by Jan Cherubin
“I didn’t expect you to be doing this,” Liz said. “I thought it’d be Susan.”
“Doing what?” I said. “Oh. At the hospital every day.”
“I’m just surprised you’re this devoted to him considering how shitty he was to you,” Liz said. She was direct. We had that in common.
“It doesn’t make sense, does it?” I said.
Liz laughed. She expected me to be defensive. “So why then?”
“Stockholm syndrome, I guess,” I said. “I don’t know. I mean, you know! I don’t have to explain myself to you of all people.”
“It seems like Susan’s never around for the bad stuff,” Liz said.
“He loves that about her,” I said. “No darkness between them.”
“Yeah, but I still thought she’d be here, not you.”
“She has kids, I don’t. That’s the reality. Anyway, I forgave him and c’mon, you forgave him, too. Eventually. And you didn’t have to! You didn’t have to speak to him ever again after the camping trip, or hang out at my house, and you did.”
“True,” Liz said. She took a mouthful of ice cream and sucked on the wooden spoon before stabbing it back into the cup. “Whenever I’d come over, he’d pull me aside and ask me about something I was doing, like those speaker cabinets I built, remember those? And he wanted to know the details, how many nails I used. He showed me his tomato plants, and he’d put his arm around me, not in a lecherous way, not usually, it was more conspiratorial. He’d tell me some insight he had, like some key to happiness he just thought up, and he’d make it seem like I was the only one he was telling this stuff to. Like everyone else was stupid. Just him and me, we were the only ones in on the secret.”
“He does that, doesn’t he?” I said. I asked Liz not to come up to the room with me, though. He wasn’t in the mood to see anyone. Talking hurt his head. Besides, Liz giving all her time to me was good for everyone. It was amazing what seeing a friend for a couple of hours could do when you were in some kind of nightmare.
CHAPTER 21
At fourteen, I was a moody teenager—self-serious, more introspective than Susan—and it was at this tender threshold, just at the moment in my development when I could have begun to know my father and let him know me, that he put up a barrier. He might not have realized his bad behavior created an obstacle between us, not consciously, as I didn’t then either. But it was as if he raised the drawbridge and slammed shut the castle gate. He could have been the ideal father, a teacher and protector. Instead he fell in love (that was how he described it) with someone Susan’s age. Susan had nothing to do with it, but I did. The girl was Liz Stone’s cousin.
My mother let it happen. This was the sixties, free love and everything. She didn’t put up a fight. She didn’t get involved. She was her usual laissez-faire self. It bothered her, but she was quietly plotting her escape.
That summer I decided not to go to sleep-away camp. My father grumbled about how I was moping around doing nothing. Why didn’t I learn to play tennis, he said, or volunteer, find something useful to do? I didn’t know where to sign up. I didn’t own a tennis racket. Most of my friends were away at camp or on family vacations. My mother was working at Beautiful Kitchens and taking community-college classes at night. Susan had a job at a clothing store called The Crotch. In those days, in the late sixties, it was very exciting to have a store nearby with a dirty name like that. I was bored. I got up late every day. That summer was especially hot. The cicadas surged. Not the seventeen-year locusts, but the cicadas we had every summer, and the sound, surging high up in the treetops and dying down and surging again, always made me feel I was being called outside from miles away and drawn into the woods. I put on shorts and found a sleeveless top that wasn’t too rumpled and I slipped on my Keds with the backs flattened and I went outside. If Liz were home I would have answered the call and hiked with her into the woods behind her house. But Liz was away at Green Mountain, a horseback riding camp. I kicked at stones in the gutter for a while, and then sat on the curb under the maple tree and peeled the bark off a stick. The faint dinga linga ling of the Good Humor truck rose in the air like vapor over a distant street. I hoped Tom from next door wouldn’t see me on the curb. I’d grown out of Tom. After a while, I went inside and lay on my bed and read The Good Earth, my mother’s recommendation, and at some point when my mind was free of everything except the world of the novel, my father’s voice and Johnny Dolan’s in the kitchen broke into my thoughts. Johnny Dolan had just joined the English department at City, and he was my father’s new best friend. “You got anything good in here?” Johnny said. He must have been leaning into the fridge. My father offered him the flank steak leftover from last night. “Here, I’ll make you a sandwich,” my father said. Johnny was a lot younger—even younger than Shep Levine. He could have been my father’s son. When Johnny finished eating the steak sandwich, he wandered into the back of the house and knocked on my door and came into my room. I turned The Good Earth face down on the blue bedspread so I wouldn’t lose my place. He was wearing cutoffs and no shirt. He was sweaty and smelled of cut grass. Johnny didn’t like teaching summer school, so he made money in the summer mowing lawns, riding around in his red Triumph Spitfire with the top down and the lawnmower sticking up in the back seat. He asked what I was doing and I said I was reading. Then he left and went outside to help my father dig up a tree stump in the yard.
