by Amy Bloom
I had to smile; when “we” cleaned up, Mrs. Hill put on an old plaid apron and sat back in her recliner while I scrubbed the backsplash and threw out dead plants and moldy bread.
I didn’t like cleaning, and Mrs. Hill never offered to pay me, and even if she had, Reverend Shales had made it very clear that I was not ever to take money from her.
“I can’t. I’ve got school stuff. The paper. I have to go to a meeting.” I didn’t think Mrs. Hill would know that the special ed class put out the school paper all by itself.
“I think you might have to skip that meeting, sugar. I don’t like to put you out, you know that, but I really do need your help on Tuesday. Can’t have my Doctor FancyPants shakin’ her head, talkin’ about putting Mrs. Hill in some home. I need you Tuesday.”
If I came Tuesday, I would be there all the time. I could feel her need for me reaching out like terrible black roots, wrapping themselves right around me, burying me in wet brown earth.
“I’m really sorry. I just can’t. I have to be at that meeting. Maybe there’s someone else from church.” The A.M.E. Zion Church seemed to me to be overflowing with neatly dressed gloved and hatted ladies eager to help.
“Have someone from church come in here? Don’t talk crazy. You’re the one I need. And I need you on Tuesday. It’s not too much to ask if you think on it.”
I didn’t say anything, hoping that she’d get embarrassed about being so insistent.
“Come here, sugar. It’s not too much to ask since you’ve got three of my spoons. Three silver spoons and you won’t come on Tuesday and help out your friend Mrs. Hill? I call that selfish. And stupid. I call that stupid. Steal from me and then make me mad? Don’t you think I’m going to go right to Reverend Shales and tell him that nice little Jewish girl he found for me is stealing my silver? Don’t you think I’m going to have to call your father and tell him that his daughter’s a thief, taking advantage of a poor old lady, half-blind and living all on her own?”
“Jesus,” I said, keeping my voice low, so she wouldn’t leap out of her recliner and attack me.
“Don’t you call on Jesus.” Her voice softened. “You can have the spoons. You can have a teacup too. I can’t get by with only Saturdays, and that’s the truth.” She leaned back in her chair, pressing her cheek into the ratty old doily she’d pinned to the headrest.
I went over to her, more ashamed that I had made her beg than about the stealing. I would make it up to her; I would walk in the pathways of righteousness every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday for the rest of her life.
A Balm in Gilead
Ellyn and Cindi, who had followed me faithfully every day through the winter of sixth grade yelling “Thou shalt not steal” and “Watch your stuff, here comes the thief,” moved on to boys and pretty, popular, less honestly aggressive selves. They said hi when we passed in the halls, to show that they were nice girls, but they didn’t say my name, to make it clear that I was not part of their group. There was only one person still interested in my criminal past, a big redheaded eighth-grader, arms like pocked marble, lashless blue frog eyes watching for me as she leaned, surefooted and excited, on the door of my locker. I was so far off the mainland of junior high that I couldn’t see she was barely one notch above me on the reject pile. I didn’t even know she was crazy, but I don’t think anyone did. I thought she was just mean and my destiny.
I tried to find safe corner seats at isolated tables for study hall, but every other day Deenie sat down across from me. The first Monday, she cracked her knuckles a few times and handed me a sheet of paper. She had drawn a picture of a fat little girl hanging from a gibbet, wavy lines indicating the swinging of her feet. In later pictures the girl was frying in the electric chair, hair sprayed straight out from her head; one time she was lying in six pieces on the ground, with “Thief = Shit” carefully blocked out under her in strawberry-scented marker. Deenie smiled at me, clinically curious. I counted the dots in the grey ceiling tiles, wondering whether I would die or just be paralyzed for life if I jumped from the second-story window. I bit the insides of my cheeks to keep my face still and ran my tongue over the tiny grooved holes inside my mouth. Her notes got more elaborate, whole paragraphs describing my crimes, illustrated by drawings of my violent, Road Runner-like deaths. At the end of seventh grade she went to a private high school. Five years later, I saw her sitting across from me at the Aegean Diner, drinking coffee and poking at piles of change scattered over the tabletop. Her red hair was dyed black. She nodded vaguely, and I have to say I was a little hurt that she didn’t remember me.
