“We’ll have our dessert and coffee now,” Mother said to Luanne. Mother straightened her shoulders whenever she spoke to what she called the help. Luanne nodded and headed back to the kitchen.
“Hamlet was riddled with ambiguities,” Father explained, opening the book and licking his lips. “I’ll do the openers.” He took a deep breath and boomed out the first line, “Who’s there?”
“Leonard, don’t shout,” Mother said, tapping her ears.
“You do it then,” he said, supremely offended. He pushed the book at me and I passed it over to Mother.
“I’d like to read Ophelia’s part.” She turned the thin pages, squinting at the words. “Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?” She over-enunciated ‘commerce’ and ‘honesty’ as if her mouth were pained or tied down by something I couldn’t see.
“Ophelia doesn’t hiss, Irene. Read it again.”
“I’m not hissing. Could beauty, my lord…”
Luanne nudged open the swinging door and placed a platter of oatmeal cookies in the middle of the table.
“Coffee?” Mother said, turning toward her.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I thought we were starting after dessert,” Elliot said. My youngest brother reached for a handful of cookies but Mother stopped him.
“Start with one, luv,” Mother said.
Elliot looked like Uncle Max. Soft around the stomach, and wide-faced, he was the baby but possibly the wisest of us all who kept his deepest thoughts to himself, preferring sedentary activities. Slow to speak, he gave the impression of excessive dreaminess.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’ll read Or-feelya,” Robert said. He spoke in high grating tones.
“O-feel-ee-ah!” Father corrected him. “Say it.”
“I’ll feel ya,” Peter joked, grabbing a cookie with long, dexterous fingers. He was pale and light-haired like me. The oldest at seventeen, he sank into his chair, lanky — all arms and legs, a shadow of a mustache defining his upper lip.
Father pounded a fist on the table. “Enough!” The storm perpetually brewing beneath his skin surfaced and made his face turn red.
Everyone was silent except for the swinging door. Luanne walked back in with two cups of coffee.
“Bring the coffee here, girl.” Father fished a cigarette from his shirt pocket and separated his saucer from his coffee cup to use it for an ashtray.
“Don’t talk to her like that,” I wanted to shout, but my words stayed mute inside my head.
“Luanne, the ashtrays are in the cupboard,” Mother said. “Above the refrigerator.” She spoke slowly, a careful movement of her lips.
Robert jumped up, pressing his hands to his ears. “I can’t listen to this family!” He ran upstairs howling. Craven and overexcited, words spat out of Robert’s mouth from the time he had taught himself to read when he was three. We heard his footsteps and the bedroom door slam. Mother pressed her lips until they whitened.
“Give me the book, Irene.”
She obeyed.
“Sarah, tell Robert to come back down here. He was not excused.” He took a cookie and pushed it whole into his mouth. His cheeks changed shape, sticking out like miniature fists. The oatmeal crumbs settled on the corners of his mouth.
“Do it now.”
I slid out. We all knew Father’s rule. Families who ate together got excused together. Anyone who veered from this cardinal regulation risked punishment. I feared for Robert who upstairs was hanging over the side of his bed reading a book. His dark hair shot up like his thoughts, abruptly and sharp.
“You’re invading my privacy,” he said.
“Dad wants you to come down.”
“I’m reading.”
“Just come down,” I said in an attempt to offer an older sister’s advice, “or he’ll blow up again.” I was three years older than Robert and knew if I stood still, he would calm down enough to reconsider. He prickled and folded his shoulders, then shoved the book under his bed and followed me down.
By now it was pitch-black outside and the large globe light above the table reflected off the windows like a bloated fish.
Robert stood in front of Father.
“You will not,” Father said, smacking Robert on the cheek, “leave the table without permission. Now you may be excused.”
Robert burst into tears and tore back upstairs. Father headed to his den office and slammed the door. Elliot started humming. I couldn’t move, paralyzed by my unintended betrayal of Robert.
“Elliot, time for a bath. Sarah, Peter, you have homework,” Mother said.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” Peter said, shoving his chair out from the table.
