Come to the Edge

by Christina Haag

  I went to Sacred Heart for nine years. When I was old enough, I got a colored pass and took the city bus each day up Madison and down Fifth. It was a seed-kernel of a world, at once tight and about to burst. One of ritual and hegemony. We imagined ourselves different from one another, that each of our stories was special, but with rare exception, most of us lived in the small patch of privilege between East Sixty-fourth and Ninety-sixth streets. The West Side by Lincoln Center, where I had ballet class twice a week, was another country, and Downtown another planet.

  It wasn’t until I was fourteen and about to leave Sacred Heart that I fully questioned any of it. It was spring, close to our last day, and I was walking with the one Jewish girl in the school, who also happened to be in my class. Rachel was excused from chapel each week, which made us all jealous, and her mother was glamorous—a jazz pianist with a wicked sense of humor and a trust fund, who let us play with her wigs, her muumuus, and her fake nails. Their apartment was bigger than ours, and it was always dark. When I slept over, I’d wait for the sound of Rachel’s breathing in the next bed. Then I’d sneak down the long corridor to find her mother in the den. It would be dark save for the blue glow of the television and the red tip of her cigarette. I’d curl up on the couch beside her, and we’d watch The Late Late Show and I’d listen to her stories of old boyfriends. If I was lucky, she’d pull out her Ouija board and tell my future.

  It came without warning on that spring day—a gauntlet. We were close to Park Avenue, by the Brick Presbyterian Church, when Rachel turned to me with what looked to be a smile and said, “Do you really believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”

  My mouth fell open. I felt like I’d been slapped. I’d known her for eight years, and she’d never said anything like that. We were close to the corner, and I could hear the cabs whizzing by. It wasn’t just the theological issue—in fifth grade, we had studied Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam, and in seventh grade, for the whole year, I had been obsessed with Chaim Potok—it was that her words exploded the foundation of everything I knew: a world solid and immutable, with all the rules in place. Whether I conformed or rebelled was another matter; it was there, safe, to push against.

  No one had ever asked me this question, and when she did, doubt slipped easily beside me. In that instant, everything began to fade: the mansion, the Arts Days, the felt banners, the Virgin with her lily and her book, the quiet on the stairs and the darkened stone, the shoe box full of gloves.

  We stood at the light, awkward and silent. I believe she was happy, as if a war inside her had been won, but I was unmoored. I had no answer; I wouldn’t for years. As we crossed the street, I wondered how long she had been waiting to say those words. What I didn’t know then was how long I’d been waiting to hear them.

  “Don’t be afraid!” my father yells. He’s waist-deep in water, far out on the second sandbar. I’m on the first—hands on my hips, foam at my ankles, and heels deep in wet sand. It’s August. That’s when they come, the sandbars and the jellyfish and the warm, shallow moats behind me near the shore. The waves are longer now, thicker—with storms roiling to the south. It’s the best time to ride our navy canvas rafts, hurling and bouncing all the way, until we hit sand and fall off, scratched and breathless from the race. It’s when we stand on our father’s shoulders and dive off into the shimmering wall of waves. “Careful,” he’ll say when I scrabble up his back. “I’m not as young as I used to be.”

  My father is happiest in the ocean. It’s something I have with him.

  I can’t see, but I know he’s wearing the old suit, the blue-and-white-checked one. He has a new one with anchors he got for his birthday (same kind, different pattern), but he never wears it. Janie’s father is younger. His suit has big Hawaiian flowers—pink and orange—and it hangs to his knees. He grew his hair long for the summer. But my father never changes. He’ll wear the old suit until it fades to white or my mother throws it out, whichever comes first.

  “Come on!” He’s using his happy/angry voice, the one you pay attention to, the one that might hurt. So I dive in through the heavy surf, the water a cool, bright knife. “See,” he says when I shoot up beside him like an otter. We’re past the break and I stand on my toes. “Now how hard was that.” It’s not a question and he’s laughing. He’s always laughing then. It’s the summer he turns fifty. He’s happy with my mother. They have parties with wooden dance floors built just for one night, a bartender in each corner, and a band. He’s still Fun Daddy and takes us for rides on his motorbike in the fields around our summerhouse.

