Our date Saturday night started out fine. We went out to an Italian restaurant with Sheldon and Jessie, ordered four dishes, and shared them so we all got to taste everything. Sheldon was a year older than Lenny, and since they were best friends and their birthdays fell one week apart, they had gotten into the habit of celebrating together.
Sheldon and Jessie were the couple Lenny and I went out with most frequently. I had always liked Sheldon, but I wasn’t wild about all his ideas. He had this very old-fashioned attitude toward girls— mainly that they belonged tucked away at home somewhere while boys could go around doing whatever they pleased. Sometimes this attitude rubbed off on Lenny, and he would do or say something that sounded just like Sheldon and which would drive me absolutely wild. Still, as long as Sheldon kept his macho tendencies under control, we usually had a good time together.
Tonight was one of those times everything seemed to be going well. Jessie and I had called up the restaurant beforehand to order a cake for the boys. They were both taken by surprise when the waiter brought it out all aglow with candles. We sang an off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Then Jessie and I presented the gifts we had bought—football sweatshirts with logos from their favorite teams.
All this attention must have made Lenny feel especially good about me, because he sat with his arm around me the whole bus ride out to the track.
“This has been a great birthday so far,” he whispered to me. “But the best is yet to come. Just wait until we get to the track.”
Despite Lenny’s excitement, I felt very apprehensive as we approached the racetrack. No one in my family gambled, and I never thought of it as a good thing to do. Once we got there, I found the place was even dirtier and sleazier than I had expected. The air was thick with smoke, and layers of losing racing tickets, papers, and other assorted litter covered the floor.
Lenny seemed unaware of anything negative. “Isn’t this great?” he asked excitedly. “What atmosphere!” He rushed to buy programs for him and Sheldon, then led us to some seats overlooking the track. He sat down, took out a pencil, and began making little marks all over the program. It all looked very complicated.
“What is it that you’re doing?” I asked.
“Shh!” He held up a warning hand. “I’m about to hit upon something big!”
I sat there watching him impatiently. Sheldon was pointing out the various horses and their colors to Jessie, but Lenny was so engrossed in his dumb program it was as if he were totally unaware of my presence.
“I’ve got it!” he announced, suddenly jumping up from his seat. Before I could ask him what it was he’d gotten, he had disappeared into the crowds of people near the betting windows.
“He must have gone to make a bet,” Sheldon said. “Lenny gets really intense at the track.”
“Intense?” I repeated. “If you ask me, the correct word is insane! It’s like he’s blocked out the rest of the world, including me!”
“Isn’t he a riot?” Sheldon laughed. He thought everything Lenny did was funny. But he wasn’t acting the same way Lenny was. He took time to explain to Jessie how the race was run, the advantages and disadvantages of the different post positions, and what all those numbers in the program meant. Then he asked her to pick the horse she liked, and he would go bet two dollars on it for her.
“This is fun!” Jessie said to me when Sheldon left to make the bet.
“Not for me,” I replied. “It’s as if the Lenny I know and love disappeared the moment we got here. In his place is some sort of zombie—he’s practically in a trance!”
“He is acting awfully strange, isn’t he?” Jessie said, giggling. “But why worry about it, Linda? Loosen up! Have some fun!”
“Here are the winning tickets,” Lenny announced when he returned. He handed them to me. “You hold them both for good luck.”
I glanced at the tickets. There were a bunch of different numbers and combinations that were hard to follow, but one thing I did understand. The dollar amounts on the tickets added up to way more than two dollars, ten dollars more to be exact.
“Lenny? Am I seeing this correctly? Did you bet twelve dollars on this race?”
“I guess so.” He glanced at the tickets. “I liked Happy Boy, so I bet four on him to win. Then I backed that up by betting him for place and show— that means you get money if he comes in second or third as well. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know, Lenny,” I said doubtfully. “What if you lose? At that rate, if we stay here for eight races and you lose every one, it’ll cost you almost a hundred dollars!”
He laughed and put his arm around me. “What do you think, I’m going to lose every race? Come on, baby! I told you I’ve got great skill when it comes to picking horses. I picked you, didn’t I? That makes me a winner for sure. Relax and enjoy the race. Look—the horses are in the starting gate already. They’re off!”
