In Case We're Separated (8 page)

Then Jeanie Murdoch, the daughter of the synagogue's caretaker, raised her hand. A skinny child with hair over her eyes, Jeanie owned no uniform, and Ruth had been trying to figure out how to secure her a bigger girl's hand-me-down without embarrassing anybody. Jeanie reminded Ruth of herself. She recited the Promise with her eyes closed. Now Jeanie stood—nobody else had stood—and, in a pure, careful soprano voice, sang, out of season, “O Holy Night.” Ruth was startled: startled at Jeanie's intensity, at the beauty of her singing, at the strangeness of her choice. “O Holy Night” is a long song—long, religious, of course not Jewish—and it took Jeanie a while to sing it. Ruth glanced across the room and saw that Mrs. Freedman was rolling up her crocheted peninsulas with extra attention. In the other direction, Lillian leaned forward on her folding chair.

“Fall on your knees!” Jeanie sang, for the third or fourth time. “O night divine! O night when Christ was born!” Some girls—the troop was mostly Jewish—frowned and whispered. Ruth knew Jews who preferred to leave the room during the singing of Christian songs, others who merely kept silent, and still others who sang all but certain words, like
Christ
. Ruth hadn't been in the sanctuary of the synagogue—just above them—since her brief religious period in high school. She had an unruly voice, so she never sang anything very loudly. But if she felt alien singing Christian songs, she was no less uncomfortable with Jewish ones. Where did other Jews even learn those songs? How did they get so cozy about it all, about matzo balls and Yiddish jokes and prayers in Hebrew? When Ruth did sing, she sang every word,
Christ
and all. Now she listened for as long as Jeanie's song lasted.

 

R
uth and Lillian were swift walkers, and they set out down the dark street, their feet making plenty of noise on the sidewalk. “How come you came?” Ruth said after a while.

“Did you mind?”

“No.” But ordinarily Ruth enjoyed her solitary walk, and these days she had something pleasant to think about: the poetry professor was excited about her. He'd hurried into the classroom before the most recent class, exclaiming, “Ruth Hillsberg has had a breakthrough!” The poem he liked had been written late at night—not first thing in the morning—and was about Ruth's mother. In the poem, as often in life, her mother went straight to the kitchen after work, and then, standing at the stove, nudged each shoe off, using the other foot. “My Mother in Her Stocking Feet” the poem was called.

Walking beside Lilly, Ruth thrust her hands into her pockets and was surprised to discover the medicine bottles. If she'd been alone, she could have found someplace to discard them.

“You didn't mind even though I witnessed the heresy?” said Lillian.

“Jeanie singing in the temple?”

“Mrs. Freedman did not like that.”

“It didn't do any harm,” said Ruth.

“I didn't say it did,” Lilly said. “The reason I came is—I wrote a sestina.”

“No kidding! A whole sestina?”

“A whole sestina.” Lilly took a folded piece of loose-leaf paper from her pocket, stopped under a streetlamp—Ruth thought she looked beautiful and mysterious, standing there—and began reading aloud:

“I put a broken diamond in my mouth.

You told me not to swallow. In exchange,

You offered me a cooling drink of water.

You tried to tie my hands with a thick cord.

I ran away. I wandered over the map.

The diamond cut my tongue with its sharp point.

“You said, ‘I think I understand your point.'

You held your hand to catch what was in my mouth.

You followed me when I wandered over the map.

You offered me cool soda in exchange.

You offered me a pretty silver cord.

In a clean cup, a soothing drink of water.

“I didn't take your soda or your water. . . .”

But then Lilly began to cry. She crumpled the page, then tore it into shreds, letting the pieces scatter. She leaned against Ruth's shoulder and sobbed, while Ruth reached up awkwardly to pat her.

Finally they walked again. “It was good,” Ruth said.

“I really did write a whole one.”

“I believe you. I don't suppose you have another copy.”

“No, that was it.”

“It seemed sad.”

“It was sad. It got worse.”

“But wasn't it fun to write it?” Art, she wanted to say—as dopily as that—makes life worth living. But she couldn't say that.

“I can think of things that are more fun,” Lillian said.

 

A
t home, their parents were quarreling over a map of Brooklyn. Their mother had found an eye doctor for Lillian, and they were figuring out where his office was, their voices becoming querulous, more Yiddish. “What are you talking about, Eastern Parkway? That's nowhere
near
Eastern Parkway.”

“Of course it's near Eastern Parkway. Where Sylvia lived when she got married.”

