by Daniel Stern
They were both silent for a long while. Elly felt that he was tense beside her, knew he was angry with himself, was afraid he had done something terrible to her. But he hadn’t at all. She lay there, one bare foot dangling over the bed (she had kicked off one of her ballet slippers earlier), with her skirt spread high on her bare thighs and she was fine. She felt as relieved as on receiving a gift so long delayed that she had almost given up hope of it. There was no question of disappointment. She had always wanted to know but some inbred quality of doubting had prevented her deciding in advance what it was to be like. Now she knew, through the awkwardness and the pain at first, what it was and she couldn’t let him lie there, thinking terrible things, as he must.
Then something seemed to lift her like a cat being pulled by the scruff of the neck and she whispered, “I’ll be right back,” and slipped out of the room and then out the front door. She could hardly feel herself walk. There was that in her throat which had brought her inevitably outside, where she could see and touch something that could not possibly be an extension of herself, as Lang, lying inert next to her, might be. Something made her stretch out on the evening-damp grass and dig her fingers into the ground. This was where she ended. She wiggled her toes. She could go no farther than the soles of her feet and the top of her head and the tips of her fingers. But all those could touch Lang’s great body and she felt herself an entity, a being that had an existence of touch only, and looking at the smeary evening sky she knew it did not exist because it could not be touched, because it did not begin where she, Elly Kaufman, ended. She bit off a mouthful of grass and felt it against her tongue, sore from the half hour of friction. So love was knowing where she ended and where someone else began.
She felt suddenly weak and, getting to her feet, found her legs were trembling a little. She leaned against a tree and closed her eyes. She was dizzy and felt ill, the sudden sting of tears against the lids. A fist flew to her mouth and her teeth bit into the flesh for a moment. Then she walked back to the house and to Lang. She lay on the bed next to him. “Hello, stranger,” she whispered.
“Hi.” He twisted his body around and smiled a pale smile at her. “What happened?”
“Guess.”
“It was me, wasn’t it, who—”
“We both did it. It was lovely.”
“Another question. Was I the first? I … I couldn’t tell.”
“No,” she lied. “You weren’t the first. Don’t worry so.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry either.” She grasped his convulsive hand. “Stop that.” She wiped a few moistened strands of hair from the corner of her mouth, bloodless from the half-hour-long kiss.
He put his arms around her shoulders, held her for a moment and then said, “We’d better get out of here.”
After shaking down her skirt and combing her hair she walked out after Lang.
“Hey,” she said.
“What?”
“It was really wonderful.” The words, which she knew were those which were supposed to be spoken only by the experienced, came so easily to her lips that she realized she felt experienced, that for some people there is never a first time for anything. We live in museums.
He smiled broadly. “Really,” he said. “Well, I’m glad for that. You’re a real woman.” But he was thinking, I’m a real man, right now anyway. Outside they both agreed it should have been dark but the April afternoons were long and the light was grayish. She kissed him quickly. He stood looking at the house. The glass wall was clear and open, an eye on them. Elly was beginning to wonder and worry a little about whether or not Mr. Larkin had called to check on her excuse for missing a lesson. But there was no reason why he should. If only she didn’t have to go on lying about things like her music lessons and where she had been last night.
“Take me with you,” she said.
“What?”
“Take me with you.”
“Where?”
“Wherever you go.”
“Do you think you’d get along with my wife? I’m sorry.”
“No, I hadn’t forgotten about her. It was just a crazy thought.”
“How old are you, Elly?”
“Nineteen,” she lied. “My folks will deny it, because they hate me to go with men.”
“Yes. You’re so goddamned much older.”
He fought off feeling guilty. She was over the statutory age anyway. The sky clouded for a moment and Elly said, “Look.” They were caught in the glass, reflected by the comparative darkness; it was a dim, anonymous portrait with no distinctive features of profile or age. Just a man and woman. Then the sun erased the image.
Elly’s exuberance was gone. She knew the house, now. It would be part of the museum. Even when they moved in she wouldn’t be stepping into it for the first time. Lang carried a topcoat over his arm and Elly’s blouse was open at the throat to catch the breeze, which was becoming a little damp. They reached the bottom of the hill in silence and turned to look at the house.
“It’s a funny thing with a few of the houses I’ve built, like this one. For a while you find dead birds lying near the walls. During the daytime they fly right into the glass walls as if they were air. I wonder if it will happen here.”
“I’ll write and tell you,” she promised.
He drove her home. There was no reason for them not to be seen together. He had picked her up in town and given her a lift, that was all. A light drizzle fell. She opened the window wide and sat so that no part of her body touched him. Lang did not notice this. She was thinking of how he would leave in a few days and she would remain buried here. But that wasn’t fair. He wasn’t deserting her. Hadn’t he made her glass house for her? The girl in the house in the hill. But his going away became all mixed up in her mind with Mr. Larkin and his bad breath over her shoulder as she struggled with the “Appassionata” sonata. She had to do something about it.
