FOUR

I’m thrilled when my dad and I move out of Aunty Rita’s and into our own apartment in a complex called Village Green. Mostly because I will have my own bedroom and Dad says we will get a kitten. We drive in through iron gates into a maze of gray-shingled buildings. We’re apartment number 21, and have a numbered parking spot and mailbox with a lock and key. The best part about Village Green is the pool. In the summer Dad takes me swimming almost every day. He lies out on a chaise while I wear my body ragged swimming from one end to the other. I can’t get enough of the deep chlorinated water, and Dad has to beg and bribe to get me out.

Dad makes me the same thing for lunch every time we go swimming: the Daddy Special, which consists of a can-shaped mound of tuna on a plate, no mayonnaise, and a pickle on the side.

In the mornings before he drops me off at school he asks, “What do you want to wear?” I am going through what my Aunty Sandy calls a princess phase, refusing to wear anything except party dresses, and then only if I’m also wearing a slip, stockings, and patent-leather shoes. Dad tries briefly to persuade me to put on a turtleneck under my dress. When I refuse, he doesn’t fight me.

“What do you want for lunch?” he asks.

“Mustard sandwich,” I say.

Dad spreads yellow mustard between two slices of white bread and cuts off the crusts. He opens a can of corned beef hash and fries it on the stove, spooning it onto a plate with a Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie on the side. I love hash because it’s what Dad ate in the army. We call it Vietnam Breakfast.

I look at the clock above the stove. I will be late for school. Dad will be late for work. But we don’t care. In the apartment, Dad and I mostly keep our own time. I stay awake until midnight while Dad listens to records and drinks Heinekens. He tells me about fighting in Vietnam. I play jungle in my bedroom, crawling across the carpet on my elbows.

“Did we win the Vietnam War?” I ask.

“We won a lot of battles,” Dad says.

“What does that mean?”

“It means the whole thing had no point, and a lot of people died.”

“What was war like?” I ask.

“It rained a lot.”

Dad wants me to know how important it is to be smart. Every night we take turns reading aloud to each other. In this way we get through The Phantom Tollbooth, The Illustrated and Abridged David Copperfield, Of Mice and Men. We read every single book by Roald Dahl. Dad tells me I’m so good at reading I will probably get an academic scholarship to Harvard one day and buys me a Harvard Crimson sweat suit.

At night, in my bedroom, I listen to the sounds of Dad in the rest of the apartment. I track his movements. If it’s a good night, he laughs at something on the TV and rides the exercise bike in the living room and talks on the phone. If it’s a bad night, the only thing I hear is the sound of Heineken cans as he drains and scatters them across the kitchen table, and the glug-glug of the Jameson as it pours from the bottle into an ice-filled glass. Or worse, there’s the sound of Dad, assuming I’m asleep, slipping out the front door into the night. No matter how quietly he shuts and latches the metal door, the noise echoes in my head. When he comes back, hours later, I wake to half-remembered nightmares, sweating and nauseated. I wander into Dad’s room.

“Can I sleep with you?” I ask. On these nights I crawl into his bed. He curls his giant body around mine. Sometimes he holds my hair to his face and weeps and mutters thick-sounding nonsense in his sleep. I think I would do anything to make him stop being sad.

Dad works at the Providence Journal offices at 75 Fountain Street in Providence. The plaque on his desk says KEVIN CARROLL, DISTRIBUTION next to his electric typewriter. He has a rolling office chair, like Dr. Claw, the faceless villain from Inspector Gadget. I sit in the chair, my back to my dad, and pretend to give evil orders.

Dad shows me where they make the newspaper: the huge machines that cut the giant reams of paper and print the words. In the middle of the machinery is a long twisting slide where the finished and bundled newspapers shoot down to the trucks for delivery. Every time I visit, Dad asks if I want to go down the giant slide, and says he’ll do it with me. Every time I tell myself this will be the visit I do it. I picture the truck drivers’ faces, all my dad’s friends, when the two of us pop out the other end instead of a bundle of newspapers. Every time I chicken out at the last minute. The machinery is loud and metallic and the slide seems too high.

At lunchtime we go to Murphy’s Pub and Deli with all of the guys from Dad’s office. Murphy’s is across the street from the Journal office, tucked behind the hulking buildings of Westminster Street, shady and cool inside even when the sun shines brightly. I love being at Murphy’s with Dad and his friends. Everything is a different shade of green, from the felt coasters on the table to the wooden bowl of pickled tomatoes and cucumbers that the waitress, winking at Dad, slides in front of us.

