Girls of Tender Age, Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine of Girls of Tender Age treats a visit to the downtown Hartford department store G. Fox, a visit that can’t possibly have been duplicated any time in the store’s history.
Girls of Tender Age, Chapter Nine
By Mary-Ann Tirone Smith
NILAN STREET. My own bedroom. I am overjoyed and the number of nightmares I have goes down. There is wallpaper with pink roses on the wall, the pattern almost as beautiful as the internal red glow of the coal furnace that I will never see again. Now my father turns a little disk on the wall to heat the house instead of shoveling coal. The outside of the house is clapboard, unlike Pippi and Grandpa’s houses, which are sided with something called asphalt shingles, rough thin squares with edges that curl up in the hot summer sun. The floor is wood instead of linoleum. I touch the wood with my fingertips taking in the pattern of the oak grain.
We have a new chair, a wingback upholstered in a pattern of grapevines. Its back is velvet, the color of wine from the grapes. I sit behind it and feel the velvet with my fingertips. I feel the cover of my favorite book, Silver Pennies, too. Silver Pennies is a collection of children’s poems, many of them having to do with fairies and several of them written by Yeats. The cover is midnight blue and there is a girl on the cover sitting in the grass reaching up into the night sky. She is reaching for the silver pennies embossed on the cover spilling down upon her. I feel the small silver disks. They are cold and smooth.
Tyler has the other upstairs bedroom under the dormers of our cookie-cutter Cape Cod house. I am not a good sleeper even with fewer nightmares because I am afraid of the dark what with all the previous primal sex I witnessed four feet away from my crib. Night lights are verboten because they are a waste of electricity. In the fifties, you are aware of wasting electricity, wasting food, wasting water. Wasting time is not a negative phenomenon; if you have time to waste, it means you’re happy and doing well. ‘Waste all the time you want. Afraid of the dark means I must pull my hands and feet in close to my body because if my foot hangs over the side of the bed, a blade will come down and slice it off. Perhaps Joseph Ignace Guillotin, the French physician who proposed the concept as a method to execute people, was afraid of the dark. (Mary Warburg will tell me she was afraid of the dark so her father gave her a loaded gun to keep by her bedside.)
What soothes me in the night is Tyler’s voice, across the hall.
He is always in conversation with his “critter,” a mangy, one-eyed stuffed animal, its fur entirely worn off. It might have been a teddy bear once. When I am an adult and I see the critter lying on Tyler’s bed, it reminds me of a swarthy five-month fetus.
Sometimes Tyler calls: Sister, come tell a story to the critter.
Autistic people don’t like to use real names. He calls our mother Lady and our father Pop-pop.
The stories he prefers are anecdotes that chronicle some trouble he got into when he was little. I am happy to run to his bedroom and get into bed with him and the critter because Tyler is not the least bit afraid of the dark. How could he be when he has far more serious things to be afraid of—like clouds of needles lodging in his face.
His favorite story is the commandeering of the elevator at G. Fox, Hartford’s fifteen-floor department store. We call G. Fox, Fox’s. Before Fox’s is forced to close when malls are invented, you might need a new blouse to pep up your old suit so you’d go to Fox’s, get off at the ninth floor, where the entire sprawling space is devoted to rack after rack of blouses organized by color. Bring the suit along, and a sales lady finds the perfect match immediately.
I am with Tyler that day at Fox’s, the day the elevator story is born. He is nine and I am four.
My father is shooting the breeze with a friend he meets on the lobby floor by the elevator. (In the days of the big department stores, the buildings are so otherworldly that they have lobbies like the Plaza Hotel, a place that actually no longer has a lobby but rather a shopping mall. Ironic.)My father’s friend’s name is Abe Lieberman. My father calls out to his friend, Hey Abe, you Jew bastard!
Abe’s face breaks into a grin and he calls back, Yutch Tirone, you sonofabitch no-good wop, how the hell are ya?
They smack each other on the back, shake hands, and then get down to the business of comparing notes as to which horses should have won in the fifth at Narragansett yesterday, as opposed to the one that did, which they didn’t have, goddamn it. Abe says, My nag stopped to take a leak at the clubhouse turn.
Tyler and I slip away into one of Fox’s elevators. It goes up. Once the last passenger is ushered out at eight—Shoes—the elevator operator always steps across the threshold to hold back the shiny, bronze accordion gate in case it malfunctions and crushes a dawdling customer. Tyler pulls the gate out of the operator’s hand and throws it shut. Then he swings back a lever closing the back-up metal door. He presses a special button that means the doors won’t open no matter who is outside hammering away at all the floor numbers. Down we go.
