “Slowly but Shirley, the train approached the station,” Beryl Abbie announced in a low, ghoulish voice, cupping her mouth over the loud choo-choos. She didn’t have a Queens accent, so the way she said surely made it sound like Shirley.

  Shirley wanted to correct her, “You mean ‘slowly but surely,’ don’t you, Beryl Abbie?” But sometimes the littlest things got Beryl Abbie riled up, so Shirley didn’t say anything.

  Maury did, though. Curling his hand around his ear, he said, “Your mom is calling you, Beryl Abbie.”

  Even though she wasn’t.

  Chapter 5

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RICH AND POOR

  After Maury left, Shirley gathered up her library books, looped a Macy’s shopping bag over the right handlebar of her bike, and dropped the books in. She wheeled the bike through the bedroom, down the short hall, past the dinette table, and across the living room rug, where Anna was ironing her dinner dress and Grandma was looking for her sandals.