Your Sad Eyes And Unforgettable Mouth Part 5

"Oh, who knows where she was! It's all tangled up there in what she calls her brain."

"Never mind, don't feel bad. I have to go help Mummy make supper, and after that I have a date with this guy, Freddy. But come over tomorrow morning, can you? Maybe you can stay all day, if your mother doesn't mind. There's a party in the evening."

"Party?"

"Yes, Mummy and Daddy spoil me. We have a party every Sat.u.r.day night, it's fun. We dance, we play games..."

"What sort of games?"

"You know, charades, stuff like that."

"I won't know anyone."

"Don't worry about that. I'll introduce you to all my friends. You'll like Sheila-I mean, Dominique, that's her new name-she's smart like you. And Dvora, everyone likes her."

"Is Freddy your boyfriend?" I asked, bracing myself for the answer. And yet I wasn't exactly jealous. What I already had-Rosie in my life-was a bounty for which I could only be grateful. But there was more to it: Rosie's availability was a part of who she was, and yielding to it was a way of having her.

"Not really ... he wants to be. He wants to be the only person I date. Poor Freddy!"

"He shouldn't be so possessive, maybe," I ventured.

"I can tell we're going to be best friends. Even though you're ten times smarter than me."

"I'm not. I'm really not."

"Next time I'll tell you more about myself. Will you tell me?" she asked generously.

"I don't have any secrets," I replied, downcast.

"You're a riot."

"I didn't mean it as a joke," I said. "I really do wish I had some secrets, and you were the only one who knew them ... I do have something nice I can show you, though. It's not exactly a secret, but we keep it in a drawer."

Desperation had given me an idea, and with the idea came a sweet surge of antic.i.p.ation. My mother had a treasured cashmere sweater with pearl b.u.t.tons which she kept in the bottom drawer of her dresser. It was pale blue, though the usual terms-cloud blue, pastel blue-fail to capture the quality of its colour; it was the sort of colour that, in combination with the cashmere, the pearl b.u.t.tons, and the simple cut, made you wonder how a piece of clothing could convey such pure innocence. It was nearly unbearable, that innocence, that purity. The story that went with the sweater was as unbearable: when my mother returned home after the war, she found her old apartment empty, not a curtain left, not even a broom, and as she sat on the steps and wept, the man who lived next door showed up with a parcel, left for her by her mother. Inside was the sweater. More likely that he stole it and repented, my mother added with a snort. And who knew what else the neighbours had in their cupboards! Candlesticks, silverware, lace tablecloths that had taken months to sew, hundreds of books-expensive, leather-bound volumes-and, worst of all, her father's entire collection of photographs. The sweater looked bereft even without this Aladdin's story of lost fortune, and I often paid it a visit in the dresser drawer. I'd take it out for an airing, lay it on my mother's white chenille bedspread, press my cheek against the cashmere, then carefully refold it.

Signalling to Rosie not to make a sound, I led the way to my mother's bedroom and shut the door behind us. Luckily Mere Levitsky was busy in the kitchen and didn't see us creeping to her room; it would have ruined everything, had she swept down on us with her account of our solitary family heirloom.

I lifted the sweater from the drawer, held it against my torso, and told Rosie the story of the kind-hearted, or repentant, neighbour.

"They weren't taken away together?" Rosie asked. "Your mother and her mother?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. My mother was at a friend's house or something..."

"It's fabulous," Rosie said.

"Here, try it on. It's too small for me, but it would fit you."

"Oh, no! I don't think your mother would want that. Anyhow, I really have to go. I have to help Mummy and Daddy ... Pretend I died!" And before I had a chance to ask her what she meant, she fell down to the floor and lay there limp and motionless in the nook formed by the two beds.

I bent down and whimpered, "Rosie, Rosie, my only friend, how could you leave me like this?"

She lifted a swan-ballerina's arm.

"She's alive!" I cried. "Call the doctor!"

"There are no doctors in this place," she rasped. Then she laughed and stood up. "You understand things," she said.

