The Cigarette Girl Read online

  “Max,” she purred, “I didn’t know we were to come in costume.” Her shoulder and chin seemed drawn to each other by magnets.

  Max’s belly brushed Berni’s hip. “But you are in costume, dear. You’re Anita Berber.”

  Berni thought the costume comment wouldn’t go over well, but Anita fluttered her false eyelashes, draping a long-fingered hand across her bony chest. “Max, I go by Anita Bourbon. Der Berber, may she rest in peace.”

  “Who’s Anita Berber?” said Berni, and Max and Anita both squealed in disbelief.

  “She was a famous nude dancer and actress,” Anita told Berni. “Taken from us too soon.”

  “Some say of a sex accident, some of an overdose.” Max put his pacifier in his mouth.

  Anita handed Berni a drink that sparkled and excused herself to talk to another man in a fox fur with claws. Berni stood by the wall, glad to have something in her hand. She watched Anita’s friend produce a vial from his purse, and from it he and Anita took a miniature spoon and put it in their noses. Anita caught her watching. Her lips formed the words don’t tell Sonje.

  Berni nodded and found a seat on one of the satin sofas. Next to her a girl and boy were wrapped around a pipe with a glowing orange end. The boy elbowed Berni, his eyelids with their white eyelashes drooping. Pale-orange freckles dotted his cheeks and elfin nose. “It’s your turn.”

  “Karl,” his companion whined, “we don’t have much more.”

  The pipe smelled like Eastern spices. “No, thanks.”

  Karl waved the pipe in front of Berni’s face. “This will make you relax.”

  How different from a cigarette could it be? Berni inhaled and handed it back to Karl.

  “What about him?” Karl pointed to Anita, who stood alone now, peering over the tops of people’s heads, looking for someone. “Isn’t that your friend?”

  “Her,” Berni corrected him. She felt suddenly protective of Anita. “It’s her. Sie.”

  Karl blinked slowly. “I don’t understand.”

  Berni’s mind had slowed. She looked at the men’s clothing on the girl beside Karl, at the outfit she herself had chosen, the jodhpurs and suspenders. They weren’t called “he,” but Anita was “she,” and Anita was “she” all the time. Berni watched Anita’s dark nervous eyes dart around the room, and a sad thought came to her: How complicated Anita’s life is . . . She looked so vulnerable that Berni would have stood and embraced her if her legs hadn’t turned to lead.

  Berni watched, as if through water, as the baby-man approached Anita and put his hands on her thighs, rubbing up and down roughly, as an ungainly child might pet a cat. Berni took another pull off the pipe when the boy put it to her lips, surprised to find that she did relax. Karl kissed her on the cheek. She shut her eyes and felt very good indeed, and for a while, wrapped in Karl’s pale arms, she forgot Anita.

  Berni did not wake until someone threw her arm around his neck. His elbow went under her knees, and as he lifted her against his chest, she smiled, happy for someone to carry her somewhere. Her eyes opened and she caught a hazy glimpse of a dark beard where she’d expected the smooth curve of Karl’s jaw. But then, from far away, she heard Anita’s voice: Not her, that one’s sixteen, and hasn’t been touched deeply yet. Then Berni was put back on the cushion, and then she was left alone.

  Just before she was engulfed in sleep, a thought came to her, perhaps the first clear thought she’d had since she arrived at Sonje’s. Incorporating Grete into this life would be difficult. As difficult as weaving a satin ribbon through burlap.

  South Carolina, 1970

  The fly had grown comfortable enough to entwine its back legs and let down its sucker. Janeen could have killed it, if she had a swatter; instead she watched it take minuscule gulps of a buttermilk biscuit. For a minute she wished she had one of those machines from the movies, through which she and the fly could switch bodies; how gladly she’d trade her slouching frame in its elephant-leg trousers for a pair of wings! She gazed out the banquet room’s lone window, aching to buzz past the moss-draped oak outside and take to the skies.

  Her mother rested a large hand on Janeen’s shoulder, bringing her back to the buffet at the luncheon following her father’s funeral. An impromptu receiving line had formed. Yet another neighbor had made a forced nice comment about how big she’d grown, something wildly inappropriate to tell a five-foot-ten seventeen-year-old.

