Val shook her head. “I think it should be a cocktail party, with champagne and fancy food. My mom makes good crab puffs.”
This was true. Crab puffs were, in fact, one of the two things I’d ever known Mrs. Adler to cook. She could do crab puffs and sake-glazed duck, which was delicious, but not the kind of thing you could cook, or would want to eat, seven nights of the week.
My mother sat up, adjusting her knitted shawl, and I could see her making an effort to smile, to act like this would be fun.
“And it should be dressy,” Val continued.
“Well, it is New Year’s Eve,” my mother said.
“Can I get something new?” I wasn’t sure whether getting dressed up for the party was something I dreaded or anticipated. I was already wearing the largest sizes available in the juniors department, and I could see that unless I managed to do something, to stick to a diet, to stop the secret eating on nights when I woke up at two a.m. and couldn’t fall asleep; to actually get out of bed and go jogging when the alarm I’d set for six a.m. rang, instead of hitting the snooze button and rolling over, I’d be shopping in the big-lady specialty stores and Dan Swansea, my secret crush, would never notice me. But Val’s enthusiasm was seductive. Maybe the combination of twinkling white lights and music and champagne at midnight would work some kind of magic. Maybe I’d find a dress that could transform me. Maybe my mother would let me go to Shear Elegance for an updo. Waiting for her answer, I promised myself that I’d throw out the bag of cheese curls as soon as we got back to the bedroom.
My mother looked at her legal pad. “I think it sounds like a great idea.”
Valerie started listing the things they’d need: champagne and champagne flutes, serving trays for the canapés, the little lights, which would surely go on sale after Christmastime. My mother wrote a poem inviting the neighbors to come celebrate. Mrs. Bass, who did calligraphy in her spare time, wrote them out, and I painted little watercolors on each invitation, pictures of our street, each house under a dark-blue sky, with a single star visible above it. Valerie and I tied the invitations up with silver ribbons and slipped one into every mailbox on the street.
For the ten days of Christmas break, I taped songs off the radio, Whitney Houston and Simple Minds, Steve Winwood and Bon Jovi. My mother came through with an outfit for me, a long, sheer gold skirt with tiny bells sewn onto the hem and a forgiving elastic waistband, that I’d wear with a black bodysuit and black lace-trimmed leggings underneath. She even cut a length of elasticized black lace and sewed it into a headband to match the trim on the leggings.
The party started at the sophisticated hour of nine p.m., after people had had their dinners and the families with small children had welcomed the sitters and put the kids to bed. It had snowed the night before, draping the frost-burned lawns in a blanket of white. Valerie and I had twisted strands of Christmas lights into the hedges and through the bare branches of the trees, and Val had used sand and votive candles and a hundred brown-paper lunch bags to make luminarias that were set along our driveway, lighting the path to the door.
Jon stood in the entryway, waiting for the guests to arrive: first Mr. and Mrs. Bass from next door, then Mrs. Shea from the end of the street, alone and looking exhausted in green slacks and a red sweater, with an unblended blotch of rouge staining one cheek. The three of them sipped champagne and warmed up in front of the fire while Mrs. Shea told the story of how her husband had brought home a puppy for Christmas—“and just when the babies were out of diapers,” I heard her say. Then the doorbell rang and people started piling into the foyer: the Carvilles and the Buccis and the Prestons. Val nudged me, grinning, as Mr. and Mrs. Kominski arrived—they were the young married couple who’d just moved to the street, and Mr. Kominski was cute, as long as he kept his baseball cap on and you couldn’t see that he was already mostly bald.
Jon carried everyone’s coats upstairs and piled them on our parents’ bed. He was having a good night so far—he wasn’t as slow or as stumbly as he normally was, he wasn’t drooling or constantly wetting his lips with his tongue, and when people asked him questions, there was only a slight hitch, a barely perceptible pause, before he’d answer.
