Love Is a Rebellious Bird

by Elayne Klasson

  You began to stroke my head. “Judith, I feel so terrible for her. It’s a tragedy. She has a little kid. She and her ex-husband adopted him when she couldn’t have children. The dad is a real loser. He did drugs heavily. Now he’s in jail and she’s alone. Sick, with a small child she lives for.” You looked out the window and then back at me. “Honestly, Rocket, I didn’t think all of this would happen between us.” You swept your hand across the room to encompass, I suppose, “all of this.”

  “What did you think would happen?” I asked in a whisper.

  “I thought it was great, of course. That we reconnected. We were such good friends back then. I love being with you. We’ve always meant so much to each other. But I didn’t expect to feel these feelings for you.” You kissed me softly on the forehead, then over my eyes.

  “I never didn’t feel this way for you,” I said and sat up. “It’s always been the same for me. I’ve loved you ever since we were children. You must have known that.” My hands were beginning to tremble and I was having a hard time getting the words out. I had never spoken honestly with you about what I felt and it frightened me. In the rules of our relationship, it was an unsaid agreement that I not talk about my love for you.

  You winced. “No. What we have has always seemed outside of normal day-to-day life. When we’re together, it’s something separate and special between us alone,” you said and at first you spoke hesitantly. “When we would spend hours in my room, after my mother died, it was our own secret space. The same as this room is now. Ours alone. There’s no one else. Afterward, we go back to real life.”

  “This is real to me, Elliot,” I said.

  “I know, I know. But you have to remember that time in New York, when I was studying for the bar?” I saw you become more sure of what you wanted to say now, warming to your own words. You were constructing your legal argument and it was starting to coalesce. “After you and Seth traveled. You were completely strong. So independent. I think I was intimidated by you. When I watched you walk away that day back to Seth, I knew he was everything I wasn’t. Fun, spontaneous. He was your real life. Not me.”

  “Meredith doesn’t know about me, does she? She doesn’t even know I exist, does she?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Judith, come on. She isn’t like you. She’s not tough and capable like you. Especially now that she’s sick. Of course I’ve told her about you, what a good friend you’ve always been. I’ve told her I’ve visited you here. She knows you’re important to me.”

  “But not that we’ve stayed together here in your hotel room. And that we’re sleeping together,” I said and made you meet my eyes.

  “No, not that I’ve slept with you,” you admitted, sighing.

  Meredith was not the pale shadow of a girl you dallied with and took out to drinks after work in New York. Meredith was real. You reached to the floor and pulled your T-shirt over your head. “Judith, please understand. I have to help her. She’s got no money. No insurance. She’s going to have to stop working and have more surgery. She’s really sick. And she’s alone.” You pushed the hair back from your eyes and looked out the window.

  I lay back on the pillow, wanting to tell you just how wrong you were. How much I had always longed for you. I wished I could cry and fall apart in your arms. But I knew what role I was to play. I was the faithful friend. I was to support, not need you. So I scraped the spilled milk of my feelings back into the bottle. I would understand and go on with my own life, my real life, just as you’d said.

  You came to San Francisco only a few more times, now staying where the other lawyers stayed, the hotel in the financial district. The verdict was announced and it was a huge win. You won the case for the important Silicon Valley firm, defeating the government’s antitrust suit. Your name was in the news and I saw you being interviewed on Sunday morning talk shows. On your last visit here, you took me to a restaurant in Sausalito for a congratulatory meal.

  “You’ll find someone, Judith,” you said that night. “How could you not? Someone as smart as you, as alive as you. Someone will be part of your life out here. I know it.”

  It was crazy, but I wasn’t angry with you. Our friendship, amazingly, remained intact. We continued to speak on the phone about our lives and work. About the twins. Except now, every conversation ended with me asking about Meredith. How had her latest surgery gone? Did they get all the cancer? Had it spread? I even began to ask about Meredith’s little boy. He had a name as well. Matthew. He was only three years old. How could I not care?

