Split-Level

by Sande Boritz Berger

  “Cute, but will Jake agree to it?”

  “He’s got no choice unless we drive to the house. Want to go for a little ride?”

  “It’s getting late, who’ll watch the kids?” I ask, looking around.

  “Oh, right, silly me! I forgot. It’s nanny’s night off—which means nanny’s night on the town. You got to keep these young girls happy, or they go running straight back to Dublin.”

  “Hey, why don’t I go?” I say, surprised by my own words. “I think I remember how to get there.”

  “Alex, fabulous, would you? I have to bathe the little monsters.”

  “Sure, but I better take your car. If I ask to borrow my father’s at this hour, he’ll ask a million questions.”

  Sophie reaches into her pocket. “Here, this key is for the side door, near the kitchen. In the laundry room, you’ll find a basket of the kids’ clothes, grab something—anything.”

  I call downstairs to say good night and check on the girls. “Mom, I’m hanging out in the stratosphere with Sophie. Guess what? These people actually believe in Freon.”

  Missing my sarcasm, my mother says, “Be sure to say hello for me.” She is thrilled that Sophie and I are friends, which distinguishes her from the rest of the tenants.

  “By the way, did Donny call?” I practice my best blasé.

  “No, dear, he did not,” and through the wires, I hear the judgment mounting in her mind.

  About to pull out of the parking garage, I adjust the seat in Sophie’s ’74 silver Porsche, wondering how she could feel safe driving her kids around in this sleek sports car. I don’t trust the power of this machine, and for several blocks my speed is about twenty miles per hour.

  The radio is tuned to a station playing golden oldies from the ’50s and ’60s. The deejay’s voice is barrel deep, reminding me of my own favorite, Cousin Brucie. My mood shifts when “Wake Up, Little Susie” comes on, and I begin belting the words out loud. I drive in the opposite direction of Sophie’s for many blocks just to hear the song finish. There’s a dedication: To the boy I have always loved, wherever you are, I hope I am in your thoughts. Katie. The Skyliners are singing This I Swear, and I am fifteen again, making out against the garage door with Jonathan who smells like a wet puppy after playing basketball. He looks at me and is about to say something, then changes his mind, then starts again: “I love you,” we whisper at the exact millimeter of a second. How could he know he’d ruined things for me, right then; silly me believed passion was something one could savor, play again and again, like a favorite cut on a record.

  As I am rounding the corner leading to the Woodmans’ house, I notice a car, lights on, parked in the driveway. What? My vitals are pumping as I increase my speed. Turning for no more than a few seconds, I spot Rob, that tropical shirt of his, unmistakable, and the blurry image of a lanky young woman. They are walking up the driveway toward the well-lit house, him leading her by the hand as if she were a toddler unsure of the terrain. Through my rearview mirror, I see them turn and gape in my direction.

  Faster now, I reach an enclave of dark, narrow streets where the houses are all pitch black. More than one ferocious-sounding dog begins to bark, and as lights switch on like some syncopated dance, I lose control, plowing the Porsche through a neat row of privets. Branches and leaves hit the dashboard like confetti. My hands are sweaty, and I struggle to grasp the wheel. As soon as I’m in the clear, I pull over to catch my breath. I really have to pee but squatting here is out of the question. Instead, I begin concocting my story for Sophie:

  Well, I guess you’re wondering why I’m not carrying any swimsuits. The thing is—when I got to your driveway, there were three workmen idling in a rusty pickup. I couldn’t imagine what they were doing there, especially at that hour. Sorry but I got scared. I decided it best to turn around. Oh, I might have hit a bush or two during my getaway. Check your car.

  I picture Sophie listening, intently, her eyes bright as high beams, forcing me to look down and smooth the wrinkles in my shorts. I embellish this tale while exhausting myself in the process—for the want of her friendship, my budding confusion, and the prickly sensation across my neck, the slow gestation of fear.

  Back in the hallway, I knock softly, figuring, by now, Sophie’s children are asleep. She opens the door as if she had x-ray eyes and knew I’d be standing there at that precise instant.

