Shrug

by Lisa Braver Moss

  Fortunately, Sylvia seemed too busy with her women’s poetry workshops and women’s drumming circles and women’s hiking groups to track my meals at her house, and Stephanie kept assuring me it was okay for me to eat there. So did Brett. The three of us spent a lot of time listening to records and talking about music, and we all got along great.

  One of the things my mother cried about was the way my father sent home money for child support after our every-other-weekend visits. More than once, he’d given Drew the cash and told him to fold it up and put it in his shoe for safekeeping during the cab ride home. My mother was furious that my father was using Drew for this task, though I wasn’t sure what she would have preferred, since she didn’t allow my father in the house and certainly wasn’t going to go pick up the money—or us. Maybe she was insulted that the cash had been sitting in Drew’s sour-smelling PF Flyers. Maybe she was mad that my father put us in a cab when money was tight and we could’ve taken the bus. I didn’t ask.

  One day, my mother put her long wool coat on over her nightgown and drove to Smoke and Records to confront my father about all this. She came home fuming. “Guess who was at the store!” she demanded, standing in the doorway to my room.

  “I don’t know, Mom—”

  “Just guess!”

  I was sitting at my desk, trying to finish a math assignment. I twisted around to face her. “Mom, I have no—”

  “Iris Cray, that’s who! Buying some jazz album—”

  For a second, I thought my mother was going to start bitching about how shocking it was that a Juilliard-trained musician and teacher would be buying a lowly jazz record. Then I realized— shrug—she’d probably gotten wind of the fact that Mrs. Cray played jazz tunes for me during our lessons.

  “—as if it’s perfectly fine to shop at Smoke and Records! Martha, haven’t you made it clear to your teacher just how sick your father is? How destructive?”

  “What? Mom, she and I have other—”

  “What could possibly be more important than your father’s behaving like a psychopathic madman?”

  “But Mom, if I used lesson time to talk about that, you’d be mad at me for not working hard on violin!”

  “Frankly, Martha, Iris Cray has never struck me as being all that insightful.”

  “Mom, that’s not fair! Just because—”

  “Look, Martha, you’re old enough to learn that life is about standing up for what’s right, even if it’s inconvenient. I thought for sure that with your insight, you’d see through your father’s bullshit. His seductive charm. His phony—”

  “I do see through all that!” Shrug.

  “And yet you don’t think it’s important to mention that to your favorite teacher?”

  I tried again. “Then you’d be mad because—”

  “The hottest seats in hell,” my mother intoned, “are reserved for those who cannot take a stand in a time of crisis. That’s a quote, Martha. From Dante!”

  Of course it fell to me to tell Mrs. Cray that I couldn’t study with her any more. I let her think it was because of money problems. She said I should feel free to come over any time I wanted, especially on Saturdays, because she could use my help teaching her younger students, and she’d be happy to keep giving me lessons in exchange. I did a regular shrug and looked down at my white canvas Keds.

  I know, I know: I should’ve fought harder. I should’ve found a way. But that’s not how I was. My outrage faded, and I began to see things from my mother’s perspective: maybe it had been immature of me not to tell Mrs. Cray that my father hit us. Wasn’t it possible my mother had a point?

  Being a complete bitch and being wrong about everything—those are two different things, aren’t they?

  This is stupid in retrospect, but I assumed my mother would want me to keep playing the violin, just with a different teacher. She didn’t care, though. Since the whole reason I liked violin was Mrs. Cray anyway, what was the point of continuing? I finished out the semester in Miss Transom’s orchestra, and then I switched to Chorus. Which turned out to be a good thing.

  I wouldn’t have thought of singing in Chorus except for Paisley and Philip, the Gorman twins, who were in my homeroom all through junior high. They both sang and had seen me with my violin. I must’ve said something about not signing up for Orchestra on the day we were enrolling in classes for the following semester, because they both started trying to convince me I should be in Chorus.

