Don't Worry About the Kids

by Jay Neugeboren

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Well, then?”

  “I guess I ask too many questions.”

  When Dr. Hunter called for her, I didn’t go out to say hello to him. After they left, though, still feeling worried about what I’d said to Mother, I kept walking around our house, going from room to room, upstairs and downstairs. It seemed terribly large to me, and I wondered if Mother was afraid when she stayed in it by herself sometimes. I tried hard to remember what things had been like when Father was there, but I couldn’t. I went into Mother’s room and took out her box of photos again and looked at the pictures of him, but that didn’t help either. Not even when I found a picture of him with his arms around some other guys in sweatshirts, and a football on the ground in front of them.

  But looking at the pictures of him, and seeing the way he smiled, reminded me of Mother being alone with Dr. Hunter, and when I saw that picture in my head, for the first time I asked myself if she could actually enjoy going out with him. Then I closed the box of photos and went downstairs to watch television.

  I must have fallen asleep on the living room couch, because the next thing I knew, Mother was sitting next to me, stroking my forehead with her fingertips. The television set was still on.

  “Hi, Eddie,” she said. She bent over and kissed me. She held me for a long time, pressing her lips against my forehead in a very gentle way. Then she sat up.

  “Did you have a good time tonight?” I asked.

  She seemed surprised that I should ask her, but when she answered me I saw that I’d said the right thing. “Thrilling,” she whispered. “I talked about irregular French verbs, and he told me about his eating club at Princeton.”

  “His what?” I asked.

  “Never mind,” she said, laughing. “At any rate, there was one interesting thing that occurred tonight. I couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation, and about how much, when you get angry, you remind me of your father. You made good sense, you know…” I looked away from her then. She stood up, turned off the television, and sat down across from me, letting her shoes drop to the rug. “All right,” she said. “Let me ask you something, Eddie. What would you think of our leaving the Fowler School and moving somewhere else? Maybe back to New York City, where—”

  “Do you really mean it?” I exclaimed. My face must have registered how happy I was at the idea, and when she smiled and said that she did mean it, I tried to check myself, to hold back my enthusiasm. “Well, don’t do it because of me,” I said.

  “You?” she laughed. “If we do it—and I’m not promising anything yet—we’ll do it for the two of us.” She leaned forward, and bit her lower lip before she spoke again. “I think we could both benefit by giving ourselves the chance to meet new people, don’t you?”

  “I suppose,” I said, trying not to appear too excited. I didn’t fool her, of course, and soon I stopped pretending and we were both talking about what it would be like to live in a place like Manhattan and of all the things we might do there together, and all the interesting people we might meet.

  When she spoke about selling our house, though, I began to feel sad, and when she began talking about my going away to college someday and beginning a life of my own, what I wanted to do was to cry out that I would never leave her. Never! I didn’t say anything, though. Because I guess I knew she was right about my leaving her someday, and what I was hoping was that by the time I did she would be married again. But I knew that she might not be. I guess she knew it too, even though you never would have guessed it from the sweet way she kept smiling at me.

  Romeo and Julio

  JULIO LAY ON HIS SIDE, as if, Tony thought, he had been folded into position like a paper swan. An aide gave Julio an injection, then wrapped him in a straitjacket. Patients swarmed around, chattering like birds, shuffling in carpet slippers, bare feet, broken shoes. They asked Tony for money, for golf lessons, for candy bars, for skate keys.

  Tony imagined that Julio’s skin was made of glass, that he could see through to the skeleton below. Julio was a large prehistoric bird—more deadly and beautiful than an eagle, his bones held together be gleaming black railroad spikes. Julio was flying home, his wings spread to the width of the highway, his eyes bright as emeralds.

  Tony went over his lines, so that, afterward, when he brought Lynne home to Brookline from the dress rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet, he would be ready. O, Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied? he would ask. He saw Lynne lean against her door, smile, take her cue. What satisfaction canst thou have tonight? she would reply.