  “Oh, so you couldn’t find anything for them to wear?” Sophie says, her face dewy, her eyes as I imagined: star bright with anticipation.

  “Well, the thing is when I got to your—”

  “Oh, so you saw them?” Sophie asks, smiling broadly. “It’s really fine. I’m completely cool with it, Alex. Relax, breathe.”

  “Sophie, I’m not quite sure what I saw.” This is when I smooth the wrinkles in my shorts, again.

  “Alex, please, you can’t be that naïve. Rob and I have an agreement. It’s good for him, good for me, and therefore our marriage.”

  I shiver, victim to her words plus the efficiency of the Woodmans’ air-conditioning. I wish I had a soft woolen blanket to wrap around my shoulders. As Sophie continues to chatter, I stare at her lips. The room becomes vacant of sound, as if watching a silent movie. Laughing faces dance before my tired eyes. I see a parade of familiar men, doing what they like to do. Look, there’s Donny, Ben, Dad, and Rob, and all those who came before.

  Donny calls the next morning while we’re eating breakfast. Words stick in my mouth like thickened oatmeal. When he asks about the girls, I report with clips, like excerpts from a travel journal. There are long pauses in our conversation; we are walking along some dangerous edge. I look for a hidden meaning in every little thing he says, annoying him by interjecting “What?” constantly. He’s forced to repeat things, pacing his answers to avoid a fight. My mother’s presence in the kitchen keeps me from going overboard. She sips her coffee, but I know she hasn’t missed one of my sour intonations.

  Later, despite my suggestion he leave extra time for holiday traffic, Donny misses his flight. He calls from a boisterous airport lounge, and I can barely make out his words, except that he has to connect in Atlanta, making his arrival after midnight and certainly past the girls’ bedtime.

  I break the news to Becky and Lana while we are sitting around the table having the usual five o’clock dinner. Upon hearing this, Becky, child of reason, says, “Well, then I’ll have to get in your bed and tickle Daddy in the morning.” Lana, however, is inconsolable. She cries throughout the entire meal and eventually tosses her macaroni and cheese in my mother’s direction. Ducking the plastic bowl before it hits the floor, my mother laughs, infuriating Lana even more.

  “No laughing, Nana!” Lana pouts.

  “Lana, sweetie, calm down. I promise you’ll see Daddy in the morning,” I say, kissing her curly head.

  “Oh boy, what a mouth on her. Well, we know whose daughter she is,” my mother says.

  “Mom, not now, she’s really upset.”

  “She’s a little actress, a regular Sarah Bernhardt like her Momma.”

  “Miriam, enough!” My father’s head pops out of the Herald. He’s been sitting at the table waiting for the blowup, something he did all through my teenage years. When I was really “fresh,” he would jump up from the dinner table, holding his belt that he’d already quietly unbuckled. In one swift motion he’d push back his chair, yank the belt from his waistband, and hold it high in the air, ready to tame the unruly lioness, me. I’d run screaming to my room and lock the door, terrified, not of the belt, so much, but at the fury lurking in his eyes.

  “All right! I guess everything’s my fault, but I bet Alex would never open her mouth to Mrs. Wonderful, Louise Pearl!” I have the notion I am about to pay hard for my father’s remark to her.

  “Mom, what on earth are you talking about? I said Lana was upset, and you were making her even crazier.”

  “You don’t have to tell me the truth—I know the truth. If your father and I had loaned you money to buy
a house, you’d kiss our asses too!”

  “Dad, make her stop, the girls!”

  My father says nothing as he stands and pushes back his chair, scraping the tiles below. Becky and Lana watch transfixed as if this were early morning cartoons. I flinch when he walks toward me, my eyes fixed on his waistband, but he is wearing beige polyester slacks, the kind with a sewn-in self-buckle. Dad grabs his newspaper and locks himself in the bathroom, where he will remain until God knows when.

  Hands shaking, I pull Lana out of the booster seat. I wipe Becky’s sticky fingers and kiss her forehead. “Go, go play on the terrace.”

  The silence is awful and yet so very familiar, like a second language I learned while growing up.

  “Give me the sponge, Mom. I can clean that. It’s not good for your back.”

