By the time her letter arrived, my mother’s marriage to Eddie was already bleeding out. She had married him, of course, and of course it was a calamity. Eddie had opened up his own garment factory with money borrowed from my mother, but the business was in trouble from the beginning. After a time he simply stopped going in to the city, staying in the apartment all day, not bothering to shave or change out of his bathrobe. His eyes were chronically bloodshot from his violent bouts of crying. At night, my mother whimpered and moaned on the floor. Eddie stamped around the apartment like a lovesick elephant. “Ruthie, baby,” he would cry, “please come to bed. Oh, baby, please come to bed!” Sarah and I shared a bunk bed, but she spent nearly every night at the house of her best friend, Cheryl Edelstein. I would lie on the top bunk, wanting to escape my body, praying that I would die during the night.
But Zelda’s letter saved me; it provided me with a passport out of myself when I needed it most. Every night, I reread her letter in bed, thrilled that she was safely ensconced at an all-girls boarding school, hoping and praying that days and nights would pass rapidly until I was old enough to come for her.
AFTER KISSING ZELDA GOOD-BYE ONE more time, I walked back to the sandbar. The water felt silken against my body. When I reached the middle of the pond, I turned over onto my back and looked up at the sky. At that moment I was inspired by the moon landing. Floating in the middle of that vast black disc of water, reveling in my own sweet secret, gazing up at the stars and the moon, I felt that I had traveled millions of miles away from my life and had my found my own uncharted spot in the universe, a place where anything was possible, a place where I was free from the gravity of my other life. I imagined that the astronauts felt exactly the same way, bounding weightlessly, joyfully across the surface of the moon.
My euphoria subsided as I swam closer to the house and noticed that all the lights were blazing. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that my father and Hortense might have been concerned when I didn’t return after dark, and, full of dread, I tramped up to the house. When I opened the door, I heard my father call out my name. “Yes,” I answered. My father, Hortense, and Sarah were sitting at the kitchen table. Sarah burst into tears when she saw me. My father stared at me with a mixture of anger and relief. I crossed my arms over my chest to warm myself up. I could have controlled my shivering, but I let myself vibrate violently in an attempt to quell my father’s anger.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I told him I was cold.
“Sarah, go get your brother a towel.” Then he asked me where I had been.
“I met someone. We were watching the moon landing.”
“You were watching the moon landing!” he repeated incredulously. “Do you know we called the police? Do you know there were divers looking for you in the pond?”
Sarah returned and handed me a towel. I draped it around myself but kept shivering in order not to answer.
“I mean, didn’t it occur to you to call us?”
“I don’t know the phone number here.”
“Look, I have to call that police lieutenant and tell him you’re all right.”
My father went over to the phone and dialed a number on a card. I tried to get a sympathetic look out of Sarah, but she refused to return my gaze. I heard my father telling someone that I was back and that I was all right. He said that I had been at someone’s house watching the moon landing. Then I heard him say, “Yes, all right. I understand.” He put the phone down and looked hard at me. “Do you know that I’m going to have to pay for the rescue effort? Do you know how much that’s going to cost?”
I didn’t answer.
“Hundreds. They dragged the pond. They brought in divers. This is going to cost hundreds of dollars.” Then he pointed his finger at me and said, “I’m sending the bill to your mother. She can pay for this.” He kept staring at me, expecting a response. When I remained silent, he said, “All right, Horty, let’s go to bed.”
I went into the bathroom and changed into my pajamas. Sarah was in her bed, turned to the wall, when I returned to the bedroom. No one had replaced the sheets on my bed. I lay down on the bare mattress and told Sarah that I was sorry. She didn’t answer.
“Sarah?”
“I’m never talking to you again,” she said. “For as long as I live.”
SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER, she told me what had happened. The police had found the bloody sheets when they were dragging the pond looking for my body. As a diver brought them up from the bottom of the pond, one of the men on the boat cried out that they had found something. The boat sped back to shore and a policeman laid the bloodstained sheets on the ground. Hortense said that the sheets belonged to her. A policeman asked my father if I might have tried to hurt myself. “I don’t think so,” my father said. Then he added, “I don’t know.” The policeman told my father that he might have to prepare himself for bad news and they would continue to drag the pond. Then Sarah realized she needed to explain.
“Why?” my father asked her.
“I don’t know,” Sarah replied.
