by Pamela Erens
“How about a game of chess?” asks Marshall.
Seung stares. Marshall is planted there, at the door to Aviva’s bedroom, with his mauled head, his clear, knowing, innocent eyes.
“All right, one game,” agrees Seung.
28
The health club pool is in a vast, high, steamy room, with seven lanes fussily marked SLOW, SLOW/MEDIUM, MEDIUM/FAST, COMPETITIVE, FAMILY, etc. For now Aviva’s mother still has the use of the membership; later, when he gets around to it, her father will revoke it.
The pool is almost empty today. Seung picks one of the slow lanes. Aviva has complained to him that she gets winded easily when swimming, and he promised to observe her and see if he can help. She wears a plain black one-piece that makes her skin look bluish-white. Though vain about her everyday clothing, a lover of the plunging neckline, she dislikes skimpy bikinis and thinks she looks better in something simple and classic. But as usual she cannot risk being invisible, so she keeps her gold hoop earrings on and makes sure she wears waterproof mascara.
She minces about on the shallow-end ladder, oohing and ughing as if she’s sticking her toes into dry ice.
“All at once,” Seung tells her.
“I never can,” she insists. She starts to plunge down, stops helplessly in a crouch above the water. She looks like a toddler about to relieve herself. Seung laughs at her.
“All right,” she says, stung, and rolls under. She comes up shouting, shaking like a dog. Her messy ponytail slaps her in the face.
“It’s better that way, right?”
“Yes,” she says. “But I already knew that.”
He tells her she wastes the strength of her arms and legs by rocking from side to side in the water, dispersing her energy. He teaches her to bring her arms up in an arc and push them with intention through the water, in a clean forceful sweep. The legs need hardly to move if they are kept straight and gently tensed. She practices slowly, then moves faster. She can feel the difference.
“My God, it’s good,” she says. She’s exhilarated. For once she feels physically strong, competent.
She does laps until she tires and then sits, warm and satisfied, on the pool edge watching him. He covers the length of the pool in a few hard strokes, curls, and like a circus tumbler reverses direction. By the time he comes out of the somersault he is already halfway back across the pool. His arms are massive as they rise from the water. He swims on and on without flagging. Eventually she goes to her bag for a paperback.
“Will you teach me to do the turns?” she asks, when he’s done. He promises. He can teach her dives, too; she just needs a little courage.
The locker room has thick white robes, attendants, face scrubs and scented hand lotions spread out on a long table under illuminated mirrors. Women take their time here, drying their hair, smoothing their skin, watching themselves dress. Aviva and Seung eat triple-decker sandwiches in the club café, order three-dollar lemonade. They sign the bill with a membership number. It will be paid by someone. Aviva’s father, Seung assumes.
29
A strange, dry Christmas afternoon. It hasn’t snowed since the tenth of the month; on the ground stand the crusty diminished banks of that storm, pocked with dog pee. Seung and Aviva take the bus to her father’s new apartment; Marshall is spending the day with their mother. The people out on the streets, passing from one family obligation to another, look bleached and weary. The air is bone-dry; the wreaths and lights lashed to the lampposts shake in the stiff wind off the lake.
Mr. Rossner’s new apartment is between Lincoln Park and the Water Tower District, on one of the little streets, dotted with old mansions, where Waspy bankers and heirs to industrial fortunes live. The buildings are substantial-looking, four or six stories high, with manual elevators and doormen in white gloves.
Inside the apartment everything is swathed and draped in heavy fabrics: velvet, chintz, and satin imprinted with flowers, birds, and paisleys. There is some sort of duplication of rooms, or rather everything has the same superfluity of fancy chairs and tables, so that Aviva can’t tell which areas are supposed to be for dining and which, perhaps, for guests. Mr. Rossner greets her with a dry kiss and extends his hand to Seung. He leads them to a room with several couches and a large tree decorated with tinsel and glittering balls. There are colorful presents all around the base. The apartment is hot as a greenhouse and smells chemically floral, as if perfume has been sprayed in all the corners.
“There’s Edith,” her father says.
Edith’s hair is wet from the shower and she’s panting, as if she ran all the way from upstairs. She’s barefoot and in a bathrobe. She has a large painted mouth, large brown eyes, and beautiful skin. Aviva’s mother says she comes from a wealthy horseracing family in New York State.
