“Is my father expecting you?”
“Oh, yes. We have an appointment.”
In fact, I knew this. Mrs. Gore had just sold Aunt Annette’s house. September was nearly gone and my aunt and uncle’s impending move to Miami, Florida, in December, spurred Father to see what kind of money he might get for our house. Father planned to rent something, then buy something smaller.
As soon as the Klines’ house sold, Uncle Max officially shut down the shoe company. He announced this development during Sunday dinner at his house the week before. I hadn’t been to the Klines’ since Mother’s funeral and upon entering the Klines’, I grew morose. The mahogany paneled walls in the entry room, the dark furniture and heavy furnishings brought ugly memories back into being. I ached for a joint to lighten my head but Kenneth and Peter were not there to distract me. The Klines’ house felt enormous, silly in its overreaching grandeur. No majesty, only the resin of failed Passover dinners and the hangover of Uncle Max’s lusting eye. Even my aunt — plumpness and smoothly swept back hair — seemed out of place in her endless rooms, as if her impending relocation had unbalanced her too.
Mary, their housekeeper, served meatloaf casserole. She carried a bowl of green peas around the table, cradling the china in both hands. It wasn’t necessary. The table was too long for our small group. Mary wore a maid’s uniform and I wondered if it was something that my aunt had supplied? The white dress buttoned in front like my gym uniform. Uncle Max sat at one end and my aunt on the other, leaving a gap in the middle of the table for the pared down Kunitz family. Elliot, Robert and I sat on my side. Father and Sherry sat opposite.
“If you know how to turn a key, you can sell a house,” Uncle Max said to Father. I sat closest to Aunt Annette. The house sale had absorbed all of my uncle’s attention. He showed little interest in me.
“It’s not that easy, Max, you know that,” my aunt said.
Uncle Max released a guffaw. “Sure it is. With the money from the house sale, we’ve enough to retire. Florida is the next frontier. Look,” he went on to explain. “It’s cheaper living, certainly cheaper than the northeast. Even in this bad housing market — you can buy good, solid — I mean very good — houses in Florida for pennies.”
The Klines had owned their mansion for twenty-seven years. The sale would give them enough to buy a beach home outright, he told us. “Unimpeded water views!” Uncle Max made his point by dabbing his face with a linen napkin.
“I may get into this sham of a business myself,” he added. “List a few properties.Why not?”
“Max, I think we’ve been lucky,” my aunt said, again.
“What luck? A beautiful home doesn’t need anyone to sell it. It sells itself.”
“You’ve been blessed with a beautiful home,” Sherry said.
Sherry’s presence, along with Peter’s west coast migration and absence, created a low-grade tension in the room. Peter was in the process of moving out of Kenneth’s condo into a house with four others near Venice Beach. He had enrolled in the California State College system to avoid the draft. He wrote me letters on stationery so thin his handwriting made bumps on the pages. I liked running my fingers over the indentations. He always drew a picture of himself, a stick figure of a man with hair grown to his shoulders. And he included lyrics to new songs he wrote, scribbling guitar chords like E6 and A minor so I could hear them. “This one’s for you, Sarah,” he wrote.
Satellite Heart
See you flying through space
Can’t leave yourself behind
‘cause the world’s a circular place
I carried his latest letter in my pocket, a talisman of our bond, proof of purchase for hope, for my future. If he had made it out, so would I.
My aunt made an effort to talk to Sherry at dinner.
“And you said you teach women studies? What is that exactly?”
Sherry wore a pale blue pullover sweater and plaid slacks. Each time she put the fork to her mouth a jangle of bangle bracelets chimed in. She looked over at me and tried to smile but I looked away. Unlike Mother, who charged her outfits with surprising dashes of colored scarves, Sherry inevitably forgot some critical detail — as in the case of today’s outfit: a crooked blouse collar. She just couldn’t get it right, or maybe she didn’t care, as if something in her was set free, willing to get messy in her bare feet.