"Not really. But I like you."

"I'm sorry I have to go. Will you come over tomorrow?"

"When's the earliest I can come?"

"I usually sleep in until ten or eleven. But don't worry-even if I'm asleep, Mummy and Daddy are always up early. They'll be happy to see you."

"I'll walk you to the bus," I said. "I could ride back with you, to keep you company."

"And then I'll have to come back with you! We could do that all day. Really, I don't mind. I like buses."

"Okay, I'll just wait with you."

We walked to the bus stop and waited together in silence. There was nothing more to say. We both knew that Rosie's benevolence was an equal match to my desire, and that this would be the basis of our friends.h.i.+p. I would give her my need and in return she would give me as much as she could of herself. And if she was enlisting me for reasons of her own, reasons that had to do with her parents, that was fine with me.

The bus arrived and took her away from me. I walked home slowly. Alone in my room, tucked in bed, I let the day's pleasures billow like a sail in warm wind. I had a friend. This was what it was like to have a friend, a friend for life. Rosie's monastic house, the abandoned school, Rosie on my flowered bedspread: with these things in my life, nothing but their disappearance could ever make me unhappy again.

Rosie kept her promise. She drew me into her life, introduced me to everyone she knew. "This is Maya, my new friend. She wants to go to Eden next year, so she's going to learn everything in one summer. She's really brainy."

"I'm not-I practically flunked out," I said, but no one believed me.

The designated centre of the world that summer was the local swimming pool. DJ Doug Pringle with his s.e.xy English accent on the radio, lifeguards with sun-bleached hair, wet feet running on wet cement. It was noisy and crowded, but when Rosie emerged from the dark, dank locker rooms, currents of excitement travelled through the pool crowd. She was beautiful even in her striped navy and zinc-yellow bathing suit, beautiful even in the rubber bathing caps we were all forced to wear. But she was unimpressed by the impression she made, and thought we were only humouring her.

It would have caused my mother no end of anxiety had I removed one of our colour-coordinated bath towels from the house, especially for a venture as dubious as public swimming. With a handful of coins from the money jar in the linen closet, I bought a beach towel at Woolworth's. My mother was convinced that tuberculosis lay in wait for me at the pool: I'd end up spending half my life at a sanatorium. When I came home, she took the towel-on which Rosie had knelt as she spread suntan lotion on my back, on which I had lain as I delved into the mysteries of Hebrew vocalization-and boiled it for several hours in the tub. The oversized image of a sailboat soon faded into a masterpiece of abstract art.

My notion of Judaism up to then had been foggy. At our place, as in a futuristic story in which the last Jew clings irrationally to the single surviving remnant of a forgotten past, we had an aquamarine menorah with a gold Star of David etched in front. Bubby had brought it with her when she came to us, and had set it prominently on the television cabinet. It remained there for the next few days, expanding under my mother's glare. At last, unable to bear its presence any longer, she picked it up by the stem and removed it to a more secluded location, between the toaster and the sugar tin.

Now, as Jeff and Freddy and Kris strolled over and settled themselves along the perimeters of Rosie's towel, I read about the beginning. In the beginning, G.o.d created the heavens (plural) and the earth (feminine) and the earth was (feminine form of the verb) chaos, and darkness was (implied verb) upon the void. In Hebrew, it rhymed, alliterated, pulsed. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. A language of abbreviations, blunt and evasive at the same time. The words were everything and nothing.

I worked hard, though there were also days when my brain seemed to be waterlogged. If Rosie were a Catholic, I'd be studying The Lives of the Saints- The Lives of the Saints-it was all the same to me. But what exactly was Judaism? Clearly it was more than Adam and Eve in the garden, Cain and Abel outside it. I had no one to ask. The Michaelis, like my mother, were removed from the more tangible aspects of Jewish life, and my questions were too vague for my new pool friends. I found a dusty one-volume Jewish encyclopedia at the At.w.a.ter Library which I was allowed to check out, and I began to read entries at random. A spiral of festivals and significant food entered my consciousness, and I filled several Hilroy notebooks with complex stories involving miracles and violent death, all of it as foreign as the fat alabaster Buddhas in Mr. Wong's gift shop. I read until late at night, but no coherent picture emerged, and when I put away the encyclopedia and closed my eyes, I had visions of the disparate pieces falling in slow-motion through the air, a shower of plagues and horseradish.

