When I was little I used to sit there at Lili’s side, supplied with cookies, myself, and a teacup filled with milk. It made me truly sick, Peter, it made me furious, to look at Mrs. Spiegel’s arm, just lying there casually on the table—her sleeve riding up over the blue brand that looked so similar to the numbers stamped on the meat at the grocery store: Did Mrs. Spiegel want to be a human being, or did she prefer to be a slab of meat? The truth is, it was as though that dark number of hers could activate Lili’s, even under the “decent” (as I felt) cover of her clothing or bracelets.
They never spoke about the past, really, either, those two. At least when I was around, they never, to use Neil’s formula, had “a normal conversation” about their “past situation.”
And what do you suppose he meant by that, Peter? A normal conversation about her past situation—It seems to be one of those things words can construct independently of meaning, doesn’t it? Because how could there have been such a thing?
In fact, I don’t remember anything that sounded particularly like “a normal conversation” about anything! Mr. Korda’s arthritis, what the hairdresser said about her son’s girlfriend—no subject was sufficiently mundane as to resist a septic influence.
I submit to you, Peter, this example: The day Lili found Walden Tócska in the street and brought him home. Well, as you would imagine, Mrs. Spiegel was simply horrified. “But, darling!” she said. “The beast is filthy!”
Not so, Lili said. That very morning, we’d gone to the vet, where Tócska had received numerous shots and his leg was bound up; we’d bathed and deflead him all afternoon.
But there was no telling where an animal like that had been! What habits it had acquired, or what secret diseases, clever enough to evade the vet’s medications, it might be harboring, to spread among us at any instant!
Absurd, Lili said; not scientific. Besides, every child should have a pet, and clearly—she shot a guilty look at me—Anna already adored this dog.
Adored, Mrs. Spiegel protested—though I’d steeled myself to pat, illustratively, the great, snoring, quivering heap of hair—it was completely obvious that, on the contrary, the child was terrified!
Lili inhaled deeply, and put her palms down on the table in front of her. “Lise, are you saying that poor dog should be…”
No, but of course not! Mein Gott! (And both women, Peter, had gone absolutely white.) Mrs. Spiegel hadn’t meant…She had only meant…She had meant only…
And then, Peter, there was just a long, long silence, which Lili brought to a close with a sigh, and that was that.
I mean, Lili allowed something terrible to develop? It was Lili who created an atmosphere of violence and danger? Lili was responsible for an atmosphere of violence and danger?
If the silences around our household were vivid and eloquent, was that Lili’s fault? Look, I said to Neil, we were all careful back then. And wouldn’t you have been, in my place? It was as if Lili were sleepwalking over the abyss of her own life. What if she were to wake? What if I were to wake her?
What about us, I asked him—Did he think he and I were starting Eric out on some perfect, pure, unpopulated, white-sand beach? Did he actually believe Eric was not going to bear some indelible, if illegible inscription?
Neil looked at me steadily, wagged a finger, and lowered one eyelid. I’ll get back to you on that, he said.
I wonder what impression I made on you at first. Oh, I know, Peter, none. But I mean, by the time you showed up, I suppose I wouldn’t have been all that worrisome; I’m sure I resembled a child: I was taking piano lessons, I had my friend Paige…
Of course, I had no friends but Paige. I sometimes imagined my schoolmates rising up unblinkingly to tear my arms and legs from the sockets with a juicy pop and stuff my slippery remains under the bulgy asphalt of the playground. I was even afraid of our poor, raddled dog. You were forced to notice eventually, of course, that, for someone so scowling and skinny and unwholesome, I was an amazingly poor student; that I couldn’t fix my attention on anything, that I seemed actually impervious to information; that all facts, the whole world, disassembled into identical meaningless units and slid off my brain into a heap of smoking rubble. That my sole talent—and it wasn’t pronounced!—was for satirizing my mother’s suitors.
So, did you ever happen to observe how surprising it was that such a child had become interested in playing the piano? Especially in view of how little ability, I’m sure, I demonstrated.
