Cambridge (18 page)

I’d come back from these death dives with a shred of a memory, like of my father putting me to bed when I was four. A little memory. He used to sing to me. He couldn’t sing at all. It was croaking. Every night he groaned out “The Skye Boat Song.” “Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, Onward, the sailors cry. Carry the lad that’s born to be king over the sea to Skye.” When I was about five, my mother played this song for me on the piano and I learned its real tune, not my father’s croak-tune. Then I could sing it with him when he put me to bed. He told me about the prince who’d been hidden in Scotland waiting to get on the throne of England. In the dark, with the bulk of my father’s body making my narrow bed tilt to the side, I’d picture the island as blue and frothy, like its wonderful name. There was a line I specially liked: “Baffled, our foes stand on the shore, follow they will not dare.” Why were they baffled? I asked. Because they couldn’t navigate the waters, my father said. They weren’t from Scotland and they didn’t know how to get around in that part of the sea.

Now and then he sang a different one: “You’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland before you.” Why? I asked. I guess the low road was quicker for some reason, my father said. Then soulfully, sadly, croakily, he’d conclude
it: “But me and my true love, we’ll never meet again, on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.” Why? I asked. Why wouldn’t they meet again? He didn’t have an answer.

It was terribly sad. Even my father’s atonal rendition couldn’t disguise or subdue the sadness in that tune and those words, and sometimes I cried when he sang it. He didn’t sing it often.

Thinking of these things now, in fourth grade, I felt they had happened to somebody else. I wasn’t that person anymore. I could make myself teary by singing “You’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road” to myself, and I would do that, to try to be once again the little girl in the bed, with the tuneless father sitting by. But it didn’t work. I wasn’t that little girl, and me and my father would never meet again on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.

Eventually I had to leave the Isle of Skye and Loch Lomond down at the bottom, under the waves I kept sinking into. Likewise the vivid pictures in
Struwwelpeter
, a book my father had adored when he was a child and had cajoled me into adoring as well, though it gave me nightmares. It frightened me, but I couldn’t leave it alone. I wanted to see the bad boy with his electrified hair and talon-nails, and the one who wouldn’t eat his dinner and turned into a stick, and the pair who were dipped in ink and became silhouettes. The very improbability of these stories, which offered some sort of protection, also made them scarier. That couldn’t possibly happen, I’d tell myself. Nobody is going to come and cut off my thumbs. So I don’t have to worry about that. Then I’d worry that because I was so sure it wouldn’t happen, it was going to happen.

But now I knew it wasn’t ever going to happen. If I thought of my thumbs being cut off, which I rarely did, I’d think: I used to be really afraid of that.

I’d been lots of things: scared and mad and curious, caught
up in patrolling Cambridge on my bike and eavesdropping on grownups trying to figure out what they were up to. All that was over.

I wasn’t much of anything anymore. No matter how far down in myself I poked, I found empty, blank nobodyness. The worst part was the way the past seemed to have vanished. It hadn’t really vanished—or so I hoped. But it felt foreign. There wasn’t any continuity between now and what had gone before. I couldn’t even get nostalgic about it. The most I could manage was a sniffle over a Scottish song.

Only one thing could break through my stupor and make me feel something: my mother. She had decided to study Ancient Greek. She was horning in on my Greek year. Why was she doing it? It was like the piano. She wanted to make me look bad. She wandered around the house practicing. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon. She kept
The Iliad
in the kitchen and worked out lines while waiting for the water to come to a boil or the steak to be done. Zeta, eta, theta, iota. Her teacher was a dapper classics professor named Eli, with a dotted silk handkerchief in his sport coat breast pocket, who came Fridays. He had a devil-beard and green eyes and two-tone lace-up shoes. They sat on the sofa together and he read Pindar aloud and they laughed. Who did she think she was? Sometimes he stayed for dinner, just as Vishwa had in the old days.

But there was no more Vishwa. There was no more Frederika either. She’d gone back to Sweden. Their cross-country car trip in the Rambler had done them in, somehow. It had been a big September muddle. Frederika in tears, Jagdeesh coming over to discuss the situation, Vishwa not coming over. And now the house was quiet. I was alone on the third floor next to Frederika’s abandoned, dusty room, with her leftover, hand-me-down
makeup from my mother in the cabinet above the bathroom sink.

