The Appetites of Girls

by Pamela Moses

  AMY EINHORN BOOKS

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

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  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2013 by Pamela Moses

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Moses, Pamela.

  The appetites of girls : a novel / Pamela Moses.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-16447-5

  1. Female friendship—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.O7793A67 2014 2013037701

  813'.6—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my mother and for my father

  With all of my love and gratitude

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part ONE

  FOR OLD TIME’S SAKE

  SWIMMING LESSONS

  SEXY GIRL

  PARTIES IN THE PENTHOUSE

  TORU

  Part TWO

  THE WORK OF A WOMAN

  A MATTER OF SMALL CONSEQUENCE

  BUILDING RESISTANCE

  AFTERNOON AT MOON BEACH

  Part THREE

  UNNECESSARY BURDENS

  THE BRIDE

  THE GOOD SISTER

  TAKING WING

  ALOFT

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FOR OLD TIME’S SAKE

  • 2003 •

  This, above all else, binds the four of us together: standing side by side, each struggled to believe the best in herself, hearing amid the dark doubts in her mind the whisper of triumph.

  Long before we grew in strength, we began life in separate corners. In my first moments, I made only small whimpers, my family tells me. Then my face turned red as beet soup, my fists tight as knots, and I cried with a roar that seemed beyond my tiny lungs. Opal was born into the arms of midwives in a country house outside of Paris. Her mother reclined on feather pillows and sipped lemon water until it was time. Francesca claims she bellowed her first day morning through night until the nurses relented, freeing her from her swaddling blanket. And Setsu’s life opened just as her mother’s closed, her cries lasting longest of all.

  Far we have come since those beginnings, and long the journeys to victory over doubt. But always, in us, were stirrings of possibilities, and we would find the will to hold fast to these hopes.

  • • •

  In the eleven years since graduation, Francesca and I have phoned each other regularly, as we have with Setsu and with Opal, a pledge we made long ago and kept. But in the spinning hum of our grown-up lives, our visits became sporadic, and not since our final college year have all four of us been together in one place. This past spring, though, just days after Francesca had come into Manhattan, meeting me for lunch and a stroll through the American wing of the Met, she called, insisting the baby I was carrying deserved a celebration. Besides, what better excuse could the four of us have to reunite? For old time’s sake, she said. Wouldn’t it be fun?

  “Oh, no, Fran, you don’t need to. Thank you, really . . .” I had fumbled for the appropriate words to decline her unexpected offer. In part because it is not in the Jewish tradition, a baby shower had never crossed my mind.

  “B’sha’ah Tova—in good time,” my aunts and sisters and mother had said when they learned that I was expecting. One’s hopes should not rise too high before the hour comes. Congratulations may bring bad luck, they worried. My grandmothers and great-grandmothers would not have so much as knitted a bootee before a baby’s arrival. “Why tempt bad spirits?” Nana Leah had cautioned with an old wives’ superstition.

  But shouldn’t I have known Fran would persist? “Ruth, you are bringing a daughter into the world. How can you refuse her some festivity?”

  There was a time she could talk me into many things because I lacked the courage to trust my own mind. Now, though, with the sudden possibility of reuniting with my suitemates, I realized I missed not just each of them separately, but all of us together as a group. Our weaknesses differed, but our journeys to overcome them were shared. We learned from one another’s struggles, and learned, too, we were not alone in struggling. In our day-to-day living together and the friendships formed in those years, we gained strength to fight for our deepest yearnings. And now as I take this new step toward motherhood, it seems fitting that we four come together again.

  So here we sit at this table beneath the tulip tree: Francesca, Setsu, Opal, and I. Our spoons dip into shallow dishes of chilled soup as the tree’s high branches cast soft, swaying shadows across our faces and arms and the plates of luncheon food before us. Years ago we could not have dreamed we would ever be this picture of contentment. But no storms rage forever, not even those that whirl within us. Yes, each of us was stronger than she knew. Even I.