She stretched out languorously, forgetting about not wanting to touch his body, and remembered the feel of being full of him, moving on him and yet having both hands free to hold tightly.
“You all right?” Lang asked.
“I’m fine,” she replied.
He parked the car and they walked home.
Sitting on the edge of the bed Elly gave her hair one hundred strokes exactly, rested her arm and then gave it another hundred. She took a cigarette, tapped it on her thumbnail four times, reversed it, tapped it four times again and lighted it. She crawled into bed and finished the cigarette there. Looking down at herself, her legs seemed incredibly long; for a moment her body seemed in some way different. Then, running her hands over herself, she was reassured. There was no difference. She could feel, down the hall, the oppressive presence of her father and mother. Out of here, to get out of here! She shook her head despairingly. Nothing was enough, nothing would ever be enough.
The house became mixed in her mind with the thought of college. If only she could have won that victory, as her mother had won the Lang house. She had to go far away to college, like Vernon, in Vermont, instead of near-by Crofts. Then there would be no piano lessons or anything (and Lang would be taking his great body and spasmodic hands back to New York, soon, where he was free).
She took from the night table the book she had been reading, The Tempest, and read, whispering aloud because at the thought of college and Lang leaving she was beginning to feel quite alone again:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind….
She, of course, was Miranda, the delicate, untouched by the world, the insubstantial world. She loved quotations; that was how she’d got to know Roz: Do you know that? And: Have you read “Our life is rounded with a sleep”? She replaced the book. Her full breasts seemed
larger, rounder. Was she pregnant? The thought came unsuspected and unannounced. She was paralyzed. She touched them tenderly. How foolish! That came much later. If they had changed, it was from being touched by his hands. She would never be pregnant. She knew.
She lay back and drew the covers about her. Even when it was quite warm she always slept with covers protectively on her. “Our little life is rounded with a sleep.” She liked appropriate quotations. Why couldn’t everything work out that way, like this quotation just before going to sleep? She repeated it—“rounded with a sleep”—and thought she would drop off immediately to preserve the purity of the words, but the thought of her cousin Lester’s wedding intruded itself like an obscene remark. She fell asleep thinking of Lester’s little mustache, looking as if it had been painted on his small, thin face, and trying to erase it with no success.
Relatives had come from everywhere, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles. Lester and his bride were to have a “big” wedding, as Rose Kaufman spoke of it for days before.
“If you were to elope,” she told Elly, “I’d kill myself. These are the things a mother lives for.”
“She’ll never elope,” Max had said. “She loves people making a fuss over her.”
“Oh, yes,” Elly had replied sarcastically, “I just love it.” She directed her remark toward Lang, who was thinking thankfully that he would be out of there the next day on his way back. Lorraine had not written for a few days and he was feeling a little guilty, a feeling which he had tried to keep from affecting the tone of his letters to her.
The wedding was held in a great ballroom and Lang, who had tried to beg off earlier but had failed, arrived early with the Kaufmans. It was a formal affair and, not having been prepared for such a contingency, he wore a dark-blue suit. Elly wore a pink taffeta dress with the wide swirling skirt she always insisted on, over her mother’s objections. There was a luster about her as she fell into the bustle and movement, drinking a cocktail, feigning delight at the sight of this or that relative whom she hadn’t seen for years. “Such a big girl!” and behind this almost involuntary exclamation a bit of shock (she’s too mature—it’s a little indecent). “Just through with high school, aren’t you?”
An attendant passed her, wheeling a cart of hot hors d’oeuvres. She seized two and, thrusting one between her teeth, sought out Lang and fed the other one to him.
“How do you like the Jewish rites of passage?” she asked.
“Rites of passage?”
“You know. Anthropology. Ceremony for birth, circumcision, marriage.” She was pleased that she had known and he had not.
Standing next to him, the conversation and music dinning in her ears, she tried to recall how they had looked the afternoon at the house. She failed completely. It might never have happened for all the intimacy she could muster. His arms, his legs, her skirt around her waist, were just another nighttime fantasy dreamed up when she was alone in her bed and feeling suddenly sensuous.
“It’s fascinating,” he said. “Quite different from anything I’ve ever been to before.”
“If you say it’s charming and quaint later, I’ll kill you. The only honest thing to say will be that it’s been in the most horrible taste, loud and disgusting.”
“Why do you hate everything around you so? It can’t be that bad, can it?”
“That bad and worse. By the way, how old are you? I never thought of asking you the other day.”
“Forty-eight. Why?”
“Just curious. After all, you—” And then realizing she had been about to make a reference to their intimacy she called out “Hi, Jacky” to a passing friend and ran off.
She’s so cool about it, Lang thought. What did she mean, after all, you—You what? You seduced me. No, she must know that one word from her and he would have run. He went off for another drink.