“Everyone has accidents,” he said. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”
Sarah told me all this in 1986, a couple of days before her marriage to Aaron Zelman. I was treating her to a celebratory dinner. As adults we had become extremely close; we had recovered our private language, mainly through the medium of our mother. She was the main topic of our lives: her madness, her habits, her demands, her crude, sad, and comic life. As close as we had become, though, we were both discreet and shy with each other about our sex lives. But at dinner that night we got drunk and exchanged sex stories like two old friends. She told me that the best sex she ever had was on July 4, 1976, when she and Aaron had made love on the beach in East Hampton. She said he was a true maestro, so much better than any of the teenaged boys she had fucked, boys who always came too fast and kept their eyes shut. Aaron gazed into her eyes the whole time, she said. Then I boasted that I had received my first blow job the night Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.
It took Sarah a second to do the math. Then she screeched, “You got a blow job when you were twelve years old!” The people at the next table turned and looked at me.
“Sarah! Shhh,” I said.
“Seth, I never would have guessed that about you.”
I felt a little guilty, as if I had revealed to Sarah that I had access to a private bank account during our childhood.
“Well, I did have to wait seven years until my next one.”
I didn’t tell her that it took me nearly that long to get over the blow job Zelda had given me, that throughout my adolescence it cast a spell over me as potent and paralyzing as any kiss from a princess with magical powers. I replayed the act over and over in my imagination, believing that only someone who recognized me as her true soul mate would do such a thing for me. I didn’t understand, of course, that Zelda was just a mixed-up fifteen-year-old who had been left alone for the night by her parents, a girl who was just trying to feel in control of things, and the only way she knew how was through sex. Sarah demanded details. Who? How? When? I told her it happened that day in Wellfeet when I swam across the pond and everyone thought I had drowned. Sarah’s eyes filled with tears, remembering all those hours when she had thought I was dead. Then she told me about the bloody sheets. I was mortified and apologized profusely. I imagined her humiliation, her secret so publicly exposed, everyone staring at the sheets, at her, our father’s thoughtless comments. Sarah made light of it. “Seth, did you really think we could hide those sheets at the bottom of the pond and not have Hortense discover them?” We both laughed, but then she began crying. Tears welled up in my eyes too. Sarah tried to laugh my tears away, saying, “Why are you crying, asshole? Some fifteen-year-old girl was going down on you!” But of course we were crying because we were seeing ourselves as children, remembering how sad and strange our lives were during the summer of the moon landing and Woodstock, remembering how we had haplessly,
hopelessly tried to rescue each other.
SOS
• MARCH—JULY 1976 •
On July 4, 1976, my mother, sister, and I celebrated the bicentennial at the Long Island summer home of Abe Zelman, a sixty-year-old married man who had been trying for years to get my mother into bed. We found ourselves in this position because back in March I had told Hortense to go fuck herself. Of course I had wanted to say that to her for as long as I had known her, and I finally had the opportunity after my wisdom teeth were pulled. I told the oral surgeon to send the $175 bill to my father, but when the bill arrived at his house, Hortense opened it up and immediately phoned me, demanding to know why my college health insurance didn’t cover the expense. I told her I was only covered if I went to the University of Chicago clinic. Hortense asked me why I hadn’t done that. I explained that the procedures were done there by residents in oral surgery and I had wanted to go to a real oral surgeon, adding that my friend had gone to the clinic and the resident had pulled the wrong tooth. Hortense told me that she was sending the $175 bill to my mother; they were already spending enough money on my tuition. I reminded her that my father was required to pay all of my medical expenses until I was twenty-one. Hortense pointed out that she had been to France only three times in fifteen years because of all the money they had spent on me and my siblings. I replied that maybe she ought to have thought of that before she began having an affair with a married man with three young children. Hortense said she would have her revenge against me when I had my own ungrateful children. Then she added that I was too much of a child myself ever to have children anyway. That’s when I told her to go fuck herself.
The next day my father called and told me that I needed to apologize to Hortense. I refused, insisting that Hortense owed me the apology. My father replied that Hortense didn’t owe me any apologies, and, if I looked at things honestly and dispassionately, I would realize that Hortense had always wanted the best for me. “Really?” I said. “What about that time she refused to give me a clean plate until I ate my leftover jam?” My father said that he had no idea what I was talking about.
At the end of May, I received a letter from the bursar’s office informing me that I would not be permitted to enroll for classes in September until my outstanding tuition bills were paid in full. The total came to $4,800. I called up my father and asked him why he hadn’t paid my tuition. “When you apologize to Hortense, then I’ll pay your tuition,” he answered. I told him that he was required to pay it. “That remains to be seen,” he said.