Dvora and Sheila/Dominique came to the pool nearly every day. Yes, Sheila-my former bunkmate! Her memories of Camp Bakunin were different from mine: "What a pretentious a.s.sortment of neurotics," she said, referring to the counsellors. If she remembered that I'd washed her underwear, she didn't let on.

Along with her new name, Sheila had adopted a particular style of hippie cool-sombre, skeptical, sophisticated. I rarely saw her smile, though her comments were often amusing. She wore a long black skirt and stayed away from the water; she said she was hydrophobic, but the real reason, I discovered, was her conviction that kids were peeing in the pool. "You'd have to put a gun to my head to make me go into that p.i.s.s-pot," she confided. She couldn't bear direct sunlight and never stretched out to tan like the rest of us. "I must be part-vampire," she liked to say.

Sheila-I could never think of her as Dominique-occupied herself in other ways. In a small black notebook she jotted ideas for use in a future film or novel. She also knew how to crochet. "I crochet because I'm high-strung and compulsive," she said, her arched eyebrows arching even higher. She sold doilies and tablecloths to her parents' friends, and she'd buy us all pepperoni pizza with the money she made, not because she liked pepperoni, but because she wanted to prove that G.o.d didn't care what anyone ate. "Have a kid in its mother's milk," she'd say wryly as she handed us slices. I had read about dietary restrictions in the Jewish encyclopedia, but the article hadn't mentioned that decisions about which ones to follow depended on whether you were Very Strict Orthodox, Strict Orthodox, Religious But Not That Strict or Not Religious. Do not eat a kid in its mother's milk: Do not eat a kid in its mother's milk: a moving directive, thin and exotic, almost a plea. a moving directive, thin and exotic, almost a plea.

One day, Sheila gave me a seash.e.l.l shawl she'd been working on. "I'll keep this forever," I said, embarra.s.sing her. "Don't exaggerate," she chided me in her usual sardonic drawl. But in fact, I still have Sheila's shawl; I've spread it over my DVD player. Study in Metal and Lace Study in Metal and Lace, by M.L.

In spite of her cultivated nonchalance, Sheila's life was hard. She could never stay at the pool for more than an hour or two because she had three younger siblings to look after. Her parents worked long hours at a store, six days a week, and Sheila helped with the cooking and childcare. I offered to lend a hand-we all did-but she put us off. "I like being captain of the s.h.i.+p," she said. Possibly she didn't want us to see the chaos in her home; there were rumours of a cramped, squalid apartment, with diapers soaking in pails.

Dvora in her ruffled bathing suit was round and bosomy; the ruffles matched her Little Lulu curls, which bounced like Slinkies when she moved. An expert on the Top 40, she brought her transistor radio to the pool and always knew who was singing and for how long they'd been on the chart. A flyer from the local radio station helped her keep track, and she ticked off the songs as they came on: "Mrs. Robinson," "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Angel of the Morning." Between hits she furtively handed us small, individually wrapped toffees she'd snuck past the guards. Sheila broke pool rules as well: we weren't allowed to bring furniture with us, but Sheila sat on her own portable lawn chair. She told the lifeguards that she'd had polio as a child and that her back was damaged. I doubt they believed her (we'd all been vaccinated against polio), but it was easier to let Sheila be. Her Madonna eyes and pale oval face, partly hidden by stray strands of hair, discouraged confrontation.

It seemed as if everyone but me knew how to swim. They'd had lessons, or their parents had taught them, or they'd somehow taught themselves. But I was afraid of the deep end, and there wasn't any marker to show where the floor of the pool dipped-you could be wading in the shallow part and suddenly your footing would be gone. Occasionally I lowered myself into the pool in order to cool off, but I didn't let go of the ladder, and after a few seconds I climbed back out and returned to my towel and books.