  Eventually you married Meredith, maintaining that the reason was so that she and Matthew could be added to your excellent health insurance coverage. What else could you do? She had no one else.

  Once more, you did not choose me. You gave your love to another woman. And, of course, I asked myself the question that any sane person would be asking. Why, after you’d treated me the way you did, did I stay around in your life? I had no easy answers, but one night, after the twins were asleep, I lay awake and remembered an incident that had happened to me as a little girl in Chicago when I was in kindergarten. Suddenly the memory took on a powerful significance. Growing up an only child, my parents had taken great pride in me—in my health and my cleverness. I was living proof that their misery in the old country was over. The bastard Russians hadn’t managed to annihilate them. They’d made it to America. They had a lively, bright-eyed child to prove their existence. People even stopped my mother on the street in the old neighborhood to admire me when we were out walking.

  “She looks just like Elizabeth Taylor,” old ladies said and lifted my chin to study me. “A little Elizabeth Taylor with that thick dark hair. You should get her a screen test.”

  My mother never complimented me, or anyone else, directly. But I could see how proud of me she was on those outings. Even when we were going on simple errands in the neighborhood, she brushed my long, shiny dark hair and dressed me in full-skirted dresses, bleaching and starching the white collars, ironing the full skirts. Somehow, she, an immigrant from an insignificant shtetl in Russia, had come to Chicago and produced this healthy American child. A child who people even said looked like one of the most popular child stars of the day.

  My father treated me as his confidant, always sharing his pleasure in books, discussing politics while I sat near him on the couch as he puffed on his pipe. He’d put down his ever-present newspaper or book and tell me about what he’d been reading. I inhaled his liberal and generous view of the world, along with the sweet smell of his pipe tobacco. I felt loved in that house. It was only when I first ventured out of the house and into the neighborhood public school, that I learned how people were ranked and how a caste system for children is created from a very early age.

  In the large, sunny kindergarten room, children were seated at square, wooden tables. Two boys and two girls sat at my table, one at each side of the square. Our small chairs were of the same blond wood as the little tables. I don’t remember the teacher, or much of anything else about the room, except those light tables on a sea of green linoleum. The table became the site of my daily torture.

  We’d hang our coats on low hooks in a cloakroom and in winter, sit on the floor to pull off our galoshes. Then, we’d troop to those square tables. Coloring, the first activity of the day, was my torment. At our table, one girl and one boy were the upper caste, and the other boy and I were the untouchables. Literally we were untouchable. The other little girl had golden ringlets, with barrettes that each day matched her dress. The boy, the favored boy, was robust and well groomed. He also had blond hair, a comb brought through his still-wet hair so that the teeth marks still showed. The girl with ringlets was in charge. The other boy, the unacceptable one, was somewhat dirty. No one had taken care dressing him and his clothes were rumpled and mismatched. He also had the unfortunate habit of picking his nose and then, disgustingly, eating his snot. He was dreadful, and I certainly would not have chosen to align myself with this child. However, Miss
Ringlets and her major domo, the neatly combed blond boy, decided that he and I were to be equally shunned and tormented.

  All four of us would work quietly, heads bent over our coloring projects. The two favored children would pleasantly pass crayons back and forth between themselves, but never share them with us, clutching them when one of us untouchables would reach for a color they’d just been using—as if we would contaminate the crayon for later use. The judging came after the drawings were complete.

  Miss Ringlets would look at the blond boy’s paper and say, “Oh, beautiful.”

  The blond boy would look over at his superior, Miss Ringlets, and know what was expected. He’d say, “Yours is beautiful, too.” He would stretch out the word beautiful to four syllables. Be-u-ti-ful.

  Then the little girl would look over at the messy boy’s paper. “Pee-yew,” she’d say and both blond children would hold their noses distastefully. And the whole routine would get repeated as my work was considered—including the nose pinching.

