One of These Things First

by Steven Gaines

  Slow or not, the Jewish imperative was marriage, so one day Rifka, dressed in finery she wore only if she was going to visit some potentate, and went to the Manhattan offices on West 34th Street of Mr. Field, the famous Jewish matchmaker, for a consultation. Mr. Field, a small man dwarfed by the large leather chair in which he sat, told Rifka that for $1,500 he could introduce Seymour to a woman named Esther, who was also slow, and whose father owned a bakery in Canarsie. If Esther and Seymour were a match, part of her dowry would be that Seymour would be taught how to bake bagels and bialys at her father’s bakery, and he would have a trade to support his wife. On the occasion of their wedding, Mr. Field would be paid a second $1,500.

  On Seymour and Esther’s first date they went to the movies on Kings Highway and held hands in the dark. On their second date Seymour proposed marriage on the E train to Sheepshead Bay, where they spent the afternoon looking at model apartments to rent. A rental agent, who momentarily left them alone in the empty bedroom of one of the model apartments, returned to find the couple lying on floor of the walk-in closet, fully clothed, kissing passionately. The agent, unaware that this was a poignant moment—probably the first and only moment of ardor in the couple’s lives—threatened to call the police, which terrified them, and she threw them out.

  That night when Esther returned home, buoyant with her marriage proposal, she naively told her parents of the brief romantic passage on the walk-in closet floor. The parents were horrified, and Seymour was banished. Mr. Field branded him a letch and refused to give Aunt Rifka her money back. Seymour’s heart was broken. He pined for Esther the rest of his time on earth, lying in bed in his mother’s house, listening to sports on the radio. He died at age fifty-eight, a bachelor.

  I knew all this because when I was in the sixth grade, Aunt Rifka’s two-family house on East 47th Street was right across the street from the schoolyard of PS 192. For all of sixth grade I went to Rifka’s house twice a day, the first visit at lunchtime, when she made me huge meals served in a soup bowl: overflowing tunafish sandwiches on toasted white bread with a whopping side of mashed potatoes and butter. The second visit was after school let out. The other kids would scatter into the school yard, a Martian landscape to me, while I went to Aunt Rifka’s living room and practiced piano for an hour on the piano on which dead Becky had practiced. Aunt Rifka requested I played Für Elise several times every afternoon, while poor lumbering Cousin Seymour would lie in bed in his room listening. Sometimes I repeated the first two expectant notes of the piece, stretching them out until the tone was only a lingering vibration in an unbearable repetition, and I could hear Seymour moan loudly in his room, “I can’t stand to hear it anymore.”

  One day when I was on my way to Aunt Rifka’s, a neighborhood boy whose mother shopped in my grandparents’ store asked me where I went every day after school. I debated telling him that my father didn’t like me to go to the schoolyard because he was afraid I’d get hurt, and that when my father was a little boy another kid in the school yard kicked him in the balls and he had a “rupture,” and the doctors had to put lamb tendons in his groin. Instead I told him I had to go to my Aunt Rifka’s house to practice piano. He seemed a bit flustered. “Do you like that?” he asked.

  “I can play Für Elise from beginning to end,” I told him.

  He looked confused. “Well, Liberace is laughing all the way to the bank,” he said cheerfully.

  I shrugged like I didn’t understand what he meant, but I did, and I walked across the street.

  White Rabbit

  The summer I was ten years old I was all angles and bones, like a stick figure in khaki shorts and a Camp Lokanda tee shirt, such a skinny-marink that they gave me peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches before bed to fatten me up. A coed, kosher camp, Lokanda was the stuff of childhood dreams: sun-dappled white bunkhouses with maroon shutters, towering Adirondack pine forests, meadows of wildflowers, archery, horseback riding, nature walks through the woods, and the crystal-clear, bracing waters of Loch Ada to swim in. My bunkhouse leaked in three places when it rained, and bats slept in the eaves and fluttered through the air at night like butterflies. I was in heaven.

