Instead, p.11
Instead, page 11
13
A rigid grid, defined by adult prejudice, was superimposed on the civic pattern of avenues and streets of the old neighborhood. Blacks were exiled in two asbestos-shingled multi-family houses where 50th Avenue swerved to sever 61st Street. The attached brick homes of Czechs, Germans, Italians and other Middle Europeans jostled each other with grudging familiarity on the street’s upper end. Jews, of whatever nationality, inhabited the lower. Despite parental warnings, the children, on their skates, ranged defiantly over the lines.
Tessa still bore an indentation at her temple; the boy had lobbed the rock from the recesses of the apartment yard. Sabine complained, and all parties were brought face to face in the principal’s office. Even the rhyme about the pimple in Mrs. Kelly’s belly, repeated over and over in Tessa’s head, did nothing to diminish the woman’s authority. Or her own guilt at having muttered the obscenity, which instigated the attack. In the end, it came down to Tessa’s word against the boy’s. When each child was reprimanded in turn, Gus was indignant; there must have been provocation. It was inconceivable that both versions of the truth be given equal weight.
Tessa was less brave when running past the last of the houses on 61st Street to get to the candy store on the corner, afraid of catching something, afraid of being caught. This was where Pearl Mother lived. On a block peopled with exotic faces, hers startled, dark hair pulled back fiercely to reveal ears like tiny shells.
The widow, Mrs. Perlmutter, craved anonymity. Her house was overgrown with vegetation. Vines encircled the windows, the front door barricaded behind two dense yew bushes. The cracks in the sidewalk out front sprouted weeds. Cats preened themselves on the stoop, but Pearl Mother was never seen tending to them or watering the plants which thrived in the heat of summer. Even in winter, heat seemed to come from that house.
On the north side, the bricks were crumbling under the work of the ivy. A narrow alley ran along the side and back of the row of houses, defined by a steep wall: the children’s escape route. From two small windows on this exposed side, Tessa imagined Pearl Mother observed them at their play in the empty lot, which was a dumping ground and a good place to explore, all the more inviting by its proximity to danger.
The vacant lot was full of cats, noisy and complaining. No one ever petted them and they got booted if they came too close. Wolfie tied the feet of one loosely to the end of a tree branch, then bent the limb and let it go like a catapult, sending the creature flying; he wanted to see if it would land on its feet. Tessa watched her cousin intently after that; she believed you were always punished for an unkind act. For disobedience. Her mother had warned her about sneaking to the candy store before dinner.
“If you do,” she predicted, “you’ll get sick.”
Tessa threw up the ice cream on the way home, the mess lost in the debris of Good Humor sticks and gum wrappers in the curb fronting Pearl Mother’s house. Dogs loved to hang around there, nosing after the cats.
Once, the older boys, like a bunch of thieving jays, roosted in Pearl Mother’s cherry tree, gorging themselves.
“You damn kids,” she hissed, “get out of that fucking tree.”
None of their parents swore, at least in English; the tone of voice, more alarming than the invective, sent them scurrying for home.
Not far from Tessa’s house, 61st Street ran up against Zion cemetery and became a dead end. The rows of headstones were jammed together like ill-fitting, black teeth. On Saturdays, the gates opened to let in lines of cars. The children never went in; something bad happened to nonbelievers who gained entry. If Pearl Mother had relatives there, they never saw her add to the piles of stones which grew higher on the more faithfully attended graves. On Sundays, toes anchored in the chain link fence, they reached over the top and knocked the stones off with their sling shots.
The twin smoke stacks of the incineration plant looked down on the oldest part of the cemetery, the garbage finding its way into the surrounding fields. Sitting in the weeds among the piles of tossed wallpapers, the children sifted through the fuzzy flockings, the shine of mylars. The keening rose like a chorus to accompany their play. It was louder than Charlotte’s howls when she knelt on a broken beer bottle in the grass. The wailing continued over the leveling of the hill, the construction of a milk-processing plant, the unpopulated street along the cemetery now an avenue for the trucks that rumbled through day and night. The farmhouse was sacrificed, the choke cherry trees, all the cover, sending the tramps who sought shelter there to seek another hiding place. The collied monuments were the only permanence in the neighborhood; no one dared move the dead.