  My mother drives us to the station in the white wood-paneled Ford wagon. We wait for my father’s train and place pennies on the tracks. My brother Bobby and I climb off the platform ledge. Below, it smells like oily gravel. We line our coins up carefully, dull copper against the silver rail. My mother gives us extra ones for Andrew. He’s only three, too small to come with us, and he watches from above.

  My father always takes the Cannonball. Before it stops, steam hissing like Hades underneath, I spot him between the cars, and when he sees me, he makes a Daddy face. That’s another game we have. He jumps down—suit jacket still on (although it’s hot), a briefcase in one hand and a newspaper in the other. After the whistle and the “All aboard Montauk,” he helps us find the pennies in the tar, their faces ruined now and pink. On special days, we use nickels, but never quarters. Because that’s illegal, he says. And we need to know the meaning of a dollar.

  He tells us stories then. Depression stories, war stories, slipping-out-the-window-at-night-when-he-is-a-boy stories, sliding down the drainpipe to gamble with marbles in his Pennsylvania river town. Stories of when he is a pilot, a Democrat, a union organizer, a businessman, a rascal, a Romeo. The son of a railroad worker, who, by daring and chutzpah, made good and married a beauty. He tells us the stories, he says, to teach us about life.

  My father is not a vain man. A handsome man, yes, with the profile of a young Brando. People stop him on the street, mistaking him for Ted Kennedy, to which my grandmother replies, “Much more handsome.” He knows the effect, but he’s interested in other things. And only more so as he gets older: the rumpled raincoat, the frayed cuff, and shoes worn and resoled when he can well afford new ones. “You’ll understand when you have children,” he grumbles.

  It wasn’t always so, a friend of my parents tells me later, when I am sixteen. I’m friends with her daughter, and we’re sitting in their Beekman Place kitchen as her mother rhapsodizes. “Your father … Now, your father was a catch.” I lean in and can smell the Scotch on her breath. Custom suits, white silk scarves, designer apartments, and parties. I’ve seen the pictures, and I remember the colored linen sport coats he used to wear. But it’s as if she’s talking about another person.

  When I come home that night, he’s up late working, a single light on in the apartment. He looks up over his reading glasses, asks how my night was, and then goes back to his papers. I stand there in the hallway watching him, trying to reconcile the whimsy of white silk with the man bent over yellow legal pads by a standing brass lamp.

  “Put your fingers together. Keep your head down. And kick.” We’re bodysurfing, and his big thing is timing. I hold my hands as if I’m praying, but flat out, with thumbs crossed and elbows straight, and I hear him. “It’s coming! Not this one!” We watch TV together late at night and guess the endings—that’s another thing we have, we’re both night owls. And now, in the water, we guess the waves.

  There’s a home movie: I am small, and he flings me in the surf by an arm and a leg. It appears almost painful, but each time I run back for more, my face shining. With Bobby, this doesn’t work so well. He cries, imagining sharks. Aligned with my mother already, he sticks to the pool. “Respect its power,” my father says. “Never turn your back.” And I know, because he’s told me, that when the big rollers come, I need to dive long and low so I don’t get tangled in the break. If this happens, he says to hold my breath, make myself into a tight ba
ll, and trust that the ocean will spit me back up. “It’ll be over soon,” he promises. “And I’ll be there.”

  This is before a lot of things. Before he votes for Nixon, before the battles in high school, before he’s angry most always, and before the stroke that years from now will leave him childlike, without interest in all that drove him.

  It’s when he takes me on night drives and tells me about love—the hometown girl; the wartime sweethearts in Paris, and the stockings and soap he gave them; the actresses and models at the Beverly Hills Hotel; the wild times on Fire Island. The ones who still, he knows, hold a torch for him. He keeps a shoe box, filled with snapshots of old flames, hidden in the attic. A secret I keep for him. One of the secrets I keep.

  This is the summer I am eleven. I look up the sexy parts in Mary Renault books. I finish In Cold Blood when my parents aren’t looking and hide my journal under the footed bathtub in the guest room. I wear a rope bracelet and cotton bikinis with ties on the sides. Before, I would wander the beach without my top and think nothing of it, but no longer. It’s the summer I can still dive from my father’s shoulders, the summer I still believe in his stories, the summer I am still his.

