You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  But this is Maggie I’m speaking with. She says: “You know you sound exactly like your dad?”

  “Yeah yeah. ‘God’s green earth,’ I get it. I’m not fucking going there.”

  She has her I’m speaking to an infant voice, which I hate. “No, darling. Not the expression, though it is your dad’s. More the flying in the face of reality, the incredible, inappropriate stubbornness. The self-righteousness, the adamant overstatement. The apple doesn’t fall far, my darling.”

  I pause on this for a moment. Until I remember that they don’t know yet about Sinai dying. Then I pause some more. And finally, I find my voice.

  “God damn it, Maggie.”

  “The taking-everything-so-personally. Jesus, you called me for help, Izwizz. I’m helping you.”

  I don’t have an answer for that, so I don’t say anything while, in the background, I hear Danny talking to someone. Then I say: “My dad’s not there, is he?”

  “Where?”

  “At Bedford Street, Maggie. Christ sake.”

  “No, no. Woodstock, dear.”

  Then there’s more talk and Maggie says, “All right, darling. You’re in luck. Uncle Joe will let you in.”

  “I don’t have an Uncle Joe.”

  “Joe Igneri, stupid. The next-door neighbor. Jack’s old friend. I can’t believe you don’t remember him. He’ll come in through the back garden and open up for you. You remember the way? 22 Bedford, just off of 6th, runs east from 7th. Ring the bell at the gate under the stoop.”

  It was an amazing, amazing series of accidents. My whole life has been, and will be, but never has there been nor will there be an accident more amazing than that one which had me, not forty-eight hours after wheels-up in Riyadh, the day after I learn that my father is dying, pulling up in front of my grandfather’s house at 22 Bedford Street, walking to open the little black gate to the basement under the stoop.

  And you know what?

  I am actually so clueless, so stupid, so delusional as to try to convince myself that, boy, this is a sweet little perch, a townhouse in Greenwich Village, you can’t buy a house like this for love or money, wonder where the closest liquor store is, I’ll just settle right in here, won’t I, and order up some bottles, cop a loose joint somewhere, a half gram, a dime bag, whatever’s going, pick up a hippy girl from the New School, wait for Maggie to make it go away.

  Aren’t you just the funniest girl? That old glass-half-full child, aren’t you just?

  Chapter Two

  Isabel Montgomery

  March 7, 2011

  New York City

  1.

  Okay, so it is March 7, 2011. Early in the morning. I know that something strange is happening to me, but haven’t you been paying attention? Something strange is always happening to me. And if it isn’t, well then, I make whatever is happening strange by frontloading it with masses of THC or whatever else is going. Given: I don’t have a clue how strange this one will be. Given: I don’t give a fuck.

  This has been going on for a very long time. The fucking decade has been a steady series of strange things I don’t give a fuck about.

  This is just one more.

  The house is a four-story brownstone on a block which, at this time of a weekday morning, is apparently sending half the corporate lawyers in the city to their offices dragging half the private-school students of the city behind them. Is this what it was like fourteen years ago, when last I’d lived here? Oddly, it’s easier to see what it was like when my grandparents moved in, in the forties, because I’ve read about it. No doubt, Cy Twombly’s studio was next door and Martha Graham lived in a cold-water walkup around the corner. This much I know: the price of any one Sub-Zero refrigerator in any one kitchen on the block would have bought Willem de Kooning a decade of paints.

  Mr. Khan pulls off, leaving me alone on the sidewalk, feeling bereft. The house stands out, somehow, from the block, in a way I cannot put my finger on, so I cross the street and look some more. Through the big parlor floor windows you can see a wavy image of a well-furnished living room all the way to the back windows, which are filled with the branches of a huge tree. That it feels as if it houses empty rooms is true, but it’s also not quite it. Then I get it. It’s not the house, it’s the windows themselves: wood-sashed and single-paned in hand-blown glass: thus the wavy image. All the other windows on the block are renovated, double-glazed, and as clear as lenses—also, all the other windows on the block are shaded, hiding their interiors.

  Jesus. This place is a museum. Or a mausoleum. But it’s also the mausoleum or the museum that, at this hour, is my best bet for a) not getting arrested and b) getting a drink—if I can actually get my ass inside.

