by Diana Altman
“But you’ll hate me.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“It was my fault Willa got fired.” He glanced sideways at me on the bench next to him to see my reaction and when I didn’t react he continued. “I was visiting Grandma and Grandpa in Chicago. My parents were in Rome, and I had to stay with them during Thanksgiving break. I was really bored so I was wandering around one evening and went into Grandpa’s room and looked in his bureau.”
“Why?”
“I just told you. I was bored. You know how his socks were in the top drawer?”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
“You did too.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I know you.”
“You mean you think I looked in Grandpa’s bureau?”
“Yes. You did. Don’t lie.”
“Okay. I did.”
“Right. So you know how his socks were all neatly paired in the top drawer? I wanted the brown ones with the stripes on them so I took them.”
“But what does this have to do with Willa?”
“That’s when Grandma fired her. That was just the sort of thing Grandma would fire her about.”
“You mean you think Grandma knew every pair of Grandpa’s socks?”
“Absolutely. That’s why she’s never said exactly why she fired her because even Grandma knows it was petty. She could never tell us she fired Willa over a pair of missing socks but that’s what she did.”
“But why didn’t you just ask Grandpa if you could have those socks?”
“How could I ask him? He’d know I was poking around in his bureau.”
“But why didn’t you confess when you found out Willa got fired?”
“Too embarrassed. I’ve never told anyone. Ever.”
“You mean you let Willa get fired? You just let her get fired? What about her children?”
“See. I knew you’d judge me.” Here was a guile he must have used with his mother when she scolded him. Shrinking into himself and looking very miserable must have worked.
“How could I not judge you? That was a terrible thing you did. You should tell Grandma. You should tell her now. She’s probably still disappointed that her beloved Willa turned out to be a thief. How could you do that?”
“See. I knew I shouldn’t have told you.” He increased his injured child posture by pushing his lower lip forward.
“I mean I could sort of understand if you were a child. But you weren’t a child. You were a grown man.”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Grown enough.” We sat without speaking for a while, watching the waves roll in, roll in, roll in. A man walked at the water’s edge with a little boy then paused to wait for the child to dig some treasure out of the sand. The dad put the little treasure in his bathing suit pocket then they continued hand in hand. I tried to imagine Wiley in college with parents living in Italy and his childhood house sold out from under him. He must have greeted every college break with anxiety instead of joy. He had to make do with friends’ houses. My mother was in Italy too but at least I had my father’s house. I might not have liked being there with Annabelle but at least it was mine and I had a right to it. Maybe Wiley felt the world owed him something. “You must have liked those socks.”
“I did.”
“Do you wear them for dress up?”
“No.”
“You mean you just keep them like your little wad of secret shame?”
“Not exactly.”
“Wiley, you have to wear those socks. That way it won’t be an entire waste.”
“I can’t.”
“But you should. You should wear them. Grandpa would be sorry you stole them but he’d be glad you’re enjoying them.”
“I threw them away.”
“What? When?”
“At the time.”
“Why? Why did you throw them away?”
“Couldn’t stand to look at them.”
“So Willa got fired for no reason whatsoever?”
“Yes.”
“Wiley! You’re a coward.”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t want you to be a coward.”
“I don’t want to be either.”
“Then tell Grandma. You have to tell Grandma. Then she can write to Willa or call her or something. I’m sure she still feels terrible about Willa.”
“I was an idiot to tell you.”
“Do you want me to forgive you?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s not up to me. It’s not my forgiveness that you need.”
“So do you hate me?”
“I hate that you did that.”
“So do you hate me?”
“I can’t stand the sun on me anymore.” I stood up and walked to some shade under a palm tree. Wiley stayed on the bench with his hurt expression. Maybe this was what Dr. Goldfarb meant by relationship. He kept telling me it didn’t matter how many college degrees, how handsome, how rich, the person was, it was my relationship with the person that mattered. You can add a person up on paper and the total might be impressive, but it didn’t mean you got along. The men I dated all went to Ivy League schools and had professions. My boyfriend was the youngest doctor ever accepted onto the Harvard faculty at Mass General. He graduated from Yale undergraduate then Harvard Medical School. My mother met him and called him “a prize.”
I went back to the bench and stood before Wiley. “You’re a total moron,” I said. So this was how women could stay married to drunks and crooks. Their heads said one thing and their hearts said another. He stood up and we hugged. “You won’t tell?” he asked.
“No. I want to, but I won’t. What you should do is try to find Willa. Tell her you know she did nothing wrong. Can you imagine how injured she felt when Grandma fired her?”
“Stop. Just stop talking, please. She would have lost her job anyway. She wasn’t going to move to Florida with all her kids.”
“But she wouldn’t have lost her job shamed.”
“Sonya. Basta! Stai zitta!” He spent summers in Rome and was fluent in Italian.
My estimation of Wiley had gone down, but I still loved him. His presence was dear to me, his body and his face and his hair and the gap between his front teeth and his physical warmth. This was perhaps the first time I ever felt that head/heart divide, that cliché of song lyrics that the head says one thing and the heart another. For a second I felt like I was Titania in Midsummer Night’s Dream and woke up loving Bottom.
