“If you want to support Gerald Ford in next year’s election, then by all means do it,” he told her just a few weeks ago. “All I ask is that you have reasoned positions, that you research his positions on the issues.”
Sunny wasn’t going to support anyone in the election. Politics was stupid. It embarrassed her to think of her impassioned speeches for McGovern back in 1972, part of her sixth-grade teacher’s current-events debates on Friday. Only six kids in a class of twenty-seven had voted for McGovern when their mock Election Day came-one fewer than had voted for him in the initial poll when school started. “Sunny talked me out of it,” Lyle Malone, a smugly handsome boy, said when asked if he wanted to explain his change of mind. “I figured anyone she liked that much couldn’t be much good.”
Yet if Heather had spoken for McGovern, then everyone in her class would have followed her. Heather had that effect on people. People liked to look at her, make her laugh, win her approval. Even now the MTA driver, a type that usually screamed at anyone who dawdled at the open door, seem charmed by the excited girl with the denim purse held tightly to her chest. “Drop your fare here, sweetie,” the bus driver said, and Sunny wanted to yell, She’s not that sweet! Instead she climbed the steps, looking at her shoes, wedgies purchased just two weeks ago. The weather really wasn’t right for them, but she had been dying to wear them, and today was the day.
CHAPTER 9
Woodlawn Avenue was busier than usual the Saturday before Easter, with steady streams of people in and out of the barbershop and the bakery. The impending resurrection of Jesus apparently required fresh Parker House rolls and trimmed, exposed necks, at least for those Baltimore throwbacks who still believed in haircuts. There also was a spring festival at the elementary school, an old-fashioned fair with cotton candy and goldfish free to anyone who could land a Ping-Pong ball in the narrow neck of a fishbowl. This is a city where change is slow to catch on, thought Dave, an eternal outsider in his own hometown. He had traveled all over the world, determined to live somewhere else, anywhere else, yet somehow ended up back here. In opening his shop, he had rationalized that he might bring the world to Baltimore, but Baltimore wasn’t having it. For all the people on the sidewalks, not a single one had stopped to inspect his window displays, much less come inside.
Now that it was almost 3:00 P.M., according to the “Time for a Haircut” clock over the barbershop across the street, Dave had run out of ways to occupy himself. If he hadn’t agreed to pick up Sunny and Heather at the mall, he might have packed it in and closed up early. But what if a customer arrived in that final posted hour, a customer of taste and means, determined to buy lots of things, and he lost that person’s business forever? Miriam worried ceaselessly over this scenario. “It just takes once,” she would say. “One time, one person pulling on the door when it should be open, and you’ve lost not just that customer but whatever word of mouth he or she might have generated.”
If only things really were that simple, if all that success required was showing up early, leaving late, and working hard every minute in between. Miriam didn’t have enough experience in the professional realm to realize how touchingly naïve her views were. She still believed that the early bird caught the worm, slow and steady won the race, all those clichés. Then again, if she hadn’t held those beliefs, she might not have agreed so readily to his plan to open the store, given that it meant leaving his state job, a job that was all but guaranteed for life. Lately he had begun to wonder if Miriam figured that she would benefit either way. The store would make them rich or provide her with something to hold over Dave’s head the rest of their lives. She had given him his chance, and he had blown it. Now every disagreement between them was rooted in that unspoken context: I believed in you / You blew it. Had she hoped all along that he would fail?
No, Miriam was not that Machiavellian, he was sure of that much. Miriam was the most honest person Dave had ever known, quick to give credit where credit was due. She always admitted that she had never seen the potential in the house on Algonquin Lane, a rambling, run-down farmhouse that had been the victim of repeated architectural insults-a cupola, a so-called Florida room. Dave had restored the house to its original bones, creating a simple, organic structure that seemed of a piece with its large, untamed yard. People who came to their house were always exclaiming over Dave’s eye, pointing out objects he had collected in his travels and demanding to know how much they had cost, then announcing they would pay five, ten, twenty times as much if he would only open a store.
Dave had taken those words at face value. He still did. Those compliments could not possibly have been social niceties because Dave had never inspired that kind of effusive tact. Quite the opposite-he had always been a magnet for blunt, unpleasant truths, aggression disguised as candor.
On their very first date, Miriam had said to him, “Look, I hate to tell you this…”
He was familiar with such beginnings, but his heart still sagged a little. He had thought this trim young woman, with her Canadian manners and vowels, would be different. She was working as a clerk-typist in the state Department of Budget and Revenue, where Dave was an analyst, and it had taken him three months just to ask her out.
“Yes?”
“It’s about your breath.”
Reflexively, he had clapped his hand to his mouth, Adam shielding his nakedness after a bite of the apple. But Miriam patted the hand that remained on the table.
“No-no-no-my father is a dentist. It’s really quite simple.” It was. With the introduction of dental floss and Stimudents and, eventually, gum surgery, Miriam rescued Dave from a life in which people had always reared back, ever so slightly, when talking to him. It was only when this behavior ended that Dave understood what it meant when people pulled their chins in and lowered their noses. He stank. They were trying not to inhale. He couldn’t help wondering if those first twenty-five years, the fetid years, as he thought of them-had damaged him irreparably. When you spend a quarter of a century seeing people recoil from you, can you ever expect to be embraced and accepted?
His daughters had offered his only chance at a clean slate. After all, even Miriam had known bad-breath Dave, however briefly. The girls’ hero worship of him had been so pronounced that Dave had been foolish enough to believe that they would never tire of him. But now Sunny seemed to regard him a corporeal embarrassment, the walking embodiment of a fart or a belch. Heather, precocious as ever, was already imitating big sister’s coolness at times. But although his daughters now tried to keep him at arm’s length, they could not keep him from knowing them. He felt as if he lived inside their skulls, saw the world through their eyes, experienced all their triumphs and disappointments. “You don’t understand,” Sunny snarled at him with increasing frequency. The real problem was that he did.
Take this newfound obsession with the mall. Sunny thought Dave hated shopping centers because of their emphasis on cheap, mass-produced consumer pleasures, the diametric aesthetic to the one-of-a-kind handicrafts sold in his store. But what he really disliked was the mall’s effect on Sunny. It called to her as surely as the sirens had serenaded Ulysses. He knew what she did there. It wasn’t that much different from what he had done in his own teenage years in Pikesville, walking up and down the business district along Reisterstown Road, hoping that someone, anyone, would pay attention to him. He had been very much the odd boy out, the son of a single mother when everyone else had parents, a nominal Protestant in a neighborhood of well-to-do Jewish families. His mother had worked as a waitress at the old Pimlico Restaurant, so their household’s fortunes were tied to the generosity of his classmates’ fathers, men who sat in judgment of Dave’s mother at meal’s end, taking her tip up twenty-five cents or down fifty, and every penny had mattered. Oh, no one had taunted him openly for being poor. He wasn’t worth the bother of ridicule, which seemed worse in a way.