by Joan Silber
I hadn’t told Phoebe the whole story, which grew its own chapters, a network of dank tunnels in my mind. I was a laughable woman who had been tricked by an oily, illiterate drummer, and maybe I had never even liked him either. My anguish was not lessened by my disdain for him. Whether I wanted him or not was not the issue. What was the issue? Nothing you could get a grip on. How long had I been living on nothing?
Phoebe knew what had happened when she saw me packing all Randy’s leftover clothes in a carton. I kept the goddamn rock records. “Was it your fault he left?” she said. “Sweetheart,” I said, “it’s never that simple. You don’t need to blame people.” “It was your fault,” she said.
SOMETIMES RANDY CALLED ME, out of last-ditch pangs or sentimental greed, raspy-voiced from booze or weed, to tell me I was really the best of all. “Do you know that?” he said. “I just wanted you to know that. Even though.” (Why was I talking to this person?) After a while he’d hear that I was humoring him with my thanks—I’d say, “So good of you to call”—and he’d get testy. “Would you please excuse me for taking your valuable time?”
“You’re excused,” I said. “This time.” But I was sorry when he stopped phoning, I was.
AT THE DAY-CARE CENTER, the staff had a mini-celebration in the teachers’ room—toasting our diet Sprites—because Byron, the boy with the broken leg, had been moved into his aunt’s at last. He still wasn’t talking much, but he had been heard singing the toothbrush song in a monotone with the others. I saw the aunt—very fat, very young—picking him up after school, and he went to her, on his crutch, gladly enough.
His plaster cast, with its inky drawings and signatures, had just come off when he stopped coming to our center. The director made a few calls and found out the aunt had given Byron back to the mother. The mother was back with the father and pregnant again, and the sister said they could be anywhere, how did she know, nobody asked her opinion ever, she couldn’t do everything.
We left Byron’s paintings of space aliens on the wall, and as time went on they came, more and more, to seem like the relics a soldier’s mother keeps. The crayoned letters of his name (written by me) were terrible to see, next to the crepe paper turkeys and jolly foil Santas. No one would take the paintings down either and they stayed up till June.
I CAME HOME AT NIGHT tired and spent. But still I met a few new men, mostly in bars and once in a hardware store. I’d have a little sexual enthusiasm for someone—the beginning was okay—but before long I’d lose heart, so to speak, for the whole enterprise. The last thing I wanted was a guy so ordinary he made me miss Randy. Toby, my boyfriend from high school, used to say I had no patience, and maybe he was right. Then Phoebe launched into full-tilt adolescence and I could hardly manage anything but trying to keep her from combusting.
I hated it when Phoebe started stealing. Of all the idiotic objects of desire—what was she even going to do with what she slipped under her jacket? The tacky name-brand sunglasses, the overhyped designer T-shirts. “In Mexico,” I said, “a family can eat for a month on what that shirt cost.”
“I didn’t pay for it, did I?” she said.
“What are you going to do with it? Wear it and look rich? Status for who? I though you knew better.”
“I’m not giving it back,” she said.
“Look at the world, will you?” I said. “Have some imagination. Just for a second.”
PHOEBE CUT SCHOOL, she hung out with a snotty girl named April, she did drugs I didn’t even know the names of. She wasn’t a bad kid but she was nervy and reckless. “You think you know what you’re doing but you don’t,” I said.
“Poor Mom,” Phoebe said. “Poor, poor, pitiful Mom.”
There was some affection in her mockery. We were dancing around each other, the old-broad mom and the sly little Barbie. Then she trashed a boy’s car she shouldn’t have been driving, and her father decided she was only going to keep trying to shock me, who was so unshockable, and she’d better come live with him. Phoebe was too flattered to resist this, and I had to relent or make everything worse. This was a very bad time for me.
I phoned Doug’s house too often. They didn’t want all my messages. Phoebe was a big hit in her new high school—more savvy, more streetwise than the other girls. I wanted her to be happy, didn’t I? “Call when you get a chance,” I’d tell the machine, Mother Casual. It was not her fault how lonely I was. Any break with a man, any insult or betrayal or sudden shocking reversal, was a piece of cake compared to this.