  He wondered: if he were to tell her he had spent the afternoon visiting his brother Julio in a mental hospital, would that make her like him more? He did not want to be liked because he had a brother who was mentally ill. Still, it pleased him to imagine Lynne asking questions, gazing at him with admiration while he talked about how close he and Julio were.

  You really love him, don’t you? she would say, and he would shrug, modestly. Sure—Romeo and Julio, that’s us, he would reply. Then he would apologize quickly for the bad joke, so that, sensing his embarrassment, she might like him even more.

  He had met Lynne at the Cambridge Public Theatre, where, three months before, they were chosen, along with ten other high school seniors, to serve as apprentices. After rehearsals they would go with the other apprentices to a nearby luncheonette, and often they would stay and talk long after the others had gone. He loved being with her—loved her directness, her sometimes strange sense of humor. She seemed always to say just what she was thinking, without worrying about how it would play to others. And he loved, too, the way her hazel eyes flickered, as if filled with fine gold shavings.

  Tony dressed, looked past the closet mirror, to the window. Below, in the courtyard of their apartment building, Julio had become a small mud-colored lizard. Julio scurried under hedges, leapt to the wall, began climbing. Julio appeared at the window, crawled onto the sill, dropped to the floor, skittered behind the bed.

  After the rehearsal, they rode the train back to Lynne’s home. The train rose from a tunnel into the night-lights of the city, then crossed over Longfellow Bridge. Tony saw Julio slipping down from one of the bridge’s old stone towers, riding the roof of the train like a cowboy, hanging by his ankles, peering upside down into the subway car, grinning brightly.

  The instant they were inside Lynne’s apartment building, Tony’s chest constricted, as if, he felt, the muscles around his heart were drying out, so that the blood had to force its way through. When, on the second floor landing, Lynne turned away to put her key in the lock, Tony touched her arm. She faced him at once, smiling so warmly that he sensed she did want him to kiss her, and yet, his heart pounding, he told himself to wait, to follow through with his original plan.

  “O, Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?” he asked.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?”

  She laughed and he found himself too surprised to know what to do next.

  “The question’s from the play,” he said. “I was saving it. I was hoping you’d remember—that maybe you would recite Juliet’s reply back to me…” He felt dizzy. “I’m sorry,” he added.

  “Oh Tony—don’t be sorry—”

  Her eyes seemed nearly transparent, as if made of the thinnest gold leaf. He shrugged. “I just…”

  “You just what?”

  I was just thinking about my brother, he wanted to say. I just love looking at you. I just can’t believe a girl as pretty as you would like me as much as I like you. I just don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t want to put on an act and make a stupid joke from my brother’s name and yet…

  “Nothing,” he said.

  She smiled and brushed her hair back. He wished he were her hand. He wished she could know, without words, how much he loved being near her. But he was frightened that if he began telling her about Julio he wouldn’t know where to stop and that the moment he’d been hoping for would pass and never come again.

&nbs
p; He felt faint. He imagined a twister of frigid air swirling up the staircase, tunneling around him, wrapping him in white. He blinked, looked down, saw nothing but her mouth, her lips.

  “Would you like to come in for a few minutes?” she asked. “I have to get up early tomorrow to help my mother bake. Before ten o’clock mass. Then we’re going to my aunt’s house.”

  “I’ll be visiting my brother Julio tomorrow,” Tony stated. “He lives in a mental hospital. He’s been there for almost three years. He’s my only brother and he’s a year younger than I am. We were always very affectionate with each other.”

  Lynne cocked her head to one side, and he saw a look of such intense compassion on her face that it made him stiffen.

  “That must be hard for you,” she said.

  What Tony wanted more than anything in the world was simply to hold her and to have her hold him, yet when her fingers touched his cheek, gently, he was too ashamed of himself, and too furious with her, to risk being repulsed again. What right did she have to know about Julio’s life, and why—what he would never be able to take back, he knew, and what she would surely despise him for—had he been so weak as to mention it?