Finally, weeks later, Liz came home from camp and redeemed herself for abandoning me by inviting me on a road trip. In the space of a few seconds I went from bored and restless to wildly happy at the prospect of Liz’s older sister Mandy and their cousin Nola driving us up to Canada in the Stone family’s big old Pontiac Bonneville, camping out the whole way. Canada! The birthplace of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell! We were going to cross the border into another country and drive all the way to Quebec City where I could practice my eighth-grade French. It was insane to let four teenaged girls camp on the side of the road hundreds of miles away from home. Fortunately for us, our parents were oblivious.
Not every young person was a hippie then, although most pretended they had been in retrospect. But the four of us were. We didn’t use that word often though—hippie. We called ourselves freaks. We were outsiders—shy kids, artists, sensitive types, poor kids. Our lives were saved by the counterculture, goofy girls like Liz and me, girls who didn’t know how to be girls, only now we could wear blue jeans and secondhand clothes and be cool, so we wore thrift-shop dresses and jeans and painter’s pants, and then there were girls like Mandy and Nola, older girls who did know how to dress and apply makeup and would have been popular in any group, but rebelled anyway and called themselves freaks. Even in old, torn clothes, Nola looked fresh and clean, with her flaxen hair and white teeth, like an Ivory soap girl. When I said Nola was beautiful, Liz got annoyed. “You’re beautiful, too,” Liz said. “You’re beautiful, too,” I said.
I went with Liz to Nola’s once. She lived in an apartment with her mother. She’d never even met her father. There was nothing to eat. No knickknacks or junk either, no trace of family life, just pastel-colored furniture and two gray cats. There was a high partition between the kitchen and living room, and the slinky cats walked along the top of it like runway models.
Liz brought Mandy and Nola over to my house to look at my father’s maps. Among my friends, I had the only father who talked to us. He was curious about what young people thought. If those other fathers ever said anything it was mumbled in tight voices in the backs of their throats. My friends called my father Clyde—even to me, they usually referred to him as Clyde and not “your father.” He liked kids. Not me, but other kids. With me, it was as if I were his hired hand. You don’t think about liking your hand. My friends could come to our house and get help with their papers like Eloise did and talk about anything. They couldn’t shock Clyde. He liked to shock them, though. I was proud of having the coolest father. But something changed that day when Liz and Mandy came over with thei
r cousin Nola. He took off his glasses to read the small print on the map spread on the dining-room table and started pronouncing the Canadian towns with an exaggerated French accent and pursed lips. Trois Rivieres. Notre-Dame-de-Montauban, L’Ancienne-Lorette. There was something creepy about his wet lips shaped in an “o.” He sat in front of the map, and we gathered around him. I had a turn tracing the highway route with my finger, and I was upset. I whispered in Liz’s ear that it looked like I would get my period on the trip, probably around Montreal, maybe sooner. I got it bad. Every month for four or five torturous hours I wanted to die. I imagined myself in agony tossed around in the car and trying to sleep on the stony ground. I left the four of them studying the map and I flopped onto the sofa. After a while, Liz came over and sat by me. “Bummer about your period,” she said. “So, we were thinking . . .”
“What? No, no, don’t switch anything on my account. I’ll be fine.”
