“I’m respecting your mother’s wishes.”
She did not want us to see her until her swollen face subsided, which the doctors said would take a week. I heard my aunt tell my father that she needed a different kind of help.
A few people who had been to the dinner party stopped by with offerings: a casserole, a box of candy. Shell showed up in a red cardigan sweater and green pants, carrying a basket of fruit. He scrubbed my head with his knuckles.
“Not to worry,” he assured me. “It’s that change in season. Makes you drive crazy.”
“What change?” I asked.
“Summer heat.”
He didn’t mention her overdose of liquor and pills. No one did.
My aunt stoked my hair. Her long fingers nudged me to smile.
“What?” I said, accusingly.
“She’ll be home soon.”
“If she hadn’t gone out driving in the middle of the night, this wouldn’t have happened.”
~~~~~
That night in bed, I floated over the rooftops of the neighborhood. In the darkness I tried to count stars but they had receded like a tide of sand toward another shore. When I saw the quarter moon I fell back on my bed. The crescent light shattered my windows. Mother appeared in the broken pane and smiled. She wore a red woolen skirt and cashmere sweater, a long string of pearls draped around her neck. Her diamond ring was missing.
Mother?
Sweetie.
When are you coming home?
Soon, darling.
I stood in front of her and stared but she didn’t say anything else.
Mother returned home after a week, just like everyone said. The first night she came into my room.
“Still awake?” she asked standing in my doorway.
“Sort of.”
She moved closer and sat on the edge of my bed, the mattress so thick it hardly registered her weight.
“Homework done?” she curled her fingers around my ear.
“Of course.”
“Good.”
She got up from the bed and went over to my desk and fidgeted with a pencil, then parted the curtain and looked out. The streetlight scraped against her cheek and made her oval face look empty, like a pretty candy dish. Circles under her eyes cast a greenish halo.
“Fall’s coming,” she said. “When I was a child I wanted — ”
She leaned against the desk and turned up the cuffs of her blouse, exposing thin wrists.
“Wanted what?” I said, propping myself onto my elbow.
“Sweetie,” she said, coming back over to the bed and sitting on the end. “My mother used to call me sweetie, isn’t that something?” She stroked my bedspread. “She always believed I would be something special, a star. She never liked your father from the beginning. I think she was afraid of him.”
“Mother,” I said, turning over, tightening the blanket around my neck. “Stop it. You’re talking funny.”
She looked at me, blinking. Her lipstick had been licked off and only the outline remained.
“Sleep tight, my love.” She patted my shoulder and went down the hall to her bedroom.
~~~~~
In the next few weeks, she was apologetic about the accident but distant, becoming wispy again once the bandage on her nose was removed, busying herself with her roses, and taking new pills to help her sleep.
She ordered a custom Cadillac similar to Aunt Annette’s, and when she drove it home and parked it in the driveway, it was so big and wide it wouldn’t fit in the garage. She looked small at the wheel, frail, I thought.
“Big as a tank,” Father said to her.
“Yes. That’s what I want. Protection.”
After the arrival of the new car, no one mentioned the accident anymore as if we’d made a silent family pact to avoid it; and, I didn’t know what else to say to her. She’d already left me. What do you say to someone you’ve lost?
The answer to that got washed under another pressing matter: an historic dock strike in Boston that severed the legs of the family business. Within days Grandpa had a massive heart attack. He collapsed at his kitchen table on the top floor of his condo building overlooking Boston Harbor. There was no reviving him at ninety-one.
But I remembered when he held all of me in his arms. He didn’t rush when he spoke. His voice had a feeling of forever in it. Light, Sarah. Look. He pointed to the hallway light outside my bedroom door, his sounds popping like soap bubbles in my ear. On the ceiling, the saucer-shaped fixture shone. He carried me over to the window in my bedroom and pointed to the moon. Light, he said again, so that I understood the moon was in my house too.
It seemed to me that such a quick death at this time of his life was a blessing.