This sort of argument had embarrassed Ruth until recently. So trivial, she'd complain to Lilly. Now she discovered an odd comfort. Her parents' sentences felt like lines in a poem; maybe after a while Ruth's thoughts would all come out in poetry. “It's where Aunt Sylvia lived when first she married,” she recited. “Where little Richard and small Joan, my cousins / First drew their breath. . . .”

Everyone ignored her. “The map could be wrong,” her father was saying. “Isn't there a little street over here?” Her father looked elegant, with precisely drawn wide ears that stuck out from his head, which was serenely bald. He looked as if he'd speak in whispers.

“There's nothing wrong with the map,” said their mother.

Lillian had dropped her coat on a chair and gone into the bedroom. She was wearing the yellow sweater again. “Homework?” her mother called after her.

Ruth found it easier to study in the dining room, listening to her parents' conversation. In the bedroom, she and Lilly would talk—Lilly never did homework—while Ruth strained to hear her parents as well. For the first time, Ruth was going to read
The Waste Land
by T. S. Eliot, and she took off her shoes and settled down at the dining room table with the anthology. April was the cruelest month, just as she'd always heard—but quickly the poem lost her. Ruth was distracted not only by her family but by herself, as if a radio announcer behind her whispered with suppressed excitement, “Ruth Hillsberg is reading
The Waste Land
.” Soon she'd no longer be someone who had never read
The Waste Land
. These days, though, when she read a poem she wanted to know if it might influence Lillian—either by convincing her of life's goodness or by comforting her with a telling depiction of its woe. If anything, this poem would be in the second category, but Ruth didn't think it would interest Lillian.

“The garbage smells,” she said then, however: suddenly and usefully inspired. She got up and put on her shoes. “I'll take it out.”

“I don't smell anything,” her mother said. Ruth hadn't either, but at last she could throw out the old medicine bottles. She put on her coat, took the overflowing grocery bag from the pail in the kitchen, and then remembered that the wastebasket in their room was also full. “The
bedroom
waste land,” she remarked to nobody, setting down the kitchen garbage near the apartment door, as her mother passed behind her, walking toward the kitchen: the phone was ringing.

“Hello?” said her mother's voice just as Ruth opened the door of the room she shared with Lillian. Her sister sat on her bed, a loose-leaf notebook open beside her. The left sleeve of Lilly's yellow sweater had been pulled up to her elbow, and with the point of a compass—she was taking trig this term—tall, curly-haired Lilly dug in an already deep welt on the back of her arm.

“What are you doing?” Ruth said in a harsh whisper. Before she'd spoken, the compass had been dropped, the sleeve pulled down, while Lilly turned the back of her head toward her sister and looked at the notebook. Their mother was calling Ruth to the phone.

To commit suicide, Ruth explained silently to herself as she went—still in her coat, leaving the kitchen garbage near the door, quickly abandoning her plan to take out the bedroom trash—one would cut the
underside
of one's wrists, not the tops. But with lips and tongue she had to force to form the word she said, “Hello?” into the receiver.

The caller was a man Ruth didn't know, the treasurer, he said, of the temple. “I just wanted to tell you,” he began—but he sounded harsh. He wanted to tell her that all the members of her Girl Scout troop had to attend Friday night services that week. “Youth Night,” he explained. “Required.”

“Required?” said Ruth.

“That's right.”

“It can't be
required
,” Ruth said, a little sleepily. It was hard to pay attention, but what this man wanted didn't seem to make sense. “I won't see them for a week,” she said.

“You'd better call them on the phone, then.” He had a high, hurried voice.

“And it's up to them,” Ruth went on reasonably. “I can't
make
them come. Maybe they won't want to.” She'd never heard of Youth Night. Had Mrs. Freedman rushed to the phone? Had one of her Jewish scouts arrived home singing “O Holy Night”?

“It's required,” he said. “Your troop is sponsored by the temple. It participates in temple activities.”

Ruth remembered something from the leader's handbook about sponsored troops. “Oh,” she said. “No. It's not a sponsored troop. That's something else. We just meet there.”

“Look, I've been in scouting for years.”

“Boy Scouting or Girl Scouting?” said Ruth, aware of the bedroom door being closed firmly.

“Both!” said the treasurer.

“Oh, but they're completely different organizations,” Ruth said fluidly. Suddenly she felt able to speak convincingly, at length, to anyone. She held the receiver in her right hand, and with her left, she fingered the bottles in her pocket, running her finger on their metal caps and glass necks and paper labels. “In Girl Scouting,” she said, “a troop that meets in a church or a synagogue is not necessarily sponsored. This troop isn't, and it includes girls who aren't Jewish, as well as Jewish girls who don't belong to the temple. The troop will not expound Jewish theory.”