Even though my mother had tried to talk her out of it, Val had insisted that the invitations say “black tie.” Most of the guests hadn’t taken her literally, although people were definitely more dressed up than they were at the neighborhood barbecues or the potlucks. All of the men wore ties. Some wore suits, and a handful were in tuxedos. Most of the ladies wore wool skirts and Christmas sweaters with embroidered reindeer or jingling sleigh bells sewn on the front. Mrs. Bass was glamorous in a floor-length black velvet gown that smelled faintly of mothballs, and a few of the younger mothers wore jeans and blazers with low-cut tops underneath. Mrs. Alexander, whose kids Val and I sometimes babysat, wore tight black pants and a silver halter that left her freckled shoulder blades bare. (Mrs. Alexander kept a diaphragm and a tube of contraceptive jelly in her bedside table, and every time Val and I went over we checked on the tube to see if any gel had been squeezed.)
Valerie’s mother arrived just before eleven, and when she pulled off her coat, even Jon stared. Her dress was pale pink, with a bodice that clung to her breasts and hips, and she wore high-heeled silver shoes. “That was her wedding dress,” Val whispered.
I knew it was. I’d recognized it from the pictures. Valerie’s parents had gotten married on the beach in Cape Cod. Mrs. Adler had described the day: the wind that had whipped their hair and the hem of her dress, blowing so hard that not even the priest could hear their vows, and he’d made them repeat them, yelling “I do!” over and over again until all the guests were laughing. Their reception was at a vineyard, where they’d danced beneath the setting sun. It had sounded so romantic. The only wedding I’d ever attended was when my mother’s cousin got married three years ago. The service had been in a church, and the party had been at the Marriott. There was no salt-scented wind swallowing the vows, and the bride and groom hadn’t slow-danced underneath an arbor or fed each other morsels of wedding cake with their fingers. There was, instead, a buffet with tired-looking lasagna set over blue-flamed tins of Sterno, and a disc jockey who played “Maneater,” which, even at eleven, struck me as highly inappropriate.
“Sara / You’re the poet in my heart,” Stevie Nicks sang on the tape I’d made. Valerie circulated with champagne. Mrs. Adler closed her eyes, turning in dreamy circles. Her skirt spun out from around her body; her hair flared out from around her head. Val looked proud as she watched.
I played my tapes on my parents’ stereo, where the songs sounded so much better than they did on my tinny little boom box. When the first tape ran out, I was ready to go with Sting’s The Dream of the Blue Turtles, but my father intercepted me. He’d worn his tuxedo, the same one he’d been married in, but at some point he’d ditched the jacket and cummerbund and was now slim and graceful in his black pants and white shirt. “I got this, Pal,” he said, setting his empty champagne glass down on the bookcase. His pale face was flushed, his hair was damp and curling over his forehead, and he looked more relaxed, happier, than I could remember seeing him. He reached into a cupboard and retrieved a stack of albums, flipping rapidly through them until he found the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, which he put on the turntable, cranking the volume up loud. “Brown Sugar” came blasting through the speakers. By the door, Jon was so startled he jumped. Mrs. Adler threw her hands in the air, laughing. My father crossed the room and took her by the hands and spun her, and I was struck by how right they looked together, paired and partnered in a way I’d never seen my father and my mother. My heart gave an unhappy lurch as Mrs. Adler turned around, swinging her hips and smiling over her shoulder at my father.
“Whoo-hoo!” somebody shouted… and then another couple started dancing, and then two more. Within minutes, our living room was filled with people waving their hands, singing along, dancing. Jon leaned against the wall with his mouth half open, like a kid a
t a fireworks display. Val sidled up to me and cupped her hands around my ear. “Isn’t this great?” she shouted. She poured more champagne into my plastic cup and clinked hers against it in a toast. As “Sway” turned into “Wild Horses,” Mr. Kominski crossed the room. I held my breath as he approached, but I wasn’t surprised, and I tried not to be disappointed, when he asked Val if she wanted to dance. He led her to the center of the room, where Val smiled up at him, lifting her mouth to his ear to shout answers to the questions he must have been asking, then quickly pressing her lips together, the way she’d been doing lately, to hide her teeth. I sat down on the couch that we’d pushed against the wall, letting the music pound through me. It was okay if boys liked Val better. Someone would love me someday. Even if I wasn’t an obvious choice, I’d be somebody’s choice, some boy’s choice, the way I’d once been Valerie’s. The wind was howling outside, bending the trees, rattling the windowpanes, but inside we were warm and happy, all of us safe and together.
