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.