  “Here we are,” her mother, Anita, murmured close to her ear, her cologne thick in Janeen’s nose. “Another vulture. Lacey!” she greeted the next sympathetic well-wisher.

  It both amazed and irritated Janeen that her mother, who wasn’t even a born-and-bred American, played this game so much better than she did. “Southerners will tolerate some eccentricity, as long as they can make of you a sort of pet,” Anita had said just that morning as she buttoned her white polyester shirt, a purchase from the men’s department at Sears. “To a few, I am their German pet.”

  Janeen felt fairly certain she, herself, was nobody’s pet. Lacey Callahan, mother to the junior prom queen, approached her with the same bless-your-heart smile her daughter had perfected, her teeth hard and white as squares of gum. “Oh, he was a wonderful man, y’all,” Lacey cooed. “So . . . jolly. I thought you might’ve buried him with a tumbler in hand. My Lord, never saw the man without his drink!” She laughed behind her fingers, the nails Pepto pink.

  Janeen might have slapped Mrs. Callahan if it hadn’t been for Anita, who tapped her chin. “An interesting idea, but as you saw earlier, Remy opted for cremation.”

  Mrs. Callahan’s smile cracked a little. “I—yes. I was at the service, o’course.”

  “Of course. Biscuit?” Anita asked, reaching for the one the fly had been nibbling. She plopped it on Mrs. Callahan’s paper plate.

  As Mrs. Callahan melted back into the crowd, Janeen’s teeth shredded her chapped lips. How many people in this room had really known her father? How many cared he was gone? “I can’t do this much longer,” she murmured to her mother.

  Anita squeezed her around the shoulders. “At least we are not wallowing at home, Liebchen. And this crowd is making your father in heaven laugh.”

  In heaven. Janeen felt her stomach flip. Her father, who had been perfectly well seven months ago, was in heaven. And here she and her mother were, smiling sadly as people they hardly knew filled their plates with pasta salad.

  Then she noticed a scruffy little man lingering beside a fake ficus tree, a young girl on his hip. She crossed the room in ten strides, never taking her eyes off of him. He wasn’t much taller than she—the height came from her mother—and he looked a bit frightened as she gazed into his eyes.

  “You came,” she said breathlessly, unsure if she should hug him. “Everett. Maisy. You’re the only family who came.”

  Her mother had warned her not to expect any of Remy’s Louisiana relatives to show. They were notorious homebodies—“Hermits, almost,” Anita claimed—who Janeen saw but once every five or ten years. But she had made a point to call Everett, her father’s favorite cousin from childhood. She peered into his face now, trying to find any trace of her tanned, swarthy father in his features. With his thinning hair and sad-dog eyes, Everett Lefevre was at best a watered-down version of the man she’d lost.

  Everett hefted Maisy on his hip. He’d borrowed a shirt for the occasion, she could tell; the seams fell far below his shoulders. Tears welled in her eyes. “A cryin’ shame, all of this,” he said. “And you so young.”

  Janeen swallowed. “I’m not so young,” she told Everett, and she meant it. She felt like she’d been zapped overnight into middle age. She touched Maisy’s small white shoe. “I’m sure glad you’re here.”

  “Daddy told me not to touch the vase,” said Maisy.

  “The vase?”

  “She means the urn,” Everett whispered.

  For a moment Janeen couldn’t look at them. Everett slid Maisy to the ground, and Janeen felt h
is arm go stiffly around her, then drop. At least he seemed genuinely sad, unlike the others in the room, who appeared anxious to make their tee times.

  “A shame your daddy isn’t here to give you comfort. Ironic, I guess.”

  “Ironic?” She looked down; Maisy had pressed a tea tassie into her hand. “Ironic how?”

  “Maybe that’s not the right word.” He tugged his collar. “I meant because the same thing happened to him, you know, and he just a little older than you.”

  The pecans in Janeen’s mouth turned to stones. “I didn’t know he was that young when Granddad died.”

  “Well, sure. His daddy had the same thing, early cancer of the prostate. Runs in the family. I’m lucky it’s my mother who was a Moore . . .”

