2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas Read online

  “Key lime.” Mrs. Santiago passes it over the counter and Georgie pays. She pulls a card from her wallet and hands it to Sarina.

  “Call if you change your mind.” She bells onto the street, pie in hand.

  Sarina says, “Two pounds.”

  Mrs. Santiago weighs and bags the caramel.

  Is it Sarina’s imagination or did Georgie pause for the length of a sock in the jaw before Ben’s name? On the sidewalk outside the shop, a mechanical carousel horse leaps to nowhere. “What’s the deal with that horse?” she says.

  Mrs. Santiago looks up from the scale, her face still arranged in an expression of scrutiny. “The deal?”

  Sarina’s grade partner is calling again. She answers.

  “Clare Kelly … has been attacked by a biker!”

  Sarina apologizes to Mrs. Santiago with her eyes, gathers her bags of caramel, and slips outside. Flurries second-guess through the alleys. “Is she dead?”

  “She’s at the hospital now, poor lamb. I called Principal Randles. We need to find a replacement to sing at this morning’s mass. But who? When she sings it’s like God is hugging you.”

  Sarina supports her bags on the carousel horse and rolls her eyes. Her opinion on God: You work your side of the street, I’ll work mine. She mentally sorts her students for a singer. The twins, James and Jacob, two variations on the same, dull boy. Brianna, the other Brianna. Maxwell, Devon, Mackenzie. A classroom of girls angling for a future in swimsuit modeling. Maybe don’t name your kid on an empty stomach. Her mind’s eye rests on Madeleine, a hastily combed little girl in the third row. She recalls some teacher’s lounge gossip: Madeleine, assembly, singing.

  “What about Madeleine?” she says.

  “Good Lord, no,” her grade partner chortles. “She sang last year but it was … unpleasant. I doubt the principal thinks of that day fondly.”

  “She was that bad?”

  “Did I say she was bad?” the woman says. “Things happened.”

  “If we need a singer, she’s all I have,” Sarina says.

  “She probably won’t want to sing after what happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was unpleasant. Let’s leave it at that.”

  Sarina freshens her tone. “I could ask her.”

  “You could.”

  “I will.” Sarina hangs up.

  Mrs. Santiago has waited for her to end the call. The window between them, the women wave good-bye. Sarina mouths the words: Thank you.

  “My pleasure,” Mrs. Santiago says, at full volume.

  You can hear through the window, Sarina realizes. Another stunning miscalculation on her part.

  7:30 A.M.

  In Fishtown, beneath a pile of construction flats, Pedro the dog launches out of a nightmare. The bear that chased him becomes an advertisement pasted to the bottom of a box, a tax attorney with reasonable rates.

  Pedro is an open-air pooch, not prone to evenings at home. His joints are nimble and his snout superb. He spent the previous night following the scent of a bitch, pink notes and hydrangea and dung. The pursuit led him out of the meat and coffee smells of his neighborhood to the minty trash of Fishtown. Flirting around the periphery of his brain is an idea both completely vivid and at the same time so malleable that it is not only an image but a hope. When he moves from one street to the next he feels he is moving more toward himself. He is lonely and knows he is lonely. He is in love but is not sure with whom.

  As the dog awakens, the city awakens. Crust on its windshields and hungry. Snorting plumes of frustration in the harbor. Scratching its traffic on the expressway. Bone cold and grouchy, from the toes of its stadiums to the strands of its El. One by one each Main Line town revs its city-bound trains. Against the light of dawn, their track lamps are as worthless as rich girls.

  Good morning, the city says. Fuck you.

  The dog does not consider himself lost, though several neighborhoods away, his person’s worry manifests in food prep. Fat sausage and sweet bread. The flurried sidewalk dampens his paws as he sniffs around a fire hydrant. Her? Her? A street vent. Her? The trunk of a tree that in warmer months brags cherry blossoms. Her? A stretch of fog-colored siding, then a blunt interruption—the cement steps of the Red Lion Diner.

  Inside at the counter, Officer Len Thomas finishes his breakfast. This final bite, the corner of toast dipped in the bit of ketchup piled with the last of the eggs, is the culmination of ten minutes of planning. Napkin dispensers on the counter: gorged, gleaming birds. He chews thirty times, gives up after sixteen, dabs his mouth with the napkin, and with a succinct gesture signals for the check.