Well, in fact, I had not been interested in playing the piano. There was a sound, however—partially embedded in a piece of chamber music that I overheard one day on a neighbor’s radio—by which I was utterly bewitched. The other voice, speaking to me from just beyond articulation…my unknown twin…
I hung around our school orchestra a bit, traced the sound, and announced at home that I wanted lessons. Music lessons? All right, good, Lili said. But why the viola? Why not the piano? On the piano one could accompany oneself. Pianists were always in demand. The repertoire was splendid and inexhaustible. We might even manage to find a small piano, second-hand, for ourselves…
Ourselves…“Did you ever play the piano?” I asked, beadily.
Lili, of course, went instantly vague. Oh, she said, not well. But how did you learn? Mmm, we all played a bit. We? Oh, you know, just…girls…of our class…
I stared around at the boxy furniture, the threadbare rug, the pad of scratch paper lying on the table that said, Dr. Martin Weissbard, Optometrist, and Lili drifted off toward her room.
She wants to play the viola? was what Mrs. Spiegel had to say. No, darling! She wants to play the violin!
Lili shrugged. She says she wants to play the viola. Impossible! Mrs. Spiegel turned to me: The viola was for girls who wanted to play the violin but weren’t gifted. Surely I was gifted! Therefore—she turned back triumphantly to Lili and Sándor—I wanted to play the violin!
Such a word, Sándor said. Gifted. Not to be used in front of a child.
And besides, Lili said. She wants to play the viola.
I was just sitting there, Peter, watching the three of them as they debated, and I had an extremely strange sensation. It was as if it had been given to me to see them in the vast, unruly time before I was alive, weighing and meting out, like beings in an old story, a fairy tale, the destiny of a child, soon to be born—the destiny with which that child was to be equipped against the time when they themselves have become weak, have become mere human beings.
No, I said, and the three of them stared as if I’d dropped in by parachute. I want, I announced into the silence, to play the piano.
Lili and I looked at one another for a long moment. Well, she said comfortably to Mrs. Spiegel, so there we are.
And that’s how I met Paige. You didn’t imagine I’d met Paige at my school, did you? There were no girls like Paige at my school. I met her at music school. And if she and I hadn’t become friends, Peter, you would have come into a very different situation, I can tell you—at least in regard to me.
What Paige was doing taking up the violin, I couldn’t say. No—what I couldn’t say is how she would have heard of a violin, in that family of hers. But I don’t think she had any more interest in music, per se, than I did. I suppose she was just determined, however briefly (and in whatever manner was available to a ten-year-old who would have been slaughtered if she hadn’t behaved “nicely”), to be a mutant.
I don’t think you ever met her mother; you weren’t around yet the time Mrs. Chandler came for tea. A ritual inspection, I have to presume, which, I have to presume, we failed. Mrs. Chandler was wearing a suit of a kind I’d never seen outside Lili’s magazines; the driver was parked downstairs, waiting between a row of garbage cans and a game of stickball. That incredibly courtly old man had just dropped by—Mr. Kecskeméti—and Mrs. Chandler couldn’t understand one word out of his mouth. At first she kept saying, Pardon me? Pardon me? And then she gave up and simply carried on her side of the conversation as an
improvisational solo. Mr. Kecskeméti was totally bewildered, Lili proceeded to forget her English, Sándor basically left the planet, and Paige and I were clutching each other with merriment.
In Paige’s family, there wasn’t a loose end in sight. Everything was hermetically sealed; her parents had encased themselves in a veneer of propriety so effective you could have lain right down on their floor, screaming in agony, and never have been heard by a living soul.
I, of course, was a walking loose end. And Paige spotted me immediately: something at last to unravel! And not to be vain, but I must have looked worth unraveling—I suppose it was the very weaseliness of my demeanor that was so promising. And once Paige had set her sights on me, she went about me the way she went about everything—calmly, inexorably, sure of success: Why can’t you come over and practice with me? Won’t your mother and father let you? Well, next week, then. Or the week after that. So, if it’s too far, I’ll come to your house. My mother won’t mind—she’ll have the driver bring me.