  • • •

  Fran has thought through every detail. Her garden table is set with linen place mats and napkins, at its center a crystal vase thick with daffodils. At the table ends stand two pitchers of iced mint tea, their handles wound with ivy and tiny white flower buds as intricate as snowflakes. And beside each plate, someone has placed a pair of cellophane-wrapped baby shoes made entirely of pink sugar.

  This is the first time any of us has seen Francesca’s new Connecticut home, and when I arrived, ringing the bell to the right of her paneled front door, I heard her calling to someone—“Got it! Got it!”—and then the familiar pounding of her running feet.

  “God, it’s great to have you here,” she said, kissing me, walking me through the house, hanging my spring jacket in her hall closet. As we pass the kitchen, I glimpse the food to be served—dishes I had seen in magazines—crustless sandwiches rolled like pinwheels, bowls of pastel soup with scrolling loops of cream at their edges, salads of nearly transparent green leaves no larger than rose petals. A trim woman in a starched white blouse stands to the left of the double sink, slicing raw vegetables—Lucienne, Francesca introduces her.

  “This is really so beautiful, Fran—everything. And so generous—”

  “Oh, goodness. You’re welcome.” She shrugs off my words, never comfortable with sentiment. “Let’s talk about you. You look wonderful. How are you feeling? Are you getting any sleep?” It was the one trial of her own pregnancies, she remembers. How for hours in her bed, with eyes wide open, her mind would whir.

  “Sleeping, yes, but I’ve never had such vivid dreams,” I tell her.

  As we speak, a dream of the four of us from the night before returns to me: we are racing along the shore, kicking up the foaming water. And how young we are. Only girls, but then in a twinkling we are women, with our shadows stretching far, out into the ocean.
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  Then we are interrupted by the arrival of Opal, followed soon by Setsu. “I can’t believe you’re here,” Fran says. “You both look terrific. And doesn’t Ruth look terrific?”

  But Setsu and Opal are already embracing me, asking me exactly how many more weeks, exclaiming that I’m radiant.

  In the kitchen, Fran mixes mimosas, pouring them into tall flutes. “Occasional drinks in the third trimester are permissible, aren’t they?” She winks at me.

  “Just not the way you make them.”

  She laughs, surprised by my retort but approving of it, and fills a separate flute without champagne.

  Lucienne arranges the bowls of soup on a tray, and we follow her, carrying our glasses across the lawn, settling around the table. And now as our spoons clink against Francesca’s china bowls, we begin to chat, at first taking turns, speaking of work, of families, of things we’ve heard of other college friends. But before long, we are talking together and at once, the way we used to do. A rhythm suddenly familiar as chords from well-loved but, for a time, forgotten music.

  Setsu surprises us. While sorting through some files at home, she has unearthed some photos from our college days.

  “Oh, look at us. Is that freshman year?” Opal asks.

  “Yes, it must be finals week. We look exhausted. Remember how we studied until morning and Fran kept us all awake with chocolate-covered coffee beans?” Setsu smiles at Fran.

  “That’s right! And, Ruth, you collapsed on your books right on the floor!” Fran recalls.

  We laugh and agree it feels both a lifetime ago and just like yesterday.

  As we put aside the photographs, and as I look from Setsu to Opal to Fran, I see their clothes are more tailored than they once were, their hair more stylishly cut, the angles of their faces more defined. But in other ways, how little they have changed. Setsu’s long fingers still fold beneath her chin as she speaks, pressing to her mouth now and then when she has finished. Francesca’s voice pierces with the same old boldness. And as the soup begins to disappear, how well I recall Setsu’s tiny meals—mouse portions, I thought them—that gave her rope-thin arms. Opal’s insistence on measuring, analyzing every morsel before it passed her lips, scrutinizing each bite before she swallowed. Francesca with her penchant for frosted cakes, her French baguettes and Brie from the gourmet store in town. Much of those years has faded and blurred, but these and other things I still see clearly. And I cringe at what they surely, maybe especially, remember of me.

