The five towns, p.21
The Five Towns, page 21
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the spring of 1965, Melanie Miller would have graduated from college. But after her automobile accident, she had not gone back to school. The reason was not purely medical; although she’d had to undergo a series of complicated operations on her face in an attempt to restore it to something resembling what it was before, she might have resumed college once the worst of the damage was repaired. But since the accident Melanie had changed into a different person, one who no longer cared about going to class, earning a degree, or even dancing. Her lack of interest in dancing was the most frightening sign of apathy, for she had been so passionate on the subject that she would formerly have let nothing stand in her way. The breakup of her affair with Christopher had drained the life out of her, and although her face was restored to a semblance of the beauty she once had, her spirit had gone.
Gerrie Miller had believed Melanie’s trauma would fade once the plastic surgery was completed, but when her daughter showed no sign of change she began a frantic round of doctors to determine the cause. She dragged Melanie in and out of various psychiatrists’ offices, hoping that someone would suggest a way to wake Melanie from her trance. Melanie would respond if spoken to, and she ate bits of food and occasionally went out for a walk, but she did little else. She developed a hobby which she pursued fanatically; she collected classical records. She did not play most of them. She enjoyed owning them and seemed to want to possess every piece of music ever recorded.
The habit had begun modestly at a time when Gerrie felt she would do anything in order to help her child. Melanie asked her mother to please buy her Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which Gerrie did. And then she asked for the Fourth and then the Eighth, and soon she announced she had all the symphonies so could she please now have the string quartets. She sent her mother out armed with a list of opus numbers, and the collection began to grow until it filled the bookshelves in Melanie’s room and spilled over into cardboard cartons. Once in a while Melanie would take out a record and play it, but she never played the piece through to the end. She would select only a movement here and there, then lift the needle and replace the record inside its jacket. She kept an enormous list of what she owned and another list of what she wanted to buy. The lists took no particular order. Once Melanie had collected the works of one composer she would move on to another. She went from Beethoven to Handel to Ravel to Mozart. After a while the record store had to order some of the works Melanie requested, and she got very frustrated when a particular record was out of stock or, worse, out of print.
Gerrie began to wonder where this insane preoccupation would end and when her child might be returned to her. She often thought that the only way to bring Melanie out of her state of bewitchment might be by finding Christopher and bringing him to see her. But when she called John Dodge to ask for his help, he hung up on her. Once when she telephoned she got a frantic, frightened woman she knew was the mother. But the woman was so terrified her husband might come in and overhear the conversation that all Gerrie could learn was that Christopher was out in California somewhere, still in the navy, and was going out on a ship bound for Vietnam.
She called a naval recruiting office and asked where someone might be stationed before shipping overseas and they told her San Diego. She decided to take the address and try to write to him there.
The letter was the hardest she had ever written, for in it Gerrie had to admit that she had been wrong. She had treated her daughter’s romance as if it had been a childhood crush, an infatuation, but it had turned out to be the foundation on which Melanie’s frail existence had rested. She attempted to explain this to Christopher Dodge, whom she still regarded as the cause of all the trouble. Her daughter had had a near-fatal car accident that was, in truth, a suicide attempt and the boy had disappeared off the face of the earth. She knew he must have heard about the accident; there was an enormous photograph of the car tangled in the twisted metal of the bridge railing on the cover of the South Shore Record, and a similar photo in Newsday. But he’d never phoned or written to ask how she was. Gerrie thought it tragic that her daughter could love someone so completely and yet be abandoned by him without a backward glance.
Well, that’s what those gentile families were like—repressed emotions, no expressions of love or warmth. How could Melanie have imagined she could marry someone so cold? Gerrie had met Christopher during the first summer they were dating, and she had sized him up. He was good-looking, quite agreeable, and cared about Melanie, but she’d suspected right away that he was not Jewish, and there was something else about him that disturbed her: He was weak; his face had a pleasant expression on it but a slack look that she knew would one day fall into loose jowls and wrinkles and be the face of a man who would fail in the world. She could never explain that to Melanie, who idolized him, and never felt she had to. The fact of his religion was enough.
Gerrie had made a rule for herself, and that was that her daughter would marry a Jew. There would be nothing improper in her family, nothing the Millers could ever point to and say, “Well, what do you expect from that shiksa Sidney married?” She had made a vow on her wedding day that she would be the most Jewish of Jewish wives, and she had been quite happy with what she had accomplished thus far in her life. She had been charitable; she had given freely of her time and energies; she had seen her two sons bar mitzvahed; she had become a respected Jewish member of a Jewish community. Until Melanie and her foolish romance. She sat at the dining-room table bent over her sheets of stationery, wondering how to tell this gentile boy that he had ruined her daugher’s life, and was ruining hers, and that if he didn’t help, she could not predict what would happen to a girl who had once been so full of life.
The letter was heartrending, and when she sealed it in the envelope she knew that he would never answer. Her daughter was lost. She mailed it anyway, and spoke a little prayer to God as she slipped it into the mailbox. Then she got in the car and went to the record store, because Melanie was collecting Debussy and had to have the Children’s Corner Suite.