2
Interlude
In bed, and almost asleep, my cell on the night table chirps a message. Alan writes: Flight canceled. Snowing hard. Going to hotel. Will call after I check in. Love you.
Love you more, I write back, relieved that my husband is safe but worried that he’ll rush back for my performance tomorrow night. I don’t want him to do that, so I call him.
“How much snow?”
“Four inches. It’s supposed to stop soon.” His voice is deeper from too much coffee and long meetings, which is what happens when he goes on these business trips.
“Promise me you’ll wait until the weather is clear, You don’t need to be here for this.”
“I know. Don’t worry. I promise. Now, get some sleep. Gotta go. The bus is here. I’ll call when I get an update.”
A peek out my bedroom window, a smudge of pink is bleeding into the eastern sky. Daylight settles my brain. Relieved. Alan is safe.
I settle in again. It’s a new morning. Day three of the Festival of Lights. I like this particular Jewish holiday, this proof of miracles. Our menorah is in the kitchen, candle drippings hardened on the plate like cake frosting. I’m not nervous about my gig tomorrow night. It’ll be a friendly crowd: animal lovers raising money to sustain an elephant reserve in Africa. My next door neighbor, Becca, arranged the event in nearby West Hollywood and apparently five hundred people have bought tickets. That’s a good audience for an indie folk singer like me.
My bedroom is a comfortable sixty-seven degrees, in December, which is still odd to me. Even after thirty-plus years of living here, I’m not used to L.A.’s mild winters as if I am still waiting for those snows and terrible winter freezes to erupt. My two sons — the oldest named after Grandpa Jo, my youngest after Alan’s father, Steven, are with their girlfriends on the east coast this year. Strange, too, how almost everyone except Peter and I, are back in New England — Elliot at his farm in Vermont, and Robert, who never left Yale after he graduated, is a tenured professor there. I’m here, and Peter teaches music at U. of Cal. I just don’t like the uncertainty of winter weather, and yet that cold side of the world pulls hardest on me at this time of year.
Chapter Seven
Nylons
A month after Mother’s accident, I started high school at Soquaset High. Margaret Lucci sat on my right in homeroom, the room I went to every morning for attendance. Her last name followed mine.
“I lost the baby in the bathroom,” Margaret said, three weeks into the first term.
“You what?”
“I lost it in the girls’ room. I had a miscarriage.”
We shared the same desk, a long table divided in the middle by two shelves. I kept my notebook and paper in the bottom shelf. Margaret put her papers in the top shelf.
“Are you sure?” I leaned down to the floor pretending to look for something in my shelf. I wanted to believe her but I couldn’t see any bulges anywhere. She wore a straight, tight black skirt and a white blouse so sheer her black bra floated against the cotton. Her breasts bobbed with every movement of her arms. I rummaged around in my shelf and pulled out a sheaf of lined paper. I had never known anyone, personally, who had been pregnant except for Mother with my younger brothers and my memory of her was that of a
woman wearing clothes draped like curtains.
Margaret nodded. “I’m sure. Six weeks and four days. Come with me to the girls’ room when the bell rings.”
I nodded and looked straight ahead at Mr. Giles who was also my English teacher.
“Kunitz?” he called softly. He didn’t look as if he had heard what I just heard.
“Here.” I raised my hand.
Mr. Giles sat at his desk in front of the wall-sized blackboard and penciled off my name in his attendance book. His hands trembled. The eraser head on his pencil wobbled noticeably. His eyes, always kind, skittered past my face and onto Margaret Lucci’s.
“Lucci?”
Margaret nodded.
I turned to her again. She had straight black hair, cut to her jawbone. Tiny hairs darkened the back of her neck. Her bangs fell into her eyelashes.
“I had terrible cramps.” She whispered this after Giles called the next name.
“Monihan? Patterson?” Mr. Giles had an ailing person’s voice, an uncertain tone.
“Don’t you think you should go home and rest?” I worried about her. At the same time I felt honored and exhilarated by her confession. She had picked me, and no one else, as far as I knew.