“I'm not asking you to expound Jewish theory—”

“I think you are,” Ruth said.

“Look, are you Jewish?” the treasurer demanded suddenly.

“I don't think that's relevant,” Ruth said. Her mother was standing behind her, listening. Ruth took her hand out of her pocket.

“But are you Jewish?” said the treasurer.

“My family background is Jewish.” Past her mother, who looked baffled, was the closed bedroom door.

“Your family background is Jewish,” the man persisted, “but
are you Jewish
?”

“No,” said Ruth at last. The man laughed or growled and hung up.

“What did he want?” said her mother as Ruth turned from the phone.

“Go talk to Lillian,” she said, almost in tears.

“What does Lilly have to do with it?”

“Just
talk
to her.”

No great poets were Girl Scout leaders. No Girl Scout leaders were great poets. Ruth picked up the bag of garbage and left the apartment. She was of no use to her sister: she was too happy. She would have to teach herself to be unhappy, but even as she formed that resolve, she knew how far she'd have to go.

What had just happened on the phone stunned but also pleased her. Ruth would be a martyr to religious freedom. Maybe she'd have to defend Jeanie and her song not just to the treasurer, but to the vice president, the president of the temple, and the rabbi.

“But are you Jewish?” they'd say.

What was the answer, and why didn't she know? A person trying to become unhappy, Ruth almost let herself understand, might well begin with that question. She carried the garbage outside and put it in the metal can with its battered cover, stuffing the old medicines deep inside and pressing the misshapen lid down tightly. Then she looked up at the Brooklyn sky—faint stars overlaid with tree limbs. She stood in her open coat with its empty pockets until she was cold, and then climbed the stairs to Lillian, who was alone in their room, her math book open, her sleeves pulled down over her wrists.

Election Day

I
met a sweet man named Harold during the Eisenhower years, but Kennedy was president by the time we went to bed. When I finally saw Harold naked, his penis rising toward me even as he stepped out of his checked boxer shorts, I loved the way he looked if only because I'd waited so long to see. I taught fourth grade, and was in my classroom when Kennedy was shot, but that afternoon I made my way through grieving crowds to meet Harold, a high school teacher, in our usual place, an Upper West Side apartment belonging to a friend of his—a bachelor, we said in those days, but the elegant, subtle drawings on the walls were of men. That afternoon, as we made love, then smoked in silence, the men—nude, hardly more than needy clusters of lines—seemed to reach toward one another in hope not of sex but consolation.

“You have talkative bones, Sylvia,” Harold said when I walked to the window, still naked, and stared out. “I can see what you're thinking.” I hadn't been thinking of the dead president, just then, but of Harold's constant smoking. But I liked—how I liked—his eyes and mind on me. I told nobody about Harold except my sister Bobbie, who's dead. So now (it's 1980; Ronald Reagan has been elected president) to my knowledge nobody alive knows except Harold himself, assuming
he's
alive.

My husband, Lou, is a Democrat, but he didn't respond to Kennedy's death by sitting dully in front of the television set for days. He'd stop where the doorway framed his familiar slope, glance at the set and me while tying or untying his tie, and leave the room, saying “Enough.” From the day Roosevelt died until 1963, I hadn't wept over the news either. As the sixties continued, public happenings changed not only my thoughts but how I spent my time. Lou remained as he'd been.

Harold couldn't stop talking about Kennedy's death. He carried around a letter about it from his son, who was somewhere in Africa, in the Peace Corps. In the waning light of a weekday afternoon, Harold read me letters to and from his son, and letters he'd written me but hadn't mailed. I mailed my letters to him, and at times I wrote about wishing I could give him up. I was trying to stop smoking, and I said breaking up with him might save my life. I didn't worry that the affair might end my marriage.

Two years after Kennedy died, my son, Richard, graduated from college and waited with distressing resignation to be drafted. A pianist, he refused to do anything but practice—anything that might get him a draft deferment. “The Peace Corps?” Harold suggested.

I'd already said it to Richard with stupid nonchalance: “Why don't you just join the Peace Corps?”

“Just?”
Richard had replied, waving an arm. Then, “I couldn't practice in the Peace Corps.” The day Richard went to Vietnam, I wrote to Harold, ending the affair.