My determination to attend Eden so I could be with Rosie transformed the decoding of Hebrew into an impa.s.sioned undertaking. I studied amidst an unabating soundtrack of shrieks, splas.h.i.+ng, and radio hits. At times a particular song served as a mnemonic. Stoned Soul Picnic Stoned Soul Picnic came to be a.s.sociated in my mind with the deep abyss of Creation, came to be a.s.sociated in my mind with the deep abyss of Creation, tehom tehom, while "Honey I Miss You" was to be forever linked to G.o.d's plan for interminable reproduction, pru urvu pru urvu.

Despite Herculean efforts, by mid-August I had only reached the sixth chapter of Genesis, though I'd skimmed the rest of the Bible in English. And even those six chapters-up to G.o.d's instructions to Noah-were only partly intelligible; I was stumped by some of the verses, and no one could help me. Rosie didn't know; Sheila, sighing and looking bored, occasionally agreed to take a stab at the problematic pa.s.sages, but though her Hebrew was better than Rosie's, most of the time she handed back the Bible with a triumphant "I don't know what the f.u.c.k this means." And there was no point asking Dvora, who had never once pa.s.sed a Hebrew exam.

Like Judaism, though far more hopeless, heteros.e.xuality took shape that summer, summoned not from an inchoate state but from non-existence. Rosie acted as matchmaker: Avi Ozier, the sought-after lifeguard, was taking her out on Friday night, and she invited me and a bony boy named Earl Margolis to come along. Earl, it seemed, had a secret crush on me; he'd confided in Rosie, and she had promised to do what she could.

My fantasies had changed, now that a real-life object of desire had risen from the mist. In my daydreams I'd focussed on the female models who'd posed in studios over the ages; now those anonymous women had been replaced by Rosie, and my pa.s.sive appreciation by dramas, or rather melodramas, in which I played a heroic role. Rosie was drowning in a lake; I reached out for her, lifted her soaking body onto a boat, bundled her up in a towel. She was wrongfully accused of a crime, and I found the evidence that freed her. Inspired by Persona Persona, which I'd seen on late-night television, I imagined the two of us marooned together on a desert island ...

I had remained more or less impervious to jealousy; Rosie's Friday-night dates were, I felt, a trivial part of her life, even an aberration, like a cold that comes and goes, or the pool closed for cleaning. I was, however, annoyed that her boyfriends took up time she might have spent with me, and I often wished I could trail along as she and her guy-of-the-evening went roller-skating at the Recreatheque. It had never occurred to me to be interested in members of the opposite s.e.x; vaguely and instinctively, I knew a date with a boy would lead to exactly nothing. But the prospect of joining Rosie on one of her evenings out was, quite literally, a dream come true.

The four of us were supposed to see a movie, but Avi was late, so we bought a large bag of barbecue chips and made our way instead to Earl's place. Earl was the only one of our circle who lived in the Town of Mount Royal, known for its affluence and h.o.m.ogeneous Updike-white population. The bas.e.m.e.nt of Earl's house was more like a clubhouse than a room in a someone's home, with its bar, ping-pong table, beanbag chairs, rows of records leaning inside built-in cabinets, s.h.a.ggy off-white carpets on a dark red linoleum floor and, permeating everything, the innately nostalgic smell of cedar and mothb.a.l.l.s.

"This bas.e.m.e.nt is great," I said.

"Groovy," Avi agreed.

We sprawled on beanbags, and Avi, who was enterprising as well as handsome, produced a small piece of hash, lit it until it burst into flame, trapped the smoke with a gla.s.s, and used a hollow Bic pen to toke up. I watched as Rosie and Earl inhaled the delicate smoke but declined when my turn came. What if I got so high I ended up soaring straight into the worm museum?

