Plus, now that my father had shown that he knew what to do in a tear gas situation, Hildy would probably act even more like he was the bravest person who ever lived. Jesus Christ! Just because someone isn’t afraid to hit people doesn’t make him some kind of goddamned World War II hero, does it?
17
rebellious
“There’s nothing wrong with sex,” my mother said to Hildy one evening a few months later. The doors were all open, as usual, because children don’t need privacy! My mother was lecturing Hildy from the doorway, not even making an attempt to keep her voice down so that Drew and I wouldn’t hear. “You don’t want to be one of those uptight girls, playing games,” she went on. “Depriving their boyfriends of intercourse when it’s only natural that’s what the boyfriends want.” “Mom!” Hildy said.
“You can’t string him along indefinitely, you know, Hildy. That would be cruel.”
Afterwards, Hildy came into my room. Her voice wobbled as she tried not to cry. “Mom wants me to go to her gynecologist so I can get birth control,” she said, as if I hadn’t heard the whole conversation. “She wants me to have sex with Greg.”
Have sex: that was not what my mother had said. She’d said “intercourse,” and Hildy had automatically corrected it, just as I would’ve done, maybe without even noticing, putting as much distance as possible from my mother’s repulsive way of saying things. Intercourse. Only my mother could make something nice sound clinical and disgusting at the same time.
“Hildy, what do you want?” I knew she didn’t want to have sex with Greg Gold. Maybe if she said it aloud, she’d have more of a chance of listening to herself.
“You know, Greg thinks I’m exaggerating about how mean Mom is. He doesn’t believe me.”
“I hate when people are like that!”
“Plus, he acts like he owns me or something,” she went on. “I asked Dad what he thought. He said if I’m not having fun with Greg, or if he isn’t being nice to me, that’s a good enough reason to stop dating him.”
“Oh.” Was it?
“And I said, ‘But Dad, it’ll hurt Greg’s feelings if I break it off.’ I told him I thought I should just gradually spend less time with him. But Dad said that was a bad idea. He said breaking up with someone was kind of like an amputation. He goes, ‘Do you really think it’s better if you do it an inch at a time?’ And I can see Dad’s point.”
“So—you need to tell Greg. Right?”
“I know. I’m trying to get up the nerve.”
Hildy had been getting horrible stomachaches lately. I told her she should make my mother take her to a stomach doctor, not a gynecologist, but we both knew that if Hildy let on, there’d be some reason why the situation was Hildy’s fault. Or Jules’s fault, for being such a psychopath, it was no wonder Hildy had developed physical symptoms to mirror the psychological damage, blah blah blah. . . .
Not that Hildy could get help from my father, either. If she told him she wanted to go see a doctor, he’d open up the register and say, “What do you need?” as if the problem were cash. What Hildy really needed, of course, was help finding a doctor and making an appointment. As for our pediatrician, Hildy would no more confide in him about her stomach than I would about my shrug.
One Friday, Greg Gold’s parents were letting him have a party as a reward for how hard he’d been working to fill out his college applications. That was when I realized Hildy hadn’t been working on hers. At one point she’d talked about UC Santa Cruz, but she hadn’t mentioned it lately.
My mother didn’t seem to care, because, she told me, she didn’t think Hildy was “college material.” I said Hildy was as smart as anyone I knew. Smarter. And a lot more well-read. But my mother insisted Hildy’s so-called intellectual life was all bullshit and that deep down inside, Hildy knew it was bullshit: that was why her unconscious mind kept her from filling out any college applications.
I was surprised when Hildy came home early from Greg Gold’s party, around ten. Drew was already asleep, and my mother was in her room. Hildy closed my door quietly behind her and plunked down on my bed. She smelled strange—not bad, just not familiar. Or maybe familiar, but strange at the same time.
“What’s going on? And what’s that weird—”
Hildy ran her tongue over her front teeth. She spoke softly. “Okay, so, like, I was with Dad, and—wait, first, what happened was, I got my period at school and I started having cramps, and I told Greg I didn’t feel well enough to go home with him after school to help him set up for the party. I just wanted to sit on the steps of the Community Theater. And then Greg left, and Matt Baskit was there, and he, like, sneaked me a joint, but then—”
“Wait! A joint of grass?”
