by Pamela Moses
“Yes, of course, Ma.”
She and Poppy glanced around as if unsure where to set their bundles, then chose a spot on the carpeting just inside the bedroom door. I could see, peeking from the bags, tissues, jars of cherry preserves from Zimmerman’s, mandelbrot, pumpernickel bread. Mama’s breathing was labored, and I wondered if they had found parking nearby or carried these bundles some distance. She glanced at Angie’s bed and then looked down at mine before lowering her bottom onto the edge of it as if she weren’t quite sure she trusted the mattress. Then she smoothed wrinkles from a section of the bedspread, inviting me, I understood, to sit beside her.
“Last week Aunt Bernice had a lump removed.” Mama ran her finger down one of the pleats in her dark tweed skirt. “I thought you would want to know. Her treatment begins Tuesday.”
Bernice was Mama’s favorite sister, but her voice held no hint of tears. Already, many times, I could see, she had told these things before repeating them now to me. “It’s easy, I suppose, to forget how quickly life can crumble into pieces. Like a fragile dough.” Mama tapped the tops of her knees, making an attempt at the beginning of a laugh.
I nodded silently, my throat sick.
For long minutes, Mama studied my room. I saw her gaze shift from the stacks of papers on my shelves—essays for my Shakespeare and Romantic Poetry courses, stories I’d written for Professor Brennan over the past months—to the letter I’d taped to my wall congratulating me on my position as teaching assistant the following autumn. And her eyes flickered. I caught some arching of her brow. Or I thought I had. No. No, merely my imagination. Of course, of course, she had other matters on her mind. She seemed not even to see the borrowed sweatshirt I wore, only swirled the fingers of her left hand over her right.
“What I came to tell you, Ruthie,” she said, reaching for my hand to pat it between hers, “is that you are still my little girl, still my sweetest sweet. Life’s too short, yes?” At this, she reached for a wadded hankie in her pocket. It smelled of Lady’s Lace, the perfume she occasionally sprayed on the insides of her wrists. “We are woven together, threads from the same garment. When a strand is cut, the garment unravels. Nothing remains but shreds.
“Do you know what Bernice has been asking for these past days? Her family. Her dearest friends. Those who have loved her always, whose hearts, whose thoughts are one with hers. Without that . . .” Mama stopped and turned toward the room’s single window, toward all that inhabited the world just beyond the glass. And I understood the things she implied.
“We belong to each other, Ruth. So, I forgive you,” she whispered into my hair as she drew me close. “I forgive you, I forgive you.”
If a sob had not clogged the back of my mouth, I would have said, “Oh, Mama. Mama, I forgive you, too.” This was what I was thinking, but from the way she blew matter-of-factly into her handkerchief, I could tell she sought no forgiveness, that the idea, in fact, had never occurred to her. But as Mama’s arms wrapped me in all the familiar places, I melted in her embrace. And at this moment, what else mattered?
• • •
In the afternoon, after Mama and Poppy left, I ate, in a single sitting, half the food they had brought me until each breath became a stab in the constricting denim of my jeans. I exchanged them for elastic-waisted sweatpants, my stomach engorged, tight as a stuffed apple, so full I dashed twice to the toilet, thinking all I had consumed would spew back out. Almost hoping, hesitating. God! What a wreck I had made of everything again!
That night I dreamed of Vanessa Randall’s birthday party. The summer I was twelve, the Randalls had thrown Vanessa a gymnastics party. This, one of a handful of sports party invitations I had accepted over the year despite Mama’s reminders that I did not need to attend all of them, that the frenzy of so many overexcited children at such events was a recipe for accidents. “Did Vanessa invite the whole class?” Mama wanted to know when I opened the envelope with the pink card featuring a drawing of a young gymnast in a purple leotard. “I don’t know, Ma.” I could tell she was surprised I had been included. Mama knew the Randalls only by sight—a family who lived in the estate section of Riverdale near the water and who took riding lessons and ski vacations and kept a hunter-green Jaguar with leather seats, which they packed each weekend to visit their house on the Connecticut shore. “Looks like they bought half the store,” she’d whispered once when, on the way to a dentist’s appointment in Manhattan, we had bumped into the whole Randall clan laden with bags, stepping out of Ralph Lauren on Madison Avenue.