It wasn’t long before we all learned the contents of Grandpa Greenstone’s will. He left everything to his wife. When she died, it would go to their children. He left nothing to his grandchildren, believing the money would trickle down to us eventually. The only gift Grandpa left to Violet was half of a warehouse in Oklahoma City. He bestowed the other half on Alan with the stipulation that when Alan sold the warehouse, Violet’s share would be put in trust with Alan as trustee. Grandpa did not believe his daughter capable of taking care of her own affairs. This was a terrible blow to my mother. I think she saw herself as her father’s favorite. She was “the pretty one.” Now she realized that her father thought her so stupid she couldn’t even take care of her own money. The warehouse was worth about a million dollars, and when it was sold she would get five hundred thousand that she couldn’t spend without asking her brother, who was only one year older. It was as if the last words her father said to her were, “I don’t respect you. You are incapable of acting like an adult.” On the phone she said, “Well, that’s that,” which I took to mean she had no intention of sharing her pain with me and that some decision was forming inside of her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
My boyfriend Stewart Weintraub was the youngest man ever accepted to the Harvard Medical School faculty. His goal was nothing less than to cure blindness, especially that caused by retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary malady passed from mother to son. Stewart was a medium-sized man with brown hair, a large nose, and very clea
n fingernails. His eyes were blue and sad. There was an injured quality about him that was appealing. From him, I learned that there was a machine that could actually measure the amount of electricity generated by the eye. The feeling of having someone looking at you came from actual beams shooting out of the person’s eyes. The intensity of that beam could be measured. This deepened the meaning of the words ogle and leer. It wasn’t only in a woman’s head, after all, that she felt sullied by such looks. Something actually got on her when men looked at her that way. Even if the person was behind her, she could feel the penetration of that look. People with retinitis pigmentosa gradually lost the electricity in their eyes until there was none. I admired Stewart’s obsession with his work, his dedication to helping people. He was five years older than I, believed in “spheres of influence.” Mine would be the home and his the outside world. It was the husband’s duty to bring the outside world inside to his wife. “You mean I have to stay inside all the time?” I said.
“No. I mean the wife is in charge of the home.”
“But suppose I don’t want to be in charge of the home.”
“Then you hire somebody.”
“Thank you.”
“The wife organizes the home. That’s her sphere of influence.”
“Well, I’m glad I don’t have to mop the floors all the time.”
“Don’t be silly. You know what I mean.”
“Can I ever go out of the house?”
“Yes. You can go out of the house.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Now let me work. I’m almost done with this.”
If I complained to my mother about Stewart’s preoccupation with his work, she said, “A man who only has you on his mind, doesn’t have much on his mind.” I never suspected that the opposite might be true. Stewart was the sort of person I was supposed to marry. He published papers in the New England Journal of Medicine. He graduated from Yale then Harvard Medical School. He took me to expensive restaurants where I sipped wine and admired him as he spoke about himself. He believed he would die young and had no time to waste. We never just hung out and took walks or sat in a coffee house but always had dates, either for dinner, the symphony, or a play. Though Stewart was preoccupied, it was in the cause of others. There was nothing conceited about him.
If we had nothing scheduled, I went to his apartment and listened to his expensive stereo with headphones on while he worked at his kitchen table. We slept at his apartment but never at mine. He was an indifferent lover, not particularly interested in sex, often too tired to even bother. Nor was he one of my friends. He was never one of the group sitting around in my apartment, passing a joint and convulsed with laughter. Yet I was hoping we would get married.
Jewish mothers all over Boston tried to fix him up. He was the catch of all catches. Sometimes he went out on blind dates but mostly he didn’t. We were a couple. I was the one he brought home to meet his parents in their dark house in Boston, where Stewart sat at the table with his eyes lowered not saying a word and slumping in his chair like a child of eight. His father was a doctor and his mother was a snob. It was illuminating and horrible to see him with them, silent and sheepish despite being the winner of several prizes. I was the date who went with him to family weddings where we didn’t dance because he didn’t know how. He didn’t approve of my clothes, wished I would dress in a more conservative manner, a la the Junior League. In particular, he didn’t like my leather jacket with the curly sheepskin lining and the embroidery on the front, my favorite jacket. We spent a lot of time wishing that the other would change. He was allergic to my cat.
One evening when I was alone in my apartment in Cambridge, I tried to draw my cat sleeping with a paw over her face. As a child and even as a teenager I could have done this but my skill had atrophied. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed drawing and regretted losing this skill so I signed up for a night art class at the Boston Museum School. When I went to register, there was a young man ahead of me in line, a teddy bear cuddly person with curly hair, funny, easy to talk to.
