Love Is a Rebellious Bird

by Elayne Klasson

  “Elliot’s a big deal here,” Jordan said. “He’s been coming to Avodah forever.”

  I looked at Jordan. “Yeah, I know. But thanks, Jordie,” I said, and we smiled at each other helplessly.

  That was our first fight—me asking you for more than you gave.

  Another important dollop of wisdom my mother had dished out was that a couple’s first fight would inevitably be the same fight they’d be having until the end. I’d heard her say this to her lady friends: “You should have paid good attention to your first fight. Then decided whether you were willing to keep having it. Because you will—you’ll have that same argument over and over.”

  Despite that tense beginning early in the session, there were other nights with you, hours under the stars that made me crazy with desire and love. One evening, very late, we sat on a patch of grass near the lake, leaning our backs against a stack of silver canoes. On the side of each canoe, the words “Camp Avodah” had been stenciled in shiny red paint. You balled up your sweatshirt and placed it behind my back, then put your arm protectively around me. We watched the moon rise over the lake, its reflection a perfect circle on the still water below. You brushed your lips softly along my neck. Even though the Wisconsin night was warm and humid, I shivered. I still shiver at the memory. The words came into my mind with great clarity: this is what love feels like. This is it, this exact sensation sitting by the lake with Elliot. This Is Love. I have never forgotten that night or those words. Yet when I saw you in the daytime, I understood that I was to keep it light, make no demands. It surprises me that at only seventeen, I already knew those two things—what love feels like and how I must not kill it with demands. My love for you was already bundled together with restrictions.

  Two weeks later, we rode the camp bus back to Chicago. I made sure that I was jovial and sang every Avodah song energetically with the children and other counselors. I was expert at the hand and body motions that went with the silly camp songs and I was a popular song leader. I learned that I was not to complain. You liked me to be cheerful and you liked it when I was funny. When we arrived back in the city after our weeks in Wisconsin, I gathered my sleeping bag and duffel from the pile at the bus stop and scanned the crowd for my parents. I gave you a quick smile and wave. No longing stares, no desperation. I would not park myself by the telephone when we got home. I had other projects. College applications, for example. There was much to do.

  Later that night, the phone did ring. I was sorting through my camp clothes before tossing them into the hamper. Everything was covered in dust. I’d been shaking the dust from my clothes into my duffle bag, so the camp dirt wouldn’t fall onto the carpet, making work for my mother, who was always obsessively cleaning. When I heard the phone, I got up and stood in the doorway of my room, listening.

  “Yes, it’s me. Hi, Rose. No, no, I didn’t hear a thing. What’s the matter? Rose, why are you crying? What’s going on?”

  I walked into the kitchen. My mother was slumped down on the small chair she kept next to the telephone. She’d gotten very pale. Rose was the synagogue secretary, and a good friend of my mother’s.

  “Oh, my God,” my mom said. I immediately felt a premonition of dread, and had the feeling that this news was going to be more than I would know how to handle. “Terrible. Just awful. Yes, of course I’ll tell Judith. Thank you for calling.”

  She looked up at me, and although this was a rarity, I saw tears falling. “Judith, that was Rose. From the Temple. She was calling to let us know bad news. Helen Pine has killed herself. That poor, unhappy woman committed suicide. And those poor sons. You’ll have to go over there and see Elliot.” Then, seeing my stricken expression, she added softly, “Not now. Maybe tomorrow.” She reached up for my hand and I stood looking down at her, frozen.

  It was then, when your grief for your mother was still so fresh, that we discovered an important part of our relationship: consolation. I gave you whatever solace I could and I discovered something surprising about myself: I was actually quite good at consolation. Maybe that’s why I became a social worker. Your grief didn’t scare me half as much as I expected. In the weeks and months that followed your mother’s death, I was able to fill some terrible hole for you. Your father and brothers walked around the apartment aimlessly, trying to avoid each other, yet caroming off one another like pieces in an air hockey game, while you and I spent hours together quietly in your room.

