Crush

A sketch of a wanted man hung on a corkboard at the corner of 96th and Amsterdam, in the Grand Union grocery store where my mother shopped. He looked like Alfred E. Neuman on the cover of my cousin’s MAD magazines, but this man sodomized children. Soon most of the stores in the neighborhood had tacked up his likeness, until I couldn’t keep track of all the places he was. I saw him near the registers at the Woolworth’s, his picture splashed with purple grape juice. He was taped to the door at the Dairy Queen, home of my favorite cherry-dipped soft-serve. The dry cleaner framed his face beside headshots of his actor customers, but his was the only one that wasn’t smiling.

At this dry cleaners, I learned what sodomy was. A woman, first in line, clutched a wedding dress trimmed with lace and tiny seed pearls. She was correcting the Korean storeowner who, knowing little English, thought sodomy meant the wanted man was cutting up children.

“That’s sawing. Not sodomy,” said the woman, shifting the weight of her white dress.

The dry cleaner scrunched his brow. “What?” he asked.

“This man is wanted for snatching up little kids and doing them up the butt without their say-so,” she said, deliberately, as if teaching a preschool class.

A seamstress, tucked in a space behind the washing machines, stopped mid-stitch. All you could hear were shirts being pressed in the background. The dry cleaner clapped his hands above his head and the ironing came to a standstill, the last puffs of steam rising to the ceiling. He shook a metal hanger at the woman. “You are crazy,” he said.

“No, I’m right.” And with that, she dropped her wedding dress on his counter. “I can’t look at this thing hanging in my closet another second. Store it. Charge me. I’ll be back for it never.”

The dry cleaner stared back at her. Remembering what he was there for, he took a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote her a receipt. When the lady turned to leave she found me standing a foot and a half below her with an armful of dirty clothes almost as big as I was.

“Oh. Hello,” she said, somewhat rattled. “All of those yours?”

“They’re my mother’s,” I told her. “She’s an actress.”

“I see,” she said, staring at the lump of laundry I was struggling to hold. “And where is she now?”

“At the drugstore buying Pssst.”

“What in the world?”

“It’s dry shampoo for last-minute auditions.”

“You don’t say?” She pulled on the belt of her navy jacket. Her eyes were mostly white and unblinking, round and smudged with black eyeliner. “Maybe I’ll just wait for her. There is a crazy man on the loose.” She stuck her hands deep into her pockets and headed for a rack of New York City souvenir postcards that the dry cleaner sold on the side. “I’m right over here until she turns up,” she said.

I was always waiting for my mother, but it was strange to have someone else waiting with me.

A carousel of clean clothes in clear plastic started turning. I watched a kelly green coat with large gold buttons going round and round. Across the room, the woman who knew about sodomy collected postcards of the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and Times Square. When she picked a card she liked, she called out “Little girl!” and held it up to show it to me.

The kelly green coat was on its eighth lap when my mother hurried in. The bell on the door jingled, as if to accompany my happiness upon seeing her. She’d been gone less than 15 minutes but it was rare to have her return so soon. The dry cleaner smiled and waved, excited as I was to see her. Last time we were in, he’d told her she was as pretty as the girls on The Dating Game and that she should give them a call...