  The waitress, who had to promise him twice that she understood what dry meant, watches a television that hangs in the corner. A famous actress is coming to town. The waitress does not see Len’s gesture or hear the whistle he adds when he performs it again. She is officiating the marriage of two bottles of ketchup; overturning one and balancing it on the mouth of the other so it can empty its shit.

  The man whistles again. The waitress turns around and in one fluid motion replaces his plate with the check. It strikes Len, still enjoying the slide of egg-bread-ketchup down his throat, that the waitress and the actress have physical traits in common. If the waitress lost twenty pounds and straightened her hair she could be the actress’s fatter, less attractive cousin. Len unfolds his wallet and counts out bills. The waitress doesn’t hide her interest in the badge and picture in his wallet: a Sears shot of Margaret holding their alarmed-looking son.

  “Your wife?” she says.

  “Ex.” Len flips the wallet shut. “The Cat’s Pajamas is on this block, right?”

  “Next block.” This man has rejected her niceties, so the waitress returns to a glare. “Not open this early, though.”

  “They’ll open for me.” Len forces a laugh.

  “Sor-ree, Mr. President.”

  “You look like her.” He counts out a tip. “That actress.”

  “Nah,” she says.

  “Change?” he reminds her.

  She rings him up and deposits the change onto his palm. “Good luck with Lorca.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Cat’s Pajamas, right?” She turns her attention back to the television.

  Outside, Len unrolls a stick of gum from a pack he keeps in his breast pocket. He’s accustomed to people not liking him. The waitress, everyone in the Boston precinct he left behind, and probably whoever this club owner is whose day he’s about to ruin. The morning feels scraped clean. He folds the wrapper into a neat square and tosses it into a nearby trash can. He knows the numbers on his license plate add up to fourteen. He knows the latch on his belt is centered because he has checked, twice. A dog sniffing a newspaper stand notices him. Perfect flakes twitch in his whiskers.

  “Hello, pooch,” Len says.

  The dog finds nothing it needs in the figure of Len Thomas and goes back to searching.

  8:00 A.M.

  The only sojourn Madeleine is permitted to make alone is the half-block walk to Café Santiago every morning to eat her breakfast. It is one of the many rules that snap frames around her newly motherless life. No alleys. No sleepovers. No going anywhere except Santiago’s after school.

  Her apartment complex is shaped like a horseshoe; her father’s apartment is on the fullest swell of the round. In the center stands a halfhearted fountain that has surrendered to time and inattention. Madeleine marches past it, through the arch that leads to the street, past the store of stained-glass lamps (a line of dancers; their jeweled heads bow), through the cobbled alley (screw off, rules), to the blue carousel horse in front of Café Santiago. She rests her mittened hand on the horse’s saddle.

  “Hello, horse,” she whispers.

  Madeleine can feel its yearning to go up and down, its hooves frozen in midgallop. Slipping a quarter into its rusted change box would elicit nothing but a lost quarter. It’s busted, marooned and affixed to the sidewalk by an indiscreet pole, with no carniv
al for miles and no equine company. But Madeleine loves the horse, and saying good morning to it is one of her traditions. Skipping it would feel as uncomfortable as an incorrectly buttoned coat.

  Inside the shop, Madeleine unlayers her outer garments by the door. Mrs. Santiago fries sausage behind the counter; the café is filled with the pleasant crackling of a vinyl LP. On the table, a stack of chocolate chip pancakes, a cup of black coffee, and the newspaper, opened to the Entertainment section. Madeleine delivers a kiss to Mrs. Santiago’s cheek and sits.

  Mrs. Santiago is a lumpy woman in a state of continuous fluster. Most of the business of her face is conducted on the top half: forehead, mournful eyes, and tiny nose lined up in short order. Her mouth, dime-sized, is usually arranged in a surprised purse, giving her the effect of a holiday cherub, the light-up kind currently decorating the neighborhood’s abbreviated yards.

  Mrs. Santiago evaluates all situations through the prism of her late husband Daniel’s likes and dislikes. Daniel liked good posture, gingersnaps, and aloe plants. To Mrs. Santiago, a good world is straight posture, gingersnaps, and aloe plants. “Your teacher was just in buying caramel,” she says.

