And then came the five-year class reunion at the Columbia Club in Manhattan. Leaving work early, she took a cab to the elegant building on West Forty-third Street. Her heart pounding, she slowly pushed open the door. When she asked the uniformed man at the desk where the event was, he directed her to The Grill on the fourth floor.
She saw him before he saw her. And she had too long to study the familiar blue eyes and dazzling smile. It was Philosophy 101 all over again. She wanted to be back in his life.
“Janey!” she heard Tim shout. He was moving across the crowded room, a drink in his hand. When he reached her, he gave her a big bear hug.
“Tim,” she said relaxing into his warm neck, feeling his hair brush up against her eyes. “I didn’t know if you were still in the city.”
They unlocked their embrace and stood looking at one another. His face was flushed, but he looked genuinely happy to see her. “What are you up to these days?” she asked. “Are you still on Wall Street?”
Laughing, he shook his head. “Don’t have to now. I came into my trust fund a year ago. I don’t have to work at all. But, let me tell you what I’m doing. You’ll be proud of me.”
“What is that?” Janine asked cautiously.
“I’m teaching. History. I love it.”
“No!” she said. “I never expected that.” But before she could hear more details, a pretty dark-haired woman came up beside Tim and touched his arm possessively. Janine guessed she was barely twenty. She looked at the woman’s left hand. A huge diamond engagement ring and wedding band glittered on her third finger.
“Tim, I was missing you,” the woman said in an accented voice which suggested she was Italian.
“Ah, Janey. Here’s someone for you to meet. This is Lisetta . . .” Tim paused dramatically, “. . . my wife. We met on my last trip to Italy.”
Janine stared into the woman’s large green eyes which gleamed with fire. She felt as if she had been hit. Why had she not seen this coming?
“And cara mia, this is Janey. We knew each other in college.” Tim put his arm around his wife. “It really is good to see you again. I mean it, Janey. We had some good times together.”
“Lisetta,” Janine managed to say at last. “What a nice surprise to meet you.”
“Isn’t she gorgeous, Janey?”
Janine had never liked when Tim called her Janey. Now she positively hated hearing the name. “Yes, Tim,” she said with a forced smile. “Yes, she is.”
“Hey,” Tim said. “You don’t have a drink. Let me get you something from the bar. White wine, as usual?”
“That’s fine.”
“Be right back. You stay here and get to know Lisetta.” He winked at his wife, who didn’t seem to understand the gesture. She also didn’t seem happy to be abandoned.
“So you met Tim in Italy? Whereabouts?”
“Firenze,” Lisetta answered, still watching her husband making his way toward the bar in the center of the room.
“Florence,” Janine said. “I’ve always wanted to go to Italy. But travel is so expensive these days. Of course, Tim can afford it.”
Lisetta smiled. “He can afford many things. His grandfather gave him much money.”
“Yes, he told me. He is very lucky.”
“We are both very fortunate.” Her face had suddenly changed. Janine was startled by the difference in its appearance. She was reminded of a picture book illustration of a fox standing over his prey that had frightened her as a child. “In his testament,Tim gives you much money.”
“You’re his wife,” Janine said. “Under New York State law, you have certain rights to his estate, no matter what is in the Will.”
“Yes,” Lisetta said with a sly smile. “I think there is enough for both of us.”
“LET’S go to the cemetery tonight, Janey.”
“It’s late,” Janine said as she stacked the dinner dishes in the sink. “You’ve got to teach tomorrow, and I’ve got reading to do.” In addition to the grant writing job, which she still held, she was going to NYU Law School at night. “Besides, doesn’t Lisetta want you home?” Tim had never thought it necessary that the two women in his life should socialize.
“Come on,” he said, digging for the car keys in his pocket. He put on his corduroy jacket that he had left draped over the back of a chair. The coat made him look old. But perhaps that was the twenty pounds he’d put on in the years since graduation.
