Bridge of Sighs

nowhere else. The whole store was permeated by the smell of the popcorn that cranked more or less constantly out of a stained, cloudy, antiquated machine near the front door, each kernel of exploded corn as bright yellow as a rabid dog’s eyes. It didn’t just look yellow, it
tasted
yellow. Needless to say, it was delicious, the reason being, according to local legend, that the machine was never cleaned, its oil never changed. When my mother and I passed Newberry’s, she’d wrinkle her nose and say, “Lord, that
smell.
” Little did she know how I yearned for the day I’d be old enough to go inside on my own and spend hours investigating its dark, delicious mysteries. Even then I seemed to know that all this would begin to happen in junior high.
    So it was in seventh grade that all but the most sheltered of us began to share space and air with kids outside our own neighborhoods. Monday through Friday, from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, kids from all over mingled in the halls—if not the classes—of the junior high on upper Division, but this was just the beginning of a new kind of social commerce that took place on weekends. Saturday afternoons, for instance, we all came together, trailing customs and baggage we were scarcely aware of, at the Bijou Theater. We East End kids would buy popcorn at Newberry’s, and oddly enough the theater’s management didn’t seem to mind. Their own popcorn, in addition to being expensive, was fluffy and albino white, tasting of air. It was a point of pride among East End and Borough kids that we purchased our Sno-Caps, Jujubes and soda (no ice, we insisted) at the theater’s concession stand, whereas West End kids filled their pants pockets with stale, off-brand candy stolen as often as purchased from Newberry’s and generally went thirsty. Just from the detritus we left beneath the seats, the truth of those Saturday matinees would’ve been plain as day—that West End kids congregated on the left-hand side of the theater, we East Enders and Borough kids on the right. But the sticky floor would also have revealed another truth, because among the West End candy wrappers, there would be the odd Sno-Caps box, the shoe-flattened Jujube. We knew it was happening. As soon as the lights went down in the theater, shadows began to move stealthily along the bottom of the screen, left toward right, right toward left. And when the lights came up again, nervous new constellations had formed, though they held together only inside. Once we were out in the late-afternoon light, the separation would occur again, beads of oil scurrying on water.
    If West End kids had to cross Division Street on Saturday afternoons to go to the movies, East Enders crossed it every Friday night to attend the junior high dances at the old YMCA on the edge of the Gut. The dances started at seven, by which time, on payday, the nearby gin mills were already revving up, and when their doors swung open, we heard the raucous revelry. By nine o’clock, when the dance let out, dark men would emerge from the bars—sometimes Uncle Dec among them—to leer at the more mature girls, West Enders mostly, since East End parents waited for their daughters in the parking lot of the Y rather than let them parade past the gin mills on their walk home.
    Everything about these Friday night dances was dramatic. Everyone was there. Not the black kids from the Hill, of course, but those of us with social currency to spend, a little or a lot (even we ourselves didn’t know how much, though we were learning). Since the doors stayed shut until seven sharp, we were forced to mill about outside in the cold. In my memory, it’s always winter, though dances were held throughout the school year. Inside, up on the third floor it was sweltering, the old gym packed to capacity with hundreds of jitterbugging twelve-and thirteen-year-olds. Nothing in my previous experience of life in Thomaston so completely subverted the social order as those dances at the Y, and it was this very subversion that was at once so thrilling and terrifying. As we gathered outside waiting for the doors to open—Borough kids with other Borough kids, with the East Enders and West Enders composing their own circles—the same social rules that governed the school lunch table still applied. But there was also an electricity, a sense that once the doors opened and we clambered up those six dark flights of stairs, the air redolent of nearby