If You Come Softly

by Jacqueline Woodson

  Then Jeremiah rose and I rose.

  “Well ... good-bye. I guess ... I guess I’ll see you around,” he said softly, looking at me a moment longer before turning away and heading down the hall, his locks bouncing gently against his shoulders.

  “Jeremiah,” I whispered to myself as I walked away from him. I could feel his name, settling around me, as though I was walking in a mist of it, of him, of Jeremiah.

  I stopped then and looked back over my shoulder. He was looking at me, a kind of puzzled look. Jeremiah, I thought, smiling. Jeremiah smiled back, then sort of waved, and turned into the classroom at the end of the hall.

  Our apartment takes up the top two floors. Inside, it’s more like a house than an apartment, with high windows, a fireplace in the living room, and stairs leading up to the bedrooms. I let myself in quietly then tiptoed up to my room. Outside, thunder clapped hard. The rain sounded soothing though, consistent. Like it would always come down. Like it would always be here.

  I stepped out of my shoes by the closet then sat on the bed to peel off my wet socks. From my room, I could lie across my bed and watch the cars rush along Central Park West. In a hurry to get someplace. Everyone in New York is in a hurry. You see businessmen walking fast, their heads bowed, the cuffs of their pants flapping hard against their ankles. They don’t look at anyone. Once I followed this man, walking so close beside him I could have been his daughter-but he never even looked over and noticed me. For two blocks I walked like that beside him. It made me sad for him—that he could walk through this world without looking left or right.

  Lonely.

  I sighed and lay back on my bed. Some people had friends surrounding them all the time. Sometimes when groups of girls passed by me, giggling and holding hands, my stomach tightened. I wanted that. But I didn’t want that. Marion says it’s because I was born so long after everybody else. The twins, Anne and Ruben, were already ten by the time I was born-and my older brother, Marc, and my sister, Susan, were in graduate school. She says I got used to being alone early on. And this house—with all its empty rooms and quiet. Some days I walked through it slowly, touching the walls of my sisters’ and brothers’ old rooms, wondering what it would feel like to grow up in a house full of people. And some afternoons, sitting at the coffee shop on the corner, eating fries and reading, I wanted to hug myself. Those days, being alone felt whole and right and good.

  Jeremiah. Who did he go home to? Would he remember me? Had he seen it too, whatever it was that I saw when we looked at each other? What was it?

  Once I had kissed a boy—a boy named Sam in seventh grade. He wore braces that made him lisp. Around me he was always nervous and fumbling, offering to carry my books and buy me sodas. I liked him, liked how he stuttered and looked away from me. One day I just kissed him, leaned forward while he was sitting beside me stuttering out a tale about his father’s sailboat. I had never kissed anyone on the lips and Sam’s lips felt dry and hard. But at the same time warm and sweet. We sat there, in the park, our lips pressed together until Sam pulled away. After that, he avoided me.

  Lying across my bed, I wondered where he was now. Good old Sam, who grew scared of me suddenly, scared of kissing. I wondered when I’d kiss someone again. Wondered if it would be Jeremiah.

  “Elisha!” my mother called from the bottom of the stairs. “Are you planning on spending the whole afternoon in that room?”

  “Maybe,” I yelled back.

  I sat up and pressed my hand across the pleats of my gray Percy skirt before pulling it off. I had never worn a uniform. It had hung in my closet beneath thin dry-cleaning plastic all summer. Once I had tried it on for Marion and my father and they had smiled, made me turn this way and that. Still, it felt strange to walk into a school full of people dressed exactly like me.

  “Elisha,” Marion called again. “Come down and tell me about your first day.”

  I met a boy, I wanted to scream. His name is Jeremiah.

  “I’m changing clothes, Marion. I’ll be down for dinner.”

  “Well, it’s almost dinnertime now.”

  In the dining room, Marion had set the table for two. A thin white candle melted slowly inside a silver holder. I stared at the flame a long time. Jeremiah’s face flickered once inside of it, then disappeared.

  There were rolls and a bowl of steaming green beans on the table. When I was small, I had gone for weeks eating only green beans. My parents laughed about it now, about how they had worried I’d wake up completely green one day.

  “Daddy working?” I asked, coming up behind Marion in the kitchen.

  In the past year, I had grown as tall as my mother. It was strange that in such a short time, she had gone from being someone I had to look up at to someone I met at eye level.

  “Of course he’s working,” she said. “First I was married to a nice young medical student and I saw him all the time. Then I was married to a resident and I saw him once in a while. Now I’m married to a doctor who I never see. He called right before you got home from school-said he hoped your first day went well.”

  “It was fine. It’s just like Jefferson only the kids can afford dermatologists.” Thomas Jefferson was the public school I had transferred from.

  Marion laughed. She pulled a chicken covered with rosemary and lemon slices from the oven.

  “Smells good, Marion.”

  “Stop calling me Marion.”

  “Stop calling me Elisha.”

  “That’s your name.”

  “And Marion’s yours.” I smiled, pulling a sprig of rosemary from the chicken. It had been going on like this for years. She refused to call me Ellie, so I refused to call her Mom.

