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  She heard water in the sink. Her mother rinsing the dishes, leaving them for her to wash. Bobbi had her duties. Her stepfather said that as long as she lived under his roof and ate his bread she would have her duties. Of course her mother agreed with him. She said work was good for a young girl. Sometimes Bobbi hated them.

  She moved onto her stomach and reached beneath the bed. The dress and the needles and thread were still there. She would wear the dress today. Soon her mother and her stepfather would leave for the shop, and then Tom would sneak over, and before that she would carefully shave her legs and bathe. Bobbi had planned it for so long. She wanted everything to be perfect. She had fixed the dress’s hem so that it just brushed the tops of her thighs, and she hoped that when Tom saw her he would think her beautiful and sexy. Bobbi had rehearsed her movements and lines. Acting blasé and nonchalant, she would tell Tom that she wore the dress all the time, even to school sometimes, sometimes even when she had to give a class report; then she would show him how she had looked when she sat up on her teacher’s desk in the dress—she would smile and sit demurely on the dining room table—and all of this plus the new perfume she would wear and the expressions she’d put on her face and in her eyes would make Tom jealous and excited and he would love her. They would do it. And then Tom would never leave her, ever, because he was such a clean, decent Catholic boy and because she would have given him what all the boys wanted. No, he would never leave her. And then he would finish school and she would finish school and they would be married—maybe on her birthday—and she would wear a veil and a white dress, and she would never have to live another day with her mother and her stepfather. Tom would never regret anything. She would make a perfect wife. And then for the remainder of her life, for the first time in her life, she would be happy.

  There was a pounding on her door. Quickly Bobbi turned to face it. She called out, “Yes?”

  “We’re leaving,” her mother called. “It’s eight o’clock. Wake up, or were you planning on sleeping all morning?”

  “No,” Bobbi called back, slipping out of bed. She hadn’t realized it was so late. “Good-bye,” she said. “I’m wide awake.”

  II

  “Well,” Tom said, “who was it?”

  Bobbi slowly looked up from a spot near her knee where the new razor had nicked her skin and a dark clot of blood had formed. Her hand moved to cover the spot. Her legs were crossed. She was sitting on the table in the dining room. Tom was standing in the front room facing her. The late morning light from the windows behind him framed him.

  “I’m sorry,” Bobbi said. “Tom, what was what?”

  “Whose desk did you sit on?” Tom blinked several times, and his Adam’s apple jumped as he swallowed.

  Bobbi put her hand over her mouth and laughed. She thought quickly. “Oh,” she said, “it was Mr. Percy, he teaches algebra.” She didn’t know why she chose Mr. Percy; he was short and drab, and she disliked math. There was something in Tom’s voice as well that she did not like. Her fingers picked at the scab near her knee. Maybe, she thought, she could tell Tom she did it for a better grade if he asked why. She waited for him to ask why.

  “I thought you didn’t like math,” he said instead.

  “I don’t,” she answered. She was irritated. Sometimes Tom could be so stupid; he couldn’t even tell when she was lying. Now the lie was becoming more of a problem than it was worth. But there was still plenty of time in which to mend things, she thought. Her mother and her stepfather wouldn’t return for hours.

  “Then why did you do it?” Tom asked. He stared at her, then folded his thick arms.

  He was still at it. Couldn’t he see? Boys were stupid. She wanted to get down from the table. She wanted to sit with him on the sofa and be held by him, but she felt unable to move; she felt pinned. She looked at the vase of plastic flowers on the end table. Shaking her head she finally said, “I don’t know, Tom. I just did it.”

  “You just did it?” he said. He sounded like he was spitting.

  “Yeah,” Bobbi shouted, “I just did it.” The tone of her voice frightened her. She felt like she wanted to cry. “Look at me,” she said. “Tom, please look at me.”