“I’m looking at gender roles in nineteenth-century literature. But that’s just one example.”
“Sherry has been a great family friend,” Father pronounced. He sat up suddenly after not moving for most of the meal. He looked contracted in his chair, crunched as if suffering stomach pains. His head bent away from the conversation, from words that hurt his ears. He resented Uncle Max’s flush state of affairs, my aunt’s seamless life.
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. Did Sherry think studying gender roles made her a family expert? A mother substitute?
Uncle Max nodded and peered at Sherry as if he were looking through a mask or darkened spectacles, though he wore no glasses. But, he didn’t say anything. The unmentionable was Mother. Her absence lodged in my ribs, a cramping ache that I couldn’t expel. Everyone felt it.
Aunt Annette prodded Sherry to tell her more.
But Sherry didn’t want the attention and turned to Robert and Elliot. “Tell your aunt about your newest fish,” Sherry said. Robert and Elliot had returned to the pet store with Sherry after Robert’s fish tank fiasco to get this newest fish for Elliot.
“We have a Betta fish.” Elliot looked at our aunt to see if she recognized what this meant.
“Betta Fish? I have no idea what that is.”
“His name is Only Boy,” Elliot said. “But he’s everybody’s fish.”
“That’s marvelous,” my aunt said. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“I’ve allowed Elliot to keep Only Boy in his room,” Robert said.
“He’s got beautiful scarves for fins,” Elliot said. “But you can’t put him in with other fish. Bettas fight. They eat other fish. Sometimes they’re called Siamese Fighting fish.”
“They’re territorial,” Robert said.
“That’s why we named him Only Boy,” Elliot said.
I liked to watch Only Boy in Elliot’s room. Drifting to the bottom or easing up to nibble the surface, the Betta flickered around his small glass bowl on Elliot’s night table. When I approached the bowl, Only Boy puffed out his lungs readying for attack. But as soon as I retreated from his sight, he relaxed and floated mid-water like a miniature blimp.
“He’s really nice,” Elliot said.
Maybe we were like Bettas, too. Bettas lived in shallow pools of water in rice paddies in Thailand. We lived in shallow pools of separateness in our bedrooms.
“A happy Betta makes bubble nests,” Robert said.
“You’ll have to explain that to me, dear,” Aunt Annette said.
“That’s a cluster of bubbles that the fish makes,” Robert said. “It forms on the surface to attract a mate.”
“Only Boy makes bubbles at night,” Elliot said. “He’s happy.”
Uncle Max twisted his lips. “Very good,” he said.
He resumed talk about the great new Florida real estate frontier. Who needed the winters? It’s a wonder he hadn’t come to this revelation before. He refilled Father’s glass of wine. Father remained bent over the table disinterested, taking short gulps of wine. Elliot mashed his potatoes, peas and meatloaf into one big lump.
~~~~~
All this whizzed through me as Mrs. Gore stood in the foyer waiting for me to let her in. Her cropped silver hair bubbled out as if frozen mid-air.
“You’re the oldest girl, I understand?”
“The only girl.”
Tiny curls twisted around her earlobes. Bangs trimmed just above her penciled eyebrows, exaggerated arcs that created a surprised face even when she stopped talking.
“And your father, he’s here?”
“Yes.”
She smil
ed again. I found her large, conical-shaped breasts irksome. They burst against a white cotton shirt. She wore black pedal pushers that made her appear chunky at the hips. I loomed over her to block her view of our house but that proved difficult. Her eyes automatically and coldly found a way to photograph her potential listing. I saw her mind clicking away.
“Lovely home,” she said.
“Thank you. Wait here, please.”
“Glad to meet you!” she said exuberantly as I turned away, as if she were the party and she needed to make sure I knew how much fun she could be.
I went upstairs to get Father, who was talking to Robert. They had reconciled about the fish and now Father visited Robert’s goldfish every day. I went back down to the living room. I didn’t want to miss what Mrs. Gore had to say.