  Paisley Gorman acted a lot more grown-up than other thirteen-year-olds, but it was genuine. It wasn’t so much a case of her seeming like an older teenager; it was more as if she’d skipped through childhood and adolescence altogether and was already a grown-up. She had this tedious kind of maturity—niceness and wisdom and goody-goody-ness—where you could just tell she’d been like that since she was four or five. Paisley was passionate about the art and music of the Renaissance, whose palettes I found depressing. One time her mother took me and Paisley to the Renaissance Faire, and Paisley just wouldn’t stop with all the prithees and fies and huzzahs, which made me roll my eyes when she wasn’t looking. Actually I kind of felt sorry for Paisley, because even though she had pretty features, it all added up to something bland and unnoticeable, and also, she was more interested in being friends than I was. But there was something so earnest about her affection for me that I couldn’t just ignore her.

  Philip had always liked me, too, and he had his good points. Midway through second semester of eighth grade, when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, a group of mostly black eighth-grade students from Garfield, plus some seventh graders like Clifton Cray and his friend Ben, marched up the hill to the Berkeley Unified School District building and demanded that Garfield be renamed in memory of the slain leader. The students won. It was a very important statement, and I was proud that students had made it happen, but thanks to Philip Gorman, it was also funny. Philip insisted on calling our newly renamed school “The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior Junior High School,” pausing in between the two “Junior”s for emphasis. I was the only one who laughed, so he kept finding reasons to say our school’s “full name” in front of me. Which was kind of annoying, but I kept laughing. Funny is funny.

  In Chorus, Paisley planted herself next to me in the alto section and kept telling me what a nice voice I had. At first I thought it was just her usual thing of trying to get me to like her, but soon she pointed out that other altos were trying to sit as close to me as they could. It turned out that because of my violin training, I was a good sight-singer, meaning I could follow the music and look up at Mrs. Finkelstein, the conductor, basically at the same time, which is exactly what Mrs. Finkelstein said you should do. You were also supposed to keep going even if the others in your section were lost, so I did that too, and the other altos started using me for orientation whenever we were doing something unfamiliar.

  Most of the other kids were shaky and noncommittal while sight-singing, but new music was fun for me. In fact, I kept myself from studying the music in advance, or listening to a recording of whatever piece it was, so that I could enjoy the challenge—and also, not get completely sick of the music.

  The third week of the semester, we read through the first movement of Bach’s Cantata #140, Wachet Auf. I wasn’t familiar with Wachet Auf—it wasn’t one of my father’s favored cantatas. There’s a tricky syncopated sub-theme that the altos are supposed to sing at Letter I, until the tenors come in four bars later, but it didn’t throw me. I came in and sang even though the other altos were lost and only straggled in because I sounded sure of myself, I guess.

  Mrs. Finkelstein started tapping her baton against the podium. Tik tik tik tik tik. “Altos!” she exclaimed. “Where were the rest of you at Letter I?” It was a rhetorical question. “Let’s try that again. Along with Martha, this time?”

  I knew I was being complimented, and it was inevitable that I would shrug in that moment. But for the first time, I didn’t mind the shrug, because it made me realize s
omething. Whenever I was sight-singing, or doing any kind of singing, I didn’t shrug. The same thing had happened with violin—when I was really lost in the music and could forget about everything else in my stupid life, it was as if my body forgot about the shrug and just floated along.

  At the end of class, Mrs. Finkelstein asked me to come speak with her. Did I want to be leader of the whole alto section?

  I kept having a dream where I was about to slap someone across the face, hard, but then their hair would get in the way, or their arms. When I woke up, my hand would be tingling with the frustration of having been unable to get in a good whack.

  School was getting harder. I could never seem to concentrate. It was tiring, having to remember not to look confused or blurt out something stupid while I was orienting myself with what the teacher and other kids were saying in English or Social Studies. Shrug. I would grab onto certain bits of information as if they were placeholders, without actual comprehension, as if I were borrowing something that I would pay back in the future, once I understood. But the future never seemed to come. I had this gut feeling I was falling more and more deeply into a kind of debt that would eventually get me in big trouble.