“Why not?” she said decisively. “It’s only nine. Let’s go.”
TIM seemed instantly at home amid the old graves. He sat down on a large slab of pitted gray stone and lit his pipe. Janine settled near him on the grass. Tim took out the familiar silver flask from his coat pocket, sipping from it before offering it to her. She shook her head and watched him puff contentedly on the pipe.
How his students at the elite private school where he taught must detest him, she thought, remembering the way she and Tim had shared snickers at their mad, inebriated philosophy professor.
“How is Lisetta these days?” she had to ask. “You said her English is improving.”
“Her conversation isn’t what interests me.”
“Naturally. Tell me again why you had to marry her.”
“How else to keep her in this country? She’ll last quite awhile before she fades.”
“You make her sound like a flower.”
Tim seemed pleased by the comparison. Janine got up to stretch out the crick that was developing in her lower back.
“I’m going to look around. I’ve forgotten how interesting these old cemeteries can be.”
“There are mausoleums over in that direction,” Tim said, waving to his left. “One of them has a broken lock. I’ve been inside.”
When Janine returned, Tim looked peacefully asleep on the grave. Lisetta stood beside him, the look on her face one of satisfaction.
“You should have known him back in college,” Janine said wistfully. “He was actually beautiful. I used to massage his shoulders while we studied for exams. He wouldn’t have graduated, if I hadn’t pulled him through. His father was threatening to cut him off without a penny. Tim said he’d never forget what I did for him, and I’m glad that he didn’t.” She sighed. “Why did he think I would wait for his money? Much better to spend it while I’m young. Law school isn’t cheap, Lisetta.”
“We both have what we wanted from him.”
“When he told me he got married, I hated you.” The other woman looked surprised, as if anyone could hate her. “But that was before we became friends.” Janine picked up Tim’s flask from the grass. “We don’t need to leave this behind, do we?”
Lisetta reached for it, but Janine held the flask firmly to her chest. “I want it as a souvenir.”
“Destroy it.”
“No one will know it was his. His parents never bothered to have it engraved.”
Lisetta looked displeased, but she turned and started walking away. “The subway station is there. Hurry.”
“You didn’t have to come,” Janine said. “I told you I would take care of everything.”
“I wanted to see him. To know that it is finished.” Lisetta shuddered. “I hate this place. Tim laughed when I said cemeteries depress me.”
“Then you must have him cremated, Lisetta.”
“Yes,” she said, with a final look back at her late husband. “Always, you have the good ideas, Janine. Tim said you were very intelligent.”
SYLVIA
Roslyn Siegel
LET me tell you about Sylvia. My cousin Sylvia, that is. Or, rather, was.
Our mothers were sisters, Rose and Flora. My grandmother, Bella, rest her soul, had pretensions. She had come from some cold, godforsaken place in Eastern Europe, with frozen soil and limp turnips, and she foresaw a kinder, more verdant version of Mother Nature, in which her two transplanted babes would flourish.
She ended up in Brooklyn.
It must have started then, with the uprooting, the transplantation, the
disorientation that never seemed to go away.
Whenever I asked my grandma where we came from, she would shake her head and mumble something in her native tongue, soft syllables with an occasional crunch that flowed like caramelized honey from her mouth. My mother would rub her back, shake her head and say, “Sometimes it was Russia, and sometimes it was Poland.”
I mean, how can you not know what country you live in?
When we were young, Sylvia and I used to spin the battered globe on the desk in my living room and jab our fingers at the flying green lines, trying to touch the little village with the unpronounceable name they had come from.
In the glittering corners of my imagination, it was a place filled with castles and turreted huts overflowing with fierce dragons, flying horses, and golden bulls.
We would play dress-up by draping one of the ubiquitous lace doilies around our necks, and wrap ourselves up in the long velvet table runner that always covered our old oak table. We would march and chant and sing, and pretend we were born princesses in an exotic world while we climbed up and down the cracked stoop of our small apartment building in Brooklyn.