She was petite yet I could feel the enormity of her judgment as she sized up the hallway, living and dining rooms. She sidled closer to the piano. “Will this be for sale?”
“No,” I said.
Father turned to me.
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
Pausing again, did Mrs. Gore see the worn spot in the rug at the bottom of the stairs? What about the paint lifting off the wall near the front closet? Did she smell the odor of our missing mother, the listless air, the home’s chronic desuetude? Father trailed her. The forced peppiness in her voice hurt my head. Who was she kidding?
Mrs. Gore walked back into the living room, saw me staring at her and smiled impulsively. Her eyes grew tight as they circled the rooms, taking in furnishings. She nodded and they moved on.
“Will you be including anything in the purchase — light fixtures? Larger pieces? The dining room set for example?”
Father shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“We’re not selling furniture,” I said.
She turned and gave me a sewed-up smile this time.
“I understand. It’s terribly disconcerting, isn’t it? This moving business.”
They disappeared upstairs to the second floor. I heard them stopping in each bedroom, including mine, then returning to the upstairs hall again. I hid our good silverware in the closet.
Their footsteps paused directly above me. I heard Father’s voice. More steps as they moved through Mother’s room, around the king-sized bed, into Mother’s changing room. Would she open the closet doors? I couldn’t hear.
“Elliot!” Father called up to the attic.
Again the footsteps resumed upwards to the third floor. Mrs. Gore’s voice rose above Father’s and off they went to the top of the house. A breeze blew outside. In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s house spins to a distant place. I held on to the arm of an imaginary couch waiting to land.
They came down again and went to the kitchen. She oohed and ahhed. “How convenient for a family,” she said, referring to the eat-in counter with bar stools.
On her way out she walked into the living room and touched a blue, ceramic plate that mother had brought back from Mexico on one of their adult vacations.
“Careful,” I said. If I were a bird, I would have pecked her.
“Nice to meet you.” She turned to me, all smiles once more — the experienced, older woman who could set things right. She had shell-colored teeth, sharp, brittle at the edges, a wet-looking tongue.
As soon as she left, Father came back and sat on the other end of the couch.
“It’s the best thing to do right now.”
“You know,” I said, getting up. “It’s all your fault.” I suddenly hated him. The feeling surged like an open water hose. “This mess. Everything.”
“What?” He reached to touch my arm.
I twirled away from him.
“Don’t touch me!”
He stood up.
“None of this would have happened if you had gone with her. Why didn’t you go? Why didn’t you drive?”
We looked at each other, locked in an emotional paralysis until plumes of grief started spilling out. I didn’t want to inhale them so I fled.
I left the house.
I walked to the town pharmacy and called Gregory from the pay phone. The first week after Stonehill, we talked a few times. Twice, Dora had taken the call. But since starting college, I hadn’t heard from him.
“That boy from New York, he lives too far away, don’t you think?” Dora had said. She looked me up and down like a doctor giving an exam. “Be careful,” she said. “You’ve got plenty of time for men in your life.”
“Look. He’s nice. It’s not a big deal. He’s just a friend.”
I pretended boredom with the subject. I even tried to pretend to myself that he didn’t matter because it was too hard to live in this in between. I was old enough to drive but I hadn’t yet gotten my license. Maybe I was afraid to. Gregory was far away, and a phone call didn’t replace or compare to walking in the woods, or getting photographed, or having sex.
At the pharmacy, I stood in the phone booth fiddling with the change slot. Gregory’s dormitory phone rang and rang. No one answered. In a panic, I hung up and called Margaret.
“Did you hear?” she said, after she answered and heard my voice.
“Hear what?”
“Anthony’s been drafted.”
“What?”
At the end of the school year, I had watched Anthony drift away from sports and grow his hair. I sometimes saw him smoking joints across the street from the school. I felt indebted to him for walking me home after his sister’s friends harassed me. The girls never bothered me again. After our walk, Anthony broke up with Giselle. But then I saw him with different girls, lots of girls. Whatever seemed ready to happen between us didn’t.
