by Joan Silber
For weeks Rhoda interviewed contractors, getting estimates, receiving the architectural recommendations of friends. In the muddy days of early spring, a troop of masons and carpenters came, messing the house and busying her days. By May her father was installed in the new room, with a TV set of his own (a hand-me-down from Andy), a studio bed, and a reclining chair made of sticky vinyl. He kept more to himself this way; he had long since chosen to take his meals alone—now he ventured out only between TV programs.
Suzanne was given back her old bedroom, refurbished in pale turquoise. She showed little enthusiasm for the move, aside from picking a surprisingly garish pattern of wallpaper; but the first day she tried (unsuccessfully) to barricade the room against visitors by means of string and a bicycle lock.
In June Rhoda took a course in ceramic sculpture, where she met a big, brisk-looking woman with short gray hair, named Harriet Tuckler. What Rhoda admired about Harriet was her attitude. At the beginning of each class she listened keenly to the instruction, then pummeled the unrelenting clay until the results produced in her a sighing bemusement. “Let’s face it,” she said one night, ready to drape a wet cloth over her uncompleted effort to model a reclining dog. “It looks like a turd.”
“She has great joie de vivre,” Rhoda told people. One week Rhoda admired her tan, and discovered that Harriet often spent her weekends at a resort in the mountains.
“Don’t you put on weight there? I thought they did nothing but eat in those places.”
“This one’s very low-key. It’s not all full of har-de-har types and yukkaputzes, if you know what I mean. They get an older crowd, you should pardon the expression.”
“Go with her some time, for Christ’s sake,” Annie Marantz said, when Rhoda mentioned it. “What the hell have you got to lose?”
Shadyside, on first being approached by car, presented a huge sign with its name spelled out in logs, then a farmhouse, flanked by rows of bungalows. They were all painted white, trimmed with a dark, foresty enamel whose color, Rhoda insisted, was WPA-project green. In the main building the desk clerk, a fat, overeager man, took their luggage and led them to the room they were to share. The place smelled like the summer camp where she sent Suzanne—steamy institutional cooking, fresh pine needles, and clothes left too long in the rain.
They arrived midmorning on a Saturday. Rhoda had bought a new swimsuit for the trip, black latex with a stiff boned-up bust. “Anybody leans on me,” Rhoda said, tugging at the straps, “there’s going to be a whoosh of air.” She tapped at the bust to show it was hollow.
“An empty promise, I’d call that,” Harriet said. Rhoda wriggled and shimmied to show that the suit didn’t move with her. “Oh, you should see yourself,” Harriet said. Harriet, in her red suit with its white cuff across the bust, looked dense and strong; she was barrel-chested, with very little flab on her anywhere. A tight ship: there was something so clean and matter-of-fact in her—she was well into her forties, and had, Rhoda gathered from her stories, been married to a man much older than herself who had died early in their marriage. She seemed completely at her ease in being single. Once they had walked home from their class together and passed a shop window with a travel poster of an ancient, crumple-faced Italian peasant warmly urging them with a chip-toothed smile to come to Sardinia, and Harriet had said, “That’s the kind that usually goes wild to take me out.” It was a thing Rhoda never would have joked about—she had been quite startled. It had given her an odd, tense, cheerful feeling about her own future.
“Do these straps for me, will you?” Harriet asked her now, holding them out to her. “They cross in the back.” Harriet’s back was freckled and broad, damp and leathery to the touch.
In their beach shoes they walked along a path marked by whitewashed rocks to the lake. Rhoda tested the edge of the water with her toe. The lake, although crowded with people fluttering in the water or sitting on rocks at the shoreline, seemed oddly quiet, and Rhoda realized that she was accustomed to the shrieks of children in swimming areas. She lowered herself into the water suddenly, fighting the cold, and began swimming with furious energy; she was not a strong swimmer, but she felt compelled to count laps, beating a vigor into herself. When she stopped for breath, standing in shallow water, a man on the shore crouched down to her and said, “You’re quite an athlete, aren’t you?”
“I’m out of practice,” Rhoda said hoarsely.