Rose, my mother, was homely, despite her name, but Flora was a real beauty and so was my cousin, Sylvia. She was prettier, but I was older by one year, bigger, and stronger. I was not above pinching her upon occasion, watching a slow purple mark spread over her white skin until I grew ashamed, while she said nothing, but stared at me with adoring eyes.
I don’t ever remember being jealous of her. It was rather that I felt her beauty and her adoration bathed me in a special kind of light, in which I glowed, like a renaissance painting, much brighter and more important than the candle that illuminated me.
All through elementary school, she followed me around the schoolyard, laughed when I laughed, and frowned when I was unhappy. Her pale, blond hair curled in a haphazard fashion, caressing the translucent skin of her oval face, and her blue eyes reflected a cloudless sky. My friends all played with her as if she were a doll—combing her hair, and bringing her gifts of colored ribbons or bits of bright glass stones they had found in the street. She wore my sweaters and skirts when I outgrew them and never seemed to mind.
Those were the years when I would toss and turn at night in bed, a victim of the most terrible nightmares, in which I would be eaten alive by a sea monster, or trampled under the sharp hooves of runaway horses. I would fling my books at the walls in a rage, and beat my fists against the floor when I didn’t get my way. Rose would wring her hands and try to distract me with a sweet. Flora would shake her head and quickly leave the room.
But Sylvia. Sylvia’s pale face would grow still more bloodless when I carried on, and she’d retreat silently into the kitchen where she would hide under the table until I calmed down.
I don’t really remember when things began to change, but it was my friend Hilda who first noticed something wasn’t quite right.
“Your cousin,” she said to me at her Sweet Sixteen birthday party, “I think she’s a little deaf.”
I knew that Hilda had been a little jealous of Sylvia since we were very small. She wanted to be my best friend, and somehow, Sylvia always managed to sit next to me, no matter how hard Hilda tried to outmaneuver her.
“When I ask her something, sometimes, she just stares at me, like she doesn’t understand a word I’ve said to her.”
This wasn’t a complete surprise to me, but nothing I worried about. Sylvia didn’t respond much to people she didn’t care about.
“Sylvia,” I called out. This time Hilda had managed to seat her at the other end of the table. “Do you want another piece of cake?”
She slowly turned her head in my direction, so I knew that she had heard me, but her eyes seemed to focus on something far beyond me. And then, instead of answering, she turned her head once more, leaving me only a view of the tangled flaxen strands of her hair, tossed like hay on a windy plain.
This response didn’t trouble me. Sylvia didn’t much like birthday cake.
But soon after this, something in me started to change. I began to be really annoyed at Sylvia’s constant presence in my life.
I mean, every time I turned around, she was there behind me, like some strange shadow flickering in the dim light. When I tried to sneak a cigarette from a friend in Prospect Park, she would appear silently at my elbow, a half smile spreading slowly across her face. When I took out a book at the library in Grand Army Plaza, she would be next to me on line at the check-out desk. When I attended an art class at the Brooklyn Museum, on Saturday mornings, while the museum was still closed to the public, I would hear her footsteps echoing through the dark halls filled with marble statues of Greek gods. I began to shout at her and even insult her—anything to get rid of her—but Sylvia would just get that faraway look in her eyes and say nothing.
Once I almost lost her on the subway—the door about to close on her slender body—and I had a fleeting, horrifying vision of her fragile bones being crushed like a bird’s in the machinery of modern life, but before I could take a step to save her, she slid noiselessly through and slipped into the seat beside me.
Sylvia, Sylvia. “Who is Sylvia, what is she that all the swains adore her?”
In fact, the swains did not adore her, something that always seemed awfully strange to me. She seemed to have no friends of either sex, and after her mother died, and a couple of years later, mine, I suppose I gave in to the inevitable and moved into an apartment with her near Brooklyn College, where we both attended school.