  We sat on your narrow bed. Someone made the bed each day, pulling your blue corduroy spread neatly up and over the blanket and pillow. It must have been your aunt, your uncle Lou’s wife, who tidied your room and kept the rest of the house in order. I’d heard she’d made it her habit to stop by the apartment each morning—even stocking the refrigerator. I also came every day, even after senior year began. We shut the door behind us and spoke softly to each other in that stifling hot bedroom. You opened the window, but few breezes stirred the sheer white curtains that muggy summer and fall.

  “Do you think she planned it before I left for camp?” you agonized again and again. Mrs. Pine had killed herself late in the night before the day we returned from Wisconsin. It was said your father found her hanging when he went into the bathroom early that morning. She was often absent from their bed in the mornings, in another room, unable to sleep, so he hadn’t been alarmed when he woke and didn’t see her sleeping beside him.

  “Or,” you asked, “do you think it was just a spontaneous decision?” You kept dwelling on the significance of the timing of her death. What did it mean that she had hung herself the night before you arrived home? Was it a message to you in particular? Had you failed her in some way? What could you, or any of them, have done differently?

  “Thank God you’re here, Rocky,” you told me over and over, your beautiful orator’s voice now husky and strangled sounding. “I think of her body down the hall, hanging right there in the bathroom.” You covered your eyes. “It’s so awful to think of her that way. Why the hell won’t my father move out of here? What does he think about when he goes into the bathroom? I’ve started peeing out the window just so I don’t have to go in there at night.” I almost smiled at the image, then brushed back your thick hair from your forehead.

  I let you talk. You’d always been a talker. Sometimes one or the other of your brothers arrived home in the afternoon, driving north from their rooms on the University of Chicago campus. When they were there, we heard music coming from the bedroom they shared. We knew it was Jeffrey when we heard jazz, and that it was Phillip if the music was classical. Phillip particularly favored Bach. I couldn’t decide which was more grating, the jazz without recognizable pattern or the overly organized Bach. You seemed not to hear the records. I suppose you’d grown up with this constant music, so you paid no attention to it.

  Once your brother Phillip knocked on the door. “Elliot,” he called. “Leonard Chover’s on the phone. He says he’s written you several letters, but you haven’t answered. He wants to talk to you.”

  “Not now,” you said. “Tell him I’ll call him later.”

  “You ought to talk to him,” Phillip said through the door, more softly. “Leonard really cares about you.”

  “I will,” you answered. “Soon. I promise.”

  You stared at the pile of letters on your desk. “He recites all this psychological bullshit to me. He says he understands. But he knows shit,” you said, and swept the letters to the ground.

  I rubbed my palm over the corduroy spread and looked at the posters covering the walls. Pictures of Israel and happy workers with tanned faces, wearing shorts and sandals. I listened to you talk. There were no answers, but the talking seemed to comfort you, to give some relief. Soon, we began to lie down together on the bed, but didn’t touch, a narrow space between us that seemed disrespectful to cross. Finally, one day, you stopped mid-sentence, then got up and took a sip from one of the cans of fizzy soda on your desk. We both loved sodas, though back then we called it “pop.” Grape was our favorite.
When you came back to the bed, you pulled me close and I could smell the sweet sticky flavor on your breath. We embraced and wrapped ourselves around one another. I remember that in those sultry summer afternoons, in the tiny back bedroom that was yours, we created a private world that seemed as much ours as the opening in the trees in Wisconsin had been.

  “Do you have to leave now?” you asked, whenever I stood to go home. “Is it time already?”

