I told my father I wanted to go home.
“Why?” he said.
“Because Mom is waiting.”
Sheila was sitting on the stool, on my coat. I asked her to please get up. I grabbed my coat and started putting it on. My father leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek, shrugging his shoulders.
We walked out of the bar, my father trailing behind me.
“What’s your rush?” he said.
“I told you. Mom is waiting.”
to the mountain
Between my junior and senior years of high school in Brooklyn, I spent the summer of ’57 up at Sader’s Bungalow Colony, helping my grandmother run the concession. Bungalow colonies were summer shtetls. Jews, happy to escape the Cossacks, but missing home, recreated their home villages in the Borscht Belt in the Catskill Mountains. Sometimes whole cemetery clubs—lantsmen from the old country—would come to stay at the same bungalow colony. It wasn’t enough that they were going to be together for eternity, they should still be together for the summer. The bungalows—little, one-story cabins—dotted the landscape around the main house the way houses in the shtetl clustered around the synagogue. People who couldn’t afford a bungalow but still wanted to get out of the city for the summer stayed in the main house. For half the price of a bungalow, they got one room, a bathroom down the hall, and a shared kitchen. Sharing a kitchen led to fights like, “Who took my blueberries?” or “That was my fish!” Thank God that a free bungalow for Grandma and me came with the concession.
The concession sold cigarettes, newspapers, and sundries. There was a soda fountain where Grandma made malteds and egg creams, but that was it. There were no real stores at Sader’s. Every time you put your toches down in a chair, another peddler came, and you had to go get the cheese from the dairyman or the meat from the traveling butcher. When the blouse man came, you ran like a chicken; you shouldn’t miss a bargain. You stood around the peddler’s cart trying on this one and that one, always with an eye to see what Selma liked. If Selma said it was good, then it was. Every bungalow colony had a macher, a big shot. Selma was the macher at Sader’s.
But Selma didn’t buy from the peddler. Why should she? There wasn’t a weekend that her Herbie didn’t bring her a present from the city. Like everybody said, Selma and Herbie were “sitting pretty.” They had an apartment on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, an apartment in Florida on the water, and, in summer, the big bungalow at Sader’s with the wrap-around porch and the best view. There was nothing humble about Selma and Herbie.
Aside from me, there were no teenagers at Sader’s. Had it not been for my best friend, Phyllis, who stayed with her mother at a bungalow colony the next town over, I would surely have died of boredom. Phyllis had a pretty face, great skin, and no eyebrows. She said they didn’t have enough of an arch, so she shaved them off and drew on new ones with dark brown Maybelline pencil. They looked like marionette eyebrows, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I kept my mouth shut. Because Phyllis was a little on the chubby side, her mother fed her diet pills. Phyllis would call me up and want to talk for hours. Sometimes I’d have to just say bye and hang up the phone. She was so wound up on those pills that even after I’d hung up, she probably kept on jabbering. I didn’t see why her weight was an issue, because Shelly, her boyfriend, was fatter than she was, and he thought Phyllis looked just fine.
Shelly came up to visit Phyllis in the mountains because they were having sex, and she said he didn’t want to miss any. Phyllis was my second friend to lose her virginity. My friend Sharon lost it first. Sharon was a kewpie doll—short with a small waist and big breasts. She had dimples and blond hair and three dates a night. The boys lined up to date Sharon. My mother said Sharon had gone in the wrong direction. Phyllis and I didn’t care what direction she’d gone in; all we knew was she was getting all the dates. When Sharon got pregnant, I didn’t tell my mother because she would have declared it a victory, as in “your mother is always right.” Sharon moved away after she got pregnant, and that was that for Sharon.
Shelly had a cousin named Ralph Lifshitz. Ralph was staying at his parents’ summerhouse in Monticello, which was only twenty-five minutes from Sader’s. Ralph was nineteen and had a driver’s license. Shelly said that he’d fix me up with Ralph, and we’d all go on a double date.