  The eight kids in my bunkhouse all had their B-movie roles: Squeaky, the runt mascot; Fetsy (Yiddish for “fart”), the pudgy kid with horn-rimmed glasses; Moe, the goofy kid with a sad smile who could outrun even Brucie Cohen; and Brucie Cohen, our leader, child Adonis, the athletic kid with a stubby crew cut and dismissive glare, for whom I developed strange, unsettling feelings. And there was freckled me, the liability exiled to deep center field, waiting for a long drive that never came, just me and the grasshoppers in the hot sun. In a world where status and popularity were based on brute athletic prowess, I could not name one player for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but I knew the style number to three different kinds of White Swan panties.

  One afternoon, during a softball game, I lay down in the sweet meadow grass to watch the clouds pass overhead, and I closed my eyes and fell asleep. When I woke the sun was low over Loch Ada, the game was long over, and my bunkmates had gone to get ready for dinner without noticing I was missing. Instead of being upset, I lay back down in the grass and looked up at the sky and it dawned on me that no one in the world knew where I was. I was in no one’s thoughts. I was a secret. For that moment I didn’t exist. I had an erection, and I rubbed myself through my shorts and thought about Brucie Cohen’s chest, and a spasm went through me. I was ashamed of what I had just done, mortified about what I had been thinking. And continued to think. Could not stop thinking. I had to turn away when Brucie Cohen was near me, and one time tears ran down my cheeks I was so upset by my desire to kiss him.

  I felt a different kind of gnawing need another day. I was walking with my bunkmates down a grassy path from the dining hall when I saw a gooey ice cream stick, covered with scurrying ants, lying at the side of the trail. The thought came into my head—it wasn’t so much a thought as a feeling—that the stick was lonely and I had to pick it up and take it with me. An uncomfortable electric tingling sensation that I had never felt before filled my chest. I thought if I didn’t pick up the stick, it would be lonely for the rest of its life. It had no life, it was a stick. Yet it would be intolerably lonely if I didn’t rescue it. I could feel the loneliness in the stick, and if you suggested that perhaps I was the one who was lonely, I might have agreed. But that wouldn’t have stopped me from having to pick up the stick. Nothing could stop me from picking up that stick. There was no longer any reason why, there was only the need to get the stick and make the unbearable feeling stop.

  So I broke away from my bunkmates and snatched the pop stick from the ground, ants and all, and stuck it in the right pocket of my khaki shorts. When I caught up with my fellow campers, one of them asked what I had gone back for, so I said, “Dropped a penny.”

  After that, I was terrified to look at anything lest I needed to keep it. Out of nowhere compulsion tyrannized me. Some of it led to no small feats of pilfering: it’s not easy to spirit away a catcher’s mask from a softball game. Within a few weeks, hidden in my footlocker were a whisk broom, Brucie Cohen’s sock I took from the washing machine, assorted pebbles and stones, a Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine that belonged to a kid in another bunk, my counselor’s toothpaste tube, a toilet paper roll, a butterfly under glass from the nature shack, knives and forks, pennies, chewed bubble gum, a sliver of soap from a garbage pail in the shower room, and a prayer book from Saturday morning services.

  I tried desperately to figure out what was happening. Was I putting these thoughts into my head purposely or did they appear randomly? Maybe an alien had taken over my body, like in It Came from Outer Space, a really spooky science fiction movie in which people in an Arizona town looked like themselves, but an alien controlled their thoughts. Could there be an alien inside my brain? I seriously considered it.

  Or was this what it felt like to be crazy? Could you even be crazy at my age? I was
ten. Rhoda Penmark, the child serial killer in The Bad Seed, for which Patty McCormack was nominated as best supporting actress, was crazy, and she was my age. So it was possible I was losing my mind.

  On the day I stole the prayer book after services I became so distraught that I ran a fever and vomited. The camp nurse put me in the infirmary, a little white cottage that smelled of alcohol, away from the rest of the bunks. The camp owners, “Uncle” Sammy and “Aunt” Ellie, phoned my parents to say that they were worried about me. When I spoke to my mom and dad on the phone I begged them to come and get me. For a second I thought about saying, “I need to take things … ,” but my father was on the extension, and Uncle Sam and Aunt Ellie were standing nearby listening, so I said the lame thing that I began to say over and over through the years when I was at a loss to explain the confusion in my head: “I don’t feel well.” Not very evocative or compelling. “I just don’t feel well.”