  We’ve started diving now. He steadies me on his back with both hands and lowers down into the water. I’m taller than last year. It’s tricky, but we get it. I wobble on the first dive, and he yells to keep my legs together. I swim back and we wait.

  Remember this time. Soon it will start going fast. He says it like it’s a bad thing. We’re between waves now, and he won’t look at me, his eyes as far away as Portugal. I scrunch my face and pray he’s right. I want the days to rumble on, spin out, race ahead. I want to close my eyes and be there. It’s all so endless: the summers, the school year in the city, the car rides, piano lessons, the nuns, the times tables, hot Sundays in church—endless, endless hours. I want to be twelve, to be sixteen. To kiss a boy, smoke a cigarette, have the curve when I lie on my side. I want to begin, to become who I will be.

  But he tells me to remember, and I do. My arches curled on the slip of his shoulders, his back lowering like a whale, the clasp of our fingers wet and braided. The sun’s in my eyes and there’s a slight shift of knees before the wave comes and I go.

  Waiting

  The meeting of two personalities is like the

  contact of two chemical substances: if there is

  any reaction, both are transformed.

  —CARL JUNG

  In high school, we run in packs. It was no different in New York City in the mid-1970s at elite private schools such as Collegiate, Brearley, Dalton, Trinity, and Spence. We roamed the streets of Park and Fifth and ventured deep into the crevices of Central Park. We piled into Checker cabs, six or seven of us, or took the subway to Astor Place to wander the gridless Greenwich Village streets, untouched by designer outposts. SoHo was deserted; Little Italy was Italian; thrift shops were thrift, not “vintage.” We passed the Bottom Line and Free Being Records on the way to Caffè Dante or Washington Square Park. The subway, green and tattooed with the tags of graffiti masters, rattled and rolled. We stood at the front of the first car, window down, the rush of speed on bright faces.

  Stone chess tables at Carl Schurz Park, the Burger Joint on Broadway, coffee shops near our schools, wisteria arbors behind the Bandshell, Alice in Wonderland, the winged angel of Bethesda Fountain, the boat pond, Belvedere Castle, and the long even steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—these we made ours.

  “Later at Alice.”

  “Catch you at the Met.”

  It was all about meeting. That’s when the magic happened.

  It’s the weekend, and in that narrow Upper East Side hub, we’re looking for apartments devoid of parents. Some are done up like Versailles, with gold accents, mirrored hallways, paintings glowing under their very own lamps, and Nat Shermans, like pastel candies, artfully fanned in small china cups. Others are more restrained—pale sofas, family pictures framed in silver, and everywhere the smell of soap. On the West Side, ornate gothic caverns rise, the stone dark with soot. And the buildings have names: the Kenilworth, the Beresford, the El Dorado. The real estate boom of the late eighties hasn’t happened yet, and the West Side lacks the spit and polish of the East Side. It’s dirtier, more dangerous, exotic. Often we head farther east or north, to smaller apartments without doormen—or with doormen whose uniforms fit more loosely—apartments of friends whose parents are not titans of industry or scions of inherited wealth, but schoolteachers, designers, artists, editors, or scientists.

  We do our homework and we hang out. We smoke Marlboro Lights and we smoke pot. We lie about where we are going. We have crushes on boys we do not know but talk about incessantly. We are juvenile and we are jaded. We are insecure and we are worldly. With our friends as mirrors, we slip on identities like wispy summer dresses and just as easily toss them aside. Like teenagers everywhere, we are trying to find out who we are. Only we are doing it in a city that in 1975 has been almost felled by a fiscal crisis, where police and social services have been cut drastically, and homicide and muggings are rampant. Despite this, it is a city that knows itself to be the center of the world, the matrix where art and commerce thrive and power and excellence are de rigueur. This city. Ours. We can feel its promise; it’s there beneath our feet. A shallow beat in dark asphalt.