“Don’t have a conniption, Martha. Yes, of grass—duh! That’s what joint means!”
Now that Hildy and I were finally at the same school again, I was more aware of the kids she hung around with. Most of them were fine, but there was something about Matt Baskit that didn’t sit right with me. Maybe it was because Hildy was always giving him money. He’d forgotten his lunch, or coins must’ve fallen out of his pocket, or he’d given all his spare change to a street person on his way to school because the street person seemed like they needed the money more than he did. Matt always said he was going to pay Hildy back, but this was the first I’d ever heard of him giving her anything—and it was marijuana. “So what did you do? Did you smoke the joint with him?”
“Well—the thing is, Dad says you shouldn’t ever smoke grass that someone gives you unless you know for sure where it comes from. It could be laced with something really dangerous. So I wasn’t sure if it was safe or not. So what I did was, I talked to Matt for a while, and said I didn’t feel like smoking right then, because I didn’t want him to know I’d never done it before. Then I went to see Dad at the store and showed it to him.”
“What did he say?” I gasped. “Hildy, did he hit you?”
“No, dummy! He took it and flushed it down the toilet.”
“Oh.”
“And then—”
“What?”
“Well, I never went to Greg’s. Because Dad took me upstairs to his apartment and—let me smoke some of his own pot.”
“What?”
“Shhh! I told you, Martha, don’t have a spaz!”
“Are you kidding? Dad has pot? From where?”
“I don’t know, but it’s safe. And this girl was there, too, Shalimar. She’s really nice.”
“Shalimar? Like the perfume?”
“Not a girl, really, a graduate student, I think. She likes Dad. Which is really weird, because she’s not that much older than I am. God, I’m thirsty.”
“I never even heard of her.”
Hildy moistened her lips, but they still looked a little shrunken. “Dad says the first time you try grass, you don’t feel much, but I’m not sure.”
I just sat there, my mouth hanging open.
“Don’t you understand, Martha? Twelfth grade is old to be trying pot for the first time.”
“But Hildy—”
“You know, you’re really gonna like Shalimar. She’s smart, and tall, kind of skinny, and she wears these billowy clothes and has this great laugh and really white teeth and this long, flowing hair. And she’s nice! I needed a Kotex, and she gave me three of them.”
I had a feeling that even if she never found out about the pot, my mother would think of a reason to hate Shalimar. “So what happened with Greg? Was he mad that you didn’t show up?”
Hildy shrugged. “I called from the store and said I had really bad cramps and had to lie down. I mean, that part was true. Then Dad called him and said I still wasn’t feeling well enough to go to the party.”
“Wow.” I let it all sink in. “How’d you get home?”
“Dad and Shalimar put me in a cab.”
“But Hildy—why? Why would Dad give you pot?”
“I told you, dummy! My period. Shalimar said she used to get these real
ly bad cramps, and it helped her. Plus, Dad said all kids are curious, so they’re gonna experiment. He said it’s the human condition, and it’s better if I try it with him.”
“Man, Hildy, Mom’s gonna have a cow.”
“She’s not gonna find out, dummy!”
But that was the thing Hildy didn’t understand about my father: he assumed that everyone, even my mother, thought of him as a basically good person and a caring parent. No matter what he did, he figured people would say, Isn’t it refreshing how honest Jules is about things? Why can’t more people be that way? So when Hildy was in the bathroom a few minutes later, sipping at the faucet, because there was never a cup in there, and the phone rang, and it was my father, probably explaining to my mother that all kids experiment, that this was the human condition, that he was just trying to protect Hildy from something worse, he probably really believed my mother would see things his way.
After screaming for a few minutes into the phone, my mother slammed down the receiver and came running out of her room in her flannel nightgown. She wasn’t wearing a bathrobe, and I could see her saggy breasts. It was hard not to be disgusted as her nipples jiggled with anger. I was always fighting the urge to hate her.