Richard went, he came home, and he was not physically maimed. Since then his speaking voice has been louder, less nuanced—a piano on which some keys no longer sound. He gave up music and went to work for the city planner's office, becoming an expert in traffic. You'll occasionally see him quoted in the paper. I didn't like the women he brought home—too much hair and makeup, too few opinions. Meanwhile my daughter, Joan, became a psychotherapist, married another, had three kids. She has plenty of opinions. “Don't you know Richard's gay?” Joan said one day, and I said, “Of course I know,” then tried to convince myself that I had. I was hurt that he hadn't trusted Lou and me enough to talk about it, or bring home a boyfriend. I didn't tell Lou about the conversation.

I stayed married, but while marching in antiwar demonstrations or otherwise leading my life, I continued to keep an eye out for what signs in a catering establishment might term my “next affair.” I am not bad-looking. I have short curls that have been gray since I was thirty-five, a hooked nose—which, I believe, makes me appear interesting—and a narrow, energetic body. When my mother was still cooking she always said I was too skinny.

 

N
ow I don't teach fourth grade; I'm the “facilitator”—awful word—at an alternative high school in a former elementary school. We have what is called an emphasis on the arts (I imagine myself explaining “an emphasis on the arts” to a panel composed of Michelangelo, Mozart, and Milton) and we address ourselves to mildly troubled but smart kids. One day early this fall I looked out my office window above the school's back entrance, and saw fifteen blue-jeaned teenagers—all sizes and races—led by a middle-aged black man in sweat clothes. They ran into our small paved yard, and the teacher unrolled two mats. He knelt, then beckoned to a thin Korean boy, who was coaxed to climb on the teacher's back and sit on his shoulders. The boy stood up cautiously, then let go of the teacher's hands, one at a time, and straightened. He hesitated, then let himself fall forward onto the mat. The teacher was a new part-timer whom I hadn't met.

A short black girl, smiling self-consciously, did the first part of the exercise, but didn't fall forward. Others tried. At last they ran inside again, beneath me, as if I were that big old mother on stilts in
The Nutcracker,
whose children rush out of her skirts, do cartwheels, and then return.

I stood up and stretched, wanting to climb on that teacher's shoulders. The scene excited me, but not sexually. I don't screw my staff for numerous reasons. But I felt left out as that teacher's boss, the responsible person into whose voluminous skirts the lithe young people had run.

In the next weeks I came to know the teacher, Robin Stanford. We shook hands at the end of a staff meeting, then walked down the corridor. Robin's an actor, he told me. He also teaches exercise classes, often to old people, so I mentioned my mother's nursing home and he'd worked there, but before her time. He, too, had an old, ailing mother, and we talked—with quick sympathy—about that life, that responsibility.

“But did you visit someone else at that home?” he asked me. “Two, three years ago?”

“No.”

“I've seen you before,” he said. He has an expressive voice that rises in pitch when he emphasizes a word. “I've
watched
you. I have to remember where I stared at you, Sylvia.”

At our self-consciously innovative school, nobody owns a last name and even the kids call me Sylvia, yet it pleased me when Robin said it. This man had noticed me as I'd made my way through the city, through my life.

“You hustle your elbows,” he said. Now he sounded saucy. He imitated me, walking ahead down the corridor with a slight crouch, his behind thrust out a tiny bit, his elbows pointed and working. “I have
admired
that walk,” he said solemnly, before giving me a nod as we reached my office and I stepped inside, a little unsettled.

 

I
n the old country,” my mother said abruptly on Election Day, while Reagan was being chosen, “a woman had a terrible shock, and all her teeth came out.” We were in the car. The schools were closed, and after voting for Carter I cooked a pot roast, then drove to the nursing home and brought her home for supper.

“Her hair, you mean, Mama?” I said, although that's hardly likely either.

“Her teeth. In the morning, she goes to rinse her mouth, and they come out in her hand.”

“What was the shock?” I'd been concentrating on traffic and thinking about the election.

“I can't remember.”

At my house, I took the wheelchair out of the trunk, unfolded and braked it, and bundled my mother into it. Her paralyzed right arm bunched on the arm of the chair. If she could ever have written, she couldn't do so anymore, but she never learned how. She'd cast an absentee ballot that someone had read to her and marked. “I hope she didn't vote me for Reagan,” she'd said when I asked her about it, finding her watching television news in a semicircle of wheelchairs.

“The
shvartzers
? They don't need Reagan no more than you!” called an old man.

