I hooked my toes on the back of his sneaker so that when he lunged he lost it. Flat tire. We were out to get each other, the three of us.
Nan Shemaria was a professor of sociology. Everything she told my mother about the human race ended up being something bad, something snide, something derisive.
Or something doomsday. Professor Shemaria was politically childless, my mother informed us. You could defeat anything, said my mother—biological imperative, winsome little babies—with the right term for it.
If why questions weren’t already anti-faith, Professor Shemaria’s defeat of religious holidays was the institution of wine-and-cheese Fridays. On the department’s nickel, reported my mother, a spread of Swiss, Brie, butterfly crackers, chunks of unripe cantaloupe like something from a dermatology experiment. Adjunct faculty debated Head Start vs. stipends for home tests administered by stay-home mothers, grad students dangled their theses like undergarments, a pair of humid undergrads stuck their heads in, only to recoil when they gauged the naked distance across the room to the wine and cheese table.
Fridays my mother got home after midnight.
Our house was a one-story box, like the little green ones in Monopoly, but with a sun porch. My mother rented half the driveway to a neighbor for the neighbor’s son’s Yamaha. My brother played on the bike incessantly, and my mother yelled through the louvered slats of the sun porch. We were right across the street from Our Lady F, Efraimia, where we did not go to church, because of questions handed down from Professor Shemaria.
Happy Mor-tal-ity to you, Happy Mor-tal-ity to you, you act like a monkey, ’cause you came from one, too! That was my mother’s version.
Truthfully, was it Happy Birthday or death itself that was transmitted from outer space? Death, for sure, when it was beamed down through the middle school PA system, as if the space shuttle Challenger had exploded in real time, in Social Studies. It was the same January week of my mother’s first diagnosis. “Not too shabby compared to Christa McAuliffe,” said my mother. I thought of the air-beyond-the-air that hosted Russian spy pods. The stars like streetlights on foggy winter evenings.
Anyway, my mother played it loud and raucous. She played with exaggerated fermatas, derisively, from the sun porch, not an ideal place for an instrument, and she winced and cursed when another key mutinied, the pedals swollen at the root so they were nothing more than footrests. Or she sang in Spanish. We were basically Italian. Singing in Spanish mocked Spanish, for no good reason, mocked birthdays, made birthdays part of the running joke on the banality of love in families.
My mother was tall and spidery, all transparent joints, pipe-cleaner legs in off-brand blue jeans. Her cigarette leaned out of her mouth dangerously—she liked to scare us. She kept a big glass jar of pennies on the kitchen counter, as big as those jars of jelly beans you’re supposed to count to win prizes: a gift certificate to Newport Creamery, a shampoo-color-cut by Trudy.
Trying to guess the pennies made your head spin, like an optical illusion.
For a couple of reasons the pennies were more or less impossible to steal. This was one thing my brother and I agreed on. First of all, you didn’t have time to count to a hundred. Second, you didn’t steal a dollar, you faced a hundred counts of stealing. That was a lot of wrongdoing for a stinking dollar. That was the point. That was the hard lesson. Another hard lesson was our father leaving, but to our mother it only proved there was no love in families. The Alimony Asshole, our father.
Truthfully, he didn’t just vanish. My mother said he was a long slow death like cancer. She was the expert.
He worked at T.F. Green Airport. My brother used to think he built T.F. Green Airport. The Unions squeezed him, and same as our mother, he wasn’t a joiner. He was snuck on a construction site in Dorchester. Then there was a gig in Lowell. Each job a little farther from Providence. When he stopped by, unannounced, he always brought a box of donut holes. “Hah!” our mother would cry scornfully, and tip them straight into the garbage. “Did they sweep them off the floor for you, champ?” she’d say then, getting in his face, softer.
We got a long-suffering, bearish stepfather after a while; our mother teased him without mercy.
Whenever we found a penny, exempting in a public fountain (because Professor Shemaria had catalogued the “wishing well phenomenon”), we were supposed to pick it up and save it for our mother. Pennies were different from donut holes. All the lost pennies on all the gummy floors and cracked sidewalks in Providence belonged to our mother. Her eyes were copper. Green spots appeared with her illness.
