Joey chattered without breaks from one sentence to the next, the tone of his voice getting higher and higher as he grew more excited. He was always trying to persuade me of something, of the way things were, which was the way that Joey saw them. And I usually agreed; with early adolescence had come a growing conviction that we were the only ones in our family who understood what was really going on in the world. Joey scarcely paused to see if I agreed; as long as he kept talking, periodically poking my upper arm for emphasis, he assumed he was getting somewhere.
My anxiety competed with the inherently calming properties of the environment, the comfort of being with Joey. He was busy making up rules for the games we would play later, elaborate tournaments of Chinese checkers and Monopoly. When Joey stayed over at our house, these marathons could span several days, a board of Monopoly not to be disturbed on the living room floor, another of the Game of Life on the dining room table. Now Joey was saying that if I lost the games, I would have to pull down my pants and show him my woo-woo.
Joey and I had played variants of these diversions on and off for years—kissing-touching-showing games. Joey might have been the initiator, but I was a willing participant even though I nearly always lost, and it never occurred to me until years later that maybe these games were rigged.
When we’d been younger, the kissing, touching, and showing were incorporated into frequently reenacted storylines. I was the seductive hypnotist who, with my swinging crystal, controlled Joey, my unsuspecting victim, and forced him to do my bidding. Only he just pretended to be hypnotized as a ploy so that when I leaned over him, he could pull me down and kiss me. I dropped my crystal and submitted.
In another scenario, I was an independent cowgirl who’d inherited her father’s ranch, and he the traveling cowboy who fell off his horse and broke his arm. Delirious for days with an infected wound, he lay tossing on my bed while I nursed him back to health, largely by wiping his forehead with a damp towel. I only realized he had regained full consciousness when, as I leaned over to give him a sip of water, he pulled me down and kissed me. The unanticipated kiss—which the heroine first tries to fend off, then submits to, and finally relishes—had made its way from the movies into our stories.
Sometimes we dropped the dramatic underpinnings and simply practiced kissing as a technical form. Always a perfectionist, when Joey attempted a new roller skating maneuver outfitted in his official black Roller Derby skates, he’d practice it over and over again, imploring, “Don’t take your eyes off me. Did my ankle turn too soon? No, you didn’t watch close enough. Watch me again.”
He was the same way with kissing. On a Sunday afternoon, in Rebecca’s antiseptic bedroom, when Joey and I were seven, while the rest of the family congregated in the living room, Joey employed this same persistence in duplicating a kiss he’d seen Tony Curtis deliver in a movie. Again and again, he put me in his arms, bent us halfway over, and planted his chapped lips on my closed mouth.
“Let’s try once more, my mouth was too tight,” he said, wiping his lips on his madras sport shirt’s short sleeve, and starting over. As fond as I was of Joey, I never liked the taste of his mouth. His sinuses chronically plugged from allergies, his mouth possessed that yeasty, closed-in odor of someone with a cold.
By the time of Rebecca’s diagnosis, Joey and I had stopped kissing. The showing had endured and become more baroque. If I lost one of our games, he proposed, I’d have to dance in a circle naked; I’d have to dance in a circle naked with a feather in my hair; I’d have to dance in a circle naked with a feather in my hair singing tra la la; I’d have to dance in a circle naked with a feather in my hair and do the Hokey Pokey while I sang tra la la.
I didn’t mind the games. I liked to think of myself as sexy. I’d pull my T-shirt down off my shoulder and swing my hips as I walked. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to grow up to be exactly the kind of girl my father liked, as I was becoming more and more aware of the contempt for women that seemed to go hand in hand with his appreciation. Still I felt powerful and free exhibiting my body, and Joey had always been duly appreciative. But we were getting older now, approaching the age where sex was no longer a game. This conversation was adding to my unease; should we be talking about this while Grandma was in surgery? If my grandmother was suspicious of all bodily pleasures, she held out a special level of disdain for sex. She’d caught me once on her front porch with a scarf wrapped over my waist covering my Bermuda shorts, pretending to be a circus performer and doing a strut down to the ring for a boy from the neighborhood. She yanked me back inside, shrieking, “You little hussy!” as if I’d been caught soliciting.