For a minute, I actually thought she was going to check and make sure Hildy was okay. I thought she’d feel bad about waking Drew up with all the shouting. Afterwards, of course, the echoey slaps across Hildy’s face next to the bathroom sink, the stinging smack across my own face when I shrieked at my mother to stop slapping Hildy, the terror of Drew, his running out to see what was going on and then running back into his room and crawling into his closet in the dark to multiply numbers—all this seemed like the only possible outcome.
Normally, Hildy wouldn’t even cry in a situation like this. She always said she didn’t want to give my mother the satisfaction. Of course I was crying, because when I got hit, I cried whether I wanted to give my parents the satisfaction or not.
This time, though, Hildy did cry. I guess she couldn’t help it; there had just been too many slaps. The tears streamed down, but she was quiet and held her head high. She went into Drew’s room to try to get him to come out of the closet. “How touching,” my mother sneered. “The protective older sister.” Then she turned to me. “I expected better from you, Martha. I thought you, of all people, would grasp the need to take a stand here.”
“Take a stand?” I shrieked, my palm at the side of my face. “This isn’t Hildy’s fault! It’s Dad’s fault!”
My mother shook her head. “You know, I’ve come to the conclusion that I just hate that girl.”
“Wh-what girl?” Shrug.
“You know perfectly well what girl! Hildy!”
“What?”
My mother was a bitch. That was a fact. But I’m telling you, I never thought she was this much of a bitch. Had Hildy heard what my mother had said? She must’ve, with all the stupid goddamned open doors in our house. “Mom, how can you say that about your own daughter?”
“Martha, I want you to call your father right now! I want you to tell him that Hildy came home with a marijuana cigarette, and that she gave it to Drew, and forced him to smoke it.”
“What?”
“You do it!”
“Mom, I can’t just make up some bullshit story—”
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that!”
“You’re the one who supposedly hates bullshit!” I shouted.
She grabbed my arm, trying to drag me into her room and over to the phone. “You do it, Martha! You tell your head-pot father about that marijuana cigarette!”
“It’s called a joint, for your information,” I countered. I decided not to correct her about my father’s being a pot-head, not a head-pot.
“I don’t care what it’s called. You call that son of a bitch and humiliate him, right now!”
“No! Hildy!”
“What did you say to me?” my mother demanded. Hildy and Drew were in the hallway now. Their mouths were open.
“I said no, Mom. I’m not doing it.” There was no shrug now. Maybe I did have some control over the stupid thing, if only I’d ever get over being stupid.
“Doing what?” Hildy took a step forward, pushed Drew back. “Mom, what are you telling Martha to do?” Her voice was calm.
My mother glared at me, her jaw shaking with rage. “You rebellious little bitch!”
“I am not rebellious!” I screamed into my mother’s face, and she slapped me, again, across mine.
18
best judgment
“Mr. Lucas? Should I put Leonard Bernstein in the jazz section? Or classical?”
“Isn’t West Side Story a musical?” he puffed from the back, where he was moving around heavy cartons of LPs that had been delivered to On Record that morning.
It wasn’t busy, and, keeping my eye on the cash register, I walked toward the inventory room, choosing my words carefully so I didn’t come across the way my father would’ve. “Um, the thing is, right now all the Bernstein is sitting in the musicals section. But Chichester Psalms is choral, and I think The Age of Anxiety is a symphony. The back of Trouble in Tahiti says it’s an opera—”
Mr. Lucas gave the slight groan of an overweight man turning himself around on leather soles while remaining in a squatting position. His beefy face was red, especially the nose, and his scalp was pink under the thinning fine blond hair. “Use your best judgment. There’s a stack of those white separators under the counter. Find a marker and create a new category, if you need to.”