We ride up and down pretending we are in a flying boxcar, transporting the troops across enemy lines. Tyler keeps saying to me, You’re a fine soldier, Sergeant. Where did you train? Hickham?
I say, Yes sir, I did.
A maintenance worker is called to the scene by the elevator operator, who tells my frantic father there is nothing to be done but to wait us out. My father knows it’s an extended combat mission Tyler has planned on so he asks Abe Lieberman to go see if Lukey Welch is working that day. Lukey Welch is our neighbor in Charter Oak Terrace. I call him Daddy Welch and his wife, Mommy Welch. I don’t know why but I do. Lukey Welch is Fox’s head painter. Abe finds him and brings him to the lobby floor elevators.
My father says, Jesus Christ, Lukey, Tyler’s stuck in the elevator.
Lukey Welch says, Where the hell’s Mickey?
She’s in there with him.
Jesus Christ!
We have landed the flying boxcar back at the first floor so we hear all this. Tyler makes a slashing gesture to his throat which I know is a signal not to speak so I don’t. I am a fine soldier trained, after all, at Hickham.
Lukey Welch says to my father, Can Tyler handle a bump on the noggin?
My father says, What choice have we got here, Lukey?
None.
Lukey Welch doesn’t concern himself with my noggin as I am the normal one expected to handle any problems with panache never mind that it’s not normal for a four-year-old to have that kind of je ne sais quoi.
Lukey Welch says to the maintenance worker, What in the Sam Hill are ya doin’ standin’ there like some kinda fuckin’ wooden Indian? Go get a plank and we’ll stick it into the shaft between the floors.
The maintenance man says, We’ll burn out the motor if we do that.
Lukey Welch says, The only other choice is to shut down the electric power and if we do that, Mrs. Auerbach will take a shit and fire every goddamn one of us. Now go get a fuckin’ plank!
Mrs. Auerbach is G. Fox’s granddaughter, who now owns the store.
Tyler hits twelve, Men’s Furnishings, and up we go. Then down to the main floor again. Then up, and our elevator hits the plank. We come to a jarring stop and our heads bang into the ceiling and we land in a heap. I don’t cry of course.
Tyler and I disentangle and get to our feet, come out, and there is a crowd gathered. Lukey Welch is standing in front of all the people in his paint-covered overalls. As I am rubbing my head, I say, Hi, Daddy Welch.
He picks me up.
The crowd applauds, which sends Tyler running for the hills. Abe catches him and he and my father get him into our Ford parked out on Main Street. My father takes off but Tyler gives an order to reconnoiter because his heroic gunner, who trained at Hickham, is missing in action. My father does a U-turn on Main Street, and Lukey Welch is standing there on the curb in front of Fox’s still holding me in his big freckled Irish arms.
All the way home, my father says, Don’t tell your mother, either of you.
Tyler says to me, Name, rank, and serial number, Sergeant, that’s it. Then he says to my father, But don’t forget to stop at the Lincoln Dairy, driver.
We get ice cream, we don’t tell our mother, but Daddy Welch tells Mommy Welch, who does tell my mother, and there is hell to pay. Tyler doesn’t pay, my father does. And me. My father gets the silent treatment for about a month, and I am deprived of Big Brother Bill, my favorite radio show, which I listen to on Saturday morning, while Tyler is still asleep so it won’t bother him.
When I finish telling Tyler his favorite bedtime story of the Fox’s elevator, he knows the deal is that he has to tell me a story too. But first he shares a three-month-old chocolate chip cookie he’s rationed. He gets it out from under his rug.
I request Cinderella. Here is Tyler’s version of Cinderella: A lady goes to a ball and a prince wants to marry her but she runs away. She loses her shoe, which is made of glass. The prince finds it. Luckily, no breakage. Cinderella’s wicked stepsister tries it on because the prince says he’ll marry whoever the shoe fits. She puts her foot into it and …grunt, grunt: Fail-ure! Then her other stepsister tries and…grunt, grunt: Fail-ure! Then Cinderella tries and . . . grunt, grunt: Suc-cess!
We giggle. My father yells up the stairs, Mickey! Are you in Tyler’s bed?!?!
I scuttle back to my room on my hands and knees and call out, No, Daddy.
Tyler also calls out, not to our father but to me: Continue your watch, soldier. No enemy made it through our lines tonight due to your diligence. I’ll be seeing to your commendation. Count on it. And remember, first and foremost, we must protect the antiquities.
Aided by Tyler, the critter salutes me.
I hear my father’s distant voice a moment later. He is reporting to my mother. He says, They’re both in bed, for Christ’s sake.
My mother says, All I know I have a member-guest first thing in the morning.
I hear Tyler say, Over and out.
[END OF GIRLS OF TENDER AGE, CHAPTER NINE]