Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  The experts, having embraced the concept of sibling rivalry, are too quick to dismiss the force of sibling love. Lee, nuzzler of puppies, cuddler of kittens, could not fail to be moved by the fragility of seven-year-old Robin’s frame, by the almost cartoonishly-big gray-green eyes that dominated the younger girl’s dainty face, by the angelic softness of her pale hair. When not exasperated by Robin’s excessive response to people and noises and smells, Lee wanted to protect her from reality.

  “You made me take back Grape-Nuts Flakes,” Sylvia was squawking.

  “Don’t make it sound like I held a gun to your head. I asked for Grape-Nuts and you bought Flakes. You know I hate them. Jesus H. Christ, is it such a big deal to return something to the A & P? What the hell else do you have to do all day?”

  “What else? Pick up the black wing tips that were getting new heels. Take your gray tweed sports jacket to the cleaners for one-day service.” She was probably enumerating, Lee thought, holding down each graceful, tapering finger, its nail perfectly polished—Cherries Jubilee this week—with the index finger of the other hand. “Pick up a baby gift for your accountant’s sister—”

  “How could you neglect your own child?” Leonard boomed. “How could you leave her in the nurse’s office, in pain?”

  Lee thought that if she were her mother, she would demand: How come you left her in the nurse’s office in pain? You didn’t exactly run to grab the next train back to Shorehaven. Her mother, Lee noted—with a clarity of thought that coexisted with the ripping pain in her gut—was a lousy arguer, never coming up with a good enough answer. And after these fights, her mother, shaken, ashamed, would take to bed for days, shutting the louvers of the blinds, refusing to come down for meals, not combing her hair or brushing her teeth. Her father, on the other hand, having blown off steam, invariably seemed lighter-hearted than usual, although that may have been because Sylvia was so despondent as to be mute and, thus, incapable of making any emotional demands of him.

  But for the moment, Sylvia had not yet given up trying to win over the unwinnable. “Leonard, hon, Robin wasn’t dying, for God’s sake. It was just a sore throat. She gets sore throats all the time.” She added vaguely: “I really should talk to Dr. Gould about her tonsils.”

  At last, Robin’s tears fell. Lee was full of the envy and admiration she always felt. What dazzling crying! First, Robin’s huge eyes would glisten. Then perfect, fat teardrops would meander down each cheek. No sobbing, though, although her reed of a body would jerk as if someone were screaming “Boo!” at her again and again. Miraculously, Robin’s silent suffering brought her double—no, triple—the attention the average caterwauling child could get.

  It wasn’t only their parents’ fighting that brought tears to Robin’s eyes, however. Lee watched the little girl blanch as she took another peek at the liver. Any external event could cause an inner storm. Right that second, it had switched from her parents’ fight to dinner. Robin was probably thinking: Doomed. There they were, sitting in the breakfast nook, with Greta just yards away alternately clanging pots and picking over the apples she was going to turn into applesauce. No way could Robin escape the dread liver. True, Greta’s powerful back was turned toward them, but that meant nothing. A scrape of the chair leg at a decibel level so low that not even Woofer could hear it would make Greta spin around and blare: Ha! In any other house in Shore-haven Estates, children could flip food to the family dog, but Woofer was as awed by Greta’s authority as Leonard and Sylvia were, so even though he lay right there under the table, he could not be relied upon to be the consummate disposal unit dogs by nature are.

  Another thing about Robin’s genius for crying, Lee mused. You’d think a kid who was such a bundle of nerves would always be grabbing wads of tissues, or wiping off her cheeks with her fingers, or blotting her nose with the back of her hand. But no, Robin never wiped away her tears; they accumulated around her nose or left shining trails until they dripped off her chin. They were mesmerizing, beautiful.

  Robin’s crying made Lee want to weep with jealousy. At the same time, it also forced Lee to come to her sister’s aid—instantly. “Give me your plate,” Lee commanded, but softly.

  “What?”

  “Pick it up quietly and hand it to me. Don’t slide it. She’ll hear. You take my plate. Don’t be too quiet or she’ll turn around.”

  “Why should I give you my plate?” asked Robin.

  “You’re too upset to eat your dinner. I’ll eat it for you.”

