“That was him, in Carberry’s.”
“I thought so.” He pulled her closer and then he felt her tongue exploring the inside of his mouth: the linings of his cheeks, his teeth—one skewed, but the others orderly.
Jo’s tongue arched to meet his. “Let’s see,” he said, pulling back just far enough to speak, postponing the question of calling the police. “What shall we do now?” He fell in love with her that morning, or at least with himself, which made anything possible. They had love followed by brunch, out in the city where the dead—kind or malevolent—couldn’t be heard; where the malevolent living disappeared around corners just in time to be missed; and where everyone else was like them, lining up with sticky thighs for pancakes, Danish, or omelets.
Brooklyn Sestina
Crates of live chickens,” said Lillian: an example of what made her wish to die.
“Where?” asked Ruth. Ruth was a student at Brooklyn College and her sister, Lillian, was in high school.
“Blake Avenue. Kosher chickens.”
“Recently?”
“I was little.”
“What about them specifically?” asked Ruth. It was 1960. Their parents were out and the girls would cook their own supper when they got around to it. Now they lay on their beds in the impinging spring dusk, both on their backs, shoes on the tasteful beige bedspreads. Frightened by her sister’s mood, Ruth stared at a plaster excrescence on the ceiling—an old gaslight—as its knobs and petals disappeared in the thickening dimness.
“Their squashed feathers,” said Lillian. “The feathers could be broken. What would you call that thing that would break—you know, the spine of the feather?”
“I don’t know. Is it cartilage?”
“Between hair and cartilage.”
Lying as she was, Ruth could not see Lilly, only the ceiling. She asked, “Did the chickens make you want to die when you saw them years ago, or is it only now when you think about them?” Presumably their being kosher chickens had nothing to do with it. Their family was not kosher and had belonged to the temple for only one year, when Ruth—in high school then—insisted on going to services. Now, she’d recently told her parents, she was an atheist. “Nonsense,” her father had said, though he’d been just as dismissive when she’d persuaded him, once, to come to services. Halfway through the prayers he’d whispered, “If God is so powerful, couldn’t He make this shorter?”
Now Lillian’s voice came out of the dark. “I wanted to die when I saw them.”
“So you were six or something, and you were already thinking like this?”
“I was born thinking like this. I found out why when I saw the crates of chickens. I thought Oh.”
Ruth had never wished to die, yet sometimes it seemed that she and her sister were a single organism. She understood “I thought Oh.” She tried to think when in her life she’d thought Oh. She rolled onto her side and could see part of Lillian now, across the room. Ruth’s woolen skirt was bunched uncomfortably under her thighs.
Lilly raised a long arm toward the petaled shape on the ceiling. Her hand—just visible to Ruth in the dark—made and unmade a fist as she took exuberant pleasure in the point she was about to make. “Figuring out a good way to die is like using the q on a Triple Word Score.”
Her sister had gone too far. Ruth stood up and smoothed her clothes. “I’ll make supper.”
She warmed the meat sauce her mother had left, and boiled a pot of water for spaghetti. She boiled more water and broke off a chunk of frozen green beans to put into it.
“This afternoon I planned how to kill myself,” Lillian had begun. If Ruth ought to tell their parents—who would do the wrong thing, whatever that might be—Lilly was being disloyal to her: it would be like saying, “You’re not enough for me. Let’s invite Mom and Dad into the conversation.” Ruth dipped into the spaghetti pot with a fork, trying to snag a strand. She burned her fingers, then scalded her tongue when she sucked spaghetti into her mouth. Then she drained the spaghetti, though some of it was in clumps. She drained the green beans. Some of them still looked a little icy. Ruth was an English major. She could discuss literature, or write a poem, more easily than cook a meal.
“All the old pills in the medicine chest,” Lilly had enumerated. “Or just closing my eyes when I cross the street.” As Ruth dished up the food, Lillian came to the table dangling and shaking wet hands until they blurred before Ruth’s eyes. Lillian’s breasts were high and round, and her hair was in supple curls shaped nightly by big pink rollers. She was taller and sexier than her older sister. Her movements were bold, easy—and then abruptly awkward.