  Madeleine swings her legs. “We’re making caramel apples today. I’ve never had one.”

  “Bring the fork to your mouth, dear, not the mouth to the fork. Pedro is still missing. The last time, Frank down the street called to say he was eating from the trash. Stop swinging your legs. Why would he eat scraps when he has every kind of food he could want here?”

  Madeleine stills her legs and brings the fork to her mouth. She cuts her pancakes into equal-sized pieces. In the corner of the shop, a briefer stack of pancakes sits in a bowl marked Pedro.

  “He’ll have to stay in the house when he gets back. This will give him anxiety attacks, but it’s for his own good.” Mrs. Santiago slides a sausage link into a pan of quivering grease. “Maybe it’s time he started eating canine food.”

  “What about a leash?”

  Mrs. Santiago snorts and gives the pan a shake. “He’d die on a leash.” She brightens with a new thought. “Madeleine, it is almost your birthday. Who should we invite to your birthday dinner?”

  Madeleine pretends the article she is reading is the most important article in the world. “No, thank you.”

  “You can’t ‘no, thank you’ your birthday.”

  “You ‘no, thank you’ed your last birthday.”

  “That’s different.” Mrs. Santiago wags a tube of sausage at her. “I’m old and allowed to ignore whatever I want, like time. How about Sandra?”

  Sandra is Mrs. Santiago’s sister, a retired reading specialist and paraplegic who tests Madeleine’s aptitude by having her read Harlequin romances aloud.

  Madeleine doesn’t answer.

  “What about Jill from school?”

  “I hate Jill from school.”

  Mrs. Santiago makes the tsking sound that means she’s offended and only half-listening. “Where did this hate come from? Your mother loved everything.”

  “Like what?” Madeleine says. This is her second favorite game.

  “Flamingoes, your father, when people slipped. Not when they would fall outright and get hurt. When they would lose their footing for a second. She’d laugh so hard she’d turn purple.”

  Madeleine frowns. “I already know those.”

  “You ask every day, dear,” Mrs. Santiago says.

  It has been a year and a half since Madeleine lost her mother, and she has been living, more or less, alone. Her father owned several businesses in the city, among them a celebrated cheese store in the Ninth Street Market, but hasn’t so much as sniffed a wheel of Roquefort since his wife’s death. He stays in his room, listening to her favorite records. Not even the sound of his daughter calling his name can rouse him as each day passes seasonlessly by.

  Madeleine knows she will only be getting a Christmas/birthday present from Mrs. Santiago and it will likely be a knit vest with a Pedro on it, while Pedro will receive a knit vest with a Madeleine on it. “I don’t want a party,” she says. “And that is that.”

  “I promised your mother. And that is that.” Mrs. Santiago shrugs.

  Madeleine shrugs.

  Mrs. Santiago looks outside and gives a sudden wave. “The McCormicks are here. Get your things.”

  Madeleine stacks her plates in the silver sink. She presses her chin into Mrs. Santiago’s elbow as the woman slices the browned sausage into medallions. Then she re-layers coat-scarf-hat by the door.

  Outside, she exchanges vague heys with Jill McCormick and her two older brothers. Together, the children boot past the carousel horse (good-bye, horse), back down the alley, through the back doors of the bread store (cloths, earth smells), the fish shop (boxes on boxes stacked on boxes), the cooking store (a worker sitting on a crate peels a potato, cigarette balanced on his lip) and through another alley until they arrive at the immortal realization of Saint Anthony’s.

  Saint Anthony of the Immaculate Heart’s schoolyard, the size of a football field, is shaped like an hourglass. On the top half (what time you have left), grades K to 4 double-Dutch and hopscotch; on the bottom (what time you have lost) grades 5 to 8 hang in slack-jawed clots digging fingernails into their pimples. The middle belt section acts as repose for teachers who hand off whistles, balls, warnings, and gossip before diving back in.

  Row homes, each bearing five families, border the field. Every morning out of these crowded brick houses emerge the sorriest kids in the world, yawning into maroon V-necks, sneering at each other to get off, stop it, find the cat, stop doing that to the cat, shut up, leave it, give it back! The proposition of the yard is conducted on an upward slant, so that children going to school can climb from their cruddy homes with plenty of time to appreciate the magnitude of the church and school. Check me out, the building says, this is what happens for those who pray. At the end of each learning day, the school dispenses the children back to their cruddy homes, quick as gravity.