I hadn’t thought my life would turn this particular corner. I came home from work every day surprised all over again that Phoebe wasn’t there. All the things I owned—my wardrobe, my furniture, the kinds of music on my records—looked tawdry and half-baked and laughable to me, the trappings of a person who had never known for a second what she was doing. The sight of an ashtray Phoebe had lumped together in day camp could make me soggy with tears.
On the phone Phoebe said, “Tell April she would like it here. They won’t let me call her, and you’ll see her at the supermarket or something. She would like this school, tell her.”
My mother thought maybe I should really think about getting back with Doug, who was single for now. I said Doug was a boob and I hated his house, I hated the smugness of his carpets, I hated all that creepy isolation from funk and riffraff, I liked my own life. “The school of hard knocks, is that what you mean?” my mother said. “Keep knocking around, then. Go ahead.”
But it was Phoebe who decided to come back, after six months. She didn’t exactly say why. Or she gave too many reasons: the school was full of prissy little jerks, her father had really brainless opinions he was always mouthing, there was no place to eat as good as the Cuban place we went to. She was less noisy when she came home, as if her sojourn into another world had sobered her, and she actually did her schoolwork for a while. We were jokey together again—we had a food fight with marshmallows, we hooted at the TV—but cautious too. Anyone could have seen how cautious.
IN HER LAST YEAR of high school, when things were really quite calm, I began to wake up in the middle of the night from dreams of Randy. A terrible, keening lust for him came bursting out of nowhere, and worse than that, an old, fevered, desperate love. Certain fond phrases floated back. I remembered every eccentric detail, it turned out, every buried endearment. I’d chuckle to myself in bed over hilarious things he’d said years ago.
And no one knew where he was now, which was probably a good thing. This did not stop the dreams, or the haunting that settled over my waking hours. Sometimes I played his favorite groups on the stereo (the Cars were not so bad) or made foods he’d liked (I’d forgotten about Swiss steak). “I must have always missed him,” I told Phoebe.
“What are you talking about?” Phoebe said. “You didn’t even notice when he was gone. April’s mother couldn’t get out of bed for months when her boyfriend walked out. You didn’t even sleep late.”
“Yes, I did,” I said. “In my heart I slept very late.”
“I bragged to April about how fucking together my mother was,” Phoebe said. “Don’t tell me now you minded.”
I told her I minded, but I believed in having a sense of scale about the whole thing.
“Scale who?” she said. “Like on a fish? Like on a map?”
“A map.”
“I know. You were thinking of all the poor starving millions who’re so busy being fucked over they’d be grateful for just a single spare moment to boo-hoo over being jilted by some asshole.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Oh, Kit,” she said, which was what she called me instead of Mom when she wanted to act baffled by me, though she was not baffled now at all. She squinted and cocked her head in puzzlement, like the mouse María used to say she resembled, but she was only giving me a hard time (how could she resist?).
It surprised me to think of María like that. I had a sudden memory of sitting on the floor in María’s house in San Cristóbal, hooked to a backs
trap loom—who did I think I was?—with Phoebe darting around, playing some loud, giddy game she and María’s kids had invented. The scene was like a fan flipped down from a folded world. María had enjoyed our visits and been glad for the money, because she had no husband, a fact that had never seemed to us then to be any big deal.
Phoebe said, “I do believe you that we’re not the only people on this earth. You think I don’t. You never think I know anything.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. It was the thing I was always trying to say, wasn’t it?
A person might not think that occasionally bothering to remember how fucked up the world was would serve anyone as any sort of comfort. But it did. It made me less stupid, which was really very precious. I might have picked something that stood me far less well, I might have been a lot worse off.
PARADISE
Corinna
WE MOVED TO FLORIDA IN 1924, just as the land boom was taking off. We were not a young family—I was already twenty-one and my parents were in their forties and fifties. What was my father thinking? He was thinking two things, and only one was money. My father worked all his life in a bank in Kingston, New York, but what he loved was to be outdoors. He was a great student of trees and rocks and bugs—a great woodsman and fisherman—and he used to take my brother and me out walking the Catskill trails whenever he could. My brother was the sort of boy who liked to dash up the craggiest heights by taking a running start, but I could clamber behind quite decently. My favorite outing was a trail that was covered in mountain laurel in June and my father used to call it the Corinna Trek.