“The thing is, Mandy’s worried about money. The Bonneville’s a gas guzzler.”
“We’re all chipping in,” I said.
“Yeah, I know, but she didn’t realize how far it is to the Canadian border. And then Quebec, that’s really far. And Mandy and Nola are the only drivers.”
I sat up in alarm. “We can’t cancel it! We’ll go somewhere closer. Maine. Cape Cod. What about Cape Cod?”
“Mandy’s dead set on Canada,” Liz said. “It’s an obsession or something.” She took a big breath, held it for a second and let it out. “Listen, Joanna, there’s still a way we can go.” She paused. “Clyde said he’d drive,” she said. “We’ll take his car and he’ll pay for gas. We’ll be able to do a lot more.”
“My father? You invited my father on the trip?”
“He offered and Mandy said yes.”
I fell back onto the sofa.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Liz said.
I felt the blood draining out of my face.
“Stop staring at me,” Liz said. “You’re freaking me out. It’s the only solution.” Liz was half-sitting on a throw pillow and I yanked it out from under her and covered my face with it.
My father came in. “What’s wrong with Joanna?” he said.
Couldn’t he see I was dead? He went outside without waiting for an answer. The screen door banged.
“What’s wrong with Joanna?” my mother said.
“She’s bummed because she’s going to get her period during the trip,” Liz said.
“Poor girl,” my mother said. “She gets it bad.” My mother leaned over and tried to take the pillow away from my face, but I held onto it. Liz got up and my mother sat in her place. “You’re upset because Daddy’s going on the trip, aren’t you?”
I spoke through the velveteen. “How did you know?”
“Just a lucky guess.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Outside with Liz’s cousin.”
I slid the pillow away and held it against my chest. “Why does he have to take over everything? This was MY trip, with MY friends!”
“Is it that bad?” my mother said.
“This is my territory,” I said.
My mother brushed a strand of hair off my forehead and looked at me with her soft brown eyes. “You’ll have plenty of trips in your life without him,” she said. “And didn’t you have fun when we went cross-country, and in Ireland? Daddy’s fun to travel with. It’s better than not going to Canada at all, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said.
“Look, Jo,” my mother said. “It’s not safe, the four of you girls traveling on your own. This way you still get to go.”
Liz came over and swiped the pillow. “Don’t hate me,” she said. “Hate Mandy.”
I wondered if my mother minded being left behind. Over the next few days, I watched her watching us drape the big tent over the hedge to air it out in the sun, and later, folding up the tent and packing our bags, loading our gear into my father’s green Ford Torino GT. I didn’t detect envy or concern. My mother seemed happy to get rid of us.
CHAPTER 22
I walked Liz from the Sinai cafeteria to the parking lot. I was freezing without a coat. We hugged before she got into her car. I didn’t want to let go. “The sun’s going down so early,” I said, and both of us realized at once it was the shortest day of the year, December 21st. When Liz and I were twelve, my father enlisted us to help him make a papier mâché sun to celebrate the Winter Solstice. We papered over a supersized balloon, attached cones of newspaper for rays, painted the whole thing orange and yellow, slathered it in shellac, and hung it from the rafters in the living room over the objection of my mother who felt it clashed with the room’s décor. Eventually, she relented and allowed the sun to stay until the spring equinox. This was in 1967, and my father hung it up every year thereafter until he married Brenda, because at that point he could justify having the real thing, the originally coveted, enticingly taboo thing, which was a Christmas tree. Until then we stacked our Hanukkah presents under the sun. I finally let go of Liz and she got into her car and drove away.
My father’s room was dark. He was sleeping, covered in two white cotton blankets. I didn’t want to disturb him. I figured we could talk about the MRI results in the morning. But he liked to know when I was leaving for the day, so I reached over and touched his hand curled by his cheek on the pillow.
“Brenda?” he said.
“Joanna.”
“You’re still here?” He turned onto his back and felt for the button to raise the bed. Only his left eye was open. His right eye had stopped moving completely. His eyelid was shut and bulging like a frog’s.