  He had turned toward the windows. She slid off the table, smoothing her dress down across her thighs with her hands. Tom turned around and she put out her arms to him, and when he didn’t move she said, “Please come here and hold me, Tom. Please hold me. I’m cold.”

  “Then maybe you should put on some decent clothes.” He turned once again toward the front windows, then stretched his arms and back.

  “You’re a bastard,” Bobbi said, and she hoped that it would make him angry because now she was angry and because everything she had so carefully planned was now going astray. She thought about how long it had taken her to shorten the dress, and how she had had to hide it and the thread and needles from her mother, who never left anything private in her room. Her mother sometimes even opened her personal letters and listened on the extension when she talked on the phone. Her mother treated her like she was an infant. It was unbearable. Bobbi was furious.

  She glared at Tom’s broad back. “Did you hear me?” she shouted. “I just called you a bastard. Aren’t you going to say anything to me, you damn bastard?”

  He looked at her and laughed. Bobbi realized then that she had gone about this entirely wrong, and she felt ridiculous.

  “You did it for a grade, didn’t you?” Tom was saying. “You dressed yourself up like a cheap damn tramp so you could get a better grade.” He shook his head and made a hissing sound. “You could have come to me, you know. I’m good at math. I could have helped you.”

  Frustration rose from Bobbi’s stomach and burned up through her chest and in back of her throat and her eyes, and before she was aware of what she was doing she had clenched her fists so tightly that her fingernails sliced into her palms, and then she began crying. She felt suddenly blinded and fiercely angry. Then she was aware that Tom had come over to her and was putting his arms around her and drawing her close to him, and she put her arms up around his neck and relaxed, all at once grateful that he was holding her. She felt relieved; she was crying less bitterly; and it was then that she recognized what Tom was doing, that instead of comforting her and forgiving her and understanding her he was trying to unzip the back of her insulting and ridiculous dress.

  III

  Her father, her real father, had been a tall dark man, thin, with large hands and an easy smile, an indolent laugh. By trade he was a salesman. His name was Constantine Tzeruvctis, and even as he emigrated from the lush expanse of Lithuania he was willing to make a deal: the stony immigration officer stamped Constantine’s papers but shortened his last name to Tzeruf; the exchange seemed fair enough. It was a big, new country. Constantine worked his way west to Chicago, sweeping floors, washing dishes, even polishing brass spittoons, and then for the next thirty years or so of his life he peddled Dr. Cheeseman’s Liquid Wonder, a patent medicine. From door to door to door to door on Chicago’s North Side the immigrant tradesman worked: knocking, smiling, selling.

  All of this Bobbi learned from her mother, from the few photographs, from the yellowed newspaper clippings that described her real father’s death. And like a detective in the paperbacks she had read and the late-night movies she had seen, Bobbi had attempted to piece everything together. More than anything, she wanted to know, to understand. But of course that was impossible. There were pictures missing from the stiff album. There were questions her mother refused her the answers to. And the musty clippings from the newspaper dumbly reported only the what that had happened.

  The girl knew facts about her father. That he drank. That occasionally he attended baseball games, preferring Charlie Grimm’s Cubs. That he wasn’t religious. That both his birth and his death days fell in September. In the oldest photos her father smiled and sported a mustache. His discharge papers from the First World War listed his vocation as Tradesman and his character as Excellent. His co
mplexion had been Ruddy. Next to signature of soldier was a neat, curly X, and beneath it was printed “His Mark.” Bobbi kept the papers in her top dresser drawer with her jewelry, her letters from Tom, and her cosmetics.

  In her parents’ wedding photograph Constantine sat, her mother stood. As a child Bobbi thought that her father was sitting because he was dead in Heaven. Later she realized it was custom. Her mother’s hand gripped the back of the chair. Her father’s eyes looked down. Neither smiled.

  The first child, a girl, had been stillborn. She was not named. The gray tombstone in the cemetery read BELOVED BABY TZERUF. Bobbi saw it once. Green lichen grew inside the letters. She was born eleven years later, eleven years after her parents’ marriage, and was named for Robert, her mother’s grandfather.