“If they give you a choice, it makes sense to stick to the floor mats, don’t you think?” Mama said the day before the party. “You spent all that time at Uncle Leonid and Aunt Nadia’s practicing somersaults and cartwheels on their lawn last year. I remember you were quite good at those.”
The party was held in the newly constructed gymnasium of a school near Vanessa’s home. For days I had anticipated the celebration, having overheard Vanessa describe the delights that awaited us to a cluster of girls in our class. And when I first passed through the double swinging doors into the brilliantly lit room, which smelled excitingly of new vinyl padding, I could see that she had not exaggerated: gleaming silver rings hung from bars, lacquered balance beams stretched over thick plastic tumbling mats. There were climbing ropes and monkey bars and pastel hula hoops. The girls who had arrived before me were already swinging and dangling and swooping. These things, I could tell, were not new to them; in fact, they seemed near experts—calling to one another as they twirled, laughing openmouthed, loose hair fluttering. Three women in lollipop-red T-shirts supervised. “You’ve done this before?” the one with the gold-flecked ponytail had asked as I approached two long horizontal poles. “Oh, yes,” I lied, allowing her to coat my palms with white powder and lift me up, up until I gripped the higher of the two bars. “Have fun,” she said—this the extent of her directions. So I began to pump my legs as I’d seen the others do, feeling suddenly clumsy and self-conscious. What I needed was enough momentum to plant my feet on the lower bar. Yes, was that it? Trickles of perspiration trailed from my brow, stinging my eyes. My arms ached. But I needed height, more height. I wanted to fly! So I did not feel the slipping of my fingers until . . . Despite the padding, the floor was shockingly hard. A great wind-knocking slap from skull to buttocks. A circle of sympathetic faces over me, a phone call from Mrs. Randall to Mama with apologies that I would have to miss the cake.
As Mama had helped me up the stairs and onto the sidewalk, wrinkles of worry creased the corners of her eyes. Her fingers squeezed deep into my left arm. “Sometimes, Ruthie, you lose sight of common sense, you know? You try for impossible things.”
“Yes, Mama.” I nodded, bruised and blurry-eyed with shame, leaning into her with each gingerly step.
Then Mama kissed me under the steamy July sun. “Think of this as a lesson, Sweet Pea. Then, perhaps, some good can come of it, hmm?” As she pushed my damp hair from my brow, I squinted in the brightness, knowing, even at that tender age, this day would sear into me like a brand or a scar—and, perhaps, yes, as Mama said, for my own good.
• • •
Professor Brennan had asked for a completed version of my story “Bird on the Tide” within the week; he wanted to enter it into a writing contest sponsored by a literary magazine that was gaining acclaim. But every breath of a new thought in me had turned to dead air. My character, Natasha, was at a crossroads, but each flickering idea for a conclusion sputtered out before I put it to paper. Over the next few days, I walked the paces of my usual routine, but my mind dragged. All this time, I guess I had known. It could not last: I, on my own, reaching for this life that defied Mama and Poppy and all I had ever been. Hadn’t it all along been a fraud, a joke? Missteps down an unnavigable path. Ridiculous promises I had told myself of some splendid Ruth waiting to emerge. It had been a hope as distant and unlikely as the colliding of two stars. There was nothing left to do but drown my pride and disentangle myself from the
mess I had created.
I would tell my professors first, they far less painful to face than Joshua. Five of them in all, so the announcements of my withdrawal should have grown progressively easier. But instead, with each, a greater burning flamed in my gut; I choked more over the explanation I had so carefully planned. And to Joshua, what could I possibly offer? He had met me near the university’s observatory in a side passageway used by few students, a spot we had considered our own. In the damp chill, he stood hunched, his hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans, his face rigid from cold but also from the knowledge that I had something serious to discuss. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’ve started something I can’t finish!” My breath came in thick, frosty clouds. I paused to watch a couple in matching red hats sharing a cup of something frothy and steaming pass by. “The thing is, this, this is not who I really am. I don’t know if you can understand.”