My high school yearbook voted me most likely to keep my figure. It wasn’t necessarily a compliment. It seemed to me you wanted, at that age, to spend your figure.
My mother was balancing on the kitchen counter—lemon yellow with sparkles, a 1950s dessert, what was floating island?—on one elbow. My mother said the sparkles were mica. Another thing that cracked her up was how kitchens had evolved from the fucking fire of Prometheus. “The Early Peoples actually used three hundred and sixty degrees of their cooking fires.” My brother and I rolled our eyes behind her.
The pattern in the tan carpet was like worm tunnels in tree bark.
My mother was idly paging through my yearbook. I remember thinking, What if you were thirty-seven, instead of seventeen, when you graduated? What if you could calmly flip through your yearbook, pointing out, “Hah. That’s Diane Orabona’s daughter. I remember when Diane Orabona peed her pants in gym class.” Or, stabbing at a bleached blonde in a homemade anarchy T-shirt, “Look at the birth-control boobs on that one!”
My mother talked fast, and she only ever smoked half her cigarette.
She said, “Didn’t they lower the hormone dosage? Didn’t I read that?”
I laughed nervously. Those girls towered above me in popularity.
“In my day birth control was a fucking horse pill.”
What if you were a certified know-it-all and you had something to say about everyone? My brother and I called each other doho, for the failure of the donut holes, for the failure of anything that was, in and of itself, a hole, a negative greaseball.
What if, at thirty-seven, you had already had two scares, including chemo, surgery, and remission, and you could still say boobs? As if you still possessed them?
And how could I laugh with you when you said it?
“They couldn’t say anything about your grades?” my mother persisted, thumping the yearbook. “Nothing cute about straight A’s is there. Nothing hot about a four-point-oh, four years running.”
Why did I choose this moment to notice that my mother had, since yesterday, become flat-chested? But I could easily see her chucking the post-mastectomy bras the insurance company paid for on a one-time-only basis. Her vanity was never sartorial.
One Saturday morning I found her on the sun porch engrossed in papers, fanned, stacked, and scattered around her. The sunlight through the slats blinked maniacally. She was kneeling, using the piano bench as a table, furiously marking across the pages of what could only be, I realized with horror, Professor Shemaria’s students’ papers. Her left hand was pulling out hairs, strand by strand, a habit of which she was so deeply ashamed that my brother and I had never even mentioned it to each other.
“What are you doing?” I surprised her. She snapped back like a measuring tape into its metal locket.
“Maybe you’d care to help me here, genius.” She recovered quickly.
“Okay.” I didn’t move. I tried to look without looking, as if the pages were love letters or a diary.
“Intro to Sociology.” My mother’s voice went up—she couldn’t conceal her excitement. “Her TA had to go home to Argentina.”
My mother smacked the page in front of her. “Are you kidding? Anybody could do this.”
I reached for a single sheet of paper and I saw that my mother’s impulse was to stop me. She caught herself. I looked at it without reading. A college paper. “What?” said my mother.
“Y
ou were supposed to rest—more—I thought.”
“Do you see me on my feet?” she said. “I’m poolside, genius.” She let her big eyes droop for a moment. She grabbed a handful of papers and made for the sofa. It was mildewed, it was on Zack’s list every weekend to get rid of it, but she rolled herself out luxuriantly.
“I could do this in my sleep,” she said, closing her eyes again, for my benefit.
“Or I could farm some out to you,” she called after me. I couldn’t recall ever having heard her so hopeful.
I could live at home and put myself through college. I could choose—two years, secretary, four years, teaching certificate. Never a nurse. I had done my fair share of nursing. Besides, those were girls who smoked since seventh grade, starred in slumber parties, and were now forced to cup their cigarettes in the wind tunnel against the north side of the hospital annex.
I met Phil because we attended the same teachers’ conference in my home city, and he mistook my parked car for his Rent-a-Wreck.