There was a funereal silence around Pearl Mother’s house; no musical sounds other than the mewling of the cats in spite of the rumor that she gave piano lessons. The children of the neighborhood were all disciples of Miss Tuchman, who lived across the Boulevard. On Saturday mornings Tessa endeavored to coax her teacher’s canary to sing. The pieces Miss Tuchman assigned were obscure classics, exercises in tortured fingering which her pupil couldn’t master. Exasperated, she would wave the child off the bench, take charge of the instrument, and play the music with a heavy foot on the pedal, which Tessa was forbidden to use. Elsewhere in the house, Miss Tuchman’s mother, the critic, also listened, the slamming of a kitchen drawer, or the scraping of a chair more eloquently damning than any bird’s silence.
Cruel April came, time for the annual recital; Tessa’s excuses about family commitments--weddings, trips to visit ailing relatives--fell on deaf ears. Miss Tuchman placed a call to Sabine, who cleared up any lingering doubts about the availability on that date. The invitations were sent out, the programs printed. The competitive tick of the metronome could be heard through the screen door of the house across the street where Tessa’s friend, Martha, was being coached by her father. The theatre impresario had the foresight to change his daughter’s last name to something less difficult to pronounce in anticipation of a career in show business.
He did not like Martha to play in the lots with the other children, putting her hands at risk. While away from the piano bench, the girls were witnesses to a man exposing himself on 63rd Street; Martha’s mother called the police first and Martha got to tell them all about it. Tessa stood on the porch and looked dumbly at the police car parked importantly out in front of her friend’s house. She didn’t tell anyone about the man who rolled down the window of his car and said something about “directions.” When that failed to draw her near, he had mouthed the word, “candy;” so this was what her mother had been going on so much about. Mesmerized, Tessa hung onto a tree to keep herself from giving in to a natural desire to see what was going to happen next. She never found out; a neighbor coming from the IGA grabbed her fiercely by the arm and pushed her towards home, repeating the license plate numbers over and over like a chant.
The parents didn’t understand their children’s fascination with the incineration plant, the cemetery, or 63rd Street, although they had seen stranger things. Once, a woman was found dead in front of the cemetery gates, deposited there with no clothes on. A man was thrown from a moving car, along with a pile of phonograph records and shoes, only the left ones. A week later, the right shoes appeared. Things like that happened mostly at night.
The photo on the front page of the newspaper showed five coffins, one large and four smaller, being carried down the steps of a church. A man across Laurel Hill Boulevard had locked himself up with his four children after his wife died. He wouldn’t go on living without her and didn’t want his children to be left without a mother or father. Tessa went into mourning and refused to come out and play. She wondered at the calmness with which the man had conceived and carried out his plan on the unsuspecting children whose names she noted and repeated in her prayers. She furnished the room where they all died; it was devoid of all decoration, even wallpaper, the furniture wooden and hard, to match the father’s resolve. No grand piano stood in the corner covered by a fringed shawl--Tessa’s idea of Pearl Mother’s parlor, a more overwrought version of Miss Tuchman’s, without the bird cage. Powerless to see into those two disparate interiors, Tessa invented spaces she could understand; these images fastened themselves to her dreams. She wondered what it would feel like to be orphaned, to be without this mother and father who failed to save her from recitals and encounters with the principal, who told her things she was beginning to suspect were not in her own best interest to believe.
On a day when she should have been practicing, Tessa and her friends were in the vacant lot next to Pearl Mother’s house, pulling the stuffing out of an abandoned chair. Intent on their task, the children almost missed the black car back soundlessly out of the garage. The vehicle tried several times to negotiate the corner before it turned and headed up the side alley, stopping abruptly before it reached the street. The driver got out. Tessa could see the stockings and high-heeled shoes under the car on the other side, surprised they were not unlike those her mother wore. The woman knelt down beside the back tire and near-sightedly peered at the cat. She scooped up the animal, hugged it to her chest and let out a sound like a primitive echo of those cries they heard on Saturdays. Afraid to move, rooted to the spot, they were unwilling witnesses to such a naked display of grief. After what seemed like a very long time, Wolfie poked Tessa, “Let’s get out of here.”