  Janeen half-listened, watching Anita. Her hair had grayed significantly in the past year. She wore it as short as Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby and dressed in men’s shirts and trousers, never a bra. Her flat chest, she quipped, helped her “support” women’s lib. She had her hand on Mr. Beecham’s shoulder—the owner of the restaurant where Remy had worked for twenty years.

  “Did my mother know about this? About Granddad having prostate cancer, too?”

  “Uh, I’d think so.” Poor Everett seemed to know he’d stepped in something. “Your father would’ve told her, right? When they talked about their families?”

  “My mother wouldn’t have told him about her family.” Anita acted as though she had no history, as if she’d washed up on the shores of America fully formed, like Aphrodite, or a piece of sea glass, broken and beaten but remade into something better. “And she tells me nothing.”

  She left poor Everett in midsentence and strode toward her mother. She didn’t even acknowledge Mr. Beecham. “I’m walking home,” she announced, drowning out his platitudes.

  “Liebchen.” Anita lifted a damp, dark curl off Janeen’s forehead. Now that they were close, Janeen could see red at the corners of her brown eyes and around the rims of her nostrils. But when had she wept? She’d been stiff and erect as a lightning rod throughout the service. “Do not run off alone. We have been invited to Charlotte’s for supper. They will close the restaurant tonight in honor of your father, so that we who knew him might dine together, reminisce . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” Janeen said in Mr. Beecham’s direction, without meeting his eyes. As she fled her mother managed to grab her fingertips, calling her name. Eyes closed, lashes wet, Janeen wrenched herself free, knuckle by knuckle.

  • • •

  A few mornings after Remy’s funeral, Anita went back to work.

  “I do not think I need explain, Liebchen, why I must return so soon to the library,” she’d said the night before as they watched television. “We need money, for one. Also it will be good for me to have my hands busy. You will see, when you return to lifeguarding. It is a shame you aren’t in school right now.”

  “Yeah. Would’ve been nicer of Daddy to die in the fall.” Janeen stuffed her mouth with the last of her TV dinner.

  “Janeen, for hell’s sake!”

  “Mutti, it’s ‘for heaven’s sake.’ No one says ‘for hell’s sake.’” A newspaper lay on the ottoman in front of Janeen; she tented it in front of her so that her mother wouldn’t see she was about to cry. Anita would only act dismissive. “Chaneen,” she would croon in her accent, “it will all be okay.” It was not supposed to all be okay. They were supposed to be sad. To be angry. To throw things.

  “Heaven, hell, whatever it is. You know what I mean.” Anita got to her feet, the long bones in her toes cracking, and went to adjust the rabbit ears. Onscreen, Marlo Thomas had her toe stuck in a bowling ball. The laugh track echoed. “You have been acting as if your father’s death is my fault. And I think it is a bit unfair, considering I am mourning him too.”

  Janeen said nothing, staring with glazed eyes at the U.S. section of the paper. On the third page was a photograph of a father and daughter on a beach. The man was swinging his little girl by the arms, and the girl’s head was thrown back, her mouth open in adoring laughter.

  “If you become lonely tomorrow, Janeen, have lunch with me in Shortleaf Park.” Anita ran her hand over her head, leaving rake marks in her short, sweaty hair.

  Janeen said nothing. She took a second look at the man and his lucky daughter. They’d been photographed from a distance, and the image was grainy. Then she noticed the second photo that accompanied the article, one of a fair, hawk-nosed young man in a black cap and gray jacket, silver bars on his collar. A swastika on his sleeve.

  She sat up, knocking her fork to the carpet; she ignored her mother’s squawk. “Neighbor Claims Missing Man Is Former Nazi,” the headline declared. Henry Klein, the man in the beach photo, had been missing for over a month. Before his disappearance, a woman had reported she recognized him as Klaus Eisler, a former officer in the SS intelligence service.

  “Huh. Look at this.” Janeen spread the newspaper down on the ottoman. “A Nazi was living in Florida.”

  “Psst,” Anita replied, pretending to spit. “May they catch him and string him up by the little hairs.” Her eyes flitted briefly toward the article. Then she did a double-take. She brought Janeen’s arm closer, her fingers cold and rigid. In the blue light from the television, her face seemed drained of color.

