Security
I push a folding metal shopping cart beside my mom over the thumping cracks in Frankford Avenue’s sidewalk across Cumberland, Coral, and Martha Streets toward Kelly’s Korner, where we will shop for groceries. That it is the first of the month means nothing to me. I am with my mom. I am free for summer between first and second grades. In my backpack, I’ve got a coloring book, the journal where I keep my ideas, two pencils, and a Ziploc bag of crayons. “So you won’t drive me nuts when you get bored,” my mom says. I am wearing a sky-blue T-shirt advertising my favorite local business, Famous Italian Ices, with the number 14 on the back–– it used to be my cousin Bobby’s basketball jersey––a pair of shorts my mom cut from jeans I’ve grown too tall for, and one last thing, which I cannot stop staring at: a pair of new bright white, low-top canvas sneakers my mom plucked from a foot locker outside Dick Byrd’s Discount Merchandise on Kensington Avenue.
I don’t know yet how terrible an idea white canvas sneakers are on city streets. When a car turning a corner splotches mud on them, I will try to rub them clean with my thumb and only make things worse. Right now, I love how clean they make me feel. I hope kids from school see me wearing them as I pass, rubbing my newly-shaved head. Earlier today, Gary, the black door-to-door barber who comes around every few months, cut my hair outside our house. My mom brought a kitchen chair out and knotted a beach towel around my neck like all the other moms did as Gary worked his way down the block, naming books we should read, calling us melon heads, saying the way we acted was stranger than fiction, giving us lessons on how the neighborhood’s changed since he got clean and started doing this twenty years ago, giving each of us his White Boy Special: a crew cut that left each of us nearly bald, that would be our only haircut until school was ready to start again in September. On either side of my head, Gary shaved two lines like the racing stripes I’ve seen on cars after I’d asked him to and my mom said it was all right. With every movement of the wind, my scalp tingles, sending a chill through my body sometimes even though it is still hot––over eighty degrees––and past dinner time. A spot behind my left ear keeps itching. I scratch it with a cupped hand, making my mom’s voice even louder when she talks to me.
Along the avenue, summer’s heat has driven people from their houses and onto their stoops and folding chairs on their front sidewalks. We say hi to my mom’s friends Susan and Cynthia leaning out second-floor windows, talking from their connected row houses, arms crossed on their sills. In front of Ruth’s TV Shop, we weave our way through empty multi-colored plastic chairs through which someone has woven a long lock-linked chain. My mom almost falls into a kid’s swimming pool until the girl screams and my mom jumps back. Our empty cart rattles when it bounces over curbs and clatters when we cross intersections.
We have to walk across a wide parking lot to get to Kelly’s Korner’s automatic doors, which open to a security guard’s back turned away from us. He leans over a stack of Coke 12-pack cans reading the sports back pages of the Daily News. My mom says Excuse me and takes one. Kelly’s has everything. My mom likes shopping here, she says, because she can go one place instead of walking Kensington Avenue for hours or taking the bus out to Aramingo and back all day. “I only have so much time,” she says. She pulls a store shopping cart loose from the others and hangs our folded cart over its handles. She lifts me into its child seat and then turns the cart around so I’m facing the rest of the store rather that her, like I’m the captain of an expensive ship. Behind me, she drops bananas and apples and a three-pack of tomatoes wrapped in cellophane into the cart. When we have eaten them, I will use the plastic rectangular sled they come in as another bed for my Star Wars guys. From every aisle, she grabs something. Ritz crackers and Cheez Whiz. Marshmallow Fluff. Two double boxes of Honeycombs cereal. Coffee. Most of the time, I don’t look back to see what. Until she stops in front of snacks––Nutty Buddies, Oreos, a three-gallon jug of fruit punch. Herr’s potato chips. She asks me what else I want and I tell her the orange cheese puffs on the top rack. I love how the extra cheese powder comes off on my fingers and lips. In the baking aisle, I pick the yellow cake and chocolate frosting I want for my birthday.
Near the divide where the store shifts from food to clothes, my mom runs into a mom who jumped straight out of a Sears catalog and who, I guess, knew me as a baby. She leans over and tells me to look at myself, just look, look at how big I got. A double strand of pearls loops around her neck above the deep V of her black dress nice enough for church. She pinches my cheeks until they hurt and smiles like she has loved me every day of my life. The skin her dress’s V exposes is covered with freckles. She’s got a small scar over her right eye like a fish hook. I breathe in a big whiff of whatever perfume she’s wearing, which is not my mom’s Jean Naté, and cough. Then she turns back to my mom and they talk for what feels like an hour. No jokes, either, just talk, talk, back and forth. “Oh, that’s terrible” the woman says. “One day at a time,” my mom says. I stand behind the cart, listening but not listening, for as long as I can take it, then grab on to the cart’s side and lean back. Kelly’s has ceiling fans. I didn’t know that. Kelly’s has security cameras. It has long rows of fluorescent lights from the back of the store to the front. Inside some of the light covers are brown stains. Not all of the light bulbs work. Some flicker. It has several ceiling tiles missing. I can see the white and black and yellow wires the rest of the tiles hide, and the metal heating duct wider than I am tall.
