Читать книгу Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones - Lucia Perillo - Страница 8

First Job/Seventeen

Gambelli’s waitresses sometimes got down on their knees

searching for coins dropped into the carpet—

hair coiled and stiff, lips coated in that hennaed shade of red,

the banner-color for lives spent in the wake of husbands

dying without pensions, their bodies used in ceaseless

marching toward the kitchen’s mouth, firm legs

migrating slowly ankleward. From that doorway,

Frankie Gambelli would sic a booze-eye on them,

his arms flapping in an earthbound pantomime of that

other Frank: The Swooned-Over. “You old cunts,”

he’d mutter. “Why do I put up with you old cunts?”—

never managing to purge his voice’s tenor note

of longing. At me—the summer girl—he’d only stare

from between his collapsing red lids, eyes that were empty.

Once I got stiffed on a check when a man jerked

out of his seat, craned around, then bolted

from those subterranean women, sweaty and crippled

in the knees. Though I chased him up the stairs to the street,

the light outside was blinding and I lost the bastard

to that whiteness, and I betrayed myself with tears.

But coming back downstairs my eyes dried on another vision:

I saw that the dusk trapped by the restaurant’s plastic greenery

was really some residual light of that brilliance happening

above us on the street. Then for a moment the waitresses

hung frozen in midstride—cork trays outstretched—

like wide-armed, reeling dancers, the whole

some humming and benevolent machine that knew no past, no future—

only balanced glasses, and the good coin in the pocket.

Sinatra was singing “Jealous Lover.” All of us were young.