by Margo Rabb
Alex still wasn’t speaking to me the day of the surgery; she sat curled up in her square orange seat in the hospital lobby, with her calculator and protractor and textbook. I wandered in and out of the gift shop, carrying my books from school yet not opening one of them. I bought a new romance novel, Rosamunde’s Revelation, and skipped to the sex scenes. I was hyper-awake from exhaustion; all night I’d been unable to sleep. At three o’clock I’d gotten out of bed and started watching television, flipping between reruns of Twilight Zone and Love Boat, and periodically visiting the kitchen to rummage through the freezer. I opened a yellow Tupperware container and found the frozen three-month-old carcass of Jay Kasper’s Cocoa Krispies treats. Whenever I saw him in the halls at school now, he smiled at me faintly, as if he barely remembered who I was, and walked on. I threw his creation out and settled on a more recently purchased Sara Lee chocolate cake; I ate it frozen from the box while my imagination leaped and bounded off, alternating between scenes of my father on the operating table and visions of the wedding dress I’d marry Richard in, ivory sleeveless with long silk gloves.
At six that morning I’d started getting dressed. I didn’t wear my mother’s clothes, to try to keep peace with Alex for at least one day, but I used every kind of makeup my mother owned: eyebrow pencil and cheekbone highlighter, even a set of false eyelashes she’d bought for a Cleopatra costume one Halloween. I wore my own small wool hat and matching dress; in a moment of inspiration I stuffed my bra with cotton.
Late in the afternoon, I plopped down in the chair beside my sister, who was scribbling away in her notebook. For the first time that day she really looked at me.
“What’s on your face?”
“Nothing.”
She squinted. “Your eyes. They look weird.”
“They’re fake,” I said, and blinked at her. “The eyelashes. They make my eyes look big.”
She shook her head and went back to her work, and I read until I fell asleep. At five o’clock she nudged me awake—Richard stood before us in the lobby.
He looked tired but relieved. “It was a success,” he said. “Everything went well. He’s still unconscious—he will be for a while—but he looks good. I can take you up to see him.”
We packed up our books and followed Richard to the staff elevator. We didn’t speak. The tension of the past days and weeks trailed us into the elevator and up to the sixth floor.
No paintings hung on the walls of that floor; there were no couches, no solariums. Just random medical machinery I’d never seen before, parked throughout the corridors; the hulking machines looked like creatures from the future, as if they could scuttle away on their own. Nurses and doctors flurried by, their gazes gliding over our heads. Richard led us into the brightly lit recovery room. The beds were lined up like in an orphanage. He pointed out my father’s body.
His bed was at my chest level. Alex and I stood stunned before it, hypnotized. The transparent blue of the oxygen mask, the clicking and whirring of pumps and electronics, the breathing machine, the closed eyes, the random spots of dried blood, brown on the blank bedsheet. My father’s blood. It ran in tubes, transported to and from another machine. His whole body seemed like a technological, digital thing, as if where the machines started and stopped couldn’t be defined.
It wasn’t our father. It was some replacement, a wax model, a plaster shell. Our real father was upstairs with his Times and Sanka. The body in front of us was a mistake, and we stood there blinking at it, and at the other sheet-covered shapes with their mechanical breaths and computerized heartbeats, until finally Richard tapped our shoulders and led us out.
None of us spoke in the elevator, but Richard seemed proud and eager, as if seeing our father had actually pacified us somehow, instead of making me feel like I’d just seen him dead.
I held on to the straps of my book bag. Richard led us to the place where we’d been sitting before. He stared over our heads and stood beside us, as if waiting for something. I wanted to speak to him, to tell him that it wasn’t my father in that bed—to let him comfort me, wrap me in his arms and keep everything away—but I couldn’t say it; I didn’t even know how to begin.
Richard’s eyes focused on something down the hall; I turned to see what it was. I heard Gina Petrollo’s shoes clicking toward us even before her figure came into view.
“How did it go?” she asked, out of breath.
“Wonderfully,” he said. “No complications—everything’s fine.”
He stretched out his arms; his hand touched the edge of her back. It was the tiniest gesture, a flick. If I hadn’t been replaying his every movement again and again in my mind over the past three days, I’d have missed it. But there was something unmistakable in the motion that was intimate and familiar, the way my sister and I would sometimes pick a bug off each other; it was a touch that indicates more.
“I’m so glad,” Gina said, grinning at us. “We were so worried about you.” She reached over and enveloped my sister in a tight, long hug. Then she hugged me.
For a second I thought I’d suffocate, and I wanted to wrench myself away. But gathered into the pillow of her marshmallowy chest, inhaling her perfume, I almost didn’t want to be released. I couldn’t remember when I’d last been hugged—really, tightly hugged. Once clutched to her body, it almost didn’t matter who she was, until she let go.
She stood beside Richard, who smiled at us.
“Thanks, for everything,” Alex said quietly.
I couldn’t speak. Richard and Gina said “you’re welcome” with a kind of finality to their voices, and Richard shook our hands as he said good-bye.