“Well, it’s nice to see someone with spirit.” He reached down and they shook hands. From where she stood she saw the loose edges of the man’s trunks, the coarse, bandage-like fabric of his jock strap, and a glimpse of his testicles. They had always seemed to her the least attractive parts of a man. Suddenly she felt miserably discouraged; it was not his fault, but he menaced her privacy. He shifted his weight, showing even more of himself on one side; she tried to keep from smirking.
“You look happy,” the man said. To change her view, Rhoda turned to watch the other side of the lake. A very tall, long-legged man was approaching the edge; he was dark and hairy, and he walked rocking one leg stiffly behind him. “That’s Moe,” the man said. “He caught some shrapnel during the war. But you should see him swim. Watch him now.”
Rhoda could not see how well he swam, for all the splashing; what she did see was that he kept it up. She watched for a while, getting chilly as she bobbed, half-immersed. “Hey, Moe,” the man called out as he finished. “This lady admires your stroke.”
He dog-paddled over to where she stood. “Hello,” he said. “Want to race?”
“Sure,” she said. She felt the attention of the other guests on them. “You better rest first.” He was breathing deeply, staring down at his stomach as it rose and fell.
“I’m okay,” he said. The other man cried out, “On your mark, get set, go!”
Rhoda kicked off, laughing, which made her swallow gulps of water; she surfaced, sputtering. He was way ahead of her; suddenly he stopped, grabbed her shoulder, and pushed her—she was afraid he was drowning her, until he raised her arm high above the water and shouted, “The winner!”
“Well, it was very close,” he said, “but I happen to be a pretty good loser. I’ll buy you a drink later, how’s that?”
Rhoda was blowing the water out of her nose. “It’ll have to be a Coca-Cola for me. I don’t drink.”
“Too bad. If this was really a class joint, they would have some nice Perrier water for you.”
“Two cents plain is the best they can manage here, I’m afraid. How do you know about Perrier?”
“I was in France during the war and I drank gallons of it. Great for a hangover.”
“Mademoiselle from Armentières,” Rhoda began singing in a nasal, kidding voice.
“That was the other war. How old do I look?”
“Est-ce que vous parlez français?” Rhoda asked.
“Some,” he said. “But I can’t say anything clean in it.”
Rhoda stopped rubbing the water out of her eyes. He was not as good-looking as she had thought at first—his chin was too long and his features were so rugged as to be almost homely—but he had a deep, boomy voice, and he was the first man she had met in three years who did not seem to be a fool.
On the other hand, she discovered when he sat across from her at dinner, he was not formally educated. They were seated at a long table of eight people; the waiter had just gotten chicken grease on a lady’s sleeve and someone asked him if he was working his way through college and if he really thought this was a better way than selling encyclopedias. “I often wonder,” the waiter said, dabbing at the stain with ice and a napkin.
“Me, I never went to college,” Moe said. “In fact, I never got past the ninth grade.”
When he was fourteen, he told her, his father—a dapper man who had taught his sons to fish and to box like Gentiles—had left one morning to take the subway from Flatbush Avenue into Manhattan to look for work—“and that was it, nobody ever heard from him again.” Two weeks later Moe was kicked out
of school for picking a fight with an Irish kid and winning. His mother, a timid, ignorant woman who to this day spoke almost no English, found him a job in, of all places, a ladies’ specialty store, on the argument that his unusual height would be an asset in reaching the higher shelves. There he spent his days folding and unfolding the merchandise of silk stockings, corsets, and lace-trimmed teddies. (“You can imagine, I almost went crazy—it was like heaven being in there with all that underwear.”) His first girl was a typist who spent all her pin money on blue satin garters; he got her attention by stealing them for her. For this he was fired, but he was then hired by a wholesaler named Rifkin who needed a boy with good muscles. A month later Moe discovered the man was homosexual; he repelled his advances but to Rifkin’s great relief he kept his secret, as he would have guarded the reputation of an adulterous wife who had offered herself to him, and they became friends. Rifkin was making a big splash with a line made from a sleazy artificial silk called rayon. The stuff could not be ironed without melting and came out of the wash looking as though a cat had chewed it, but Moe—promoted to salesman—knew his territory: Brooklyn would go for anything modern. He talked Rifkin into buying up more of the new man-made fabrics; all through the Depression Rifkin Intimate Apparel survived when other businesses went under, because they had a cheaper line of goods. At twenty-one Moe was a full partner. They worked a twelve-hour day; Rifkin spent his weekends in sad waterfront bars, while Moe went to the gym or to the park; he had given up boxing but in summer he liked baseball. Rifkin was “artistic” under his tutelage Moe got to know good music, and, having always read the newspapers, found that he liked history; he worked his way through Gibbon and Macaulay and finally Spengler.
