I was focused on Sils. That night after work we walked to Dairy Dreem for cheeseburgers and milk shakes, sitting outside across from the old Fond du Lac Fort, taken by the British from the French in the 1700s, and recently reconstructed for the tourists. Once in a while a fake cannon went off, and a teenager dressed in eighteenth-century British military garb — red coat, black hat, ponytail wig — would bang a drum, his summer job. The Old Paddle Wheel at the marina would whistle off its steam, and set sail on its dinner cruise. Cars would drive slowly on Route 9, looking for something to happen, or else they would rush, on their way to the beach, or to miniature golf, or to spin painting, or beyond to Montreal. Sils and I sat at Dairy Dreem, at the picnic tables, near the trash cans, eating our cheeseburgers and french fries in wax paper and red plastic baskets. We stirred our milk shakes with long, plastic iced tea spoons. We felt anonymous, Alone Together, like the song; we knew every song there ever was.
“I’m probably stalling,” she said, “kidding myself.”
I nodded sympathetically, poured more catsup on the wax paper, like some inadvertent symbol, then quickly mopped it up with my fries. I suddenly felt strange. “How long”—and here I cleared my throat—“how long are you overdue?” I sounded like an embarrassed boy, or a nurse. An embarrassed boy-nurse.
I thought she would say a week. Instead she said, “Two months.”
“Oh,” I said quietly. My grasp of basic syntax palsied. “Shouldn’t you try and better hurry soon?”
Sils let her head fall into one palm. Her hair fell in long lines across her face. “God, I feel sick.” She shoved her food away. “My problem is I guess I just don’t want Mike to know.”
I didn’t say anything.
“All those years at St. Alphonse’s Academy in Albany,” she said. “He’ll want to keep it. He’ll want to get married. I just can’t.”
“You’re too young,” said I, the agreeable sidekick, the Greek chorus of one earnest pip-squeak, though the words were those of my sixth-grade teacher, scolding my lipstick; I’d inadvertently seized them, applied them beyond the lines of my mouth.
Sils straightened and looked me square in the eye. She was wearing a rhinestone earring and it caught the setting sun — it did! — sending out a flash of light, like a rescue flare. “How can I not tell Mike and also come up with the five hundred dollars?” We earned a dollar sixty-five an hour. It was 1972, and that was minimum wage.
“I’ll get it,” I blurted.
“Pardon?”
“The money. I’ll get it for you.” It was such a daring and preposterous remark that it silenced both of us, silenced us deep into the evening, even when we were at the Sands, dancing and drinking and bringing on the blur, farming the fuzzy foam, the dream edges, feeling our own watery gait and the tough, hard drums of the band, the ride home perhaps from someone we knew this time; I think it was someone we knew.
And when I awoke the next day, too little, too young for the headache and dry nausea I inevitably had, and too old suddenly with information, the sun cutting through the moist morning already, getting down to business, like a street sweeper, my best friend meditating her abortion, my mother, menopausal and preoccupied, driving me to work and saying nothing, not really, just dropping me off, then adding, “That’s sixty-five cents each way, don’t forget,” so as not to feel used by her children, imposing a lesson about money, how you must pay for everything, nothing is free (“Yes,” I said), charging me daily for the lift to work, a practice that now in memory embarrasses me for both of us; why did we live like that, with all that mean, incessant tallying? And me changing from my clothes into my striped dress and pinafore, having learned furtiveness first here, in hiding my too-thin girl’s body from the others, looking up my number on the chart, picking up my money box and sorting it out in the drawer of my register — tens, fives, ones, quarters, dimes, nickels, all with their own compartments, fitted together in the square of the drawer like a Mondrian or spice cupboard, and no pennies, just a big blank space for twenties; fifties and traveler’s checks under the drawer; it was then I knew what I would do. Of course. I had all A’s in math at school; that’s why I’d been hired. It came to me in an obvious way, like a chambermaid who year after year sees plane tickets on the nightstands of the rooms she dusts, the rooms of the toilets she cleans, and to whom it comes in a snap, a quick vision, like a stroke of genius or perhaps just a stroke, that she must travel, fly: take these and go. And so she does without a word.
Of course, she is caught.
But I had it planned differently. What I could do, I could do during lunch, when the other cashiers, Sheryl or Debbie, were on their breaks and I had to both ring up and tear the tickets myself, at the perforation, and hand them back to the customers. Customers who were always right.
“The customer always sucks,” Sils once said. “Now that’s a great motto for an amusement park.”
“That’s twelve dollars, please.”
“But the kid’s under four.”
“Yeah, right.” I’d roll my eyes, and put one hand on my hip.
“What are you, the owner’s daughter?” they’d ask.
The children were always indignant. “Daddy?”
“What?”
“I’m six. I’m six.”
“The kid’s not six. Don’t listen to him.”
“OK. All right. Eight dollars. Here’s your tickets. Jesus Christ.”
Sometimes I didn’t ring up. When the other girls were on break, I pressed the No Sale key, rang open the drawer and sold stubs, keeping track on a scratch pad so that later, before closing, I could reclaim this amount from the register, or sneak it from the money box, which I would take to the bathroom with me, “for extra security.”
“That’s twenty-four dollars. Here are your tickets.”
“That’s it? That’s all there is to it?” the park visitors (“Visitors to the Park,” according to the P.A. system) would say.
“Yup.” I would stare straight ahead.
“That’s all we get? We just show these?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh. OK.” And they would wander off through the gate into the park.
At first there was never an overage, or a shortage, or a discrepancy of any sort. I would walk across the park with my money box to a snack stand, buy a root beer, and then, heart briefly pounding, go to the bathroom and take out the calculated sum — forty-eight dollars, say, or once, ninety-six — and return the rest to Isabelle, our supervisor, in the office upstairs. It wasn’t that scary to do this, for some reason, because — unlike the time I ran under a truck stopped for a red light, rather than walk all the way around it, and unlike the time I hitchhiked alone at night to the lake just to test myself, to learn the meaning of myself good god whatever that was, and unlike the time I shoplifted from a downstreet store a sweater I had coveted grossly, in a heat (“hocked,” we said; “I like your shirt; did you hock it?”) — I was doing this for Sils and her emergency.