Bridge of Sighs

paper—things they wouldn’t make a special trip to the supermarket for. They liked coming into a store like Ikey’s, he reiterated, where they knew people, where they could find what they were looking for and there was somebody to ask if they couldn’t.
    Upstairs, I was certain, a very different conversation was going on, and a very different picture of Ikey’s being painted. My mother did Ikey’s books every month and knew what a shoestring operation we ran, how small fluctuations and surprises could throw us for a loop, how hard we had to work for the slender living we made, how we ordered close to the bone so we wouldn’t incur losses. Even when we did everything right, we were often flummoxed by unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances. Yes, we were making a go of it, but each year it was getting harder, not easier, and now there were rumors of a new supermarket coming to town, one that would obsolete the A&P. Ikey’s wasn’t the kind of star any sensible young person would hitch a wagon to.
    Nor was Thomaston. In the years since the tannery closed, no other industry had come in to give hope to those who’d lost their jobs there. FOR SALE signs, more of them every year, bloomed on West End, East End and even Borough properties. The Beverlys, who could afford to, had finally sold their house at a loss. Those who couldn’t afford to bail out consulted one demoralized realtor after another, plotting doomed strategies to sell their homes, first at “fair” prices that represented the owners’ diminished hopes and expectations, then at “reduced” prices designed to show how “motivated” they were. But only fire-sale pricing attracted serious buyers, of whom there were precious few, and fierce competition for them drove desperate sellers to slash prices further.
    So did the now-conventional wisdom that Thomaston had, in fact, been poisoned. Even our local newspaper had finally given up running editorials to counter the Albany whistle-blowers on the pollution of the Cayoga Stream and our tainted groundwater, instead arguing weakly that we weren’t that much worse off than our neighboring communities. On weekends, to reassure residents that the Cayoga now ran clean and pure, the paper printed photos of men fly-fishing in the shadow of the abandoned tannery. The problem was that people remembered their poisoning fondly. Back when the Cayoga ran red, they had money in their pockets. Now jobless, once their unemployment was exhausted, they signed up for welfare and drank their government checks in gin mills like Murdick’s. Division Street wasn’t really even the boundary between the West and East Ends anymore. The poverty and lack of opportunity that had once characterized everything west of Division was now encroaching on formerly respectable East End neighborhoods. Before long, my mother predicted, the banks would own every house and business in town, and then even the banks would leave. Of course Sarah already knew most of this, but I was sure my mother, fearing that her time away might’ve made her nostalgic, took every opportunity to remind her.
    To be honest, what tormented me most when they were alone together was what my mother might be saying to Sarah about me. My mother loved me, I knew that. Why, then, did I suspect her of warning my girlfriend against me? Though we’d never discussed them, Sarah knew when and how my spells had begun and that I’d battled them throughout my adolescence. My father believed they were a thing of the past, that I’d outgrown them like an ugly sweater forgotten in the back of the closet. Would my mother share with Sarah her fear—and, I confess, my own—that I’d never be free of them? Why did I imagine her warning Sarah about what she’d be in for if we married, that she’d spend the rest of her life trapped by not just my condition but also my temperament? “Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in that store?” I could hear her saying. At night, unable to sleep, I cataloged all the things my mother knew about me that I’d rather Sarah didn’t: how as a boy I’d been afraid to walk home from school alone after Bobby moved away from Berman Court, how I’d failed to call the turn in the milk truck and gotten Bobby’s wrist broken, how devastated I’d been when the Marconis moved to the Borough, how I’d allowed Karen Cirillo to steal cigarettes from Ikey’s.
    I knew that these were paranoid fears, evidence merely of self-doubt