The lipstick dried up and got waxy and the powder solidified into a cracked cake, and I plodded through my days. I didn’t care. It was easy to be dead. Now and then I got a jolt of hatred for my mother over the Greek competition, but that just encouraged me to enjoy my diminished self, because hating—and loving—took a lot of energy, and I didn’t have much of that.

I couldn’t understand what had happened between Frederika and Vishwa. I asked my mother about it, even though I didn’t want to talk to her. But it didn’t help. She couldn’t explain it. Maybe she didn’t know either. She had a lot of different versions of it.

“They are both stubborn,” she said.

Another time—I kept going back to her, picking at it—she said, “He is a fatalist and she is an optimist.”

“Am I a fatalist or an optimist?” I asked.

“You are more of a pessimist,” my mother said.

“What’s the difference?”

“A fatalist is cheerful. A fatalist believes that whatever happens was meant to happen and doesn’t fight it. A fatalist is brave and calm.” She looked at me with her intense eyebrows arched high. “You are not calm.”

She was right. I was pretending to be calm. I’d thought I was doing a pretty good job.

“And what about a pessimist?” I wanted to know. “What’s a pessimist like?”

“Just a disappointed optimist,” she said. “An optimist who doesn’t have enough backbone to stick to her beliefs.”

That didn’t sound good. I supposed she was talking about me.

“And that isn’t Vishwa at all,” she continued. “Which is why
he’s a fatalist. Happy and resigned, unflappable, really. He always makes the best of whatever comes. Whereas Frederika is a big improver of things.”

Maybe she hadn’t been talking about me. Maybe it was like when she was making the shopping list and she’d stare at me until I thought she was angry and about to say a mean thing, and all she was doing was trying to think of what to get for dinner.

“I still don’t see what happened,” I said.

“I bet she tried to improve him,” my mother said.

The worst thing she said was, “What they love you for in the beginning is what they will hate you for in the end.”

I couldn’t get that out of my head.

It was a terrible idea, and I believed it. I had believed it before she said it, so hearing her say it was frightening because that made it true. I knew that inside me was an indigestible nastiness, which was bound to poke through and kill anything nice that had managed to grow between me and somebody else. I knew that my balkiness could be appealing at first. It made people want to help me, and plenty of people had tried: the man with the sticks in third grade, the solfège teacher, my mother at the piano bench. But one way or another, I defeated them all. I wore them down until they tired of me and my difficulty. My capacity for disappointing people was bigger than their capacity for putting up with me.

“Can you improve people?” I asked her.

My mother laughed. “You can bribe them to act better. Or try to scare them.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t work very well. Just look at you!”

What did she want from me? What was I supposed to be, that I so obviously wasn’t? I didn’t dare ask.

In late September I’d sat on Frederika’s bed while she cried
into her open suitcase. She folded her shirts and skirts and her sweet lace-edged slips and packed them into tidy tear-splotched stacks. She rolled her marvelous Swedish tights that were red or lilac or dark green—colors American tights never came in—and jammed them into the toes of her shoes and sniffed and coughed from crying.

“Why?” I kept asking. “Why do you have to go away? I know you’re unhappy, but I could take care of you. Stay here.”

On a normal day Frederika would have laughed and told me that it was her job to take care of me, but that day she didn’t.

“I must go back home,” she said. “It isn’t really home, though, now.” This started more crying. “I’m not sure where I belong now. Am I a Swedish person? Am I a sort of half-Indian, half-Swedish person? Am I an American person?”

“American,” I said. “Anybody can be an American person. If you just stay here, you’ll be American.” This seemed like a good solution.

She shook her head.

“Did Vishwa do mean things?” I asked.

“Vishwa is never mean,” said Frederika.

“I know,” I said. “Then why do you have to leave?”

“It’s time to go,” said Frederika. “Every story has an end. It’s time for the next story. This wonderful story is over now.”

“But, Frederika,” I wailed, “does it mean you don’t love me anymore either?”

