Before I really understood what this meant, another wave rose, my head went under again, and I came up coughing and spitting. My mother, to my relief, was right beside me, treading water.
“Mom,” I tried to warn her, but the look on her face told me that she already knew. Her eyes were wide open and there was a big frown between her eyebrows.
“Turn around and swim,” she said. “It’s not as far as you think.”
“I can’t,” I gasped before a wave pounded me, filling my mouth with a burning, bitter taste.
My mother was beside me again, treading water. She couldn’t reach out and hold my hand now, I realized suddenly, because even she needed both of her arms to stay afloat. The water was moving underneath, pulling us sideways. The beach looked farther and farther away. It was all I could do to keep my head from going under.
My mother started flinging her hand upward, trying to wave it from side to side. She was calling for help. That meant we were drowning.
Before the next wave hit us, I kicked my legs as hard as I could and lunged toward my mother, making up the short distance between us. The wave hit. We came up, both of us coughing and spitting, my arms clutched tightly around her neck.
“Listen,” my mother said, in a choked-up voice. “You have to let go.”
“But I’ll drown,” I wailed.
She stopped moving her arms for just a moment — long enough to put them around me and draw me closer. I could feel my shoulders, wet and slippery, pressed against her collarbone. “Let go,” she said in a voice that sounded surprisingly calm. “Now, or we’ll both drown.”
By the time the next wave went over my head I was swimming alone, flailing my arms and legs to come up for air, and my mother was beside me. If it weren’t for me, I thought, she could easily swim back to the shore. She was a strong swimmer. We were drowning because of me.
“Stay calm,” she said, “and float.”
We treaded water for a while, and between the waves my mother looked around, no doubt trying to measure the distance we had to swim.
“Look over there,” she said, turning away from the shore and pointing toward the piece of land jutting into the sea. “We can’t swim back to the beach, but we can make it to those rocks.”
The waves had been pushing us sideways, toward the rocks, as well as farther from the shore. From where we were now, the tip of that land was about as far away as I could swim in the river without stopping if the current was with me. That piece of land was our last chance. If I couldn’t make it there, I would surely drown: Heading toward the rocks meant turning away from the beach completely, swimming farther out to sea. If I drifted too far to the side and missed the tip of the land, there wouldn’t be anywhere else. Every time I came up for air, I’d better be looking at those rocks, making sure they were still in my sight. The only stroke that would allow me to do that was the breaststroke.
I took a big breath and started kicking my legs with my knees bent, flicking my ankles the way my mother had taught me in the river. The arms, I told myself, should draw nice big arcs, not a bunch of little frantic circles that would make me tired. My mother swam right beside me in her easy graceful breaststroke — she was between me and the rest of the sea, guiding me toward the rocks, showing me how I should swim.
The waves we had been fighting were suddenly helping us. In just a few minutes, my mother and I stood on the rocky ground of that slip of land, looking back toward the shore. My legs felt wobbly, and I was breathing hard. The two of us looked at each other, too stunned to say anything. For a while we just stood trying to catch our breath, listening to the waves as they continued to crash at our feet. Then we started walking. The rocks formed a steep cliff above us, but at the bottom, there was enough room for us to walk side by side. Cautiously we picked our way back to the beach, trying not to cut our feet or slip back into the sea. On the way we noticed a group of people gathered on the sand, watching us. When we got there, they came rushing toward us. They were my uncles and several other men we had never seen.
“I waved for help,” my mother said to them.
“We thought you were just waving for fun,” one of my uncles said. “We didn’t know anything was wrong until we saw you walking on those rocks.”
One of the strangers, an old man in a shirt and trousers, shook his head. “You got caught in a rip tide,” he said. “A fisherman drowned there a few years ago.”
Several people were talking all at once, saying how lucky we were, but I wasn’t listening very carefully. My brother was running toward us. Behind him, the beach was more crowded than when we had first started swimming. For the first time, I noticed an ice cream stand not too far away.
“Mom,” I said. “My throat hurts from the seawater. I would love some ice cream.”
When my mother told people the story of our near drowning, that was the detail she always emphasized — how I had calmly asked for ice cream as soon as we were back on the beach. Every time we remembered this incident, she said to me, “You are a brave girl. You let go of me when you had to.”
The way she talked about it, our experience in the Sea of Japan was a great adventure that proved my courage: If I could swim well enough not to drown in a place where a fisherman had died in a rip tide, then I never again had to worry about drowning. I did not question her logic — though years later I realized that my mother had said just the right things to prevent me from becoming afraid. If she had told stories of a near disaster, a close call — instead of the story about my courage — I might never have been able to swim again. Instead I believed that I had conquered that sea for good. All I had to do was be more careful and watch out for the rip tide. My mother and I swam at the same beach again the same afternoon and the two following days; we returned to my grandparents’ house and continued our swimming lessons. I was getting so good, she said, that the following year she would teach me the butterfly.
