Coney Island in Winter

EDITORS' PRIZE WINNERS THE EDITORS' PRIZE WINNERS Fiction—Dana Kinstler Standefer "Coney Island in Winter" Essay—Dorothea Freund "A Bride for My Son' THE LARRY LEVIS PRIZE IN POETRY Rick Hilles— "Flashlight Stories" CONEY ISLAND IN WINTER/ Dana Kinstler Standefer THE FEELING OF MY FAT on me—and wanting to get rid of it. Seeking to sell it, get something for my fat. Fat sells. My mother's fat I inherited, her swaddling hips, "childbearing" they've been called by a few men, one indifferent, one passionate, one ambiguous. The ambiguous man, Bob Scheinman, had also been a hooker, which I'll get into later. While working part time in a women's clothing store he also discovered he had a knack for taking care of children. When shoppers came in off Second Avenue he was somewhere on the floor, pushing clear plastic hangers around the rounders of orange and green silk shirts, nylon tank tops and pretty lace camisoles. He would set down an armload and pick up little Jennifer, two, or Tony, four, while their mother tried on different outfits for him. He told me later he liked to imagine what kind of bizarre possibilities awaited them. He didn't think anything terrible had to happen, but he read the New York Post almost every morning, and that offered a myriad of examples of what could happen to anyone. You see something pure and wait to see how it will develop; he called it living in the wreckage of the future. Like his life, for instance, starting out one way—a poor kid raised in Brooklyn by good parents, honest, hardworking immigrants from Russia. He ended up in the same business of rags, schmatte, the industry of Seventh Avenue. He moved up from being a salesclerk in his father's store to a delivery boy, and then he got his job at the store on Second Avenue, Mona's. Eventually he was the manager. And by the time I went to work for him, after an apprenticeship in one of the best evening-wear houses, he was the designer. He had his own company, Bob Scheinman's Elegant Poofs, which sold to the elite the kind of party dresses you see sometimes in black and white in the society pages of the Sunday paper. Scheinman was an industriaUst, and he was androgynous; the squalid circumstances of his life developed more Uke mold spores than in any linear way. Events multiplied in a sort of silent, lateral spread, a dappling flood of changes at once connected and expanding. He explained it to me as if he had nothing to do with any of the commotion. I had been working under him for many months, taking messages in the perforated pad and filing invoices in the dusty metal cabinet that rose to my chest. The Missouri Review »103 He was thirty-four when he told me this. And after twenty years of working in any business you've seen a few things, you've been around the block, so to speak. He was saving his money for the retirement years. He wanted to retreat to a home somewhere near Miami, where he could rub his toes into the hot sand and Usten to the spray and bake. And he would meditate on all he had done and then clear his mind of it, vanish into the fabric of a seashore bumpy with worn shells and pebbles as soft as worrystones. I had started as a temp in Bob Scheinman's office. It was late summer , and I meant to stay only a week, maybe two. Suddenly March turned to May, and then it was summer again. The days kept getting hotter; no sign of change, except the fall was approaching again, and Bob Scheinman was designing his poofs in orange and brown. On that first day I got acquainted with the menus in the front drawer of the desk, left by his last three receptionists, none of whom had lasted more than a month. There'd been a Deborah, a Liana, and one day I saw a Gladys. Her signature was left like a scar underneath the others, at a...