After Delores Read Free Page B

between the two. I knew enough, though, to keep in control of things or else the customers looked at you funny, which makes you feel paranoid and pathetic.
    In the old days, I would come home from the restaurant and Delores would be there.
    â€œHi, baby, I missed you so much,” she’d say.
    I’d put my nose into her neck and say, “Mmmm, you smell great.”
    â€œYou don’t,” she’d laugh, that strange Delores way of mocking and loving at the same time. “You smell like eggs and grease.” Then she’d kiss me on the face and slap my ass, being silly and mean and cute.
    Even after I took a shower, I never smelled as good as she did. I had to settle for being a nicer person and what the hell does that mean?

3
    PRISCILLA HAD THE kind of gun you’d expect from Barbara Stanwyck. It was tiny, with a pearl handle, deadly, sleek, and feminine. I knew that if I hung on to it, I would kill someone. Probably myself.
    Delores used to carry a picture of Barbara Stanwyck in her bankbook. On the back was a copy of her favorite Stanwyck quote: “My three goals are to eat, to survive, and to have a good coat.” But Delores could never remember if it was Barbara the person who said that or whether it was a line from a movie.
    Delores was out for the basics but she also liked being around glitz. She only took the kind of work that let you be near fabulous people. I remember one spring I got a job dressing up as a tomato and handing out flyers for a vegetable stand. Not Delores. She got a job calling up presidents of major corporations and asking them how they felt about their Lear jets. Both gigs paid five an hour, but when I was leafleting downtown Brooklyn, she was phoning from an office on Fifth Avenue.
    â€œYou never know who you might meet in Midtown,” she used to say. “In Brooklyn, you can be pretty sure.”
    Also, she loved People magazine. We used to go out on Sunday evenings to walk around Astor Place, where all kinds of people were on the street selling their stuff. You could buy somebody’s shoes off their feet if you wanted to, that’s how down and out everybody seemed. Some people would have good spreads of old books or coffee pots and radios that had obviously been freshly ripped off. But some people just had an old shirt or a couple of magazines they found in the garbage. That’s where we did our shopping. Delores would buy weeks-old Peoples and some fashion mags for fifty cents, when they cost five times that in the store. Then when we got home, she’d cut out the most outlandish outfits and paste them up on the bathroom wall.
    â€œIsn’t that fabulous?” she’d say. “Really fabulous.”
    Delores’s new girlfriend was named Miriam Silverblatt but she changed it to Mary Sunshine when she got a job as a staff photographer for Vogue . It looked better in the credits. They met when Delores had a job in the garment district putting electronic price tags on minks.
    It took ten hours to tag six hundred coats and by the end of the day you’d throw those coats around like they were garbage. Sunshine came in to take pictures and caught Delores trying on a full-length in the back. Thinking she was a customer going shopping and not a worker being paid six dollars an hour, Sunshine asked her out for lunch and the rest is herstory. You always fall for someone thinking they’re something they’re not. Sometimes I think that fashion was made for Delores, because it’s so dependent on illusion. The people involved tell useless lies professionally and make money, then buy contraptions and use them to have sex. Sunshine had a loft in TriBeCa, invested her money, and developed a good-sized dildo collection. She wore tweed pants and expensive leather jackets. I know this because I have investigated her thoroughly.
    Having Priscilla’s pistol in my pocket opened up a whole new world of possibilities. It might be the