Eighth grade. Mr. O’Donnell discovered that I had the uncanny and otherwise useless gift of flawless sentence diagramming. If I was allowed to leave class and go to the lunchroom, I brought back twenty-eight perfectly corrected papers. I didn’t have to take a single English test that year, and got on good terms with the cafeteria ladies, who used to fold their arms in front of the baked goods when they saw me coming. Now we were all pals. I walked in three times a week with a quarter for the carton of milk for Mr. O’Donnell’s ulcer, a fat sheaf of papers under my arm, and my new Saint Christopher medal around my neck. I’d found it in the girls room and thought that if anyone should have one, it was me. It looked good down between my breasts, knocking against the pink bow on my bra.
There were other, fatter girls in navy blue A-line skirts and loose sweaters, arranging and rearranging the Honor Society bake sale table, running their fingers along plate edges and cupcake overhangs, and other, braver girls in sloppy shirts and overalls, their long hair twisted up in barrettes they’d made at Bucks Rock leather shop, sitting on the back stairs passing cigarettes around. I clung to my own marginal, frightened identity and refused to be part of any group that would have me.
My mother went to England for two weeks in October, and my father went to Oregon after Thanksgiving. She brought me a white cashmere cardigan and he brought me a malachite butterfly on a silver chain and I thought both were pretty in their way and I lost them. I don’t remember anything else about eighth grade because my body took over my life. The changes surprised me, even though I’d seen the Snow White and Her Menstrual Cycle filmstrip in sixth grade. Everything was moving, even while I slept, and when I woke up, flesh I had known my whole life had slid off or moved down or hidden itself under a blanket of thin dark hair. I wouldn’t have mentioned my period to my mother at all if I hadn’t had to apologize for the blood smeared across the top and bottom sheets, seeping down to cling to the ruffled edges of my lilac shorty pajamas. My mother stripped my bed herself and plunged everything into cold water in the tub as I stood behind her in my wet pajamas, pressing my legs together to keep blood from dripping onto the lilac bath mat. Right then, chin tucked down to steady the pile of clean linen, she was not my chill, familiar mother. She was the woman in overalls who attacked white fly in the greenhouse, who rubbed an ice cube against a wad of bubblegum stuck in my hair down to the scalp, and took it out without a cross word. Her suddenly rough, competent hands snapped in the pleasure of the task, and her lips set in a cheerful can-do line. I longed for her the way lovers in movies longed for each other, across time and space, their eyes looking right past what was possible.
She pushed me down on the toilet seat with one tiny hand. I waited for her to come back, afraid to move until she brought me what I knew would be the right thing; she came in with a small blue box of Tampax and a pair of dry underpants.
“Don’t wear light colors when you have it, lovey,” she said, and left, and I pressed my face against the clean pajamas.
My mother had rules and guidelines for life, and although none of them applied to the life I’d led so far, she delivered them with great force, sometimes digging her hand into my shoulder until I nodded. Only beauty gives life meaning, she said. Good manners are more important, and more durable, than feelings. Natural fibers and a flattering cut are all that matter in clothing. Also, men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.
These ideas were held by my mother’s friends, too: “progressive,” apparently romantic, sixth-generation upper-class daughters of twits and earls. Everyone who knew our family knew that my mother was the daughter of a barrister and his landed-gentry wife, both tragically killed in the Blitz; in some stories they were buried in each other’s arms, in my favorite they were overcome by smoke after pulling their servants out of the burning rubble.
What everyone knew was a lie, except the English part. My mother was the illegitimate daughter of a London prostitute who had just enough feeling for her newborn baby to bundle her up in a stained sheet and deliver her, clots of blood still clinging to her little scalp, to Great-aunt Lil in Putney. My mother left school and Putney (and Aunt Lil and Cousin Harriet) at sixteen. World War Two gave her the opportunity to re-create herself. She took off for Liverpool and ran goods for black-marketeers and did other things that the poor and resourceful do in major ports.
