About My Sisters (8 page)

And then there were David and Wanda, Londoners who didn't travel outside their city. David was beautiful to look at (everybody knew he was beautiful to look at and commented on it regularly), very talkative, and full of quips. He was one of very few people who could consistently make my mother laugh. David was an aspiring actor and always had a story about an audition or a film set. He was terribly glamorous and I always loved it when he was around. When he told the story about breaking his arm during an audition for a Shakespeare play, my heart wanted to break.

Wanda was David's girlfriend and perpetual fiancée. She was even more beautiful than David, but it was the ethereal, milky-skinned, limpid-eyed kind of beauty, as if she was some sort of landed ocean sprite. I always felt comfortable trading a joke or two with David, but Wanda was just too beautiful. I couldn't talk to her at all. Although everyone had more than a working knowledge of astrology in those days, Wanda was the expert. Every chart passed through her hands first. She told my mother that, although I seemed more gregarious than Maya, our charts dictated that as we grew older, Maya would become a much more social person than I. Maya would be externally motivated, she said, whereas I would spend a lot of time examining my own head. I never forgot any of this. These are the kinds of things one tends to remember. Especially when they turn out to be true.

Harold, a South African expatriate who ended up in London, was another fascinating character who appeared on the land
scape fairly frequently. Like David, he could be counted on for a colorful story, but his stories usually involved being arrested and jailed somewhere for smuggling drugs. Harold was the one who usually brought the hashish to the party. By the time I was eight, I knew that there was blond hash and black hash and that everybody usually preferred the black, although I couldn't explain why. Wanda said that Harold had a glitch in his chart. By all indicators, he should have been a handsome man, she said, but he was small, dark, and gnomelike. He had an intercepted twelfth house, she said, and that's why prison would always play a role in his life.

The two others I remember clearly, George and Sondra, were among the few who never met each other and this was a good thing for me because I found them both inaccessible and daunting. Sondra was my mother's friend. She was tall, imposing, and made up of sharp lines; a blond-haired, black-robed sepulchral image. Sondra was a self-confessed child hater. She saw absolutely no use for children whatsoever, called them “nasty things,” and made no bones about her distaste. It was hell visiting her house; a cold hell because she was too cheap to turn her heat on. Maya and I had a tiny cubic area of space we could occupy while we were there and we were not to touch anything, talk to anyone, or breathe too strongly in anyone's direction. Sondra was the stuff of childish nightmares, something of a Roald Dahl character come to full-bodied life.

George didn't hate children, but he wasn't sure what to make of them either. In a field of people who had given themselves a 1960s license to be bent, George stood out as weird. When we lived in New York, he'd ride the subway over to our apartment, often bringing his own bottle of Jack Daniels with him. He lived with his parents, which I thought was strange, and he never had any kind of girlfriend. He would speak in riddles and quote TV commercials when talking to me and then laugh at my frustra
tion when I didn't understand him. Nothing he said made any kind of sense at all and that made him somewhat frightening to me. All I could decipher from him was only an intellectual and intense dissatisfaction with everything. Sort of like an extremely sarcastic Eeyore. George was fonder of Maya than he was of me, which was fine with me since I found him both dark and indecipherable and therefore scary. When Maya turned seven, George gave her Candy Land as a gift and made her a giant poster-sized card on which he modified the words of an Alka-Seltzer commercial into a birthday greeting. And he didn't just buy her the game, he played it with her, too.

In both London and New York, it seemed as though there were always people wandering in and out of our apartments and flats, especially at night. There were constant “happenings” in those days and I didn't want to miss any of it. If I was very quiet, my mother would let me stay up and join the party for a while. Maya was never interested in any of this, not when there was sleep to be had, so it was just me, sitting on the outer perimeter of the circle, trying to appear as small as possible so as not to be noticed. Most of the time, I brought a drawing pad and some colored pens with me because it made me look busy and I didn't want my mother to notice that I was paying too much attention to what was going on. Generally, when she caught me watching or listening too closely, she would order me off to bed, so I learned very quickly how to observe without being observed. For the same reason, I never asked my mother any direct questions about what I saw or heard. Afterward, in the quiet of my bed, I would try to make sense of it all. Ultimately, my conclusion was that adult behavior wasn't a huge mystery. Mostly, they were just stoned. And when they were stoned, staring into candle flames or pontificating about being and nothingness, they were interesting but intellectually unreliable.