Mr. Rossner is fiddling with the stereo system. It’s new and it’s been giving him trouble.
“Jews are lousy mechanics,” says Edith. Her laugh is staccato, shrill.
“Well, then, my dear, you come over here and mend it,” says Mr. Rossner mildly. Edith bends forward and fills her wine goblet, offers some to Seung and Aviva. They clink glasses and talk briefly about their flight from New York and the weather. The wine tastes thick and sweet to Aviva. The heat in the room is astonishing.
Mr. Rossner has got it now: the sound is static-free, the bass adjusted, the music coming from both speakers. It’s Ella Fitzgerald doing Christmas music: “Jingle Bells,” “Let It Snow,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
“Larry, get us those two shopping bags over there. No, those.” Edith points him to two large bags sitting toward the back of the tree. Her hands sport gold and diamonds on several fingers.
Aviva realizes with horror that they have brought no gifts. It didn’t occur to her that Christmas here could actually mean gifts. Edith drops the first bag in front of Aviva and the second in front of Seung. “Go!” she trills.
Aviva lifts the topmost box from the bag and pulls at a fat silver ribbon, which slithers to the floor. The box is from I. Magnin; inside is a chocolate-colored cashmere turtleneck. Soft hairs cling to Aviva’s fingertips as she strokes it; it’s like a sleek, shedding cat.
“Thank you,” she murmurs. Seung holds a snow-white polo shirt to his chest, nodding to indicate the size looks right.
“Keep going!” cries Edith. It appears that there are not only the packages in the shopping bags but more presents on the couch for them to open. Edith leaps up to get the boxes, claps her hands wildly whenever she’s convinced a gift has been successful. Even when she is still she seems to be in frenetic motion, like a hummingbird whose wings must beat thousands of times a minute just so it can stay in place.
Afterward, the bright wrapping paper lies on the carpet in long, torn strips and crumpled balls. Yards of ribbon, immaculate bows, the hand-cut kind, like huge hydrangeas, that will go straight into the garbage in the morning. Aviva wants to spread all the rich clothes on the floor and admire them, touch them repeatedly. She’s also received, among other things, a big box of chocolate cordials, a purse soft as skin from Coach, and two record albums that are clearly her father’s contribution: Louis Armstrong and Marian McPartland. Seung got two shirts, a tie, a seersucker sports jacket, two excellent cigars, a sweater, a leather wallet.
The three of them—Aviva, Seung, and Edith—slump back against the couches like people spent after a harsh bout of lovemaking. Edith’s long legs sprawl before her and Aviva is afraid that if Edith doesn’t sit up, her panties are going to come into view. Or maybe she isn’t wearing panties. Mr. Rossner remains upright, sipping parsimoniously from his wineglass. And what is Seung studying at school? he asks after a long silence, as if successfully dredging the sentence from an old phrase book. He’s put on one of Aviva’s records: Louis Armstrong’s low growl fills the room.
Chemistry, Seung tells him. The parents always like to hear chemistry.
Aviva’s father doesn’t seem to listen. He goes back to squat by the new stereo,
lifting his glasses to peer at the lights and dials.
Outside, the lake-blown cold cuts again across Seung and Aviva’s naked hands, their unbuttoned coats. They hurry to cover up, to put on their gloves. They are laden with bags filled with things that already feel, to Aviva, tainted and shameful, purloined somehow, and they’ve eaten all kinds of indescribable things: balls of whipped cheese, nutty something-or-others rolled in bread flakes. At the door Edith told them she was teaching Aviva’s father how to enjoy life at last. “All that Jewish earnestness,” she said. “It’s cute, but so limiting.” She laughed her high staccato laugh. Her hand fluttered onto Mr. Rossner’s shoulder, her red nails touching his collarbone.
“Don’t even tell me what you thought,” says Aviva. The cab whisks them down the darkened Outer Drive. Anything human is indoors now, savoring a fire or a TV movie before bed. The lake is a frozen sheet of gray. She leans her head onto Seung’s shoulder. There’s an enormous pressure in her chest and throat.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Seung tells her.