  The following day my parents made the three-hour drive to Glen Spey and my father let my mother have it in the car the whole way. He could really go at her: she was a fat slob, her father was a whoremaster, and he was having a heart attack and/or going to kill himself. By the time they arrived at Camp Lokanda she had such a bad migraine she could hardly see. I ran to her and hugged her, a mist of Arpège perfume calming me like nepenthe, while my dad stood back and puffed out his cheeks, grumbling about my “pulling this shit” and repeatedly calling me “Mister.”

  We went to my bunkhouse and while he waited outside, smoking cigarettes, my mother and I packed my belongings—all my Camp Lokanda clothing into which she had just weeks before sewn name tags. I saw the look on her face when she discovered the items in the bottom of my footlocker. She knew instantly I had taken them, stolen them, but she didn’t ask, “What are these doing here?” Instead she looked at me wide-eyed and packed my clothes on top of my stash so no one would see it, an act of complicity for which I was grateful.

  At that moment cheers of excitement rose up outside. We could hear laughter and whoops of pleasure. Gracie, the camp’s pet white rabbit, had gotten loose from her cage and run away from the nature shack. The whole camp was trying to capture her. I ran down the steps of my bunkhouse and got caught up in the pursuit along with dozens of kids. We chased the rabbit in circles in and out and around the cabins, all of us shouting and laughing, and after a few exhilarating minutes, the rabbit ran right toward me and stopped. Just like that. She sat twitching her nose in front of me, like a dog that had come to its master. She looked up at me with little black marble eyes and held my gaze. I thought this rabbit knows that I’m crazy. I approached her slowly and she allowed me to lean over and pick her up in my arms, where she nestled calmly. There were cheers from the other campers. They all surrounded me and I was a celebrity. It was thrilling. The nature counselor took the rabbit from me and an older boy patted me on the back and said “Good job!” and then my parents came and got me because my camp trunk was in the car, and it was a long drive, and we had to go. I told them I needed to say goodbye to the rabbit—it was the only one who understood, after all—but they wouldn’t let me, and my mother took my hand and led me away.

  I guess I could have said I changed my mind and that I wanted to stay, but I couldn’t go on taking things and not get caught, and if I didn’t go with them they would die on Eagles’ Nest Road, the treacherous cliffside road on the way to camp. Huh? A new thing in my head? So I reluctantly got into the car, and the camp and the kids and the pine woods disappeared at the first turn in the road.

  The next morning I woke up in my narrow bedroom above the store, the only outdoor space the tar roof outside my window. I lay there and thought about the green outfield and Bruce Cohen’s chest.

  Brooklyn was the last place anybody would want to be that July. Brooklyn had its own special kind of hot. That summer was so hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk in front of the store. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun was yellow and relentless. It was in the newspapers that six people keeled over from heat exposure at Ebbets Field, and the elevated line was packed with people carrying bedsheets, towels, and a cold thermos, taking the half-hour ride to Coney Island to cool off.

  My father resented me for making him lose the $800 fee for Camp Lokanda, and for punishment he didn’t speak to me for the rest of that summer. The way I felt about it was, he didn’t deserve any other son than this one.

  Two

  Joyce Brothers

  By the time I was eleven years old I was swimming in twos and drowning in twenties. The numbers tumbled through my head as in a cartoon, solid, sentient, shapes that tasted like metal. Twos, two, two twos. Twenty was the best. Counting to twenty was magic and calming; it would keep me and my mother safe. It was the prime number in our lives, because my mother and I were both born on the twentieth day of the month, and exactly ten years to the day before I was born, on November 20, 1936, my twelve-year-old mother dropped her scarf during her solo as Little Buttercup in HMS Pinafore at Montauk Junior High School, and my dad, who was then fifteen, stepped out of the chorus of sailors and picked it up for her. Years later, when they married and looked at the date on the HMS Pinafore program that my mother had saved, they discovered that their names were directly across from each other in the columns that listed the players: Isidore Goldberg (sailor) and Ruth Goshin (Miss Buttercup). Him, her, me, it was meant to be. We were bashert.