  As the soup slides along my tongue, I gaze at each of the women and think of the hindering roots that had found soil in our earliest experiences of life. Entangled with a thousand secrets and unshared stories, and thickening as we grew, becoming, after a time, almost as hard to cut away as our own limbs.

  But these struggles are part of what it means to be human—struggles with our own natures, often undeclared, as if unnoticed by those who know us, even by ourselves. Yet such battles must be waged and won if we are to grow, if we mean to claim what is truest within.

  SWIMMING LESSONS

  (My Story)

  • 1983 •

  On the third Saturday of May, exactly one month after my thirteenth birthday, I was to become a bat mitzvah. Already seated in the temple, waiting for me to recite my Torah portion, were my eight aunts and uncles and my eleven cousins. The Kramers had come all the way from Farmingdale, the Martins from Staten Island. Neighbors from our building had shown up as well—the Schafers, the Rosenbergs, the Kleins from across the hall. Mama, Poppy, Sarah, and Valerie had spread across the first pew, Mama in the center in her new navy Anne Klein suit and her best patent leather purse with the gold horseshoe-shaped clasp.

  Though the temple was only a six-block walk from where we lived in Riverdale, north of Manhattan, we had, at Mama’s insistence, been dressed and squeezed into our building’s narrow elevator two hours before the service began. “I want to be sure of securing the front row, the one closest to the bima,” Mama had informed us. She’d been standing before the bathroom mirror, spraying her hair—which had been styled just the day before at the salon—filling the apartment with the sweet scent I associated with Saturday mornings and all significant occasions. Even for weekly services, Mama made certain we were fifteen minutes early so she could turn and wave to friends as they arrived. But this day, of course, was of far greater importance. “It’s only once you become a bat mitzvah, hmm, Ruthie?” Mama licked her thumb to flatten a strand of hair that had loosened from my rhinestone barrette. “Poppy and I want to be just an arm’s length away when you stand to read.”

  During the service, Jessica Neier and Harold Green would also be called to the Torah, and, of the three of us, I would read last. As Harold recited his passage, I gazed at my new chocolate-brown shoes with their almost-grown-up heels, which Mama had bought at Saks Fifth Avenue especially for this occasion. Most items for my wardrobe, and those for my younger sisters, she purchased at a bargain basement in Brooklyn, scrutinizing labels and buttons and seams until she was satisfied that, despite the discounted prices, she had found top-quality clothes. But at the beginning of the month, Mama had taken Sarah and Valerie and me by bus to midtown Manhattan, to the girls’ department at Saks. At the back of the store, a carpeted elevator chimed softly when we reached our floor. And there, on orderly racks, hung dresses and gowns like those I had seen in the fashion magazines Mama bought now and then. Gowns overlaid with lace, silk ones with sashes and pleats or with shoulder straps as fine as shining strings. Dresses like those my sisters and I noticed on girls our age during our occasional trips to the Upper East Side, their hair tied back with ruffled ribbons, on their way to parties, we guessed, or expensive restaurants. In my bedroom closet at home, between my plaid wraparound skirt and my gray flannel one, hung the outfit I had always assumed I would wear: a charcoal suit, wool with four black buttons down the front of the jacket and a slight scallop along the skirt’s hem—a purchase from the last High Holy Days that still fit and seemed appropriately solemn. But the Saks dress Mama chose was a deep rose taffeta with a velvet collar and a large bow, and she paid more for it and for the blue crêpe dresses for Sarah and Valerie than I could remember her spending on any previous shopping excursion.

  I proudly ran my hands over my lap, feeling the smooth taffeta, prettier than the beige wool of Jessica Neier’s. As she was called to read, I repeated again and again in my mind the trickiest phrases from my portion.

  Every Wednesday for months, in one of the third-floor classrooms of the temple, I had studied with Cantor Rothman the Hebrew syllables, the pronunciation and meaning of each word, as well as the musical symbols indicating pitch.