“Cute date, Kev,” she says.

“Marie, this is my daughter, Leah,” he says, and reaches up to loop his arm lightly around her waist. My grandmother has told me how handsome Dad is, with his mustache and thick head of salt-and-pepper hair. Dad started to go gray in his early twenties but never tries to hide it. It’s something that distinguishes him. He primps in front of every window, every mirror, smoothing back all his hair and saying, “Your dad is one good-looking man.”

Even then I understand it to be a boast based on fact, something that is confirmed every time a woman laughs too loudly at one of his jokes and leans in to touch his arm, every time he walks into a room and smiles his big confident smile and everyone yells, “Kev!”

“Well look at you, Leah, with those beautiful brown eyes. Would you like a Shirley Temple?” Marie leans in close to me. Her hair brushes against my face and I smell her perfume. “Extra cherries?” Marie winks at me.

We eat corned beef sandwiches and potato salad. Dad and all his friends drink Heinekens and laugh. The men all call me Princess Leah, after the character from Star Wars, even though the pronunciation of my name is different. I love the nickname and the attention and the way that all the men laugh at Dad’s jokes and tilt their heads to get the last drop of beer before they push their chairs away from the table and say, “Back to work!” Being inside Murphy’s is like being inside the enormous belly of a friendly whale. Some of the men sway as we walk back to the Journal’s offices.

MURPHY’S TAVERN HAS moved locations since I went there as a child, but only a block and a half away. The interior is still brown and green; the pickled tomatoes and cucumbers are still at the ready. The owner, Ruth Ferrazano, rolls her eyes at this.

“I never thought my legacy would be pickles,” she says.

I sit with Ruth at the corner of the long bar. The sun streaming in from the many windows (this incarnation of Murphy’s is certainly brighter than the last) gives everything the impression of serenity. Even the old man with the oxygen tank at the other corner of the bar seems like a sweet old-fashioned mainstay. He makes polite conversation with the bartender, a friendly woman in her fifties with severe bangs. I sip slowly from a pint of Narragansett.

Downcity, as this part of Providence is known, is sedate, nearly silent. We are across the street from the convention center, but there is no convention. Up a few blocks is the Providence Civic Center, now called the Dunkin’ Donuts Center. On the nights when the Providence Bruins play there, Ruth tells me, the bar can get pretty rowdy. The Providence police station, though, has moved across the 95 overpass. The Providence Journal headquarters are directly across the street, but the paper is a shell of its former self and the production facilities have long ago moved to a more industrial neighborhood. And so the bar is quiet, and peaceful. The oxygen tank hums slightly, or perhaps that is the air-conditioning. Ruth says, “I have to just tell you, you are very pretty. Your dad, my God, he was handsome.”

There was a time when Murphy’s was the second home not only to the guys from the Journal, but to the cops, the politicians from city hall, and various mafia types. “The mafia guys,” says Ruth, “they left me pretty much alone.”

“Do you know why?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Murphy’s has always been kind of an icon. And I guess they just knew I didn’t play that game. You know, don’t get me wrong. We sold raffle tickets when we had to sell raffle tickets, but when it came down to it, I just didn’t play the game, I guess. And they knew.” It’s not hard to imagine, looking at Ruth, that one would be disinclined to mess with her. Even against the backdrop of the deli case, of the silent shell of a city, she exudes a kind of sharp-edged elegance. A cook emerges from the kitchen to ask if he should put hot dogs on the board for the evening dinner specials. She stares at him for a beat and sighs slowly. “We talked about this, I think,” she says.

“Oh yeah, yeah. I’m sorry, Ruth!” He rushes back into the kitchen.

Ruth turns to me. “This is my job? Hot dog patrol? I don’t know what they would do if I wasn’t here.” Watching her hold court from the bar stool, I’m not sure either. She is the real thing. The old guard. This isn’t the kind of woman who tells you that you are pretty to butter you up. She says it because you look like your father. And he was good people. And she says what she means.

“EVERYONE WAS JUST more fun back then,” Ruth tells me. In the old days there were maybe four bars you went to: Player’s Corner, Christopher’s over on Pine Street, Gus Smith’s, and Murphy’s. In those days, the pressmen and the drivers at the Journal would all be done by two or three in the afternoon. They called Murphy’s the Annex.

“In a lot of ways,” says Ruth, “the Journal made Murphy’s a success.” But it wasn’t just Journal guys. At Murphy’s you could sit down next to a Supreme Court judge having a beer on his lunch break. A gangster would gladly sit next to a union guy. There would be a table of cops two seats over.