  “You’re kidding!” Robin’s face reflected incredulity, then wonder.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Oh, Lee-lee,” Robin cried in her tiny high voice. Although not too loud. (Even as an adult, she would tend to sound like Tweety Bird.) “Thank you!”

  “Welcome.” Lee, naturally, played the liver for all it was worth, cringing at the taste, shuddering with revulsion at the texture. However, the truth was, she was crazy about liver and onions. In fact, after years of Sylvia’s medium-rare meatballs and Chinese Jell-O—an ill-starred combination of lemon-flavored gelatin and julienned water chestnuts with a dash of soy sauce—there was nothing Greta cooked that Lee did not love. Although in later years Lee would refine her palate, her lifetime food preferences remained those of a Hessian day laborer.

  “I’m done, Greta,” Robin sang out.

  At the exact same moment Leonard roared: “You went to Garden City, to a shoe sale at Saks, when your child was sick as a dog in the nurse’s office!”

  “I said I was sorry.” Sylvia was screaming now. “What more do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to say: ‘I have no other responsibilities except to be a mother to my goddamn kids!’”

  Greta set aside her apples and wheeled around for inspection of Robin’s plate. “See?” Robin said. Her eyes were still wet. “All finished!” Her heart of a face was suffused with the light of grace under pressure: I have done my best under terribly trying circumstances.

  Shrewd Greta turned her pale eyes to Lee’s slick lips and shiny chin. “You think I was born yesterday, Miss Lee White? You think I don’t know?”

  Even way back then, in 1960, Lee would never cop a plea. “Know what?” she inquired, projecting genuine curiosity, even though she was beginning to feel a little nauseous from eating nearly a pound of liver—although not so distressed as to make her willing to forgo dessert.

  “Know that you ate your sister’s supper. Shame on you!”

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  “No dessert tonight.”

  “Come on, Greta!” Lee protested. “That’s not fair!”

  “I decide what is fair!” Greta banged her fist down on the dish drainer; a colander rattled, and Robin shook.

  Don’t be too harsh on Greta here. True, she was a dreadful stiff, but her steel-rod spine grounded the White family. Because of her, floors were washed, dinner was served, Woofer got his rabies shot and the girls their polio boosters—all of which left Sylvia free to pursue her God-given talents: eyebrow-plucking, smoking, and creating bad art. And Greta never once complained, although working in other people’s houses was a sad and wearying job.

  (Greta had come to the United States in 1937 with her husband, who had determined that being a half-Jewish labor union organizer was perhaps not the ticket to a happy life in Nazi Germany. Although it was still the Depression, he managed to find a job operating a machine that sliced pumpernickel at a wholesale bakery in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. While he did not thrive, he did well, except for his high blood pressure, which he didn’t know about. In any case, he dropped dead of a stroke a few days short of his first anniversary in America. Greta took the bit of money they had managed to save and enrolled in a secretarial course. But during the late thirties and early forties, her heavy German accent was an insurmountable obstacle to office employment. However, the same business big shots who would not let her take their dictation did not mind her scouring their bathtubs. In fact, the upper-middle-class families wh
o employed her in the years before the Whites, as well as Sylvia and Leonard themselves, viewed her Teutonic style with approbation. They saw in her inflexible bearing and clipped consonants a benign personification of the efficient German war machine. Therefore, although she was a thoroughly decent person, her employers treated Greta as if she were more apparatus than human—that is, with all the warmth that would be accorded a well-oiled panzer.)

  “The little one is all skin and bones!” Greta chided Lee. “How could you take the food from her mouth? No fresh answers, Miss Lee Whiter

  Just as a big grin began to spread across Lee’s face, her mother screamed at her father: “Drop dead!”

  “Ladies first!”

  Lee’s grin disappeared, but Robin, no fool, knowing she was off the hook in the dinner department, offered Greta her captivating waif smile. Then she climbed down from her chair and, purposefully, headed to her room. Lee realized: She’s going to do it: Until Greta makes her go to bed, Robin will draw, color, and cut out yet another new wardrobe of paper doll furs, mink coats, Persian lamb ski jackets, and sable boas. And the second Mommy and Daddy’s fight is over, Robin will be squeaking: “Ooh, Daddy, look!” And Leonard would cry “Fabulous, Robbie-my-baby!” Even Sylvia, in bed, would find enough energy to kiss the top of Robin’s head and sigh: “Lovely, sweetheart.”