They ate. Lillian said, “My spaghetti’s full of rocks.” Ruth reached across the table and exchanged her sister’s plate for her own.
Ruth was taking a poetry workshop. The professor said he rose to write poems each morning at five thirty, and Ruth thought she’d try that. She bought a big alarm clock with a loud tick, which Lillian called the Time Bomb. But when she woke up early, Ruth discovered that the heat in their apartment didn’t go on until six thirty. She hurried from their bedroom while Lillian turned over and went back to sleep, then sat on the living-room floor with her back leaning on the radiator, waiting for the heat’s gurgle. She wrote no poems or bad poems, but did better with the required weekly exercises, which had to follow certain rules but could be pointless. One week she wrote a silly sonnet early in the morning, the next a villanelle.
The week after Lillian’s remarks about suicide, the poetry professor distributed a mimeographed sestina. Ruth had never seen a poem like that before. When she arrived home after class, the apartment was dark. Her parents hadn’t yet returned from work, but Lillian ought to be there. Ruth snapped on lights on her way to their room. Lilly was in bed. “Leave me alone,” she said.
“Wake up. You have to see this.”
“See what?”
“It’s a kind of poem.” A sestina, Ruth explained, was a medieval Italian form. “Give me six words. Any six words.”
“Sleep,” said Lilly. “Sister. Dumbbell . . .”
Ruth wrote them down. “Come on, just three more.”
“Just. Three. More.”
“Okay, fine. Now, the first line of the sestina will end with the word sleep. The second line ends with sister.” She made for Lillian the chart her professor had drawn on the blackboard, showing how in each subsequent stanza the same six words would end the lines in a strict, varying pattern. In the second stanza, Word Six would be used first, then Word One, then Five, Two, Four, Three. “Bottom, top, bottom, top,” she explained. At the end, a shorter stanza would use all the words.
The next morning, in the chilly dark, Ruth began a sestina using Lilly’s six words:
When I lay down and tried to fall asleep,
I heard a lumbering tread. It was my sister,
A person who is surely not a dumbbell,
A person who is decent, true, and just,
A person I have known since she was three,
A person I will love forevermore.
Awakened from my nap, I cried, “No more!
Don’t you know when someone is asleep
You don’t come waltzing in—one, two, three—
Disturbing and awakening your sister,
When after an awful day she’d managed just
To fall asleep, you noisy rotten dumbbell!”
Then she ran out of ideas. That night, Lilly helped. She liked being a character in the sestina, and caught on to the tricky form more quickly than Ruth. Between them, they wrote something that almost made sense, and went on for six stanzas, plus a short one at the end.
The following Thursday the poetry professor distributed Sir Philip Sidney’s double sestina. Again Ruth arrived home and woke Lillian. “This guy did it for twelve stanzas!”
“Do you have to write twelve stanzas?” Lilly sat up in bed. She was more cheerful.
“No, we have to write a ballad. But listen to this poem.”
“What’s it about?”
“Feeling terrible.”
“I like that,” said Lillian, and reached for the pages. “ ‘Ye Goat-herd Gods . . .’ What the hell does that mean?”
“Gods who herd goats. Listen to this part:
“Me seems I see a filthy cloudy evening,
As soon as sun begins to climb the mountains.
Me seems I feel a noisome scent, the morning
When I do smell the flowers of these valleys.
Me seems I hear, when I do hear sweet music,
The dreadful cries of murdered men in forests.”
Ruth turned shy. “I thought that might be what you meant.”
“What I meant?”
“You know. Our conversation that day . . .”
“Oh. Wanting to kill myself. Yup. Music sounds like the cries of murdered men in forests. Joan Baez, say.”
The sisters began reading Sidney’s poem out loud. The last stanzas, in which the poet explained that he was feeling bad because his girlfriend had broken up with him, interested them less than the preceding ones, which expressed an unqualified, unexplained misery. These they chanted in chorus, marching and even dancing. “Shall we both kill ourselves?” Lilly said breathlessly when they finished.