Three weeks later, a letter arrived from San Diego. But when Gerrie found it, she discovered it had already been opened and read and stuffed back into the envelope. She pulled it out and read a few lines, then dropped it on the kitchen table and ran inside to find Melanie. She pushed open the door to her daughter’s room. The piles of records sat in great stacks all around the floor. The bed was neatly made, the covers pulled up and the spread in place. Gerrie went into the hall and tapped on the closed bathroom door. There was no answer, so she turned the knob and opened the door. There was no one inside. She searched the small house but Melanie was not there. She went out into the street, but saw no sign of her daughter’s stoop-shouldered figure walking defeatedly along the edge of the road. She got into her car and drove around and around the neighborhood. She could not find Melanie. She returned home and saw the letter lying on the kitchen table. She picked it up and read it through. It said:
Dear Mrs. Miller,
I am quite sorry to hear about what happened to your daughter. I wish there were something that I personally could do, but by the time you receive this I will be on my way to Southeast Asia for a tour of duty and do not believe I will be returning to the Five Towns for quite some time, if ever. There really is nothing I can say. I have had to behave in this way because of my father and don’t feel I should be blamed for what has happened. I hope you can try and understand.
Yours truly,
Christopher Dodge.
Gerrie Miller thought it was possibly the most disgusting letter she had ever read, and the thought that Melanie had seen it and opened it after all this time gave her more pain than she could bear. She tore the letter into small pieces, sat down at the kitchen table, lowered her face onto her arms, and wept.
The police were kind when Gerrie called, but they did not know how to help her. The local hospitals had no record of admitting a tall, dark-haired girl. Sick with fear and grief, Gerrie sat at the kitchen table until her youngest boy, seventeen-year-old Jon, came home from school, then she sent him out to look. Several hours later, when she had given up all hope and had begun to believe Melanie had tried to kill herself again, her daughter returned. She came into the kitchen quietly, shut the door, and walked over to the refrigerator.
“Where have you been?” said Gerrie, rising up from the table as anger flooded over her to replace the fear of just moments before.
Melanie shrugged, opened the refrigerator, and began to study the contents. She looked the same as usual—her shoulders bent defeatedly, her hair pinned up messily—but Gerrie caught sight of a change, the smallest of differences, the hint of a smile around her daughter’s mouth. She wanted to ask Melanie what she had been doing, but decided that if something could make Melanie smile, it must be a good omen. After the letter from San Diego, Gerrie believed her daughter would lose her slender hold on life; now it seemed that the terse message had had the opposite effect.
Melanie removed a wedge of cheese from the refrigerator, then a package of ham, a tomato, a head of lettuce, and a jar of mustard. She took down a bag of bakery rolls, sliced one open, and began to prepare a sandwich. Gerrie had not seen Melanie approach food so willingly in the long months since the accident. She piled the sandwich high with meat and cheese, then sliced it through and began to eat.
Melanie finished the sandwich and made another. She hummed to herself as she piled the ham atop the lettuce and tomato. It was the first time she had been really hungry in years, the first time she’d felt her appetite the way she used to after finishing a strenuous dance session. How good to feel hunger and to bite into the thick pile of ham and cheese and chew, then bite again. She had loved to eat with Christopher—what’s Christopher? Who was that person? Surely not the same stranger who wrote some words she’d read that morning. What had he looked like? She could not remember his face. His face … He had blond hair, didn’t he? Maybe he was tall.… Not the same person who wrote the letter. She took a huge bite of sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. Someone else wrote that letter, and then Christopher signed his name, without reading it. Who was Christopher, anyway? She didn’t know anyone by that name anymore. “Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”—that was the only Christopher she knew. Pooh. Winnie the Pooh. Oh, if her mother only knew where she had been and what she was going to do. She was going to have some fun!
Ignoring her mother’s puzzled glances, she strolled back into her room carrying the rest of her sandwich. What were all those piles of records doing there? Who had brought them and dumped them right in the middle of her bedroom? And look at that—most of them weren’t even opened, the cellophane wrappers were still tight around the jackets. She could return them, all those records still unplayed, and buy something new to wear instead of looking like a slob. Her clothes were so old and they didn’t even fit anymore. There must be nice new things to wear in some of the stores. She couldn’t remember the names of the stores, but she recalled the plate-glass windows and the pretty things hanging inside them when she used to walk on the streets in town.
And look at her hair. She bent over close to the mirror and stared at herself. She put down the chunk of sandwich and pulled out the barrettes. Her hair tumbled down and hung past her shoulders, almost to her waist. Ridiculous to have such long, tangled hair. She picked up a scissors. Time to take care of business, time to look pretty again. Who was that girl in the mirror? Who had bought all those silly records and piled them one atop another all around the room?