Ashamed and horrified by what I’d done, I went upstairs to my desk and stared out my bedroom window at the weeping birch tree that hunkered over the driveway in the dark. Later that night, I knocked on Robert’s door to apologize but he wouldn’t let me in. He had pushed his bureau in front of the door.
“I’m really sorry,” I said through the keyhole.
I went to bed and stayed awake a long time waiting for sleep, my raw stomach unable to settle down. The hall light shone into my room. I tried humming. The vibrations of notes calmed my nerves. Ahhh, ooooo, eeeee. Oh Lord, show me the bridge. I mimicked the way Luanne opened her mouth and felt the tone change on my tongue, then shiver along the path of my cheekbones.
I watched the treetops out my window, thin tall pine trees like still figures watching back, and the long backyard that curved up to the stars. The bright moon gleamed on the wooden floors and made my floor melt and become liquid as a pond. I invented songs. In this universe away from my father’s explosions and Mother’s thin voice, I imagined standing solo on stage singing to an auditorium filled with understanding faces. Come and see what I see.
I sang to the moon, the hall light, and my memory of the honey summer light when the low sun slunk into my room in warm weather. I hummed. I changed my notes from high to low. I rolled them on my tongue. Singing was like eating. It filled a hungry feeling.
Chapter Two
Black Maids
In the kitchen, Luanne snapped green beans for dinner. She wore pink, pearl-like earrings and she was humming. She seemed different, more distant after a day off. For two nights of the week, she lived in Roxbury, a poor, black section in Boston that white people avoided.
“What you want, Sarah?” she asked in a Haitian accent. Her skin looked creamy. She had high cheekbones and moist, glowing eyes.
I sat by the window overlooking our driveway. Through the cluster of fir trees, Mickey Fineburg’s bedroom window lit up, shiny and lemon-colored. I didn’t see him much. He was my age, but he went to private school. I knew his family’s routines. The Fineburg’s white Colonial made different sounds at different times of the day. Doors opened and shut. Their station wagon hummed in their driveway in the morning before backing out.
“You’ve got some thought in your head. I can see it.”
“Isn’t it hard living somewhere else and coming back here?” I asked.
She nodded but didn’t say anything. When she finished with the beans she placed whole potatoes in the oven and asked me if I wanted to watch television with her. In her small room beside the kitchen, I sat on the linoleum floor beside a basket piled with pink rollers. She had draped a blue scarf across her window. It darkened her room, making it soft and cozy. On her bureau, she kept a paper cup filled with earrings. She sat on her cot behind me. Together, we watched a movie about the Wild West on her black and white television perched on a fold-up chair. During the commercial I said, “You could ask my mother for another day off.”
She shook her head. “Always trying to be the adult. That’s not your business.”
“Luanne!” Mother called from the kitchen.
Luanne left the room. I wasn’t an adult, but at fifteen I noticed things.
“We’ll need a salad,” I heard Mother say.
Luanne’s room f
elt safe as a warm secret. I didn’t want to leave and stayed to watch the rest of the movie. I heard cooking utensils clattering. Father came home, slamming the door. “Anyone home!” He went into the hall to hang up his coat. Luanne moved back and forth through the swinging dining room door, setting the table. Finally, Mother called to us. “Elliot, Peter, Robert, Sarah! Wash your hands. Dinner is ready!”
Not long after, when winter’s icy roots plunged deepest and seemed destined to stay forever, I came home after school, plopped my books on the kitchen counter, and went looking for Luanne in her room. Oddly, her bedroom door was wide open. The room appeared lighter, her bureau top swept clean of perfume bottles. I stepped inside. Her scarf over the window was gone. Where were her cups of earrings?
I ran upstairs to find Mother in her bedroom. She was sitting on her red upholstered loveseat reading a fashion magazine.
“Where’s Luanne?”
“She left, honey. I’ve called the agency. They’re sending someone next week to replace her.” She removed her reading glasses. “She quit, dear.”
“Why?”
