“Feeling better, hon?” Aunt Kate asked, not taking her eyes off the road. Just two days earlier she’d quit her graduate program in classics, chucked those Romans as if they were all losers, chucked her boyfriends, too. “They can cool their heels,” she’d told us. “Your dad is my current boyfriend.” We’d left Cincinnati the day before. “Feeling the same?” she asked me.
“Feeling worse.”
“Let us know if you have to stop.”
“I have to stop.”
At the next opportunity Aunt Kate pulled over. I sat on a hump of grass and thrust my head between my thighs. New England dandelions, I noticed, were different from Ohio ones, though the grass seemed browner in late August than Ohio’s. I could smell hamburgers from a highway McDonald’s. If I hadn’t been nauseated before, I would have been nauseated now. Aunt Kate stood nearby. Willy gazed at us from the car.
“It might be better if you did throw up,” Aunt Kate said, not unkindly. “Car sickness is your specialty.”
“Vomiting is not my specialty,” I reminded her, though I spoke into my skirt and probably couldn’t be heard. I can still remember that ugly plaid—turquoise and peach. At the time—we were ten—I thought it gorgeous. My nausea at last subsided. I thought of the delicacies that awaited us: clams and lobster. The streets of Boston were paved with them, my father had said.
My car sickness had something to do with my inner ear, our pediatrician had told us: I had an atypical vestibular canal. Willy’s vestibular canal was less atypical, the doctor had tactfully said, when pressed. More normal, better—but he didn’t say those things. Who cared? I had a more atypical memory than Willy. That is, she remembered a lot and I remembered almost everything.
Otherwise we were pretty similar in aptitudes and tastes, though we don’t look alike—I am dark and she is fair, I have a blunt short nose and she has a long thin one. In those days we both wore braids.
I didn’t throw up, not once on the two-day journey to Boston. My father had thrown up at the beginning of his illness, when the headaches began. He and my mother were already in our new home while we were driving and I was not throwing up. Our new home was a rented flat in a three-decker section of the city. My parents had flown ahead with two suitcases and my father’s violin. “The doctors in Boston are better than the ones at home,” my mother had explained. “No, not better—more experienced in Dad’s disease.”
“It’s all that shellfish they eat,” my father had playfully added.
WHEN NOT IN THE HOSPITAL for treatments given by those fishy doctors, my father slept in the front bedroom with my mother. A congregation of mahogany furniture kept them company. On the highboy stood a stag line of Dad’s medications. Mom’s perfume bottles flared their hips at the pills. The violin in its case lay flat on top of a lower dresser. We didn’t ask who was substituting for Dad in the quartet—maybe old man Premak. He, too, played in the symphony.
Aunt Kate had the middle bedroom. Willy and I shared the back room. Our window looked down on an oblong of brown earth rimmed with pink geraniums, an abscess of a yard. The view horizontally at our third-floor level was more encouraging—clapboard three-deckers like ours, their back bedrooms close enough to see into at night. These were children’s rooms. We gave the children epithets: Nose Picker, Curls, Four-Eyes, Amaryllis. Amaryllis was a stalk of a girl with a beautiful drooping head. She was about thirteen. Beyond and between these nearer houses we could see bits of the other side of their street—more houses with front porches—and beyond that row still another set of back windows. “Like scenery,” Willy said. I knew what she meant: the flat, overlapping facades destroyed perspective, turned the daytime view into backdrop. At night, though, when the near windows were lit, the rooms behind them acquired depth, even intensity. Nose Picker practiced his perversion. Curls read magazines on her bed. Amaryllis smiled into the telephone.
There were black-bellied hibachis on some of the porches. It was the era of hibachis. It was the era of consciousness-raising. The previous year our third grade had been told that women could be anything they wanted to be. We were puzzled by this triumphant disclosure; nobody at home had hinted otherwise. It was the year of war protests and assassinations. Hubert Humphrey kissed his own face on a hotel TV screen. There were breakthroughs in cancer therapy.