So, there was Paige—sitting right in our living room. And needless to say, I was numb with embarrassment. But on whose behalf? On behalf of everyone who’d ever been born, I suppose. Though to my astonishment, all parties other than myself appeared to find everything perfectly natural.
Lili was delighted, of course, that I’d found a friend—so well-mannered and self-possessed a friend at that. Sándor was fascinated by the black velvet headband in Paige’s glossy, American hair, her perfect impenetrability, her sudden (calculated, I was quick to inform him) dimplings. Mrs. Spiegel adjudged her gifted—not unbecomingly gifted, but gifted. And Tócska! Poor Walden Tócska, who flattened himself against the wall whenever I appeared, heaped his great bulk across Paige the moment she sat down on the sofa, and wheezed with love as she crooned to him and ran her fingers through his nasty fur.
Paige herself was aglow. I guess she’d had something rather concrete in mind for us (“exotic” or even “colorful,” I’m afraid, is how she might have characterized us in later years) and we must have accorded satisfactorily to her specifications—the accents, Sándor’s marvelous white hair and elegant posture, my blond, stunning, soigné mother, the mere functionality of the furniture, the noisiness of the street outside, the casually shifting landscape of visitors, the—the-what-was-that-thing-called, Paige asked Lili, the delicious thing with the apples? And how ever could Lili have made it!
Oh, one learned, Lili said absently; she’d often watched the cook…
Paige and I practiced our duets, and then Lili would give us a snack. Paige would be all smiles and dimples, while I watched Lili tremulously, hoarding the sight of her as she took the glasses for our milk down from the cupboard…the plates…It was as if Lili were about to undergo, unknowingly and at my hands, an operation which would either save her life or kill her.
Because as soon as Paige and I were alone in my room, Paige would get right down to business: What cook? Well, then, what was my mother talking about? Where were she and Sándor from? Who had taught her to play the piano? So why didn’t I ask? Why had she stopped playing? Well, so why did her whole education stop? Then why did she have to go away? But didn’t she have to go to school there? So why did her mother and father let her go? But anyone could get off a train—they must have come with a car! What had she done wrong? But that was impossible—she couldn’t be! Didn’t I know what they looked like? Like Kathy Frankel, or like that girl with the bassoon, Risa Loeb. Well, we didn’t eat funny food, did we? Anyhow, what did that have to do with it? So what did their friends do then? Their neighbors? The cook?
And where was Sándor when she was away? Did he go with her? But no one could really live in someone’s closet—how would you go to the bathroom? And where were all the others? The others—like Lili’s mother and father; I had grandparents, didn’t I? Or aunts and uncles—didn’t Lili at least have a brother or a sister?
Paige and I stared at each other, and then I exclaimed: No, breathless, as though running at top speed I’d smacked right into an invisible wall.
Of course not, I said. Obviously Lili had no brother or sister.
Paige frowned. But anyhow, she said, what happened to the piano?
It was very much a common enterprise that Paige and I pursued on those afternoons. It was Paige who could lower me down into the world I couldn’t reach by myself, and Paige who could haul me back up, to tell what I had seen. But she couldn’t go down there herself. And she couldn’t see it—not even at second hand, as a nightmare, the way I could, or even as a migraine. It was up to me to tell her what was there; Paige couldn’t see that world at all.
We’d stare at one another, concentrating, going over and over it, straining to fit fragments together—straining to look all around, to see its landscapes, its weathers, its populations…Sometimes both of us fell asleep, quite suddenly, like travelers. Often we found ourselves at a cul de sac and had to discard a question or an answer in order to proceed.
But slowly, slowly, from the shadows of overheard conversations, as I felt my way around the shapes of skirted subjects, pictures began to distinguish themselves from the welter of my dreams, refining and embellishing themselves; Paige and I watched, as though we were watching a photograph immersed in a solution developing details from a blur.
