Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  In truth, Kendra had an amazing voice, big on charm and mimicry, mannered in a much earlier era’s hyper-enunciated way, a bit like Gertrude Lawrence or one of those people who sound so odd to the ear now; but then she could drop her pitch and really belt it out. In the house were piles of sheet music with elaborately illustrated covers, some of it predating the Great War (I remember particularly a piano rag called “The Oceana Roll,” with its drawing of a big ship billowing oddly ominous-looking black smoke against a border of jolly fish, smiling chairs, and dancing sailors—the Titanic hadn’t yet sunk). After Kendra’s little recital, which would be repeated numerous times on those winter Sundays, we’d all find ourselves around the piano: Kendra, me, Cornelia at the keys, even Zeyde, and we’d crowd together and sing standards in our quartet of barnyard voices. We’d sing “Georgia on My Mind” and “You’re the Top,” “Too Marvelous for Words” and “Lookie, Lookie, Here Comes Cookie,” we’d sing train-travel songs like “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.” We’d sing “Our Love Is Here to Stay” and gaze upon each other with big, sentimental eyes. Cornelia for whatever reason loved novelty songs like “Abercrombie Had a Zombie” and, amazing to relate, something called “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?” (“Now she wants to swing the Highland Fling…”) I have a terrible voice and an absolute tin ear, I can’t carry a tune even if it’s handed to me in a zip-lock bag, but the delight I took in singing around the piano with the Löwenstein family was, I have to say, tremendous.

  Needless to say, back uptown, I made no mention of these deeply uncool activities.

  I was seeing my other friends, of course, doing my work for school, attending to my job in the library, but it felt to me like real life was lived on Eleventh Street, on the weekends.

  Kendra and I could get very silly, and we both liked absurd things and ridiculous contrasts. She had a riotous appreciation for Emily Post’s Blue Book and was in possession of a copy from the 1920s, which she loved to read aloud from, making us dissolve in glee.

  “ ‘At times a few words of explanation make the introduction of a stranger smoothly pleasant,’ ” she read with a didactic, lock-jawed delivery. “ ‘Mr. Worldly! Miss Jenkins—her pen-name is Grace Gotham.’ ” Or, “ ‘Mr. Neighbor, I should like you to meet Mr. Dusting—he has just returned from Egypt, where he’s been searching for buried Pharaohs.’ ”

  “Mr. Vanderslice!” I would riff. “May I present Knuckles, doing five-to-ten at Dannemora!”

  “Miss Vandergriff,” she would add, “I should like you to meet Mr. Not in Your Backyard, who operates the squeegee at the base of the Lincoln Tunnel!”

  “Mr. Vandersniff!” Cornelia would chime in. “May I present my sixth-grade homeroom teacher, who is a big fat fartbrain?”

  Sunday nights would hit Kendra hard, and she would plead with me to stay over. I’d always say no, because I had plenty of work to catch up on after goofing off all weekend, but also because I had a terror of meeting the redoubtable Clarice. At these times Kendra quieted right down, high spirits gone, and fell to sulking. As the holidays got closer, she got gloomier and gloomier. Silly riffing turned to endless complaint about her family. Winter break loomed large for her, and not in a good way. Her family had a house in France, in Burgundy, a drafty old barn of a place, as she described it, with nothing around it and nothing to do, and traditionally the family packed themselves off there for the holidays. She was facing the prospect of winter break stuck in that sweaty-walled dungeon, with nothing but her asphyxiating family and some dismal Charolais cattle for company. Normally it wasn’t so bad, because her brother Jerry would be there, but he was AWOL, in case I hadn’t noticed. How could I, since I’d never met him? I wanted to say, but there was no interrupting Kendra on one of her gloomy jags. And so there was nothing at all to look forward to. How could I explain to her that the prospect of going to France was amazing to me? That the idea of staying in a house from the seventeenth century was like something out of a dream? I was eighteen years old, hungry for living, and I had been nowhere. Nowhere, that is, except New York City.

