How to Fall (13 page)

Whenever I see the word
happiness
I think of that corner.

Few of Mom's co-workers were married, and none were parents. Some brought their dogs to work. One evening one of her fellow programmers took us to a wrestling match. We held our breaths each time a fighter was pinned, sighed when he was resurrected. Later in the year a young woman took us to the Flower Show. Clubs from the suburban towns had created real gardens in real earth in front of painted houses. We brought home a pot of daffodils and a paper poppy. “I will extract some paper opium from this,” said our father in his weakened voice. “We will have such dreams . . . Dreams!” he suddenly shouted.

But field trips were rare. Mostly we spent Mom's workdays in our corner.

An elderly secretary labored for my mother's group. She kept conventional hours, and it was a while before we had any commerce with her. But one December afternoon at about five she stopped us on our way back from the sandwich machine. She was seated at her typewriter, and she didn't lift her fingertips from the keys when she spoke to us, though the tapping ceased. “Harriet and Wilma,” she said by way of greeting.

All we had to do was say Hello Miss Masters and smile and skedaddle. But: “Harry and Willy,” Willy corrected.

Miss Masters slid her hands onto her lap with an awful gravity. “Twins but not identical.”

“Fraternal sisters,” said Willy.

“What grade are you in?”

“Fourth,” I said at the same time that Willy said “Fifth.”

“My oh my” was the extent of Miss Master's reply, but her tone was inquisitorial.

“She's advanced,” I said, my explanation ruinously coinciding with Willy's “She's retarded.” Then we did skedaddle. When we'd turned a corner I grabbed Willy by her bony shoulder.

“Do you
want
to go to school?” I demanded.

“Jeez. No.”

“Well, then.”

My mother was sitting at her slab of a desk, writing code. Whenever she was bent over her work, her shoulder-length hair, abundant but limp, separated of its own accord and fell on either side of her neck. We settled down on our chairs with sandwiches and books, our presence unacknowledged. We understood that absorption, not indifference, made her ignore us, just as we understood that our father's sudden explosions were disease, not rage. My mother's pencil scratched. We read and chewed. She began to hum—a sign that she had solved a problem. She straightened and moved her chair outward, and it protested faintly, aagh. I looked up and began to sing the words to the tune my mother was humming. The song was “Good Morning” from the movie
Singin' in the Rain
—we'd seen it twice in the Revival House back home and once on somebody's television. Willy joined in, a third higher. We sang the words and Mom abandoned the melody and hummed continuo. The wrestling programmer, walking in with a flow diagram, stopped to listen to this makeshift serenade.

 

When we didn't go to work with Mom we went to work with Kate. After my mother left for the hospital, after we had finished the housecleaning (Kate wore a blue bandanna over her hair) and had made a trip to the library and the Civil War Monument and had perhaps listened to the organist practice in the little brick church
or visited chilly Walden Pond, traveling by bus, or inspected the daily catch up in Gloucester, traveling by train, or curled up at home, listening to our aunt read her own translation of Ovid . . . after that, we set off for the Busy Bee Diner. Aunt Kate did a half-shift at the Busy Bee, from four until eight.

On our walk to the diner we saw the children of the neighborhood engaged in their various childish activities: practicing hoop shots, or minding toddlers, or, at the variety store, fastening powerful gazes onto the candy counter so that Baby Ruths would leap into their pockets. Often we recognized the young people we'd spied on from our window—Nose Picker, his hands safe in his pockets; Curls, pretty; Amaryllis, gorgeous. Other kids, too. They wore hand-medown clothes and they looked strictly brought up. They were all white, and most were fair. Not Amaryllis, though. Dark brows shaded dark eyes: a Mediterranean siren in this Hibernian tract.

We looked at the familiar strangers, and they looked back at us. Did they wonder about us? Parochial School students probably thought we went to Public School. The Public Schoolers knew we had never been seen in their cinder-block building; did they notice that we didn't wear the pleated skirts and white blouses of Catholic scholars? How did they explain us to each other? We speculated about their speculations.

“Because of our delicate health we are tutored at home,” suggested Willy.

“By our aged relative,” I added.

Aunt Kate grinned.

