Either Side of Winter

by Benjamin Markovits

  Southern light fell through the uncurtained window. It caught the cheap gleam of a small plastic trophy Rachel had won in seventh grade for spelling and dictation; her name was misspelt on the marbled base: Miss Krank. Sunshine emphasized the woodstain of her first tennis racket, in its antique press; the glint of gilt lettering from what was left of her grandfather’s library. When her grandfather was a young man, he began buying books, whole collections. The complete works of Sir Walter Scott. Rachel suspected he never read them; it was a show of learning, a neglected ambition: ‘If I had time I would read deeply into the world.’ They lay in damp cardboard boxes and many of the spines had flaked off; they fell apart in her hands, stained her fingers brown with rotten leather. When Rachel dipped into them she looked for any marks he might have left.

  His business was in produce and canned goods; he came over from Hungary to work at his uncle’s grocery store. Together they expanded. For a while, the names Kranz and Myerson were well known between Port Jervis and Schenectady: brought back friendly, indifferent recollections among strangers. ‘Kranz, Kranz, I know you. My mother sometimes bought milk and eggs from Kranz & Myerson’s on Sunday mornings for making pancakes.’ But other thoughts followed, inevitably, the usual lamentations: even convenience stores may serve as symbols of lost youth. ‘Kranz and Myerson’s, I remember. On the corner of State and Orange, opposite Liebman’s pharmacy, where we sat up drinking ice-cream floats. Now it’s a Safeways; my corner shop’s run by Koreans.’ The company sold out some time in the Sixties; by this point, however, Rachel’s father was already a rich man, a lawyer, though he liked to talk about his youth in retail, how he stacked crates in the summer, his blistered hands. The humid stink outside the service door, the fruit-flies, the rats, a real Kindheit. From which he had preserved Rachel.

  Towards the end of her parents’ marriage, she liked to sit in the armchair with her legs kicked out, looking through everything. She could hear her mother’s raised voice. ‘When you don’t answer I like you least. When you stand there stumm with your hands in your pockets as if your silence were of a very superior quality. As if nobody kept their mouth shut before. Go on, talk, say something. Surprise me. I’d rather be accused than pestered like this.’ Tasha, her father once explained, could never let anything go, anyone. Wherever she gave pleasure, she felt too strongly the duty of giving it. Another way of saying she had a sweet tooth for flattery. It meant too much to her, but then she was lonely, idle. Tasha had great appetites, wanted a full life to match her full heart. And really he offered only…

  Rachel read into this what was intended. Before the divorce, Jimmy, Tasha’s ‘cousin’ from Port Jervis (really only the nephew of an aunt by a second marriage) had come to stay – lived with them several months, sat on their pot, washed his hair in Tasha’s bathwater, ate their takeaway leftovers at lunch. A photographer, he said, freelance. Reuben said this meant out of work. He had a long face, a pimple on his chin he scratched with dirty nails; nicotined fingers; long thin pale legs he showed off when he could, when the sun was out in cold weather. Other friends followed, knocked on the door, stayed late, got drunk. Tasha turned no one away. Reuben retired early to bed and left them to it. He never mentioned these things. Perhaps he found them too painful; or he guessed his indifference would appal her. Instead, they argued about money, her collecting habits. Rachel heard them at it, while going over old photographs in a shoebox: their honeymoon in the Maldives, her father in white linen, her mother holding a sandy towel against her pale breasts and laughing.

  ‘This counting of money is a very bad sin. Thank God I know how to spend. For someone who grew up with little enough I can throw it around. Something to be grateful for. I couldn’t bear to be tight-fisted.’

  ‘Oh, you, come off with that. You’ll make me angry. What is there I don’t give you? That isn’t the point.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake why should you grow angry? It’s not your marriage too. Of course, none of this applies to you. Why should you lose your rag?’

  ‘I come home I can’t open the door. The house looks like a pawnshop. What are we selling? And in the mornings I can’t take a leak without watching James shaving, one hand on the blade, another holding up his towel. Rachel preparing for school. Every day I clean out his hairs from the sink. You know how precious these minutes are. There isn’t room for me here. I want you to throw something out. One thing. As a gesture of love.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘One thing. As a gesture of love.’