She explained that Luanne had left a note about finding a different situation. “Just as well. I always thought she was too young. Not like you, Sarah. You’re such a mature girl for your age, beyond your years.”
Stunned, I turned away from her. My parents’ bedroom had views of the front, side and backyards and a dressing room with a wall of closets. It was a spacious room but I felt suddenly squeezed in. I ran upstairs to the attic to see if Peter had come home. I was mature enough to know that our family was a problem and I wanted to tell him. Instead, I found Elliot playing with miniature plastic animals in his room. He occupied himself well for a young child.
The following Saturday afternoon Luanne rang the doorbell to pick up the rest of her clothes. Father answered the door.
“Taking off to shack up with someone?” he said as I ran downstairs to see her.
She was already walking back to the front door with her suitcase in hand when I called to her.
“Leonard, please,” Mother said standing next to him. “Are you sure you have everything, Luanne?”
She barely nodded and headed for the door.
“I’ll miss you,” I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “Bye, Luanne,” and looked at the rug, ashamed.
She went through the front door and hurried down the flagstone walk. A black man waited for her in a white Dodge Dart. At the last minute, something pushed me and I ran to the open door and shouted, “I’m sorry!” But it came out in a whisper that only I could hear. By then, Luanne was in the front seat closing the car door. The car flew off down our road in a cloud of exhaust and sand.
“Come inside, Sarah. It’s cold out. You don’t have shoes on,” Mother said.
I went back to my bedroom and shut the door. A sharp pain threaded my chest to my stomach. I tried singing a lullaby, leaning on my windowsill — Kumbaya My Lord — the notes low in my throat. Where was Luanne now? Would she think of me ever? My imagination failed me. My heart felt cumbersome on my lungs. Yet the tears wouldn’t rise up or drain out of me. I went downstairs again to Luanne’s closed door in search of her quiet, kind essence. I turned the doorknob and went in. Bare bed. Bare floor. Bare everything.
Mother heard me. “These things happen,” she said, stopping in the hall outside Luanne’s old room. “It’s too bad. But there’s nothing we can do.” She turned and went into the kitchen.
Mother filled her days with bridge and luncheons during the week. On Thursdays, she went to the hair-dressers then food shopping on Fridays. Occasionally, she signed up for a flower arrangement class or joined friends from the country club for communal sessions on cross-stitching. This didn’t last. Her rheumatic fingers refused such delicate needle work. But I have a pillow she made: a green and white checkerboard pattern backed with dark green felt. It’s a small item but I cherish it.
All these things replaced the musical life she once led: the violin recitals and college concerts, the discipline of rehearsals and practice replaced by a need for order in the house; the need to perform taken up with these social gatherings, a way to keep herself on public display. Something else inside her was not keeping up. I just didn’t know it then.
~~~~~
After Luanne, different black maids came and went. No one lasted more than a few months. One white maid from Ireland stayed for five days. None replaced Luanne. Then Dora, another black maid, took the position. She was different. She was obese, squat, and surly. She came from Florida and didn’t care about earrings or singing. She said, “You can’t fool me. I have five grown children.” She looked at me as if I had hidden things and she was going to find them. But, not by inviting me into her room. Her door was closed. She was efficient down to the minute. “When I tell you to wash up you go right ahead,” she said. “Your dinner is waiting. I don’t serve hot food to eat it cold. You hear?” She talked as if she knew everything about life, as if nothing could shock her, as if she had seen it all.
Chapter Three
Somewhere, a Promised Land
I hurried down the cement steps to the car on my way to Aunt Annette and Uncle Max’s house to commemorate the Jews’ escape from slavery in Egypt. “Moses is off to the Promised Land!” Father shouted from the kitchen. He wrestled his knit tie into a knot and headed out. The door slammed.
Snow was gone but the trees had not yet poked their greening fingertips to test the air. Mother took her place in front, looking crisp in her pale blue suit and taupe shoes. The car absorbed her perfume and waxen scent of lipstick. She turned around to survey us.
“My beauties,” she said, approvingly.
