“Why?” I said.
“You know,” Candi said, awkwardly, “after what happened.”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“You know, your problem, the abortion,” she whispered.
“I can have children,” I bristled, defensively.
“I see that,” she said.
I had made several attempts to reunite with Candi, and my other friends in the past, but they had ignored me. After the abortion, the infection had caused me to miss the whole end of seventh grade. In that time, while I was recovering from the infection, I was “homeschooled” (i.e., yelled at) by my father, making a few attempts to go back but always ending up at home after half a day. I missed Candi Miranda’s East Hampton birthday party and Margaret Eisner and Carly Mandlebaum’s bat mitzvahs. My bat mitzvah had been canceled. I had overheard my father and mother having a fight once. In a fit of anger, my father had said that he didn’t feel he had to spend ten thousand dollars to make me a woman when I clearly already was one.
I was cliqueless.
"How’s L.E.?” I asked.
“She’s great. She’s married, living in Denver.”
“I know, I saw her wedding in the Times. I read all about your wedding too,” I said. "It looked fantastic.” It was a beach wedding, East Hampton, everybody barefoot, all the bridesmaids wore the same color toenail polish called Sugar Daddy.
“Thanks,” Candi said. “That’s funny that you live at One Fifth Avenue. I remember you always used to say you wanted to live there.”
“You remember that?” My eyes instantly welled up with tears because at least she remembered something about me.
“Are you crying?”
“No, that’s why I’m here, my eyes keep tearing,” I said.
“I have friends who live in One Fifth.”
"Really? Who?” I asked, even though I had never even been in the building.
“Drew and Laurie Baum?”
I frowned in mock concentration as if I was really trying to figure out which of my neighbors were Drew and Laurie Baum.
“Do they have a dog?” I asked.
“No, they just had a baby.”
“Don’t know them,” I said.
“I think they’re moving,” she said. I hoped they moved before they had a chance to tell Candi that I didn’t live in their building.
The miserable girl behind the desk called my name.
“Well, Merry Christmas,” Candi said, as if that was the end and we wouldn’t see each other again. How could someone not want to be friends with someone they knew when they were twelve? I wondered. To me, Candi looked twelve, and if to her I looked twelve too, that seemed reason enough. And according to my medical questionnaire we had so much in common—I had a son Scott’s age, she had friends in my building.
“I’d love to get together sometime,” I said.
“Sure,” Candi said.
“So much has happened. You know I have a sister now,” I said.
“Really? Wow,” she said. She made no move to ask for my number or to give me hers. My eyes continued to water. She had an enormous purse probably filled with pens, and the Dr. Max pen fell off my lap when I stood up, but she ignored it. “Maybe I’ll leave a note for you with your doorman,” she said.
I knew that even if I did live in that building, there would never be a note. “That would be great,” I said.
I said good-bye to Candi and her mother and was ushered into a tiny dark office, where a black patch was snapped over my right eye and my face was shoved onto a chin rest and a clicker was pressed into my hand.
“It’s like a video game. Click when you think you see a white flash,” a woman said. “You know we usually only do field of vision on Tuesdays.”
She walked out of the room and slammed the door. For several minutes there were no flashing lights. I clicked the clicker about ten times in case there were lights and I just couldn’t see them. Usually if you messed up a video game the most you lost was your quarter, but in this case it was my sight at stake.
I panicked. I couldn’t concentrate. I was clickless.
People were laughing right outside the door. Some white lights flashed, some as bright as opals and some so faint I wasn’t sure if I had really seen them. I clicked away like a patient trying to get more morphine drip.
The technician came back in and switched the patch to my left eye.
“This isn’t fair!” I said. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. It’s too noisy out there, I can’t see.”
“Just click when you see a white flash,” she said and left the room. I spent a few seconds adjusting the eye patch and trying to get comfortable in the chin rest and then clicked several times to catch up. Each flash was a flashback. Andrew Resnick punching me in the upper arm once a week during Hebrew school. The spot was still tender to this day. Vomiting over and over again on a school trip to the Thomas Edison Museum. Telling Candi, Margaret, and Carly, about losing my virginity at Disney World, the looks on their faces.
A flash went off in my head.
Maybe that’s why I had lost them: not because of the abortion, but because of the sex itself. I had assumed sex was a good thing, that they’d be impressed. "Were you raped?” L.E. had asked me. “No!” I said. They were so immature. I was adventurous and powerful. Men looked at me when I walked down the street because I was sexy. I was in control. I wanted to lose my virginity. I thought everyone did. I had lost my friends, my virginity, my father, my bat mitzvah, half a school year, but I had found Arthur Weeman. Arthur Weeman was the only one who understood someone like me. He introduced me to a whole other New York, the New York I still believed in. New York through Arthur Weeman’s eyes was Wonderland. Children could be grown-ups but the best kind of grown-up. You could read The New York Times over cappuccinos and go to the zoo. You could have sex at Disney World and still go to Serendipity with your friends. You could have an abortion and still make it to Carly Mandlebaum’s bat mitzvah at the Russian Tea Room.