He ran to the rail where he could get the best view. I went to the rail next to him and tried to follow what was going on, but it was all beyond me. The horses were all in one big jumble. The announcer talked too fast, and the horse positions changed so quickly, they weren’t where he said they were anyhow.
Lenny seemed to know exactly what was going on. “They’re coming into the stretch now! Move him! Look at the way that driver knows his horse! Come on, Happy Boy, Happy Boy, Happy Boy!”
He was shouting now, his face a bright red. He looked so funny that Sheldon was pointing at him and laughing instead of paying attention to the race. But Lenny only had eyes for the horses as they thundered across the finish line.
“Unbelievable!” Lenny slapped his hand to his head. “He almost had him! He almost had him! If only he had made his move sooner, we would have won for sure!”
“We lost?” I asked worriedly. “The twelve dollars is gone?”
Lenny grabbed the tickets from my hand. “No, silly. Happy Boy didn’t win, but he did come in second, so we get money back for place and show. We hardly lost anything at all.”
“But—but you said we got place and show. How come we’re still losing money?”
“It’s the odds that determine what the payoffs are,” he explained. “The horse that won is the favorite, and that means the place and show prices are low. But don’t worry about it—it’s chump change we’re talking about. We’ll make it up next race.”
But we lost the next race and the two after that. It wasn’t until our fifth bet that Lenny finally had a winner. He whooped it up and spun me around, as excited as if he had hit a million dollar lottery. But the way I figured it, what he had won on that race didn’t even make up for what he had lost on the others.
By the time we left the track my voice was hoarse from hollering and my nerves were raw from all the ups and downs. We had lost two more races and won one more. It was good to see Lenny so exuberant when he won, but I didn’t think the disappointment of losing was worth it.
Lenny didn’t seem to look at it the way I did. “Wasn’t that great?” he asked me as we walked to the bus. “What I lost hardly amounted to the cost of a movie, and we had all that terrific excitement.”
“I guess it was exciting, but I can’t say I liked it much,” I said.
“Listen to her,” he said to Sheldon. “If I like something, you can bet she’ll find something wrong with it.”
I bit my lip to keep from saying anything further. I was very uncomfortable with Lenny’s actions at the track. I only hoped the whole thing was a phase he was going through, one he would get out of his system fast, before it became a problem.
As if to prove that my fears about the track were wrong, Lenny went and got a real job downtown that next week. It was in an accounting office, as had been the last job, but he was sure this one was going to work out.
Despite Lenny’s assurances, I was plenty worried. He had been hopeful about other jobs he had started, and none of them had amounted to anything. So it was with great apprehension that I waited outside the subway for him to come home after work his first day.
My heart soared when I saw him. He looked so grown up and distinguished dressed in a suit and tie. And not only that, he was smiling broadly.
“Wipe that worried look off your face right this minute!” he said, laughing, when he saw me. “This job is a winner! I like it! I actually like it!”
“Oh, Lenny, I’m so glad!” I gave him a hug. “I have to admit I was worried about you.”
“Worry is a useless emotion, baby. If something bad is going to happen, worrying about it isn’t going to make it better. And then if it doesn’t happen, you’ve done all that worrying for nothing!”
“That makes sense.” I smiled at him, my heart filled with love. It was at times like this that I marveled at how much common sense Lenny had. That’s why I found it so hard to understand those other times—when he did one thing after another that could do nothing but create problems in his life.
* * *
With Lenny working downtown and going to school at night, I didn’t get much time to see him during the week. I met him by the entrance to the subway every evening, and he would walk me home. We would sit in my hallway, on the steps between the second- and third-floor landings, talking and making out until it was time for me to go in for dinner. My mother served dinner at exactly six p.m. each night, and not being home in time for it constituted a sin of great magnitude.
