Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  I tried to explain how I felt: “It’s the pointlessness of waiting. If we can be married now, why should we wait? We know what we want.”

  She only had one answer, which always came back to the same thing: “If you love each other, you’ll still love each other in six months. If you want to get married then, I promise I won’t object. I don’t object to Jake. I don’t even know him. What I object to is the hurry. What for? Wait!”

  Jake’s father gave him a ring to give me, a single pearl, very large and rough, of a creamy pink, with two small glittery diamonds on either side. I wondered whether he had bought it for us, or if it had been reclaimed from one of his previous wives. There were three, I think—or was it four, or even five? His ring didn’t match in spirit the wedding rings we had selected: Each of the two was like a squared silver chain—one line of the chain for Jake and one for me. The links formed where our lives met; it was the kind of symbol Kahlil Gibran wrote about.

  We had only made love once or twice before the wedding, barely successfully enough to save me from being a virgin bride. I didn’t wear white—only because the dress I liked was blue, an iridescent blue silk that shimmered and changed into shades of near-green as I moved. It reminded me of all the summers I’d spent at the beach, my eyes sunstruck from sand and sea, and the blue of the ocean.

  My mother wore a black suit. Did she mean to mourn so publicly? Or was it a Freudian slip of the closet? As I recall, my sister wore a black suit, too. She insists she did not, and that she tried to persuade my mother not to, either. The image I have of my family—those who were present at the small civil ceremony held in Jake’s father’s apartment on East 64th Street—is of a row of dark, solemn, unhappy figures, something like the totems on Easter Island.

  Weddings are like pardons granted from reality. Of all our ceremonies, they are the most innocent—celebrations of hope, of trust, of the springtime of love. Inevitably, the weather changes later; but, for that moment, everyone believes like children again, in terms of happily-ever-after, “for better or for worse.” Tears shed are not for what will surely follow. They are the tears of completion: We have arrived safely at this point. Let’s pretend that the rest of the journey will be safe and happy, that this ceremony is a strong enough blessing. We remember the journey to this point; how incredible and wonderful it is that we are still safe. Now there will be joy; we celebrate.

  Jake found a furnished apartment in Atlantic Highlands, a sweet, small town near the ocean, south of Sandy Hook, in New Jersey. It was a converted attic in a big old stone house. The wallpaper in the living room had roses all over it; the bed was tucked under one of the eaves in the bedroom; and the kitchen was a tiny square next to the bedroom.

  Jake also found a 1938 four-door Ford touring sedan convertible, red, with leather seats, swooping fenders, and a wooden shelf between the front seat and the back to separate the passengers from the driver. Sometimes when we parked it on the street in Manhattan, we’d come back and find a note under the windshield wiper: “Call me if you want to sell this car.”

  In the mornings, I drove Jake to the base, and then went on to Marlboro; I picked him up in the afternoon after work. Everything was different, from taking buses to meet in the biggest town between Fort Monmouth and Marlboro, and meeting in bars, or going to the movies, wishing we had a room of our own. Now we had a room of our own—three rooms, in fact.

  From Jake, I learned about photography as we went through endless books and magazines: I had to look at each photograph and say what I liked about it, and what I didn’t. He taught me to frame a picture through the tunnel of a double-lens reflex camera, and how to hold a camera without feeling conspicuous, a kind of arrogant stealth. He taught me how to develop my photographs afterward. He taught me how to have my picture taken—as if I were completely unaware that there was a camera anywhere nearby.

  He taught me how to make salads his way. I made them the way my mother did, with lettuce, tomato, green pepper, cucumber, onion. Too much, he said, with too many things. When his father came to dinner, I think I made a salad all of lettuce. I made a salad dressing of sour cream with lemon juice and dried thyme, from a cookbook a friend had sent as a wedding present. And, as I recall, I made my mother’s stuffed cabbage. What did we talk about? Was one of his father’s wives along? I don’t remember anything but the salad.