“It’s not going to work,” I said to Phyllis.
“What do you mean? You haven’t even met him.”
“You said he lives in the Bronx.”
“Yeah, so?” she said.
“Well, I live in the wrong direction,” I said, “because the Bronx doesn’t go to Brooklyn.”
Phyllis was silent for a minute, and then, in an effort to be encouraging, said, “If you hit it off, and you will hit it off, he’ll schlep. Trust me on that—if a guy is getting what he wants, he’ll schlep. Look at Shelly. Every weekend, he’s taking the Trailways to Monticello.”
What Phyllis said made me nervous, but I didn’t tell her, because she was ahead of me, and she thought I needed to hurry up already.
They came to pick me up at eight. They were supposed to be there by seven, but Shelly said that Phyllis kept erasing her eyebrows. I’d been ready since five, and I would have been ready even earlier except that I kept fixing my hair. I had one of those bouffant hairdos. The bouffant was about as practical as a girdle. You had to start working on it the night before by sleeping, or trying to sleep, with your hair wrapped in toilet paper around these big fat rollers. When you combed it out, you had to pull it straight, then tease it up and turn it under. When you were done, it looked like you had a hair helmet. I also kept changing my outfit from pedal pushers to poodle skirt, back to pedal pushers. Every time I changed, I had to fix my hair. It was making me crazy.
When they finally pulled up, I took a deep breath and then took my time walking over to the car; they shouldn’t think I was on pins and needles. Ralph, my date for the night, was coming around the back of the Chevy to open up the door on my side. He was stunning, nothing like the boys at my high school with their duck’s ass hairdos or James Dean motorcycle boots. Ralph Lifshitz was no greaser. He had class. He wore a crisp, white, linen shirt that someone had just ironed, with the cuffs turned up. He had on khaki Bermuda shorts, and no socks with his penny loafers. As he reached out to open my door, I saw his silver I.D. bracelet with his engraved initials. I’d only known him for five seconds and I was already envisioning walking into class in September wearing that bracelet.
“Linda,” he said, looking straight in my eyes, “pleasure to meet you.” And then he gave me a peck on the cheek. He was smooth and his smile was sexy, and I didn’t know if he was being polite or being forward, but I didn’t care. He was the only college I wanted to go to.
“You’re so tan,” I said, and then thought it a dumb thing to say. Of course he was; it was summer.
“Tennis,” he said. Nobody I knew played tennis. Stoop ball, stickball, dodge ball, but not tennis.
As he drove, he covered the basics, confirming what Phyllis had already told me, that he lived on Mosholu Parkway in the Bronx, had two older brothers and a sister. His father was an artist, and his mother stayed home and cooked and cleaned house.
“What kind of artist?” I asked.
“He goes to rich people’s apartments and paints murals in their dining rooms and hallways.”
“What kind of murals?” I’d never seen painted murals in apartments in Brooklyn. Maybe it was a Bronx thing.
“Pictures of the English countryside,” Ralph said. I smiled and nodded as if I knew what that looked like.
Ralph said his parents had been coming up to the country since he was a baby, and he knew all the back roads and hidden trails. “Who knows?” he said, “maybe someday I’ll take you for a hike to the top of the mountain, and show you one of my favorite spots in all of the Catskills. There’s a big rock at the top, and when you climb up on that rock and look down, you can see the Concord Hotel—the richest hotel in the Catskills—or
look up, and see the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt.”
I tried to do what Phyllis would do: I gave him a come on smile and asked, “Is that a tease or a promise?”
He smiled back at me, and I could tell he liked my sass.
“Where to?” Ralph asked, through the rearview mirror, directed at Shelly in the back seat, but Shelly and Phyllis were busy making out. We drove up and around the mountains with no particular destination in mind. It was fine with me. My eyes were fixated on Ralph’s thigh muscle as it tensed each time he hit the brake, and on the beauty of his hands as they turned the steering wheel. There was nothing about him that I didn’t like.