For years he argued with Rifkin that war was inevitable in Europe. After Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the army; he was then twenty-eight, in perfect physical health, a bachelor with a weakness for baby-voiced blondes. Nothing even in Gibbon prepared him for Anzio.
While he was away, Rifkin (not for the first time) was badly beaten by a sailor he brought home one night. He lost his nerve and at the age of fifty moved in with his mother. In a last act of sense before his spirit broke altogether, he sold the business and put half the proceeds into a bank account for Moe. When Moe returned to the States he bought into a plastics factory; he was now the chief national supplier of the protective bags used by dry cleaners. He still worked a sixty-hour week; he read less nowadays, prone to headaches from a residue of chemical fumes.
“Now you know all about me,” he said. “More than you wanted to know, I’ll bet.” The dining room had emptied out now except for a small group at another table. Some sort of lively Latin music could be heard coming through the windows from across the lake. “They’re starting the entertainment at the barn,” Rhoda said. “We should go in.”
They walked through the moist and breezy night air around the lake to the barn which had been set up as a rustic nightclub. Inside, people were sitting at round tables before a stage, where a couple—available for instruction in the daytime—were demonstrating dance steps. The woman was twirling her skirts, showing her legs; they paused on the beat and struck stiff, dramatic poses. They demonstrated the samba, the rhumba, the mambo, and the tango. “The tango,” Moe whispered, “is a very sexy dance. You lead with your stomach.”
“They taught you that at the gym?” Rhoda winked.
Then a comedian came on and told them all the funny things that had happened to him on the way to work that night, most of which Rhoda had heard before, but she opened her mouth to laugh anyway. A boy singer came out, first attempting perkily to ask how much was that doggie in the window, then softening to a croon as he sang of a love from here to eternity, begged do not forsake me, oh, my darling, and then whispered that most of all he wished them love! He ended with good night, ladies.
When they got up to leave, the night had grown black and chilly. “Look at the stars,” Moe said. “Watch out—you lean back like that, you’ll fall.” The lake made faint lapping sounds in the wind, and there was a constant din of crickets. Fresh, mossy odors were around them. There was something painfully young in all this, and Rhoda felt in her a stirring that was not happiness.
She yawned, and excused herself. “It’s been a long day,” he said. They were in front of the main house. He put his hand on her shoulder, fatherly. “You go up and rest now. I’ll see you tomorrow, yes?”
She passed through the pillared doorway. He was walking away; the tall manly shape of his shoulders loped into the half-darkness. She turned down, the hall and went up the staircase to her room. She felt vapid and tired: probably she wasn’t used to swimming all those laps, she had overdone it. I’ve met someone, she thought, turning the key in her lock, but the prospect didn’t make her feel glad or light. Nothing did: what would? Her strongest desire was for a good night’s sleep. And, really, she had been resting too long.
At breakfast he was sitting across from a black-haired woman in red toreador pants, and there were no seats left at his table. He waved and shrugged as she went by. “Who the hell is she?” Harriet said, pulling herself into a chair. “She looks like a hair-dresser from Canarsie.”
“Maybe that’s the kind he likes,” Rhoda said. “Probably what he’s used to.” Through breakfast she was distracted by a sense of the two of them leaning forward to speak to each other, but it was worse when she looked back quickly and saw they had left.