  “What’s the difference?” she says, handing me the sponge, getting up slowly.

  Instead of being furious at her for hurting me and upsetting Lana, all I feel is a punch of ancient, nagging guilt. I imagine reaching out to hold her face, forcing her to look at me. I might smile, even stick out my tongue, anything to break this nauseating tension—maybe I might stand tippy-toe next to her tall, imposing frame and give her a feathery kiss on her cheek. But I do none of these things. My arms are like dumbbells, and my stomach churns from a half-eaten dinner. Again, my mother’s words are the mortar for the wall she builds between us. I am too tired, and much too sad to drill through it. Instead, we finish cleaning up the kitchen in a hammering silence.

  Almost three years ago, when Becky and Lana were still babies, Donny and I stayed here for the very first time. My parents had just moved in and were excited to have a place big enough to house us all. Although this trip was a badly needed respite from winter and the clutter of our mousetrap of an apartment, I arrived in Florida without my usual enthusiasm. For months I’d been hiding out—not sharing the disturbing, haunting thoughts that kept me awake each night and prohibited me from shopping for, cooking, or swallowing food. I barely functioned as a mother. While the girls napped, I’d lie on the couch in a fetal position, riveted to the TV. I’d turn the volume down low while I stared at soap opera stars, beautiful women—who looked older than me—embracing lovers, caring for babies, having heart-to-heart chats with caring friends or mothers. I had difficulty moving from my spot and had concluded the worst—I was probably dying. I watched and listened to my body as intently as an air traffic controller keeping planes out of danger. But I was about to crash. Every heartbeat became a string of palpitations; each swallow produced nausea. I focused on the numbness on the right side of my face, and a strange tingling in my fingertips. At the library, while browsing through medical books, I was sure I’d found my diagnosis: a brain tumor. My symptoms worsened and still, I told no one. Not even Donny. He had just given up some of his own dreams to work in his parents’ business. We had to put off looking for a home, even though our apartment was cluttered with two cribs, two strollers, and cardboard boxes stacked with toys. When Donny came home from work, he’d bathe Becky, while I tended to four-month-old Lana. Then he’d put on his headphones to listen to some opera until his father called and they would talk about something that might have occurred during the day, or what had gone wrong and was probably Donny’s fault. After the call, Donny closed his eyes and returned to his music. No, he didn’t want to talk to me. It could be days before he’d touch me. Donny just wanted to be alone. And all I could think was: Well, now he will finally get his wish.

  Then somehow, that December, we managed to get on a plane to visit my parents in their beautiful new condo. And a few nights into the trip, at the dinner table someone called out my name, but it sounded muffled, as if I was hearing it underwater.

  “Alex, what the hell is wrong with you?” my father yelled, snapping his fingers in front of me, getting me to open my eyes wide. But I was too tired to answer him, too tired to even feel embarrassment. My plate was clean, just the remnants of a roll on its shiny surface. He couldn’t be angry at me because I’d wasted my food. I hadn’t eaten a single morsel. The very next day my father made an appointment for me with his internist. I agreed to go but insisted he wait outside, next to the thirty-gallon tank of tropical fish. As soon as I sat down across the desk from Dr. Unger, I burst into tears. He reminded me of the old grandfather in my favorite childhood book, Heidi. How he ran through the snowy streets looking for her, thinking she was lost. I, too, was lost. And I was hoping, just maybe, Dr. Unger might find me. He stood up, finally, from his leather chair, came around the desk, and patted my shoulder a few times, waiting patiently for me to stop weeping.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ve lost some weight, and you’ve written here that you can’t sleep, suffer from headaches, numbness in your fingers, and now a new baby, added to your toddler. Married four years—are things okay?” He peered down at me from gold wired spectacles.

  “It’s my mother,” I said, grasping for the one convenient place to put the blame for whatever I didn’t understand. It seemed so easy; the words felt so right. “She’s driving me nuts, making me absolutely crazy.”

