How to Fall

by Edith Pearlman

  “Because of our delicate health we are tutored at home,” suggested Willy.

  “By our aged relative,” I added.

  Aunt Kate grinned.

  The Busy Bee was owned and manned by the Halasz family. The Halasz rice pudding was made with ricotta; the Halasz chocolate pie contained nuggets of chocolate cake. When my father was out of stir, as Kate called it, we would bring home one of these desserts, and also a carton of barley beef stew. Though the food was very good, he didn’t finish it.

  We longed to practice short-order cooking behind the counter with Milo Halasz, and to try waitressing with Kate. But laws against Child Labor were more severe than laws against Truancy. Mr. Halasz allowed us to work only in the kitchen, a high square room that the public couldn’t see. Mr. Halasz, who wore a beret as a chef’s hat, taught us to scrub up like surgeons. He taught us to pound herbs and then powder them between our palms, and to roll leaves of cabbage around chopped meat sweetened with rosemary, and to beat egg whites until they were as stiff as bandage gauze.

  Some mornings Kate visited my father while my mother stayed home with us and the eunuch. We didn’t resent not being left on our own. We knew that our competence was not in question, just as we knew that it was not hatred of men that caused Aunt Kate to snub the blameless advances made by some of the Busy Bee’s patrons, and to keep Milo at arm’s length too; and that it was not Willy’s skinniness that prompted Mom to lay her cheek against my sister’s some wintry mornings in the living room, and it was not my tendency to vertigo that made her embrace me suddenly in the kitchen. And although Willy and I liked to check on what the neighbors were up to, it was not to watch Amaryllis brushing her hair that we perfected our spying techniques. It was to watch our two demi-mondaines. We saw the glances they exchanged in the beginning of that year; and then we sensed glances without seeing them; and eventually we sensed glances they didn’t even need to exchange.

  Often I got up at night—to use the bathroom, if anybody asked—but really to draw closer to the dark heat in the living room. Sometimes Aunt Kate played Chopin or Schubert on the upright. Usually she lay on the couch, her knees bent, reading. Mom sat at the desk, coding. Music came from the hi-fi; Rosamunde, Egmont, Siegfied. The two women talked a little. One time, without preamble, my mother got up from the desk and crossed the room and dropped to the floor and laid her head on Aunt Kate’s abdomen. She began soundlessly to cry. Aunt Kate placed the book she’d been reading, still open, across her own forehead, like a sombrero. She held it there with her left hand as if against a gale. With her right hand she fondled my mother’s foolish hair.

  In March my father was transferred to a Rehabilitation Center. One Saturday afternoon my mother took us to see him there. We drove across the city. The place was near grim buildings of mostly undefinable uses, though one of them, we knew, was a popular roller-skating rink.

  Dad was not connected to an IV. “A free pigeon,” he said, flapping his elbows. His gait was unsteady but he could walk without a cane and without leaning too much on my mother—his arm around her shoulders was mostly an embrace. The four of us tramped up and down the corridors, as if not daring to stop. I think he guessed what was coming—the tumor’s steady growth, the blindness in the right eye, the new operation, the new operation’s failure . . . Along the polished linoleum the sick man marched, whispering into his wife’s ear. Her hair separated, revealing her meek nape. We trailed behind.

  At four-thirty my parents finally sat down on my father’s bed. They were going to share supper in the cafeteria, they said. It was always nutritionally appropriate. “Bilious,” Dad confided. “Maybe you two would like to go out for pizza.”

  If we stayed we could watch her eat, watch him pretend to eat, eat ourselves, see! good children, swallowing the meat loaf, the stewed fruit. “But . . .” Willy began.

  “Have fun,” said my mother.

  We trudged down the corridor. In each room lay two sad patients.

  The pizza parlor had tiled walls and a feral odor. There were no booths, only tables. It was too early for the supper crowd. Except for a few solitaries in windbreakers we were the only customers. We ordered our pizza and sat down to wait for it.

  Four girls burst in. They must have traveled by trolley and underground to get here. Roller skates hung from their shoulders. Amaryllis’s were packed in a denim case.

  “Hello,” they said.

  “Hello,” we said.