“Yeah, I’m still here. But I’m about to go. I’m sleeping over at Mom’s tonight.”
“Brenda gets lonely, too, you know.”
“It doesn’t seem like it.”
“Well, she does. You could sleep there once in a while.”
“Guess what? Today’s Winter Solstice.”
“I know, kiddo. I know. Happier times.”
I kept the overhead light off and opened the curtains. The street lamps in the parking lot splashed silvery rectangles over his covers like moonlight.
“Don’t go,” he said.
I sat on the windowsill. “I’m not going. Not yet.”
“That Heidenheimer was in here.”
“Yeah. I spoke to him, too.” I swung my legs and kicked at the heating vent with my boot heels.
“So you heard. They found something.”
“Yeah, but they don’t know what it is,” I said. “Could be TB or something else benign.”
“Joanna, listen. Come closer. Don’t sit way over there. Pull up the blue chair.”
I hopped off the windowsill and pushed the recliner across the floor and right up to his bed. I sat down and reached across the covers to hold his hand.
“Listen, I’ve got to ask you something.” He gently squeezed my fingers. From somewhere far away a female voice repeated a doctor’s name, and we both looked up at the ceiling and listened. She spoke so softly over the intercom she could have been whispering to her lover. Then it was completely quiet. He let go of my hand and met my eyes with his one eye. “Tell me something, Joanna,” he said. “Seriously. Am I going to come out on the other end of this thing well—or am I going to die?”
A cart rolled by, wheels clicking. My heart thumped.
“You’re the only one I can ask,” he said. “You’re the only one I trust.”
On the camping trip the woods and lake were dark, water lapping at the shore. In the morning Nola was wearing his jacket with floppy sleeves too long for her. “I can’t trust Joanna,” he had said to my mother when we got home. “I’ll never be able to trust her again.” I was stunned. It was the opposite. How could he lie like that? I was shocked. And yet, he wasn’t entirely wrong. You couldn’t trust someone if you knew she couldn’t trust you.
“Me?” I said in the silvery light of his hospital room. “I’m the one you trust?”
“Yeah,
you. Who else?”
I sat there and blinked the way he blinked when he was thinking. Again, he wasn’t wrong. For whatever messed up reason, or perfectly good reason, no one was more loyal to him, not even Harry.
CHAPTER 23
Tuckahoe
We were permitted to go back to the Bronx for the eight days of Passover—but no longer. If your family could afford to keep you more than eight days, they could afford to keep you forever. So said Miss Claire Beaufort, the social worker. I was nervous. I didn’t know what to expect. Would my mother change her mind and decide to keep us forever? She came to Yonkers to pick us up and clung to us but we pulled away. We stood on the trolley, and wouldn’t sit on her lap on the bus or train either. On the walk from the subway station, I noticed girls everywhere. Girls on the Grand Concourse and across 166th Street, on Sherman Avenue and Morris Avenue. I didn’t often see girls. Vivian on Visiting Day didn’t count. Then before I knew it, we were on College Avenue, my own block where I used to play stoopball and ringolevio, yet I felt awkward. Was the Bronx home or was The Home home? After a couple of days, I figured it out. I decided the city was like a big noisy family at the poker table having an argument, and the country (when the supervisors left us alone) was like hanging out with your friends not needing to talk, just kicking stones. I wondered where I would live when I grew up, how would I choose, city or country, and if I would always have a divided heart.
“Everything they have there at the HNOH,” said Mama at the seder table. “Horses, they ride. Like a boarding school.”
“Is that right?” said Aunt Adele. She was Rich Uncle Seymour’s gentile wife. I liked her. She knew games and rhymes.
“We don’t ride them,” I said. “They’re dray horses. They pull the plow.”
“I want to live at the HNOH,” said Alvin. Everyone laughed.
Gertie was talking. “Kwai! Kwai!” she called, reaching her arms out. She couldn’t pronounce the “l” or “d” in Clyde. Vivian dragged Gertie around like a doll but Gertie wanted me. “Kwai, hold you,” she said, mixing up her pronouns.