I slip Han Solo into my backpack’s front pocket of broken pencils and a giant eraser that says “For Really Big Mistakes.” while my mom is still talking to her friend. “Go ahead and look,” my mom says, “but we’re not getting anything.” I lift the package down from the hook and work with it behind a box for the TIE Fighter, which the box says comes with a flashing laser light and space sounds. There’s a kid holding it who doesn’t look like anyone around here. He’s wearing a black turtleneck and smiling with his mouth closed. He’s slicing a Death Star’s fighting ship through the sky with the same peace and delight in his eyes as if he were holding a kitten. The plastic separates from the cardboard easily. I can hear my mom and the other mom two aisles over going back and forth in the same low voice. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” my mom says. “I wish I was,” the other mother says. Every time we come, my mom says “Maybe next time.”
I put Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in the sleeves of my black coat last winter. Yoda, too, although there’s not much to do with him. I play with them on the stairway landing outside our apartment after my dad goes to bed. You can only have the same fight so many times, though. Both Vader and Luke’s lightsabers are bent. I need some new guys. Chewbacca would be nice, although he’s kind of like Yoda. He just stands around most of the time in the movies or flies their space ship, the Millennium Falcon, which I don’t have and never will.
The other thing I do in the hallway is play basketball. I cut the bottom out of a Styrofoam cup, tape it to the wall, and crumple a ball of tin foil. I write all the Sixers’ names and the team they’re playing’s names on lined paper and make a box score listing shots made and shots attempted, rebounds, assists, fouls. The Sixers play the Lakers and Celtics a lot and win most of the time on a last-second three pointer from the top of the stairwell, where I slip onto the stairs as I let the shot go. I hold the foil with my thumb and first finger. If I shoot it too hard, the balled-up foil sails over the basket and stirs up dust motes on the hallways floor. If I shoot it just right, though, the foil hitting the Styrofoam sounds a lot like a basketball swishing through a net. It’s a sweet sound.
My mom, dad, and I share a bedroom. I sleep on a fold-up couch at the foot of their bed. In the morning, it’s my job to fold it up, one side at a time, and slide it into the space between the long brown dresser, where next to the mirror there’s a picture of my dad at my age, looking just like me, and the wall. When he gets into bed, I can’t go back in there until I am ready for bed myself. It’s okay. Before he comes home from work, I have it all I want. I play Atari and shoot rolled-up socks into the lamp hanging from the ceiling, the one thing we brought with us from the house we had to move out of last Halloween, that I use as a basketball hoop. That’s when my mom is usually smoking on the front steps. Here’s our whole apartment: that bedroom, which overlooks the avenue, and the room next to it, which is the kitchen. We have a gas stove with blue pilot lights that you can see even in pitch-black dark. We keep our food on shelves dad nailed into what used to be a clothes closet. He built other shelves in the corner out of 2x4s. We have a round glass kitchen table we push against the wall unless we’re eating. We have to keep it organized. There’s enough room to get through if we do that. The refrigerator has old-fashioned handles that click shut. You have to pull them sideways to open the doors. In the freezer, each ice metal tray has three rows of cubes. To get them out, you pull back the lever in the middle until they crack. The bathroom is in the hall. We share it with Eddie Dillaplane from the third floor. He was in World War II. He comes home late every night, sometimes with his friend Eleanor, and turns on WPEN, the Big Band music station. He is always on his way to or from Bob and Ray’s Bar whenever I saw him outside our building.
My mom asks me if I heard her calling and I say I didn’t. It’s the truth. She had added one more thing to the cart: a half-gallon of Neapolitan ice cream. She lifts me back into my seat, turns me again to face away from her. She moves us into an aisle of women’s accessories: tote bags and handbags and purses, beanie hats and bucket hats and huge straw sun hats; bracelets that say “Best Daughter” and letters and people’s names; hoop and stud earrings, pendants of unicorns and elephants and hearts; fancy and casual watches in hard clear cases.
“This bag has seen better days,” my mom says. I don’t know what I’ll say if she unzips the small pocket. Before I can think of anything, she pulls open the bigger one. “Definitely a new one for second grade.” She keeps fiddling with my bag zipping and unzipping, moving things again, and I realize what she’s doing. She’s pulling something inside. Something flat. Bigger than earrings. A bag, maybe. I want to turn around, but I don’t. It’s all over in a second. She pulls the zippers closed and pats my back. “What do you think of this one?” she asks, Velcroing a pastel baseball cap in the back. “Does it scream ‘Mom’?” She’s smiling, which I’ve seen her do a lot, but the face she wears is new to me. She feels far away, like on the other side of a gate. “No,” she says, without me answering. “This isn’t me at all.”