“I’m so worried about Grandma,” I said to Joey, changing the subject. “I’m scared of what’s going to happen.” Now I was so nervous that, despite the risks, I had to get my finger into my mouth. I wiped it on my skirt, examined it for obvious signs of contamination, and then made room for it alongside the strand of hair. Joey had inherited my Uncle Nathan’s devil-may-care fatalism.
“Oh, cousin,” he said (he had taken to calling me cousin, an affectation he’d borrowed from a French movie), “Que Sera Sera.” He had heard Doris Day sing that song in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
I still felt uneasy. Not only should we not be talking about sex, we should be saying something especially nice about Rebecca. We should be behaving like good little Jewish grandchildren who had never seen each other naked. That way, God, who might be guiding the surgeon’s hands at this very moment, would know how much we loved her, and reward us by not taking her away.
I prodded Joey. “I hope Grandma will be okay,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” he said. He picked up the cue and began to reminisce about the giant bags of M&M’s and chocolate-covered orange sticks that Grandma bought for us when we came to visit. His voice trailed off wistfully at the end, as if we had eaten that candy eons before, as if Rebecca were already dead.
Bringing sweets into the house constituted a major concession on my grandmother’s part; she not only kept strictly kosher but renounced any interest in food. She sustained her ninety pounds on canned peaches, the medically obligatory prunes, cream of wheat, and a sludgy grain drink called Postum. The mainstay of her diet consisted of cold boiled chicken that she made every Friday afternoon—after traveling three hours to the kosher meat market on Vermont Avenue to obtain it—and ate all week, down to the last stringy, slimy shred. The candy, and occasional cans of Franco-American spaghetti and tuna fish bought for us, constituted the only foods in my grandmother’s house that Joey and I considered edible.
Affecting nostalgia, Joey said, “Remember those old-fashioned sayings Grandma told us? Beans, beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot. I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. Let’s not and say we did.” He laughed and nudged my arm. These sayings were as close to jokes as anything my grandmother ever imparted. She tended to be sourly prescriptive where Joey and I were concerned, always advising us to calm down and “Shah still before somebody gets hurt.”
“I remember,” I said.
The surgeons removed my grandmother’s colon and rectum and found that the cancer had invaded her liver. They weren’t sure about her brain. When my father learned she had only months to live, he became frantic. We were sitting at the table over lunch one day soon afterward, when my father got up from his place at its head and began to prowl.
“Her doctor should have found the cancer sooner; why didn’t he do a sigmoidoscopy?”
“She didn’t tell him anything was wrong,” my mother said. “She was too embarrassed.”
“She was alone too much,” he said. He stopped and stood in front of Paul’s chair. “If you’d only gone to see her more often, she would have told you what was going on.”
“I’m the one who did go to see her. We had lunch together all the time. Where were you? You were the one who always wanted to go to a movie instead of visiting her.”
My father screamed, cursed, l
amented, his voice booming, black eyes boring into Paul, and then my mother. “Couldn’t you see how much weight she was losing? You took her to the ladies’ room; couldn’t you tell that something was wrong?”
Then he settled on a new target—the pigeon drop. Yes, that was it, the pigeon drop to which she’d fallen prey the year before had given my grandmother cancer.
“It was the shock,” he said. “A bad shock can cause cancer.” And after a beat, “I shouldn’t have yelled at her when it happened. Why did I yell at her?”
My father yanked out his chair and collapsed back in his place at the table.
“I should have called her every day. I should have taken her to the doctor when I saw she was getting oyver-botl, we should have taken the money out of her account and doled it out to her ourselves.”