“No. I can’t let my mother suspect anything.”
“My mother wouldn’t have a clue,” I said, trying to keep my lips from moving so Mr. Giles wouldn’t notice.
“You’re lucky,” she said.
“Robertson, Schwartz?” Mr. Giles called down to the end of his list. Even his head shook a little. His whole body vibrated like a tuning fork, as if a ghost of himself moved beneath his skin at a different tempo. His right hand trembled more than his left.
The bell rang and I followed Margaret down a flight of foot-sculpted cement stairs, into the girls’ room next to the gymnasium. The bathroom looked like an old dance studio with penny-sized, black and white floor tiles cracked and crushed with age.
“No one ever comes down here,” she said, going to a sink, one of many lined against a mirrored wall. She plopped her black purse into the drain. “You can see why. It’s a dump. See if anyone’s in the stalls. You never know.”
I bent over and didn’t see any feet resting on the floor. “No one,” I said.
“I had really bad cramps in this very room yesterday morning.” She rummaged through her bag and pulled out a black eye pencil. “I couldn’t walk.” She drew a thin line of black on the inside rim of her eyes, pressing her hips against the porcelain sink and leaning forward until her nose almost touched the mirror. “Do you have your period?” she asked. She widened her eyes and inspected every eyelash.
I nodded.
“I’ve had mine since I was nine,” she said.
I didn’t tell her that my first one came just this past summer. I went up to the sink next to hers and turned the hot water on but nothing came out.
“None of them work,” she said.
She smoothed lipstick, white as confectioner’s sugar, over her lips. I licked my lips and realigned my cable-knit sweater so that it hung squarely across the waistband of my green, pleated skirt. For all my colors — green socks and skirt — I looked conspicuously plain in the mirror. Margaret wore nude-colored pantyhose that made her calf muscles gleam. She had long, slim legs. Her black shoes, though scuffed and dull, fit snugly. Her shoes had small heels that made her leg muscles curve. She had pared herself down to an essential something that I wanted.
I looked away from the mirror and counted eight sinks. Every one of them had a crack, either in the drain or near the water taps.
“This place is useless,” she said, talking to me in the mirror. “Do you smoke? I’ve noticed Jewish girls don’t smoke. Too busy studying, I guess.” She gestured toward her bag. “You can help yourself.”
“My parents smoke.”
The bell rang again and I knew I had to go to class.
“I better go,” I said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes. I’ll see you later, at lunch.”
She smiled and I left her dabbing a mascara stick across her bottom lashes.
The halls had already emptied. I went quietly through the back door of the classroom and slid into my chair in the middle row. The biology teacher, Mr. Bingham, looked at me but didn’t say anything. He lumbered in front of the blackboard, a tall man with a baritone voice and a black, triangular beard trimmed to a point below his chin. His brown hair looked greasy.
“What did I miss?” I sat next to my lab partner, Sophie Cohen.
“Nothing, yet.”
Sophie sat perfectly straight, stretching her long, pale neck. She had hair so thin and light, strands of it floated over her shoulders like milkweed. She wore yellow kneesocks that matched her plaid skirt and sweater.
Mr. Bingham talked about stable and unstable molecular states. He said water molecules adhered with great strength in the liquid state. But I couldn’t get Margaret’s pregnancy out of my mind. I calculated that she had had sex before school started, on a warm summer night, under the trees, not unlike the night of my parents’ party.
Mr. Bingham flicked on the overhead projector. Water molecules looked like sports equipment: round balls with sticks jutting out of them. He told us that molecules, when heated, knocked together and got excited, causing the temperature to rise even more, which explained how water turned from liquid to gas. Sophie pulled a comb out of her notebook and ran it once through her hair, then put it back into her notebook again. Thin strands floated back up in the dry October air.
The bell rang, ending the class. Together, Sophie and I walked to Mr. Giles’ English class where molecules slowed to a freezing state. None of the students moved in their chairs.