  We only had one fight: He used toothpaste neatly, from the bottom of the tube to the top, and I just picked up the tube and squeezed, leaving it crimped and bent. That made him angry.

  When he said he was going out to get the paper, and was gone for hours, I wasn’t angry: I was wildly jealous. Had he been to see Carol? She was in New York City. Tormented and desperately unhappy, I didn’t say anything about these disappearances.

  When he left letters he’d received on the top of our bureau: “Dear Jake, I loved seeing you again,” he always had a good explanation: “I lent her my Robinson Jeffers books. That’s all. Absolutely nothing happened.”

  We found an empty, silent house on the ocean, abandoned after a fire, with a boathouse next door, its own boardwalk, tennis courts, and weeds everywhere. We climbed through the ruined rooms, taking pictures. We found burned books, some with the ashes all blown away, but others with the words still visible. Everywhere we turned, there were charred silhouettes of what had been.

  When the Army sent Jake to Germany, we had been married for less than half a year. We had already begun to wish we had never gotten married.

  Jake had a leave coming, so before he left we drove out to visit his mother at her family’s old beach house, near Benton Harbor on Lake Michigan. The lake was all about childhood summers in affluent middle America: barefoot walks, tall grasses on the sides of the roads, brown cow ice cream sodas in the middle of the afternoon, weeds and wildflowers, bees, sand dunes, dogs shaking themselves after swimming in the shallow water, voices everywhere—but no people to be seen.

  Jake’s mother was an older, more gracious-looking version of Jake, with the same aura—that of the enchanted explorer. She was tall and graceful. You could tell she had been somewhat bohemian when she was young. Jake said that when she was in college, she and her friends used to drive across the sand on moonlit nights with their headlights turned off. She was warm of heart, although a little remote; I liked her very much and felt comfortable with her, though she was far removed from my own intense, warm, open, and involved mother.

  She talked a little about the girls Jake had gone out with before me; she’d met Carol and Ann. I thought she liked me, but I wasn’t sure. I think she felt sorry for me, as she did for Jake. She knew we were unhappy.

  The ride back from Lake Michigan progressed through what was then the farmland of borderline Midwest America: rolling patches of land, clutches of trees, Burma Shave signs, and eventually new turnpikes—dullards even then, though we talked about how beautifully the curves were banked. It ended in the surrealism of northern New Jersey, with car dealers, food, furniture, factories, dead marshes, smudgy skylines, smells. I remember that I was wearing a blouse Jake loved, and I wondered if that was why he said he thought we should try again.

  Or maybe his mother had suggested it.

  After dropping Jake off at the Army Embarkation Center in New Jersey, I got lost in the maze of bridge and tunnel approaches to New York City, and stopped at a diner for directions. There were enormous trucks parked in rows off to one side. As I started toward the diner, a brightly lit magnet in the back of the lot, a man emerged from the tunnel of dark trucks. Though he was imperfectly silhouetted, I could see that he was tall and thin, and had an intense look. The features of his face seemed crowded together.

  “You looking for something?” he asked me.

  “I seem to be lost,” I said, smiling. “I’m trying to find the George Washington Bridge.”

  “Where you coming from?” he asked, as if that would help him decide which road I should now take.

  “The Army Embarkation Center.”

 
; “Yeah?” He smiled. “Saying good-bye to a soldier?”

  “My husband.”

  “You look too young to be married. You’re gonna miss him, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You scared?”

  I couldn’t imagine why I should be.

  “No,” I said. “I just want to find the bridge.”

  He pointed. “Right over there.” He looked back at me again. “Want a cup of coffee or a drink?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m kind of tired.”

  “I have a place where you could rest . . .”

  “No, thanks,” I repeated. “Which way do I go to the bridge?”

  “Come over here, I’ll show you.”

  Before I could move, he grabbed me, and put one arm around my back, and the other on my shoulder. His mouth was on mine at the same instant, his tongue cold, wet, tasteless, and hard.

  He let my rigid body go as suddenly as he had grabbed me. “I hope you did better for your soldier.” His smile was a sneer.