“Here we go!” one of the husbands shouted. The music skidded into silence, and Mr. Preston snapped on the TV just in time to see the glittering ball begin its descent in Times Square. “Four… three… two… ONE!” The room exploded with cheers. Husbands kissed wives, and not the polite closed-lipped kisses that Val and I had seen on our babysitting jobs, when the husbands came home from work. Some of these couples were kissing like they meant it.
Suddenly Val was beside me, grabbing my hands. “Come with me,” she said, pulling me off the couch.
“Where?” I asked as she led me down the hall to the kitchen. “What’s going on?”
“Shh,” she hissed. She stuck her head around the corner, waited, then beckoned for me. I stood on my tiptoes, craning my neck. At first what I saw hardly seemed remarkable: my father, with a bottle of champagne in his hand and his white tuxedo shirt clinging to his chest, leaning against the refrigerator, as Mrs. Adler stood in front of him, talking earnestly. Her feet were bare—she’d ditched the silver shoes somewhere—and as I watched, she tilted her head up shyly, clasping her hands behind her back. My father said something, and she nodded, breasts bouncing below her tight neckline.
“That’s it, that’s it exactly!” she said. “God. You really get it. To go from California to a place like this… it’s so small-minded. Little boxes. Like the song.”
I frowned. That didn’t make sense. Except for college and Vietnam, my father had lived his whole life in Illinois, so how could he really “get it”? And then, as Val and I watched, Mrs. Adler wrapped her hands around his neck and kissed him.
I sucked in my breath. From far away, I could feel Val grab my hand, could hear her whisper, “Isn’t this great?” I squeezed my eyes shut, but I could still hear them—Mrs. Adler (call me Naomi!) murmuring softly, my father’s lower tones as he answered.
“I should get my mom.”
Val squeezed my hand harder. “Why? This is perfect.”
I made myself open my eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“Because we’ll get to be sisters,” she said.
“What about my mom?” As I watched, my father reached behind his head, took Mrs. Adler’s hands from around his neck, and folded them on top of her chest.
“I think,” he told her, “we’ve both had a few too many.”
“Oh, no,” she said, looking at him with her eyes wide, drawing her no-o-o-o into a little girl’s whine. “I’m fine! I’m having fun!”
“Come on,” said my dad, putting one hand on her waist, turning her around, and trying to steer her out of the kitchen. “Let’s get you home.”
She dragged her feet over the floor. “Will you walk me?”
“Addie and I will take you,” said my dad. He paused by the edge of the kitchen and saw Val and me standing there. “Val, you want to grab your mother’s coat?”
Val’s face was unreadable as she turned and ran up the stairs. This is perfect, I heard her say in my head. I was furious at Val if she’d meant what I thought she had, and angry at her mother and my father, too (she’d kissed him first, but he’d kissed her back). I was also, I found, consumed by a kind of guilty curiosity. What would it be like if Mrs. Adler and my father got married? What if Valerie and I were really, truly sisters? My mother could stay here with Jon and take care of him. My father and Mrs. Adler could live in the DiMeos’ old house—my dad was handy, he could fix it up, scrape off the peeling paint, patch the holes in the walls, and it would be weird for a while, but people got used to all kinds of things. Val would have a father. We would finally finish her pink-and-green bedroom, and we’d get matching beds that Val had shown me in a magazine, and…
“Here, Mom.” Val’s lips were pressed into a thin line as she helped her mother slip into her coat. Then, kneeling, she slid Naomi’s feet into her high-heeled silver shoes. “Come on,” she said. “The party’s over. Let’s go home.”
FOURTEEN
“So what happened to your parents?” Valerie asked as we drove east, along the wide, empty lanes of the Eisenhower Expressway, heading toward Chicago, where Dan lived in one of the high-rise buildings downtown. It was five in the morning, my first all-nighter in years, and I was exhausted, shaky from adrenaline and lack of sleep, but Val looked fresh as a flower, her skin creamy, hair falling in curls to her shoulders.