“He’s leaving in two days for Vietnam. Someplace south. I know how to find him if you want.”
“Yes. I want to.”
“I’ll come get you now,” she said.
Chapter Eighteen
Gooseneck Lake
I left the drugstore and walked back home. Father had retreated to his murky little fish tank of an office to correct students’ papers. No doubt his true love, Sherry, would soon be over to cheer him. While I waited for Margaret to pick me up, I went to Peter’s room or what was left of it since he had fled to California to seek his fortune, and took out his old guitar from his closet.
As soon as I held my brother’s instrument in my arms, a tunnel opened up for me and took me through a mountainside. So easy to sing. I started with The Weavers’ familiar folk tune. If I had a hammer. I curled my left hand around the guitar frets, the way Peter taught me. The pressure of my fingertips on the strings renewed a deeper purpose. Melodies took me out of the house, away from my father’s romance, far from my own dark place of losing Mother. I sang new words for old songs.
If I had a car, I’d drive across the country. I’d visit my brother, far far from this land.
A car horn honked twice. I ran downstairs, across our long front yard, to Margaret’s car. She looked different sitting behind the wheel in her uncle’s Dodge Dart. Her legs were pale, her dark Italian eyes ringed with smudged mascara. She had been inside all summer working at her cousin’s beauty parlor. But she smoked as elegantly as ever in her mini yellow dress.
“He shows up when the sun goes down,” Margaret said. She pushed her dark bangs from her forehead, shiny with sweat.
“It’s dark, now.”
“That’s what I mean.”
She offered me a cigarette and I lit up expertly. I had smoked all summer long, taking on the habit completely. She steered a look over at me, surprised by my nonchalance, which I had first modeled after her.
How glorious to be out: my elbow resting on the window, a breeze riffling my skin. I wore a tight cotton top and long, flowered skirt, my tiny Jewish star around my neck. It gleamed nicely against my skin, still tanned from lying in a grassy field with Gregory. But already Gregory was slipping into long ago.
Margaret drove slowly through my neighborhood, past brick estates, then down the hill where smaller houses sat
on the flat part of town, to the ice-cream store.
“See him?”
I recognized the gait, his shoulders leading the way as he walked toward a small clique of boys smoking in the adjacent parking lot. Margaret circled the lot and parked. We got out. I flipped my hair back over my shoulders. It was awkward, this sauntering over to a group of boys I didn’t know, except for Anthony who spotted me and nodded in recognition. I waved to be friendly and he left the group to meet me. Margaret headed for her new beau waiting for her inside.
“You grew up,” he said, sizing me up and down, eyes to ankles. He had a dreamy but inanimate smile on his face. “You seeing anyone?” he asked.
“I was.”
“How far did you go?”
“As far as I wanted to.”
I looked into his blue eyes but they were screened in, hard to see beyond the marijuana glaze or what appeared to be his general disinterest in anyone or anything in particular. He had changed.
“You’re different,” I said.
“You too.”
He stood in front of me and touched my chin then leaned in to kiss me. I let him press his lips against my mouth.
“You’re not a virgin,” he said.
“And you?”
He smiled and shook his head.
“Come on. I’ll buy you a coke.”
We walked into the bright ice-cream store. A group of long-haired boys sat on counter stools smoking, waiting for sodas, French fries. Their bangs fell past their eyes. One boy hung over the counter stabbing a straw into his coke, poking for hidden answers. Margaret was sitting in a far booth making out with a blond boy that I didn’t recognize. Maybe I had made a mistake, calling her, setting this whole thing up.
The store had a frosty, crystalline glare from an air conditioner that pushed too hard. I was cold. Anthony sat beside me and lit up a cigarette. He wore a blue tee shirt and black jeans. He looked at my blouse and ran his finger along the edge of my neckline. He touched my star.
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