He parked the car on Main Street in Monticello. Ralph and I got out, giving Phyllis and Shelly time to put themselves back together. Then we all walked to a chrome diner with a soda fountain, and I slipped into one side of a wide booth with red leather seats. Ralph slipped in beside me, really close. Still too excited to eat, I ordered a vanilla malted. He ordered a Reuben sandwich and a Coke. Phyllis and Shelley had a feast: burgers, fries, and big pieces of pie for dessert. Phyllis asked Shelly for a quarter—I guess sex gives you the right to ask the boy for whatever—and she fed it to the miniature jukebox that sat on our table. Looking at me and then at Ralph, she chose Doris Day singing “If I Give My Heart to You.” I’d already given it, and Phyllis knew it.
“I’ll call you,” is what he said when he dropped me off. He’d written my number down on a piece of paper he found in the glove box. He’d tucked it in his shorts pocket. I couldn’t tell if he was politely brushing me off or if he really meant it.
Phyllis spoke to Shelly later, and Shelly said Ralph meant it.
After that night, I divided my time between the porch at the main house and the soda counter inside the concession. The main house had a radio; the concession had the telephone. I’d lie on the porch swing and incessantly turn the radio dial, listening for Elvis singing “Love Me Tender.” When I found it, I sang along in this false baritone.
I wanted Ralph Lifshitz to love me tender and true. I wanted him to never let me go.
With my singing, the yentas couldn’t concentrate on their mahjong; two cracks, three bam, two flowers. There was usually harmony in the click of the tiles, but I couldn’t relax. Finally, the yentas had had it. I was ruining their concentration. They yelled to my grandmother that her granddaughter had lost her mind, and that she should send me back to the city to my mother. That was it for the main house. There was no way I was going back to the city as long as Ralph was in the country. I gave up on the radio, went back to the concession, and sat on the stool, staring at the telephone, willing it to ring.
It was the only telephone at Sader’s, and it got plenty of use. When you wanted something from the city, you had to come to the concession to use the phone. When a call came in, Grandma would announce it over the loudspeaker, and everybody would know that you had a phone call. It was good to get phone calls. It meant that you were important, that you had business to do and things to take care of. No surprise that Selma got most of the calls. I think she told Herbie to tell people to call her just so she’d look good. I sat there listening to her yack away. She was tying up the phone, and, even if Ralph were trying to call me, he wouldn’t get through. I kept asking Grandma for change to play the pinball machine, so the ka-ching sound of the pinballs would drive her up the wall and off the phone. I sent her all the bad vibrations I could muster until she finally glared at me and gave up.
All the time I waited for his call, I pictured us in a tight embrace, his hand pulling my head towards his kiss, his tongue exploring the inside of my mouth. He would know how to do it. We would be Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr—their beach would be our mountain. Warm feelings churned deep inside my belly. I hadn’t known these feelings before.
“That’s passion,” Phyllis said. “That’s what you feel when you are really turned on.”
“I’m an idiot,” I said. “I should have known all this. I’m sixteen. I feel like I’ve been living under a rock.”
“Well it’s time to come out. That’s what I’ve been telling you. Ralph’s perfect. He’s just the guy to do it,” she said.
Each day he didn’t call me, I became more despondent. I kept calling Phyllis and begging her to ask Shelly what he knew about Ralph. Phyllis said that Shelly wasn’t the one to ask.
“So then, who?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You just have to wait.”
“Easy for you to say,” I told her. “You have Shelly.”
“No, I don’t. We broke up.”
“What?” I screamed into the phone. “You can’t break up! How am I going to know what I need to know? You can’t break up. That’s simply unacceptable. What happened?” I wailed.
“I didn’t want to do it,” she said.
“Do what?”
“That mouth thing,” she said.
“What?”
“You know,” she said, “where you put his thing into your mouth until, you know … it’s over.”
I was exasperated. “What’s your problem?” I said. “You have no problem stuffing things into your mouth! That’s why you have to take those diet pills. So go take a pill and call Shelly.”