  “Mutti,” Janeen murmured, “did you know this man?”

  “Did I know him!” Anita rolled her eyes and snorted, horselike, but Janeen noticed that the hand holding her tumbler of schnapps seemed to shake.

  “It says he grew up in Berlin, like you.”

  “Berlin is a large city, Liebchen, didn’t you know?” Anita squeezed her dark eyes shut once, twice, as though she were using her lids to erase what she’d just seen. Her mouth set itself in a hard line. “It is time for me to fall asleep, and so should you. Stop reading this nonsense.”

  “Okay,” Janeen said, her eyes on the page.

  “And it would not hurt if you would take a minute to clean out the refrigerator in the morning.” With that, she’d gone to bed. Janeen had stayed on the sofa for hours, waking only when faint light began to creep under the drapes. The newspaper lay over her lap like a blanket. Her fingers and the side of her face were stained with black ink.

  That morning, alone in the house for the first time in she didn’t know how long, she opened the refrigerator. It smelled terrible. Casseroles wrapped in aluminum foil or plastic were shoved in every which way, behind which she and her mother had let fruit and vegetables molder, a carton of milk turn lumpy. A hastily wrapped block of Cheddar bore green spores. Science experiments, her father would have called them.

  At the back of the top shelf, Janeen saw why her mother couldn’t bring herself to throw out the spoiled food. There was the final pie her father had baked, peach crumb. Late at night, after they’d come back from the hospital, her mother had been taking tiny bites directly from the dish with a fork. Now white fuzz dotted its surface.

  Janeen stared at the glass dish for a while. Her father’s last pie. His blunt fingertips had crimped the edges of the crust. He’d softened the peach cubes in butter and brown sugar. Come fall, the apples on her father’s favorite scruffy tree would rot on their branches. Come Thanksgiving, there would be no bourbon crème, no chocolate pluff mud pie. A vision flashed past: Janeen and her mother parked glumly in front of a Christmas special, freezer meals on their laps. Silence between them. For a minute, she couldn’t move.

  And then she could. She yanked the dish from the fridge, took it to the garbage can, and shook it until the pie went splat across the top of the trash. The underside of the crust looked naked and exposed, shattered into a dozen pieces. She put her wrist to her forehead, breathing hard. Anita had never been sentimental or delicate, but she should have known Janeen wouldn’t want to do this by herself.

  Anita’s own father had passed away when she was a girl. Shouldn’t she have understood? All she would say about it was that she’d lost her
parents at a very young age—too young to remember, she said. Too young to grieve?

  • • •

  For a while that afternoon, Janeen lay on her stomach in the spare bedroom, which would have been her sibling’s if her parents had another child. Instead it hosted their record player and her father’s rarely used banjo.

  Lately, she’d been dying for a sibling.

  Their house was a ranch, the windows low enough for her to watch blue-black birds nip insects off the tops of the grass. Through the screens she could smell pine resin and, from the salty flats of the Lowcountry, a hint of brine. The grass needed a trim, the tops of scattered blades turning to seed.

  Tending to the yard had always been her mother’s job. She was the only woman in the neighborhood who could operate a lawnmower, which she did with vigor as she chain-smoked. As a kid, Janeen had sometimes wished her parents would fit in better, that they’d act like normal people. Like squares. Most people’s parents were squares, even though they tended to be ten years younger than hers. Remy and Anita had gone to outdoor concerts and sat on blankets holding hands. On more than one occasion they’d come back smelling of pot. Her father baked. Her mother was a librarian’s assistant who tinkered with their cars in her spare time. When they danced together at weddings, they’d always joked that she liked to take the lead.

  People in Pine Shoals always assumed her mother was a war bride, but her parents had met in a bakery in Atlanta right after the war. Her mother had just been let go from a munitions factory, and her father, back from France, had taken the morning shift at a bakery.

  Every day at five o’clock in the morning, before anyone else arrived, her mother would be waiting outside the door. Face gaunt, her hair chopped at uneven angles, she’d mumble her order: apple streusel and a coffee. After weeks of watching her stare out the window and take long bites of cake, Remy sat down at her table, and immediately she moved to put on her jacket.