As they walked off down the hall I started to cry. It was the first time I’d cried openly in the hospital. My body shook, my hat fell off, and some of the cotton balls roamed toward the middle of my chest; my rouge ran, and the eyeliner, the fake eyelashes, the whole great mass of it smeared off until I must have looked like modern art, a twisted Picasso, features falling all over the place.
“Look, you’re shedding,” Alex said, and plucked a hairy blob of false eyelash off my cheek. She held it up, like a spider.
I couldn’t stop crying. I knew it was the wrong time to cry publicly now, so late for my mother’s death, so prematurely for my father’s. What no one ever tells you is that people don’t die all at once, but again and again in waves, before their deaths and after. And I wasn’t just crying for watching Richard leave with Gina, or seeing my father’s body, or the fight with my sister, or even my mother. It was everything, suddenly—every person and object and speck of existence in the world seemed as if it could be lost. I kept crying until my sister put her arms around me, my fallen eyelashes folded inside a crumpled tissue, and said, “Come on,” and took me to the cafeteria to eat.
MY MOTHER’S FIRST LOVE
I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
—Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye
That summer, I kept dreaming about the man who was my mother’s first love. In the dream I followed him, detective-like, slinking through museums, coffee shops, libraries, subway trains, hoping he’d lead me to my mother. He strode like a movie star, confident and oblivious to the rest of the world; at dusk he wound his way through Central Park, down narrow paths along patches of forest to a small, secluded lake. There, drying off by the shore, stood my mother. She looked nothing like she had when I last saw her, with her hair matted against the hospital pillow and her belly bloated with growths. By the lake her black hair gleamed like velvet; her stomach looked taut and smooth. At last you’ve found us, she said, reaching for my hand. I’ve been waiting.
The dream had started in my summer English class, when Ms. Poletti asked us to write a story about true love.
Groans
all around. Billy Marino sailed a spitball at the blackboard. “I don’t know any love stories,” whined Luisa Rodriguez. Eddie Silva muttered “Bullshit” through his gold teeth. Marisol Peters ignored the class altogether to doodle across her No Guns in School! bookmark—a gift we’d all received from the Board of Education. I stared out the barred windows to the rolling pavement of the Bronx. I was in summer school for history and English; the only spring-semester class I’d excelled in was hygiene.
“Love is beauty,” Ms. Poletti sighed, off in her own reverie. We’d just finished reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning in class; Ms. Poletti had recited each stanza in a Britain-meets-Bronx accent, her flower-patterned dress dipping frightfully low as her bosom heaved. She was an anomaly at our school, flitting about like a robin, perching on our desks to impart to each of us seeds of hope. Rumors about her abounded: Luisa swore she’d seen Ms. Poletti adjusting her G-string in the girls’ bathroom; Billy had spotted someone on the subway reading a romance novel by a Madame Poletti. In the cafeteria and on the walk to the D train after school we made fun of her, arching our eyebrows, shrilling our voices, but the consensus was that she was an improvement over Mr. Tortolano, the English teacher we’d had that spring. He had been fired in May after his membership in the North American Man-Boy Love Association had been confirmed. Everyone was passing now—that is, everyone but me.
Failing English again was a particularly remarkable achievement, considering that I was the only native English-speaker in the class. I wasn’t a terrible writer; my subjects were the problem. For the how-you-overcame-your-deepest-loss assignment I’d written “Snuffy: Better Off Dead,” about my departed overweight gerbil, who’d suffered a slow and painful demise after getting stuck in the Habitrail. Most recently, for the topic of great social and political import, I’d completed “Plaid Pants: Should They Be Outlawed?” which had garnered a round of applause when I’d read it to the class, but received yet another U.
Ms. Poletti called me to her desk that day after class. She sat there like a magistrate escaped from Las Vegas, her sequined glasses slipping down her nose. “Miss Pearlman,” she said, “are you familiar with the phrase ‘Attitude is everything’?” She tapped a pink fingernail on my compositions. “There’s a tone to these essays that’s not suitable for the assignments. Good writing isn’t about glibness. It’s about life. Think Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Think ‘How Do I Love Thee?’”
She smoothed the ruffled pages. “Now, this Snuffy piece—I see things to admire here. Clear language. Solid composition.” She removed her glasses. “Yet you haven’t let your readers feel your triumph over this loss. What was your connection to Snuffy? What did he mean to you?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know how to explain myself. All I knew was that after school and the subway ride home, when I put my mother’s old typewriter on the dining room table, listened to my sister talk on the phone about logarithms, and heard my father snore in front of the TV (he liked to keep it on even while he slept, for company), the last thing I could write was something serious.
She surveyed the index card I’d filled in the first day of class. Under In your own words, why did you not succeed in English during the regular school year? I’d written, My mother died; my father had a heart attack. It was strange to see it on the stark white card—name, address, Social Security number, grade-point average, dead mother, sick father, heading for the orphanage.
“I know that other things have been going on in your life,” Ms. Poletti said. “But if you fulfill the assignment just one time, you’ll pass this class. I don’t think you want to stay in high school an extra year.”
I said I didn’t think so either.
She sighed. “You shouldn’t have trouble with this. It should be a pleasure to write about love.”