Back at school in September, I swam the length of the pool in the breaststroke without stopping. When I got to the end, I touched the edge of the pool and turned around. The other side of the pool didn’t look nearly as far away as the shore had from the sea the day I had almost drowned. The water wasn’t moving or trying to pull me under. It was nothing. I started swimming back, past the first five meters where the pool was deep, then past the ten-meter mark, past the halfway mark, where the only other student from my class had stopped. I took a deep breath, changed to the front crawl, and swam all the way to the end. My hand hit the wall; I stood up. My mother would be pleased, I thought, to sew five black lines on my cap.
Though I did not know it then, that winter, when my mother turned thirty-eight, she began to be overcome by her unhappiness — not about me or my brother, but about her life in general and especially about the way my father seldom came home to spend time with her. In the next three years, this unhappiness grew heavier every day — till it was something she could not bear alone. My father stayed away more once he sensed her unhappiness. My brother and I were too young to fully understand what was happening, though we both knew deep down that something was terribly wrong. My mother had been the oldest of five children, the one who always took care of her younger siblings and helped her parents. She could not imagine confiding in her family and burdening them.
When I was twelve, my mother decided to die rather than to live the rest of her life crippled by unhappiness, unable to stir from the chair where she spent her afternoons weeping. She left me a note in which she told me these things and more. “You are a strong and cheerful person by nature,” she wrote to me. “The way I am, with my unhappiness, I am no good to you. I’m afraid I would only hurt you by being around. You must go on alone without me. At first you will be sad, I know, but you will overcome your sorrow. Be strong. Be happy for me.”
Her choice is not one I would make now if I ever found myself drowning in unhappiness. I would try everything to live. But I understand my mother, too. She had told me to let go of her when we were both drownin
g in the sea. Though I wanted to cling to her then, I knew that I could not. When she decided to die, she must have remembered that time. She was asking me, again, to let her go — to let her float deeper out to the sea, where she could be at peace, while I swam with all my strength back to the rocks. She wanted me to live and to be brave. Swimming now in the clear-water lakes of Wisconsin, where I live, I sometimes imagine my mother riding the waves of the sea, cresting over the top and falling gently without ever hitting bottom, laughing her easy musical laugh. She could be right next to me: We are separated only by glimmering water.
“I decided to write about my experience in the Sea of Japan because it was by far the most dramatic thing that happened in my childhood. I have changed a few details of geography, and the ‘real’ experience happened in another language, but otherwise, the details are close to the facts from my past. Even when the facts are ‘true,’ though, our minds shape our memories. No matter what we write about, the distinction between fact and fiction, memory and story, is as elusive as the constantly moving wall of water that separates one swimmer from another.
I have always wanted to become a writer. In those summers that my mother, brother, and I stayed at my grandparents’ house, my grandfather and I used to sit side by side every morning, writing in our diaries. In first and second grades, I had a diary that was divided in half: The top half was for pictures, the bottom half for words. As I grew older, words replaced all the pictures — became the pictures, which was just as well. Although I loved to draw and paint, and I still love to look at art, even in third or fourth grade I knew that words came easier to me than lines and angles.
My mother and her family encouraged me to write. My grandfather had been a schoolteacher, though he was retired by the time I was born. My mother, like her father, kept a diary and wrote weekly letters home to her parents during the year, describing the flowers in her garden, the cookies she and I had baked, the new clothes she was making for us, some funny thing my brother had said. Two of my uncles — my mother’s younger brothers — are teachers. Because I am the oldest of all the children in my extended family, I remember the things my brother and cousins were too young to remember: When I was young, our grandfather was still strong enough to go walking in the mountains with me; my grandmother grew more flowers and vegetables than she did years later when my cousins were in grade school. So in a way, I always thought it was my duty — as well as my pleasure — to write down the family stories: To record, describe, and re-create the past so that it will never be lost.”
In the early 1960s, I lived in a neighborhood in Baltimore city where everyone pretty much knew everyone else.
Our parents gathered on weekends for community barbecues while we kids, in shifting patterns, flocked from one friend’s yard to another. In good weather, seven or eight of us would park our behinds on the corner stoop and put on a talent show. And every night, up and down our block, fathers would come out on their porches and call their children home.
“Harry!” That was Mr. Izzy.
“Bonnie!” That was Mr. Maish.
“Howard Brucey!” Howard Bruce’s father had a voice so deep, he might have been calling Howard Bruce all the way from heaven.
My father didn’t call me. I came home after my last friend vanished from the block.
Maybe my father’s day job as a collection man exhausted him too much to come looking for me; maybe the constant battles between my parents kept them from noticing that it had grown dark and I hadn’t yet come home. Whatever the reason, I didn’t mind. I hated when evening came. I dreaded going to bed, because in my bedroom, at night, voices haunted me.
They whispered to me, whispered secrets, secrets I couldn’t tell anyone.
Secrets about myself.
Secrets about my parents.