At the register, I help my mom lift our groceries out of the cart while the person in front of us checks out. The belt starts to move. Our items beep as the cashier scans them. There’s a spot for someone else to bag, but it’s empty, so our groceries begin to pile up at the end of the belt. While the girls says how much it is, I look over at the security guard, who is walking out of a small room with a woman holding a walkie-talkie. They look serious. They take turns leaning close to each other and whispering. He says something that makes her jump back and slap his arm. She laughs, then he does. He walks back to the stack of soda cases shading his down-turned head, still smiling. From his belt hang shining handcuffs and a blackjack. There’s an ironed-on patch on the right arm of his short-sleeve shirt that says Sterling Security. He doesn’t look over at us. He flips to the middle of the paper and pulls a pen from his shirt pocket.
My mother hands the cashier three green food coupons with a picture of a white guy with white hair on them; one blue one with a picture of another guy who looks pretty much like the first and Independence Hall, where my school’s third graders went on their school trip; and one brown, which has on it a scene from the signing of the Declaration of Independence on it. On each is written “Do Not Fold or Spindle.” I have never before in my life heard the word “spindle” and don’t know if I’ve ever done it or not.
The man behind us in line made a sound with his mouth.
“Food stamps are for food,” the man says to my mom, who takes coins of change from the girl.
“What do you call this?” my mom asks.
“I call that a waste of my tax money,” the man said. “And I call you lazy. Get a damn job.”
I'll hear this tone from my dad now and then until he moves in with his sister. It’s the kind that starts off mad and gets worse. It's been my job since before I can remember to stand between my parents when his voice gets like that and break up their fights, which aren't really fights but instead are him pushing her against a counter and her putting her hands over her face. A few beers into the night, he goes crazy after her sometimes. He'll stop if I get in the way, though, so I know I always have to be in the way. Most nights, nothing happens. I listen for change in their voices, but all they do is sit in the kitchen, talking softly, listening to news radio, mostly just drinking and smoking.
My dad says he learned in the service the vulnerable parts of a person’s body. One of the man’s, his privates, are right in front of me. Worst case, my dad says, grab on to that and keep twisting and try to rip it off. Don’t stop twisting, he says. Remember that. People all of a sudden aren’t so tough. In my mind, I do that to the man. I grab his privates and twist. He buckles over and smashes his head against the handle of our cart and maybe even gets stabbed in the eyes by the metal tips sticking up from our folded shopping cart and I’m still twisting. I’ll tell my father later and he’ll be proud. “What did I tell you?” he’ll say. The man won’t say more to my mother after that. He would let out sounds of pain that a little boy had brought from him. And his face would be down to my mother’s level then and she could slap him across it like she did once to a woman who said she ought to be ashamed while we were in line outside the St. Francis Mission for free cheese. I like that cheese. It comes in a five-pound carboard box and melts easily over macaroni or within slices of bread.
The cashier slides change into my mother’s hand, then puts her other hand over my mother’s.
“Don’t listen to him,” she says.
“No,” my mom says to the cashier. “He can’t talk to me like that.” She turns back to the man. “You can’t talk to me like that,” she says. “You don’t know I’m not working,” she tells him.
The man starts putting his items on the belt, ignoring her.
“It’s my son’s birthday this week,” she says, not really to the man, not really to the cashier or to the huge store that has begun the rest of its day without her: carts squeaking up and down aisles past everything anyone could possibly need, it seems, to be happy.
The store stops. In that stillness, I can hear instrumental jazz music. Everyone looks over at us now. The other cashiers freeze mid-sale. Shoppers on their way out the door, bags pulling their arms toward the ground, stop and look back. The security guard straightens himself and stands akimbo, both hands on his belt.
“Something I can help you with?” he says to her.
“No, thanks, we’re all set,” she says.
“Are you sure?” he says. “Because once you walk out that door, it’s a different story.”
“What do you mean?” she says.
“Why don’t we just step over here and let him pass?”
So we do that. The man buys only four things. He passes carrying a paper bag without looking at us.
“Let’s just give him a minute,” the guard says to us. “Your birthday, huh, Buzz Cut?” he says to me, smiling at my head. His teeth are white and even, as if he has filed the ends to make them all exactly the same size. “How old?”
“He’ll be seven,” my mom says. She doesn’t say anything else before we leave to me or the security guard, who asks me what I want and I wonder if he already knows. I ask him if he likes being a security guard. He says it’s all right. He’d rather be a musician––he plays bass better than Adam Clayton––have I heard of U2?––but this is okay for now.
“It looks like the coast is clear out there now,” he says, stretching his leg in front of us to push down his foot and open the sliding door, then stepping back toward where he’d been, where the woman with the walkie-talkie waits with a clipboard and green pen behind her ear and can of seltzer she sips through a straw.
My mom won’t cry until we’re almost home. She will stop between Diamond Furniture and Jack’s Cameras in the middle of the sidewalk to catch her breath. Her eyes, which puff out a little like a pug’s, will turn red, as will the loose dark circles of skin under her eyes. Then she will tell me to come on, to watch myself crossing the avenue. She will tell me to do us both a favor, take her hand, at least hold on to the cart, and wait for the light to turn green.
Daniel Donaghy
Daniel Donaghy grew up in the Kensington section of Philadelphia and is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Somerset, which was named Co-winner of the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize. A Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University, he received an Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of the Arts in 2019. His fiction has appeared in Missouri Review, Quarterly West, and Philadelphia Stories. danieldonaghy.com