She and Harriet spent the morning on the hotel’s hilly nine-hole golf course. On the fifth hole they rounded a bend behind an oak tree and came upon Moe Seidman and the woman in toreador pants; three people were with them. Moe had the club high over his shoulder, and the others were watching his ball amble its way across the grass. “Bravo,” Rhoda said heartily from behind him. He saw her and touched his brow in salute.
“I’m not really playing,” he said. “I’m just showing.”
“It’s all right,” Rhoda said. “We’ll wait until you people get through.”
The group was already moving on. “Come on, Moe,” the black-haired woman was calling from behind a tree.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Go ahead without me for a minute.”
“It’s yours, Rhoda,” Harriet murmured. Moe was still standing, watching. “I’m just a beginner,” Rhoda said. She chopped at the ball fast to get it over with, and missed. “As you can see.”
He asked if she minded his showing her, and she consented. Behind where she stood, he put his arms around her and guided her hands over the club. “Relax,” he said. She could feel his belt buckle pressing into her light cotton shirt. She was laughing foolishly, excited by the feel of him, behind her where she couldn’t see. “No giggling,” he whispered into her ear.
He braced himself and, increasing his grip over her hands so that he pinched her knuckles, bore down, drew her arms back, and pushed her into a powerful arc, cracking against the ball, and ending in a sort of pas-de-deux with their arms upraised together. The force of it dazzled her for a minute. “Gawd, you’re strong,” she said, as he let go of her. She shook her hands to show he’d been squeezing them hard.
Harriet was applauding. “Look how far it went.”
“You okay?” he said.
“That was fun,” she said. “Whooh.”
He stayed with them through the rest of the course, letting Harriet trail behind them, until he remembered her and turned to ask her questions. Rhoda did not care about hurting Harriet’s feelings—she cared for very little now except the continuing elation produced by his company, a buoyancy like a sudden flood of relief. She liked him, really liked him. She was remembering what it felt like.
At lunch the Sunday papers had arrived, and after the meal they sat on the lawn in deck chairs reading, littering sections of the grass. Moe did different voices for the characters in the funnies. Brenda Starr he did in a wispy falsetto, the gangsters in a growling bass. “That’s my younger daughter’s favorite,” she said, when he came to Blondie. “Is she blonde?”
he asked.
“No,” Rhoda said. “Sort of medium brunette like me. The other one’s fairer.”
“Pretty, like their mother, I bet.”
Rhoda stiffened—she was something, but she wasn’t pretty. “Oh, they’re gorgeous creatures,” she said. Actually, she had forgotten them, which was a measure of her interest in him.
All the next week she was in a state of constant physical excitement, a revved-up restlessness that ate into her concentration; she was like the children before the first day of school. When, on Tuesday, he finally called, her voice on the telephone was simpering and nervous, so cloyingly pleasant that when she hung up she thought, God, how nauseating of me. Already she was homesick for her old ordinary life.
On Saturday she saw Suzanne off to camp early in the morning. All day she felt rushed and expectant. They met for dinner in an odd sort of restaurant he suggested in midtown Manhattan, elegant but Chinese. The red-and-gold décor startled her, hard-edged in its notion of sophistication. He was seated at a table when she arrived; he was wearing a well-cut brown suit, and he looked bony-faced, with a five-o’clock shadow. His expression lifted with pleasure when he saw her, but she had remembered him somewhat differently: less coarse.
He made a point of calling the waiter by name, and he tried to get her to order the most expensive things on the menu. Seeing the strain of his efforts, she felt a touch of pity for him that was not altogether affectionate. “Know who that is over there?” He nudged her. There was a dark-haired, chinless woman at the next table. “It’s Dorothy Kilgallen.”
“I see she’s having the almond chicken, too,” Rhoda said coolly. He seemed disappointed. “Wait till I tell Suzanne,” she added. “She always listens to Dorothy and Dick on the radio.” They could not quite overhear what Miss Kilgallen was laughing at, but a group in a booth caught Rhoda’s attention—two shiny-haired and straight-nosed college girls with their dates, Ivy League types. They were laughing about a practical joke one of the boys had pulled on the maid who cleaned his room at Yale—he had filled his pillow with shaving cream on sheet-changing day.