  They swept to the counter to order their pizzas. We studied their various backs—erect, round-shouldered, slim, bisected by a braid—and their various stances—jumpy, slouching, queenly, hands in back pockets—and their noses as they turned their profiles this way and that, and their languor or purpose as they visited the jukebox or the ladies’ room, and their ease as they more or less assembled at their table, one always getting up for something, where are the napkins anyway, talking, laughing, heads together, heads apart, elbows gliding on the table. The girl with glasses—I was pretty sure her name was Jennifer, so many girls were Jennifers—sat in a way that was familiar to me, her right knee bent outwards so that her right foot could rest on the chair, her left thigh keeping the foot in place like a brick on a pudding; this position caused a deep satisfying cramp; I knew that pain. “Wilma,” called the pizza man. Willy got up to get our pizza. The girls didn’t watch her. Willy brought the pizza to our table, and we divided it, along with our salad. “Nicole,” the pizza man said. The girl I’d thought of as Jennifer uncoiled and went to fetch the pizzas with Amaryllis. Nicole and Amaryllis set the big round pies carefully on the table. Then came an unseemly scramble. They laughed, and grabbed, and accused each other of greed, and somebody spilled a Coke. “Pig!” they cried. “Look who’s talking.” “Jen, you thief,” laughed the bespectacled Nicole as Amaryllis overturned one wedge of pizza onto another, making a sandwich of it, doubling her first portion. “Jen, you cow!”

  So Amaryllis was just another Jennifer. She raised her face. She was wearing a tomato sauce mustache, beautifying. She looked directly at me. Then she looked directly at Willy. Four-Eyes—Nicole—raised her head too and followed Amaryllis’s gaze—Jen’s gaze. Then the third girl. Then the fourth.

  We were all over them in a minute. We swarmed, if two boyish eleven-year-olds can be said to swarm over a quartet of nubile adolescents. Eleven-year-olds? Yes; we had celebrated our birthday the month before. We were officially teenagers, my father had said from his bed in the front room (he was out of stir, that weekend), handing us each a leather diary, one brown, one blue. Any number between eleven and nineteen, inclusive, belonged in the teens mathematically, my mother explained; we might call ourselves one-ten or one-teen if we liked. Many languages used that locution, said Aunt Kate.

  We were one-ten; this interesting fact we told our new friends. We talked about pizza toppings. We discussed television programs we’d never seen. Boys in the neighborhood too. “You know Kevin?” Nicole asked.

  “I know who he is,” I lied. “Wicked.” We knew that wicked meant splendid.

  Did we like the Stones? Harrison Ford? Had we ever seen the gas meter man?

  No one asked us what grade we were in.

  Did we skate?

  Skating was our passion, Willy said. We had practically been born on little steel wheels. Next to watching television and plucking our eyebrows . . .

  “We come to the rink on a lot of Saturdays,” said Amaryllis, who would never be Jen to me. She stood up, and her associates stood with her. “Maybe we’ll see you here some time. Here.”

  Hear, hear: here. Any further commerce between us would be off-neighborhood. We got it: we were known in their homes, and not thought well of. Maybe their families had glimpsed the whorish dressing gowns of our mother and aunt. Perhaps they were prejudiced against men in turbans.

  The schoolgirls whirled out. Willy and I shuffled back to the hospital. My mother was waiting for us in the dim lobby. We three walked wordlessly to the car.

  In the late sprin
g he came home for the last time. He couldn’t eat, unless you count tea. “I’d like to play a little,” he said to Kate.

  Whenever the quartet or the symphony performed he sat up on the stage, remote. Once, though, he had fiddled almost in our midst, at the wedding of my mother’s youngest brother; standing, he played “The Anniversary Waltz” by request, borrowing an instrument from the hired trio. He was wearing his tuxedo on that occasion, and his red hair above the black-and-white garment gave him a hectic gaiety. My mother told us that “The Anniversary Waltz” was an old Russian tune, stolen and given words in order to fill a need in a movie musical.