He hung his head low and ran his hands through his hair. Then he jumped up again, back in motion, twirling his curls with his pincer hand, dripping with sweat. Finally, he looked up to the ceiling and, in his most stentorian tones, found a target large enough to encompass his accusations: “God, what did my mama ever do to deserve this? All that observance, traveling miles to the kosher meat market, depriving herself, divorcing Sam because he wasn’t frum enough, and you still let her get cancer? Gotteniu! What kind of God are You?”
Then came scheming and planning.
“Those Glendale hick doctors don’t know anything. We’ll take Mama to the Mayo brothers,” the Mayo brothers being my father’s equivalent of Mecca.
“Ira,” my mother said, shaking her head and enunciating each syllable, “there’s nothing anyone can do. We’ll just have to see how it goes, keep her comfortable.”
“Don’t be a patsy. Movie stars and rich people get all those experimental treatments—”
“You’ll only prolong her agony.”
“Ira,” Uncle Nate had said, when my father got him on the phone at midnight, “you keep trying to fight Nature. Sometimes you just have to let go.”
“Nobody loves Mama the way I do,” he said. “Screw Nature.”
The surgery left my grandmother with a colostomy bag. “The doctors removed her rectum,” my mother told me. I could not fathom it. How did you remove a hole? I pictured the crack of her buttocks stitched up tight with a band of stitches like my mother used to close the Thanksgiving turkey. What did my grandmother feel inside when she bore down—a gutted vacancy?
My grandmother could not fathom it either.
“It’s been days since I’ve had a BM,” she fretted to my mother.
“Ma, it’s okay,” my mother said. “Remember I told you every thing comes out higher up, everything comes into the bag. That’s what the nurses come to irrigate the bag for.”
“What bag?” she said.
Every other day two home health aides arrived at her door to flush the stoma. I tried to picture the procedure, but it felt too close to what was happening to me on a nightly basis. What if I ended up the same way, with a stump in the place of my colon, and strange women interrogating that hole in my flesh? I imagined my grandmother having to take a bath in a tub full of her own feces, surrounded by the bad stuff she had worked so hard for so long to rid herself of.
One day she called, hysterical. Two unfamiliar women had come to her door and demanded entrance. “Get away from me,” she had cried from behind her door. She thought they were the bunco artists returned to finish the job.
“We’re from the home health agency,” they said. “You need to let us in.”
“Didn’t you get enough from me the first time?” she screamed. “Didn’t you humiliate me enough? I don’t have a penny left! Leave me alone!”
The strangers finally in retreat, Rebecca called my mother.
“Oh, Becky, you should have let them in,” my mother said. “They were the nurses who came to irrigate your bag.”
“What bag?” my grandmother said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Buffers
As a seventh grader, I struggled to maintain a life beyond my family. Though we both felt like outsiders at school, my best friend Wendy and I had each other.
Saturday afternoon, late summer, 1965. Wendy and I lay on either ends of our living room couch. We’d come in after sunbathing in the backyard, following a fruitless attempt to bring out our natural highlights by squeezing lemon juice on her blonde hair, pouring white vinegar on mine. If we could not get our boobs to grow faster to fill out our bathing suits, at least we could try to control our highlights.
We put a batch of records on the stereo: Herman’s Hermits, Gary Lewis & the Playboys, Lesley Gore. When Peter Noone launched into “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” we felt the beat of the music pool in our bodies and compel us to dance. We did our own interpretations of the Freddie and the Jerk while Paul watched. Then he got out his Polaroid camera, and we began to dance more frenetically, self-consciously striking poses. Paul, already a diarist, a collector, a hoarder of the ever-passing moment, took photos. He held out his wrist, officially timing on his Timex the interminable sixty-second wait for each Polaroid he shot, and then presented us with the images for our judgment. Whether we liked them or not, he would take more.
“I look fat,” Wendy said. “Look at my butt.”
“You look cute,” I said. “Look at my stomach.”
We screamed and made Paul rip the pictures up.
Wendy ran into the bathroom and stuffed her bathing suit top with Kleenex.
