Living Room Read Online Free Page B

shoulders, trying to stop him from thinking when would they find the corpse.
    In fact, Shirley at the moment was miles away, at the Brooklyn terminus of the subway. At the end of the line, she got off when everyone else got off, and then, seeing a bum on the station, she got back on the train just as the doors closed. But the train did not move. The bum was watching her through the window. He took a slurp from the head of a bottle sticking out of a paper bag. Shirley ran through the empty train to the front, hoping to find the motorman in the first car.
    There was no motorman. The train was not going anywhere. And when she looked out on the platform for help, all she saw was the breathless bum, who had run along the platform, laughing.
    Suddenly the doors all opened, the bum stepped in, but so did a motorman, who looked surprised to see a thirteen-year-old girl alone at that time of night, but not too surprised, since anything can happen on the New York subways. He went into his cab and the bum sat down opposite Shirley.
    The train roared off into the darkness of the tunnel. Why had she not behaved with Harry the way he had expected? Why had she returned home early and poked her head into her father’s bedroom? Had God, in retribution, provided the impulse to flee on a subway train so that at the end of the line, this bum who relished young girls would be waiting to tear her legs apart like a wishbone? Would his stiff thing look like the picture in the hygiene book, curving for better aim? Would it matter if he knew she had the curse and had not changed the Kotex since before leaving for the dance?
    At the next stop, a couple got in. Would they come to her aid? Would anyone in New York see or hear?
    Shirley moved to the other end of the car, next to the couple, engrossed with each other. The man gave her a look: What kind of oddball girl, all those empty seats in the train, was she looking for a three-way deal?
    “Look, kid,” said the man, “why don’t you go back to where you were sitting before?”
    Shirley started to point to the bum and saw that he was stretched out now, asleep, the paper bag with the wine bottle nestled beside his cheek. Embarrassed, she left the train at the next stop.
    The empty station was frightening.
    It was Harry’s fault. When she said aboriginal, she was being descriptive. Knocking on her father’s bedroom door and going in, that was her fault. Being alive was a fault. Her mother, dead, was blameless. Or was it all her mother’s fault for having deserted the living? Wanted dead or alive the poster had said, as if it didn’t matter. If that thing of hers could be sewn shut, would that be a defense?
    A train roared into the station.
    Was standing up safer? She sat down. The conductor shook her awake in the Bronx because they were nearing the end of the line and he thought she might miss her stop.
    It was almost two in the morning when she let herself into the apartment, ablaze with lights. Philip Hartman jumped up from his chair. Behind him came Mrs. Bialek, and a policeman holding a notebook and pencil. With one swift movement, Hartman slapped his daughter’s face, then put his arms around her, and as a startled policeman watched these Jews whom he didn’t understand, Philip Hartman and his daughter cried in each other’s arms.
    *
    Three weeks later Shirley answered the telephone in the apartment, expecting this or that person to remind her father about paying a bill, and heard instead Harry’s voice saying could he have a date.
    Her vocabulary tumbled through her head, retorts, questions that answered instead of asked, sharp-tongued, sarcastic, needling things. She closed her eyes and said only “Yes.”
    “What would you like to do?”
    “Most?”
    “Most.”
    “Can you teach me to drive a car?”
    “Do you have a learner’s permit? How about the movies?” What Harry had in mind, as it turned out, was not a movie, but what he called a get-acquainted walk in the park, during