Secrets about the woman in the house next door. I was an unwilling conspirator in my next-door neighbor’s secret. Her secret was so big, so cruel, it filled her own house and spilled over into mine. The secret of the woman next door was that every night, somewhere around midnight, she’d lock her children in an upstairs closet and wouldn’t let them out again ’til morning.
Our row houses, on West Garrison Avenue, mirrored each other. The closet in the house next door was an exact reflection of my own. Those closets were small, too small for me to stay in for very long, much too small for the kids next door to spend each night in. All through the long hours, those children stood, jammed together inside that dark, airless closet, pleading with their mother to be let out. “Please,” they would whisper. “Please, Mommy. We’ll be good. Pleeease.”
I heard every cry they uttered, every rise of panic, every whimper. Sleepless, I listened in my room, my bed pressed against the common wall between our two houses.
The secret of those children I kept along with all my other secrets. That’s the way things were back then. You didn’t interfere in anyone’s private stuff, and no one interfered in yours.
I found ways to get through the night. I read under the covers using a flashlight; I made up stories inside my head, retelling those same stories at our neighborhood talent show the next day. I never told the truth about how things were for me or for the kids next door. Instead I kept my friends riveted to the stoop as I spun tales born out of my nightly need to escape the whispering.
Through most of my childhood my mother worked as a receptionist at Margo-Lynn Beauty Parlor. My father drove down the dusty back roads on the outskirts of Baltimore, collecting weekly payments from the poorest families, as they purchased, a dollar or two at a time, a new refrigerator or a new stove. When I got sick, neither of my parents could stay home from work. I went to school every day, regardless of how I felt. But on the days the school nurse sent me back home again, I stayed with Bubi Hannah.
Bubi Hannah lived with her daughter and son-in-law, in the row house two doors down from ours. Once, after coming home midway through the morning, I threw up all over Bubi Hannah’s sofa. She never even got upset. She just cleaned it up, flipped the cushions over, and patting them smooth said, “Shirley’ll never notice.”
When I stayed at Bubi Hannah’s house, sometimes I could hear the woman next door. She would pace, muttering to herself. I would look to Bubi Hannah, to see if she heard, too. Bubi Hannah would gaze into my face, her eyes moist. I wondered if Bubi Hannah knew about the children and the closet, too, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
When I was ten, I read a story.
The story took place during Shavuos, a Jewish holiday that falls somewhere around the end of May. The hero of the story, K’Tonton, a Jewish Tom Thumb, plans to make a wish for himself at midnight on Shavuos, when he believes the sky will open and his wish will be granted. At the climax of the story, the sky does open, however K’Tonton doesn’t spend the wish on himself. In the end, he uses it to help another.
It was a simple, moralistic tale, but arresting nonetheless, because it gave me hope that God might intervene if only I spoke out at just the right moment, in just the right way. I had plenty to speak out about: The way my parents were with each other, the way my mother was with herself, the way it was for the kids next door, the way it was for me.
I rarely saw the children next door, except occasionally when they twitched open their living-room curtains and peered out. They didn’t attend public school. Their mother had made other arrangements. She had once taught school herself. My mother said she had been brilliant. But she had suffered a nervous breakdown and received no help, and that was supposed to explain everything.
We were told not to go trick-or-treating at her house, but never told why. We wouldn’t have gone anyway. She scared all of us. Me, because I knew what she did to her children; the others, because she was so strange. Being near her felt like standing too close to a high-voltage wire.
It was impossible to avoid her, though. She would come out on her porch while I played jacks on mine.
“Hello, Karen,” she’d say.
I’d feel myself stiffen
as I said hello back.
“Have you read the newspaper today, Karen?” she’d ask.
I’d shake my head.
“How do you expect to learn?” She’d sound almost calm, but there was something in her voice that made my skin crawl.
“You’ll never get anywhere if you aren’t informed,” she’d say. She’d stare at me, force me to look back at her.
I would slip off the porch as soon as I dared and race up the block, away from her, thinking all the while that her own children couldn’t do what I had just done. They couldn’t race up the block, they couldn’t get away from her, not ever.
When I did catch a glimpse of her children — the girl, a few years older than I was, the boy, a year or two younger — the whiteness of their skin startled me. So pale, they were completely untouched by the Maryland sun, completely untouched by anyone or anything that wasn’t in that house. No one knew them. I knew only their voices, only their desperation.
Meanwhile in my own house my mother sickened; dark circles under her eyes, no appetite, so thin a slight wind might blow her over. Her illness seemed connected to her unhappiness with my father, though I didn’t understand how. Twice my mother went to the hospital. Each time she nearly died. Her doctor instructed me to take care of her: Do nothing to upset her; say nothing to upset her.
Each morning before I left for school, and each afternoon when I returned home, I would scramble eggs for my mother. I learned to make them moist, the way she liked them. From the time I left until the time I returned, and all through the evening and the long nights, my mother ate only those eggs. As I stood over the frying pan twice a day, I’d try to think good things, healing things, hoping those thoughts would enter the eggs and make my mother better.
When I Was Your Age, Volume Two Page 9