That night Alex gabbed on the phone about sine and cosine curves, and my father wheezed on the couch while zebras leaped across the TV screen. The narrator droned on about mating practices as I settled in front of my mother’s Smith Corona. The first thing that came to mind was my parents.
TRUE LOVE
On a cold, rainy night in March, over a year ago, Simon Pearlman gave his wife, Greta, their twentieth-wedding-anniversary present.
“Is it clothes?” Greta asked excitedly, clutching the huge box. “A case of wine? A crate of imported fruit?”
“Better,” Simon said.
Greta ripped open the cardboard to reveal a glimpse of shiny red enamel.
“what is it? what is it?” shouted the Pearlmans’ two charming young daughters.
The packaging fell away to reveal—a fire extinguisher.
“It was on special at Sears,” Simon said, taking the extinguisher from her, stroking it lovingly. “Should we test it?”
Alex, the elder daughter, jumped up excitedly. “Yes! Yes!” she cried. The younger daughter, Mia, shook her head like her mother; neither of them was very interested in fire extinguishers.
“Simon,” Greta groaned, “we don’t have time to test it. We’re supposed to be at the restaurant now. You agreed, for once, to go out tonight.”
Simon didn’t hear her. “I think that hooks there,” he mumbled to Alex.
“Simon, will you listen to me?” Greta screamed.
Simon didn’t look up.
“For once, will you just listen to me?!”
“Just a second—”
“Simon!” Greta lifted a plastic ashtray off the nearest shelf. She threw it at him. It missed and bounced off the floor. She picked up a candle in the shape of a turtle—a Chanukah present from her daughters years ago.
“Not the wax turtle!” the daughters shouted. “Not the wax turtle!”
I crumpled it up; this was not a love story. My parents had fought so frequently that eventually Alex and I removed all fragile objects from their shelves, and at night I’d lie awake listening to the arguing, my sheet wound in my fist as they screamed. In the beginning Alex and I had tried, in little ways, to repair our parents’ marriage: we taped the praising Queens Independent write-up of our father’s shoe repair shop to the refrigerator; we ordered two oversized laminated buttons made from their wedding photo. But soon my mother began to call her friend Fanny nearly every night (Fanny had divorced her husband, Irv, four years earlier) and whisper on the phone.
Fanny told my mother to give up trying to drag my father to restaurants and the ballet, and to take me instead. I loved being my mother’s date: together at Lincoln Center we’d cascade past the outdoor fountain, through the main hall, past the rustling taffeta and swishing silk of the finely dressed ladies with their sweeping furs and wafts of expensive perfume. I pretended we lived there, in this mansiony hall with marble banisters and chandeliers like explosions of glass. Afterward we’d linger at the Pirouette Café across the street, heavily under the spell of the performance, not ready to go home. Queens—my father and his stories of hammertoes and plantar warts, my sister shouting at her calculator as she practiced for Math Team—seemed like somebody else’s life. For the first time, I began to wonder whether my parents should be married after all.
One night at the Pirouette last summer, seven months before my mother died, her mind seemed elsewhere. “I was talking to Fanny the other day,” she said. “She invited me to come visit, for a little vacation. I was thinking you might like to come too, and see Lucy.”
I’d been friends with Lucy Gluckman since I was three, when she and her parents lived four blocks away; I hadn’t seen her since the divorce. In her letters she said she liked Maplewood, in upstate New York, much better: the houses weren’t attached, as they were in Queens—no more crazy Mrs. Fonchette scratching on the walls. And her father arrived for visits with presents overflowing from the trunk. Her boyfriend, Brad, was captain of the lacrosse team; in ballet class she was now working en pointe. Not wanting to feel left behind, I’d embellished my own life: I invented a passionate affair with Luigi, the handsome clerk at Cardially Yours, our corner gift shop; I told her that my recital at
the Flushing Academy of Dance had received a standing ovation, when in reality I’d pranced across the floor twelve counts early, like an escaped jumping bean. But the embellishments never seemed entirely false—sometimes at the Pirouette, after a performance, a part of me actually believed that one day I would be a dancer, twirling around that huge stage, leaping into Luigi’s arms.
“You’d like Maplewood,” my mother said. “There’s shopping, forests and lakes, and the community center, where Fanny teaches folk dancing. You could even take ballet there if you wanted.”
“It might be weird seeing Lucy—it’s been so long,” I said, wondering how I’d explain my less-than-stellar ballet technique.
“Maybe at first. Then things’ll be like before. Some of the people in Maplewood I haven’t seen in years—old friends from Washington Heights. People I’ve been wanting to see for a long time. Fanny said she’s surprised how little they’ve changed.”
Whenever we drove through Washington Heights my mother shuddered, remembering the grave-faced men and women shuffling from store to synagogue to their tiny, crumbling apartments, undecorated and bare—not like homes, my mother said. She told me once that her parents never hugged her; I couldn’t even imagine it, our hugs were such an event. Even at fourteen I’d sit on her lap on the couch some nights, facing her, nuzzling my nose into her neck, talking as she kissed my hair—“huggies,” we called these moments, like they were a game or a performance.