  What a fucking dilemma, girl, and don’t you just fucking deserve it? Couldn’t you just laugh your head off? Years of therapy and I could say that it is this house and all it represents from which I been fleeing since, at thirteen, I made them send me to live with Momma, and yet here we are.

  And then with that little shiver to which I am growing all too rapidly accustomed, I think, also, that this is the house to which my father will come, in a few months, to die.

  And with that thought, I come aware of the fact that I am a girl who has not changed her clothes or washed in days, standing alone on a street, hands shaking and likely with a look in my eyes like a wounded deer, about to bolt.

  That from where I stand here, there is nowhere to go.

  And that if ever I want to release the hold of anxiety on my stomach then I had better move one foot in front of the other and go inside.

  Ha, ha, reread that last line. It tells you, in rather starker terms than I care to, what this is really all about, doesn’t it?

  I ring the bell, as instructed, not at the main entrance up the stoop but at the little iron gate under the stairs. There is a stage wait and then appears a tiny little man, a dwarf nearly, or so I thought until I saw how bent over he was, a grizzled little person, immeasurably old. He greets me as if he’s known me all my life, and I am unsure what to make of that, until I see his expression. That makes me think that he knows more about what is going on here than I do, and so I step in and follow him into the kitchen while he chats about my aunts, uncles, cousins, of which last category I recognize virtually none of the names.

  “You don’t remember me? Well, I remember you, missie. Last time I saw you, you were this high. Meerskeit. That’s what your grandmother called you. Weird Jews, calling their kids ugly. Superstition. Thought God would take you if she complimented you. Weirdness from the old country. Just like my grandma, dressed in black her whole life, even though her husband’s death was the best thing ever happened to her, that old bastard. You were her favorite, you know that?”

  Did I know that? “No. I didn’t know.”

  “She loved you. She loved all of you, but you were special. Her lost one. Remember the day she died? That was a black day here, a black day.”

  “Not really. I must have been . . . away then.” For some reason I found myself unwilling to say where.

  “Ah yes, you were living with your mother. She’s the only one of all of you I never met. No regrets, on that one, pardon me.”

  I’m listening to him, but I still have time to notice all the things I remember: the linoleum floor, the ’50s fixtures—stove and refrigerator—the huge window out to a backyard where a massive leafless tree sits against the blue sky—I immediately feel the texture of its bark and the damp wood of a little bench underneath—and then we are up what seem to me to be a set of servants’ stairs. When we pass by a book-lined living room, I experience the uncanny. I stop for a moment and remember the silence, bathed in soft sun and leafy shadows of the big tree in the garden. It is a chestnut, I remember, and was higher than the house even then. I look around and find something of which I don’t have a childhood memory, but which I am now looking for specifically: the liquor cabinet. Then I follow the man up again past a coffin niche into a floor of bedrooms, and then up one more time,
all the while he is talking away:

  “This is where Beck stays when she’s here. Should be about your size—Maggie says you’ll find some clothes here to fit. Rebeccah. Your . . . sister, do I get that right?”

  “Half-sister.” I answer mechanically, a girl with a British accent, arrived out of nowhere, carrying nothing, and too tired to explain. “I met her once. Is no one living here?”

  “Christ, no. No one’s lived in this house since your grandmother died. Beck stays here sometimes, but your Aunt Klara, when she comes from Israel, likes to stay at the Yale Club. Girl never fails to invite me to dinner there. And of course your dad likes to stay here. But it’s been two years and more since I seen him last. Still, I help keep up the house.” The emphasis of this statement was not just of fact, but of intent, or determination, as if the odds against which he keeps up the house—notably, that no one lived there—are well understood.

  And so on. While he talks, I’m asking myself what I really do remember here. There’s that faint sense that I know what’s coming—the staircase, the landing. And the smell here in the back of my throat—oil paint. What did I spend here? A hundred nights over five years? I shut my eyes and remember lying in Granny’s bed with her in the morning, the dry feel of her skin, the flannel of her nightdress. I open them and see the tree outside the window. I shut them and see Granny’s studio, an easel stained with oils.