  “Goodness, I’m glad you’re the last teenager I’ll ever have to raise ... Elisha. Even when you’re fifty, you’ll still be Elisha.” She shook her head and looked at me. “What if we had named you Ellie. Kids would have called you ‘Smelly’ Ellie or ’Tattle-Telly’ Ellie. You would have come home crying every afternoon.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You should have been a poet.”

  My mother smiled. “Go put the chicken on the table, silly.”

  I started pulling the sleeves of my sweatshirt down over my hands.

  “Use pot holders, Elisha!”

  “Yes, Marion. We don’t want another little accident.”

  She laughed again and swatted me with the dish towel. It was a family joke. When the twins were still living at home, they would refer to me as our parents’ little accident. Even though my mother and father swore they had planned to have another child, none of us believed them.

  “It was the dancing,” Marion said, following behind me with a bowl of mashed potatoes. She set them carefully on the table. “If your father hadn’t taken me out dancing that night—we went to Rose-land—maybe, then maybe, you wouldn’t be here. But it was the dancing and, possibly, the wine.” She winked at me and sat down.

  I sat across from her. “I’m sure it had a lot to do with the wine.”

  “And a lot to do with why I haven’t touched a drop since!”

  We laughed and the laughter seemed to echo through the empty house and wind its way back to us. We were almost friends now.

  A long time ago, Marion left us. Just packed up and was gone. I was little and the twins were still living at home then. The three of us cried every night for a week while my father took time off from medical school to try to find her. Then we stopped crying, and three weeks later she returned.

  When she left the next time, I was eight and the twins had left for college. I was old enough to understand what it meant that she wasn’t coming home for a while, that she might never come home. When she did, I couldn’t speak to her for a long time. Scared to say the wrong thing. Scared she’d leave again.

  When you’re young and your mother leaves, something inside of you fills up with the absence of her. I don’t know how to explain. For a long t
ime, there was this place inside of me where love for Marion should have been but wasn’t.

  “Marc called,” Marion said, tearing a chicken leg away with her hands. I watched her, saying nothing. There were parts of her that were still, even after all these years, unfamiliar to me. The way her hands moved when she ate. The way she brushed her hair down over her eyes before sweeping it back behind her ears. “He said the girls are safely tucked away at boarding school.”

  My oldest brother’s daughters were twelve. All summer, he and his wife had been calling. His wife wanted the girls to go to boarding school and Marc didn’t. The twins didn’t know what they wanted.

  “Good riddance.” I didn’t like my nieces. They were spoiled and prim. Even at twelve, they insisted on dressing identically. There was something weird about that to me. It’s one thing to have someone in the world who looks exactly like you—I mean, that part you can’t help. But to want to dress exactly like that person was a different story.

  Marion shook her head. “It’s not like you’ll see them any less, Elisha.”

  “I know. One can only hope.”

  Marion laughed.

  Although they lived in Seattle, they came east once a year at Hanukkah. Unfortunately, that would probably still be the case whether they were at boarding school or not.

  “One day I’ll join Marc and Susan and Anne and Ruben on the great parental divide.” I smiled, picked up a green bean with my fingers and chewed it slowly.

  My sisters and brothers had all moved on a long time ago. I missed my sister Anne the most. Sometimes we spent hours on the phone talking about nothing really. She would probably have all kinds of things to say about Jeremiah. Anne was like that. She had an opinion about everything and everyone whether she’d met them or not. She had opinions about the idea of things.

  “So do you love it or hate it?”

  I blinked. I didn’t love him, I didn’t even know him.

  “Excuse me?”

  My mother raised her eyebrows. “Well someone was far away.”

  “I was thinking.”

  “About what?”

  I looked down at my plate. “Nothing.”

  My mother sighed. “Don’t say ‘nothing,’ Elisha. You don’t have to tell me. Just don’t lie about it. Say ‘none of your business.’ ”

  “None of your business.” I put another green bean in my mouth.

  “Does it involve a boy?”

  “None of your business.”

  “You’re too young for boys, Elisha. Do you want a glass of water?”

  “Water instead of a boyfriend?” I smiled. “No thank you.”

  Marion got up and went to the kitchen. A few minutes later, she came back with two glasses brim ming with water and ice and set one beside my plate.

  “There. Cool your thirst.”

  I pulled a piece of chicken from its bone with my fingers, ignoring the glass of water. “If I were interested in boys,” I said slowly. “Which I am not. What would be the appropriate age?”

  Marion was thoughtful for a moment. “I guess seventeen or eighteen.”

  “You were married at eighteen, Marion. And pregnant. And I’m not even going to venture a guess as to which one happened first.”

  “Things were different then,” she said slowly, concentrating on cutting a piece of chicken and putting it in her mouth.

  “Well, they’re different now.”

  She chewed for a moment and swallowed. When she spoke again, her voice was low and even. “Elisha Eisen—you’re in the tenth grade. Math, science, English, and a few girlfriends to have some tea or a slice of pizza with once in a while. That’s tenth grade. Ask anyone.”

  “You’re living in the fifties, Marion.”

  “You’ve got years and years for boys.” Her eyes were sad when she said this.