“It would be hard on Mom and Dad,” said Ruth. She quickly began reciting again. Sidney’s extravagant language was fun; her sister’s wasn’t. They quit only when they heard footsteps on the stairs.
A week later, Ruth walked into the kitchen, where her mother was frying hamburgers, to see Lillian fill a glass of water at the sink. “What are you doing?” cried Ruth, rushing forward to open her sister’s fist.
“Are you trying to make me burn the house down?” Her mother steadied the frying pan.
“I have a headache,” Lillian said. “You made me drop the aspirin.” She didn’t search for the fallen pills but poured the water into the sink and left the room.
“I worry about her,” Ruth said to her mother.
“She’s sick?”
“Sort of.”
“How often does she have these headaches?” said her mother. “Maybe she should have her eyes checked.”
Ruth followed her sister, who had gone into the bathroom. “Was it really aspirin?”
“You think I’m going to take pills in front of my mother—while she’s cooking hamburgers?” Lilly glanced into the mirror and patted her curls.
“You make me nervous.”
“There’s nothing to be nervous about.”
“What about all you told me?” Ruth tried to speak in a low voice. The door was open.
“Did you tell them?”
“No. Should I?”
“If you do,” said Lilly, “I’ll never trust you again.”
She shook pills from the aspirin bottle, drank from the plastic cup with which they brushed their teeth, and squeezed through the doorway past Ruth. Lilly was wearing a tight yellow sweater, and the mohair tickled Ruth’s face. Ruth replaced the cap on the aspirin bottle and put it into the medicine chest. Then she examined everything in it, and withdrew half a dozen expired medications, brown bottles with faded labels. This house had no privacy. If she tossed them into the garbage, her parents would want an explanation. Lilly would be waiting in their bedroom. Holding the bottles close to her sides in both hands, Ruth walked to the coat closet at the door of the apartment and deposited the bottles in the pockets of her spring coat.
Ruth was not only a college student but a Girl Scout leader, in charge of her own old troop, which met at the synagogue. She wasn’t old enough to be a leader, but when nobody else would do it, a mother agreed to sign her name and come to meetings if Ruth ran them. Ruth didn’t like that cynical mother, Mrs. Freedman, who sat crocheting in the corner of the temple vestry hall, her every flick of the yarn conveying impatience, while Ruth led discussions of the Girl Scout laws (“A Girl Scout is cheerful”) and supervised craft projects she herself had done not many years earlier.
Now, in the vestry hall, the Girl Scouts were learning knots, though Mrs. Freedman said, “What do they need with knots?” Ruth had bought a rope, and cut it into several short lengths. She taught the square knot, the bowline, and the half hitch to her agreeable but slightly bored scouts, while a girl in each patrol followed Ruth’s instructions, then passed the rope on. When Ruth herself had become a scout, she’d imagined that the other members of her patrol would read her thoughts—they’d be together so much, so apart from adults—and that together they’d avert interesting dangers through their knowledge of woods and stars, drawing strength from the Girl Scout Promise and Laws. It hadn’t happened, but Ruth had retained a little of her wish. Though as a leader she led hikes through parks and organized the cooking of kosher hot dogs on sticks, her girls seemed to have picked up not her own hope but silent Mrs. Freedman’s unimpressed shrug. Nonetheless, the ropes went around the patrols, and eventually everybody learned all three knots.
Then the girls played musical chairs. After that, out of ideas, Ruth suggested singing. The scouts wanted to sing not raucous hiking songs or funny songs about the sinking of the Titanic, but solos, and they sat patiently while girl after girl sang alone. One girl knew “Hatikva” in Hebrew and another sang “I Could Have Danced All Night” in a tuneless voice with flat Brooklyn a’s. “It’s supposed to be ‘dahnced,’ ” someone said. During the singing, Ruth noticed that Lillian had come into the vestry hall and was sitting on a folding chair as far as possible from the crocheting Mrs. Freedman, from whose lap narrow yarn tentacles in all colors extended over chairs around her.