The class was in a large room with a ceiling of exposed pipes, the veins that carried the life blood of the building. I admired that the architect didn’t hide the pipes, how they made a pleasing design though that wasn’t their purpose. We sat in chairs designed for drawing. One arm flared out into a flat desk big enough to hold our oversized newsprint sketchpads. The teddy bear man and I selected chairs next to each other in front of a raised platform. At the back of the platform was a screen. From behind the screen a woman in her thirties walked to the front of the platform absolutely naked and sat on a chair with her legs slightly apart. She had small triangular breasts, exactly the kind I don’t like to see, a roll of fat around her stomach and a bush of black hair that came part way down her thighs. She put her hand behind her neck and slouched and everyone in the room began to sketch, so that’s how I knew the class had begun. A little while later, a young woman dressed in a long skirt and a silky blouse, with brown hair down to her waist stood in front of the raised platform and said, “Twenty second sketches,” so I figured she was the teacher. The model changed her pose every twenty seconds and the room was filled with the sound of sketchpad pages flipping up and charcoal scraping over paper. I was happy when the poses lasted longer, because then I could concentrate on making the fingers exact and getting the nose the right distance from the eyes. At break time, the model put on a robe, a strange gesture of modesty seeing as how she’d already showed a roomful of strangers her privates. Maybe she thought the robe-covered person was the real her.
A week later, the night before my second drawing class, I was at Stewart’s apartment. He was sitting at his kitchen table working on a paper. I was sitting on his sofa with big headphones on listening to the Brahms clarinet quintet and feeling lucky to have a boyfriend with such expensive stereo equipment. Just as I was getting up to turn the record over, the phone rang. Stewart got up from the kitchen table and went into the bedroom to answer his phone. I did not turn the record over but stood still so I could hear what he was saying in the next room. I heard him making plans to see another woman. I could tell by the formality in his voice that he was making a date with a person he didn’t know. I was sitting right there in his apartment and he was making a date with someone else. He came out of the bedroom, sat down again at the kitchen table where there were papers and books strewn about, picked up his pen, and returned to writing.
I flew at him with my fists and smacked him again and again. He tried to contain me, tried to grab my hands but my rage was so intense, fury made me strong. Papers blew all over the place as I slapped him and punched him and smacked him all the while hearing a voice inside my head saying, “This is the most uncomfortable feeling I’ve ever had.” I was out of my mind. At last the storm passed and there I stood, spent. He said, “That shows you love me.”
The following night, I went to my second drawing class full of gloom. That was the worst fight I’d ever had with anyone in my life. Now I knew what blind rage was. I sat at my desk sketching the nude model and feeling as if my heart weighed a ton. During the break, I went to the school store to buy a gummy eraser. Maybe if I had one of those erasers I’d draw better and get happier.
Worrying about the fight, new eraser in my pocket, I headed back to class down a corridor under a ceiling of exposed pipes. Suddenly, I had an epiphany. It was as if the skies opened up and bright rays were shooting down from heaven carrying a voice that said, That’s how you felt as a child. This man makes you angry, jealous, and disappointed. You were angry at your father, jealous of your sister, disappointed by your mother. You’re in the habit of being jealous, angry, and disappointed and that’s why this man feels like home. It’s a habit. Those feelings are a habit, and you can break the habit just like you broke the fingernail biting habit in second grade.
I stood there, rooted, as other students walked by me unaware that I was in the middle of a life-changing event. Being single wasn’t the
worst thing in the world. It was much better than being with a person who provoked such rage. I didn’t need to change myself so Stewart would find me more acceptable as a mate. What I had to change was allowing myself to be with people who made me feel bad. Myself was okay as is. What I had to avoid was being with people who made me unhappy. There was only one criteria for the next man. Does he make me happy? Being happy is a choice. Stunned, slightly trembling, I went back to class.
The drawing teacher stood at the front of the room advising us to see the model as a combination of shapes, negative spaces, and shadows. We should view the model as we might an eggplant. Then she went from chair to chair offering suggestions in a soft voice. Looking at the squeezed down little figure in the corner of my paper, she suggested I fill up the whole page. I understood her to be saying, take a chance. Be bold. Dare to fill up your life. It seemed a prophetic coincidence that she said this to me immediately after my visitation. Yes, I would flip the paper over and use big strokes.
I was so dazed, I just sat there absently watching the teacher go from student to student. Across the room she leaned down to speak to a man who was too tall to fit neatly in his drawing chair. His long legs stuck out in the aisle. As the teacher leaned down to offer suggestions, her silky hair fell forward and I was stabbed by a dagger of jealousy. The words in my head were Stop it! Stop taking advantage of your position as teacher to flirt with him. Get away from him! This was strange. I had never seen that man before.
At the break, when the room was empty, I went from chair to chair pretending to be looking at everyone’s drawing but really I wanted to see his. Now I saw what the teacher meant by big gestures. All the other sketchpad pages were full of sweeping lines, suggestions of a female form. Mine was the only tiny squeezed up literal representation of the model. This, apparently, was a class of art students who had sketched models hundreds of times. Walking as nonchalantly as possible, I paused at the lanky man’s sketchpad. His was the best. The figure on the page was full of personality. He’d captured the slovenly posture and the anxiety in the unkempt hairdo. He’d drawn the nipples like little structures.