  We were never interrupted in that room, except once. Your father must have come home early and we hadn’t heard him. There was no music, so your brothers weren’t visiting. Your father couldn’t have known we were there; he usually arrived after I’d left. He walked into your room, carrying a pile of laundry. We were dressed, although our clothes were in disarray. You were on top of me, moving rhythmically, faster and faster, our limbs intertwined. Dry humping was the crude expression they used back then, but what we did gave us such pleasure and release. We were moaning and breathing heavily and didn’t hear your father until he had come into the room. Then we flew apart.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Mr. Pine mumbled as he backed out the door, still carrying the clean laundry. He closed the door behind him. Never again would that man bellow at his sons or order them around in the old way. His wife’s suicide had left him permanently apologetic.

  Although we kept our clothes on in those afternoons, we took extraordinary comfort from each other’s bodies. You rubbed up and down on me, over and over, and my tight jeans touched me in a way that made me gasp. Even with my clothes on, I had orgasms. Of course, I was so naïve back then, I didn’t know what word to use to explain what was happening to my body. But we clutched each other and held one another and rubbed each other raw.

  At home, by myself, I sometimes felt moments of shame. Was I exploiting your grief in order to be close to you, to make you love me in return? Was I using your mother’s death to do this? Maybe a little. But I also knew that in the months following her suicide, whenever the time came for me to leave, you got a panicked expression on your face. In those late summer afternoons before school started, and then throughout our senior year of high school, your need was clear. I’d walk the eight blocks separating our parents’ apartments with a terrible ache in my gut, hating to leave you alone in that house.

  Thirty years later, when I too was faced by a sorrow that almost felled me, you were the first person I called. I was sitting on our velvet couch that Sunday morning, having been up all night. As the sun rose over the California hills framed by my front windows, I phoned you in New York. There were others I might have called. My husband and I had many friends. Maybe it was because it was three hours later across country, and I knew you’d be awake. Others, closer by, might still be sleeping. But I think the real reason I phoned you was because I needed to say these words to the right person. If I told the wrong person, I might be fated to a reaction that I didn’t want or couldn’t live up to. It would be the one I remembered. There would be no foolish words from Elliot. No empty sympathy.

  I needed to tell someone that Walt, my second husband, had been diagnosed the day before with a cancer so terrible that the doctors did not think they could cure it. My youngest was still small, my marriage to Walt, my rock.

  “I don’t know if I can get through this,” I said. “How will I manage?”

  You listened until I was through and then said, simply, “You will. I promise you will.”

  “How can you know that?” I asked.

  “I know. You’ll do this better than anyone I can think of. I’m certain of it. You’re Rocket, remember?”

  “Elliot, I’m so scared,” I said softly, the tears falling again. “The kids.”

  “Remember that night at my parents’ apartment?” you asked. “That crazy victory party? Regional president of American Zionist Youth. You’d have thought I was elected president of the United States.”

  “Of course I remember,” I said. “I didn’t think you realized I was at that party. I stayed in the kitchen the whole evening. We never said a word to each other.”

  “You’re right, I probably didn’t see you at the party. I was so full of myself. But afterward, my mother spoke about you. She hadn’t been talking much, she was shutting down by then. Getting quieter and quieter. It was less than a year until she …”

  “I know. I remember,” I said. “The next summer.”

  “She told me you were with her in the kitchen that night. She asked if I realized how much you’d helped me. She was kind of pissed off at me because she didn’t think I appreciated all you’d done. And she told me she loved your smile.” You paused. “Me too, I’ve always loved your smile, too.”

  “She was such a kind woman, your mother. I wish I’d spent more time with her,” I said.

  “Yeah,” you agreed, “we all did. But she said you were good for her. You brought life into the kitchen. She said she liked it whenever you were around helping on the campaign. That fucking campaign. But the thing I really remember is, my mother said you were brave.”

  “Brave?” I repeated.

  “Yeah, at first I thought it was a strange thing to say. I’d never used that word about you. Brave. You were just always there, getting the job done. But my mother saw it. And later I knew what she meant.”