Whenever my father went into the hospital for his treatments he had to share a room with some other patient—sometimes an old man, sometimes a young one. They, too, were recovering from surgery and receiving therapy. My father wore a turban, entirely white, though with no central jewel. He and Aunt Kate, siblings but not twins, resembled each other more than Willy and I did—the same silky red hair, the same soft brown eyes. His eyes were dull now, and his hair had vanished into his sultan’s headgear.
MOST MORNINGS Willy and I would find Kate and my mother at the kitchen table, silently drinking coffee. During the fall some brown light often made its way through the one spotted window, but by winter the only light came from a table lamp: a dark little pot whose paper shade was veined like an old face. We owned no appliances—a fortunate deprivation, for the kitchen had no counters. We kept crockery and utensils in a freestanding cupboard, drawers below, shelves above. Our canned goods marshaled themselves on a ledge above an ecru enameled stove. The enamel had worn off the stove in some places; it looked like the hide of a sick beast. Kate and Mom said that the atypically patterned stove was a period piece, a survivor; they seemed to feel a pet owner’s affection for it.
A brand new refrigerator occupied most of the back hall. It was too big for the blackened space in our gypsy kitchen where a smaller refrigerator had once stood. In place of the vanished fridge my mother installed her Teletype. She nailed corkboard onto the wall above the instrument. From the corkboard fluttered pages of computer code. The Teletype was usually turned off in the morning, but when she was expecting a printout she turned it on, and when we came into the kitchen we could hear its hum. During breakfast the thing would seem to square its shoulders against an onslaught. Then the message would begin to type out. Paper rose jerkily from the platen. Sometimes what scrolled into our kitchen was a copy of the program my mother was working on, with its three-letter instructions and fanciful addresses:
TAK FEEBLE
PUT FOIBLE
TRN ELSEWHERE
We knew that such a series represented the transfer first of information and then of control. We understood the octal number system and the binary number system and their eternal correspondence. Fractions and decimals, however, were still terra incognita to us, and Willy, invoking her not atypical memory, hadn’t yet bothered to learn any method of long division.
At breakfast Mom and Kate wore flowered wrappers trimmed with lace. They lingered over their coffee as if they had all the daylight hours to kill. Early in the fall, when Dad was home more often than he was in the hospital, when he was still getting up for breakfast, he told them that they looked like demimondaines and that Willy and I looked like semi-demimondaines and that we were his harem and the Teletype his eunuch.
When the New England winter settled in, my mother bought oatmeal, and on those dark mornings it bubbled on the stove. We hated oatmeal. But it was the glue of normality, the stuff that was supposed to stick to kids’ ribs through a morning of math and grammar. So we spooned some into bowls and joined our mother and our aunt at the round table. They had already divided the newspaper between them; now each divided her section with one of us. The Teletype throbbed. Kate got up to pour more coffee. Her hips were as slim as a boy’s. She sat down. The Teletype spat. After a while Mom got up. She bent over the machine, hair falling forward, hand splayed on lace-covered bosom.
It was not usual in those days for a programmer to have a Teletype installed in her home. But my mother was not a usual programmer. Her mind could sinuate into the circuitry of a machine. She understood its syntax and could make use of its simple doggy logic. “I have a modest gift,” she earnestly told us. “I was just born with it, like f
reckles.” Fifty years earlier—ten years earlier, even—a person with such a faculty would have had to divert it to accounting, or weaving, or puzzles. My mother had been born into the right generation for her talent. In that regard she was lucky.
She had landed a part-time job the week after our arrival. A month later she was offered the home Teletype and told that she could work as many hours as she pleased, at twice the original rate of pay. She had to attend the weekly staff conference; that was the only requirement made of her. But she considered contact with her fellow workers important, and anyway she always did more than people asked. So she and we went into the office two days a week, often staying until midnight. On those days she’d visit my father in the morning and then drive home to pick us up. I sat stiffly in the front seat and willed myself not to get carsick.