The Busy Bee was owned and manned by the Halasz family. The Halasz rice pudding was made with ricotta; the Halasz chocolate pie contained nuggets of chocolate cake. When my
father was out of stir, as Kate called it, we would bring home one of these desserts, and also a carton of barley beef stew. Though the food was very good, he didn't finish it.

We longed to practice short-order cooking behind the counter with Milo Halasz, and to try waitressing with Kate. But laws against Child Labor were more severe than laws against Truancy. Mr. Halasz allowed us to work only in the kitchen, a high square room that the public couldn't see. Mr. Halasz, who wore a beret as a chef's hat, taught us to scrub up like surgeons. He taught us to pound herbs and then powder them between our palms, and to roll leaves of cabbage around chopped meat sweetened with rosemary, and to beat egg whites until they were as stiff as bandage gauze.

Some mornings Kate visited my father while my mother stayed home with us and the eunuch. We didn't resent not being left on our own. We knew that our competence was not in question, just as we knew that it was not hatred of men that caused Aunt Kate to snub the blameless advances made by some of the Busy Bee's patrons, and to keep Milo at arm's length too; and that it was not Willy's skinniness that prompted Mom to lay her cheek against my sister's some wintry mornings in the living room, and it was not my tendency to vertigo that made her embrace me suddenly in the kitchen. And although Willy and I liked to check on what the neighbors were up to, it was not to watch Amaryllis brushing her hair that we perfected our spying techniques. It was to watch our two demi-mondaines. We saw the glances they exchanged in the beginning of that year; and then we sensed glances without seeing them; and eventually we sensed glances they didn't even need to exchange.

Often I got up at night—to use the bathroom, if anybody
asked—but really to draw closer to the dark heat in the living room. Sometimes Aunt Kate played Chopin or Schubert on the upright. Usually she lay on the couch, her knees bent, reading. Mom sat at the desk, coding. Music came from the hi-fi; Rosamunde, Egmont, Siegfied. The two women talked a little. One time, without preamble, my mother got up from the desk and crossed the room and dropped to the floor and laid her head on Aunt Kate's abdomen. She began soundlessly to cry. Aunt Kate placed the book she'd been reading, still open, across her own forehead, like a sombrero. She held it there with her left hand as if against a gale. With her right hand she fondled my mother's foolish hair.

 

In March my father was transferred to a Rehabilitation Center. One Saturday afternoon my mother took us to see him there. We drove across the city. The place was near grim buildings of mostly undefinable uses, though one of them, we knew, was a popular roller-skating rink.

Dad was not connected to an IV. “A free pigeon,” he said, flapping his elbows. His gait was unsteady but he could walk without a cane and without leaning too much on my mother—his arm around her shoulders was mostly an embrace. The four of us tramped up and down the corridors, as if not daring to stop. I think he guessed what was coming—the tumor's steady growth, the blindness in the right eye, the new operation, the new operation's failure . . . Along the polished linoleum the sick man marched, whispering into his wife's ear. Her hair separated, revealing her meek nape. We trailed behind.

At four-thirty my parents finally sat down on my father's bed.
They were going to share supper in the cafeteria, they said. It was always nutritionally appropriate. “Bilious,” Dad confided. “Maybe you two would like to go out for pizza.”

If we stayed we could watch her eat, watch him pretend to eat, eat ourselves, see! good children, swallowing the meat loaf, the stewed fruit. “But . . .” Willy began.

“Have fun,” said my mother.

We trudged down the corridor. In each room lay two sad patients.

The pizza parlor had tiled walls and a feral odor. There were no booths, only tables. It was too early for the supper crowd. Except for a few solitaries in windbreakers we were the only customers. We ordered our pizza and sat down to wait for it.

Four girls burst in. They must have traveled by trolley and underground to get here. Roller skates hung from their shoulders. Amaryllis's were packed in a denim case.

“Hello,” they said.

“Hello,” we said.

