Disappearing in a cloud of Old Spice, Gerry walked across the street and set Timmy free with the Cudden’s monsters and Kathleen Bennett, their sixteen year-old next-door neighbor, returning minutes later with Joe and Alice swathed in a sheath the color of Flamingoes that illuminated her white shoulders. Colleen was already downstairs in the recently finished basement batting at clusters of red-white-and-blue balloons and loops of crepe paper she had helped her father string from the low ceiling while Annette bathed and fed Timmy. Even the promise of ice cream sundae fixings at Alice’s house had not persuaded her to join the other children.
“I don’t blame you one bit, “ said Alice, descending the stairs with Annette, “I prefer my company, too.”
“Your boys are a menace,” Colleen whispered.
Alice nodded gravely.
Annette bit her lip. She had often said the same thing in Colleen’s presence, but, fortunately, so had Alice.
Alice set the cheese straws and a plate of homemade pate and water crackers down on the long folding table Annette and Gerry had borrowed from the county Democratic headquarters. With little more than a dozen active members, Rocky Ledges could not afford its own headquarters--the Shea’s home had become the unofficial clubhouse. But even though they entertained a lot, it always made Annette nervous.
“You think the food table’s OK here?” she asked. “Where should I put the hats and the noisemakers?”
Alice rested a reassuring hand on her friend’s shoulder. She breezed through the room folding paper napkins into Japanese fans, arranging plastic cups into concentric towers, and artfully displaying bowls of chips, onion dip and the platter of cream-cheese-and-olive stuffed celery Annette had thrown together early that morning. Alice had wanted to major in fine art but the grandparents who raised her when her parents were killed in a car crash would only fork out money for a nursing degree. “Something to fall back on,” they said, should she fail to marry a reliable man.
Their attempt to foist the day’s prevailing wisdom on their granddaughter backfired, however, when she dropped out after only one semester to waitress at an exclusive Manhattan club. She took up the guitar and landed a job singing in a coffee house on her nights off. That’s where she met and fell hard for a beat poet who fled to California in the middle of the night several months into their affair, leaving her in bed to face his landlord pounding on the door, insisting she hand over three months back rent. And then a cousin in Nyack set her up with Joe. A manager at the Gypsum plant, he seemed so stable compared to the city men she’d been dating. He liked pizza and beer-- movies and fishing.
“I thought I could marry sanity,” she’d once confided to Annette, sitting on a chair in her kitchen, hugging her knees to her chest, and shaking her head at her own folly.
Annette sat very still. She had never had a friend bare herself so. It gave her hope that her own nagging sense of something missing might one day work its way up her throat into words.
The doorbell rang and Annette dashed upstairs, leaving Alice to finish working her magic. The Clooneys and the Margiones, bearing Chex Mix and a bottle of Seagram’s, had driven over together. Annette took their coats and Gerry and Joe accompanied them downstairs to the built-in wet bar, Gerry’s pride and joy, courtesy of his Christmas bonus last year. About to head back downstairs herself, Annette nearly tripped over Colleen lurking behind her. The child retracted the thumb from her mouth but not soon enough.
“I didn’t have my thumb in my mouth, Mommy,” Colleen said, before Annette could launch a good scolding.
“You’re tired, maybe I better walk you across the street,” said Annette.
“I am not tired,” Colleen said.
Really, she would argue with a saint. It could drive you insane. And she hated to go to sleep—every single nap and bedtime a whole new battle.
The doorbell rang.
“Can I answer it?” asked Colleen.
“OK, “ Annette said. “That will be your job. You answer the door and tell the people to put their coats on our bed and come downstairs.”
“Yes, M’am,” said Colleen, clicking her heels together and saluting like Shirley Temple.
“Use your best manners and no thumb in your mouth,” said Annette, patting her on the bottom, the child’s crinoline springing back against her palm.
Downstairs, most everyone had donned plastic top hats with red, white, and blue Kennedy banners glued around the brims. Annette grabbed one but it didn’t fit over her newly teased hair. She fingered the campaign button on her navy blue dress. Colleen raced down the stairs and presented the Connors with a little bow. Annette handed them hats and placed one on her daughter. It swallowed Colleen’s auburn head and she staggered around in circles, giggling, arms outstretched like a blind person. “I can’t see, I can’t see,” she chanted.
“Open your eyes, open your eyes,” Gerry called, from behind the bar, one of the many routines they had perfected from the Three Stooges show.
Annette drifted to the phonograph set up on a card table and placed the needle down on one of the 45’s they had borrowed from Kathleen the babysitter--appropriately enough Tonight’s the Night by the Shirelles. They had turned the TV volume down; the polls hadn’t even closed in California and the East Coast returns had just begun to trickle in.
As usual everyone had bee-lined for the bar where Gerry and Joe stood mixing whiskey sours, gin and tonics, and 7&7s like pros, telling jokes involving priests and rabbis beneath a dangling neon Budweiser light—a gift from Annette’s older brother--complete with revolving Clydesdales.
Rene Connor had already enthroned herself on a bar stool as she was wont to do and sat popping stuffed olives and maraschino cherries like candy, tasting and turning up her nose at the many concoctions the boys whipped up for her review.
“Any bets on how many votes Jack will take in Rocky Ledges?” her husband, Micky, said.
“Well, there are the twelve of us,” said Bob Margione.
Annette laughed.
“Oh, you,” said Rene. “There are more than twelve of us Catholics, for Christ sake. They’ll all be voting for Jack.”
“If they remembered to register,” said Alice.
“How many in Our Lady of Sorrow’s parish?” asked Rene.
Gerry shrugged. “Three, four hundred.”
“There you go,” Rene said.
“Three, four hundred out of six thousand,” said Joe. “Not too bad.”
“I have half a mind to vote Communist next time just to drive our founding fathers crazy,” said Alice, tilting back her head and exhaling a Slinky of smoke rings. “Just think, the Reds crawling up the bonny banks of the Hudson.”
“They would shit their pants,” said Gerry, choking on his drink. He handed Annette a gin and tonic.
“I wouldn’t go around joking about being a communist, if I were you,” said Marie Margione.
Alice’s eyes narrowed. “What are they going to do,” she asked. “Blackball me from the Daughters of the American Revolution quilting circle? We’re already blackballed folks, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Rene pressed her pillow-like lips together.
“More libations, warden,” said Alice, handing Joe her empty glass.
He set it down on the bar. A swift volley of troubled looks lobbed between them. They had been fighting again, Annette suspected, or, rather, Alice had been fighting. Joe did not fight. Joe disappeared.
“I think I’ll go see if there’s any news yet,” he said, heading off toward the TV.
“Good idea,” said Rene Connor, staggering off on her stilettos behind the prow of her exposed chest, the pink lady she had finally approved sloshing around in her glass, pale blue chiffon jiggling like Jello.
Alice shuddered.
Annette could not figure out why Alice let people like Rene get to her.
“I cannot abide fools,” she’d once stated. An unfortunate policy that could ruin your health in a town like this, filled with generations of Revolutionary War descendents growing more inbred and intolerant each day along with a throng of vapid newcomers such as Rene.
“Dance with me, Daddy,” Colleen said, tugging on her father’s pants legs. Annette’s six-foot-three husband had never quite warmed to dancing, especially the formless style recently gaining in popularity, but, like his wife, could seldom resist Colleen. He handed his drink to Annette and set off toward the Margiones and the Clooneys and the newly arrived McDuffys, now undulating in the corner to his daughter’s current favorite song, aptly entitled: You Talk Too Much. Annette’s father had once danced with her, too. How quickly our dancing days are over, she thought.