Strange as it seemed, we saw less and less of each other then. I studied history, politics, law—I was desperate to become a lawyer. She studied to be a teacher, and slowly but surely, we grew apart.
And then one day, I came home early because my class had been canceled, and I found Sylvia sitting on her bed staring at a mound of clothes next to her.
“How do you know?” she asked me, turning her head towards me, eyes brimming with tears. “How do you know?”
I had rarely seen Sylvia upset over anything and it was very disconcerting.
“How do I know what?”
She picked up a navy blue skirt and held it in front of her. Then she picked up a red skirt. Then a black one. I looked at the pile beside her. She seemed to have the same skirt in five different colors. Then, while a tear rolled down her face, she picked up a yellow sweater from another pile on the bed, held it up, and then plucked a pink one from the pile.
Same sweater, eight different colors.
I guess I hadn’t really been paying her enough attention to notice. She always looked neat and clean. I was always rushing around trying to get to class on time—clothes weren’t on my mind.
How did I know? How did I know which sweater and skirt to buy? How did I know which color went with which color?
“I guess I look in the mirror and see what I like best.”
“But how do you know which to like best?”
“I see which color looks best on me.”
At this, Sylvia began pulling random items of clothing out of her drawers and holding them up to the mirror.
“But how do you know what looks best on you?”
Perhaps it was a trick of the light, or my own discomfort at seeing my so-placid cousin Sylvia upset, but as we both stared in the mirror, for a moment I saw only myself, silhouetted by the lamp behind me, and next to me, only a vague, foggy figure that when I blinked, gradually took on the narrow, slender shape of my cousin Sylvia.
I must admit this whole exercise was beginning to irritate me. I had a paper due on John Adams in two days and I didn’t have time for silly questions.
“I just know,” I told her. “And please stop messing up the room.”
And then I grabbed my books and went to the library.
When I returned, Sylvia and all her things were gone.
I GOT a note from Sylvia a couple of weeks later. She had decided to go to school upstate. After that, we corresponded once or twice a year.
/> I got married, divorced, remarried, moved from Brooklyn to Boston to San Francisco. So far as I knew, Sylvia stayed in Plattsburg, New York and taught kindergarten.
I can’t say I missed her much. Most of the time she had just been an annoyance.
Every couple of years we’d meet and have a coffee while one of us was waiting for a train or plane to go somewhere else. I couldn’t say I found much of a change in Sylvia, except for the fact that she seemed even lighter and paler than before, her eyes never meeting my own, her answers to my questions uttered in a softer and softer voice.
Was my friend Hilda right, and had Sylvia been going slowly deaf all these years—or was it that she just didn’t seem to pay attention?
“So tell me about your class. How old are the kids?” I would ask her.
“Well, you know. They are really young. Too young, really. I try to do what I can. You can imagine, what with this thing and that. It’s not easy. You know what I mean.”
“Are there more boys than girls? Do you have a favorite?”
“There are quite a few. You know how it is. That’s the way it goes . . . There are so many things to deal with. It changes every year. I have my work cut out for me. You know what I mean.”
No, I didn’t know what she meant, but the more questions I asked, the more vague answers I received, until, thankfully, it was time for one of us to catch a train or plane and separate once again.
I GUESS I didn’t realize how serious the problem was until the last time I saw Sylvia.
I had moved back to New York after divorce number two, made partner in a large law firm, and was trying a case in Brooklyn—and who should end up in the jury pool but my cousin Sylvia!
Her appearance was so altered it gave me a start. Her flaxen hair had turned all gray. Mine probably would be gray as well, but I dyed it. Her blue eyes were as clear as ever, but seemed lighter, their gaze far beyond the walls of the courtroom. But it was her body and her hands that really shocked me. When she came forward to excuse herself because she knew the lawyer, me, she was so thin and so—dim is the only word I can think of, even her red dress was faded—that I had the impression I could see right through her.
Family Matters Page 20