My father believed that a person who was at his ease in the woods could never be at a loss anywhere else—not in a company’s office and not at a full-dress ball—because he would have a sense of the wider reaches of life. He would not be prone to small-mindedness or afraid of petty social wounds because he would carry within him always an inner independence. I was never sure whether my love of pleasant hikes could bring me quite to this level, but I was glad to think of my summer walks as leaving traces I could later use.
My father did not deliberate very long before buying the Florida property. He saw the need to seize the opportunity, though he’d always been a cautious man. And indeed what he bought was worth a good bit more within weeks. My mother was sorry to leave her family and her church—we were from a long line of Unitarians—but in her breathless and mild-eyed way, she was happy at the adventure.
And I was happy too, though I was not the sort of girl who had simple feelings about anything. This fondness for my own varying tints of thought had just caused the end of a long romance that everyone had hoped would bloom into marriage. Ted, who was a nice and reasonable boy and not stupid either, did not like my hesitations, and perhaps he was right. He complained that I didn’t find him necessary.
As soon as he broke off with me, I was miserable—I woke every day in a fog of desolation—I hadn’t known I would suffer like that. My mother thought I had been very rash. “You were inconsiderate,” she said. “Try to consider next time.” Ted was never anything more than civil when I met him in the street, and he could not be drawn back by the frankest flirting. I had cooked my own goose. So I was glad to go away, to start again in a new place. My father’s Florida was a gift to me, a rescue.
MIAMI WAS A MESS of construction when we got there, but I loved the palm trees. They looked exactly as I had imagined—big umbrellas with arched fronds—but each so intricate against the sky, so gorgeously detailed, I could scarcely follow the fine-cut marks of their plumes. Rows of them lined the road to the sea, as we shuffled along in our roadster. My father said the royal palms and the towering cabbage palms and the little palmettos were native but some others had been brought from other continents. This made us all think of Owen, my brother, who was off working in the jungles of Siam, using his geology skills to help a trading company find tin. The first time I ate a fresh coconut I thought of how Owen had tried to describe it—“It is clean and crisp and unctuously rich all at once.”
We stayed in a hotel at first, and my mother and I were excited tourists, taking our seaside walks and watching the waves crash against the shore in their thrilling thunderous way, right next to where cranes and clattering workmen were making their own bustling noise. My father had bought a bare weedy lot, where our house would soon be, and he had bought other land in Miami too. His plan was to sell the other lots, bit by bit. Eager buyers had already snatched up the first few and resold the lots before they had even finished paying my father.
My mother was interested in the progress of the building of our house, but I was not, and I would sit out on the porch of our hotel and read my books (I was making my way through anything I could get of H. G. Wells) and I’d write letters to my friend Helene at home. Helene had just had her wedding and liked to send humorous accounts of keeping house for her husband. I was the only one of my friends not yet married. Sometimes my mother took me to tea-dances at the hotel and watched while young men bobbed around the floor with me. I liked talking to the men, ninnies though some of them were, but I disliked the hotel’s efforts to awe me with its insistent luxury—Moorish ceilings and swooping satin drapes—its eagerness to make the tropics feel moneyed. Helene and some of my other friends at home were Communists or syndicalists—Kingston was not entirely a backwater. I was not of a theoretical nature, but I certainly believed that sharing was better than grabbing or hoarding. But I liked the dancing, as I always had. I was good-looking enough to get plenty of partners, which was very pleasant. I liked the sweating musicians and would have tried to talk to the mustached fiddler had my mother not been nearby.