“Here, take another one,” Wendy said, sticking out her chest and parading around for Paul. He complied, then laid out the final series on the table so we could scrutinize them as a group.
“Ugh, I look gross in all of them,” Wendy said. “And my Kleenex boobs look fake!”
“No,” I said. “You look soooo cute.”
“Yuck,” she said.
I loved Wendy, everything about her, her blue eyes, her wispy dark blonde hair, her laugh, the way she threw the dice when we played Careers, the jittery pace at which she walked down the bowling lane. She’d hesitate at the end of the lane, throw the ball at a slightly crooked angle, and turn around as if afraid to see what had happened. Then she’d immediately turn half back and peek over her shoulder to see how many pins she’d knocked down. There was the musical tinkle of her charm bracelet as she threw it to the next square when we played hopscotch in the backyard, the adorable way she pushed up her glasses when they slid down her nose. I even loved the tone of her scream.
“No, you look perky,” I said.
“You’re beautiful,” she said. “You just never believe it.”
After all the singles played and we’d danced ourselves into fatigue, we grew more contemplative and put on an album, Richard Chamberlain (TV’s Dr. Kildare) Sings!
“Oh no, not him again,” Paul said, groaning. “That poor guy can’t carry a tune.”
Wendy and I retreated into individual reverie on our separate ends of the sofa. We would take turns with the album cover. I held the wine-colored cover before me and stared at Chamberlain’s handsome face as he sang. Clean-cut, with relatively long hair and compassionate eyes, Chamberlain smiled back. As he made it through “Love Me Tender” in his thin tenor, I rationalized that his weak, cracking voice only made him more appealing, more vulnerable. I pulled the cover closer, and stared right into his eyes. To increase the illusion of the dead image’s vitality, I moved it in even closer, until my eyes blurred. Richard’s face softened. I shut out everything else, and he was right there with me. I fell into a familiar fantasy about the precise moment at which we would meet, and he would see me—not just see me, but see me, recognize in an instant my deepest, truest, most unappreciated self. Though I was more than fifteen years younger than the actor, I knew that my superior intellect and maturity would sway him and that he would recognize our affinity as gentle, sensitive, attuned souls and artists. As with the other “pretty boys” on whom Wendy and I had crushes, it did not even occur to us that Chamberlain might be gay. We just knew that h
e was sweet and refined, nothing like most of the boys we knew in La Crescenta.
I started to kiss Richard’s photo on the cover, shutting my eyes and trying to feel the sensation of his lips on mine, but could not sustain the illusion. The album jacket had a bitter smell and kept bending in the middle from the pressure.
Paul made kissing sounds from across the room. The fantasy dissolved, and I fell back into my own life. I wasn’t with Richard Chamberlain; I was thirteen and flat-chested, wearing dirty Bermuda shorts, a sweaty T-shirt, with hair that refused to take on natural highlights, and a bowel that didn’t work. I was kissing a piece of cardboard while my brother mocked me. There was nowhere to put all the intensity of my longing.
“Give him to me,” Wendy said, snatching the album cover away. “He’s my pretty boy too.” She threw herself back down on the other end of the sofa and kissed him fervently, twisting the cover from side to side to simulate a man moving his head. She groaned and gyrated. We shrieked and laughed hysterically.
“Take us somewhere, Paul,” I said. “We’re so bored.”
I felt a restlessness, a diffuse yearning for movement, change, escape. Paul would drive us wherever we wanted to go in Montrose or La Crescenta or even farther away, to Glendale, but there was really nowhere for us to go.
After dinner, we hunted down my father who was lying down in the bedroom to help him digest. We prodded him to make up a prompt so we could write funny stories. He’d give us an intriguing line for starters, and then we’d go away and write for ten minutes and return to read our stories to him. Wendy and I sought revenge on the kids at school who shunned us. In our literary parodies we called our neighbor Mrs. Finch, Mrs. Grinch, and her mean son Kyle, Vile.
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