  They actually did consider the drawings each day. It wasn’t an automatic response. I know this because one day, one miraculous day, I drew a scene of children holding colorful umbrellas and walking over puddles. I carefully circled each raindrop with a black line. Somehow, this drawing was different and the two judges looked at it with raised eyebrows. Miss Ringlets said with surprise, “That’s beautiful!” And, her fellow torturer agreed. “Yes, that’s beautiful,” he said, using all four syllables of the word and nodding his head up and down vigorously.

  The messy child got his usual, “Pee-yew.”

  I, usually an untouchable, was shocked. In a way, that one day of affirmation made the following days of disparagement more painful. The messy child never seemed to mind. At least the disparaging comments didn’t seem to register with him. He scribbled on his paper with abandon, seemingly with no plan. When he finished, he stared out the window until the teacher released us from the tables and we were allowed to move to wherever we were going next—circle time for stories, the bathroom, outside for recess—I don’t remember where. I only remember the square tables and how carefully I tried to draw a picture that might win the approval of the other two.

  What was that cruelty based on? My mother, whenever subjected to a slight or snub in the old neighborhood, would darkly mutter, “Anti-Semite!” If I had complained to her, she would certainly have accused Miss Ringlets and Mr. Perfect Hair of being Jew haters. That would have been that. This was, after all, before the time when we moved to the Jewish neighborhood. Most of the children at the first school had Polish or Lithuanian surnames. It was the early fifties and there probably were a fair number of Jew-haters in that school. But I don’t know what caused the rankings at the square kindergarten table. I did, however, grasp that I was not one of the favored ones. I was an outcast and I fear that all of those “pee-yews” may have made me more accepting of second-rate treatment.

  Or perhaps it was that you could do no wrong, Elliot. I accepted your verdict, as I had that of the ringleted girl. Someday, if I worked diligently and persistently, perhaps the word beautiful might be mine. I might be the chosen one.

  7

  Serendipity

  Meredith’s cancer spread and you took care of her devotedly. Despite your claims that you’d married Meredith only to help her with health insurance, there was tenderness in your description of the day you’d married. It had been in your garden in Beacon, the town on the Hudson where you now lived. You married under a wisteria trellis, which Meredith had lovingly planted when she was still able to work in her garden. The garden was her greatest pleasure.

  “A wisteria trellis,” I wondered out loud. “Mmm. A stand-in for a chuppah?”

  “Come on, Judith,” you had answered with a laugh. “Only you, or maybe my mother, if she were alive, would think that. Not a chuppah. I’m not into Judaism anymore. It doesn’t seem relevant right now. Just a trellis,” you said with finality. “A pretty archway for the flowers Meredith loves.”

  I sniffed, then realized I sounded like my mother and hoped the noise hadn’t carried over the phone wires across country. Okay, call it a trellis, I thought. Let Elliot take his gentle gentile, the blond-haired blue-eyed girl who was sick with cancer, as his second bride. I couldn’t begin to understand it. The cancer inside this young woman was a stubborn one, and Meredith had looked unequal to the fight.

  I’d met her only once, on the melancholy trip you took shortly before you married. A pre-honeymoon, you told me. You wanted to show Meredith the redwoods before … and although your words trailed off, I heard them anyway. Before it was … too late. Meredith had endured multiple surgeries, chemo, then radiation. There was nothing else left to do. You traveled while she could.

  Matthew was with you on the trip, and the three of you came to my house in Berkeley for dinner. We sat around the big table I’d refinished with care, and the six of us crowded closely together on the wooden benches: Meredith and Elliot and four-year-old Matthew, as well as the twins and me. It was cozy and cheerful in my kitchen with its bleached pine planks and the bright oranges and yellows I’d painted the walls. Meredith looked up at me as I ladled the fragrant chicken soup into her bowl. She was so thin and frail, she looked like the anorexic girls I’d worked with on psychiatric wards. I could not help but stare at the bones of her clavicle jutting through her skin, and her arms, almost skeletal, resting on the table. I glanced down at my own fleshy arms. Perhaps, a very small case of cancer, I thought. The cancer diet was always a successful one, the ultimate no-fail diet. Second only to the divorce diet. But no, I had never been sickly in my whole life. Besides, wishing for cancer, even a little case of it, was a morbid, ungrateful thought that I immediately suppressed and hoped would never reach the ears of God or whoever doled out fatal illnesses. Anyway, the divorce diet had been short-lived. Slowly, all of those pounds shed after Seth and I split up had found their way back on my frame.