  It was going to be a lousy, lonesome night. For less than a second, Lee weighed the advantages of joining Robin and her paper fashions. But to watch Robin sharpen a crayon so the fur hairs wouldn’t look too thick, then painstakingly cut out those stupid tiny paper coats in teeny-weeny nips with her mother’s old manicure scissors, was too enraging to be borne. Robin’s patience for detail was … shitty. And her love of style … Daddy, I like the way the sleeves go tight on the coat in your window. Is that sheared mink or mouton, Daddy? He lapped it up like a cat with a bowl of milk. He couldn’t get enough. And, Mommy, doesn’t it look prettier if I button the top button? Mommy would be in heaven, and they would talk about the vital importance of top-button shiftiness for a half hour! Shitty! Lee loved that word: Shitty!

  She had learned it two years earlier at the school bus stop and had yet to say it out loud, but in her head she’d said it a thousand times. Shitty, Lee brooded. Lately, all Robin did was go to her mother’s magazines and copy pictures of furs or clothes, and her parents kept having heart attacks of joy. “You have so much flair!” her father would cry. “If it was real sable, I could sell it to Mrs. Continental Can. Split the profits with you, Robbie-baby.” Sylvia would sound reverent: “It almost looks like a Norell! I’m absolutely serious!” Lee thought: She’s going to spend three damn hours drawing shitty little fur hairs one at a time, and if one doesn’t look right she’ll erase it! Shitty little brownnose.

  If Lee had been asked about it, she’d have sworn that word would never ever pass her lips. But the very next day, she actually shouted the word—and in defense of Robin. “Get your shitty lacrosse stick away from my sister’s lunch box or I’ll punch your fat nose in.”

  “Yeah?” snickered Jasper Taylor, the boy from the house next door. The really tall boy. Jasper, at age ten, the third of Fos and Ginger Taylor’s four children, was already well over five feet tall and growing fast. Although slender, he had the powerful legs of a natural athlete and the presence of an all-star. Lee’s mass was nowhere near as imposing as his, but at age ten, she had an inch on him. “You and who else?” Jasper demanded.

  “I don’t need anyone else,” Lee growled, making a tight fist and holding it up in front of Jasper’s face. “I can punch in your nose all by myself.”

  To which Jasper gave a raucous, derisive laugh. It made Robin wail with terror, a squeal so maddening that it mobilized both the armies that camped on opposite sides of the corner of North Road and Taylor Farm Lane. As Lee glared into Jasper’s eyes—an uninteresting hazel, but quite thickly lashed—fist aloft, and Jasper glared back, two fellow fifth graders from the Shorehaven elementary school grabbed Lee and yanked her away. At the same time, three strapping boys, the entire midfield of the Wheatley Country Day lacrosse team, hauled Jasper back to their bus stop across the street—not without much ostentatious grunting as he fought being brought under control.

  Normally, there were no hostilities. The two armies, the private day school students and the public school kids, pretty much ignored each other. Oh, except for periodic spit fights. The origin of this particular form of belligerence is lost in time, but each new generation of schoolchildren on that particular street corner in America came to that place with seemingly innate knowledge of the rules of engagement of class warfare: The spitter has to cross the street and run the gauntlet among the spittee’s schoolmates, who are free to try to trip or shove the spitter out of the way, although they may not grab onto the spitter’s limbs or clothing and attempt to drag the spitter away. However, once the aggressor gets to his or her quarry, he or she is free to deliver the best shot as soon as the spittee’s face is no more than a foot away.

  Not that Jasper Taylor had targeted little Robin White for a gob of saliva. Far from it. His intended prey was Todd Lomax, a Shorehaven fourth grader, who had the gaunt, haunted look of a future poet. (In truth, Todd was coarse to the core and looked wretched simply because he had discovered the properties of airplane glue years before his contemporaries.) However, in Jasper’s rush to expectorate, he forgot to lay down his lacrosse stick before charging; it accidentally banged Robin’s lunch box—clunk!—putting a slight dent in the picture of the Fairy Godmother, beaming as Cinderella stares down at herself, amazed to see the ball gown just transmogrified from her rags by a touch of a wand. That was when Lee jumped forward in defense.