  “You don’t know that,” I said, getting angry. “You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day. You don’t know if I have years and years.”

  “Trust me ... Ellie ...”

  I shook my head. “Trust me ... Mom ... you don’t know.”

  My mother was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was shaky, unsure. “I know I don’t know, Elisha. But I do know if you rush into your life, you miss things sometimes.”

  I shrugged, looking away from her, embarrassed suddenly. She had married young, and some mornings I came down to the kitchen to find her staring out of the window, a dazed look in her eyes.

  “You felt like we just kept coming, didn’t you?” I said. “And you just kept getting further and further away from your life.”

  She put her fork down. “You kids are my life,” she said.

  “But we weren’t always.”

  “I didn’t know I’d wake up one day and not be able to go run a quarter mile in under a minute.” She sighed, pushing a few stray hairs back behind her ears. “That my legs would hurt from just the mere act of throwing them over the side of the bed.”

  “You left us,” I said.

  I had not known I was going to say this. I hadn’t wanted to. I had wanted to ask what it felt like to be old, to be wishing for things you couldn’t ever have again.

  Outside, the rain was falling steadily, drumming against the windowpane. I turned to watch it for a moment. It was almost night, and the sky was caught in the silvery in-between place that made a person’s throat hollow out.

  “I left you,” Marion said softly, her voice catching. “I left my family. And you—my baby girl. Isn’t that a terrible thing?” After a moment, she added, “Yes. Yes, it is. A terrible thing.”

  I turned away from the window. I wasn’t hungry anymore. Everything felt hot and tight. I wanted to be upstairs alone in my room, with the door closed. I didn’t want this-to talk about this-this thing nobody ever said a word about. But now that we were talking, I couldn’t stop.

  “You left us broken all open,” I said. “All reeling, Marion. I didn’t know it back then ...” I felt a lump forming in the back of my throat. It could have been yesterday that we discovered her gone. It could have been an hour ago. “I was only a little kid. I didn’t know I was reeling. Anne stood at the refrigerator for an hour wondering what you would cook if you were here. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  Marion shook her head. She looked small and beaten suddenly. No one ever talked about what it was like. And she never asked. Just walked back in one afternoon and held her arms out, ready for us to jump into them.

  And I did the first time. But Anne and Ruben hung back, leaning back against the counter with their hands in their pockets, watching her.

  “An hour, Marion—while me and Ruben sat at the table, hungry. Hungry and struck dumb. And Daddy upstairs calling all the places he thought you might be ...” I swallowed. “Nobody knew where to begin.”

  I folded my hands on the table. When Marion reached out with her own to touch them, I snatched them back. I didn’t want her to touch me. Not now.

  “We were like, I don’t know—like holes or something—just all ... all empty and lost. And that first night, we were so ... so hungry.”

  Marion sighed and looked away from me. “You’re fifteen, Elisha,” she said slowly. “You have no idea what it’s like. No idea.”

  “We thought you were dead.”

  “I was dead. In here.” She pointed to her chest. “I woke up that morning knowing I wouldn’t be able to stand another day of making breakfast and lunch and dinner, of fixing arguments between you all, of listening to Edward fret over medical school-of all the noise and mess and ...” Her voice drifted off. When she started speaking again, she was whispering. “I had to go.”

  I stared down at my hands. “Then why’d you come back?”

  “Because I couldn’t live without those same things I couldn’t live with.”

  I swallowed. I would never trust her
. Not one hundred percent. Not the way some people can trust their mothers.

  “You know what it made me realize, Marion? That you wouldn’t always be here. That I can’t take anything or anyone for granted ‘cause there’s no guarantee.”

  Marion reached out for my hand again. This time I let her take it.

  “I wish you were thirty and realizing that. Or forty. Or even twenty-five. I wish you didn’t have to realize it at fifteen. As for me, I haven’t left in seven years and don’t think I will again.”

  We didn’t say anything for a long time. I turned back toward the rain. One day someone would be here for me—and I wouldn’t take that person for granted.

  “Tell me about him,” Marion said, a small smile at the corners of her lips. “Tell me about this boy.”

  I shook my head, feeling relieved, glad the conversation about leaving was over for now. “No.”

  “Does he go to temple?”

  I laughed. I knew she was teasing. We rarely went to temple. “If there was a boy—which there isn‘t—I don’t think he’d go to temple.” I tried to imagine Jeremiah with a yarmulke, his locks springing out around it.

  Marion smiled. “I guess that’s what happens when we send you to a gentile school. How do you like it?”

  I shrugged. “It’s okay. It’s not Spence or Dalton or Nightingale-Bamford. It’s Percy. The kids look like their daddies are rich and their mothers are good-looking.”

  “Is this boy’s daddy rich?”

  I pressed my fork into the mashed potatoes. They were lumpy and thin, the way they always were. It was the one thing my mother couldn’t do well. “There ... is ... no ... boy ... Marion.”

  “Well, you’ll meet some nice friends there. And maybe in your junior year, there’ll be a boy.”

  I had chosen Percy myself-from a dozen schools-because I liked the name. It made me think of that song “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge. I knew it was a stupid reason to choose a school, but they all seemed exactly alike.