the summers, Da traded in every favor in order to borrow Jack Leary’s DeSoto and take us on tours of state fairs as far west as Iowa, where we learned how to sing “Galway Bay,” repair a blown tire, and pee in a can.
It was a grand gypsy life, we thought. We slept on the ground, wrapped in blankets, or in the car as Da drove from one fair to another. Occasionally, he was able to book us into a theater, where we would open for the movies, singing “I Faw Down an’ Go Boom.” We lived on cheese sandwiches and the food at the fairs — candy apples and funnel cakes, pickles and pies. We rehearsed in the car, singing as loud as we could as the hot air slapped our sticky hair against our cheeks.
In those hot summers, full of flies and white skies, corn and pigs, I learned what America was — people looking up from their work and trouble and hoping someone would tell them a story, sell them a dream. And I saw what it was like to be looked at, and came to like it.
Prosperity was just around the corner. So people said. At first I thought it meant that if Da could just walk another few blocks, he’d get a job, because the streets in Providence had names like Benefit and Benevolent, so why not Prosperity? But there was no Prosperity Street, and there were no jobs, even on a street called Hope. Delia’s salary was cut, and endorsements dried up. We were growing fast, and it was hard to look cute in a dress made out of an old faded pillowcase, even for me and Muddie. Shirley Temple was the child everyone wanted to see, with glossy curls and the fresh plump cheeks of someone who had a chicken in her pot and warm water to wash with.
In the winters, we spent all of our time in the kitchen, the biggest room at the front of the apartment, where the coal stove gave out a thin, inadequate heat. A bonus was that we were away from the thin walls of the rear bedroom, behind which the Duffys in the next apartment argued every Saturday night when Duffy came home drunk.
Delia had the bedroom, Da slept on the couch, and Muddie, Jamie, and I slept on a mattress in the hall closet, all tangled together, pushing each other and arguing about who got spit on the pillow. Aren’t you the luckiest of children, Da said, who get to sleep in a cave like wolf cubs, instead of in a regular room with a door?
And weren’t we lucky to hang on to that home when we saw other families losing theirs and disappearing in the middle of the night?
We were five years old the day Delia was fired, and we saw her cry for the first time, as fiercely as she did everything else. She prided herself on being a secretary, on her clean fingernails and her gray dresses and her pretty scarves. She was a professional.
We had never seen Da and Delia scared before.
Jamie stood up. “It’s time for the lucky pennies,” he announced.
It was a ritual we saved for only our most dire circumstances, and this was the worst one yet.
Da and Delia stood. They emptied all the coins from their pockets and Delia’s purse. Delia went to get the spare change she kept wrapped in a handkerchief for church. Jamie looked at the pile on the table. He took each coin and went around our apartment, placing them heads up on windowsills and door frames.
Then he put his hands on Delia’s knees. “All we have to do now,” he said, looking straight into her face, “is wait for the luck.”
“Darling boy,” she said, putting both hands on his cheeks.
That was Jamie. Darling boy.
At night we’d face each other, lying down in the darkness, and we’d press our cheeks against one another so that we could be eye to eye. Our eyes would be black and deep, and yet we’d wait to see the reflection of a point of light, the diamond that shone in our eyes. Then we’d shout the word straight in each other’s ears: Diiiiiaaaamond! Trying to blast each other’s eardrums and laughing fit to bust. I don’t know who thought of the game — it wasn’t a game, really, more like a ritual, a hunt to find the light in the darkness. There were diamonds in our eyes