“Of course not! I always love you. Always and always.” She sniffed. “And I always love Vishwa too.”

“But what am I going to do without you?”

“You were fine without me,” she said. “It’s only a few years that you have me.”

“You said you’d make another gingerbread house for Christmas. And little paper baskets for cookies to hang on the tree.
And I hate school so much! Please, please, Frederika.” I suddenly had an idea. “I’ll go talk to Vishwa. He’ll listen to me. I’ll tell him, Be nice! Don’t be bad to Freddy.”

“Don’t you dare to,” she said. “Don’t you talk to him about me at all. Anyhow, he never did any bad things.”

“Did you do some bad things?” I hadn’t thought of that possibility before.

“Nobody did bad things.” She sat down on the bed. “Sometimes love just dies, that’s all.” Then she sobbed, a huge sob that seemed to pull all the air in the room into her chest.

“How can love die?” I asked. “I don’t understand. How does it die?”

“I don’t understand either,” said Frederika.

My father took her to the airport. My mother stayed home with me and the baby. The new regime had begun.

But at least, maybe, with Frederika gone, Vishwa could come back and we could listen to records again.

My mother said no. “Vishwa is very busy now,” she said. “He’s conducting the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. It’s a big job and he hasn’t got time for lessons.”

I didn’t like Miss Evie but I had to admit that she understood some things about nine-year-olds. For instance, that we knew enough about hate and pride and envy to enjoy the story of the House of Atreus. It was one of the lead-ins to the Trojan War, but we could have studied the Trojan War without going all the way back to the cannibalism. However, that’s where Miss Evie started: Tantalus serving the gods a dinner made of his son, Pelops, whom he’d killed and cooked. What was amazing was that then Pelops came back to life and had two sons, Atreus and
Thyestes, and the same thing happened again, only this time Atreus killed Thyestes’s sons and served them to
him
for dinner.

I thought this was very good. I liked that the story was the same but not quite—gods replaced by a man, two sons instead of one, nephew-murder, not son-murder. But the same thing kept happening, and something about that was satisfying. The horribleness was also satisfying. The storytellers hadn’t made even a gesture toward saying why. Tantalus cooked his son for dinner and that was that. Atreus had a bit of a motive. He was mad at Thyestes for stealing a ram with a golden fleece. But anyone could see that killing and cooking his children was an overreaction. It was clear that Atreus had to do what his grandfather had done. It was his fate, as the Greeks said. And it was the story’s fate as well, to repeat itself.

I wondered about the golden fleece, and whether it was the same one that had sent Jason off on his voyage with the Argonauts. I hadn’t liked that Jason story very much when I’d read it in
Gods and Heroes
during the early-man doldrums in England. I looked at it again now. The fleeces didn’t seem to be connected. For starters, Atreus’s fleece was still on the hoof. The fleece Jason was after had long before been stripped off its ram and nailed to a tree in Colchis, wherever that was. It wasn’t in Greece. The story was full of how special the fleece was, how there wasn’t anything like it anywhere else. But there was. There was a golden fleece in Greece too.

Poor Jason. He could have skipped the trip, I thought.

The further we went in the story of Atreus and his family, the more things happened twice. Or more than twice. First Aegisthus killed his uncle Atreus. Then Atreus’s son Agamemnon killed his uncle Thyestes, who was Aegisthus’s father. Later on, Aegisthus helped to kill his cousin Agamemnon. That was just the killings.
There was also the sister and brother not recognizing each other. First Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter, didn’t recognize her brother, Orestes, when he came home (not surprisingly, he’d come home to kill his mother and cousin). Then Orestes didn’t recognize his sister Iphegenia when he found her in Tauris.

Iphegenia was a surprise. We’d assumed she was dead. Agamemnon had sacrificed her to get a good wind for his trip to Troy. That was the trouble! That had been the start of the whole second round of killings—third round, if you began with the cannibalism. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus would never have killed Agamemnon when he got back from the war if they’d known he hadn’t actually sacrificed Iphegenia. And if they hadn’t killed Agamemnon, then Orestes wouldn’t have had to come home and kill them. And all that mess could have been avoided.