In addition to all the metaphysical talk I overheard during
these nighttime sessions, there was also quite a bit of conversation about money. Nobody had any and everybody was always scrambling for it. A few of my parents' friends had rich parents who supported them and a few had actual jobs (George worked in a record store, for example), but most of them seemed to exist, as my mother would say, “on the sniff of an oil rag.” My parents traded off which one of them would work at any given time. My mother worked as a secretary for a while and my father worked in restaurants. Their jobs came and went with the same regularity as their moves, but they always seemed to manage. They—
we
—were untethered and free, tied to nothing but each other. And then, at the beginning of the new decade, when I was eight years old and Maya was six, my mother announced that she was having a baby and our family began a slow but permanent shift in its shape.

Maya and I had no experience with babies, having been exposed almost exclusively to adults to that point, and had no idea what to expect. I wasn't yet three years old when Maya was born and she'd never seemed like a baby to me anyway. Both of us were excited and looked forward to meeting whoever the new person might be, but in an abstracted way. The event seemed unreal and very far off when it was first announced. We were living in London at the time and my parents decided that it was time to leave once more. We were going to move back to New York, permanently this time, they said, and settle down for the new baby.

In June of 1971, then, we left London for good. This time, we made a crossing of the Atlantic. And it
was
a crossing. There's just no other word for it.

We'd always flown prior to this trip. In fact, Maya and I were already veteran air travelers and knew enough to charm the flight attendants (we called them air hostesses back then) into taking us to the cockpit where we could meet the pilots and look
at all the lighted controls. And we were familiar enough with that transatlantic flight to know where the extra blankets were stashed on the plane and what to expect for meals. I loved flying. Airports, however, were a different story altogether.

For a woman who did as much traveling around as she did, my mother was never comfortable in transit. And she was downright anxious in airports. There was always a minor panic with passports or tickets or getting the luggage tagged. Often, there was too much luggage and always a concern that we would go over our allotted weight. My mother was also terrified of being late and missing flights. She had a singular airport gait, a jerky half run, as she dragged me in one tightly gripped hand and Maya in the other. Going through customs was never a pleasant experience either. My mother's tension level always ratcheted up then. I could feel it like a small electric shock sent through my hand as she squeezed it. My father wasn't nearly as uneasy in airports as my mother, but her anxiety was pervasive and I absorbed it. I still get irrationally nervous in airports and, to this day, I hate checking luggage and fly with carry-on only.

For our last London departure, there would be no plane. My parents decided to go large, in keeping with the gravity of this particular move, and booked the four of us a passage on the giant and very fancy S.S.
France
. We would sail across the ocean for four days until we reached our final destination, an easy and pleasant way to make the transition between our past and our future. There were swimming pools on board, we were told, and an excellent restaurant. It was all seriously upscale. For the occasion, my mother bought Maya and me matching pairs of black corduroy hotpants with small blue stars stitched into the bibs. The two of us were in a state of high excitement and the Mariannas were in ecstasy.

As it turned out, our passage wasn't particularly easy or pleasant. My mother was seven months pregnant at the time and
spent almost the entire trip puking violently in our tiny cabin. The ship's doctor made more than one visit. My father kept us busy, running up and down the grand staircase and along the deck, as much for our sake as for hers. Seeing her curled up in the dark, groaning and spitting into a damp cloth threatened to send everyone into a panic.