When I read The Little Princess I saw my mother, not myself, as the forlorn, aristocratic little girl, befriended and heaped with presents by the very kind and very rich Indian Gentleman. I identified with her starving, dim-witted companion, roll crammed into her mouth, eyes darting in terror as she muttered thanks in dreadful yowling tones. If I had met the brave, lying girl Cousin Harriet knew, I think I would have liked her. I could have admired her improvised and perfected self; the pinched, pasty face turned into fashionable slenderness, terrible abandonment replayed as well-bred self-sufficiency. We both knew I was not the daughter she’d planned for, was not at all the necessary, dimpled denial of Aunt Lil’s boardinghouse, of night bicycle rides, two pints of gin strapped under her jacket, butter sweating through waxed paper in her book bag; of head lice and chopped-off hair. Cousin Harriet visited when I was eight and spent our only weekend together setting my straight hair on hot metal rollers until my scalp blistered and telling me the truth about my mother. As she unrolled one stiff, stupid ringlet after another, I saw the nuns sweeping my mother’s blonde curls across the room and into the dustbin and my mother turning her back to the class.
“No blubbing, mind you, like the other little girls, just wet eyes. And only cried a bit when we walked home.”
Margaret was brought to the States by Stan Muslic, an army captain, who married her somewhere near the family’s dairy farm in Ithaca. (Cousin Harriet was not sure about Ithaca, but was very sure about the farm part.) For all I know, she loved Captain Muslic madly, and his absurd death, skewered by his ski pole three days into their honeymoon, nearly finished her off just when she thought she was safe at last. After Cousin Harriet left, I searched my mother’s nightstand and her drawers, understanding that she had a past and had a self that came before me, but I never found a picture of Stan Muslic, nor one of Margaret Brown Muslic before she married my father.
I pressed my mother for details of Life Before Sol and found out only that she left Ithaca after a few years and studied art. This is what I made up: She sketched at night while lying on her pallet in the chicken coop and lived on the table scraps of the large and vile Muslic family. She sent away for art books with her egg money. Unable to endure their harshness, their obesity, their utter lack of manners, she fled to New York City, where she fell in love with garmentos, labor union organizers, knock-off Dior suits, and anonymity. She supported herself buying and selling antiques and reproductions and fakes. For herself in those early years, she bought only sketches from up-and-coming artists and two elegant, witty Limoges boxes, one of a hot-air balloon, one of a white-and-gilt piano with a single black note painted inside. She gave me the boxes instead of a bat mitzvah.
Margaret was twenty-six, with a nineteen-inch waist and a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, when she met my father. In my version, she looks a great deal like a blonde Vivien Leigh before she lost her marbles. The men she met must all have been married, or losers, or something worse, because she became fond of my father during his twenty-five-minute lunch breaks from Phillips, Kritzer and Kahn, the best firm a young Jewish accountant could join in 1953 (as he told me a hundred times). She let him browse among the antiques as though he belonged there, and let him look at her as though his interest was not absurd. He must have thought she was the answer to his prayers, the shield for his defects: naturally thin, naturally blonde, obviously English (meaning not Jewish), and artistic (meaning sexy) without being hysterical.
I don’t know what my mother thought. Her bravery had limits; she believed that marriage provided camouflage and safe passport, that she was at risk without it. I don’t say she was wrong. I just wish she’d stayed single a little longer, looked a little further. Sunday mornings I sat in front of the TV, watching cartoons and reading in my pink, pilly robe. I licked the corners of my mouth until they cracked and bled, pressing them dry on a tissue. My father threw The Saturday Evening Post across the room, saying I was “just like Aunt Freda, for God’s sake.” When I tired of imagining my own dead body sprawled at the bottom of the front hall stairs, I pictured him crushed to death by Great-aunt Freda and her sister Aunt Dorothy and their brother Uncle Izzy, all relatives I’d never met, left behind in the villages of Poland and the chicken farms of New Jersey.