  In 1974, I left the Convent of the Sacred Heart and its gray wool uniforms for Brearley. Although Sacred Heart went through twelfth grade, I wanted a change. Many girls in my class left that year. Some ventured as far as Spence across the street or Nightingale-Bamford around the corner. Some left the city entirely for boarding school. But I wanted to stay in New York, and my heart was set on the girls’ school in a ten-story building by the East River. One of the most competitive schools in the city, Brearley at that time resembled a prison and bristled with excitement. Caroline Kennedy had transferred there as well, but by the time I arrived, she had already left for boarding school. I didn’t know it then, but my world was edging closer to John’s.

  “The Brearley,” as it is known, may have lacked the poetry of the Otto Kahn mansion, but it had a major plus: no uniforms. The younger girls ran around in navy jumpers, with bloomers for gym, but there was no dress code in high school. The feel was more bluestocking than deb, and although there were pockets of Brooks Brothers and smatterings of Fiorucci and Cacharel, the standard fare was tattered jeans. It was something I looked forward to.

  The summer before ninth grade, a letter in the school’s signature shrunken envelope arrived. Inside, I was both welcomed to New Girl Orientation and asked to choose an elective. Music, dance, drama, and art were stacked one under the other. Next to each, a miniature red box. Mark one, the letter instructed. I was stunned. To my mind, they were inextricable from one another, part of one whole—what I loved best and far from optional. I stared at the word “elective” for a long time. Then I picked up my pencil and, with something akin to pain, checked drama.

  Whereas Sacred Heart classmates were cruel behind your back, Brearley girls were more direct. They said what they meant. Opinion and curiosity thrived, and our class took it to the extreme. In an empty locker on the fifth floor, we kept a stash of racy books, calling it our pornographic library and even issuing library cards. Being Brearley, the smut was classic—along the lines of Fanny Hill, The Story of O, and Anaïs Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love—and we devoured each behind folders during chorus, until a zealous math teacher ratted us out.

  Drama was taught by Beryl Durham. Small, muscular, and Welsh, she had silver hair that ran the length of her back and a face in constant rapture. She told us tales of Julian Beck and the Living Theatre, and of her friends “Larry” Olivier and Vivien Leigh. When goaded, she divulged that sex was just like strawberry ice cream—an improvement, at least, over the Sacred Heart nurse’s “like scratching an itch.” We worked on Elmer Rice’s Street Scene that year and a bad play by Giraudoux in which the tall girls played men and I was the heroine. For m
ost, drama class was time to goof off, gossip, get Beryl to tell her stories and then make fun of her—anything but the embarrassing prospect of pretending to be someone else. But I was a fourteen-year-old who could not wait to lose herself in make-believe. In me, Beryl saw one of her own. Before classes ended for the term, she took me aside behind the heavy curtain in the auditorium. She was retiring at the end of the year. “You won’t get what you need here,” she said, her voice raspy and certain, her witch eyes wavering from blue to white. I nodded gravely, but before I turned to go, she pressed a small piece of paper into my hand. On it were the words HB Studio and an address on Bank Street.

  My best friend in ninth grade was more experienced than I was. She took me under her wing, told me whose parents were famous and why, which girls were Legacy, and what the Social Register was. Most important, she made sure I never walked up Eighty-fourth Street to the two-block no-man’s-land ruled by neighborhood toughs. Chapin and Brearley had addresses on East End Avenue’s thin strip of privilege, but the half block west into old Yorkville was iffy. The toughs were just kids, really—kids who sat on stoops, who had knives, and whose favorite pastime was scaring nubile private school girls. “Why can’t the police stop them?” I asked her. We were huddled at the corner of Eighty-fifth Street. I was blocking the wind that tore down East End from the river so that she could light her cigarette. She shrugged. “It’s their turf. Besides, the fathers are all cops.”

  My friend went everywhere on her bike, dodging traffic in a faded jean jacket, her stick-straight pale hair flying behind. She lived in a town house off Madison Avenue, and her parents were divorced. We’d sit on her bed after school and talk about boys. I’d never been kissed, and she promised to tell me the secret of kissing, but only if I was her slave for the year. She knew John. He went to Collegiate, the boys’ school across the park and brother school to ours. He’d been to a party at her house the year before and had left a black leather ski glove, which she kept hostage on her dresser. Part of learning the secret meant listening to her go on about how cute he was and how she would become Mrs. JFK Jr. Sometimes when she passed notes to me during Spanish class, she signed them that way as a joke.