Bridge of Sighs

blinding.
    I could choose who to be.
             
     
    F OR A WHILE it looked like things would work out as I’d hoped they might. Every night, when my father left me in charge of the store, Karen would appear and we’d talk, usually about school. Her belief was that all our teachers were idiots, an opinion I allowed her to imagine I shared. She was convinced they had it in for the school’s dumb kids just because they were stupid. This wasn’t an argument I’d ever encountered before, so it took me a while to get a grip on it. “Take us,” she explained. “You’re smart, I’m dumb. So they like you and hate me.” When I protested, saying I wasn’t that smart, she would have none of it. “Okay,” she conceded, “you’re not like a Jew or anything, but you’re not dumb like me. And you’re
way
smarter than Jerz,” she added, apparently feeling no need to be loyal to her boyfriend. When I said that maybe the fact that I did my homework might have something to do with our teachers’ unfairly high opinion of kids like me, she brushed this suggestion aside as well. She’d tried shit like doing her homework for a while, but it was counterproductive since she always did it wrong. Doing homework wrong, to her, was worse than not doing it at all, because doing it required time and effort and yielded the same result as not doing it, which required neither. Besides, our teachers had it all figured out in advance, she said, like who was going to get good grades and who’d flunk. “Ask Jerz,” she concluded, without giving me to understand why I should value the opinion of someone she’d just admitted wasn’t nearly as smart as I was.
    That was the most curious thing about Karen’s always curious logic. The way she saw it, stupidity didn’t mean that a person’s conclusions were necessarily unsound. She saw no reason to distrust her boyfriend’s wisdom on most subjects, any more than she considered his being held back two grades indicative of anything. “Jerz knows stuff,” she insisted, then added, “All
kinds
of shit,” her rhetorical clincher.
    I kept expecting him to join us, but after that first evening he didn’t appear again, and I gathered from Karen that he’d recently come under some sort of house arrest, at least on weeknights. “He promised his old lady” was how she explained it. Karen was full of West End expressions like “old lady” for “mother.” Apparently Jerzy’s “old man” was dead, so it was just him and her and his brothers. Her own father wasn’t in the picture either, which was why her last name wasn’t the same as her mother’s, and she seemed to have concluded that this, too, was normal. Jerzy’s old lady was okay, Karen went on. She was just trying to keep him on the straight and narrow, because one more screwup and he’d be back in reform school for good and, after that, prison. So except for school and weekends, Jerzy was grounded. “You’re my only friend, Lou,” she concluded sadly. “How about a pack of those Parliaments?”
    Though I continued to give Karen cigarettes, she was good about not lighting up in the store, for which I was grateful, because my father wouldn’t have liked that, even if they’d been come by honestly. Nobody was allowed to smoke in the store except Uncle Dec, who did as he pleased in all circumstances, though he rarely visited us. When I casually let it drop that I was thinking about taking up smoking “again,” Karen was adamant that I not. “Cigs give you cancer. Especially girls. They’ll probably have to cut my tits off by the time I’m thirty.” When she said this, she cupped a hand under each breast so I’d know which ones she was referring to. The word “tits,” coming from Karen Cirillo’s mouth, was nearly enough to make me faint, and when she cupped them, I don’t know what kept me on my feet.
    If I was, as Karen claimed, her only friend, you wouldn’t have guessed it by school. Our paths crossed only in the hallways or on the property outside, but I quickly learned that our early evening friendship was something she had no intention of acknowledging publicly. I smiled a few times, maybe even waved, but though I was sure she saw me, her expression never changed. Karen possessed a special talent that I’ve seen in only one or two other people, the uncanny ability to look right at you and then, without appearing to shift her gaze, at some point over your shoulder. The change was so subtle