  Meredith brought the soup spoon to her nose, inhaling deeply but, as far as I could see, ingesting none of it.

  “I love the smell of homemade matzo ball soup,” she said with a sweet smile. “The steam is making me warm for the first time since we arrived.” She shivered and you took off your jacket and draped it over her thin shoulders. “Sorry,” she said. “This fog really gets me. I can’t get warm.”

  “They say that about San Francisco summers,” I answered and spooned a matzo dumpling into Evan’s bowl, filtering out the carrots and celery, which would ruin any chance of getting the soup into him. He was a picky eater and thin and small for his age. Miriam held up two fingers, signaling me that she wanted two matzo balls, and I nodded. No such problems with Miriam, who was a hearty eater and remained a head taller than her twin brother. “Summer is the coldest time of year here,” I said. “Colder than the winter.” I wanted to add, Remember, Elliot? How clear it was when we were together in San Francisco? but I didn’t. Instead, I smiled at Meredith. “August is the worst,” I told her. “The fog and mist hardly ever lift. But when we go south, toward Santa Cruz, you’ll see the sun. I promise it’ll be warmer.”

  Matthew ate all that was in his bowl, then asked for more carrots, please. He was a polite child, though with his dark skin and eyes, resembled his mother not at all. Meredith had explained earlier that Matthew was biracial. He had been given up for adoption by a Puerto Rican mother and a father who was possibly, or probably, black. Not biologically related to her or her deadbeat ex-husband.

  How did she get a four-year-old to eat vegetables, one who liked them so much he picked them out of his soup and ate them with relish?

  “It’s lovely that you’ll take us to the redwoods, Judith,” Meredith said in her soft, wispy voice. “I’ve always wanted to see them. The oldest living things on earth.” She closed her eyes.

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Oldest and living. Bad words coming from a very young person with a terminal disease. I sat down across from Meredith and studied her, the frail wrist that
seemed not even strong enough to hold a soup spoon. She wore a filmy white dress that was too loose and looked as if it belonged to an older, larger sister. I could still see her prettiness, though; it hadn’t completely disappeared with her illness. Her features were flawless: wide, set-apart eyes and a small nose and mouth. I could stare and stare at her delicate face. Someone should paint her, I thought.

  “What’s that lip gloss you’re wearing?” I finally asked. “It has wonderful shine.” The stain was a glimmery, honeyed color, a color I had been searching for forever.

  “Oh.” She laughed. “Just drugstore lip gloss.” She leaned down and reached into her purse and took out the tube, passing it across the table to me. “Here you take it. Maybe a few dollars at the most. Nice, though. It stays on for hours and hours.”

  I studied it, shaking my head at how much money I’d spent on expensive lipsticks and glosses at Nordstrom. And, here it was, a drugstore brand casually taken from Meredith’s purse. “Modern Mica,” the label read. It was the absolute perfect color and shine.

  On our visit to the redwoods, I led us on an easy loop through the trees, one that I knew Meredith and little Matthew could manage. Evan and Miriam walked ahead with Matthew, and I was proud of how one or the other took the little boy’s hand when the trail grew uneven. They played with him in the hollows of the enormous redwoods, finding and hiding behind burls of wood, which jutted out from the huge trunks and were, I can think of no other metaphor, like cancerous growths on the trees. Matthew stared up at nine-year-old Miriam and Evan adoringly. The twins had sometimes mentioned to me how they wished they had a younger brother or sister. Would that ever happen? I wondered. Afterward, we rode the narrow-gage railroad, an hour ride through the redwoods, stopping and getting out at a grove of trees that the engineer said was called The Cathedral. He added that it was a popular spot for couples to get married in.