Kissing the Beehive Read Online Free PDF Page A

and looked at the sky. He began to hum. For a moment I wondered if he had forgotten my question.
    "No. I don't remember her."
    "Okay. Well, it was nice seeing you again, Johnny."
    "It was my great pleasure." Surprisingly, he put out his big hand and we shook. His face didn't change expression when he abruptly turned and strode off.
    Watching him walk away, I remembered the _old_ Club Soda Johnny, Frannie McCabe, Suzy Nicholls, Barbara Thilly . . . so many others. I remembered summer days in the town park, bored out of our skulls, happy to see crazy Johnny because he was a welcome five-minute diversion. We had so much time on our hands in those days. About all we had _was_ time. Always waiting for something to happen without ever quite knowing what. Something about to happen, someone about to come and save our day, week . . . from just _being_.
    Johnny stopped, spun around and looked at me impassively. "Pauline is dead. You're joking around with me. She was killed a long time ago."
    "That's right, Johnny. A hell of a long time."

    I drove past Sacred Heart Church, Stumpel Ford, Power's Stationery Store. It's interesting how some shops, no matter how many times they change owners, always stay the same. Most locations go from pizzeria to boutique to whatever every few years. The stationery store in Crane's View had a new owner but was still the place to buy a newspaper, rubber bands, candy. As a kid, my first allowance had been twenty-five cents. Enough to buy a Payday candy bar and a _Sugar and Spike_ comic book there. I'd walk out not knowing what to do first -- open the comic or the Payday. Usually I'd do both at once -- read, eat, cross the street without looking and not realize until I got home that I'd finished everything.
    At the traffic light in the center of town, Main Street forked. If you went straight, you took Broadway uphill toward the nicer sections. If you veered right, Main Street continued through the heart of beautiful downtown
    Crane's View, all six minutes of it. When I had brought Michelle on our pilgrimage to my roots, she'd said, "But what did you do for fun here? There's nothing."
    Which was almost true. A pretty town an hour up the Hudson River from Manhattan, Crane's View had a Waspy name but was populated by mostly lower-middle-class Irish and Italian families. People there needed only a good hardware store, market, clothes store that sold chinos, Maidenform brassieres, housedresses, Converse sneakers. The most expensive thing on the menu at the best restaurant in town was surf and turf. There was a decent library but few used it. The Embassy movie theater too, but you went there to make out because it was dark and usually empty as a tomb. The bars were named Shamrock and Page 13

    Gino's. Michelle was right -- it was a town where people worked hard during the day then went home at night, drank beer and watched the game on TV.
    A few residents didn't fit the description. They were mostly white-collars who worked in Manhattan and commuted so they could own a decent house, a yard and some green around them. One rarely seen couple who lived way up on Pilot Hill drove a Rolls Royce, but they had no kids and whenever we encountered them they were like aliens from another planet.
    At the other end of town was Beacon Hill, the only apartment complex.
    For some unknown reason, a good number of Jewish families lived there. I remember in sixth grade going to Karen Enoch's apartment when I was deeply in love with her.
    The first menorah I had ever seen was on their dining room table. I told Mrs. Enoch it was a beautiful candelabra that reminded me of the one Liberace had on his piano in his TV show.
    Later that day she tried to explain Hanukkah to me, but all I understood was it was Christmas times twelve.
    I grew up in a small American town in the fifties. Part of the reason why I didn't have much to say about my childhood was simply because nothing much happened. No one grew their hair long, the only thing you