  In our rented living room my father did not play “The Anniversary Waltz.” He played a few sweet things—some Mendelssohn and some Gluck—and Aunt Kate did well with the accompaniment; very well, really, since she was silently sobbing. Then he played “Isn’t It Romantic?” and Kate recovered and pushed through with a nice solo bit, Oscar Peterson-ish. We knew the tune and the lyrics, and we could have hummed along or even sung along. But we sat mute on the sofa, flanking our mother. Outside the street lamps illuminated the cardboard facades of the other houses. The sky was purple. My father wore a striped hospital robe over custard pajamas. His eyes closed when he reached the final note. Silence. From the kitchen the teletype began to clatter.

  “No dependent clauses,” said the principal back home, in August. “No Middle Ages.” She was muttering, but in a kindly fashion. She was trying to decide whether to enroll us in the fourth grade or simply to declare it skipped. “Tell me what you did learn.”

  Willy sat looking out of the window at the playground. I sat looking at Willy. “What did you learn?” the principal gently repeated.

  We kept mum. So we had to repeat fourth grade, or endure it for the first time, who cared, same difference. Willy did master long division. I never figured out how to forget.

  Shenanigans

  “Hildy’s mother, she must be wondrously preponderate,” said Devlin’s mother.

  “Preponderate? That’s no word.”

  “’Tis. ’Twas a verb, but it raised itself to an adjective. Scrabble is a fine university. I’m dying to meet her, Hildy Tartakoff’s mother. Lillian, she’s called, or so I believe.” And Devlin’s mother twinkled at her son like an entire constellation. These damned Celtic mannerisms, he thought; they seemed to be an affliction of her old age. Other people’s parents descended sorrowfully into Alzheimer’s; his was turning into a leprechaun.

  Meanwhile, Hildy Tartakoff’s mother—she was called Lillian—was saying in an offhand manner that she’d like to meet Devlin’s mother. “That is, if your affair is going to continue. And I must admit,” she chummily elaborated, “I’d be disappointed if it didn’t do that.”

  “If what didn’t do which?” Hildy asked.

  “If the romance didn’t go on. So shouldn’t we meet, she and I?” Lillian reasonably wound up.

  No one could argue with her mother’s logic, Hildy knew, since there was never any logic to argue with. There was merely determination masquerading as syllogism. Lillian had held sway over many organizations using this rhetorical principle.

  “Shall I call her Laura?” Lillian asked.

  “If you like,” sighed the defeated Hildy. “Her name is Maura, though.”

  So Devlin Fitzgerald—whose affair with Hildy Tartakoff was continuing, at least for now—arranged a luncheon for four in his hotel on the border of Godolphin and Boston—a small hotel in the European style, the advertisements ran, though such embodiments of subtle hospitality were getting rare even in Europe. Christmas was coming. Abundant greenery, though not a touch of tinsel, decorated the carpeted reception hall. A fire blazed in a marble hearth. Off to one side was the private dining room. There, Dev and Maura awaited their guests.

  As a young man busily creating his now renowned hotel, Devlin had married a good-tempered woman who remained good-tempered through decades of neglect. But after their two daughters were grown she left him for a retired army officer who liked to putter around his own house. Granny Maura stayed friendly with the woman she still called her daughter-in-law. “Ex is not in me alphabet,” she was fond of saying, Irishing her conversation in that irritating way.

  For this special meeting she was dressed in a gray wool dress with a white lace collar, and Dev could have murdered her. He knew, because he had paid for them, that she owned a couple of Armani knock-offs; why couldn’t she have worn one of those? Lillian would arrive looking authoritative as usual, handsome, even military. He admired Lillian, from whom Hildy inherited her height, her rich hair (graying on the daughter’s head, resolutely dark on the mother’s), her energy, her cleverness. Hildy’s green eyes came from her deceased father; her extra weight—twenty pounds, Devlin estimated—was her own doing. She was a high-school guidance counselor. Twenty year ago she had endured a brief, childless marriage. She and her husband had bickered all the time, she told Dev, eyes amused, or maybe reflective, or perhaps even yearning.

  Lillian in old age (Late Middle was the term she preferred) still walked several miles every morning, a slender figure in corduroys and a sweater. After this workout she got dressed in some fashionable outfit, its skirt at whatever length Milan decreed—so it was a shock to Devlin when she entered the room in an old lady’s dress that was almost a dead ringer for Maura’s, brown rather than gray, a necklace of amber beads rather than a collar, but still . . . you’d think the two birds had conferred ahead of time, were up to something.