“Anyone here think the ghost of Hamlet’s father is real?”
Sophie passed me a note.
I think Mr. G’s wife died, she wrote in pencil. He talked about her on the second day. He said Hamlet missed his mother and that he missed his wife.
Sad, I wrote back.
Mr. Giles called on me to read a passage spoken by the ghost, which I did easily and with a semblance of great understanding. Well, in truth, I was all too familiar with Shakespeare’s rantings because of Father.
“My hour is almost come
When I to sulph’rous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself.”
“Good, Sarah. Tell me, do you think the ghost is real?”
“Yes. I believe Hamlet. I don’t think it’s his imagination. But, I can see why some people might think he’s making it up.”
“So you believe in ghosts?”
“Possibly.” I thought of Mrs. Brenwald pacing at night. Seeing Mr. Giles vibrating in front of the class, I wondered, again, if he had a ghost inside him, or if his shakes were an imaginary nervous disorder. Like Mrs. Brenwald, he didn’t seem to be a person who got mail or phone calls. Surely he didn’t have any children.
When the bell for lunch rang, I stopped at his desk.
“May I ask you a personal question?”
“Not if it’s too personal,” he said, warmly. “What is it?”
“Do you have any children?”
He smiled and stood up slowly. “Three boys, grown up now and living in other states.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Teachers have children, too,” he said mischievously.
“I know. My father is a college professor. He teaches English literature.”
“That explains it. You seem to have a good grasp of Shakespeare at your age.”
In the hallway, the swirling excitement of lunch hour freed the air. The long hallway filled up with masses of students banging into each other. Voices from the crowd became deafening. Sophie and I headed for the cafeteria in the basement, passing the girls’ room where I had been a few hours earlier. I looked for Margaret but didn’t see her in the crowds. A clique of Jewish girls passed by and waved to us. They dressed like Sophie and me, in matching skirts and sweaters, white blouses with circle pins. O
lder girls knew me because of Peter and his rock band. He played at school dances. I rarely saw him at school, though. His classes were in another wing. His lunch breaks at different times than mine.
The school building had numerous additions built onto it, unmarked doorways and stairways. I had heard rumors about a sub-basement with tunnels where janitors smoked and had sex. I would ask Margaret. She knew about things.
As we neared the cafeteria, dank odors of over-cooked food and steamed plastic blew in hot drafts into the hall. I spotted Margaret in the darkest corner of the cafeteria talking to a boy with blond hair. I waved to her and she waved back with one finger, motioning me to come over.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to Sophie.
I walked over to Margaret.
“Do you want this table?” she asked. “We’re going out for a smoke.”
The boy turned to look at me. He had beautiful, violet blue eyes, very clear and telescopic.
“This is Anthony Parelli,” Margaret said. “My cousin.”
Anthony nodded. His dark, blond hair fell into his eyes.
“Sarah sits next to me in homeroom,” she explained to him.
“You’ve got nice legs,” he said.
I stepped back.
“Don’t let him bother you,” Margaret said.
“He doesn’t.”
“What’s your last name, Sarah?” he asked.
“Kunitz.”
“You Jewish?”
“Shut up, Tony,” Margaret said.
“Yes. I’m Jewish. Why?”
“I like Jewish women,” he said, smiling.
I shook my head and looked at Margaret.
“Don’t let him bother you,” she said, again, zipping up her bag.
“I won’t,” I said, looking at him.
Anthony smiled and I rejoined Sophie in the food line. Rows of tables, long, pink-topped linoleum tables were claimed by distinctly different groups. It was easy to identify cliques by their dress code. Jews wore sweaters and circle pins. Irish Catholics and Italians dressed in black. None of the groups intermixed. Margaret was an exception. She didn’t seem to care. I paid for my lunch and walked back to Margaret’s corner table though she was gone. She and Anthony had left a cellophane wrapper from a cigarette pack on the table. Sophie sat opposite me. We both tried a mouthful of the spaghetti.
Night Swim Page 6