  But like Kendra, I’d always hated holidays. They brought only disappointment. There just wasn’t enough to go around. At Christmas as a kid, each year I’d make up my list of gifts and I’d magically think that, all precedents to the contrary, come Christmas morning these things would be mine. Instead, the gifts my dad bestowed on his children were mostly identical, anonymous, and universally, if accidentally, insulting. Here was a guy who went in for novelty nail clippers, treats from the day-old bakery shop, tiny sewing kits for the girls, cheaply made flashlights for the boys. He liked anything that could be bought in bulk: three-packs of adhesive tape, penny candy, tube socks, hankies. I would understand the reasons why later in life, get that he was casting back to his own childhood and buying us “practical” things that he and his brothers and sisters wished they could’ve had, their dreams kept small by their circumstances. His own father had been taken by TB, that poverty disease, in the late 1920s, and my grandmom was left with nothing—no money, no English, no skills beyond cooking and cleaning, and too many kids to feed. I remember when I was a teenager my dad would sometimes pick me up from school and we’d be cruising home in his beater through the sad old section called Hilltop, me scowling out the window, and he’d point to what seemed like every third broken-down row house and say, We lived there, and there, and there…They moved whenever the rent was due. Anyway, with Kendra I could commiserate over hatred of the holidays quite sincerely, although I was loath to mention details such as my familiarity with bakery thrift shops.

  And then she had a plan.

  Why not spend winter break together? There at the house on Eleventh Street? They all knew that Zeyde didn’t travel well, so the rest of her family could go off to Bourgogne while we stayed in New York to take care of him. And this’d also mean they wouldn’t have to board Agnes Smedley. Wasn’t this a great idea? And what kind of argument could Clarice have against it—especially since she and Zeyde weren’t, let’s just say, the closest of pals? What kind of argument could I have against it? It’s not like I was homesick, Kendra told me, as if I needed reminding.

  And it was true, I felt no joy at the prospect of seeing my sisters and brothers. We were in those days constantly at one another’s throats, which is what having a recently dead, violent, and angry failure of a father can get you. But I knew my mother would be hurt, because I had a feeling I was her favorite child (not that she’d ever say such a thing), and I was her youngest, after all. Beyond this, I did need to pick up some secretarial temp work over winter break back in my grim home city if I wanted to have any kind of spending money, but I was too embarrassed to tell Kendra this. She must have sensed something along this line given my hesitation, though, because she was quick to add, Don’t worry—my dad’ll leave us all kinds of cash.

  And for the first time in my life, the idea of Christmas seemed wonderful.

  The city was all turned out for the holidays, and I found myself wanting only to walk the streets and look at the lights. One weekday when no one was around and I was feeling studied out, I took the bus over to the Met to see the Christmas tree, paying a dollar for admission. I’d taken some fruit from the dining hall for lunch, and I sat on a bench in the sculpture hall and ate an apple, an orange, and a banana while looking at the old Gothic facade of the original Calvert Vaux building. Afterward I took the bus down Fifth Avenue. This was the first time I saw the Cartier building all tied up in its red bow—I think I actually said Wow aloud, like any little yokel. It was so thrilling to see a building wrapped up in ribbon like an enormous present. New York to me was alive, electric, delicious with possibility.

  I called my mother from the suite phone, reversing the charges, and told her that a friend (a girl, I insisted to my deeply Catholic mother), a girl named Kendra Löwenstein, had asked me to stay on in Manhattan for the holidays. My mother told me I shouldn’t impos
e on someone for such a long time, it was too much. I told her it was quite all right, I’d be helping her look after her pop-pop, who was wheelchair-bound. It’s okay, I added, lowering my voice and feeling cretinous, they have money.

  “Is Kendra a Jewish girl?” my mother asked.

  “Mom!” I cried out. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because, honey, I want you to go to church.”

  “I’ll go to church!” I said.

  “I had a Jewish friend in college,” she mused.

  “Yeah, some of your best friends are Jews,” I said.

  “Oh, honey, I didn’t mean anything like that. Only that Jewish families tend to—”

  “Oh my God, I have no idea what you’re going to say but do not finish that sentence.”

  “Say gosh, honey, say gosssh,” she said.

