“I don’t want a baby,” he said.
He stared at her, his eyes accusing her of ruining everything. But she stared back, her feet planted and steady, the queasiness fading into resolve.
“I do,” she said back, the shivering now ceasing. “I do.”
He lowered his eyes. For a long moment, he didn’t speak. “It’s cold out here,” he said finally. “Let’s talk inside.”
He leaned to put the key in the door, but like a dark invitation, it swung open by itself. His eyes shot her a question: “Didn’t you lock the door?” But it was too late.
Inside the house, the night moved.
Part III
Silence of the city
The coffee break
by Melissa Preddy
Grandmont-Rosedale
“Oh, miss!”
“Miss!”
“Waitress, could we get some service down here?”
More cream, more ketchup. Tuna on toast, ham on rye, two slices of cherry pie. I slapped down one heavy white crockery plate after another like a blackjack dealer at a full table, my lace-up oxfords treading sideways, crablike, on the Coke-sticky linoleum floor behind the counter.
Welcome to the lunchtime shift at Cunningham’s.
Clinking cutlery and the snapping of streamers attached to the store’s giant fans created a background hum that sometimes made me strain to take in the orders for egg salad, iced tea, and Vernors.
It was August 1 of a sizzling summer and no one was ordering the patty melt.
Payday, no less. Which meant that every stool would be occupied for at least two hours straight, as the drugstore’s flush-with-cash shoppers hovered like vultures and those seated pretended not to see waiting patrons’ reflections fidgeting in the big ad-plastered mirrors that hid the kitchen from view.
Finally, around 2 o’clock or so, the counter was mostly clear and the pockets of my celery-green apron — our uniforms matched the tile on the store’s façade — drooped with their welcome load of nickels, dimes, and the occasional quarter. I packed a tumbler with crushed ice, topped it off with water, and sipped.
Grabbing a copy of Photoplay from under the counter, I fanned myself for a minute before glancing at the bleached-blond starlet on the cover. That’s when it dawned on me: It was two days now since Marjorie had been in for her customary coffee and cigarette. We had been kicking around some ideas for Saturday — maybe go to a show, maybe even ride downtown to check out the fall fashions just appearing in Hudson’s showrooms.
I peered through the window, trying to catch a glimpse of her in the storefront manicure booth at Kay’s Beauty Nook across the street, but the bustling sidewalk crowd blocked my view.
One of the redeeming features of this job — aside from the tips, which really were pretty good if you were fast on your feet like me and not above a little flirting with the guys and fawning over the women — was the movie screen — like view of this busy shopping district where Grand River sliced through Greenfield Road at a forty-five-degree angle.
Triangle-shaped Cunningham’s jutted out into the intersection and the wide windows on both sides of my counter gave me a better view than Jimmy Stewart had in last year’s Hitchcock hit, Rear Window.
Buses chugged up and disgorged patrons for the beauty parlor, the funeral parlor, dress shops and dentists, bakers and shoemakers and hardware merchants.
Not Detroit’s most posh neighborhood, this westside district was far from the worst, either — just a solid Main Street — style shopping center about seven miles down Grand River from the city’s skyscrapers.
Montgomery Wards’ cupola, revolving door, and ritzy awnings lent the neighborhood a bit of big-city flair, while across the street Federal’s and Woolworth’s appealed to the budget trade.
The busy intersection pulsed with secretaries and factory workers, housewives from the nearby neighborhoods, teachers and students from the schools down the block. On a clear day you could almost see the Penobscot building, but a lot of my customers felt no need to trek downtown. It was all right here.
I’d come to Detroit a couple of years ago to nurse a sickly cousin. She was long gone, but I was still behind this counter — mostly 9 to 6, sometimes the late shift. With that wide-angle view I could spot the regulars on their predictable rounds, like the players in my own private movie.
The daily drama unfolded with the breakfast trade.
There was Mrs. Boyd, the raven-haired pet shop lady, who showed up promptly at 9:15 every weekday for her poached egg, wheat toast, and tea. Woe betide the cook if her yolk was broken.
Today, she was exchanging small talk with Mr. Giles, the head floorwalker on Wards’ second floor. While awaiting his daily oatmeal and cream, he’d snatch a napkin from the chrome dispenser and polish the walk-to-work perspiration from his steel-rimmed spectacles. I often maneuvered to seat them side-by-side, envisioning a romance between the animal-loving widow and the courtly merchant, but so far my meddling had only spawned dry comparisons of inventory ledgers.
The neighborhood beat cop, Mick — short for the less pronounceable Michlewandoski — took his usual turn through the store and then stopped to exchange news with the security guard from the bank across the street. Mick’s report was usually pretty tame — a broken window, a bit of shoplifting — and I had the impression he liked it that way. As always, the guard was late and wolfing his ham and eggs in order to take up his post by 9:30.
Missing today was Carl Strachan, who managed the Thom McAn shoe store down the street and stopped in most mornings for a BLT. Blessed with the leading-man looks of John Gavin and a healthy helping of offhand boyish charm, he capitalized on both and the result was possibly the liveliest love life west of Woodward. Most of us single women who lived and worked around the intersection had been lured once or twice by the salesman’s spiel.
Carl, as he constantly bragged, kept a boat docked down in Wyandotte. While a sail on the breezy, cool Detroit River sounded like heaven, I could never quite bring myself to accept. There was something sly about the way he knelt in the shoe store, turning what should have been a two-minute fitting into a stealthy caress of my nyloned feet and ankles. Girls who did set sail with Carl said he dropped the Cary Grant act once they were beyond swimming distance from shore, and made it clear he expected a lot more than a goodnight kiss for his troubles. Some were dismayed at his brutish insistence and their own vulnerability out on the choppy waters. Others had the night of their lives on the blankets in Carl’s floating love nest. Myself, I didn’t fancy becoming just another notch on his mast.
There were plenty of other curiosities among my customers, but you get the general idea. And the passersby on the street, whose names I never knew, rounded out the cast.
There was the sultry brunette who spoke only Russian but showed up twice a week to Kay’s for her shampoo and set; the gaggle of gossips who never failed to check out the weekly dress sales at Lerner’s and Three Sisters; the harried-looking mothers dragging red-faced kids up the narrow stairway to the dentist’s chair.
Gingham-dressed cleaning women emerged each morning from Woolworth’s with a fresh supply of Bon Ami and ammonia; efficient church ladies bustled in and out of Holy Cross Lutheran. Veiled mourners trudged up the steps at Bishop’s. Brylcreemed delivery boys jostled doting grannies who clutched string-tied cardboard cake boxes from Ralph’s Bakery.
Weekdays around 4 o’clock, you could set your watch by the cluster of tool-and-die men who wiped greasy fingers on bandanas as they pushed their way into Leonard’s Bar &Grill for thirty-cent bottles of Stroh’s and bloody-rare ground rounds.