Nevertheless, I was the keeper of the toking pen, because I was the only one who carried a reliable knapsack wherever I went-you never knew when you'd need soda crackers, tissues, tampons, safety pins, scissors ... Every once in a while I come across that dismantled pen at the back of a drawer I'm cleaning out; for years it kept its musky smell, but now only the stained yellow insides of the barrel remain as evidence of its glamorous past.

Avi hung his arm around Rosie's waist. He was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with the confidence of recently acquired enlightenment, brought on by readings in Zen that had raised him from ordinary mortal spheres to Olympian heights. Avi: dark curly hair, blue eyes, Jimi Hendrix bandana, purple gossamer s.h.i.+rt, embroidered vest-oh, the eros and esteem one could secure simply by means of an embroidered vest! Breezy with his mind-blowing, consciousness-altering perceptions, he kissed Rosie's hair, and she smiled. Earl sat next to me, wanting to touch me but afraid. "Well, Earl, what do you usually eat for breakfast?" I asked him, trying to make conversation.

"T-toast and jam," he stammered.

"That's sweet sweet," I said. What do you do when you're given power over another person's happiness? How is it possible not to sink under the weight? I had so little to offer Earl-barely even friends.h.i.+p.

Earl blushed and ducked his head inside the record cabinet to hide his excitement and misery. "What d-do you want to hear?"

"'Ode to Billy Joe,'" Rosie said.

"What's the thing they throw off the bridge?" I asked.

"Her baby," Rosie said.

"Oh no!" Earl looked horrified. "It's a g-gun. He's killed the man who attacked her and got her pregnant."

"It's her blood-stained clothes. She's had an abortion," Avi said with unZenlike relish, as his hand slowly rotated on Rosie's midriff.

"Anyone see the moon landing?" I asked.

"Yeah. Big deal," said Avi.

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Why did they have to put up that flag?" Avi complained. "No imagination-just ego, ego, ego. Couldn't they have put something universal, like a peace flag?"

"Or Masaccio's Adam and Eve Adam and Eve," I suggested.

"It ruins looking at the moon, thinking that flag is up there," Avi said.

"It won't l-last," Earl a.s.sured him.

"It's probably flown away already," Rosie said.

"Yeah, well," Avi grunted. "They're in compet.i.tion with the Soviets. You have to give up desire to reach the realm of the True Self."

"'The ants go marching one by one,'" Rosie sang, and we all joined in, improvising silly, stoned rhymes.

Meanwhile, back home, my mother was talking to two policemen in our living room: three in the morning, she wailed, and not a sign of me, not a word. The policemen nodded. What did they make of my mother? And what had she told them on the phone to induce them to pay a house call? I don't know. But they did have words of warning for her: "She could be on LSD. Parents are the last to know." For days afterwards, my mother watched me fearfully, and it took a concerted effort to convince her that LSD was not being pa.s.sed around, along with Dvora's toffees, at the swimming pool.

When you're young and it's summer, time melts away. If not for Rosie's Sat.u.r.day-night parties we would have forgotten what day it was, but the countdown began midweek: three days to go, then two, then one. The parties were an extension of the Michaelis' distinct vision of family life: filling the house with teenagers was part of a larger plan we gladly accepted, though we didn't quite understand it. Rosie's parents remained in the background, sitting in the kitchen or paying for the pizza or collecting paper cups; whenever possible, they tried to direct our focus onto Rosie. But the parties were a family project, a staged event in which the rest of us had been cast; and the point was to include Mr. and Mrs. Michaeli, satisfy a private need of theirs. We didn't care. On the contrary, the depth and breadth of their need made us feel wanted.

The food never varied. We could expect two large plastic serving bowls filled with Cheezies, four cut-gla.s.s candy dishes containing white and pink sugar-coated almonds, and several bottles of soda. Dvora, Earl, and some of the others brought additional drinks and bags of pretzels. At eight o'clock the extra-large pizzas arrived at the door, their cardboard boxes almost too hot to touch and starting to warp from the sogging steam. We ate politely, using napkins, but sometimes tomato sauce dripped onto the sofa or carpets, leaving stains that gradually faded from copper to dark grey.