  My eighth grade history textbook was full of baffling sentences. “The general determined that the most effective course of action was to cut through and subdue the rebellion.” Cut through and subdue: Stephanie and I laughed endlessly about that rhyming phrase, and I didn’t want to ruin the joke by telling her that I didn’t get the point and was terrified of the upcoming test. Cut through: trample, like Jules Goldenthal, on whoever was in your way. Most effective course of action: divorce the son-of-a-bitch! Subdue the rebellion: Hildy. Drew.

  I knew the term “suicide mission” had to do with bravery in war, but I couldn’t seem to hold onto that meaning. Suicide, my mother said, was something other people didn’t have as much reason as she did to think about, let alone commit, because they didn’t have to deal with a psychopath like Jules Goldenthal.

  There were protests going on all the time on the Cal campus. A lot of my classmates had started hanging around Sproul Plaza and going on marches. So had Brett. They didn’t care about shallow things like homework. They cared about free speech and the war and women’s lib and racism. Free speech: having the right to tell my father he was a bastard. The war: my family, obviously. Women’s lib: a way to free people like my mother from having to put up with people like my father.

  It took forever for my parents’ divorce to go through, partly because my mother kept getting hysterical and switching lawyers. She didn’t see why my father should have visitation rights at all, and she was constantly trying to find a lawyer who would agree with her. She said if the judge really understood the situation, he wouldn’t have allowed any visitation with my father at all. Still, it was a relief that I didn’t have to figure out for myself what was fair. My mother couldn’t get that mad at me for seeing my father if the court said that was the deal.

  My mother was panicked about how close Hildy and my father were. How “incestuous.” Whereas she used to call Hildy “the little mother,” now it was “the little wife.” My father was deeply seductive, my mother told me, and even though it was only psychological seduction, it was still very damaging to a young girl. The court didn’t understand things like that, because they were completely lacking in basic psychological insight.

  On most of the allotted weekends, I went along with Hildy and Drew to the studio apartment my father had rented on Bancroft, just a few doors down from Smoke and Records. If I had a ton of homework, or if my mother was crying a lot and talking about swallowing a bottle of aspirin, I skipped the overnight and just came for a while on Sunday. My father didn’t like that, but at least I didn’t have to worry about him killing himself over it: he still had Hildy and Drew.

  It wasn’t that my father had never mentioned suicide. One time, during a fight with my mother, he shouted that he was going to hang himself from the flagpole at Cragmont Elementary. As horrible as it was to hear him yell that at the top of his lungs, it was way worse when he threatened the same thing quietly. That had happened just recently, while Drew was watching TV in the kitchen of my father’s apartment. In a muffled, eerily calm voice, my father told me and Hildy that when he’d shaved that morning, he’d thought of taking the blade out of the shaver and using it to slit his wrists “to just be done with it.”

  When I came home after that visit, I was so shaken up that even my mother noticed. “What’s wrong?” she asked as I stood at the foot of her bed, and I realized it had been a long time since she’d asked me anything like that. “Martha, what happened?”

  I wanted to ask her for more details about my father’s “emotional instability reaction,” the thing that had happened when he enlisted during the war, and for which the army had apparently dismissed him early on. I also wanted to know more about my father’s parents, whom my mother had referred to as “very old-country, neurotic, superstitious people,” even though the few times they’d visited, they seemed nice, and Hildy told me our New York cousins loved having them around. They had come to America penniless from Eastern Europe and eventually opened up a smoke shop in Brooklyn, which had always seemed really brave to me, but my mother said they had a compulsive need to overprotect their precious darling and cripple him emotionally to the point where he couldn’t achieve anything in life despite all his talents. Plus, they’d wanted him to stay in New York, which my mother felt was manipulative and selfish. But if I asked about any of this, I realized, it’d only give my mother a green light for bitching about my father. So I just kind of stalled.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God. They were all talking about me, weren’t they! Your father, Hildy, Drew—” my mother filled in the scenario with wild certainty— “and you—you were the only one who defended me!”