“Your peripheral vision is within normal range,” Dr. Max said, after I had been escorted to his examining room and waited for him in the chair for half an hour. He showed me some computer printouts. Little x’s indicated where I had clicked appropriately, but I had no idea what I was looking at. “Now let me check your eyes.” He moved his machine toward my face and I stared blankly into it. “And how is Frederick?” he asked.
“Fine.”
“Look at my ear.” He tapped his ear with his pen to show me where his ear was.
I had hated Dr. Max’s ears since I was a little girl.
“Okay, you have blepharitis,” Dr. Max said.
“What?”
He said something I couldn’t understand but the words “clogging” and “eyelids” jumped out at me. “Blepharitis is usually associated with oily skin and dandruff.”
“Dandruff! I haven’t had oily skin or dandruff since I was twelve,” I said, mortified. With the intensity of a mad scientist, I would empty bottles of Pantene for normal hair and fill them with Head & Shoulders so no one would know, if I had a sleepover.
“Yes, it’s common in teenagers. Do you use mascara and things of that nature?”
“Of course,” I said, as if he were a complete idiot.
“You might want to hold off on all that for a while. You have to use hot compresses and scrub the eye with baby shampoo.”
At thirty-three you expect to be buying baby shampoo for your baby, not to scrub your eye dandruff.
No more tears. What a fucking crock.
17.
At 33, she attends a private screening
This is my favorite episode,” Isaac said. "The one where Albert gets hooked on morphine he steals from Doc Baker.” He snuggled into me. It was already the beginning of March, and even though we’d only been dating since November, we were seeing this episode for the second time.
We ordered scrambled eggs and coffees from the diner.
“You’re going to work
later and later,” he said.
“I’m mad at my father.”
“How come?”
“Long story,” I said.
We kissed good-bye for a long time and I went to Mrs. Williams’ to bring her groceries.
When I got there, she was taking a nap so I went straight to the window. I was disappointed to see that Arthur wasn’t there. He often wasn’t there but I’d just had a feeling that I would see him.
I looked down into the Gardener School playground and saw an interesting sight. A few men were working in it, up on ladders and things, and a woman was carrying boxes in from the school. Cables for electricity were being pulled along the perimeter, and I realized some of the men were stringing lights, thousands of them, along the walls like spiderwebs. The woman with the boxes was joined by workmen wheeling in topiary and other small lush trees and flowers. It didn’t seem like they were setting up for a wedding, or even a party exactly. It must have been some kind of alumni or fundraising event, but I couldn’t remember anything like that ever happening on the school’s premises before, the invitations I got were always for the Metropolitan or University Clubs, at a museum, or in someone’s home.
One square table and two chairs appeared in the middle of everything.
Then, in front of the playground’s brick wall, a giant white movie screen was erected, drive-in style, and a movie projector set up on a scaffold facing it. There was going to be a movie!
Eight tall heat lamps, the kind you always saw in L.A. but didn’t even exist in New York, were marched in like soldiers and placed around the table and—and this was the final touch—twin red velvet theater seats, that looked like they had been ripped right out of a fancy theater, and were set to perfectly face the screen. I watched in amazement as they were actually jackhammered into the concrete ground.
Mrs. Williams’ window must be magic, I decided, a secret portal into my mind, a sort of MRI of my imagination. And, as an old-fashioned popcorn machine was wheeled in—so corny! I thought, delighted—I started to wonder if Isaac was behind this.
He knew how much I loved the movies.
Only love could propel a man to do something like this. I would have been happy with a movie at the Sunshine and dinner at Katz’s, but this! It was like my recurring movie-theater dreams. The last one had been in a sort of symphony hall, a maze of private boxes with seats arranged in circles, so although I was the first to arrive at the theater and had my pick of seats, none seemed to face the screen.
Of course most likely this had nothing to do with me, I knew, but it could, I thought. It could. And if, say, all this really was for me, if Isaac had really set all of this up, a private movie where we couldn’t be joined by Ivy Vohl or my father or black sisters or anyone, if all of this really was for me, then I was starting to think that Isaac might be planning to propose with the old diamond ring in the popcorn bucket trick.
Maybe I’d change into the black Oscar de la Renta in Mrs. Williams’ closet, I thought.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Williams asked, coming up behind me.
“Nothing,” I said, spinning quickly around. She usually never bothered to look out the window, and I didn’t really want her to start now. At least for now, this was mine. The scent from all the flowers was drifting into the kitchen through the open window.
“Mayor Beame was here. You just missed him,” she said.
I was pretty sure Mayor Beame was dead. “Are you hungry? What do you want for dinner?”
“Chocolate mousse with loads of whipped cream,” she said. I loved when she said things like “loads of whipped cream.” When I was old I would eat loads of whipped cream. Loads and loads.
Then Isaac called to cancel.
“Oh,” I said, my heart squeezed, like it was in panty hose.
“Ivy’s got me working on something, but I promise we’ll see a movie tomorrow. Your choice.”