I had a 4.0 GPA. Surely the university would give me a scholarship once I explained my circumstances to the dean of admissions, a man I believed was keenly invested in my success. In high school, I had been a C student, and my SAT scores were mediocre. I had no realistic chance of getting into the University of Chicago, but I applied anyway, hoping for an intervention of divine justice. I idolized Saul Bellow, and for my one-page personal statement
I had written a ten-page essay about how I had fallen in love with Chicago through its literature. I had read The Adventures of Augie March in tenth grade, which led me to the novels of Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Meyer Levin, and Richard Wright, and the poetry of Carl Sandburg. I concluded my essay by stating that, although I had never seen Chicago, the city’s great literary tradition had provided me with a map of the city’s soul. By the end of March of my senior year, I had already been rejected by a number of colleges, including Rutgers, the school my father was hoping I’d get into because the tuition was so much lower than at the other schools where I’d applied. Then, on April 1, I received a letter from Scholastic Magazine informing me that my story “Two by Two” had won first prize in their national high school short story contest. I still hadn’t heard from Chicago, so I immediately called the admissions office to let them know about my prize and put a copy of “Two by Two” in the mail to the dean of admissions. Three days later the dean called me. He told me that the fiction prize was a great achievement, but they were in a quandary about my application. Everyone on the committee felt my essay and my story were brilliant. Could I help them understand the gap between my mediocre grades and my other achievements? “I don’t know,” I replied. Actually, I did know, but in a way that was too inchoate and personal for me to easily articulate. How could I explain to him that nothing felt real to me except the novels I read—not the other books I was supposed to read for school, not the grades I received, not the things I said to people—that something was always lost in translation between my feelings and actions, that, except for books, everything about my life felt alien to me. Then the dean asked me what my home life was like. “My home life?” I repeated. The dean said that he noticed on my application that my parents were divorced and that certainly couldn’t be easy. “Oh, right, my home life,” I said, finally understanding. “Yes, my home life is really bad. I’m sure I would do a lot better in a different environment.”
After I received my first-quarter grades, the dean had sent me a gracious note congratulating me and expressing his pride that I had validated their admissions decision. So when I went to see the dean about the possibility of a scholarship, I decided to emphasize the home-life factor and told him a story of great woe about my cold, remote father and cruel, resentful stepmother. The dean was sympathetic, but not really. He explained that, regrettably, my situation wasn’t unique and that the university couldn’t provide financial aid for every student who had a falling-out with his or her parents. He said that just the week before a student had come to see him because his parents had disowned him after they learned he was homosexual. “Now that,” said the dean, “breaks one’s heart.”
I HAD A GIRLFRIEND, MORE OR LESS—well, really less than more. We had never progressed beyond the occasional hand job. Jane and I had met my first quarter when we were in two classes together and lived on the same dorm floor. She was raven haired, olive skinned and small figured but with breasts that pressed fully and roundly against her shirts. For years afterward, I would think of Jane every time I read the word “Jewess.” Of course I was hopelessly in love with her, and, of course, she had a boyfriend, a senior named Jeremiah. When he broke up with her in October, Jane turned to me for comfort and solace. We spent all our time together, cuddling on her bed when we studied together or watched television. One night I kissed her. Jane told me she liked me just as a friend, but she supposed it would be all right if we kissed once in a while. In November, she gave me a hand job on my birthday. She let me kiss her breasts and go exploring with my hand beneath the elastic of her underpants. When I asked her if she and Jeremiah had had oral sex, she said yes, but told me that she wasn’t into oral sex anymore when I proposed that we graduate from hand jobs to blow jobs.
Jane was sympathetic to the fact that I was still a virgin at age nineteen. When I proposed to her that we have sex just one time, she told me she would consider it, but I had to remember that it would be a one-time deal, that it was something she would do for me as a friend. Encouraged, I said, “Of course! In fact, I think I it would be easier for us to be friends if we had sex just one time.”
The night I told Jane about my conversation with the dean of admissions, I was so despondent, and Jane was so clearly appalled by my father’s cruelty, that she told me to take off my clothes and get into her bed. She went over to her bureau and extracted a small box from the top drawer. Then she lay down next to me and rolled off her jeans and underpants, keeping her top on. I had never seen her nude below the waist, but this business was too gynecological for me. She removed a diaphragm from the box and squeezed jelly from a tube around its rim. Then she hiked her legs up in the air and inserted the thing into her vagina, a look of intense concentration on her face as she felt for the right fit. “All right. I’m ready,” she said.
A Stranger on the Planet Page 4