At first, Maya did well on the high seas. The photos we have of that trip show my father by the ship's swimming pool, wearing denim cutoffs, his thick hair curling around his shoulders. Maya and I are smiling next to him, wearing yellow “floaties” on our arms and brand-new bikinis boasting peace signs and flowers. But by the end of day two, the fun was over and Maya succumbed to seasickness, joining my mother in the cabin of pain. This put an end to all our games and cavorting. As for the hotpants, they hadn't yet gotten out of the suitcase. I was, ungenerously, very annoyed by this turn of events. As far as I was concerned, there was absolutely no reason for Maya to be sick when
I
was feeling perfectly well.

Only my father and I were strong enough to venture outside the cabin on day three, but even he admitted to feeling “a little nauseous.” The seas were wild that third day and it was impossible not to notice the thrill-ride rocking of the ship. My father attempted to take me out onto the deck for some air but was forced to hold on to me and drag me back inside for fear I would get blown right over the railing in the gale-force winds.

“They must do this on purpose,” he said. “They shake the boat up for one day so that the ship's doctor gets some work. There's no way a boat this size should rock like this.”

Running up and down the ship's grand staircase wasn't at all fun without Maya. Nor was playing with the butter curls in the ship's restaurant, although the waiter (perhaps alarmed by the dwindling number at our table) lavished me with attention and
spent a lot of time teaching me how to say, “
Je suis fatigué.
” And without Maya, the ship (and the move) was no longer an adventure. Despite walks around the deck and all the butter curls I could smash, the trip began to seem endless and I started to feel some trepidation about what waited for us on the other side. I was looking forward to the arrival of the new baby, but I was also starting to understand that our family dynamic was about to change forever, that we would never again be a two-set unit of four, and I had no idea what that would mean.

By the time the Statue of Liberty came into view on the fourth day, the excitement I'd felt at the beginning of the trip was gone. It was the first time I'd seen her, despite our previous time in New York. She was shrouded in fog, looking cold and solemn, a perfect reflection of how I felt inside. The last snapshot of our S.S.
France
adventure shows much the same feeling. Taken by my father, it's a blurry tableau of my mother with one arm around Maya and the other resting several packages against her rounded belly. The ship looms large in the background. I can be seen off to the side, already walking away.

My father's mother was waiting for us when we disembarked, having driven from Brooklyn in one of the series of Impalas she owned. Grandma was still an unknown factor at that point. Our shifting geography had prevented any close connections. As we straggled off the ship, considerably more subdued than when we'd gotten on, I looked for her, hoping that the sight of her would provide some kind of stability to counterbalance the shakiness I felt. It didn't take long to spot her.

She was wearing a nautically themed outfit in navy and red, set off by white patent leather sandals and a large pocketbook to match (with Grandma, it was always a pocketbook, never a purse or a handbag) and she smelled of Jean Naté Body Splash. I didn't know what to say to her or how to be. I'd lost my tongue the
minute we'd left the ship. But Grandma required very little. She put her hand under my chin and turned my face up toward her. “Hello, Princess,” she said.

For several days, we packed ourselves like sardines into Grandma's tiny Ocean Avenue apartment. By day, we piled into her Impala and went apartment hunting. At night, we sat on her plastic-covered red couch under the air conditioner, watching TV until we passed out in its blue glow. The search seemed to take forever. It was devilishly hot in the city that summer and even hotter in the car as we traversed Brooklyn from one end to the other. The apartment buildings we looked at were dark and all of them, improbably, had Tropicana orange juice vending machines in their lobbies. We always asked to see the “super.” When the super arrived, he was often disgruntled and always holding a massive ring of keys.

After viewing each apartment, my parents would debate its merits and drawbacks as we drove to the next. And then they would turn to me and ask, “What do you think? Do you like it? Should we live here?” I became something of an apartment medium, a high-rise canary in a coal mine. My parents were very sensitive to vibes, good and bad, and saw me as a conduit of both. If I was neutral on an apartment, my parents would attempt to size it up against the next one we saw. But if I really hated the place (and there were quite a few of those; some I found too depressing to even walk through), my parents wouldn't even consider it.