  “Mom, that’s—”

  “Martha, you’re way too young to be put in that position. The pressure you’re under! You see what I’m up against? Do you?” She was crying now, of course.

  Afterwards, all I felt toward my father was anger: he was too selfish to protect us kids from threats of slitting his wrists or hanging himself. Maybe I didn’t really believe him. Maybe I couldn’t afford to. Or maybe I kind of figured my father was Hildy’s headache. I already had mine.

  11

  helvetica

  By the time we started ninth grade, Fathom was old and sick and had to be put to sleep. Stephanie was pretty upset about it, even though she was still flying high from having gotten a boyfriend over the summer at the camp she’d attended back East.

  Soon after the school year started, Stephanie noticed a grey striped cat without any tags that was wandering around scavenging for food way down on University Avenue near West Campus, which was where all we ninth graders went for a year before starting tenth grade on the main Berkeley High School campus. The main campus was in downtown Berkeley just a few blocks from the Cal campus—a much cooler location. At West Campus, on the other hand, the big attraction was a run-down Foster’s Freeze right across the street that was so crowded with other kids that I never went to it. Oh, and a vertical neon sign on one of the nearby store fronts that spelled out “L-I-Q-U-O-R” a letter at a time, pausing a beat after the “Q” and again after the “R” so it was in 4/4 rhythm, before lighting up the full word “LIQUOR” for two beats and then starting over again with the “L.” Stephanie and I kind of made a song out of it, because it cracked us up.

  Anyway, Stephanie kept seeing the stray cat and giving it little bits of food, and eventually, she and I brought it to her house on the bus. It was Brett who suggested the name Helvetica.

  “Hel—what? Why?” Stephanie asked.

  “Helvetica! It means Swiss,” Brett said.

  “We don’t know if it’s a he or a she, right? So it’s, like, neutral. Like the Swiss. Get it?” He’d been reading a lot lately about World War II.

  Stephanie and Brett and I continued to hang around together when I came ov
er. Sometimes Brett’s door was closed, but usually not for long. The three of us would listen to records, and Brett would talk about how terrible the war was and tell us about all the ways people were finding to avoid the draft. Plus he’d do a lot of philosophizing, most of which I couldn’t follow. I assumed it was because of his bookishness, but Stephanie thought he sounded more and more like a stoner.

  When Stephanie and Sylvia took the cat to the vet for shots and neutering, the sex mystery was solved: Helvetica was pregnant. Stephanie filled me in on what was going to happen. When Helvetica was about to have the kittens, she’d lose all interest in food and start licking her belly and vaginal opening like crazy. If we were very observant, we might notice the cat breathing more quickly right before she was ready to give birth.

  Stephanie said we should get a dark, quiet place ready, since the gestation period was only a little over two months and Helvetica was getting very fat. We decided to empty out the bottom drawer of Stephanie’s bureau, which was in her closet, and put the drawer on the floor in there. We made a nice bed with some old blankets that Sylvia let us launder so the spot would be fresh and clean. We put Helvetica’s food and water dishes into the closet and let her get used to it.

  All this was suggested by Stephanie’s father, Morris, a psychiatrist who taught at the medical school at UC San Francisco and had a private therapy practice in Berkeley. He’d had pets as a kid and knew a lot about cats and dogs. Stephanie was always making a point of asking Morris about things they were both interested in. She’d ask him about how he diagnosed patients, and learned about how various mental conditions were categorized in some book called “the DSM.” Mainly, I think, Stephanie did this so Morris wouldn’t feel as bad about the divorce from Sylvia, and about the fact that he only got to see Stephanie and Brett on Sundays.