  ‘Not one thing. Nothing. No.’

  Also, her cleanliness; it was erratic and mostly directed at Reuben, her strictures. She had ambitions to entertain largely, glittering receptions, but no gifts as a hostess and no wide acquaintance. Really, something low class let her down. When she threw parties, she relied on Reuben’s connections to fill out the occasion. The thought of their judgements oppressed her all week. He said, ‘Call the whole thing off, I don’t care, I never wanted it in the first place.’ On top of everything, such proof of how little he understood her made her miserable. Couldn’t he see what it was like to live in your own head, to spend so much time imagining life? Occasionally, you needed to act on these ideas. She thought she could bear anything so long as she had his understanding, his sympathy. For his part, he passed over these reflections quickly; of course, he guessed her point of view, but it didn’t seem weighty to him, significant. What she required wasn’t sympathy, but to learn to treat her own needs more lightly. If he commiserated, she only suffered more. So she found ways of making him suffer back. Before the guests came, she wanted him in the parlour to greet them. He couldn’t so much as pee in the loo lest he stain it. So when they arrive, he says first thing, ‘Go on, have a look at the toilet. I’m not allowed to use it till you see it pristine.’

  Nobody moves.

  ‘Will you do me a favour,’ he repeats, ‘and look at the porcelain. My bladder’s killing me over here.’

  Tasha blushes heavily; but something sisterly, combative, in her marriage forces her hand. She loses her cool. ‘You could sit down.’

  ‘I’m not going to sit down to take a leak.’

  ‘We’ve got a bathroom upstairs.’

  ‘I’m not going upstairs in my own home. At my age. With the waterworks under repair, no sir.’

  Their parties were rarely a success; and after a while, Tasha gave up on them. Still, they argued – Tasha never gave up on arguing. But with the door shut and locked, it didn’t seem relevant to Rachel. Her inheritance struck her rather as a subject for curiosity than regret. Everything passed eventually, and left these jumbles behind: the only things that survived were what you spent money on. Tasha herself once said as much to Reuben, the only days she remembered were the days she bought something. That’s why she refused to throw anything out.

  *

  Rachel spent the afternoon in her room, reading; lately she had acquired a passion for books. Not that she was friendless, rather the reverse. Her recent preference for solitude surprised her, too. Partly, company tongue-tied her; she didn’t like to express any common opinions, and since she found her thoughts no more remarkable than the general she kept them to herself. The prospect of college oppressed her: all those people. Wesleyan had accepted her for the fall; she dreaded leaving her father, the city. ‘Your father has something to tell you.’ What could that mean, she wondered; Tasha and Reuben hardly spoke. Also, the growing pressure of foolish adult expectations: that she would fall in love, break out on her own, etc. She had nothing to rebel against, no one to fall in love with.

  Even Reuben, who should know better, worried about drugs, sex, booze. ‘Daddy,’ she said, in what he called her voice of patient petulance, ‘I haven’t changed just because I turned seventeen. You don’t have to look for condoms in the wastepaper basket. I’m the girl I always was. People don’t change just because the clock ticks.’ Tasha, for her part, pestered her with very different worries. Why doesn’t she ask anyone over? When she was her age she co
uldn’t get enough of boys, just their smell, leather jackets, cigarettes, beer. Kisses like warm bread in the mouth. ‘Nothing is happening to me,’ Rachel cried more than once. ‘Everyone expects something to be happening to me but nothing is.’

  ‘Well, you’re very quiet.’ Both her mother, father complained of this. Tasha said, ‘Why don’t you bring that nice boy round?’ What boy, Rachel answered, though she knew quite well who. ‘I don’t remember his name, quite pink, face like a lollipop.’ They all have faces like lollipops, Rachel said. ‘Without a name, there isn’t a boy.’ Reuben never mentioned him, but offered to take her old friend Frannie to the theatre. Frannie was a girl from Hebrew school; they were bar mitzvahed on the same day, Tasha threw one of her more successful parties for the pair of them. This was before the divorce. Francesca’s mother, Ms Annie Rosenblum (Tasha pursed her mouth as she said it), had many friends. ‘Very literary people,’ Tasha said afterwards, ‘never short of something to say. Hungry and thirsty, too. Like locusts they ate and drank.’

