Happy Any Day Now Read Online Free Page B

Rusty for her red hair, and we lived in each other’s pockets. Then the landlord raised the rent on our one-bedroom walk-up a block from the Himmelsteins and we tumbled way down to Bedford-Stuyvesant. Junior high school was hell. The few white girls on one side of the cafeteria, the majority black on the other—everyone ready to rumble—and me in no-man’s-land, the Chinese (they never made the distinction; I let it ride) dork in thick glasses who had to leave early for her cello lessons and raised her hand in class too much.
    Brenda and I tried to stay in touch. We phoned each other a few times a week, but her father wouldn’t drive her to Bed-Stuy, we didn’t have a car of course, and the subway stations in my new neighborhood were a mugger’s paradise. By high school, Brenda was already only a bright memory in the prevailing gloom.
    “Just the one party on my first birthday,” I said, musing aloud. I should have been aware that my mother, an immigrant even after fifty years, was always on guard, listening carefully, eyes wary.
    “What you expect? After your father left, you think have money for birthday parties? I put food on table. You have music lessons. You know how long I wore same winter coat?”
    Back at Tio Pepe’s I’d squirmed off the birthday party hook. I’d hosed down Marti and thought I’d closed the issue. But now I thought,
I’m giving myself a party for my fiftieth
. The thought made words, a string of them that detonated like firecrackers, jolting a table of Scrabble players across the room, snapping my mother’s gaze from the solitaire hand she was laying out.
    She closed her eyes and her lips moved silently as if she were a
mudang
like Lulu Cho taking messages from the spirits. Then she opened them to say, “Good for you. You deserve.”
    This is how she surprised me, my mother. Just when I thought she came close to matching her ex-husband’s talent for self-absorption, she came through.
    “But you give party for self? You have friends now. The people from orchestra and the . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to say “lesbian,” though she watched
Jerry Springer
on TV and had seen them pulling hair.
    “Marti will take over,” I said. “She’s good at organizing things.”
    “I help, too,” my mother said. “I pay.”
    “No, Mom, that’s okay.”
    “I’m your mother. You listen to me. I pay. You don’t have big wedding.” With Todd, I’d hastened to wed so I wouldn’t change my mind. “At this age, no chance. This your wedding money. Sky is limit. Up to three thousand.”
    My mother lived on social security and a small payment from the Korean-American Benevolent Society. The whole thing sounded as fishy to me as
aek jeot
, the anchovy sauce we use in kimchi.
    “How come I never heard about these savings? Let me get this straight. You’re telling me you stashed away my wedding money and you never spent it in all these years? You didn’t declare it when Blumen House added up your assets to figure out your rent on the sliding scale? You’re saying—”
    “Okay, okay,” she interrupted. “You win, smart girl. Truth is I make killing at craps table last time in Atlantic City.” She was staring at her hands in her lap and her complexion was flushed pink, but this correction might have been the truth—it was just the kind of jackpot my mother would come up with. She looked up, eyes faking hurt. “My money good. You make nice party. And take advice from me, Judith. Brenda Himmelstein probably still in Brooklyn. Look in phone book. Invite her.”
    My mother used present tense for all tenses. In this case, I think she meant past, or maybe she knew more than I gave her credit for. Because she said, “Invite her. You love her.”
    • • •
    I phoned Marti on my way home. “I’ve changed my mind about the party.”
    “No kidding. Well, I guess it’s a good thing I started working on the guest list. You’ll help me fill in names. I should have some