  Also, two was part of twenty, the soul of twenty, if you think about it. That’s why I touched twice. Touch once, touch twice, unless it was a doorknob; the second time you touched the doorknob, you could turn it, but if you couldn’t turn it with the second touch you had to start over by wiping your hand with a tissue. Who made up these crazy rules? They were tyranny.

  All this counting and touching took up a lot of time, so when you hear about people with obsessive behavior and it seems colorfully eccentric, like Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, in which he’s a writer with OCD who has to hopscotch down the street so as not to step on a crack, the part that nobody mentions is that it can take ten minutes just to get out the front door. I developed Kabuki-like movements to try to hide the rituals from people—like brushing my hand up against something nonchalantly instead of actually touching it twice. When I counted numbers I counted silently, without moving my lips, so people wouldn’t know, but everyone could see something was going on in my mind, and that part of me was somewhere else.

  Since there was no one around who could tell me what was wrong, I decided to ask Dr. Joyce Brothers, who wrote a popular syndicated advice column that appeared in the Daily News. I hand-printed a letter outlining my dilemma, asking her what was wrong with me and how to fix it, and I mailed it to the newspaper. When I didn’t read an answer over the next few days, I impatiently called the Daily News and persevered long enough to get through to Dr. Brothers’s secretary. She said that Dr. Brothers had received my letter but they weren’t going to publish it, and I should contact my family doctor for help.

  I used this piece of information as though it had come from an expert, and insisted my parents make an appointment for me to see Dr. Kaufman, our milquetoast general practitioner on Ocean Parkway. He had salt-and-pepper–colored hair and my mother had a secret crush on him. My mother and father and I waited hours in his packed waiting room, reading through stacks of the Saturday Evening Post, before he took us into his hushed office with bookcases and green drapes. Instead of allowing me to talk, my father told him his version of what was happening. My dad said he was under enormous stress because of my behavior. He dreaded coming home from work. My mother started to dab at her tears. Dr. Kaufman nodded as my father described my compulsions—“He touches things” and “He clears his throat strangely.”

  When my father was finished the doctor looked at me and asked, “Why do you do all these strange things?”

  Good question. I didn’t know why I did all those strange things. I certainly wasn’t going to try to ex
plain my feelings about lonely ice cream pop sticks to him. Yet I did want to impart how hopeless and sad I felt, and that the prickly feeling in my chest often made it hard to breathe. Was there anything he could do for that? But I didn’t say any of that. All I could muster was, “I don’t feel well.”

  Dr. Kaufman had no diagnosis. But the local diagnosis on 18th Avenue was that I was crazy. No fancier diagnosis needed than that. Crazy. Sick in the head. A “nut job,” my father’s sister called me one day. Everybody in the store knew it, everybody on the block knew it, and everybody knew it at junior high school, where I was able to attend for only a few weeks before I began to seize up, like an engine with no oil, and I stopped going to school completely. I went on home instruction, and a nice woman from the Board of Education came to the apartment above the store twice a week and taught me math and made me read Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. She politely pretended she didn’t see me touch things. Twice.

  Being in a ladies’ clothing store most of my day, I had to be resourceful for amusement, and the cardboard shipping boxes that merchandise arrived in became my métier. I discovered I liked spending time inside corrugated boxes, with the top closed, a sort of a child’s tree house, retail-store style. New corrugated boxes packed with merchandise arrived at the store every day, all shapes and sizes. Sometimes the box would be right out in the open, sometimes hidden behind a rack of dresses, where I could do my reconnaissance undisturbed. I spent a couple of years in and out of boxes, listening, watching, thinking, reading my grandmother’s hand-me-down books with a flashlight. I read the entire oeuvre of Harold Robbins and Superboy comics in a box. I time-traveled in boxes. Sometimes I transformed them into jukeboxes, hiding a small record player inside with an extension cord to the wall outlet. The customers were encouraged to drop a nickel into a slot I cut on the side of the box, and I would play a 45 rpm of “Tennessee Waltz,” the only record I had.