“It was worse than I imagined,” Aviva says.
30
January classes, the irregular pings and tappings of the radiators, a brief show of sun at midday, the slow seepage of cold into the afternoon classrooms. It’s 4:00 PM; the students sit with their peacoats and down jackets draped over their shoulders, frowning at what they’ve written in their spiral notebooks. Aviva can’t concentrate on the lesson. Mr. Lively is explaining something about the Lawrence textile strike of 1912. Aviva read the testimonies in her history book: women struck down with billy clubs, little children thrown in jail cells. For lunch Aviva had a spoonful of peanut butter and a handful of raisins. Coffee of course, three cups. Under the large oval classroom table she rolls around and around in one hand the smooth wooden ball Seung carved for her. When he cut to the core of the wood and polished it to a high sheen, beautiful striations appeared, reddish with glints of brownish gold, like an ore. Last night, Seung took her out for dinner at the Fisherman’s End. They had French onion soup with big hunks of seeded bread. There was a bowl of popcorn on the table from which Aviva ate careful handfuls. Seung brought her wrist to his mouth and licked the oil and salt from her palm.
“Miss Rossner.”
Aviva looks up.
“Would you please answer the question?”
Mr. Lively is waiting, not unkindly. He has a boyish face, reddish hair, the sagging skin of a secret drinker. Everyone knows which teachers have the problem. No one suggests it’s a weakness; even at fifteen or sixteen years old, they understand. The grown-ups are living on an island of youth here at Auburn, a Never-Never Land. There is nothing for a proper adult to do in this tiny blue-collar town, no theater or art gallery or singles bar or bookstore or park safe to walk in at night. The teachers spend their evenings in their dormitory apartments listening to the sounds of sobbing, scuffling, bathroom retching. The Guignol’s last show ends by nine thirty. You could see taking to drink under these circumstances.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Lively, I wasn’t paying attention.”
Mr. Lively weighs his options. Aviva Rossner is a smart girl, one of his best students in fact, a strong writer, turns in her assignments on time. She makes thoughtful comments in class. She’s sufficiently well mannered. Still, lately she’s been slipping away. You see this begin to happen with some kids—there’s something on their minds, some family business or internal storm, and before you know it they’re gone entirely, intellectually speaking, and sometimes they can’t come back. They stop seeing why they should. And truth be told there’s an arrogance about Aviva Rossner that he’s never liked, a sense she conveys of following the rules only because they happen to suit her. Furthermore, she’s too sexy, with her snug sweaters, her dangling jewelry. She distracts him.
Another student would have said, “I missed that, Mr. Lively.” Or: “I didn’t hear.” This girl says, “I wasn’t paying attention.” So sure of her right to be honest.
He gives her an extra paper to write, on the conflict between the UTW and the IWW during the Lawrence strike. Her expression becomes sullen, inward. He’s made the right choice. She’ll be paying more attention from now on.
31
Those long dim winter afternoons. Neither Cort nor I play a winter sport—Cort used to play basketball but broke his wrist lower year and never quite got his game back afterward. Voss and his wrestling teammate Phil Hurston, who is in McHenry dorm, have a day off from practice. We’re sitting in Cort and Voss’s room playing blackjack. Phil, a top-heavy kid whose shoulders are way too broad for his waist and hips, likes to be dealer. Why shouldn’t he? Odds are in the dealer’s favor. I don’t care; I don’t take this game all that seriously. I engage halfheartedly, thinking about a play I’d like to put on at the Black Box, Auburn’s secondary theater. The big productions, like Macbeth and A Streetcar Named Desire, go on the main stage, and are chosen and overseen by the theater faculty, but anybody can launch a show at the Black Box if they can get the bodies and the slot on its schedule. I’d like to put on a stage version of The Seventh Seal. Mr. Boras showed the movie in my History in Film elective earlier this year, and I was deeply stirred by the beauty of the faces—the Knight’s, the Squire’s, Death’s—almost as if Bergman were re-creating stone or marble statues in a moving medium. The acting was grave without being pompous. A whole movie about how desperately we all fear dying! At this time in my life I am drawn, like many young people, to the subject of death—because I have never experienced it close up, don’t know anything about it, and believe, foolishly, that I want to know. And of course I like the fact that the characters in the movie who survive the Black Death are the theater people, Bibi Andersson with her full wholesome face and figure, her childlike husband. I think I’d like one day to have such a family, the little naked infant, the simple enjoyment of the sun, the wind, the grass, a bowl of strawberries. Who would be best to play Death, I wonder? I run through my mental Rolodex, dwelling particularly on the counterintuitive choices. Caught up in these considerations, I request a card from Phil Hurston when I should hold, and end up with a ten of spades for my king and seven. Somehow I missed it when the others decided that we were playing for money, and now I’m twenty dollars in the hole, which alarms me. The Judge is stingy and I’m already tight for the month, having blown most of my Christmas money on records and a sweater for Lisa.