  “My dear Mrs. Fitzgerald,” said Lillian without waiting to be introduced.

  “Mrs. Tartakoff, me dear dear,” said Maura.

  They were each other’s destiny, hinted the tall old Jewess. The tiny flower of Erin concurred. Over the soup they decided to attend the Yo Yo Ma concert together next week; they’d use Lillian’s tickets and scalp Maura’s. They’d go to the Foxwoods Casino in January, they settled over the chicken. Lillian liked blackjack—she was an expert card counter. Maura preferred roulette. This difference in taste would not come between them, they predicted. And—they discovered while spooning up dessert—their apartments were less than two miles apart. “Is that not a coincidence?” demanded Lillian.

  “Lillian,” said Devlin, producing what he hoped was a chuckle; “Godolphin measures two miles by three; most people live . . .”

  “Yes, dearie,” interrupted Maura, “but my being in Godolphin in the first place—that’s the astounding complementarity.” A decade earlier Maura had finally agreed to move out of the shabby South Boston house she’d raised her family in. But a retirement community?—“Over my corpse.” She allowed Devlin to pay the rent on a first-floor flat near the Godolphin fire station. “Visiting nurses; be off with you. I can manage injections on me own.” And she could, and did, testing her glucose with one of those disposable finger sticks she carried in her purse, then uncapping the one-dose insulin syringe, sticking the thing into a convenient bit of flesh. Her son had seen her perform this routine several times at a restaurant, God help him, God help her: she glanced at the blood-sugar reading while other people were inspecting their menus; yes, too high; she unbuttoned the lowest button on her silk blouse and stabbed herself in the stomach and buttoned up again. No one ever noticed the exercise except his horrified self. Once she injected herself through the garment, then winked at him.

  “You live only two miles from my house—just think of it,” said Maura to Lillian.

  “I’ll walk over sometime,” said Lillian to Maura.

  “Tomorrow, then,” said Maura.

  “Tomorrow,” said Lillian.

  Dev poured more wine.

  “I don’t drink at lunch,” said Hildy. “Well, never more than one,” she corrected, draining her second glass.

  “I’m the one who deserves to be diabetic,” said Lillian to Maura about a month later. “I’m Jewish and I’m eighty-five.”

  “Eighty-five, exactly my age,” said Maura, who was eighty-six.

  Lillian suffered only
from high cholesterol and occasional cavities. The admiring Maura had taken up walking under Lillian’s influence. They met Wednesdays and Fridays out at the Reservoir and circled it three times, Lillian looking like a long wading bird, Maura resembling a sandpiper.

  Under Maura’s influence Lillian had recovered an interest in whisky. She now repudiated white wine. “The stuff’s just grape juice, when you come right down to it,” she announced.

  “What do those two talk about, do you think?” Devlin asked Hildy. It was a Thursday night; they were meeting for a hamburg in a tavern before Devlin went back to the hotel to inspect some new fabrics and Hildy went back to her desk to write references for lastminute college applications.

  “Our mothers? They talk about us, Dev. My mother talks about how elegant and cultivated you are.” She watched him lightly preen. Well, shouldn’t he be proud, she inquired of her critical side: he reads novels in French; he attends early music concerts; he flavors this mixture with regular attendance at boxing matches . . . “And distinguished,” added Hildy, baiting him without his noticing. “What about your mother,” she asked. “What does she say about me?”

  He considered the question, bending on her the fine dark gaze that made hotel visitors feel singled out for attention, that made the hotel staff want to die in his service, that made his daughters forgive him his absences because his presences were so satisfying. “She thinks you have the world’s most interesting eyes. She wants an ornament made exactly of that pale jade.”

  Hildy grew warm.

  “And she finds your insights keen,” Dev went on.

  Hildy grew warmer still, though it might just be her uncomfortable time of life—hot flashes, and extra weight, and the Lord knew what was happening to her cholesterol. “Maura probably thinks I’m fat,” Hildly said in a light tone.