What did it look like, Paige asked, staring at me.
I lay across the bed and closed my eyes.
Suppose I’d been able, Peter—by bending my entire self to it—to imagine adequately some tiny element. Just, let’s say…oh, one barb of the wire fence. Its taper, its point, its torque, its dull gleam altering with the play of the searchlights, the small rag of flesh, the faint, high, venomous raging of the current…
Fix it in your mind, I’d instruct myself; focus in on it…Can you see it—really see it? Yes? And now—Step back!
I don’t know, I said, though by then I could hear the boots in the courtyard, smell the dank, urgent anxiety of the dogs, see the beautiful boy…Did he sense me through the layers of time, struggling back for him? No, it was something quite different he was waiting for, his eyes huge and blank, growing dull, but still stormy blue, like the ocean. Like Lili’s.
Oh, I just fry with shame, Peter, when I think of it. Of course, I felt plenty of shame at the time—Lili’s shame, probably, the shame of the body; the shame of the disgusting things that can be done to your body—the disgusting ways your body can be made to fail—by someone whose body is itself intact.
But eventually (unclearly, of course, at first—as an uneasiness or unhappiness) a different shame began to emerge from behind that one: the shame of what Paige and I had been doing. Was I exposing Lili needlessly? Was Paige’s interest trivial or merely morbid? Was mine? Had I been using Paige, and to do something that I was too weak or too cowardly to do myself or that I had no business doing in the first place?
I discussed it with you, actually. Constantly, in fact, for some years—in imaginary conversation. And what it seemed to me you had to say on the subject, was, basically, that we all live in one world; that everyone is exactly the same distance from the core of the earth. That it was, therefore, if for no other reason, very much my business. And that Paige—even after her nerve gave out and she buckled down to being a socialite—was no less involved than I was in everything that had ever happened.
Well, I still fry with shame, Peter, as I say. But this notion of yours (that I feel almost certain would be yours) does provide some consolation; and actually I think you’ve got a point.
One time, just one time, I went to dinner at Paige’s house. House, yes! Right in the middle of the city! With great, tomb-like beige-and-gold rooms, old, gold-framed—ancestors, Paige said, spying down from every wall, massive, closed, oak doors…
There was the desolate sound of the dinner bell, and then the maid brought the serving platters around to the five of us—Paige, her older sister Pamela, their parents, and me—docking, departing, docking…we might have been towns on the shore of a huge lake
. And just as the platter of steak completed its stately voyage, Mr. Chandler’s head lifted slightly, as though he had caught a scent. Very unusual, my name—what sort of name was it?
I looked frantically at Paige. “He wants to know where you’re from,” she said, coolly. “Anna’s parents come from Hungary, Daddy.”
Mr. Chandler’s fork hesitated in the air; his head rotated toward me like a planet. Were my people in Budapest? There was a family friend in Budapest—a prominent person, an elderly, highly respected woman—If my people were there, perhaps they knew her…
His stare was cold and flat, a dull blade…What had happened to my mother’s piano? Because Lili had nothing, not even a locket…
“Mummy,” Pamela said, “I don’t think Anna eats meat. Do you eat meat, Anna?”
A ring was collecting around the bloody lump on my plate, soaking the potatoes red.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Chandler said.
“No, I do,” I said. Paige was watching carefully, consideringly, as I sank my ornate silver fork into the steak. “Really…”
You might not have taken much notice of Paige, Peter, but Paige took plenty of notice of you. It was as if she’d been waiting to see what we really added up to—and voilà, yes? It was you.
She insisted to me you were beautiful. No, I said, you were—and this was the very word—creepy. The most beautiful person in the world, Paige said. Next to Sándor, of course, but Sándor was too old for her.
I didn’t see why, I said. In only one more year we’d be in high school and her parents would let her go on a date, and Sándor would only be sixty-two. Though naturally by then Mrs. Spiegel might have nabbed him.
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Page 67