Computers were hulking giants then, with lights and switches and whirring magnetic tapes. Mom’s machine growled in an air-conditioned warehouse, surrounded by a warren of offices with fiberboard walls and desks that were just planks on iron legs. Programmers hung snapshots and party invitations and straw hats above their desks. My mother’s walls were bare; but in one corner of her office a pair of old school chairs with armrests sat at a 30 - degree angle to each other. She had picked them up in a secondhand shop near the hospital. Between the chairs stood an oversize tin bucket filled with books and games. Under it all was a small fake Oriental rug.
Whenever I see the word happiness I think of that corner.
Few of Mom’s coworkers were married, and none were parents. Some brought their dogs to work. One evening one of her fellow programmers took us to a wrestling match. We held our breath each time a fighter was pinned, sighed when he was resurrected. Later in the year a young woman took us to the flower show. Clubs from the suburban towns had created real gardens in real earth in front of painted houses. We brought home a pot of daffodils and a paper poppy. “I will extract some paper opium from this,” our father said in his weakened voice. “We will have such dreams … Dreams!” he suddenly shouted.
But field trips were rare. Mostly we spent Mom’s workdays in our corner.
An elderly secretary labored for my mother’s group. She kept conventional hours, and it was a while before we had any commerce with her. But one December afternoon at about five she stopped us on our way back from the sandwich machine. She was seated at her typewriter, and she didn’t lift her fingertips from the keys when she spoke to us, though the tapping ceased. “Harriet and Wilma,” she said by way of greeting.
All we had to do was say “Hello, Miss Masters” and smile and skedaddle. But: “Harry and Willy,” Willy corrected.
Miss Masters slid her hands onto her lap with an awful gravity. “Twins but not identical.”
“Fraternal sisters,” Willy said.
“What grade are you in?”
“Fourth,” I said at the same time that Willy said “Fifth.”
“My oh my,” was the extent of Miss Master’s reply, but her tone was inquisitorial.
“She’s advanced,” I said, my explanation ruinously coinciding with Willy’s “She’s retarded.” Then we did skedaddle. When we’d turned a corner I grabbed Willy by her bony shoulder.
“Do you want to go to school?” I demanded.
“Jeez. No.”
“Well then.”
My mother was sitting at her slab of a desk, writing code. Whenever she was bent over her work, her shoulder-length hair, abundant but limp, separated of its own accord and fell on either side of her neck. We settled down on our chairs with sandwiches and books, our presence unacknowledged. We understood that absorption, not indifference, made her ignore us, just as we understood that our father’s sudden explosions were disease, not rage. My mother’s pencil scratched. We read and chewed. She began to hum—a sign that she had solved a problem. She straightened and moved her chair outward, and it protested faintly, aagh. I looked up and began to sing the words to the tune my mother was humming. The song was “Good Morning,” from the movie Singin’ in the Rain—we’d seen it twice in the revival house back home and once on somebody’s television. Willy joined in, a third higher. We sang the words and Mom abandoned the melody and hummed continuo. The wrestling programmer, walking in with a flow diagram, stopped to listen to this makeshift serenade.
WHEN WE DIDN’T GO TO WORK with Mom we went to work with Kate. After my mother left for the hospital, after we had finished the housecleaning (Kate wore a blue bandanna over her hair) and had made a trip to the library and the Civil War monument and had perhaps listened to the organist practice in the little brick church or visited chilly Walden Pond, traveling by bus, or inspected the daily catch up in Gloucester, traveling by train, or curled up at home, listening to our aunt read her own translation of Ovid … after that, we set off for the Busy Bee Diner. Aunt Kate did a half shift at the Busy Bee, from four until eight.
On our walk to the diner we saw the children of the neighborhood engaged in their various childish activities: practicing hoop shots, or minding toddlers, or, at the variety store, fastening powerful gazes onto the candy counter so that Baby Ruths would leap into their pockets. Often we recognized the young people we’d spied on from our window—Nose Picker, his hands safe in his pockets; Curls, pretty; Amaryllis, gorgeous. Other kids, too. They wore hand-me-down clothes and they looked strictly brought up. They were all white, and most were fair. Not Amaryllis, though. Dark brows shaded dark eyes: a Mediterranean siren in this Hibernian tract.
