Bridge of Sighs

enough.
    Buying Ikey Lubin’s had just as profound an effect on my father, whose life changed utterly as a result. Suddenly, for the first time in his adult life, he was no longer a route man. Accustomed to going out into the world armed with clear, simple duties, and with his own good nature as the primary tool of their implementation, he now had to stand still in one spot and trust that the world would come to him and also that, when it did, he’d have what was required. In the store he was like a man recently jailed without explanation and brutally interrogated on a subject of which he hadn’t the slightest knowledge. Trapped behind Ikey’s monster cash register, he bounced from one foot to the other, waiting for the next thing, whatever that might be. When a customer came in asking for something, he bolted from behind the counter like an escapee, sometimes doing two or three laps around the store before locating the item requested, then grimly returning to the register to ring up the sale and await his next fleeting liberation. Gone, he now realized, were the days he could stroll downtown for coffee and a doughnut at the Cayoga Diner or some joke swapping at the barbershop. He couldn’t even leave his post long enough to stroll down the block and offer advice to roofers or painters or plumbers when they showed up unexpectedly at the Spinnarkles’ next door or at the Gunthers’. He had no choice but to wait for those men to come to him on their lunch hour—that is, assuming they didn’t buy their soda from Tommy Flynn’s cooler down the street. Many of Ikey’s regulars had, as expected, fallen away when they couldn’t bet their number or daily double, and that first month or so my father sometimes waited an hour or more between customers. Uncle Dec came in just once, looked around, met my father’s eye, shook his head and left without a word.
    My parents had always argued over money, since no matter how hard they worked we came up short at the end of the month. My father wasn’t a spendthrift, but saving for a rainy day wasn’t in his nature. To his way of thinking, the sun was shining most of the time. My mother had inherited from her parents the exact opposite view. To her, a sunny day was a rarity. Tomorrow it would rain, and the only question was how hard. She didn’t think we’d need an ark necessarily, but she favored spending money only on what we really needed. She was willing to spend larger amounts if whatever it was would last, if she could be assured she wouldn’t have to buy it again next week. By contrast, my father had a great fondness for anything that sparkled, especially if it was cheap. If he went downtown with a pocket full of change, he’d spend a quarter here, a dime there and his last penny on a lemon drop, taking great pleasure in each tiny purchase. When it came to money, my mother maintained, he was like a tire with a slow leak; you couldn’t find it and wouldn’t even know it was there except that every third or fourth morning it was flat. Before Ikey Lubin’s their disagreements, however heated they were, always got resolved peacefully. Once they’d both calmed down, they convened at the kitchen table, a pad of paper and a sharp pencil between them, and she would show him the consequences of what he’d done or wanted to do. She was left-handed, my mother, and my father always sat to that side of her at the table, watching the numbers appear in columns on the pad. After a while, usually in the middle of some calculation, he’d take the pencil from her and set it on the table and put his hand on top of hers, where it would remain, sometimes for a whole minute, while they agreed to say nothing, until finally he’d grin, as if to say it didn’t really matter who was right, and give her back the pencil, which she always accepted with a sigh, as if to acknowledge that of course he was right, it didn’t matter at all. How many times did I witness this ritual during my boyhood? Even now I can feel the sweetness of those gestures, of my father first taking the pencil from her, then giving it back.
    But Ikey’s was different. Sure, I knew my parents still loved each other, but what if they didn’t love each other enough? What if the store made my mother love my father less, and that “less” was no longer sufficient to hold us together? “Divorce,” an unheard-of word during much of my boyhood, was suddenly on everyone’s lips, as familiar as cancer. Families,