Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken Page A

You’ll miss her most, they said to me. I didn’t want that job all to myself. I fell asleep and dreamed of Hattie’s weight landing in my cradling arms, my knees bent to cushion my sudden burden, the flourish I took to display her to the neighbors:
you will note that the young lady is completely unharmed
. On the sidewalk, a crowd applauded. Then I dreamt that she landed right on top of me, safe, and I was the one who was killed, and I thought, as I woke,
I’m happy to die
.
    This is how it starts, I thought: your dreams are smashed and so you stay at home and accept only what life hands over. You might as well become a shopkeeper. So I tried to take my father’s cure. I worked afternoons at the store. Men came in, a little shy over how shabbily life had treated Old Man Sharp. They shook his hand, they shook their heads, and then they conducted their business. They did not even look at me, the boy who’d failed to save his sister. I held a feather duster between my forearms and pushed stock around. The doctor had set my wrists so my hands tipped back, as though I was about to applaud.
    At home, I set my wrists on my knees and stared at the casts. I’d loved my hands, though I’d never said that aloud. I’d thought them heroic. They’d rested at the small of Hattie’s back when we danced; they rose in front of me when I delivered a monologue. When I sang I let them point at my invisible and adored audience, to let them know who had broken my heart: that woman there, and that one three rows behind, and you, the blonde in lavender in the balcony. Now, locked away in plaster, they seemed small people I’d let down, friends of Hattie’s who’d always preferred her company to mine.
    These things take time
, I heard my sisters whisper to each other.
He’ll come around
, Ed Dubuque told my father.
Shows what they know
, I thought to myself. I did not plan on coming around. I did not plan on letting time change me at all. I spent the whole summer this way, a silent, shattered kid, three months of bad thoughts and grieving for Hattie.
    In August, just before school started, I sat in my usual spot in the parlor, on the edge of our elderly horsehair sofa, the curtains shut against the afternoon sun. Rose came in and switched on the radio. She was strange, a little miniature Annie except more cheerful, and she loved the radio more than anything.
    â€œTurn that off,” I told her. “I have a headache.”
    She sat cross-legged on the carpet in front of the radio cabinet and fiddled with the knobs. “It’s time for the Fitch Shampoo Hour.”
    â€œI don’t care.”
    â€œ
I
do,” said Rose. She turned and looked at me, squint-eyed. Somewhere she owned a pair of eyeglasses that she hated. “I’m going to have my own radio program,” she said.
    â€œNo kidding,” I sighed.
    She said, grandly, “I am going to introduce great musicians. Some will be live, and some will be on records. If you make it big as a singer, you can be a guest.”
    Hadn’t anyone told her? I wasn’t a singer. I was a sixteen-year-old shopkeeper’s assistant. It irked me, as if she was really going to be in show business while I stayed in Vee Jay to man Sharp’s Gents’. “That’s great, Rose,” I said. “You’ll be a success. You’ve got a face for radio.”
    She was almost pleased before the insult hit. Then she just stared at me, and I realized who she was: our audience.
My
audience. Whenever Hattie and I danced or sang or tumbled, there was Rose, watching. Sometimes she asked to join in, but mostly she listened and applauded and called for encores. She might have been good on the radio. The live musicians I wasn’t so sure of; Rose was not so awfully good with people. But the records themselves—I could see her. There’s Rose, in her hands a record as black and slick and grooved as a