  I felt the slow burn of insane Mom Annoyance rising in me. Any kind of broader ideas she’d had in her youth had been worn down on the daily wheel of poor people’s Catholicness that was her life, until she seemed to me just as provincial as the ignorant people around her. This is what disappointment had done to her, I would understand later. But in those days I still blamed her for so much, and I only wanted her to shut up.

  All I thought about, however, was the lovely Christmas and the month with Kendra in the house on Eleventh Street.

  The semester was winding down, and I said good-bye to my friends. Trina and Fang were taking the train down to D.C., and Audrey got on the bus for Bumblebee. Other friends were going north to Cambridge or Providence; some were flying east to Asia or west to Cali or to those midwestern states that lived in our minds like Saul Steinberg’s map of the USA as seen from Ninth Avenue. Kendra’s family wasn’t leaving for France until Christmas morning, but days ahead my bag was already packed. Most everyone had disappeared by then, and that evening I ate a quiet meal in the dining hall and then went back to my empty suite in the echoing dorm with its view down Claremont Avenue, where, I had been told, Diana Trilling still lived.

  I must have dozed off, visions of sugarplums dancing in my head, because next thing I knew I awoke to the suite phone ringing off the hook. I jumped up and raced out to get it.

  “Kendra!” I said.

  “Hi, honey!” she said.

  “I’m so excited!” I said.

  “Me too!” she said. “Check it out—we’ve had some amazing news.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Jerry came back!”

  “Jerry came back!” I repeated, though I didn’t understand what bearing this had on us.

  “Jerry came back and he’s going to France!” she said.

  “He’s going to France?” I said.

  “Isn’t it great?” she said. “So they’re all thinking I should go to France!”

  “They’re thinking you should go to France…”

  “Yes! What do you think?”

  “What do I think?” I said.

  There was a full-length mirror beside the telephone, and I turned and looked at myself in it.

  “Uh?” I said.

  “I’m thinking I want to go,” she said flatly.

  “You are?” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m gonna go!” she said, now with glee.

  It seemed to me that my heart had begun to beat inside my mouth.

  “What about Zeyde?” I said. “Is he going with you? How can you leave Zeyde?”

  “Oh,” she said, “I have a Jewy aunt in Jersey who looks after him.”

  I stared at my face in the hallway mirror in disbelief.

  “You do?” I said.

  I stood staring at my face, aware that it was starting to screw itself up in an ugly, stupid way.

  “You’re not mad at me, are you?” she said to me.

  I pressed my hand to my chest to make myself speak without emotion.

  “I am not mad,” I said.

  “Cool! Chess, you’re the coolest! We’ll hang out when I’m back! It’ll be cool, I’ll have a ton of stories. I’ve gotta go—I’ve got so much crap to pack!”

  I searched my face in the mirror, and thought of something.

  “What about Agnes Smedley?” I asked with undue passion.

  “Oh, that old whore!” Kendra said. “We’re taking her with us!”

  5

  Even now I can remember the acrid taste of disappointment, so like the smell of iodine, that I was to carry around in my throat all that winter break.

  I was too humiliated to go home. I could well imagine all the shit teasing—Chess’s snooty friend left her behind—that my brothers and sisters would inflict on me. Most of them had either remained in or been slapped back to where we grew up, though Olivia got as far as Philly, so my ambitions to get out and move to New York were already seen as greedy and theatrical, if not downright alien. Actually, it was during this time that I ceased thinking of that place as home. As for the house itself, I just thought of it as the place my mother lived. It wasn’t my house; there was nothing for me there.

  But I was nowhere. I’d missed the deadline for permission to stay in the dorm over winter break, so I found myself in the Housing office, pleading my case. I was too embarrassed to explain what had really happened, so I concocted some needlessly complicated story involving a sick uncle in Brooklyn, just the sort of thing you’d never remember after you dreamed it up and yammered it out. The dining hall was closed, Housing reminded me sternly, but I was positively smooth in my assurance that I was completely equipped to cook for and feed myself from the dorm kitchen for the next four weeks. In reality, I had three subway tokens and $42 to my name.