“Okay,” I said, sincerely. It being my choice counted for a lot. I was more embarrassed than anything else, that I would have let myself even think all that had been for me.
But I suddenly felt very lucky to have someone to cancel a date with, lucky to be able to make another. You didn’t know you were in love until the other person canceled and you didn’t get angry. It seemed almost as improbable as seeing a private movie in your old school playground, but that was the nature of love. You turned a corner and there it was.
“What do you mean, ‘okay’?”
“I mean it’s fine. I understand.”
“Don’t you want to see me tonight?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It doesn’t sound like it.”
“I’m just saying I understand if you can’t make it.”
“You certainly don’t seem too upset about it. You seem almost glad about it.”
“I am upset,” I said, smiling. “Very upset.”
“Well, maybe I could get away in time for a late dinner. Could we get together at ten instead of eight?”
“Sure,” I said, laughing.
“You don’t mind not seeing a movie tonight?”
“Not at all,” I said, because I was going to see one. I’d have a perfect view of whatever was being shown tonight on that screen. Watching from the window was almost as good as being there. No, it was better.
I thought Mrs. Williams and I weren’t so different. She thought Mayor Beame had been to visit and I thought my boyfriend of five months had orchestrated a fairyland proposal for me. She sat around her apartment and took naps and I sat around her apartment and took naps. I was young like her and she was old like me.
When darkness came, I went to my perch at the window. Below me wasn’t the place I had spent so many lonely recesses but a wonderland. Winter had become spring. Night, day. Hard cement, soft with rose petals. I had imagined it this way, sometimes, as I sat on the concrete bench by myself with a book in my lap, willing free-time to be over, that I was in a secret garden, and someone was peering at me through a keyhole in the gate.
Across the way, Arthur Weeman’s window was dark, and for the first time I was happy about that so I could open the blinds more freely and focus on what was below. I turned off the kitchen light and like a sea captain, pulled on the blinds’ white cords and hoisted the opera glasses to my eyes. Next to me on the window seat was the huge bowl of popcorn I had popped in loads of olive oil on the stove.
Almost immediately, a man dressed in chef’s whites entered the schoolyard with a cart on wheels and placed food on the table. Dinner plates under silver domes, rolls and butter, salads containing something dark and red, probably beets. Red wine and water was poured, and in one of the glasses, Diet Coke.
The chef moved the cart off to the side, still laden with a tray of tiny cakes and a bottle of champagne stuck in a bucket. He lit a candle in a glass hurricane lamp and disappeared into the school.
“Dorothy, Rose, and Blanche are coming over and we’d prefer to be left alone,” Mrs. Williams said behind me, nutjobbing her way around the kitchen.
“Fine, I’ll stay in here,” I said.
She left just as the school door opened and a girl came out. And, holding the heavy door open for her awkwardly, was Arthur Weeman.
The young girl and I, at the exact same time, both opened our mouths in amazement. It was the same one with the long brown hair I’d seen him wave to from his window. She twirled around a few times, with her arms outstretched and her head thrown back, which was probably the only logical thing a girl in her situation could do. She was dressed well for twirling, in her school uniform’s pleated skirt and riding boots, and a short black puffy jacket. The dress I was wearing would also have been very good for twirling.
Y.G. (Young Girl) skipped all around looking at everything, bent to smell some flowers, and then lifted one of the silver domes an inch and peeked underneath with her cheek on the white tablecloth as if she was expecting to see a trapped gerbil or something. Watching her was so interesting, I almost forgot all about Arthur.
He sat down and they ate their salads, Y.G. poking at the red things and twirling her lettuce like spaghetti.
When they were done, Arthur Weeman cleaned the plates himself and served the next course, enormous hamburgers on big brioche buns and French fries. Y.G. picked hers up in her greedy mitts and took a bite without even waiting for him to sit back down. She made a face and lifted her knife and dug it into the small silver ketchup dish and slathered it all over her burger and fries. She wiped off her fingers on her white linen napkin, and took sips each of wine and Diet Coke.
She was nothing like me, I thought, disappointed. I would have twirled, yes, but it would have been a woman’s twirl. I would never have worn riding boots, she was clearly the rare type of New York City child who liked horses, and I’d never even been friends with a girl who liked horses. I would have eaten my hamburger carefully, like a grown-up.
Y.G. took another sloppy bite of her burger, but something still seemed to displease her, and after a brief heated negotiation of some kind, they switched plates, and she began the ketchup procedure again, but this time more daintily.
Arthur finished his glass of wine and poured himself another. Again no waiter appeared, and I realized why he had done all this. He wanted to take Y.G. out, on a sort of a date, but he couldn’t take her out in public. He must have paid the school a lot of money to arrange it.
By the time he had cut her former hamburger in half and taken a few tentative bites, Y.G. had polished hers off completely and had gotten up to wander all around looking at the lights and flowers. She touched everything—the cakes, the movie screen, and the velvet seats, the popcorn cart and the popcorn in it, and what seemed like every petal of every flower. She was talking but I couldn’t hear what she was saying.
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