He’d lost the keys and was jimmying ineffectually with a coat hanger. “You’re lucky you’re not trying that outside Planned Parenthood,” I said, sounding for all the world like my mother. He jumped. He made an embarrassing little sound and I blushed for him.
His quavering defense: “Who actually owns a—a—well, a Taurus?”
“Girls from Rhode Island,” I countered, guessing correctly that he wasn’t a native.
He happened to be standing in a significant array of pennies. I pointed. “A hole in your pocket?” Just like my mother, I said stupid things when I was nervous.
He ducked; he shook the pockets of his sport jacket; he came up underneath the pockets to gauge the sewing project (not that I knew then he did his own sewing); he stepped out of the loose circle of change around him.
He surveyed the sidewalk and smiled helplessly.
I had to smile back at him. But still, my innate tactlessness. “Are you trying to poison the pigeons?”
He laughed, but I could see he was baffled.
“You can’t feed the ducks anymore because of complex carbohydrates,” I babbled. “You can’t throw an apple core on the highway because a skunk will risk his life for it.” He was staring at me, but not unkindly.
“Phil Lebed,” he said, holding his hand out. What a round face—and was he crossed-eyed behind his glasses?
His hand was soft like a Kaiser roll from the supermarket. What was so odd about him? He talked like a white man, and he was shy like a white man, but his skin was the muted black of an old backyard tire swing.
“What’s your name?” he said finally, when I didn’t offer it, and—I knew intuitively—at great cost to his temperament.
Before I could stop myself, out came my standard, “Hey, that’s what people always ask me.” He only looked baffled again. “Swan,” I said. “I’m Swan.” I was not accustomed to speaking gently.
Between Phil’s thick eyebrows and mat of dark hair was a sweatband of tight forehead. His eyebrows kept edging the sweatband upward. “Swan!” he said, clearly delighted.
“You got it,” I said, covering my bases.
He put up his arm as if to shield himself. I would have to be even gentler!
A cunningly visored meter maid came sneaking along the sidewalk. I glanced down—yes, she had chalked my tires. I began to fumble instinctively in my pockets even as she stepped back and made to write out a ticket. The nerve. I put myself between her and the meter. Without looking up she said, “Better hurry.” I opened my mouth—I was going to lay into her—but out of the blue—
“It’s our car,” said Phil Lebed, outrageously.
To make a love story short? As of that very moment, I was no longer alone against all the meter maids of this world.
From Rhode Island to the island of Manhattan—Phil was a New Yorker—was like jumping octaves. There were actual geological gorges—Phil was a geology teacher. Truthfully. Glacial ravines, used like garbage dumps. The train from Providence bore right through them. Once it stalled (the lights went out, and there was a long sighing sensation) and I saw a man sleeping under the pitted girder of the highway above us. The slope and the tracks made a perfect vortex for eternally blowing garbage. It was hard to shake that off, gliding into Penn Station half an hour later.
But there was Phil, so glad to see me. His glasses were yellowed like calluses, his dark hair shiny with lanolin, packed on his round head like a yarmulke. His eyes were not crossed, it turned out, but magnified.
For Phil, I described the view of water from the train: slate and onyx, white birds like paper boats, tawny sea marshes. I told him about the real boats that looked like they’d been shrink-wrapped for the winter, and the beautiful old houses on the water—waterfront, the obsession of all Rhode Islanders.
I told my mother, over the telephone, which she was sharing with a dying woman pastor from Olneyville, that Phil did the dishes.
“Do you cook suddenly?” bit my mother.
I hated cooking, just like my mother. Hah. The banality of genes.
Phil cooked, Phil did the dishes. It’s not tit for tat, I wanted to inform her. But I was immediately ashamed of myself. I knew she didn’t think that. I knew it wasn’t an even exchange, her giving me life and me using it.
She was ignoring me, talking to her roommate. Stupidly, I’d betrayed a trace of self-importance in my marriage, and I was paying for it.
“Hello?” said my mother.
I said, “How’s Jeannie?” The pastor.
“Here’s a coincidence,” said my mother. A sudden shift—her voice was rich with feeling. “Jeannie majored in geology!”