  Christmas found me eating Chinese food and going to the movies, like any nice Jewish girl.

  Afterward I walked the hundred blocks back up to Barnard from Theatre 80 St. Marks to save the cost of a subway token. I had all the time in the world, after all. Strange to say, as I walked and thought of what had gone down, I fixated on the fact that the Löwensteins were taking Agnes Smedley, the fucking cat, with them but Kendra had never even thought of inviting me. I felt so hurt that the only way I could deal with it was to pretend I didn’t hurt at all. It was nothing to me, being left behind, ruining the holiday and winter break. It was nothing. Everything was all the same, going or not going, staying in a chilly, empty dorm and eating ramen noodles alone or being with my friend in her magical house on Eleventh Street, our stocking feet up on the warm andirons of the fireplace.

  I had plenty of time to think about Kendra in those days.

  Well, here was something weird, I thought: how come she didn’t seem to have any other friends? She mentioned names and told stories, but I never met these people, and weekends always found us alone, with only her nerdy little sister and wheelchair-bound grandfather about. And it wasn’t as if she’d come from East Jabip. She’d grown up in Manhattan. What kind of a person, I wondered, has no friends? The kind of person who burns through friends…the kind of person who takes up and discards.

  After that I pulled myself out of my funk, put on one of my roommate Jackie’s snappy outfits, and got myself down to the gloom-shrouded Midtown area around Lexington Avenue where the temporary agencies clustered. Oh, this was the old New York all right, when I think about it now: shabby second-floor offices with broken clock radios fuzzily playing “Sussudio” and blinking 12:07 12:07 12:07 in the reception area, joyless recruiters in pilled cardigans eating pasta primavera out of plastic clamshells while they asked you what you like to do—which to me seemed a question wildly incompatible with a job interview. The ubiquitous typing test in those days began Mark Twain said he could live for two months on a compliment and then immediately broke down into slabs of advice from the corporate cracker barrel. I quickly grew to loathe that paragraph and, after taking seven of these tests, wanted to punch Mark Twain, whose fault it really wasn’t, right in the teeth. However, I’d taken typing in high school—because academics need to know how to type, not because I envisioned life as a secretary—and I generally clocked about sixty-five words per min
ute. So it was easy enough to find something, at the going rate of $8 an hour, which was at least better than what I would’ve made in my hometown of Barfonia. Anyway, I found myself installed in the plushy office of some pooh-bah at an entertainment conglomerate, opening the mail, typing up an occasional memo, and mostly sitting beside a big floral arrangement from Irene Hayes Wadley & Smythe and reading a succession of Marguerite Duras novels.

  In this way my winter break passed. For a treat I’d go down to Theatre 80, get a chocolate bar, and see a double bill of revival flicks. But mostly I was by myself, a small fish in a pond the size of the universe.

  One evening, back in my dorm room, while I was sitting on the airshaft windowsill, smoking and gazing up at all the empty windows surrounding me, there was a booming knock at the suite door. This was strange, because there was still a week to go before the semester began. I froze. I knew it was Kendra, and there was nothing I wanted to say to her. The banging persisted, however, and I stubbed out my cigarette, flicked it down the airshaft, barged out of the room, and ripped open the suite door. And there was Fang-Hua, holding a peace lily.

  “Whoa there, Hulk Hogan,” she cried out, rearing back.

  “Fang!” I said. “You’re here!” A huge rush of emotion came over me.

  “I had to get out of that hellhole,” she said, thrusting the plant into my hands. “I thought you might like this plant thing. It’s just so big. My mother’s busting my balls all day long! I thought I’d about kill my sister, she’s such a fuckhead accounting major! The Chinese respect no privacy! You got any doughnuts?”

  Still clutching the plant, I felt something in my head explode. And I found myself sobbing and sobbing all over Fang’s skinny shoulder.

  “…well,” she said, not without sympathy, once I had told her the full story, “I always did figure her for a jerk-off rich kid. I mean, girl has a fucking Kelly bag.”

  “Kendra has a Kelly bag?”

  “I think.”

  “I actually don’t know what that is,” I told her.