“Now I remember,” my mother said as I got behind the chair. She has white hair, cut short and straight, and she wore no hat. In the dark, under a streetlight, her bright head looked like a target, the white almost gleaming. I wasn't used to seeing her outdoors.

“What do you remember?”

“The shock,” she said. “What made her teeth come out.” Her speech isn't quite right since the stroke, and I couldn't hear what she said next. I crouched next to the chair, but before she said anything, a spoke twisting off the wheel caught my stocking and nicked me. I made a sound and had to reassure my mother. In the house, I left her to change my stockings and wash the scratch. When I came back, she said, “Sylvia, I'm sorry, Sylvia,” so I knew she was wet, and we managed to deal with that.

“She visits my mother when I am a little girl,” she said, when I returned. I remembered the toothless woman. “Her mouth is folded in so you can't see it. She has no lips. It all went inside like a rock went bang on her mouth.”

“It looked bashed in?”

“I don't like to look. I stand in the doorway. My mother says, ‘Come in, Sonia.' She gives me a little sweet tea on a spoon, but I don't want it. I stand next to my mother's knees, but I don't open my mouth. I'm afraid the same thing should happen to me.”

I'd been walking back and forth past my mother's chair, assembling what I needed for supper. When she spoke of this far, far event as if it had just happened, I felt so sad that, mumbling as if I needed something, I hurried again to the second floor. I stared out a window at the other Queens houses, then remembered staring at Robin, and wondered if it was true that he'd seen me once, and then I thought of Harold, who seemed as distant as the woman whose teeth had fallen out: part of a past we can't touch again. Standing near my desk, I picked up something I did want downstairs, a program Robin had given me for a play he'd been in. Richard was coming for dinner, and I wanted to show it to him—to brag, I guess, about the interesting sort of person we have at my school.

Richard hates the nursing home and hadn't seen his grandmother for a long time. He and Lou walked in together, after meeting at the subway station. With the same motion they shrugged off their coats.

“Carter,” Lou was saying. “What choice did I have?”

“That's what everyone says,” said Richard, and as always in recent years, I found myself resisting his voice, resisting a lack of fluidity. I wish I could prove it was different before he went to war—but why should I need to prove it? How could war
not
change the voice of someone for whom sound mattered most? Now, looking at traffic patterns, he studies cacophony.

“You didn't vote for Reagan, did you?” I said. Richard was the kind of long-armed, thick-armed pianist who looked as if he might pick up the piano, and now he spotted his grandmother and pointed his big arm at her.

“Richard, Richard,” she was saying, extending her own good arm toward him.

“I didn't vote,” said Richard, over his shoulder.

“You didn't
vote
?” I considered driving him through the city to his precinct—an hour, with traffic—but managed not to make the offer. I think Richard voted for Carter last time, but in '72 we had a fight. I was running a McGovern headquarters, but my son, recently discharged from the army, was for Nixon. Now I was saved by my mother. Richard bent to kiss her, and the conversation changed. She demanded to know if his work tired him. “It's not good to live alone,” she said. “And who keeps clean?”

“I have a nice cleaning lady.”

Lou had turned on the television. The polls would be open in New York for a while and in California for hours to come, but as he flipped channels, commentators already displayed ominously shaded maps of the United States.

“That's ridiculous,” Lou said, pausing to glance at a map before snapping the set off. The red states—where Republicans were predicted to win Senate seats—far outnumbered the blue, I saw as I passed behind him.

“Let Mom see,” said Richard, who was sitting on the floor next to the wheelchair.

“She'll see plenty.”

I dished out pot roast and potatoes, while Richard scrambled to his feet and came to help. As he moves toward middle age, Richard resembles his father. He's taller but has Lou's sloping look: the glistening forehead tipped slightly back, so the grade of the stomach is that of the face, the brown curls. Both men loosen their ties in the evening so the knot rests at the same place on their chests, and they roll up their sleeves in the same careless way, so the cuffs dangle. I'd been angry with Richard for failing to vote, but I wanted to kiss the skin below his elbow that showed when he swung his arm and his cuff flapped.

At dinner, Richard and Lou sat across from my mother and me. My mother can use a fork awkwardly, but I cut her meat. “Here, when
my
teeth come out,” she said, “the dentist makes new ones. In Europe, no such thing.”

“Or she couldn't afford them,” I said.

“Afford what?” said Lou from across the table, his knife pausing in midair.

“Dentures.”

“Who's talking about dentures?”

“Mama knew a woman whose teeth fell out all at once,” I said. “Could that happen?”