She didn’t say, of course, “Like your husband,” but I was fairly certain she was speaking of him—richly. And it occurred to me suddenly that my mother never said anything bad about my husband. My mother! Who cut into everyone, who butchered everyone into simple terms and stereotypes.
I had to try her. “He overcompensates for his masculinity,” I heard myself saying.
But had my mother heard me? She crackled, and I could hear Jeannie laughing in the background.
I told myself I didn’t see how Room 743 could be all that funny.
I was leaning on the counter in Phil’s and my new co-op apartment. The countertops were a lifeless white and showed every single ring of coffee. Phil had promised to take me to Bear Mountain on the weekend. There was a soil test kit in his backpack. I told my mother I wouldn’t be coming to Providence till the following Monday.
I hung up, pretending to be businesslike when a nurse stole her attention with tubes and cuffs, a bowl of ice cubes. I could hear the rustle and slump of a great pile of newspaper the nurse had pushed off my mother’s lap unceremoniously. My stepfather always left her the newspaper, which, as she said, deprived her of her only reason for a field trip to the hospital gift shop. At home, my stepfather used to read on his back, feet up, pages splayed across his privates. Sections would slide out for my mother to retrieve, the dog to skid on.
Phil read his newspaper at his desk, back rounded like a drumlin. In a halo of Pleistocene light he was a protective examiner.
Sumi was handed down to us, I imagined telling my mother coolly.
“This girl is A++,” read the note, with her name and telephone number scribbled on the back of a register receipt from Love Drugstore. The previous owner of our co-op had purchased Dramamine, Gatorade, and shoe polish.
I found Phil in the would-be bedroom, looking happily and blurrily about him. “Look at this, Phil,” I waved the receipt in front of him. His good glasses had been misplaced in the move and these backups were from a high school prescription—thick, milky safety-goggle plastic. They say when one of your senses is compromised, your other senses kick in to compensate. Not in the case of my husband. He was packed in cotton. He couldn’t see, hear, taste (all we’d had for three days preceding the move was Chinese takeout), or smell. (Our pores were Chinese. Our clothes and the two towels we’d kept out till the last
minute.)
I spent part of every week in Providence. I kept the house up for my brother and stepfather, meaning I made one stop for milk, dog food, toilet paper. Then back on the train, most often with an empty seat beside me on the aisle, as weekday midmornings were not a popular time to travel. Trackside backyards bearing a family’s series of big purchases—aboveground pool, trampoline, boat on blocks, pre-fab tool shed with a single, barren window box. A series of disappointments. My fleeting association with sandy scrub, folded paper birds on the low water was part of the all-around sadness.
One morning while I was on the phone with my mother (and the woman pastor, I complained to Phil later), there was a loud knock on the door. I hung up apologetically (although my mother hung up before I could apologize, quick as ever to slip out beneath the weight of emotion), and rushed headlong to answer it.
I peeked through the spy hole to see a woman’s face, distorted by the miniature lens, nose first, huge, dilated. I retracted. Could she tell I was looking? Had she heard my eager footsteps, and then the appraising silence as I pressed my face to the door?
Somebody must have recognized her and let her into the building. I couldn’t tell her from a psycho killer, but I opened the door anyway. I, who could barely cross the street in New York City without blushing, sensed immediately that I must act casual and—somehow—generous with my apartment.
“Sumi Creech?” she said, as if I were to approve a password.
She was white as Elmer’s glue, with tomato-colored blemishes along her cheekbones. She smiled—a space between her small front teeth—but she wouldn’t be the type for a conventional handshake. She wore a jersey skirt and an oily-soft, drapey T-shirt beneath which her abdomen showed like a week-old balloon, or the lax pouch of an out-of-work belly dancer.
“To clean?”
“Oh!” I cried, ratcheting up my sisterly smile. “Come in. I was just—”
She moved in on my little apartment.
I shrank back toward the white counters. There must have been a hundred henna rings, quite beautiful if you didn’t think “coffee.”
Clothed, Female Figure Page 5