“What are you kids doing? What are you looking at?”
Tessa saw the cat’s limp head dangling from under Pearl Mother’s arm, saw the look of hatred directed so openly at her; too late, she was cursed. Tessa took off at Wolfie’s heels, felt her bare legs scratched by something.
She walked slowly past Pearl Mother’s silent house after that, watching for the movement of curtains at the front windows. If the rituals were observed, you might avoid retribution; she placed a small stone on the wall in the alley.
The recital was held in Carnegie Hall, not the main stage, but imposing nevertheless. Sabine’s present of lace handkerchiefs were a bribe to make up, in some way that they never could, for the wrenching ordeal ahead.
Harold Bronfman, a neighbor, drove them. Gus managed a well-practiced excuse, anticipating failure. When Miss Tuchman announced Tessa’s name and selection, following Martha’s flawless performance, Harold clapped vigorously.
Tessa sat down at the Steinway. The shaking began almost immediately in her knees and traveled upwards, settling into her hands, becoming not only visible but audible; the waltz opened with a curious staccato. She stared at the place where the sheet music should have been, and knew rote memory would never see her through. When the notes flew out of her head like a flock of routed birds, Tessa backtracked in an effort to retrieve them, playing over and over those she did remember, gathering momentum to make the leap across the gap in memory, instead of going on the way Miss Tuchman had advised. These bars of lapsed recollection appeared as walls against which she flung her fingers and then halted, starting over in yet another onslaught. It was like listening to someone learning to shift gears on a car.
At the end of the piece, more a faint drifting away of sound than a definite conclusion, Tessa’s impulse was to flee, but she had to wait for the boy in his cap and uniform to bring her flowers down that endless aisle, tiger lilies cut from her father’s garden. She stood there on stage, exhausted, with the pollen dusting the front of her new dress, exposed to the audience’s polite and embarrassed applause, a prejudicial verdict about the finite possibilities of her life, the lines she might never successfully cross.
14
“Take ‘em or leave ‘em.” The man at the tackle store refused to quibble about price.
The killies looked to Tessa as if they didn’t have much life left in them. Her father paid without an argument. If she said anything, Gus would only remind her that when the bait was fresh, earlier in the day, she had been sound asleep. Charlotte emptied the machine of sodas and put them in a bucket of water; it was a hot day and all the ice had been sold. The only time they drank soda was when they fished. Even Gus drank it instead of his usual beer. Tessa bought three candy bars, but ate hers before it melted.
On the dock, a skate lay in their path. Charlotte prodded it with her foot. A ripple went through the creature, Tessa thought like a sigh; one fin moved, barely perceptible.
“It’s alive,” Charlotte said.
Gus placed his lit cigar in the fish’s mouth; with each gasp of breath, it emitted a perfect circle of smoke. “How do you like that?” he said.
His daughters had seen the bellies of blow fish puff up under their father’s insistent scratching.
Gus was comfortable on the water. His strong, shirtless back was hunched over the oars; he pulled them taut to his chest and the boat leapt forward. The wind blew them into a shallow grassy area and he set the motor, headed for the main channel, then cut the engine; they drifted back to where they started. He told the girls to put the lines over the sides. They got no nibbles; the fluke and flounder seemed to prefer sandier bottom. Even with the motor going, Gus had to row to keep them from being blown further into shore. The rented boat needed caulking and they sat with their feet in water. Charlotte had hoarded her candy bar and began to eat it slowly in front of her sister. Tessa took a sandwich from the brown bag and offered her father the one with baloney, thick slabs of it, smothered in mustard. Charlotte and Tessa ate tea wurst, which was a paste that tasted nothing like its name, smeared on bread and washed down with the warm soda.
“Eating outside always makes you hungry,” their father said, happily.