I wrote to my brother Owen:
I see why you love the jungle so. Even in this would-be city, I have the sense that tender vines are growing tree-size overnight. Everyone is complaining of the heat as summer approaches, but I like the freedom of less cumbrous garments and the heavy air feels friendly to me. Am I a lazy lizard? Our father thinks so. He would like me to be scaring up a husband. He is on fire with his own projects however—every bit of sand in Miami will be worth its weight in gold dust! Every mangrove swamp will have a palace on it! I shouldn’t laugh, should I, since I’m living so pleasantly here on his prospects. Mother has been languishing in the heat, but she chatters from her chaise longue, bringing me gossip of an often delicious kind. I like it here, but I wish there were more people like me.
AT SUPPER, WHEN HE was not too busy to eat with us, my father would fret cheerfully about when to sell his holdings. “You know it’s only human,” he said, “to try to hold out for the highest profit.”
“Is it?” I said. “In Muslim countries, they think it’s wrong to gain money for work you haven’t done.”
“That just applies to interest,” my father said. “They’re against charging for loans. Every piece of bread that’s passed into your mouth, missy, has been from that interest.”
My father always took me down for being spoiled and airy when I made my gadfly arguments, when I spoke of other systems, and as long as my own good fortune was braided into things I couldn’t admire, I knew, with some pain, that he had a point. I didn’t know if this point was something I would ever get over. Couldn’t we live without taking things from other people? My friends at home thought so—there was indeed a whole body of thought on the subject.
My father thought I was a green girl with no understanding of the laws of economics. I did not understand how there could be laws, when each system of thought pleaded from a separate set of truths, like different kingdoms each with its own constitution.
“You know,” my mother said, “sometimes I wish we just used stones for coins and squatted in the dirt. Do you think people were happier in those days?”
“We’ll never know,” I said. I thought the glitter of Florida was perhaps beginning to pall on my mother. She loved company and novelty and conversation, but she was delicate.
We were all more comfortable when we moved into our house. There was
much work to do settling in, but my mother and I understood this sort of work, and we both enjoyed the greater quiet. My mother hired a maid and a cook, and then she felt more substantial. Sometimes I slipped off for secret meetings with Artie, the violinist from the hotel band, a Jew from Chicago. He was exceedingly handsome and had been to many places and I might have run off with him if he’d asked, but he didn’t ask, though we had long kissing and petting sessions on an isolated tip of the beach, of a more intense and swooning kind than I’d known with Ted. He had a lovely way of cracking clever jokes too but he didn’t otherwise know how to talk to me and he may well have had a wife somewhere. It took me a few months to come to that thought.
My brother Owen wrote to me from the south of Siam:
Greetings from the jungle outpost. Here I’m alone but not alone. First some villager comes tramping into town to tell us there is a rich vein of tin in some hard-to-get-to spot, and then I go off with my crew—my trusty right-hand man is a Malay who can do all things and my cook is a clever Chinaman, and my workers are anyone I can get. I don’t see women except when we go into a village, but to be a white man is to be suddenly quite an attractive fellow here—I have become irresistible! (Don’t read this bit to Mother.) I could sometimes wish for someone to talk with as a peer, but the long day’s marching on these bushwhacked trails is just what I like, and best of all is the evening in my tent, when I’ve splashed myself clean from a basin and the cook brings me my supper. Did I mention that Siamese girls are beautiful?
I MYSELF WAS in a dreamy fever. I’d sit on our patio, where my mother and I had set out pots of red ginger and anthurium and bird-of-paradise plants, and I’d have my secret thoughts of Artie. The bright outsized extravagance of the plants was a kind of propaganda for what nature really was. I wasn’t reckless—I had some prudence in me—and some uneasiness about my future too, but I was fond of conjuring heated specifics of what might be. IT DID WEAR ON me to always be so secret, to always have to tell my mother I was taking yet another long solitary walk on the beach in the afternoon. “They would get used to you,” I told Artie. “If they met you, they would understand.” My parents did not dislike Jews—truly not—though I could hardly expect that they would welcome an unprosperous one into the family, a man who played the violin at night in hotels. It angered me the way money snuck into my most intimate matters. But they would be cordial, my parents. My father would try to draw Artie into conversation about fishing or autumn hurricanes. My mother, in her shy curiosity, would ask awkward questions about his faith. I did not even have a chance to warn him of these things.