  He turned and walked toward the cave of trucks. I got back to the car, and remembered how to start it. Later I stopped at a gas station for directions.

  All the way back to the city, I tried to wipe out the inside of my mouth, by spitting, and then rubbing with my fingers until I gagged. Jake was gone, and this was the sour taste I was left with.

  6. JIL

  ANOTHER

  CHOSEN BABY

  I grew up in a classic suburban split level, a little white Monopoly house with three bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths. Our development spanned Francesco Drive and Rosaria Lane, named for the mother and father of the developer, Mr. Niccolini. My street, Francesco Drive, wound gracefully through turns and hills until it peaked and dove straight and sharply down into a big circle at the bottom, like a tilted exclamation mark with a large round dot. We didn’t call it a cul-de-sac; that term was too fancy for us. We called it a dead end. For the six houses on the hill and loop at Francesco’s conclusion, our world was defined by that peak and circle.

  The hill was perfect for sledding in the winter and skateboarding in the summer; in the circle, we played kickball and tag and dodgeball all year round. The six families were all close. One Greek, one Italian, one Irish, two Jewish, one German—all the dads had served in the war, and then come home and left the Bronx and Washington Heights behind for backyards and trees and a good place for kids to play. There were fifteen kids living in those six houses, and the front doors were never locked.

  In warm weather, the mothers gathered on back lawns or patios and brought out platters of meat for the grills and bowls of cold salads: potato salad, macaroni salad, cole slaw. In summer the children played in the circle and in the woods behind the houses all day and into the chill fire-flied darkness. The mothers drank pastel drinks with stylish names, whisky sours and Manhattans and Tom Collinses. The men drank in shades of amber: scotch on the rocks, seven and seven, rye and ginger.

  This was my mother in her world: tightly wound, straight-backed, never slack, except after a drink or two. Head to toe she was a puzzle of pieces held firmly in place. Her hair was dyed blond, lacquered and rigid with hair spray, an arrangement she adjusted every Friday morning at the beauty parlor. It never stirred, not even in the wind. Her makeup was careful and always the same: pale blue shadow to complement her blue-gray eyes, mascara, rouge, and lipstick in a dark orangey-red. A substantial bosom compressed into cone-shaped brassieres, white in the daytime, black at night. She wore thin, pointy shoes to flatter her small feet, and a thick, powerful, ironlike girdle that squeezed and squashed her middle. Sometimes, for special occasions, she wore a model that combined the cones and the girdle and went all the way from the top of her breasts to the middle of her thigh—the formidable “all-in-one.”

  My father was her opposite—tall, lanky, and graceful. He mastered anything physical with ease. He was the best dancer I ever saw, the best driver. He played several instruments by ear, could draw anything from memory, could fix any machine, pull loose teeth painlessly, close a wound, and, so he said, set a broken bone.

  My mother bullied her way through life, demanding, fighting, and pushing. Her world was filled with danger, forbidding and dark. My father glided through his sunny world with ease, welcomed by all. He rarely said no, was always ready to jump a car, climb a ladder, or lend a buck. She was his protector as much as she was ours, the harsh voice he would never use, the bad news he could not deliver—his wife, guardian, and mother.

  When I was six, Billy Ciano asked me what I was.

  “Jewish,” I said, puzzled. He knew I was Jewish as well as I did. Everyone’s ethnic background was up for discussion on the circle. We were all relatively recent immigrants, just one foot out of some ghetto or other, and the grown-ups were proud of themselves for getting along so well.

  “No, what are you?” he said. “Not your parents—your real parents.”

  I looked at him, confused. And then I got it. I was stunned. I had never thought of this before. I felt embarrassed. How could I not know what I was? Everyone knew what they were; everyone was something.

  “Jewish, too,” I said. I didn’t want Billy, so much more confident, to realize I didn’t know this important fact.

  “How do you know?” Billy asked.

  “They told me,” I lied.