We looked at the familiar strangers, and they looked back at us. Did they wonder about us? Parochial school students probably thought we went to public school. The public-schoolers knew we had never been seen in their cinder block building; did they notice that we didn’t wear the pleated skirts and white blouses of Catholic scholars? How did they explain us to each other? We speculated about their speculations.
“Because of our delicate health we are tutored at home,” Willy suggested.
“By our aged relative,” I added.
Aunt Kate grinned.
The Busy Bee was owned and manned by the Halasz family. The Halasz rice pudding was made with ricotta; the Halasz chocolate pie contained nuggets of chocolate cake. When my father was out of stir, as Kate called it, we would bring home one of these desserts, and also a carton of barley beef stew. Though the food was very good, he didn’t finish it.
We longed to practice short-order cooking behind the counter with Anton Halasz, and to try waitressing with Kate. But laws against child labor were more severe than laws against truancy. Mr. Franz Halasz, Anton’s father, allowed us to work only in the kitchen, a high square room that the public couldn’t see. Mr. Halasz, who wore a beret as a chef ’s hat, taught us to scrub up like surgeons. He taught us to pound herbs and then powder them between our palms, and to roll leaves of cabbage around chopped meat sweetened with rosemary, and to beat egg whites until they were as stiff as bandage gauze.
Some mornings Kate visited my father while my mother stayed home with us and the eunuch. We didn’t resent not being left on our own. We knew that our competence was not in question, just as we knew that it was not hatred of men that caused Aunt Kate to snub the blameless advances made by some of the Busy Bee’s patrons, and to keep Anton at arm’s length, too. We knew it was not Willy’s skinniness that prompted Mom to lay her cheek against my sister’s some wintry mornings in the living room, and that it was not my tendency to vertigo that made her embrace me suddenly in the kitchen. And although Willy and I liked to check on what the neighbors were up to, it was not to watch Amaryllis brushing her hair that we perfected our spying techniques. It was to watch our two demimondaines. We saw the glances they exchanged in the beginning of that year; and then we sensed glances without seeing them; and eventually we sensed glances they didn’t even need to exchange.
Often I got up at night—to use the bathroom, if anybody asked—but really to draw closer to the dark heat in the living room. Sometimes Aunt Kate played Chopin or Schubert on the upr
ight. Usually she lay on the couch, her knees bent, reading. Mom sat at the desk, coding. Music came from the hi-fi: Rosamunde, Egmont, Siegfried. The two women talked a little. One time, without preamble, my mother got up from the desk and crossed the room and dropped to the floor and laid her head on Aunt Kate’s stomach. She began soundlessly to cry. Aunt Kate placed the book she’d been reading, still open, across her own forehead, like a sombrero. She held it there with her left hand as if against a gale. With her right hand she fondled my mother’s foolish hair.
IN MARCH MY FATHER was transferred to a rehabilitation center. One Saturday afternoon my mother took us to see him there. We drove across the city. The place was near grim buildings of mostly undefinable uses, though one of them, we knew, was a popular roller-skating rink.
Dad was not connected to an IV. “A free pigeon,” he said, flapping his elbows. His gait was unsteady but he could walk without a cane and without leaning too much on my mother—his arm around her shoulders was mostly an embrace. The four of us tramped up and down the corridors, as if not daring to stop. I think he guessed what was coming—the tumor’s steady growth, the blindness in the right eye, the new operation, the new operation’s failure … Along the polished linoleum the sick man marched, whispering into his wife’s ear. Her hair separated, revealing her meek nape. We trailed behind.
At four thirty my parents finally sat down on my father’s bed. They were going to share supper in the cafeteria, they said. It was always nutritionally appropriate. “Bilious,” Dad confided. “Maybe you two would like to go out for pizza.”
If we stayed we could watch her eat, watch him pretend to eat, eat ourselves—see! good children—swallowing the clam cakes, the stewed fruit. “But—,” Willy began.
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Page 23