  It was a shame Ms Rosenblum didn’t get along better with Tasha – who, at that time, could be condescending to single women. ‘Her pants barely reached the top of her socks,’ Tasha complained, giggling. ‘Like an old woman she stood there in flat shoes. I wanted to stoop at her feet and pull down the hems.’

  ‘Sweet like Jewish wine,’ Anne Rosenblum remarked to her daughter afterwards, making a face.

  A pity that Frannie herself rubbed Tasha the wrong way. ‘Frannie likes to talk,’ Tasha explained. It was a line more or less everyone connected to the girl, including Frannie herself, used to describe her. But Rachel enjoyed the opportunities for silence Frannie offered her; she, for her part, liked to listen, and keep her real thoughts to herself. Though lately Rachel’s sweet looks had become a subject of reproach. Once, taking the subway uptown after a party, Frannie complained of the way Rachel drew everyone’s stares. She pointed at each of the men in the carriage in turn. ‘Do you want her? Do you want her?’ she asked. ‘Do you want her?’ They lowered their eyes. Frannie was conscious, among other things, of being at least an agent in their titillation. Yes, it roused them a little, such humiliation. Later, she apologized, after a fashion. ‘Believe me,’ Frannie said, ‘if I had a tusch like you I’d wear jeans like that, too. How much did they set your mother back?’ There was also, always, the question of money.

  The boy was Brian Bobek. He came new to the school from Pittsburgh in the ninth grade, a short round kid whose shape seemed a testament to his good nature. He took a week to settle in, quietly looking about, then declared to anyone he met that he was in love with Rachel Kranz, ‘the crown of Riverdale’. Apropos of nothing, he offered his heart. Such words he used. He said he’d made careful observations of the entire student body, and now he hoped to do the same to her. This was his kind of schtick, corny, unashamed. Quickly, he made a name for himself; many friends. Brian had a fine line in self-mockery, though not entirely without its optimistic undertones. ‘Five eight and still growing,’ he said, ‘in case you’re asking.’ His colouring was pink and lent a peculiar vividness to the skin, which seemed an unusually accurate reflection of inner qualities: bloody health. He confided in Rachel from the first; she answered him with quiet affection; it took some such bullying to make its way into her heart. Frannie attended a school in Manhattan, but ran into Brian on weekends. She decided he was a boy she could talk to – that was her phrase; his confident effusions matched her own. Rachel occasionally felt jealous of her brash friend. It occurred to her, for some reason, that Frannie was capable of falling in love with him, while Rachel couldn’t.

  In the next three years, Brian became, as he put it, a metal head. He spent every afternoon after school in the weight room, and caught the late bus home to his father in the Bronx – a divorcee, a sales rep for a computer company. Brian was a scholarship kid. At first Rachel teased him for his efforts, touched his arm under his shirt, cooing. Little Brian Bobek, she said, is growing bigger. The blush was hidden by his high colour. She felt a delicate sense of her own power, such contact was a gift to bestow, she was very conscious of her hands. But Brian had in fact begun to change shape; he was remaking himself from the raw materials. His round face sharpened into strong lines; his bent nose stood out against the hook of his cheekbones. The Polish inheritance pushed through; before he looked like a full-fed American. His shoulders took on a relaxed gravity; when he lifted his arm you felt his self-restraint. It involved you in physical sympathies with him, these withheld forces. It amazed her, his power of influence over the stubborn stuff of the self.

  The day before, he’d asked her to watch him work out at the gym. Friday afternoon; if she stayed after school, he’d treat her to a bite, a movie. This took some chutzpah, Rachel supposed; what he offered was himself on display, a vain abasement of love. But Brian seemed unabashed. She perched on the hard seat of an exercise bike – a cocked hat – and resolved to wash her skirt when she got home. Such a masculine landscape, she thought, stacked iron, warped mirrors, worn matting, very depressing: windowless, repetitive, bare. But heavy rhythms of music quickened her heart; as did the odours, perfectly fresh, emitted from the surface of the skin, these fine instant scents, among staler, more familiar smells. Looking around, she deliberately entertained sexual thoughts. But just as she began to taste his salt on her lips, she drew up short. Conscious of imperfect privacy. Even in her thoughts, her father was watching her, not without a certain satisfaction. In any case, Brian’s sweaty crotch aroused only a girlish and mannered disgust. These superficial feelings lay deep in her – often, from internal coverts, she startled another one into the light.