As we ate, Rosie performed for us. She sang songs by Schubert in her pure, faraway voice, with her father accompanying her on the piano. She sang Mahler's Kindertotenlieder and Pamina's magical aria from The Magic Flute-ach ich fuhls, es ist verschwunden. Now I know that love can vanish. The Magic Flute-ach ich fuhls, es ist verschwunden. Now I know that love can vanish.

Cla.s.sical music! No one else could have got away with it. But if Rosie sang Schubert or Mozart or Berlioz, it was because she was even better than you thought. She wasn't showing off, she was doing it for you, handing you-or her parents, through you-the luminous overflow of what she had to offer.

Occasionally, on request, she also performed the family dance. She must have been fooling around one day in the living room, with her father playing wacky, jazzy Bach to match her odd moves while her mother watched. Over the years, the Bachanova, with its stooped arm-swinging and fake tap-dancing, had evolved into family tradition. No one tried to imitate it; no one would have succeeded.

At regular intervals, Mrs. Michaeli retreated into her bedroom to smoke. She left the door open and I often saw her sitting on the bed with an ashtray on her lap, staring into s.p.a.ce. If she happened to glance my way, she'd smile and say, "Will you stay tonight, Maya?"

I did stay. More and more frequently I slept over on Sat.u.r.day nights. The sofa in the music room opened into a hard, slightly wobbly bed, and Mrs. Michaeli brought me ironed sheets and a pillow from the closet. She would light a cigarette and sit on the piano stool as Rosie and I tucked sheets under the sofa cus.h.i.+ons. "Poor Maya," she said. "We have no room for your legs." She was postponing her own bedtime, and we tried to be helpful by talking about the small mating dramas that had taken place during the party. But it was hard going, and as we spoke Mrs. Michaeli stared at the carpet and nodded vaguely. When the bed was made, she would sigh deeply, stub out her cigarette, and say goodnight.

We moved to the bedroom to change. As Rosie undressed, I couldn't help noticing the perfect triangle of dark hair springing like a miniature meadow from the curve of her thighs. Mine, a ridiculous orange, was unruly and wiry; I had not realized there were such variations. She had round b.r.e.a.s.t.s while I was as flat as a boy; she was slim but her body curved gently. I felt angular and overly solid next to her, like a child's drawing of a robot next to t.i.tian's Venus of Urbino Venus of Urbino.

"Look at me," I said, the first time I slept over. "My body proves that G.o.d has a sense of humour."

"You're a riot, Maya. It's nice to be tall. And everyone loves red hair and grey eyes. I wish I had your grey eyes!"

"I wish-" But I couldn't tell her what I wished. What I wished was to sleep in her bed. I liked to imagine that if I had the same access to Rosie's body as her boyfriends, she'd be impressed, because I'd be so much more pa.s.sionate and appealing than any boy. In fact I was luckier than Rosie's boyfriends: she never rationed herself with me. I had an open invitation to her place, and when I came over I had her to myself for hours at a time.

"Here," Rosie said unhappily, extracting a pile of letters from a dresser drawer and dropping them on the bed.

The letters were from boys. Avi's large, bold script obediently reproduced the conventions of cursive our teachers had modelled on the blackboard in third grade; Freddy's letters were smudged and barely legible; Kris used a green fountain pen. They all pleaded with Rosie, pledged their devotion. I can't live without you all I think about is you and if I thought that the future didn't include you I wouldn't want to be part of that future. I can't live without you all I think about is you and if I thought that the future didn't include you I wouldn't want to be part of that future. The tone was at times accusatory but never aggressive: sensitivity was coming into fas.h.i.+on. See me, hear me. The tone was at times accusatory but never aggressive: sensitivity was coming into fas.h.i.+on. See me, hear me.

"What should I do, what will I do?" Rosie looked expectantly into my eyes. "I don't want to hurt anyone ... I just can't give them what they're asking for. They're all jealous of each other."

"Who do you like best?" I wanted to be helpful, but I was also scouting.

"I like all of them, that's the problem."