Bridge of Sighs

her limited experience of its least prosperous sector. Which was what I tried to suggest, tentatively, by saying, “Yeah, but they live in the Borough now, the Marconis.”
    “Shithole,” Karen Cirillo repeated, her tone even more bored and offhanded, her conviction apparently unshakable. So, I was surprised to discover, was my own contrary opinion. In the face of her insistence, I felt a sudden welling up of loyalty to my town and, in particular, our East End neighborhood—to the Spinnarkles and the Gunthers and the Bishops and, mostly, my own small family. Before I could offer anything in defense, though, the bell above the door jingled again, and I looked up, expecting, almost hoping, it would be my father, but it was Jerzy Quinn himself, and when he entered, the world wobbled even more dangerously than it had when Karen Cirillo intruded on H. Rider Haggard a few minutes earlier. About the only way I can explain this wobbling is to cite my profound sense that the presence of these two West Enders at the corner of Third and Rawley was not permitted. I had no concrete idea who or what governed what was permitted, simply that this wasn’t allowed. A violation had occurred. A rule abrogated. A perimeter breached. Whatever immutable law kept Jerzy and his gang out of the YMCA dances until the last half hour, that kept West End kids out of the high-track classes made up of the Jewish kids and Borough kids and a few “gifted” East End kids, the same elemental force that caused everyone to cut a wide swath around Jerzy’s bunch both in the school corridors and outside on the grounds—all of this was called into question by their mere presence in our little store, a dislocation of reality so profound that it left me mute. And as Jerzy came toward me with his signature little jig step, I was amazed that he had just sauntered through all the invisible barriers as if they didn’t exist, when the three of us knew for certain that they did.
    Since Jerzy almost never showed Karen any affection in public, I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t take her hand or anything. For her part, she seemed to know who’d entered the store without having to look. “Hey,” she said, looking straight at me, but meaning, I understood, him. It was now, suddenly, two against one. That’s what I remember thinking. A minute before, however improbable it might have seemed, I’d been on the verge of making a friend. Now I was alone again.
    “Who’s this?” Jerzy said, also looking at me. If he recognized me as a boy he’d once imprisoned in a trunk and pretended to saw in half, he gave no sign. What would I have done if he
had
recognized me? Sadly, I knew the answer to his question, for in the second or two it took him to join his girlfriend at the counter, I’d already begun to formulate a little speech about how, no, there weren’t any hard feelings, it was a long time ago and hadn’t been that big a deal anyway, that it wasn’t like I still had nightmares or anything, or that when I came out of my occasional spells I sometimes imagined I was again locked in the trunk, a sensation so strong I could actually smell the urine. I even remember feeling guilty that he might’ve been worried about me all these years. Far from holding a grudge, I was anxious to set his mind at ease.
    “This? This is Lou,” Karen told him, surprising me with the news that I could be who I wanted. “He’s a friend of Bobby’s.”
    I felt the blood drain out of my face.
    “Bobby who?” her boyfriend said, appraising the store like a potential buyer.
    “Bobby who,” she repeated with a snort. “The Bobby who kicked your ass. My cousin Bobby.
That
Bobby who.”
    My heart pounded in my throat and I felt my knees buckle, but then Jerzy did the strangest thing. He let out a nasty little chuckle and gave an almost imperceptible nod in Karen’s direction as if to say
Girls. What’re you gonna do?
As if the two of us—Jerzy Quinn and Lucy Lynch—were fellow sufferers. As if I had a girlfriend just like Karen Cirillo in the back room. As if I knew the score.
    They were both regarding me now, curious, perhaps, to see whose side I would take, and if there’d been a trunk there behind the counter I’d have voluntarily crawled inside and pulled the lid shut over me.
    “Lou’s nice. He gave me a pack of cigs,” Karen said, smiling at me now, challenging me to say the cigarettes hadn’t been a gift, that in my father’s store we didn’t hand out