* * *
My mother left me alone in the bathroom for about an hour. Finally, I figured out that you had to take the cardboard off before you used the tampon, and after that, my period was boring. I didn’t bleed much, and I didn’t smell too bad. I actually liked the smell of iron and salt. I didn’t keep a little calendar like some girls, so I ruined about twenty pairs of panties that year and took to carrying extras in my schoolbag, along with six tampons, Maybelline Frosted Peach lipstick, Lush Lash mascara, Midnight Pearl eyeshadow, and a Cornsilk compact. I looked in that little mirror constantly and covertly. I stroked my thighs and breasts, shaved my legs every other day. I examined every inch of my face and front, and stole my mother’s pink European gels and aqua creams, sometimes exfoliating, hydrating, and pore-minimizing all in one Saturday night. I used a loofah on all my rough spots and slept on a stolen satin pillowcase to combat premature wrinkling. I bleached the tops of my toes so that when I appeared on the Riviera, Sean Connery would not be disgusted by the sight of my darkly hairy feet. I languished seductively in the bathroom mirror, using the steam and my towel-turban to create movie star cheekbones and attitude. I would not say it to anyone (who would I say it to, even if I’d been willing?), but I thought I had potential.
In ninth grade, no one cared about what anybody’d done in elementary school. When Frannie Grant, the most popular freshman girl, was browsing with her group just one aisle away from me in Woolworth’s she smiled at me, her famous triangular smile, and I picked up a bouquet of mascaras, black and mink and teal blue, one for each of her friends, and a tray of eleven coordinated eyeshadows, the nearest expensive thing I could grab, and walked out of the store. I put it all into her cupped hands.
“I have more stuff than I need,” I said. “Knock yourselves out.”
Boys looked at me carefully, smashed into me in the halls, but didn’t speak. Rachel Schwartz lent me lunch money and taught me to say “Fuck you” in Hebrew, Arabic, and Swahili. Rachel was the only person worth talking to. When we were in fifth grade and she was the new girl from New York City, she invited me over for three weeks in a row. We played Lawrence of Arabia and terrorized her mother’s elderly dachshund, Schatzie, who had to wear a chiffon scarf around his neck and be the sheik. We played Sailor, and I put on one of her brother’s blue baseball shirts and walked bowlegged around her canopied bed until the big moment, when I undid her bra and laid my head on her soft, custardy breast, making sure my nose and lips didn’t touch her raspberry-pink nipple. Because of her big breasts, Rachel got to be the Lady. A few times, dressed in her father’s black silk kimono, Rachel made me tie her to the metal pipe in their semi-finished basement and light matchbook fires in a circle around her. She swooned neatly, slipping out of the kimono, and I untied her and dragged her over the cork floor to the
safety of the laundry room, reviving her with tender pinches and sips of soda. Her head lay back on my arm, and as the Sailor and the Lady we French-kissed, and she tasted like Fresca and the smell of doused matches was in her hair. We read to each other from the Playboy Adviser, whose mascot was a Bunny Tinkerbell with fascinating, garterless black hose pressing into her thighs. Our last Saturday, we pulled her mother’s stockings over our faces and pretended we were robbing a big bank and the loot was her mother’s costume jewelry and all the change in her father’s sock drawer. Rachel didn’t call me the next day and she didn’t call me the next week. I waited and smiled warmly when I saw her at school and still she didn’t call. She walked around the courtyard with Sabra and Julianna Cohen, a twist of arms around waists.
By the next year she’d bounced off the Cohen girls to the most popular socks-matching-sweaters circle, and in eighth grade her picture was in the junior high yearbook eleven times, six times with boys. But in ninth grade, as I was finally figuring out the rules, happily wearing skirts barely covering my underpants and hiphuggers riding just above my pubic bone, she quit horseback riding and modern dance and pep band and got fat and angry and more weird-looking than the rest of us. She wore sunglasses and bunny bedroom slippers and mirror-spotted Indian halters to school. She called to tell me the dachshund had had a heart attack, and then she said “I’m sorry,” and we never got off the phone. We played records into the receivers for each other, and occasionally Rachel played her guitar over the phone. On weekends we answered the personal ads in the The Village Voice and made dates we would never keep with grown men whose desperation and terrifying want could only be managed by ridicule. The more elaborate the date plans, the more specific the costume requests, the harder we laughed when we got off the phone. Given weapons, we would have been snipers.
Most of my teachers liked me, and I didn’t feel too bad about being in Extended Algebra, which took three semesters to do what everyone else did in two. If they had had Super-Extended Algebra, I would have been in that. Mr. Provatella saw that although I grasped the concepts of algebra, I had not learned how to divide and could barely multiply, and while everyone else struggled through endless sheets of equations, he and I talked about infinity and the envelope of time.