All the talk was of Max’s new factory in Colchester and of Max’s new house outside of town. Kaufman held court in a corner with Rose seated beside him. Lang was introduced proudly time and again. He marveled at the girth of most of the women and many of the men. They all said “Congratulations” to him as if he were the father of the bride and he thanked them, feeling a little ridiculous. None of them had seen the house yet. That was planned for later, or the next day before most of them were to return to their homes. The fact that most of them had traveled a good distance to see one of the clan inducted into marriage did impart to the proceedings the quality of a ritual.
Lang had always avoided weddings as much as possible, but he was glad he had come to this one, when after he had taken his seat for the ceremony the young couple stood under the canopy and a man in black robes chanted something in a high voice. Then a woman sang a song thick and syrupy. Then a good deal of business occurred and he heard a sound like a shot. He looked around him, startled, as the cries and music told him the ceremony was over. Kaufman, sitting next to him, leaned over and said “He broke the wineglass. He stepped on it. It’s good luck” in a patronizing tone of voice. “You’re supposed to say to me now, Mazel Tov, or congratulations.” Lang smiled weakly and approximated the unfamiliar word and said, “Congratulations.”
The dinner was stuffed intestine, fish and chicken, which, Elly informed him, was standard. It was all very spicy and pleasant. Halfway through the chicken a pair of aunts and uncles came and hovered over the table for the sole purpose of asking how Elly was getting along. Elly said she was fine.
“I’m trying,” Rose Kaufman said. “I’m trying, believe me.”
“Does she go out with boys yet? Elly, darling, do you go out with boys?” Elly squirmed and glanced at Lang. A couple danced by laughing.
“Now and then,” she replied with great dignity.
“Now and then,” her mother said. “I really don’t know what to do, sometimes. I want mostly she should understand her own values, she shouldn’t cheapen herself, she should learn the only friend you have in the world is yourself and your family.” Her voice was shrill and Max said softly, “Rose, please!” in obvious embarrassment.
“What’s the matter? We’re all family here. She goes driving with that Jerry Wilson in his car, she stays out late with terrible marks in school and lies to me about her piano lessons.”
“Rose, for God’s sake, stop it!” Max said. Elly had stiffened in her chair the moment the tirade had begun. Lang stared at his plate. The aunt and uncle, sorry for what they had started, stood waiting to get politely away.
“What’s the matter,” Rose said to her daughter, “you thought I didn’t know? Your father said never mind, but my daughter isn’t going to lie to me and then I’ll forget about it. Oh, no!” Her heavy face was flushed and perspiring.
The band leader was beginning to read into a noisy humming microphone (Lang wished they would turn it down so it wouldn’t hum, or up so he wouldn’t hear Mrs. Kaufman) the first of a fat pile of telegrams from relatives and friends who had not been able to attend. His voice was unctuous and sentimental.
BAND LEADER: Best wishes from Bea and Fred. May you have a long life of happiness.
MAX: Here is not the place for this, Rose.
ROSE: I’ll tell her wherever I want to, my indulgent father.
BAND LEADER: May all your troubles be little ones—Al and Zelda.
ROSE: You were always too easy on her. You were never around when she was little. It was up to me to bring her up.
GUESTS at the table, except Lang, who still stares at his plate: Sh-h-h. You’re spoiling the fun, Rose. Quiet, he’s reading. Everybody’s looking.
BAND LEADER: Sorry, couldn’t attend. I am there in spirit. Good luck—May.
MAX: She’s only a young girl. She has to have time to grow up.
ROSE (in a slightly lowered tone, having seen people stare at her): If you ever agreed with me, I’d be thunderstruck.
By the time anyone noticed Elly, she was halfway across the empty dance floor, running in the direction of the ladies’ room. She leaned her hot cheek against the c
ool tile wall, the tears running slowly from beneath her tightly shut eyelids. The scene that was pasted against the dark surface of her lids was an old one, borrowed from a phrase her mother had thrown out a moment ago. You were never around when she was little. It was up to me to bring her up.
Max had spent most of his evenings and part of his nights at the one factory he had had then, trying to bolster up what seemed to be a dying business. In the evening after dinner Elly would drag out her textbooks and Rose would come in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on the dish towel, and straightening one of the cheap cotton house dresses she was always to be found wearing.
Then the problems. If two trains start from point A and one travels at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour—
“I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can. Read it again. The answer is in the question. Remember that: the answer is in the question.”
“Is that right?”
“No, Elly. Subtract. No, you must do it by yourself. You’re not going to fail math again.”
“If you had Mrs. Greenberg, the old—”
“Don’t blame it on your teacher. People fail themselves.”
Again she tackled the problem but came out four hundred miles off her course.
“The answer is in the question. You were so smart even before you went to school. When you were five, against your father’s wishes, I bought you a blackboard. When you went to kindergarten you could already add and subtract a little. We showed your father—don’t you want to show him now? Let’s have the homework all done before he comes home.”
“I can’t do it.”
“The answer is in the question.”
Then as now, there followed the hot face against the cold bathroom wall, the refuge for tears.
