Beggar of Love Read Online Free Page B

tissue.
    She used the side of her hand to wipe the slimy stuff off herself. When she looked up, her father was in his good blue suit. She liked his black-and-red striped tie. She liked all his ties. It was magic, the way it was a long flat thing and then he put it around his neck and it made him handsome. Her hand was red from the lipstick. She hid it in her bathrobe pocket so Emmy wouldn’t notice.
    Cousin Ruth arrived to babysit her. As soon as her mother and father left, Ruth put her to bed and went out in the living room to smoke cigarettes and listen to the record player all night. Amelia’s mustache kept away the dark-cloud feeling she usually had on Friday and Saturday nights when Emmy and Jarvy were gone.
    All these years later, smoke from Angela’s cigarette stung her nose and she stood to avoid it, as she always tried to avoid her family’s smoke, losing her reverie. Angela lay on the new spring grass in Cannon Park. Bright new dandelions and tiny white daisies with yolk-yellow centers were clustered everywhere, like glowing fallen stars. Bits of streamers had been left behind from someone’s wedding.
    “Look at this magnificent carpet, Jefferson! Summer’s here in full swing now that you’re sixteen.”
    “Summer never looked so good before, Angie,” she said, bending to finger one of the little white flowers.
    “You mean, before you?” They’d come from walking along the river, arms wrapped around each other. Angela tickled Jefferson’s bare toes with tiny pebbles that she emptied from her shoes.
    “No, Angie, before us.”
    “Before us you were making eyes at your Girl Scouts.”
    “Hey! You know I wasn’t.” She leapt to catch a tree branch and pulled it down to tease Angela’s nose with a soft blossom. “I didn’t know a girl could love a girl before you.”
    “What about Isadora Dellwood?” Angela teased.
    Jefferson dove onto her stomach and hid her face. “I should never have told you about Isadora Dellwood. We were best friends when we were kids, that’s all.”
    “And you shared a tent with her on Bear Mountain every summer.”
    “We were little girls.”
    “If only we could share a tent somewhere.”
    Jefferson dared a look up. “You? In a tent? I thought you didn’t like bugs and owls and”—Jefferson half-rose and pretended to pounce—“ferocious night-stalking raccoons.”
    “In between visits from the menagerie it might be nice. You could show me what you wanted to do with Isadora Dellwood.”
    “Angie! I never knew there was something to do with Iz.”
    “Aha. You think I corrupted you.”
    “And how.” Jefferson flopped on her back and hugged herself, trying to erase the humiliating memory of what she and Isadora did do.
    When it happened, they were only eleven. Iz lay on the couch in her mother’s apartment above the hat store and the Chinese laundry. The apartment always smelled like steam from the pressers, and Jefferson could sometimes hear the owners arguing in Chinese, their words quick, incomprehensible bursts that, for all she knew, might not have been hostile, could have been loving, or mundane, maybe about the weather.
    That day it was raining. Iz had called for her to come over and play. They’d been friends all through grammar school; play, to Jefferson, meant paper dolls or kickball. She’d loved the few paper-doll books that had boy characters. Iz would dress the girl doll and she would dress the boy to go out on a date, wishing she could wear clothes like theirs, not like the girl’s. Sometimes they talked about growing up and having children. Jefferson always wanted to have little boys so she could dress them in tiny gray flannel slacks, white shirts, red vests, and bow ties.
    She sighed, remembering how Iz had lain on the green, textured couch in that rainy-day apartment and beckoned her, crooking one finger like movie stars did. She went over and Iz looked at her with an unfamiliar faraway gaze that scared her.
    “I got a brassiere this