“Paolino would be here at the same time as Cianci,” Ruth tells me of the rival ex-mayors of the city. In his last days of freedom, before he was sent off to prison, indicted on the RICO statute—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act signed into law in 1970 and used extensively to bring down the bosses of the Italian mafia—Buddy Cianci would walk down from the Biltmore Hotel, where he lived in a suite, and sit at a table by the deli, order a pastrami on pumpernickel cut into fours, and say his good-byes to a processional of people from every corner of the city who came to join him for a few minutes at a time. Nobody minded that the charge he’d been convicted of essentially stated that he’d run the city of Providence as a criminal enterprise for his own financial gain. People loved the short portly man in the black toupee who traveled around the city with a stash of his own brand of marinara sauce to hand out as gifts. They’d already reelected him once, after his first criminal conviction while in office, that one an assault. I still own a black T-shirt, now wearing a bit at the seams, that shows the former’s mayor’s smiling face and the declaration, FREE BUDDY!

“They say Hasbro is moving into the old Blue Cross Building,” Ruth tells me. “That will be good for this part of the city. And with the Convention Center… you never know.” An older woman wearing an apron appears next to us bearing a small dish of sliced olives. “Ruth,” she asks, “I thought we weren’t going to open these?”

Ruth sighs heavily. “Of course not,” she says. “You know there’s a picture of them right on the side of the can. You don’t have to be psychic to tell they’re not whole olives.” She waves her hand. “Forget it. We’ll use them in a salad or something.” She turns to me and shakes her head.

AFTER WE MOVE into the apartment, Dad starts to have girlfriends. There’s Gail, a photographer at the Journal. She has a full head of unruly blond curls and doesn’t seem as pretty as Mom, but she laughs all the time and says things that make Dad laugh, and I like her. There’s Kathleen with the long black hair and I think she is beyond glamorous. He meets Ann-Marie at Giant Steps, the small private school I attend along with her son, Derek, who is my age. My teacher Miss Razza is always yelling at Derek and making him stand in the corner, not like Gregory Calderiso who has handsome brown eyes and is good at vocabulary. I’d invited Gregory to my fifth birthday and kissed him on the lips in my bedroom closet, telling him, “Pretend I’m She-Ra and you’re He-Man.”

I sleep over at Ann-Marie’s house a lot while Dad goes out. She lets me take long bubble baths and then wear her silky nightgowns, the straps held up with a barrette fastened between my shoulder blades. She brushes and blow-dries my long hair, and when I look at myself in the mirror, I can’t stop admiring how clean I am, how shiny my hair looks, how nice I smell. Dad uses Denorex shampoo and Irish Spring soap at home, so usually I smell like that. Ann-Marie, though, has what seems like hundreds of different bottles, all filled with soap, shampoo, and bubble bath. Her bathroom is like a pharmacy of pink lotions and gels.

At night Derek and I fight over who gets to sleep on the couch. Ann-Marie blows up an air mattress and sets it up in the living room, right outside her bedroom door. Derek and I compromise by sleeping on it together beneath a brown blanket, decorated with a jungle scene. I get to sleep beneath the lion part of the blanket.

Because I stay over at Ann-Marie’s house so much, I see less of Grandma. When I do go there she asks me about Dad’s new girlfriend.

“This Mary-Anne,” she says, “you like her? She’s nice to you? You like her son?” I answer yes to all of Grandma’s questions and try again and again to correct her about the name.

“It’s Ann-Marie,” I say.

“Oh, I know, I know,” says Grandma as she hunts around the kitchen for a scrap of paper to write the name down on. Grandpa never asks about Ann-Marie or Dad. He asks a lot about school and laughs when I tell him about how smart I am and all the books I can read. He tells me how smart my mom was, and how much she read. He says I’m just like her.

When Grandma leaves for work, Grandpa and I make lunch and give Spot his heart medicine. Grandpa hides the pills inside a Saugy and even then Spot sometimes eats the whole thing and leaves the pill, licked clean, on the kitchen floor. Grandpa pulls another Saugy from the big boiling pot, covers it in yellow mustard and celery salt, and serves it to me on a slice of bread. I like Saugy’s better than regular hot dogs, because the skin snaps when you bite into one.

But it is still Dad I like being with the best. When I’m alone with him I feel special and safe and like nothing bad could happen to either of us. At the grocery store I ride on his shoulders, up so high that when I look down I get a swooning feeling. Instead I look straight ahead and pretend I am as tall and strong as Dad. I know all the other kids in the market are jealous of the way I sit above them like a queen.