They swept to the counter to order their pizzas. We studied their various backs—erect, round-shouldered, slim, bisected by a braid—and their various stances—jumpy, slouching, queenly, hands in back pockets—and their noses as they turned their profiles this way and that, and their languor or purpose as they visited the jukebox or the ladies' room, and their ease as they more or less assembled at their table, one always getting up for something, where are the napkins anyway, talking, laughing, heads together, heads apart, elbows gliding on the table. The girl with glasses—I was pretty sure her name was Jennifer, so many girls were Jennifers—sat in a way that was familiar to me, her right knee bent outwards so that her right foot could rest
on the chair, her left thigh keeping the foot in place like a brick on a pudding; this position caused a deep satisfying cramp; I knew that pain. “Wilma,” called the pizza man. Willy got up to get our pizza. The girls didn't watch her. Willy brought the pizza to our table, and we divided it, along with our salad. “Nicole,” the pizza man said. The girl I'd thought of as Jennifer uncoiled and went to fetch the pizzas with Amaryllis. Nicole and Amaryllis set the big round pies carefully on the table. Then came an unseemly scramble. They laughed, and grabbed, and accused each other of greed, and somebody spilled a Coke. “Pig!” they cried. “Look who's talking.” “Jen, you thief,” laughed the bespectacled Nicole as Amaryllis overturned one wedge of pizza onto another, making a sandwich of it, doubling her first portion. “Jen, you cow!”

So Amaryllis was just another Jennifer. She raised her face. She was wearing a tomato sauce mustache, beautifying. She looked directly at me. Then she looked directly at Willy. Four-Eyes—Nicole—raised her head too and followed Amaryllis's gaze—Jen's gaze. Then the third girl. Then the fourth.

We were all over them in a minute. We swarmed, if two boyish eleven-year-olds can be said to swarm over a quartet of nubile adolescents. Eleven-year-olds? Yes; we had celebrated our birthday the month before. We were officially teenagers, my father had said from his bed in the front room (he was out of stir, that weekend), handing us each a leather diary, one brown, one blue. Any number between eleven and nineteen, inclusive, belonged in the teens mathematically, my mother explained; we might call ourselves one-ten or one-teen if we liked. Many languages used that locution, said Aunt Kate.

We were one-ten; this interesting fact we told our new friends.
We talked about pizza toppings. We discussed television programs we'd never seen. Boys in the neighborhood too. “You know Kevin?” Nicole asked.

“I know who he is,” I lied. “Wicked.” We knew that wicked meant splendid.

Did we like the Stones? Harrison Ford? Had we ever seen the gas meter man?

No one asked us what grade we were in.

Did we skate?

Skating was our passion, Willy said. We had practically been born on little steel wheels. Next to watching television and plucking our eyebrows . . .

“We come to the rink on a lot of Saturdays,” said Amaryllis, who would never be Jen to me. She stood up, and her associates stood with her. “Maybe we'll see you here some time. Here.”

Hear, hear: here. Any further commerce between us would be off-neighborhood. We got it: we were known in their homes, and not thought well of. Maybe their families had glimpsed the whorish dressing gowns of our mother and aunt. Perhaps they were prejudiced against men in turbans.

The schoolgirls whirled out. Willy and I shuffled back to the hospital. My mother was waiting for us in the dim lobby. We three walked wordlessly to the car.

 

In the late spring he came home for the last time. He couldn't eat, unless you count tea. “I'd like to play a little,” he said to Kate.

Whenever the quartet or the symphony performed he sat up on the stage, remote. Once, though, he had fiddled almost in our midst, at the wedding of my mother's youngest brother; standing,
he played “The Anniversary Waltz” by request, borrowing an instrument from the hired trio. He was wearing his tuxedo on that occasion, and his red hair above the black-and-white garment gave him a hectic gaiety. My mother told us that “The Anniversary Waltz” was an old Russian tune, stolen and given words in order to fill a need in a movie musical.

In our rented living room my father did not play “The Anniversary Waltz.” He played a few sweet things—some Mendelssohn and some Gluck—and Aunt Kate did well with the accompaniment; very well, really, since she was silently sobbing. Then he played “Isn't It Romantic?” and Kate recovered and pushed through with a nice solo bit, Oscar Peterson-ish. We knew the tune and the lyrics, and we could have hummed along or even sung along. But we sat mute on the sofa, flanking our mother. Outside the street lamps illuminated the cardboard facades of the other houses. The sky was purple. My father wore a striped hospital robe over custard pajamas. His eyes closed when he reached the final note. Silence. From the kitchen the teletype began to clatter.