  Brian’s attention, screwed inward, seemed to require great patience with himself. He lay on his back and pressed the dumb-bells upward in sharp strokes, grunting softly, one, two, three. Almost sexual exhalations, painful, releasing, it seemed, trapped gases, old frustrations. Rachel in fact saw the bar bend under the rings of weight on either side; she feared for him, but also disliked such animal powers. He carefully wrapped a towel around his neck before taking on weight and descending to his knees; his face sweated heavily and burned redder, but offered no other change of expression. Even she could discern the care he took over precise small movements; others, often larger boys, hoisted more wildly. Brian confined himself to very small variations. To trust in their effect over time seemed to her to require extraordinary faith.

  Afterwards, he bought her a slice of pizza from the hole in the wall under the elevated tracks. Brian ate nothing – never hungry after a workout – drank a Diet Coke and smoked one cigarette. Rachel made a show of disapproval. He sweated lightly, in spite of a cold shower, and pressed his palm to his forehead. Apart from the smoke his other smells were perfectly clean. She wanted to touch his arm again but didn’t dare. Maybe he had fallen out of love; maybe it was only a joke from the first. In fact, he thought how fresh she seemed; her scent was girlish, unspoilt. Most sexual thoughts oppressed him by their uncleanliness; but he could imagine her naked with her legs wide and odourless, the inside of her thighs cool and pale, no different from the skin on her cheek, her neck. They caught the train downtown, and she leant against his shoulder, very still, sleepless, with her eyes closed; they had run out of talk. It was Rachel who insisted Frannie come out to the movies with them. Standing under the awning after, on 86th Street, Frannie bummed a smoke off him; she stooped and he lit it with the smoulder of his own cigarette. Rachel wanted to scream. So much was forbidden her; and she had such poor desires. She walked home early and left them to it.

  Lately, books had been her consolation. She had discovered a passion for reading; and wondered if it, like Brian’s weightlifting, could effect a change in mass, in personal gravity. For the first time in her life she felt she had inward alleys to explore. Her teacher, Mr Englander – a tall sloping man with a pinned-back countenance, full in the cheeks, somewhat pink, also humorous, reserved – had a habit of catching her eye. She realized that her answering lo
ok satisfied him; and like her mother, she couldn’t resist giving pleasure. But she lacked the nerve to speak her mind; whatever she said sounded so much tawdrier than what she thought. Mr Englander was famous, especially among the girls, for kindly pedantry; they sometimes teased him by provoking his corrective habit. Rachel rather feared it; she disliked being caught out in imperfections.

  Inevitably, of course, sex talk came up in class; but his manner was cool and proper. Rachel rather admired him for it, and envied the attainment of an age, a position in life, when such thoughts lacked heat, and could be clearly, fully discussed. She remembered her own insistence: ‘I’m the girl I always was.’ Well, nobody expected her to be; they wouldn’t let her alone. Whatever she said or did was burdened by heavy interpretations; people had such dirty minds. These seemed almost a literary requirement: her classmates found sex at the bottom of every metaphor. Mr Englander, to be fair, usually discouraged them. They had been discussing Shakespeare’s influences. He had assigned them a packet of contemporary verse: a black-ringed binder with thick uneven paper that took in the sweat of your thumb. That afternoon she lay in bed, the bars of her bed against her back, and read, quietly unsticking her lips at each line:

  When as the rye reach to the chin,

  And chopcherry, chopcherry ripe within,

  Strawberries swimming in the cream,

  And school-boys playing in the stream;

  Then O, then O, then O my true love said,

  Till that time come again,

  She could not live a maid.

  But her ear baulked at the word chopcherry, though it pleased her, and she couldn’t connect the thoughts: whose chin, what time, why maid? Was a girl or a boy speaking? She had a very particular brain, like her father’s, a stubborn streak. He praised her for it once, saying her best intellectual gift was the refusal to understand. She would have to read it over again later.