  By then Constantine was nearly sixty. But when he was younger, oh, he had been quite a fellow. Bobbi’s favorite story about him took place one warm summer evening on the Near North Side in an area then known as Bucktown. Bucktown was a tough, tooth-and-nail Polish neighborhood, so named because so many of its residents owned goats. Constantine was young and ambitious, knocking on doors, the dark bottle of Dr. Cheeseman’s Liquid Wonder in his hand, when suddenly from the street a shotgun roared. Constantine shielded his head with his suitcase. The pellets were meant for him. He was not hit, but a lantern hanging from the frame house was, and there was a small fire. Constantine began to beat the flames with his jacket. Then the door of the house opened, ever so cautiously, and the barrels of another shotgun looked out at the tradesman’s face, and he raised his hands and started to explain. He showed them the contents of his suitcase. He pointed to his now-smoldering jacket. He placed blame for the incident on the Italians or the Negroes. The men then summoned him inside. While the women tended to his jacket Constantine took out his wares, and before he left Bucktown that hot, humid evening he had made over a week’s worth of sales.

  Bobbi liked the story because in it her father was such a wonderful liar. Only a Lithuanian gentleman could lie so boldly and get away with it, she thought. She didn’t realize the patent medicine her father sold for nearly half his life was so worthless that men would try to kill him out of anger for having bought it, for their families having used it. Bobbi’s mother agreed that it was a fine story. She said it showed how clever Constantine was—he could turn tragedy into success—and how quickly he had learned to do whatever was necessary to get ahead and make a profit in America.

  The newspaper clippings described a dark deranged foreigner on the downtown Washington Street subway platform waving his arms and suitcase and causing a general disturbance. The police were promptly called. There was shoving and a great deal of noise and confusion. The man appeared to have been drinking and did not speak in English. It happened quickly, one witness said. The foreigner struck a policeman. Sergeant F. Mahoney, on the side of the head with a suitcase full of bottles, and then, when a second officer withdrew his revolver, the foreigner screamed and leaped onto the tracks directly into the path of a southbound Elevated “B” train. The conductor, Calvin Jefferson, testified he could not stop his train in time. The police have launched a complete investigation. The body was later identified.

  This occurred in 1957, in September, when Bobbi was four years old.

  IV

  There was barely time to hesitate—it was happening too quickly—there was barely time in which to think, but Bobbi realized that she was falling. She broke her fall with her left arm. Then she was on the rug, beneath the dark table, trying to make her escape. Around her was the thick clutter of chair and table legs. Tom was holding her, his arms circling her bare thighs. She tried to kick loose. She was afraid, yet curiously aware that in this time when she should have been terrified she was still thinking coolly, rationally; and as the hands pulled her back she felt strangely proud. She was still in control of the situation. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t hysterical. She was still able to function and to think. With these abilities she could handle this boy and his suddenly rude hands, this Tom, her Tom, quiet Tom, Catholic Tom, stupid clean-cut Tom. He would stop if she wanted him to, she thought. He wasn’t as bad as the city animals she went to school with. Why, all she would have to do would be to say stop.

  So this was a game like all the other games, all the at-the-movies games and in-the-front-hallway games and oh-just-let-me-touch-you-for-a-moment tricks and twists. Bobbi thought about the ways she could get boys to notice her at a dance, the ways the boys fumbled in their pockets for a match to light her cigarette, the way they cleared their throats before they tried to speak, the way they pressed against her, trying always trying to get a little further, a little closer, somewhere they had never gotten to before, when all she had to do was to change the way she smiled, to push a hand against a shoulder, to yawn into an eager pimpled face. Oh how they stopped. Cold. Flat. Bobbi knew boys, how they stopped: deflated, tumbled, put down, down, down. Oh, how the boys would tumble. Boys were such silly prissy pampered things, and just as long as she stayed away from the gutter types she could control them, tease them, wind them clear around her little finger, and they loved it. They always came back to her for more because they truly loved it.