Hurston and Voss snicker at my lame play, which gets Cort snickering, too. “What are you dreaming about, honey?” asks Voss in a fey voice. “What’s going on in your little hard-on dreams?”
“You still with Lisa Flood?” asks Hurston.
I grunt assent.
“She give it up to you yet?” Voss wants to know. “You bust her cherry? Haven’t you been working on that for, like, two years?” Once, in a much earlier era, I used to confide in Voss, having yet to learn that anything told to him eventually reached the ears of others.
“You’ll be the last one to know, Donald,” I say. The guy hates his given name.
“Ooooh, ouch. That was a tough blow, Bennett-Jones. You know how to skewer a guy. That wit. That repartee.”
“You hear that Cherie Calkins and Archie Davenport broke up?” Cort can be counted on to steer the conversation when Voss and I get too seriously pissed with each other, which is more and more often these days. I can’t figure out why the guy seems to hate me so much. To be honest, I’m not sure we ever really liked each other, but we had the loyalties of long affiliation. We were roommates as preps and lowers, until he got closer to Cort and they asked to room together for upper year, which is how I ended up with David Yee. The two of them and I would probably have fallen out long ago except that we share tastes in music and they like to have me as a third for Frisbee.
“No kidding,” says Voss in a suddenly different tone. “You going to go for her?”
“Me?” asks Cort nervously. “I dunno—you interested?”
Voss gives this a moment’s thought. “Nah. She’s got a
n annoying laugh.” Voss is a good-looking guy, it must be admitted, but he rarely keeps a girlfriend for more than a month. There’s always something wrong: her laugh, her eating habits, her friends.
“I’d put up with a horse’s neigh for that body,” says Hurston.
“Well, you go for her then,” says Voss.
“Just might.”
Hurston deals the cards again. I get a king and a five. Bloody hell.
Some music goes on upstairs.
“Oh, Jesus, that whiny shit,” says Voss. It’s Seung or one of his friends, sounds like maybe Chick Corea accompanied by irritating flute. That laid-back, electronically trippy, life-is-cool sound is one that all of us particularly hate.
“Christ, I can’t take it. Bennett-Jones, put something on.” I’m only too happy to comply. I reach for Devo on Cort’s album rack, crank it up. Yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah, sings Mark Mothersbaugh a million times. Got an urge, got a surge and it’s outta control / Got an urge I wanna purge ’cause I’m losing control. The harsh, repetitive, jerky music draws us together, pumps us up with a sort of manic-robot gladness. We wave our fists around and shout for our cards and I am not surprised when I get a six of hearts for my fifteen, earning back the money I just lost.
A banging noise on the ceiling: Seung or one of his buddies with a broom handle, probably. In reply we raise the volume. After a few moments of silence upstairs, in which we are tempted to believe we have settled this skirmish, there’s a startling explosion, which seems to be the result of three or four sets of hands simultaneously overturning desks and beds and sending a lamp crashing to the floor. Once the surprise passes, I’m delighted. I start jumping up and down, shouting at the top of my lungs, grinning at Cort and Hurston to encourage them, and they catch on and start jumping up and down, too, and then Voss has to follow suit, and we all thrash around wildly screaming “Are we not men? We are Devo! Are we not men? We are Devo!” over the music. Cort runs to get his hiking boots from the closet and throws them repeatedly at the wall. Voss and Hurston and I get the rest of the shoes and follow suit. We throw them at the wall and at each other, shouting and cursing, drowning out the presences above.