Phyllis hung up on me. I guess it was mean what I said, but I didn’t see why she would do everything else, but not this. If they stayed broken up, I might never have any info on Ralph Lifshitz again. I finally gave up, put on my bathing suit, grabbed a towel, and went down to the pond for a swim.
At Sader’s everybody else hung around the pool. I hated the pool. It was a small rectangular cement hole. The bottom was painted blue so the water would look like the Mediterranean. But it just looked fake, and you could smell the chlorine from a hundred yards away. Dyed blonde hair turned green by the end of the summer, and the women started wearing babushkas to cover their heads, so no one would find out they were bottle blondes. The pond had a silky bottom that made your toes curl. There were turtles and frogs and low-hung trees. It always smelled fresh, alive, as if it had just rained, and best of all, no one was ever there. I floated on my back and picked out faces in the clouds. For a half hour, I didn’t think of Ralph. Or I did, but it was pleasant, not painful, and I wasn’t staring at a phone but at a beautiful summer sky, the same sky that held the stars he wanted to show me from his mountain-top. When I got back to the concession, I felt more like myself. I was shaking the water out of my left ear when Grandma said, “Your fellow called.”
I couldn’t believe it. How was it possible? I was gone for only a half hour.
“Ralph Lifshitz?” I said.
She nodded. “Who else?” she said. “You have some other boy, too?”
“What did he say?”
“He said ‘Hello.’ He asked for Linda. I said you were out. He said okay and he’d call back later. He said thank you—a very polite boy.”
“Later? When? Did he say when later?”
“No,” Grandma said. “Why should he have to say when? When he’ll call, he’ll call.”
Since Grandpa died, Grandma had rejoiced in the pleasures of celibacy and tried to get some of it to rub off on me. I couldn’t help it—all my adolescent energy was pushing me away from celibacy and straight toward debauchery. I slumped down to the puddle I had dripped on the floor. The phone rang. I popped up to answer it. It was for Selma. I hated Selma.
That was Friday. Don’t even ask me about that weekend. I just moped around the grounds ready to bolt to the concession if Grandma announced the phone was for me. Phyllis wasn’t talking to me except to tell me that I’d thrown her to the dogs. She said that I wouldn’t do it either and that I should stop acting like a big shot because I hadn’t done anything, so what was I even talking about? Phyllis was right. I didn’t know anything. I was going to be a senior in high school and I’d only been to second base. Ezra Cohen had touched my breast, but I had my sweater on, so I don’t know if that even counted.
When I was walking by the pool I saw that Selma
had strategically left a copy of Peyton Place wide open on her beach chair, so everybody would see that she was a sexpot. I grabbed the book and went and hid it in my room. I’d heard about this book and figured that maybe I could find out what Phyllis was making such a fuss about. By the time I finished the book, I knew more, but I didn’t really understand how the whole it thing worked. It didn’t matter because Phyllis and Shelly were back together, and the lines of communication were reopened. I’m not sure what compromises had been made, but harmony was restored.
Ralph finally called on Wednesday. We went out for three nights in a row, twice with Phyllis and Shelly and then, finally, just us. Ralph was very sure about everything. It wasn’t attitude. It was just certainty. I didn’t have to work hard to believe him. I just knew if he said it, it was true. He taught me a lot of important stuff. He said Elvis was teenage crap and that if I wanted to listen to real music, I should listen to this, and he held up Sinatra’s comeback album, Come Fly with Me. Any song on that album, he said, was better than any of that rock and roll garbage. He told me to get rid of the teased-out hairdo and just let my hair hang long and straight. He said he wasn’t going back to CCNY in the fall, that he had big plans and no time for college. I shouldn’t ask what his plans were—he’d tell me when he’d tell me. Then he asked if I was ready to climb the mountain with him. I thought he was proposing so I immediately said, “yes.” In a second, I realized that he meant the trail to the rock, not the key to his heart.
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