Casually, Anna asked, “May I hold your Flossie Flirt?”
Tabby assented vaguely, and Anna carefully lifted the doll from the shelf. Flossie Flirts came in four sizes, and this was the second smallest—not the newborn baby but a somewhat larger baby with startled blue eyes. Anna turned the doll on her side. Sure enough, just as the newspaper ads had promised, the blue irises slid into the corners of the eyes as if keeping Anna in sight. She felt a burst of pure joy that nearly made her laugh. The doll’s lips were drawn into a perfect “O.” Below her top lip were two painted white teeth.
As if catching the scent of Anna’s delight, Tabby jumped to her feet. “You can have her,” she cried. “I never play with her anymore.”
Anna absorbed the impact of this offer. Two Christmases ago, when she’d wanted the Flossie Flirt so acutely, she hadn’t dared ask—ships had stopped coming in, and they hadn’t any money. The extreme physical longing she’d felt for the doll scissored through her now, upsetting her deep knowledge that of course she must refuse.
“No, thank you,” she said at last. “I’ve a bigger one at home. I just wanted to see what the small one was like.” With wrenching effort, she forced herself to replace the Flossie Flirt on the shelf, keeping a hand on one rubbery leg until she felt Nurse’s eyes upon her. Feigning indifference, she turned away.
Too late. Nurse had seen, and knew. When Tabby left the room to answer a call from her mother, Nurse seized the Flossie Flirt and half flung it at Anna. “Take it, dear,” she whispered fiercely. “She doesn’t care—she’s more toys than she can ever play with. They all have.”
Anna wavered, half believing there might be a way to take the doll without having anyone know. But the mere thought of her father’s reaction hardened her reply. “No, thank you,” she said coldly. “I’m too old for dolls, anyway.” Without a backward glance, she left the playroom. But Nurse’s sympathy had weakened her, and her knees shook as she climbed the stairs.
At the sight of her father in the front hall, Anna barely withstood an urge to run to him and hug his legs as she used to do. He had his coat on. Mrs. Styles was saying goodbye. “Next time you must bring your sister,” she told Anna, kissing her cheek with a brush of musky perfume. Anna promised that she would. Outside, the Model J gleamed dully in the late-afternoon sun. It had been shinier when it was their car; the union boys polished it less.
As they drove away from Mr. Styles’s house, Anna searched for the right clever remark to disarm her father—the kind she’d made thoughtlessly when she was smaller, his startled laughter her first indication she’d been funny. Lately, she often found herself trying to recapture an earlier state, as if some freshness or innocence had passed from her.
“I suppose Mr. Styles wasn’t in stocks,” she said finally.
He chuckled and pulled her to him. “Mr. Styles doesn’t need stocks. He owns nightclubs. And other things.”
“Is he with the union?”
“Oh no. He’s nothing to do with the union.”
This was a surprise. Generally speaking, union men wore hats, and longshoremen wore caps. Some, like her father, might wear either, depending on the day. Anna couldn’t imagine her father with a longshoreman’s hook when he was dressed well, as now. Her mother saved exotic feathers from her piecework and used them to trim his hats. She retailored his suits to match the styles and flatter his ropy frame—he’d lost weight since the ships had stopped coming and he took less exercise.
Her father drove one-handed, a cigarette cocked between two fingers at the wheel, the other arm around Anna. She leaned against him. In the end it was always the two of them in motion, Anna drifting on a tide of sleepy satisfaction. She smelled something new in the car amid her father’s cigarette smoke, a loamy, familiar odor she couldn’t quite place.
“Why the bare feet, toots?” he asked, as she’d known he would.
“To feel the water.”
“That’s something little girls do.”
“Tabatha is eight, and she didn’t.”
“She’d better sense.”
“Mr. Styles liked that I did.”
“You’ve no idea what Mr. Styles thought.”
“I have. He talked to me when you couldn’t hear.”
“I noticed that,” he said, glancing at her. “What did he say?”
Her mind reached back to the sand, the cold, the ache in her feet, and the man beside her, curious—all of it fused now with her longing for that Flossie Flirt. “He said I was strong,” she said, a lump tightening her voice. Her eyes blurred.
“And so you are, toots,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “Anyone can see that.”
At a traffic light, he knocked another cigarette from his Raleigh packet. Anna checked inside, but she’d already taken the coupon. She wished her father would smoke more; she’d collected seventy-eight coupons, but the catalog items weren’t even tempting until a hundred and twenty-five. For eight hundred you could get a six-serving plate-silver set in a customized chest, and there was an automatic toaster for seven hundred. But these numbers seemed unattainable. The B&W Premiums catalog was short on toys: just a Frank Buck panda bear or a Betsy Wetsy doll with a complete layette for two hundred fifty, but those items seemed beneath her. She was drawn to the dartboard, “for older children and adults,” but couldn’t imagine flinging sharp darts across their small apartment. Suppose one hit Lydia?
Smoke rose from the encampments inside Prospect Park. They were nearly home. “I almost forgot,” her father said. “Look what I’ve here.” He took a paper sack from inside his overcoat and gave it to Anna. It was filled with bright red tomatoes, their taut, earthen smell the very one she’d noticed.
“How,” she marveled, “in winter?”
“Mr. Styles has a friend who grows them in a little house made of glass. He showed it to me. We’ll surprise Mama, shall we?”
“You went away? While I was at Mr. Styles’s house?” She felt a wounded astonishment. In all the years Anna had accompanied him on his errands, he had never left her anywhere. He had always been in sight.
“Just for a very short time, toots. You didn’t even miss me.”
“How far away?”
“Not far.”
“I did miss you.” It seemed to her now that she had known he was gone, had felt the void of his absence.
“Baloney,” he said, kissing her again. “You were having the time of your life.”
CHAPTER TWO
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