  “Up your nose with a rubber hose,” Lee yelled to him.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Jasper called back. He sounded bored.

  Lee didn’t follow him with her eyes. She didn’t feel her heart beating faster. In fact, Jasper was out of her thoughts moments after he was back across the street. Unlike her father, she had almost no interest in the Taylors. True, she admired their puppies immensely, but Fos and Ginger’s children left her cold. Any curiosity she had was aroused solely by her father’s inexplicable response to anything Taylor.

  Like last summer. When the sounds of “Sail Along, Silv’ry Moon” poured across the patio at Hart’s Hill and down over the Whites’ lawn, indicating that the Taylors were throwing still another party, Leonard did not react visibly. He did not stiffen in anger in his lounge chair or cover his face with his hands and weep in grief at once again going unnoticed and uninvited. No, he lay motionless so as not to display to his wife his most sensitive area. Still, Sylvia had picked something up.

  “Leonard? Want some lemonade, Leonard?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not too sweet.”

  “No.”

  “Greta made it.”

  “No.”

  “Anything wrong, Leonard?”

  “No.”

  Lee had sensed her father’s turmoil as well. How? A slight movement, perhaps, a hollowing of his chest as if he had just received a knife in his heart as the music wafted over him. Or a change in his aura—if successful furriers reading the business section of the Sunday Times do indeed have auras—from a self-satisfied peachy beige to a thunderous gray. That the Taylors had the power, simply by playing a Billy Vaughn record, to drive her father to near insanity, even for an instant, made them an object of concern for his eldest child. But not dread. She had seen the Taylors: They were simply not scary.

  Lee had seen Mr. Taylor only a couple of times. A creep, in her estimation. His chin was attachéd to his neck by a large, flappy patch of flesh, like a pelican’s. His eyes were bulgy. He looked like a slow reader. Mrs. Taylor was blonde and pretty, except if you saw her walking down Main Street and she passed you up real close: You could see wrinkles crisscrossing every part of her face, hundreds of tiny tick-tack-toe patterns. And the kids: The two big girls now were away at boarding school. They were okay, ex
cept the one whose freckles were so close together it looked as though she had a brown butterfly tattooed on her face. She was always giggling. The other girl never smiled. Jasper, admittedly, may have been a jerk, but no worse than any of the Wheatley jerks in their stupid ties and jackets, like they were on their way to an office instead of fifth grade. There was a little Taylor brother, too young to go to school, who always waved at whoever he saw, flapping his hand back and forth in a floppy-wristed frenzy. “Hiya! Hiya! Hiya!” he’d call.

  “How’s your father, the goy?” her grandmother Bella inquired. The question could have been asked the following weekend, since it was one Bella invariably posed, but it was now two years later.

  Lee was not perched on the brink of adolescence, as are many twelve-year-olds; she had gone over the edge. Her breasts were now larger than her biceps, and she had forsaken her tree climbing, her racing, and her roughhousing with the neighborhood boys for the lesser pleasures of the junior high school girls’ tennis team. Coming of age as she had in 1962, at the height of the Jacqueline Kennedy mystique, and being Sylvia’s daughter, Lee bore herself rather elegantly. She sat with her legs crossed only at the ankle, no matter how her body yearned to slump and tie itself into its comfy prepubescent knot. Lee’s figure was fine, even noble, with the lovely shoulders and strong thighs of Winged Victory—although in a family of the small-boned and wasp-waisted, she felt too large, which she interpreted as being fat. She was beginning a lifetime crusade against an ever evolving list of wicked carbohydrates and satanic fats. Her face had lost its round girlish good looks and had yet to come into its bright-eyed, clear-skinned adult prettiness; every day at least one pimple popped up on one feature; her nose had bloomed faster than her cheekbones, forehead, or chin and would have totally dominated her face if not for the competition from her stick-out ears. Her hair had become her crowning glory, turning from plain brown into a thick chestnut mix—the warm gold of the nut mingled with the intense red-brown of the shell.