“No. No!” Joshua either understood or heard nothing. His hands flew to my shoulders, pressing as though he would bore through the padding of my jacket, even through my flesh to bone, beginning to speak of attachments, of love, his voice engulfing us, until my own thoughts spun and spun, knotting, snagging. Until I could listen no more, until I wrapped my scarf around my neck to cover my ears and ran.
• • •
Near the end of the month, the semester would come to a close. Angie was now every waking moment in the library—disappearing before I tumbled from bed, returning after I was asleep. And so I had spent the past several days in near solitude, in kneesocks and the ruffled plaid pajamas I’d had since high school, holed up at my bedroom desk with notepads and the books necessary for my final papers. With pastries and bags of oily chips from the convenience store, I stuffed myself as I worked, hour following hour, until my stomach cramped, my eyes smarted, my fingers gripping my pencil throbbed. How else to fend off what kept prodding to sneak in? Doubts and second thoughts—the hundred plans that had erupted in me when my letter from Georgetown first arrived, the wave of hope that had come when I finished “Storm House,” “The Last Diplomat,” and “City Masquerade,” and with each of Professor Brennan’s notes of commendation attached to the returned stories. And Joshua—Joshua—when he caught my hand in his or brought his lips to mine—Oh!—how the very center of me had seemed to open.
• • •
Four days before my planned return to New York, a front of soft, mild air blew in. The campus seemed suddenly to teem with life, Healy Lawn dotted with students reclining on blankets, their notebooks spread before them, or kicking soccer balls, a few singing along with the FM station playing on their portable radios. In the early afternoon, I emerged from my seclusion and found a spot against the trunk of a towering oak. I had brought with me The Collected Works of Charlotte Brontë, assigned for Professor McGovern’s class later that day. And I read until I found this: The vehemence of emotion . . . within me was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway; and asserting a right to predominate: to overcome, to live, to rise and reign at last . . . Our first night at Brown, I had shyly recited this line from Jane Eyre to Setsu and Opal and Fran when the questionnaire we’d been given had asked our favorite passages from literature. I had chosen it then not because I considered it a favorite, but because strangely, for years, it had stuck with me. Still, for some moments after I’d spoken, there had been silence. And now I wondered if my suitemates had paused because something had caught at them, too. The something in each of us more expansive than what we’d known.
And so I cradled the pages in my lap. Again and again, I repeated the phrases, over and over, drinking them in until I owned them. I tilted my chin and gazed through the spreading limbs above me. And as the branches stirred, I almost heard a quiet whispering, a favorite saying of Rabbi Gerson’s: Rejoice! All creation is filled with greatness. Even ourselves. Had I never truly listened, or had I not believed? In that instant, something strengthened inside me, like fingers tightening around a staff. And then I knew. I knew the choices I would make. I knew the things I would do to claim my happiness.
For the first five months of my engagement to Joshua, Mama made no acknowledgment of my decision. During our occasional calls, she chattered on about Sarah’s premed courses at Cornell, the renovations to the buildings on either side of Broadway Paperie—improving the value of the block. And if I began to talk of Joshua, she skimmed along as if she hadn’t heard. And so my status went unmentioned to the extended family, as if it were only the speaking it aloud that would make it come to pass. “I will tell them myself!” I informed Mama after the card arrived in my mail from Aunt Nadia announcing my cousin Gregory’s engagement to Shari Fischer of Mamaroneck, his girlfriend of several years, but with no reference to my own plans. For a moment Mama was silent. “Well, I suppose it’s your news to share.”