Then Jeanie Murdoch, the daughter of the synagogue’s caretaker, raised her hand. A skinny child with hair over her eyes, Jeanie owned no uniform, and Ruth had been trying to figure out how to secure her a bigger girl’s hand-me-down without embarrassing anybody. Jeanie reminded Ruth of herself. She recited the Promise with her eyes closed. Now Jeanie stood—nobody else had stood—and, in a pure, careful soprano voice, sang, out of season, “O Holy Night.” Ruth was startled: startled at Jeanie’s intensity, at the beauty of her singing, at the strangeness of her choice. “O Holy Night” is a long song—long, religious, of course not Jewish—and it took Jeanie a while to sing it. Ruth glanced across the room and saw that Mrs. Freedman was rolling up her crocheted peninsulas with extra attention. In the other direction, Lillian leaned forward on her folding chair.
“Fall on your knees!” Jeanie sang, for the third or fourth time. “O night divine! O night when Christ was born!” Some girls—the troop was mostly Jewish—frowned and whispered. Ruth knew Jews who preferred to leave the room during the singing of Christian songs, others who merely kept silent, and still others who sang all but certain words, like Christ. Ruth hadn’t been in the sanctuary of the synagogue—just above them—since her brief religious period in high school. She had an unruly voice, so she never sang anything very loudly. But if she felt alien singing Christian songs, she was no less uncomfortable with Jewish ones. Where did other Jews even learn those songs? How did they get so cozy about it all, about matzo balls and Yiddish jokes and prayers in Hebrew? When Ruth did sing, she sang every word, Christ and all. Now she listened for as long as Jeanie’s song lasted.
Ruth and Lillian were swift walkers, and they set out down the dark street, their feet making plenty of noise on the sidewalk. “How come you came?” Ruth said after a while.
“Did you mind?”
“No.” But ordinarily Ruth enjoyed her solitary walk, and these days she had something pleasant to think about: the poetry professor was excited about her. He’d hurried into the classroom before the most recent class, exclaiming, “Ruth Hillsberg has had a breakthrough!” The poem he liked had been written late at night—not first thing in the morning—and was about Ruth’s mother. In the poem, as often in life, her mother went straight to the kitchen after work, and then, standing at the stove, nudged each shoe off, using the other foot. “My Mother in Her Stocking Feet” the poem was called.
Walking beside Lilly, Ruth thrust h
er hands into her pockets and was surprised to discover the medicine bottles. If she’d been alone, she could have found someplace to discard them.
“You didn’t mind even though I witnessed the heresy?” said Lillian.
“Jeanie singing in the temple?”
“Mrs. Freedman did not like that.”
“It didn’t do any harm,” said Ruth.
“I didn’t say it did,” Lilly said. “The reason I came is—I wrote a sestina.”
“No kidding! A whole sestina?”
“A whole sestina.” Lilly took a folded piece of loose-leaf paper from her pocket, stopped under a streetlamp—Ruth thought she looked beautiful and mysterious, standing there—and began reading aloud:
“I put a broken diamond in my mouth.
You told me not to swallow. In exchange,
You offered me a cooling drink of water.
You tried to tie my hands with a thick cord.
I ran away. I wandered over the map.
The diamond cut my tongue with its sharp point.
“You said, ‘I think I understand your point.’
You held your hand to catch what was in my mouth.
You followed me when I wandered over the map.
You offered me cool soda in exchange.
You offered me a pretty silver cord.
In a clean cup, a soothing drink of water.
“I didn’t take your soda or your water. . . .”
But then Lilly began to cry. She crumpled the page, then tore it into shreds, letting the pieces scatter. She leaned against Ruth’s shoulder and sobbed, while Ruth reached up awkwardly to pat her.
Finally they walked again. “It was good,” Ruth said.
“I really did write a whole one.”
“I believe you. I don’t suppose you have another copy.”
“No, that was it.”
“It seemed sad.”
“It was sad. It got worse.”
“But wasn’t it fun to write it?” Art, she wanted to say—as dopily as that—makes life worth living. But she couldn’t say that.
“I can think of things that are more fun,” Lillian said.
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