Dad tells me stories about when he was a kid. He says he was bad and got into lots of fights. He shows me how the fingers on his right hand are all bent. He says, “I know how to fight and I’ll always protect you.”

Sometimes we pretend we are in the WWF, and Dad pile-drives me into his waterbed. “Body slam next!” I scream. I love the feeling of flipping through the air knowing Dad will catch me at the last second. “Now a clothesline!”

Dad plays softball for the Providence Journal team and I sit in the bleachers with the wives and the other kids. He hits the ball hard and runs as fast as he can. Once he slides into third and I hear another player say, “Man you gotta watch out for that Kenny Rogers–looking motherfucker.” I know he’s talking about my dad’s gray hair and mustache, and the wives around me slap their knees and elbow each other. When dad gets back to the dugout he downs a Heineken and gives everyone high fives, and when the game is over, the Journal wins and Dad picks me up to take me to the car and I can tell everyone is looking at us because he’s the best at everything.

MY DAD AND Ann-Marie get married in the living room of my new grandmother’s house. Ann-Marie wears a beaded white cashmere sweater and knee-length white skirt. Dad wears a suit, like usual. He looks like he’s going to work. Derek and I watch from the dining room table where I eat cube after cube of cheese from the appetizer platter until my stomach hurts. When the ceremony is over Aunty Rita hugs Dad and then whispers into Ann-Marie’s ear, “I hope you know what you got yourself into.” When Dad and Ann-Marie get back from their honeymoon, Ann-Marie has a deep tan and her hair is pulled back in a tight French braid.

“Why do you look like that?” I ask.

Dad’s ruddy skin looks the same to me, but Ann-Marie’s new bronze skin makes me uncomfortable. It’s like she married my dad and came back a new person. She brings back gifts from Mexico: a pink shirt with palm trees and rhinestones, a set of maracas, and a small doll with black hair and a brightly patterned dress. I put them in a bottom drawer of my dresser.

Dad brings back a dinosaur poster from the Smithsonian, where they’d gone on a layover. I love it because it shows eight different kinds of dinosaurs and each one is labeled. He also brings me a fossil of a trilobite. I hold it and trace the ancient bug with my fingers, trying to comprehend how old it really is.

We move to a new apartment in Village Green, toward the fancier part of the development. We have a new pool, but we move in winter and it’s covered over. I’m excited because we have two floors and my upstairs room overlooks the edge of Village Green where the landscaping stops and the brambles and woods take over.

When the weather starts to warm up Dad takes me to the Looff Carousel in Riverside. The carousel is the only thing left from what was once a grand amusement park on Narragansett Bay. In addition to its hand-carved wooden horses, the carousel has dragons, tigers, zebras, and ornately carved benches to ride on. Dad says it’s a work of art. He parks himself on one of the benches that line the outer building as I go around and around. I look for him during each revolution; he’s there with his arms crossed and his legs splayed out in front of him, the newspaper folded at his side. I’ve just read the Chronicles of Narnia and like to pretend that the animals on the carousel are part of a massive parade of majestic talking animals. We’re celebrating a great victory over evil, marching toward home.

There’s a man who dispenses metal rings with the aid of a long wooden extension. You’re meant to reach from your perch and grab a hold of a ring as you spin past. If you catch a brass one you get a free ride. Every time we drive to the carousel I tell Dad that today will be the day I reach out and grab the ring, but when the time comes I’m always too afraid to extend my body and reach out. I don’t trust that I won’t fall from the horse and get caught up in the ancient-looking cogs that power the ride. Derek once grabbed the brass ring and Dad high-fived him and let us both go around another three times.

This day, though, Derek isn’t with us. It’s just Dad and me. When I’m done on the carousel, we buy popcorn from the old-timey-looking vendor and walk down to the water. I love the carousel, but sometimes it also makes me sad. A long time ago it had been glamorous, but now it seems very old.

Dad holds my hand while we walk. “I think it would be good,” he says, “for our new family if you start thinking of Ann-Marie as your new mom. I think your real mom would have wanted you to do that.”

It sounds like he practiced this, and I can tell how important it is. “But won’t my real mom see me from heaven?” I ask. “Won’t she get mad if she thinks I want someone else to be my mom?”

“No,” says Dad. “I think your mom would want us all to be happy in our new family.” He hugs me around the neck and pulls me close to him as we walk. “And it would make me happy if you think of Ann-Marie as your new mom. Will you do that for me?”

I nod yes. Of course I will. Of course.