  That night at bedtime, I mustered my courage and asked my mother as she sat at the edge of my bed in the darkened room.

  “Where do I come from?”

  She answered quickly. “You were born in New York.”

  “I mean what country? Like Billy’s parents came from Italy.”

  I couldn’t see her face, but she sat up a little straighter.

  “My parents came from Russia,” she said. “And your daddy was born in Vienna—in Austria.”

  Even at six, I knew the discussion was supposed to end there. But in the dim light, I was brave.

  “But where am I from?” I asked again. “Just me—what am I?”

  She stood up, straightened the blanket. “My parents came from Russia,” she repeated. “You’re the same as me.” She kissed my cheek and left the room.

  In the darkness I tried to parse her statement. Was I the same as her because I was her daughter? Was I the same as her because the woman in my Chosen Baby story came from Russia, too? Was I the same as her because she said so? I had asked as much as I dared.

  I learned to notice the things my mother did not say. The other mothers on the circle talked about what they called “women’s problems”: menstrual pain, husbands who demanded too much sex, or not enough, miscarriage, pregnancies, labor and delivery. After two or three whiskey sours, the other women didn’t seem to notice that my mother had nothing to contribute. From around the corner of the patio I watched her, straight-backed in her chair, the only one not swaying into the circle of women, her lips compressed, her legs tightly crossed.

  I knew a little of her story. As a teenager, her periods were heavy and horribly painful. My grandmother took her to a doctor, a shtetl doctor, an immigrants’ doctor. He said she needed an operation, and they were not the kind of people to question a doctor’s decision. He put her in the hospital and performed a hysterectomy. She knew, from what she overheard, that she could never have children. She didn’t know why.

  When she came home from the hospital, the dressing on her wound had to be changed every day. My grandmother couldn’t bring herself to look; my grandfather had to do it. He was unwell, a man with a weak heart who was not allowed to exert himself in any way. But in addition to his bad heart, while my mother was in the hospital recovering from her surgery, he had developed hysterical blindness, losing first his sight, and then also his ability to speak. In his darkness and silence, he changed the dressing every day. Perhaps this was the only way he could allow himself to perform this intimate, horrific act: blind, mute, changing the bandages on a brutal wound.

  As a child, I knew very little about all this. The story was pieced toge
ther over a lifetime, a fragment here, a detail there. My shadowy childhood was filled with secrets, whispers in corners, whispers on the telephone, whispers I wove together into stories that made sense of my existence.

  When I was four, we adopted my brother. My mother bought me a big baby doll. This was to be my new baby, so I would not be jealous of her new baby. I named her Jessica, my favorite name, and I carried her everywhere. I carried Jessica on my lap in the back seat when we drove into the city to pick up my new brother.

  Even to the untrained eyes of a four-year-old, I knew my mother’s new baby was not beautiful. I couldn’t figure out why she had picked him out from all the rows of bassinets in the long white room of my imagination. Kenny had a large head of thick, dark hair that stuck out damply from his skull in pointy clumps, like wet weeds. Over the next few weeks, the house filled with visitors welcoming the baby. My new brother was so unappealing that even the kindest grown-ups were hard-pressed to compliment him. “What a lovely chin,” one woman clucked. “Such a lot of hair!” another offered. One that became a family favorite: a pause, a thoughtful moment, then, “He has a beautifully shaped head.”

  My brother didn’t have a sweet story of a college romance and failing marriage. He didn’t have any story at all. As I got older I wondered if he were the child of a prostitute, or a foundling, a baby in a basket—a Moses of Manhattan.

  For two years after Kenny arrived, until the adoption was finalized, my father and I drove to the train station every other Monday to pick up Mrs. Tanner, the agency’s caseworker, the same caseworker who had visited after my adoption. Mrs. Tanner walked through the house, making sure everything was clean and healthy; then she and my parents would chat briefly before we drove her back to the train. If my mother was nervous about this woman coming to judge her, to run her finger along the lintels and check the contents of her refrigerator, week after week for two long years, she hid it well.