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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 Su
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 Su
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 a
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 begi
“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 Su
Take this newfound obsession with the mall. Su
And now Su