At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online

their heels against the rungs of the dining-room chairs, waiting.
    It would be growing dark by the time they finally stood together at the door, their mother once again with her pocketbook in the crook of her arm and a shopping bag now (always) resting against it. A bag filled with a loaf of soda bread or a tin of butter cookies, a blouse Agnes had bought that proved the wrong color for her, or a little something, a game, a book, two dresses and a plaid shirt, that May had picked up for the children—a bag filled with something, anything it seemed, that their mother was required each time to bring
home with her from here and seemed, to the children at least, to ensure her return.
    The children themselves carried the small folded squares of dollar bills that Aunt May had pushed into their palms. They were buoyant, jubilant in their goodbyes, jiggling and waving and calling, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” across the landing and down the first flight of brown stairs. Aunt May would be at the window when they hit the street, sometimes Veronica or Agnes as well, and the children would wave wildly to them in the still and humid air. “See you later, alligator. After a while, crocodile.” Delivered.
    Their parents wouldn’t exchange a word as they walked to where their father had parked the car, but their mother, for all her lamentations, had redone her makeup and brushed back her hair. They could smell her talc again amid the early-evening city smells of garbage and cooling spices and exhaust.
    The steel-blue car squeezed front to back between two dark strangers in the pale halo of a city streetlight might have leapt like a dog at their approach.
    Familiar click of its lock, familiar summer feel of its thin terry-cloth seat cover, familiar snap of the thin strip of elastic that held it across the back of the front seat.
    Now another journey not unlike their headlong rush through the subway tunnels, but this one, now that their father was with them, made in the soft capsule of the pale blue car as it drove slowly through the darkened streets. Each at a window, the children heard their own voices saying, See you later, alligator, as they passed men in shirtsleeves sitting on stone steps in front of apartment houses, passed dark children calling madly after the one on a noisy scooter (the noise like machine-gun fire driven into the sidewalk) made of fruit boxes and rollerskate wheels. See you later, alligator, to the
hole of subway steps with its everlasting wind, to the stores now covered with grates and grilles in preparation for the dangerous night. To choked intersections, hot brick, sidewalk.
    In full darkness now past dimly lit side streets that showed themselves and their rows of steps, their shadows of moving figures each for just one second as they were passed. Along, for a while, the dark columns of the El and the occasional thud of the invisible train it carried. Gashes of light, the glow of a clock in a tower, yellow as the summer moon. The mark of letters against a black sky: EAST RIVER SAVINGS BANK in white; in blue and white and red, HOME OF EX-LAX. Windows of light where a man stood before a fan, a woman leaned on her elbows or reached up for a shade, where a pale curtain waved like a ghost in the cool currents of an electric fan. Glimpses of someone at a table, someone before the blue light of a TV—each with a life span of just a second or two, no more, as they drove past, the younger girl tormenting herself with this notion: What if you were suddenly left here, what if you found yourself there on that dark street, alone. And imagined herself stepping through the darkness there, down that black street or that one, stepping between those patches of light and hearing at her feet the rattle of bones.
    She turned her head into her mother’s firm shoulder, the car moving faster now, adding its own light to what seemed a general flight from the city. At their windows the other two made