  We spoke until the sun was fully in the sky, and somehow, by the time I hung up the phone, I was ready to go up to Walt, my sick husband, and care for him. You had convinced me to believe your mother a bit. Whatever else you’d done in the intervening years, and whatever you would do in the years to come, that morning you consoled me.

  3

  Magic

  After we graduated from high school, you went to Brown. You’d been awarded a substantial scholarship for young Jewish leaders. I enrolled at Michigan. I’d dreamed of Berkeley, or schools on either coast, where the political activism of the times was beginning to heat up, but Michigan was what I could afford, and it was a fine school, I could not argue that. In the dorm, I was assigned to live with two other girls, Caroline and Audrey, who’d come to Ann Arbor together from Squirrel Hill, one of the wealthy suburbs of Pittsburgh. Caroline was from a family of old money and Audrey’s father wrote a nationally syndicated column on chess. I was in awe of both girls’ self-confidence. I suppose coming to school with a best friend made you more secure. But the crowded dorm room seemed built for two, not three, and I wondered if they were disappointed when they discovered they had a third roommate. In the lobby, each of us in the dormitory were assigned a cubicle with frosted glass at the front, unlocked with a small, silver key that I preciously guarded. I became a sickening slave to the mail. Day after day, I ran to my mailbox, sometimes even checking several times a day, as if I did not know the precise time that mail reached our boxes. There’d usually be something from the family, or a few punchy notes from friends at schools across the country, but because there was no letter from you, these gave me little cheer. I was desperate to see your writing, yours alone. You always used a fountain pen with deep blue ink. That, and your firm, broad scrawl, gave whatever you wrote gravitas.

  Even though I knew that it was not smart to pursue you this way, I deluged you with letters, in the beginning, sometimes three or four times a week. I told myself that mail going to and from Providence might take a long time. So I kept writing—long intense letters in which I told you every detail about being a freshman at Michigan, as well as embarrassing pages of sheer emotion. I reminisced about the year before, about the oh-so-unique love that we’d found. For it did seem unique to me, a meeting of our spirits and bodies and minds. An eighteen-year-old can be so arrogant about her own feelings, sure she is the center of the greatest drama since Romeo and Juliet. But in the year following your mother’s death, our senior year of high school, we’d spent every available moment together. It wasn’t only the consolation, although that was how it started. We told each other our dreams. You were still obsessed with politics, and through you, I became more aware of the world. We both imagined travel, thoug
h I had no clear idea how that would happen. Perhaps, I could find work that took me to remote places of the earth where I could help people. What about the newly created Peace Corps?

  “You’ll do it, Judith. I know you will. You’ll see things,” you encouraged me.

  “I hope so, Elliot,” I said, wishing I knew what my future looked like, hoping it would be exciting. Always, my parents had stressed safety, fear of the outside world. I craved experiences, adventure. Their fearfulness felt stifling.

  That last year of high school had brought us so close, I wasn’t prepared for silence once we were at college. Eventually, however, I admitted that mail from Providence to Ann Arbor could not possibly be taking so long. You simply weren’t answering. I pictured my love letters piling up in your room, stale and stagnant, the emotion in them overripened like smelly cheese. I pictured you checking your own cubicle in your lobby, perhaps a wooden block of letterboxes, the Brown lobby a fancier Ivy League version of my own modern, state-supported dormitory. Only I imagined that rather than rifling through your mail with anticipation, instead you felt a wash of pity and guilt as you saw yet another postmark from Ann Arbor.

  All through high school and your days as regional president of the Jewish youth group, you regularly received notes from smitten girls. You told me about them, groaning that it was such a chore to answer them. I saw those pink envelopes, like petals carelessly dropped from a bouquet, scattered on the desk in your bedroom. I peeked at them when you left the room, though I never went so far as to open an envelope and read the letter inside. I saw they were written in girlish hands, some embellishing the dots on the i’s of both Elliot and Pine with little hearts. Pathetic, I thought. Those silly girls chasing after Elliot were pathetic. Now I was one of them.