  “I’ll see you on Monday,” he said, stepping back. He moved toward the staircase.

  “Call me in the morning,” she said. “All right? I’ll be home until at least nine-thirty. Please?”

  Tony slept. When he woke, near dawn, thirty years had passed. He reached over to stroke Julio’s hair, the way he often did, but Julio was not there. Tony sat up. He saw himself taking Lynne by the hand, leading her to this point in his life. They were driving north of Boston, past low rolling hills and endless green fields of gravestones. Tony’s wife was beside him, his two children in the back seat. Tony was a well-known film director, his wife a beautiful movie star who had given up her career to raise a family with him, but who, every few years, appeared in a film he made.

  They drove on, Lynne invisible, yet strapped to the rear of the car, forced to watch and to listen. Why was he so angry with her? he wondered. Even if she found out the way his imagination worked sometimes—how it could contain the craziest, most violent and most beautiful scenes at the same time—why would this scare her away? Did love and friendship have to be opposites, the way sanity and insanity were?

  When they drove past an enormous complex of tall prisonlike buildings, he explained to his children, as he did each time, that this was where their Uncle Julio had lived once upon a time. They cruised along curving tree-lined roads, stopped in front of an elegant colonial home. The front door opened and Julio appeared, smiling radiantly. He walked down the steps. Tony emerged from the car and he and his brother embraced. Julio asked him why it had taken him so long to get there.

  “Long?” Tony said. “But it’s only been thirty years—”

  Tony put on a bathrobe, left his room. The apartment was wonderfully still. In a few hours his parents would be eating breakfast, going through the Sunday Glohe, talking about their visit, later in the day, to Julio. It was just past five-thirty. Tony opened the refrigerator. He could eat breakfast, dress, go out and get the paper, take a walk, come home, shower, shave. Time would pass more easily if he kept busy. He didn’t want to telephone Lynne’s home before nine.

  Leaving Brooklyn

  I STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of a luncheonette and watched the children playing in the schoolyard. I glanced sideways, aware of eyes. The owner’s head was in the window beside me—a middle-aged Puerto Rican man with deep pouches under his eyes, he was stir-frying onions and peppers on a grill, and the fragrance made me salivate. I imagined some of my students sitting in the booths behind me, inside the warm store, chattering and necking and feeling one another up, and I smiled at the man. He shrugged, and in the slight lifting of his shoulders and the world-weary expression in his eyes, I felt he was sharing something with me—an acknowledgment of the difficulties and trials life had brought to him. He returned my smile.

  “Hey Miz Mishkin!”

  “Mira! Miral Miz Mishkin! Miz Mishkin!”

  Across the street the children were lined up in a long row, on the other side of the wire fence, their fingers locked in its diamonds, their voices screeching in high-pitched tones of delight. They were glad to see me! I felt blood rush to my head, felt my heart catch, but I did not deny their greetings—I’d come for this moment, after all, hadn’t I?—I raised my head, smiled, waved to them, and then walked quickly down the street and away from the school, hoping none of the teachers had spotted me.

  “Hey Miz Mishkin!” a boy called. “You look real swift!”

  I heard cat-calls and whistles, elaborate mock-groans and laughter. I didn’t turn around. I’d never see these children again, I knew. Michael and I were moving—his company was transferring him to their new electronics plant in Seattle this time—and I would go with him. They had waited until I was out of the hospital, though. They were very considerate. They had sent me flowers. Flowers instead of a child. But we do have Jennifer, Michael said, touching my hand. And you won’t have to go through these months of pain and worry ever again.

  That’s too bad, I’d said, and Michael had looked at me in the way that made me know I had reached him, had made him worry. There were, I told myself, even in that cold and bright room, still pleasures in life.

  We have each other.

  Do we?

  “Hey Miz Mishkin—he got love real bad for you. He think you just like a real movie star!”