  Here is Madeleine, on the day of the caramel apples, blending in with these kids as they trudge to the schoolyard to engage in a perfunctory morning recess. Madeleine prefers to spend this and every recess alone, singing scales under her breath, walking laps up and down the parking lot. Madeleine has no friends: Not because she contains a tender grace that fifth graders detect and loathe. Not because she has a natural ability that points her starward, though she does. Madeleine has no friends because she is a jerk.

  “Look alive, bubble butt,” she said to Marty Welsh, who was dawdling at the pencil sharpener. That his parents had divorced the week before did not matter to Madeleine. An absent father doesn’t give you the right to sharpen your pencil for, like, half an hour.

  This is what Madeleine said to Jill McCormick (darting between her brothers, who swat at her) on the occasion of Jill’s umpteenth attempt to befriend her: “Your clinginess is embarrassing.”

  Madeleine had one friend: Emily, a broad-shouldered ice skater who wound up at Saint Anthony’s as the result of a clerical mistake. Once, Madeleine watched her make a series of circles on an ice rink. On solid ground, Emily still walked as if negotiating with a sliver of blade. Her parents moved to Canada so she could live closer to ice. Not before she taught Madeleine every curse word she knew, in the girls’ bathroom on her last day, with reverence: shit, cunt, piss, bitch. Madeleine uses these words when one of her classmates tries to hang around, as in: Get your piss cunt out of my creamy fucking way.

  There was a reprieve in her isolation in the weeks following her mother’s death when Madeleine, polite with tragedy, allowed Jill to pal around. It wasn’t long before she regained her wits and shooed her away.

  Even jerks have mothers who die.

  Into the thoughts of every playing child careens the clanging of an oversized bell, rung with gusto by Principal Randles. The children line up according to grade and height. Some of the older ones take their time. Principal Randles eyes these delinquents and rings harder. She will ring and
ring until she achieves order. Until the kids standing closest to her clamp their hands over their ears. Madeleine is corralled into line by her homeroom teacher, Miss Greene. Finally, the ringing ends. A chrism of sweat shines on the principal’s neck.

  Miss Greene kneels next to Madeleine. On the stage of Madeleine’s school-to-home world, Miss Greene is a main player. Madeleine has memorized every intonation of her teacher’s voice, every possible way she wears her blunt, nut-colored hair, every time she has varied from her black sweater on black skirt wardrobe—twice. Miss Greene always smells like a tangerine and Madeleine likes that she never wears holiday-themed apparel like the other homeroom teacher, who today wears a holly-leaf tracksuit.

  Miss Greene keeps her voice low. “Clare Kelly has been involved in an accident and won’t be in today.”

  “What kind of accident?” Madeleine says.

  “A serious one.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “She’s not dead.” Miss Greene makes the expression that means: That is a disrespectful question. “I’d like you to sing ‘Here I am, Lord’ at this morning’s mass.”

  “Has this been approved?” Madeleine doesn’t clarify because she is daft or aggravating. She clarifies because she is a girl who has had things taken away. Even before her mother died, she was not a girl who assumed her train would come. Last year, for example, she delivered a perfect rendition of “On Eagle’s Wings,” and because of the shit show that happened afterward she had to sit in detention for a week.

  Miss Greene’s smile falters. “Approved.”

  Madeleine is overcome by the desire to cartwheel, which she overcomes. She wants to sing in church more than she wants a caramel apple. In the shadow of the building, they pray: a shower before entering the house after the beach. Amened, every other grade goes to their classrooms. The fifth grade follows Principal Randles through the corridors to church. Two girls in, behind Maisie’s confused spine, Madeleine tries to control her flopping, lurching heart.

  Here I am, Lord. The lyrics batter Madeleine’s brain. All holiness and thank you, Saint Karma, for injuring that plaited kiss-ass Clare Kelly. I will hold your people in my heart. Hit “I.” Hit “people.” Hold “heart,” vibrato, done. Madeleine’s big chance. Time to knock it out of the park, toots. Here I am, Lord. Check this fucking business out.