“My dad had an aneurysm the fall after we graduated.” I knew from Mrs. Bass that Valerie had been in California by then—she’d been able, through her father, to establish residency and enroll in one of the state schools. Mrs. Adler was still technically our neighbor, but by then she was spending most of her time in Cleveland with a new man. I’d been in New York for ten days, had settled into my apartment and started my classes in Art Appreciation and History of Painting at Pratt. My dad had been driving home after a day of installing windows in one of the big new houses in a development that had gone up in Elm Ridge. According to the drivers who’d been on the road behind him, his car had slowed, then drifted over the yellow line and through a metal barrier and proceeded almost gracefully down a slope before coming to rest in a pool of shallow water at the bottom of a ditch. He was just forty-six, dead behind the wheel. He’d had a weak spot in an artery at the base of his brain that had probably been there for years and had finally, quietly, exploded.
I’d been numb as Mrs. Bass gave me the news on the newly activated telephone. I’d felt like one of my father’s puppets, a thing made of wood and wire, as I’d told my new roommate what had happened, and called the dean of students, then a travel agent to book a flight back home. I’d stayed numb as I’d filled my suitcase and carried it to the sidewalk and caught a cab to the airport, numb as I’d boarded the plane, and then, when we were airborne, I had remembered a Saturday morning the previous spring.
I’d gotten up early and was going through what had become my weekend routine: bury the empty wrappers and ice-cream carton at the bottom of the trash can, put on a pot of coffee, pull on sweats and shoes, grab a bucket and scrub brush from the front hallway, and go outside to scrub graffiti off the driveway. Most mornings my father would come out to help me. We’d scrub, then go inside to drink black coffee once the words were gone. But that morning, he’d said, “You know, Pal, it won’t be like this forever.” The older and bigger I’d gotten, the less physically affectionate he’d become, but that morning he’d pulled me close and hugged me roughly, his arms tight around my back. “I’m proud of you,” he’d said. “You’re going to be fine.” The memory pierced me, and then I wasn’t numb… I hurt all over, burning with an agony I didn’t know I’d be able to survive. In 16D on the plane, I’d doubled over as if I’d been stabbed, sobbing, unable to catch my breath. My seatmate called the stewardess, who’d regarded me with contempt showing through her makeup. I wasn’t looking pretty, crammed into the tiny seat, the seat belt cutting into my belly, my cheeks bright red and my face wet with a plaster of tears and snot. “Are you all right, miss?” she asked, and I tried to collect myself. “My father died,” I blurted.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and handed me a stack of napkins and a can of Diet Coke—the best she could do, I guessed, under the circumstances.
At home, my mother was sitting on the sunporch, a notebook, with both pages blank, spread open in her lap. “I can’t believe he’s gone,” she’d said. Tears rolled steadily down her cheeks. I thought of all the condolence cards she’d written, how her job had been to find the right words for moments such as these, and how, now that it was her, she’d fallen back on that one phrase that she repeated all through the night and the following days: I can’t believe he’s gone.
The next morning, I’d been the one to take Jon to Marshall Field’s for a new suit, and explained to him over and over why he needed it. He’d remember for a while, then look down at himself, frowning at the stiff white shirt, fingering his tie. “Addie?” he’d say, and I’d take him aside and tell him again.
There’d been an obituary in the paper. I waited to see if Valerie would call, or send a letter, or maybe even show up at the service or the grave, but she didn’t. She was gone, her mother, too, and I guessed—at least I told myself—that it was likely neither one of them had heard the news.
My father died on a Tuesday. Though he’d been barely Jewish in life, death turned my dad into a believer. He was buried as quickly as we could arrange it, two days after his death, in accordance with the traditions of his faith—in a plain pine casket with a Star of David carved on its top, and a rabbi in a black suit with a black silk cap on his head, praying in a language I’d never heard before as the body was lowered into the ground.
On Saturday morning I woke up early, with the plan of clearing out the basement, packing up my dad’s tools and whatever puppets he’d left. Basement in the morning and his closet in the afternoon, I thought, slipping down to the kitchen to make toast and coffee. Maybe Jon would want some of my father’s clothes, cuff links or a watch to remember him by.
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