Since his mother didn’t cook, Lenny would usually go out to eat at some fast-food place and then go right on to school. With our time together so limited during the week, we tried to make it up on weekends. Friday nights he usually came over to my house, where we would watch TV or try to get some studying done. Saturday nights we would go out, either by ourselves, with Sheldon and Jessie, or to someone’s house from the crowd for an informal party. On weekend mornings if the weather was good, there was always some sort of ballgame going on in the park or the schoolyard, and on Sunday afternoons we usually wound up at someone’s house watching the football games. I got to see Lenny all weekend long, which was the way I liked it.
One thing I didn’t like was that Lenny began getting into a pattern of leaving my house earlier and earlier on Friday nights, and sometimes even on Saturdays if there was nothing much going on. At first I thought this was because he wanted to go to the poolroom, where he liked to hang out until late with the other boys. It wasn’t until I mentioned this problem to Jessie that I found out what was really happening.
“Ha!” she laughed. “I thought the same way you did when I noticed Sheldon was leaving me earlier, too. But then I found out where he and Lenny were going.”
“Where?” I had this sick feeling that no matter what the answer was, I wasn’t going to like it.
“To the track! If they get up there for the last few races, they don’t have to pay admission. They make their bets, then come home and meet the rest of the guys at the poolroom.”
“How did you find out about this?”
“Would you believe Sheldon actually asked me to lend him some money to make a bet? He said there was a ‘sure thing’ running in the eighth race, but he didn’t have enough money to bet on it. I guess I was stupid to give him the money, but fortunately, the horse won. Then he asked me if I wanted him to bet the winnings when he and Lenny went up the next night. I asked some questions and found out they’d been doing this every week since that first time we all went to the track together.”
“The first time we went to the track together— but that was more than a month ago! All that time and Lenny never told me—I can’t believe it!”
“Then you’re a fool! Lenny would never tell you something like that because he knows perfectly well you wouldn’t like the idea. Look how negative you were about the track when we were there.”
“So? That’s no reason to lie! Lenny and I have been going together a long time, Jessie. He knows how important it is to me that he tell the truth about everything. How can I trust him if he hides things from me because he thinks I won’t like them?”
“Beats me.” Jessie’s sharply chiseled features took on a bored expression. “What I do is make it a policy never to trust Sheldon to begin with, and then I’m not disappointed. But you’ve got to work out your problems with Lenny your own way!”
* * *
That afternoon was Thursday, and after Jessie left, I sat in the back booth of the candy store, thinking over how I would approach the subject of the track with Lenny. Then I noticed Chris Berland come in and sit at the front counter. He didn’t see me, and I was too upset to want to talk to anyone, so I stayed where I was.
Still unaware of my presence, Chris struck up a conversation with Mike Hiller, this boy who worked behind the counter and who was known to like to gamble. Chris’s voice was loud enough for me to hear every word.
“What a hit I made at the track last night, Hiller! Lipoff and I both had twenty bucks on Making Time. Boy, did that horse run! We each came home with over a hundred and ...”
It was then that Chris noticed the dismayed look Mike was giving him. He turned around and for the first time saw me. “Oh, no—I mean, uh—hi, Linda. What are you doing here?”
“Having a soda and listening to your fascinating stories. So you and Lenny hit it big at the track last night. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Chris looked relieved at my words. “Yeah. I’m sure glad you feel that way, Linda. Lenny was worried you’d be upset if you found out.”
“Oh?” I struggled to sound calm and collected. “Why do you suppose he’d be worried about that? I mean, why should I be upset about a small thing like the fact that he had school last night and cut it to go to the track?”
Chris laughed nervously. “Aw, come on, Linda. Lenny doesn’t cut school to go to the track very often.”
Very often. So this wasn’t the first time this had happened. I could feel this heavy lump in my stomach, and a flash of hot anger rose to my head. Things had been so good for Lenny and me recently. I had thought everything was going well with his job and with school. And now I found out that my feeling of confidence was built on deceit, and he was doing things that were harmful and destructive behind my back!
I was so angry I didn’t trust myself to talk any longer. “Well, I’ve got to go meet Lenny now,” I told Chris and Mike as I stalked out of the candy store.
I saw them roll their eyes at each other, but I didn’t care what they were thinking. My only thought was to get hold of Lenny and let him know once and for all that our relationship could not continue along these lines.