My brothers, including Peter, wore matching navy blue blazers and gray slacks. Mother insisted they look this way for Passover seder but Peter rebelled, unbut-toning his blazer so that it slid down one shoulder. My velvet maroon dress confined me in a narrow, boxy shape, better suited for an eleven-year-old, not someone heading for high school next year. I don’t think Mother noticed my emerging breasts and hips pressing against my dress seams. Or if she did, perhaps she wanted to slow this part of my growth, like pruning rose bushes, which she said brought out fuller blooms. I crossed my legs and flicked the toes of my patent leather shoes, up and down, up and down, impatiently.
“Let’s pray Uncle Max doesn’t drag things on,” Peter said.
We were sometime Jews. On high holidays, mother shooed us off to synagogue while she stayed home and baked potato pudding in her apron and fine leather pumps. Next to her, a half glass of water for washing down pills stood sentinel on the kitchen counter. “Go with your father,” she said.
Father popped the car in reverse and I jerked backwards against the seat. In the short drive to the Klines’ neighborhood in the hills, we passed older houses set back from the street. The Klines’ home, a Greek Revival with enormous white pillars, appeared at the end of a long, horseshoe driveway.
Grandpa Joe greeted us at the door. “Must we wait for holidays to get together?” he asked. Approaching ninety, he suffered from angina. When he felt a pain in his heart he excused himself from the room and popped a tiny white pill.
“If I saw you every day, it still wouldn’t be enough,” Mother said, kissing him on the forehead.
“How’s my other princess?” he said, touching my chin gently.
He had a skinny face and didn’t rush when he spoke. I smelled the cologne he always wore: a combination of cinnamon and lime. His companion, a woman in her seventies named Lilly, greeted me with a firm handshake. Energetic and quick talking, she lived in the same apartment complex as my grandfather. She tinted her hair a golden brown and was the widow of one of his former business associates. I spotted my dead grandmother’s opal ring on her finger. Grandma died when I was six but I still remembered the rings she wore.
“Why don’t we see each other more often?” Aunt Annette said when we entered. “It’s a shame we can’t find the time.”
“You’re the
world travelers,” Mother said, a jealous lilt in her voice. Her rising inflections seem most pronounced around the Klines.
We lived close to each other, yet our lives and the Klines’ didn’t intersect. The Klines’ two sons, Kenneth and Edward, were much older, college graduates long gone from the house. The Klines’ house was often empty because my aunt and uncle traveled so much.
“Hello, beautiful,” Kenneth said in his loud, sonorous voice. He was a handsome giant who picked me up and swirled me around the downstairs foyer, until the yellow divan and gilt-framed pictures became a colorful blur. Kenneth was my demi-hero. Hefty with wavy, brown hair and hazel eyes, he went to college on a ship that sailed around the world. He lived in places beyond the horizon. He lived faraway in San Francisco where Mother said he was “peddling leather goods to those hippie boutiques.” I thought Kenneth handsome and slightly dangerous.
“Hello, yourself,” I said when he set me down.
“Here’s my man,” he said putting his arm around Peter. The two wandered into the living room and sat by the couch near the fireplace.
Cousin Edward, the oldest and more reserved one, was a lawyer in Boston. He nodded to me but much preferred to talk with the adults.
~~~~~
The Klines’ mahogany dining table, twice the length of ours, had a double set of claw-foot legs and matching chairs with carved wooden backs. Mother fondled a linen napkin. “Look at your table. Just lovely. Where did you say you got these? Your trip to England?” She lifted a crystal goblet and held it up to the light. “Exquisite, Annette.”
“Yes. A dealer located the set for us.”
At the far end of the seder table, Uncle Max put on a studious, half-sleepy face as he and Father droned on through long Hebrew passages. Every few pages, Uncle Max eyed me, staring at my neck. I looked down to see if I had spilled something on my dress.
When it came time to name the plagues, I dipped my pinky finger into the juice and stabbed my clean, white china plate. The drops grew into a small, bloody puddle.
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