  “She’s making fine progress, Mrs. Leiser,” the cantor had said to Mama when she arrived on her way home from work to fetch me. “She seems to have an ear for the Hebrew language.” And he had winked at me, folding his thick arms over the mound of his stomach.

  “Thank you, Cantor.” Mama had shaken his hand. “That’s reassuring.” But she had sniffed in a way I knew meant she was not yet convinced. Cantor Rothman had a reputation for praising even the least capable students. Mama had heard this from mothers of older children in our neighborhood when I had first begun attending Hebrew school some years before. And she had been privy to what the cantor had not, had listened as I’d practiced at home, had heard how the words sometimes stuck in my throat even with Poppy’s occasional help and with the practice tapes Cantor Rothman had given me.

  How many, many sounds there were to memorize, how much for my ear and tongue to learn. So Mama had begun to study the tapes as well, until she knew every line better than I, believing that she, too, could be of assistance. When she was young, not many years after arriving in this country, Mama had planned to be a school principal, or even a professor at a university. A goal she certainly could have achieved, she liked to tell us, having maintained for years in a row her position at the top of her class, even though most others had been here since birth.

 
I had heard snippets of what her life had been from the late-night chitchat of Mama and my aunts, after my sisters and cousins and I had been excused from Friday Shabbat dinners. After the reciting of the Kiddush and the completion of the meal, after our plates had been carried out to the kitchen and when our parents thought our ears were buzzing only with our own child-games. Talk of when Mama’s and Poppy’s families had made their way to America from Poland. Poppy’s family coming first, years before Poppy was even born, Mama’s coming later while Mama, Aunt Helena, Aunt Bernice, and Uncle Jacob were children. Of how turns of fortune had saved Mama’s family from the fate that had blotted out so many of our people, turns that, in the end, had allowed them to make the voyage here: of their escape to Vilna, of a Japanese diplomat there who had issued them visas, of the safe haven they had eventually been granted in the Jewish ghetto of Shanghai for the duration of the Second World War. And then talk of how both Mama’s and Poppy’s families had eventually settled in Washington Heights, and then, some years later, here in Riverdale, just north of hustling, bustling Manhattan, where the streets had more trees and the apartments were a bit roomier. Of how the families had hoped for what others already enjoyed—wages that increased, prospects that widened. How grateful they all were to be here. Still, now and then, I heard Mama and my aunts allow that if only Papa Marvin had started a business of his own as some others had . . . For those with the foresight to follow certain paths, opportunities never seemed to run out.

  “Always, always we should remember our blessings,” Mama would say. But she never explained why she’d changed her mind about becoming a professor or heading a school, why she had opened her shop, Broadway Paperie, where she sold gift cards and personalized stationery and all styles of writing implements, instead. I’d gathered it had something to do with the printing plant where Papa Marvin worked closing down while Mama was in college, with his taking up woodcarving and oil painting to pass the time “because no one was hiring middle-aged men who operated the old presses” (as I remembered him recounting), and with Mama leaving college and returning home to take a secretarial job. “Just a matter of circumstances,” was all she would ever reply if we asked, as if to mean, “It all worked out in the end.” But I saw how carefully she read through any mailings from Barnard, the college she had attended for just two years, scrutinizing the alumnae notes, the descriptions of added courses and publications by faculty, making me wonder if there were things she regretted. And if these were the same regrets that made her complain about the hours Poppy dedicated to his journals—the anecdotes of our family that he wrote with pencil in green cardboard-bound notebooks, even typing up a few and submitting them to Riverbank Press, a small literary magazine he’d heard about through a coworker. Recently, now that I was older, he would allow me to read over his stories as he worked, explaining why he’d chosen this word and not that, how he’d elaborated for the sake of humor and artistic merit, even asking if I had suggestions. Poppy had bought ten copies each of the issues that included his pieces. “See that, girls! Your Poppy is famous!” he’d joked, showing off his name—Aaron A. Leiser—in black print, listed between Kyle Jessup and Alice Novak on the back cover.