“Uh—okay.” I was pretty sure my father put West Side Story in musicals and the rest under jazz. Or wait, did he file Bernstein with other contemporary American composers, like Copland? I’d have to check. For now, I decided on jazz for everything besides West Side Story, mostly because in Mr. Lucas’s classical section, the composers were arranged alphabetically, and the idea of putting Leonard Bernstein somewhere between Albinoni and Chopin made me wince. It wasn’t that I thought of either Albinoni or Chopin as being superior to Bernstein—if anything, I preferred Bernstein to both. But at Smoke and Records, composers were organized chronologically, not alphabetically, and let’s face it, when my father is right, he’s right. How could anyone think Bartok belongs near Bach, or Mahler near Monteverdi? Albinoni should be near Vivaldi, not Brahms! Obviously.
Mr. Lucas and I were reorganizing and consolidating the records to make room for a new section he’d designated for cassette tapes, which people had started using to listen to music while driving around in their cars. My father didn’t sell cassettes, but then, Mr. Lucas had more room in his store, plus a more open mind about things that were becoming popular. He liked all kinds of music, from Gregorian chant to Jefferson Airplane, and he didn’t seem to experience the world of recorded music as a struggle between true art and the fall of civilization or something. Sometimes Mr. Lucas played Verdi operas, sometimes Frank Sinatra, sometimes Creedence Clearwater Revival. The shop was decorated with posters of Glenn Gould and Pablo Casals, but also the Carpenters, the Jackson Five and, of course, the Beatles.
Probably Hildy thought, How could you help Mr. Lucas out for money when I’ve been working for Dad for free? If you were a nice person, you’d work for Dad for free, too. At least she had the decency not to say it out loud. My father, too, kept quiet instead of stating the obvious. Sure, go ahead, spend time in Lucas’s Emporium of Mediocrity—maybe then you’ll finally appreciate how great I am.
My mother was more up-front in her disapproval. Of all the places I could work, I’d chosen one just a block away from my destructive father. Besides, she said, if he were a decent provider, I wouldn’t have to waste my time at a menial job while still in high school. Oh, and my mother didn’t like my “compulsive need to hoard money.” I guess she failed to notice that I spent my first paycheck on a pea coat from the army-navy surplus store, a pair of corduroy jeans from Hink’s, and a couple of blouses from Dharma Bums, an imports shop on Telegraph.
I often fel
t anxious when Mr. Lucas expected me to make decisions, but he seemed to appreciate my efforts, and overall, I really enjoyed my job. I liked helping the customers choose records that, based on their taste, I could be pretty sure they’d want. When people liked crappy music, I bit my tongue and let them buy crap. When people had good taste, I’d chat with them about what they chose, and often wound up selling them another record or two. I saw what my father liked about having a shop and running the register: the world came to you.
One day, for example, while I was squatting behind the cash register to straighten out the bags, a young black teenager came into view.
“Hey, that is you!” he said, grinning. “Knew it!” He leaned his skateboard against the front window.
“Clifton!” I hadn’t seen him since the tear gas incident a year earlier. He was still short, but he’d grown a medium Afro instead of wearing his hair close-cropped, and I had to admit he was pretty good-looking, for an undeveloped ninth-grader. He had this impish smile where his upper gums showed above big white teeth, and his eyebrows made a kind of jaunty tepee over his eyes when he wrinkled his forehead. “Didn’t that tear gas scare you off Telegraph?”
“Nah. Just hangin’ around with my friend Ben.” Clifton gestured outside, where the tall, beanpole-skinny black kid with a baseball cap was playing with his skateboard, the tires loud and gravelly against the sidewalk, like one of those washboards in a jug band.
“How’s your mom?” I asked.
Clifton shrugged. “You know. She’s my mom.”
“You’re still playing violin, right?”
“Ha! Like she’d let me quit.”
“You’re probably really good by now.”
Clifton shrugged again. “I got into Youth Orchestra.”
I rolled my eyes. “First chair, right?”
He hung his head, nodded. “Everyone thinks I’m a goody-goody.”
Well, he was. “Come on,” I managed. “You’re really talented, Clifton.” I realized I was looking forward to next year, when Clifton would be a tenth grader, and we’d be on the same campus, and I’d get to see him when Concert Chorale and Orchestra did rehearsals and concerts together. “Plus you work really hard,” I went on. “You should feel proud!”
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