Between rowing and eating, they weren’t getting much fishing done. Gus suggested they go to the ocean side for a swim.
They drove as tourists, craning their necks to see into the homes of the wealthy hidden behind sculpted hedges, wrought-iron gates and No Trespassing signs. A Spanish mansion, a Tudor pile, and the replica of a castle in Old Heidelberg sat exposed to the ocean, their dune covers eroded by the most recent hurricane. Further along the spit where the lawns blended into sea roses and wild grasses, the houses took on spare, geometric shapes and the potholes in the road became more serious. When the asphalt gave way to sand, they got out of the car.
Tessa wanted to stay on the inlet side, where the water was calmer. The jetty’s arm sheltered a small warm pool and it was here she preferred to swim. There was always something to discover in the tidepools: barnacles, starfish, the shells of horseshoe crabs. Her father wanted to swim in the surf. They headed across the dunes, single file, sending up clouds of angry birds; they rose up off their nests and flew out towards the water, regrouped, then returned, menacingly lower. Gus marched resolutely on, putting distance between himself and his children, while Charlotte and Tessa frantically waved their towels over their heads. Tessa was pleading, stumbling with eyes squeezed shut, her feet cut by broken shells.
“Shut up,” Charlotte said, embarrassed.
They weren’t alone. A camper was parked in the sand, the tarps on either end flapping in the wind. A tandem bicycle leaned against one of the tent poles. A dog, a golden retriever, was tied to another, straining at his leash. There was a swimmer in the water; once in awhile, an arm shot up out of the waves.
Gus pulled off his trousers, revealing his trunks. Tessa and Charlotte wrapped their towels around themselves and wiggled into their suits.
“Come on,” their father coaxed.
Tessa had difficulty standing her ground as the retreating water sucked the sand from beneath her heels. Her legs felt like sticks, so much flotsam to be easily carried off. Gauging the next big wave, watching Charlotte pause, dive and head out with a strong breaststroke to meet the next one, Tessa made a half-hearted attempt at imitation. The sky, suddenly overcast, robbed her of courage. Plunging in, the shock of cold water was disorienting and she faltered, miscalculated and struck out for the beach. A wave broke over her head, sending her under and before she could struggle to her feet, another followed. Shaken, she limped to the blanket, hugging herself for warmth. She looked back, keeping Charlotte’s pink cap, bobbing up and down on the swell, in her sight. In a panic, Tessa couldn’t make out her father. Yes, there he was, treading water, calling out something to someone, her sister, or the other swimmer, she couldn’t be sure.
The tide was coming in fast, nudging her back towards the dunes. She gathered up their belongings and shook out the blanket. A tern, flopping along the brown foam, made its way towards her, dragging a broken wing. The bird made frantic, pathetic sounds, “kee-aar, kee-aar.” Tessa stood over it, kept her distance from the pointy black-tipped bill. She dropped the remains of a sandwich in its path but they were soon washed away. In the bird’s eyes she read panic, its little heart, she imagined, beating faster and faster in fright.
She bent closer. “I wish I could help you, but I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.
Nothing to do but retract her looming presence, and leave the bird to continue its sad journey.
It didn’t get far. The swimmer, a girl not much older than her sister, strode out of the water and stood with hands on her hips, blocking the tern’s progress. She attempted to pick it up. It made a pass with its beak.
“Damn.”
She lunged after the squawking bird, pinning the injured wing against her body. More squawks. The girl held it at arm’s length.
Enclosed within the inner tube, the tern flung itself at the rubber walls. The dog barked and pulled at his chain. An older woman appeared; she and the girl conferred and she produced a peach basket from inside the camper. Then the girl unfastened the dog, holding him tightly by the collar and dragged him to the water; the animal was reluctant to retrieve the stick she threw until he was allowed to stand with both paws on her shoulders. To Tessa, they appeared to be discussing the rules of the game. Once or twice the dog lost interest and looked back longingly towards the camper. Gus wouldn’t be left out. He made a great show of wrestling the stick from the dog’s mouth, running into the water with energetic whoops to distract him. Charlotte approached the girl and pointed towards the dunes.