  What I do know, though, is the family mythology. Molly, Sinai’s wife whom he met when he was underground after he packed Momma off to rehab; Molly, whom even Momma kind of sees as my real mom, made sure I did: every year when I came, kicking and screaming, for a summer month in the States, she spent that month indoctrinating me: pictures, letters, books. One of those weird family things, seeing Molly herself was and is a staunch Republican, a Vietnam widow, and mother of a Marine lifer, and the Sinais, from the moment my grandfather shipped out to Spain in 1935, have been red, through and fucking through. Cosmopolitan, East Coast, Liberal elite: despised by T. S. Eliot and Spiro Agnew alike. Jews, don’t you know; I’m one too—at heart—even though Momma is Church of England. It was one of those things, that Molly made me learn the family history, just like she made me have a bat mitzvah, though she’s no more Jewish than Momma. I only did it because it was Molly. Probably it was Molly’s summers of studying family history that made me become a reporter.

  Anyway Sinai’s parents, my grandparents, Jack and Eleanor, lived here for an historic fifty years, from the year after WWII ended to 1995, the year he died: rare birds, both, American-born Jews, second and first generation, respectively. It was an expanse of time long enough to make it home for three generations: Jack Sinai and Eleanor Singer’s huge family, first, who had transplanted a Lithuanian shtetl, neuroses and all, here after the Civil War and whose second generation of patriarchs—Jack and Eleanor’s parents and uncles—survived into the ’50s before dying or moving to Florida. Jack’s father was the black sheep, a Bundist, anti-Zionist, and Jack himself was red from the moment he heard of Eugene Debs. And then the generation of their children, among the multitude of doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and other rip-off artists were the oddballs of Jack’s kids: Sinai and Danny and their adopted sister Klara, who were born in the ’50s and grew up during Vietnam, and who so notably inherited the long, moving legacy of the Bullshit of the American Left. And then, finally, the next generation, which, on the Sinai side at least—the Singers had dozens and dozens of kids, none of whom I knew—consisted of my half-sister Rebeccah, whose mother is Weather Underground legend Mimi Lurie and who, thus, has been known to make sentimental lefties burst into tears at twenty paces, my cousins—Uncle Danny and his wife Maggie Calaway’s kids, and then, of course, me. Only the older of Danny and Maggie’s kids knew my grandfather, though she doesn’t remember him, but all four of us knew Eleanor, my grandmother, who lived ten years after her husband died.

  Myself, I loved her.

  But the little man is still there, and so I turn from the window.

  “And, if I may ask: who are you?”

  “Me?” He laughed. “You just call me Uncle Joe. Everyone else does. I live right next door. Have for nearly fifty years. I take care of the house for your family.”

  That tells me something, but not enough. Does he work for Danny and Maggie, or is he a friend? It seemed important to know, from the viewpoint of security, at the least. “You were . . . a friend of my grandfather’s?”

  “Yes I was. For sixty years and more.”

  “Childhood friends?”

  “No, ma’am. Do the math. Your grandpa and I, we met on a cargo ship, on the way to France. And you know what we did then? We walked across the Pyrenees to Spain. That’s how I met your grandpa.”

  For a moment, now, he regards me critically, favoring his left eye which, I now see, is bright blue. “Okay, missie. You look like you might want to get settled now. You call me if you need me—the number’s on the fridge.”

  Standing at the window, listening to Uncle Joe’s receding footsteps on the stairs, I can feel the bulk of this house weighing upon my lungs as if I were underwater. I breathe carefully, in and out, looking intently at the naked chestnut, as if it matters. I can see there are tiny buds on its branches, leaves in utero, the leaf, waiting to join the blossom, growing from the bole. Great rooted blossomer. Fuck me, how can we know the dancer from the dance? I actually say the words, aloud, trying to relax my diaphragm against the sense, suddenly that I cannot breathe, cannot breathe at all.

