Bridge of Sighs

cheap one for West Enders, a slightly more upscale store for us. East End women like my mother generally shopped at Cheryl Lynn’s House of Fashion, whereas West Enders had Elsa’s Dress Shop. For men’s and boys’ there was Calloway’s, which displayed in its window a tiny sign advertising the Botany 500 line my grandfather had always favored. My father hated to spend money on clothes and often snuck into Foreman’s, the cheaper West End store, then told my mother he bought the shirt or pants in question at Calloway’s, but she always knew better. That she could tell where he’d bought something after he’d removed the tags and thrown away the bags was akin to knowing which thimble the pill was under in a street scam. It was just the damnedest thing.
    Thomaston’s bars were similarly segregated. East End neighborhood bars, called taverns, were the sort of places where men met after softball games, where a woman could safely go with her husband, where even kids were welcome with their parents before sundown. You could order a hamburger at the bar, along with inexpensive tap beer, and on weekends a cold-cuts-and-potato-salad buffet was provided at no charge on long folding tables. The free food sometimes attracted shabby, hungry-looking West Enders who were generally received coolly, the bartender idly asking how things were “back home.”
    West End bars were rougher—gin mills, people called them—and most of them were located down in the Gut, which was also home to the pool hall and two pawnshops, both of which called themselves music stores, an illusion fostered by the scarred electric guitars as well as the odd accordion or trombone set up in the front window. Into these gin mills West End women often went unattended. At the diner I once overheard my uncle Dec, one of the few men equally at home on both sides of Division Street, talking about the previous Saturday night at a West End dive, when a woman named Gina—odd how memory works, her name racing back to me across five decades—entered, pulled her blouse off over her head and spent the remainder of the night with her bare breasts resting on the bar. Of course I immediately pictured the woman who’d opened the trunk and peered in at me that night so long ago, her naked breasts huge and pendulous.
    “Yeah, you never know what’s going to happen across Division,” Uncle Dec concluded, chuckling appreciatively when the other men finally quit trying to get him to admit he was exaggerating. “In her bra, you mean,” one said in a last attempt. No, Uncle Dec insisted, he could tell the difference between tits in a bra and tits not in a bra, and these were the latter. So the rest of them then lapsed into sullen regret at not having witnessed so stunning an event.
    It wasn’t the Berlin Wall, of course. West End families that had prospered, like ours, moved across Division into new and better lives, just as families in reduced circumstances sometimes found themselves slipping in the opposite direction. Most families had cousins, aunts and uncles on both sides of Division, but visiting them
was
like traveling to another town, even another country, with its own set of customs. Naturally, such separateness occasioned fear and mistrust, yet just as often yearning. Take, for instance, the dime stores. We East Enders had Woolworth’s, which had wide aisles and bright, fluorescent lighting as well as a lunch counter that specialized in toasted-cheese and tuna-salad sandwiches and canned tomato and chicken-noodle soup. Woolworth’s catered to downtown shop clerks who wore neatly pressed short-sleeved white shirts regardless of the weather and would leave the waitress a quarter or thirty-five cents under their plates. One of the front windows was always devoted to expensive toys, and here West End kids would congregate, pressing their runny noses up against the glass until their parents hustled them down the block to J.J. Newberry’s.
    This, the West End dime store, both attracted and frightened me. It was full of cheap plastic toys whose ruptured packaging was held together by Scotch tape. Newberry’s aisles were narrow and crowded, its bins of tacky, exotic merchandise lit, at least in my memory, by little more than the light from the street outside. Most of the stuff I was attracted to there—lurid magazines like
Weird Tales
and motorcycle caps like the one Marlon Brando wore in the movie poster of
The Wild One
—was for sale at Newberry’s and