  I longed to cross the street and go through the schoolyard gates—to have them follow me into the building, singing and dancing and holding hands in a long line behind me. Still, the instant I turned the corner their voices were gone, severed by the buildings now between us. I slowed down and touched my fingertips to my right cheek, expecting to be burned. My cheek was barely warm. Willa Cather, I recalled, had felt that the years during which she’d taught Latin in a Pittsburgh high school were among the happiest of her life.

  I heard singing and tambourines, from a store-front church. Three fat Puerto Rican men sat at a card table in the middle of the sidewalk. One of them wore green wool gloves from which the fingers had been cut off. I saw infants in baby carriages, heard women call to one another from open windows, watched children playing in the small plots of dirt around trees. I thought of how wonderfully comforted I’d always felt in the morning, these past three years, walking from the subway station to my school, and I thought I now knew the reason why: I could not possibly believe, or hope, that anybody living here—the families of the black and Puerto Rican and West Indian children I worked with—could ever know what my past had been like. They came, literally, from different worlds. But on Long Island, the people looked as if they were from my world—as if they should have been able to understand what my childhood had been like. It was the illusion that angered me, I decided—and the absence of illusion that comforted me. Walking these streets, I realized—the streets Michael had walked when he was growing up—I usually felt good about myself in a way I rarely did elsewhere; here in Brooklyn I did not fear, at least not as much as I did at other times, that the sweetness others had found in me when I was a girl had been, with the years, altogether lost.

  From the train window, I saw a man without legs sitting inside an old tire. Beside him was a black cap filled with silver coins. I was in the Atlantic Avenue station of the Long Island Railroad. I heard the hissing of the train, the scraping of metal, the soft chugging as we began to leave. Soon I would be home. I would pick up Jennifer from her nursery school. Michael would be home after us. Steam rose from under the train, clouding my view. My father and mother were dead. I had no brothers or sisters, no uncles or aunts who were still alive. In my family nobody who knew me as a child knew my child. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the fragrance of warm wet wool.

  Every Thursday night, for all the years I was in high school, when my homework was done, I’d set up our ironing board in the living room, by the entrance to the kitchen, and I�
�d iron Father’s shirts—he put on a fresh one for work each morning—while Mother watched TV. I set the board up slightly behind her so that she would have to turn her head backwards and away from the TV screen if she wanted to talk to me. Father would be in the basement, puttering—or in the garage, working on the car. I loved to iron his shirts, and I loved to watch Mother’s hands, busy mending or knitting or sewing… And when, at the end of an evening, she would take the shirts from the doorknob, where I’d hung them on hangers, she’d always smile and say to me (the turn of phrase was Father’s, and she liked to tease him about it, and explain to me that his father, who’d been a farmer in Illinois, near Staunton, had said the same thing to her when he was alive) I’m really glad of your help, Ruth. She’d look at each of the shirts, lifting the hanger into the air above her and letting the shirt bottom twirl slightly, and if there were any creases left, which there rarely were, she’d point them out to me, and when she did I never felt, as I did at other times, that I’d somehow failed.

  For me, the feel of the damp bundles of rolled shirts, the lovely odors of steaming cloth when I’d press the hot iron down, the miracle of watching wrinkles made flat, of wetness made dry, the feel of the pink rubber bulb on the old jam jar, for sprinkling—these were sufficient. More than sufficient. My mind would float free while I worked—freer than at any other time in the house—and the rhythm of moving my hand back and forth in even strokes, while I held something solid and heavy and gleaming, was magically calming.

  My father’s workshop was in our cellar, surrounded by endless shelves, floor to ceiling, of Mother’s preserves: tomatoes and pickles and relishes and watermelon rinds and fruits. I always resented those shelves and jars. They blocked the light from the narrow ground-level cellar windows, and darkened the room and closed Father in. I helped Mother with the canning, of course, but what was there that I could ever do to help Father with? I mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges and weeded the vegetables, but Mother did those things also and Father never thought to ask me to help him with the car or the furnace or the TV—he never thought to ask me to help him build anything or repair anything.