I wondered if the things we had to say to each other were thinning, a binding tie wearing away. But then Mama began to call more regularly, pondering other matches for me, other futures. During my visits home her eyes, at all times, still avoided the small round diamond on my left ring finger. She asked if she had told me how her high school friend Rachel Cohen had suffered—the one who married a man she hardly knew, his background alien to her own. She seemed pleased when I joined her for Saturday services but then scanned the sanctuary for the tragic souls in the congregation. Did I remember Cheryl Mayer? After seven years and two children, she was divorcing. And, of course, poor Danny Horowitz. His wife had left him for a cardiologist from Brooklyn Heights. But as our wedding drew closer, her protests quieted. When I explained to Poppy and her that what Joshua and I wished was an interfaith ceremony—our families and friends with us, and the officiating to be shared equally by Reverend Harrington from Joshua’s home church and Rabbi Gerson—to my surprise, they made no complaints. And on the morning Joshua and I exchanged our vows, on a small hill in the botanical gardens not far from Georgetown’s campus, under a chuppah adorned with white gerbera daisies, I stole a look at Mama in time to catch her leaning into Poppy’s shoulder, sweeping away a fallen tear.
• • •
Just weeks after our ceremony, having begun to accept Joshua’s permanence, Mama seemed preoccupied with a new concern. Since the previous winter, managing (for the most part) to give up snacks, to keep my meals moderate—no small struggle to attain what for so many years had seemed impossible—I had succeeded in shedding twenty-nine pounds! But in Mama’s estimation, Joshua and I now both needed filling out. “How do you feel about latkes?” she would ask, rolling up the sleeves of her blouse so that Joshua knew to follow her to the kitchen. “I’ll show you the way I like to make them. And after you try one, you can tell me what you think.” She would position him beside her at the counter and show him how she grated the potatoes, combining them with the thinnest shreds of onion, how she beat the eggs lightly so as not to create excess air, how she lowered spoonfuls of the pancake mixture carefully, carefully into crackling oil. Then she would rummage through the kitchen drawer where she kept family photos until she unearthed some snapshot from my childhood or high school years that I had hoped would never resurface. “See how much healthier Ruth looked back then,” she would say, pointing to the roundness of my cheeks. “Maybe it’s the hours and hours of writing. You know, I think sometimes she just forgets to eat. . . . See if you can’t get her to put a little meat back on her bones, hmm? Maybe she’ll listen to you if not to her own mother.” These were the things I could hear her murmuring to Joshua. And swinging my heels until they caught on the rung of the kitchen chair where I perched, I watched the two of them together, and I thought of the many things that changed and of those that never would.
ALOFT
• 2003 •
Francesca presents me with a silver-ribboned box—a collective shower gift from Opal, Setsu, and herself, she says. Inside are three infant-sized knitted sweaters with matching hats: one in white, one in pink, one in pale green, with ribbon woven through their cuffs and collars. We pass the sweaters a
round the table. Setsu holds up one of the hats—the green one. It has a single tiny bow on its brim.
“Have you ever seen anything sweeter!” Most of Setsu’s mannerisms are as I remembered, but her laugh is different now, bursting from her as if uncontainable.
Opal smiles. “Their colors are beautiful,” she says, studying them. One of her new clients is Bridgeton, the hotel chain. The graphic design firm she owns with her husband, Campbell, is updating the chain’s brochure and the green of this sweater might work perfectly.
“How is Campbell?” we want to know. “How is married life?”
“We’re two peas in a pod!” she laughs. Children still seem a long time off, though, she says. “But if we ever have one of our own, and if it’s a girl”—she reaches for the hat in Setsu’s hand—“I want to find her an outfit just like this!”
Francesca disappears into her house then returns with a pastel pink cake molded in the shape of a bassinet. She smiles at us over the cake as if she knows what we are thinking—that this is a sentimentality in her we never could have imagined. But her steps are as clipped and purposeful as I remember them from before, when she marched in protest of everything that crossed her track. And when she talks of her work, her most recent cases at Bausch and Firth, where, since finishing law school, she has practiced as a women’s rights advocate, the same flames ignite her words as they did long ago. Still, who could have expected this kind of celebration from the Francesca I lived with throughout our years at Brown? On the night the four of us first met, she had rolled her eyes when Setsu and I admitted that we hoped, before graduating, we might find true love, the men we would marry, even share children with. She reached into the back pocket of her jeans for a pack of matches and lit the cigarette she had long held in the fingers of her right hand. She blew a perfect “O” of smoke then broke it with her thumb. “You know, this is why we’re suitemates. All colleges do this. It’s policy. They match you with roommates as different from you as night from day.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s supposed to keep things interesting.”