  How she hated them. Boys were so weak and easy, and finally so boring; how easy it was to predict what they would do. Tom straddled her, kissing her neck. How she truly hated him. She said, “Tom, stop.”

  He grunted, pawing the front of her dress.

  “Tom,” she said, “Tom, please stop and get off of me.”

  Again he grunted.

  She pushed against his shoulders with her hands. He slapped her arms away easily. When she pushed against him again he grabbed her wrists and pinned her hands over her head against the rug, and she realized how much stronger he was. She considered whether or not she should fight him. She stared up at the light over the table. A spider web floated between two of the bulbs. If she struggled, she thought, he would have to stop. Wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he stop if she struggled?

  Then all at once she started to cry, thinking not so much that he was hurting her or that she was so afraid, but simply that it had now come to this, this abject humiliation, this pushing and grunting, and now she would lose both him and something she had always felt was an important part of her.

  Behind that, there emerged something deeper, a scary feeling. The girl felt for the first time that she understood something about her father, and she pictured the old tradesman. She imagined him walking wearily from door to door to door, and as she felt the sharp sudden pain of Tom’s weight pressing against and into her she pictured her father wildly waving his arms down in the dark bowels of the Washington Street station, and she thought this was how he must have felt when he killed himself. The boy’s body above her heaved and jerked. She felt his breath against her face. This was how he felt, why he did it. She relaxed then, holding in her cries. Even though her eyes were shut tightly, the tears continued to run from them. The tears were hot and searing as they streamed down her cheeks into her ears and hair, and then the boy’s body finally came to rest, heavily and silently, upon her.

  V

  In the bathtub the girl began to wash herself. At least it was over, she thought. He was gone. He couldn’t have left more quickly if he’d tried. Lying on the rug, her eyes still closed, she’d heard him zip his pants and then open and close the front door. He’d said nothing. What do you say? There was nothing he could say. Not even sorry. She thought bitterly that he could save his apology for his Catholic confession, and she smiled, imagining him kneeling and beating his chest in some dark church. The bastard. It was ludicrous.

  For a moment she pretended she was washing herself with holy water. She prayed the water running into the tub would make a miracle. “Holy water, holy, holy water.” Turn me back into a virgin, lift the stain from the dining-room rug, lift the pain, the memory.

  Bobbi felt broken. Her insides ached. Then she began to shake her head, thinking that now she was the one who was ludicrous, talking to
ordinary bathtub water in a dark bathroom on an afternoon when she should be doing her chores around the house. She had the morning dishes to wash, the kitchen floor to scrub. She could take care of the stain by spilling a cup of coffee or cola on the rug. She would tell her mother and her stepfather that it had been an accident. It would be all right. Sure. She was all right. It wasn’t an expensive rug.

  She shut off the faucet, sighed, then stood and reached for the light switch above the sink. The fluorescent bulb made a tinkling sound, and then the radio hidden inside the medicine cabinet blared: too loud and too tinny, violins and singing, a man’s sudden voice. Her stepfather’s latest doing: he must have wired the radio to the light switch. Bobbi shut both off, and as she did she was startled and terrified, realizing she might have electrocuted herself standing in the water in the tub.

  The warm water embraced her as she sat. They had never found out exactly what it was that killed her father. If he touched the subway’s third rail before being run over by the train, he would have been killed by that. The third rail was electric. Once she had seen a gang of young boys on the Armitage Avenue EI platform trying to hit the third rail with their spit, and they had yelled out across the tracks for her to watch them, saying that their spit would sizzle. It made her cry, and after that she always took buses. At the hospital one of the city workers told her mother that if Constantine had brushed the third rail his death would have been immediate, painless. The worker had meant to be comforting. The train had severed one of her father’s legs and crushed his head.