  “Mothers can often do that, I’m told,” he said. But I knew he was placating me, hoping I’d say much more. He suggested, for “peace of mind only,” that I undergo some further testing. Then he handed me the name of someone to talk to when I returned home, but I never went. Nearly all my symptoms vanished a few days later. Maybe I just needed to cry with a kind stranger, someone who demanded nothing from me.

  The 11:00 p.m. news has ended, and my father insists on driving me to the airport to pick up Donny. Like a commandant in the Russian Army, he says, “Alex, get in the goddamn car—you’re crazy if you think I’d let you drive on I-95 alone. Don’t you read? Most of the refugees who live in Miami carry pistols in their glove compartments. Shootings, every day, that’s all you hear on the news.”

  “Really? Are you sure you aren’t afraid I’d wreck your precious Caddy.”

  “Cut it out,” he says, exhaling slowly, and blowing air through his lips.

  “Dad, are you okay?” He’s already had one mild heart attack, when I was in college, and I don’t wish to be responsible for another.

  “I’m fine, fine—just sick of the same bullshit. You think it’s easy? Do you have any idea what I deal with?”

  “Mom?”

  “All she does is dwell on the past—the same crap that happened forty years ago: If her father hadn’t pulled her out of design school, if her mother hadn’t died, and at the top of the list is—”

  “I know, Dad, if you hadn’t taken her away from her children and grandchildren—her life would be perfect.”

  “Exactly. So tell me, what has she done to make her life better down here?”

  “Does she have any real friends?”

  “Nah, you know how particular she can be. Oh, excuse me, I forgot, she does like your friend.”

  “Sophie?”

  “Yes, and those fancy guys, the decorators who live down the hall.” I hear his narrow-minded disdain, reminding me I’m with the tough sailor from Flatbush.

  “Dad, I think you’ve been watching too much Archie.”

  “Yeah, well they swarm all over your mother. They’re the bees and she’s the honey.”

  “Listen, it’s got to be hard feeling like she’s missing out on everything, thinking Donny’s folks are getting a bigger piece of us.”

  “But you’re here now, right? So why did she have to bring that up? Maybe if you visited us more or called her more often…”

  “Come on, Dad. I’ve got my own life to juggle. Sorry, but you’re the one who moved away—not me.”

  For the remainder of the ride, my mood turns sullen. I can’t help but wonder what my father’s real intent was on driving me to the airport. Does he expect me to solve his problems with my mother, as well? Fix it, Alex. Come on, kiddo, show me that A+. And yet I have taken a front seat on this guilt trip; I’ve bought the ticket he continues to sell me.

 
He’s been whistling the theme from The High and the Mighty for the last five minutes, driving me nuts. He knows he’s upset me—his one dependable ally. I’d love to blast the radio and drown him out, but it would be an act of defiance, something I can more easily save for my mother.

  As we approach the sign for arrivals, I spot Donny standing below the greenish glow of the taxi stand, swatting night bugs with his hand. I am surprised to see him looking so rested—as if he’d been on vacation instead of me. Hadn’t he switched planes and spent hours traveling? And yet, this is what scares me most: for the first time in our seven years together, I am aware that my heart is not stirring in anticipation of our embrace. The more I try to shake this thought, the more I feel as if my blood has been replaced with blue coolant. I blame it on the hour, the discussion with my father, and number one—the blowup at tonight’s dinner. But I hate the sensation; it’s as if I’ve been cut open and revealed to have nothing inside these bones. Naught, as Dad always corrects me whenever I say zero.

  My father puts the car in park and gives a shrill whistle in Donny’s direction.

  “Stay here,” he commands.

  From the car, I watch them embrace warmly. In my mother’s absence, I adopt her annoyance when my father hoists Donny’s bag. She has been known to scold Dad for carrying a gallon jug of skim.

  As soon as the trunk slams, my stomach churns.

  “Hi,” Donny says, peeking through the open window before getting in the car.

  “Pretty tired huh?” A strange shyness wraps itself around me.

  “Whipped!” Donny opens the door and slides in the front seat, moist heat emanates from his body. Though he smells of wintergreen Life Savers, layered underneath is the vinegary aroma of cheap wine. When Donny throws his arm around me, I inch closer to my father.