She raised the scissors to her hair and began to cut. The feel of the blades closing on her hair gave her a sensation of power, a thrilling control. Why hadn’t she realized before that she might be pretty, if she tried just a bit? The boys in high school would really notice her now. She might even get asked to the senior prom by the boy voted best-looking in the yearbook. He was a beautiful boy, conceited, arrogant, blue-eyed, and Jewish. Mommy won’t mind if he’s Jewish. Mommy will like it if I go out with a Jewish boy. He never looked at me before, but now I know he will, with my new hair and my new clothes. And we’ll dance the whole night together and then go to a beach party and he’ll pull me close and put his hand there, on my breasts, and we’ll do everything the way it should be done when people love each other.
The hair fell around Melanie’s feet in great piles of wispy black, curling and mounting up as she dreamed of her new life with no recognition of what had passed before. She was going back to Lawrence High School and starting all over again, but this time she would not listen to anyone but her own voice, that small voice inside her that urged her on, that gave her precise instructions as to what she should do. She must keep very still from now on so she could hear that voice. No more music. No more listening to her mother. Her mother was so loud, that’s why she’d never heard this voice before.
And as the hair kept falling around her ankles, Melanie’s small grin became increasingly more serene, until it resembled the smile that had once made Christopher Dodge conjure up Bellini madonnas in the face of a Jewish girl from Long Island. Only this time the smile was different because if you glanced up, you would have seen nothing in her eyes.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When Amy entered her junior year of college in 1967, she did so with the feeling that most of her notions about love and sex were as outmoded as those of her parents. The reason for this change of heart was simple: She had spent the summer in the company of her younger sister, and Marci’s brassy sophistication had shaken her thoroughly. She realized that the two years she had been away at school had shaped Marci into a person who was a complete stranger. The image of her bratty baby sister vanished, and was replaced by a hard-talking, knowing creature unafraid to try anything once.
Amy had returned home in June to look for some sort of summer job to help pass the time until school began again. But after a few weeks of searching, she found there were not many places that would offer work to an unskilled not-quite-twenty-year-old. Bored, and facing the prospect of spending eight weeks sitting at the beach, she asked her mother for help, and her mother offered her a job at her real-estate agency.
“But what would I do?” Amy wailed, convinced that working for your mother was worse than baby-sitting, pouring Cokes at a beach club, or clerking in the five-and-ten.
“You can answer the phone, file, help arrange appointments, and do a little typing. Who knows? You might even learn something,” Evelyn said. She was pleased to think her daughter might be by her side throughout the summer. She missed Amy, especially since the trouble with Marci. Her younger daughter barely spoke to her; and when she did, she usually said something upsetting. How could two children have turned out so dissimilar? she wondered; and then, turning in on herself, she felt she knew but did not want to admit why.
So many people she knew were experiencing the same difficulty with their teen-agers. What was it? Something bad in the air? The Five Towns were turning sour right before her eyes, the goals and dreams set aside in favor of more immediate satisfaction and pleasure. She remembered Marci playing that song again and again up in her room, about getting no satisfaction, singing the lines along with the record. Downstairs, at the kitchen table, Evelyn’s eyes would meet Arthur’s and they would not say a word.
“Well, I guess I’ll try it out,” Amy said reluctantly. She wished Stephen were freer this summer, to go out with her and make the time pass quickly. She wanted to be back at school where she had her own room and no parents around to ask her what and why. They were so anxious for her to be settled that she felt the pressure of their expectations almost constantly. They wanted her to marry Stephen. Of course that’s what she wanted, too, but why did they have to make her feel so hurried. She had to explain, patiently, that she wasn’t seeing too much of him because he was enrolled in summer school at NYU, taking extra science and math courses so he could finish in three years. He would be applying to dental schools in the fall. They nodded their approval, then her mother said, “So when are you going out again?” It was infuriating, and she felt like a baby.
But Marci was no baby. She was wise, Amy knew, wiser than any of the hard-studying girls who shared the dormitory floor with Amy in Medford. No one Amy knew was having sex—at least no one spoke about it; there were whispered rumors about a girl’s sudden departure from school because of an unwanted pregnancy. Marci, however, was clearly not a virgin. She talked openly about sex around her sister and even showed her the little packet of birth-control pills she took.
“How’d you get those?” said Amy, her eyes widening at Marci’s worldliness.
“There are ways,” Marci said. “If you want some, I’ll give you the name of the doctor—he’s right here in town. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t like to see little girls have abortions, he says.”
“Does mother know?”
“You’ve gotta be kidding. She wouldn’t know even if I told her. Haven’t you noticed that she never listens? Well, I don’t know, maybe it’s different for you. She probably listens to you. She thinks you’re perfect.”
“She does not.”
“Oh, yes, she does. She might not let you see it, but you should hear her talk about you—great college, good grades, you and lovey-dovey Stevie. He’s all right, but he’s so straight, I don’t know how you can stand it. Isn’t there anybody interesting up there?”
“Stop it. Don’t make fun of him.”
“Why? Are you gonna marry him? What do you want to get married for? It’s such a drag. Ever look at Daddy’s face when he comes home from work? Want a house in the suburbs? Hey, want a joint? We can smoke.”