  But I don’t give a fuck about the tree, you know that. It is yet another legacy of the Molly Sackler Catskill Mountain Summer School that I can name trees, and it is just that I am so fucking over-educated that I can quote Yeats. And it is because even having had the good sense, at thirteen years old, to insist that I leave my father’s house in Saugerties and live with my mother in England, I am still infused, imbued, with the pathos of the American Left, title of that seminal study I will never write and which, therefore, will never be well reviewed by some predictable contrarian in the Nation, so much so that now, suddenly, for a long moment, I simply hold my breath. Once I was researching a piece in the British Library and Lord Zuckerman was referenced in something, so I’m going through archives, and a copy of IF Stone’s Weekly—for twenty years the bible of the American Left—falls out. The typeface alone reduced me to tears. So imagine how I feel now. Imagine how I feel now at the nerve center of generations of neurosis from which I am descended. Imagine how I am feeling now, at the symbolic center of all these people, all these people, who made me what I am and who are all, now, either dead or dying.

  I will be dreaming I saw fucking Joe Hill in a moment. Alive as you and me.

  Do you know, I’m actually clueless enough not to understand my asphyxiation?

  Instead, I think: That’s all bullshit. Instead, I think: In reality, all I’m fucking doing is standing here, body as tense as a spring, waiting for Uncle Joe’s footsteps to recede fully down the stairs, trying not to think, and why? Because I’m badly needing a drink. And when at last his footsteps are gone, I slip off my shoes and follow him, softly: down again past the third floor of bedrooms, down the first few steps of the staircase into the huge living room—the stairs are well founded, super well: there’s hardly a creak, and on the carpet runners, the bare feet of a slim person—such as me—can be without sound. At the bottom I stop and listen carefully. In the living room, down the servants’ stairs, I can hear Joe in the kitchen. I cross, feeling the rough kelim under my feet, and carefully, so there is no noise, open the glass door of the liquor cabinet. In front of me are staggered rows of scotch, bourbon, vodka, all good—Johnny Blue, Glenfiddich, Stoly. I skip these and reach far in the back where sits a bottle with a black cap. This I extract, slowly, carefully, and am more than a little pleased to find it is a liter of Turkish raki, nearly full as odd liquors like this will tend to be. In normal houses, that is. Any house I am, a bottle of witch hazel is likely to be empty by lunch. Standing there, I open
the cap—it sticks, as if it has not been opened in twenty years—and pour a hit down my throat, reborative, hot, life-giving. Then I close the bottle and, closing the cabinet, make my bare-footed way upstairs again.

  Now I can breathe.

  I pause on the stairs and put another shot of raki into my stomach.

  Now I can breathe my ass off.

  Now those lungs of mine in my strong little chest, under those beautiful little breasts, which, that reminds me, one of these days I must find someone to touch, now these little lungs of mine work just fine, just fine.

  This time, in the bedroom, hitting the bottle, I step out of my pants, my underwear. I put the bottle down and peel off my shirt, my undershirt. To say that I smell is an understatement. But so is it, I note, to say that I am looking rather fine. Naked, I pick up the bottle and look at my reflection in the window. Saudi, and my liquid diet there, has been good to me: I am slim and taut, with little boyish hips and—this time of month—tiny breasts, no more, surely, than one-ten which, at five-three, is just where I want to be. But—I come to my senses—I’m also just where whoever may be watching from across the back yards wants me to be, so I kill the light, then open the window and, the chill air on my skin, smoke a cigarette. I drink from the bottle. Then I carry it into the little bathroom—ceramic bath, round toilet, black and white tile on the floor, full-length mirror in an oak frame—and, balancing the bottle on the end of the tub, step into a hot shower.

  After which, I suppose I go to bed, because when I open my eyes to the beep of my iPhone telling me that it is shutting down for lack of battery, it is eighteen hours later, four in the morning, and I am naked in pitch blackness, wondering why I haven’t charged my iPhone, then remembering that I am not in my hotel, where I left my charger, but with no idea where I am.

  2.

  Though blackness is a big word, too, isn’t it? Above me, on the ceiling, big shadows of the branches of the chestnut move slowly in the huge silence of the empty house. Beyond them the sky of flat cloud is lighted by what must be a fairly sizable moon, of which I cannot remember the phase. For a long time I lie there, floating on the surface of a huge depth of emotion, like when Dadda used to take me to swim in those rock quarries up in Maine when I was a kid, old slate and granite quarries that were hundreds of feet deep when they hit water and now, when I swam, I was aware of two, three hundred feet of teeming blackness below .