Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “What did she bring?”

  Annie leaned down into the box and sniffed. “I know where it came from: right down the block. But I don’t know what she was thinking.”

  I hurried over and leaned down, too. A sweet smell I recognized from certain Baltimore street corners: seafood, corn bread, all mashed together in thick round disks.

  “Are they good?” I asked her.

  “They’re tasty. But I’m not about to put them on your mother’s china.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Did that woman think we wouldn’t be serving enough food to tide her over?”

  “I don’t know what she was thinking. I don’t think she realized we were Jewish—or maybe she just doesn’t know what that means.”

  My mother entered at the moment and came over to stand between us, hand soft against the small of my back.

  “Mrs. Watson just told me. I made an excuse and said I was hurrying up the punch refills. So here it is. Crab, in my kitchen. That’s a first.”

  “You want me to dump it out back?” asked Annie.

  “Heavens, no,” my mother said, with a shrill laugh.

  “It hasn’t touched anything yet,” I reminded her. “Maybe she didn’t intend us to serve it with dinner. Maybe it’s just a gift, because she was embarrassed about being late.”

  “She wasn’t late,” my mother said, already defending her new female friend. “Your Dr. Watson was half an hour early.” She stood back, setting her shoulders in a posture of reconciliation. “Anyway, we don’t keep a kosher kitchen. Not entirely. We’ve been bending the rules since you were born.”

  Maybe beef from the wrong butcher, on occasion. But not like this: not pork or shellfish. Not Baltimore crab. Not trayf.

  Mother said firmly, “We’re modern people and there’s nothing to apologize about.”

  Annie turned and stared at Mother’s face. She didn’t need any theology, just directions. What to serve, and when, and on which dishes.

  “Put them on the small dishes with the silver rims,” Mother said.

  Annie objected, “But they don’t match the set I was planning to use for the roast.”

  “That’s no matter,” my mother said, trying to smile. “I’ve always been curious about crab cakes.”

  She left the room, and Annie looked around for Frank, who had been watching us from a corner, leaned up against the back counter with one big black work shoe lifted slightly and crossed over his better leg at the ankle, working a fragment of a walnut out of a half shell with a small pocketknife.

  “Wash your hands first,” Annie directed him. “Then reach me down those silver-rim plates.”

  He washed, went to find the small step stool, and laboriously set it up underneath the correct cabinet, with Annie watching him and me watching Annie, a knot of unhappiness lodged in my throat. All these years of keeping separate dishes, and now my own mother—yes, Reform and mostly secular of mind, but still—was going to let a Baltimore crab cake sit on her china?

  Annie kept shaking her head back and forth. “Driver coming to the front door. White box full of nothing we need here.”

  Frank climbed each step slowly and balanced at the top of the stool. “You want the plates or you don’t want the plates?”

  “I didn’t say I don’t want the plates,” Annie rebuked him. “Hurry up now before you fall off that stool.”

  “We could just leave them in the icebox,” I tried. “There’s no rule about eating whatever a guest brings. If it doesn’t complement the dinner, it’s downright odd.”

  Annie turned to look at me, chin jutting. Her sourness faded into a smug grin. “Look here who’s the voice of tradition. Thought it would be your mama, but it’s you.”

  “That’s not it,” I said. “It’s just that—it’s an insult to you. After all, you planned this meal with Mother. You cooked it. And you’ve made more than enough courses already.”

  “Oh, that’s it,” Annie smiled. “It’s the insult to me you’re all choked up about.”

  “Annie, one doesn’t just change things on a whim.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I think the only way things change is on a whim.”

  “Change,” I countered in a firm voice, “should be a logical, measured, reasoned decision, at the very least. And, and—I don’t appreciate how you’re talking to me, like I’m a child.”

  “Miss Rosalie, you are a child.”

  “I’m twenty-one,” I said.

  “You can ride around in your canary-colored machine, wind in your hair, strange man in your passenger seat, but your Mama and your Daddy are supposed to live like their people. Old-fashioned.”

  Man in my passenger seat? We’d only gone to lunch twice. Or three times. How did Annie know about that? My face must have betrayed my panic.

  “Honey, you think every time you’re driving around in that loud, bright automobile, every person in town isn’t noticing?” She chuckled to herself, narrow frame shaking with the pleasure. “Crab cakes ain’t nothing compared to what you’re up to.”

  I took my place out in the dining room, directly opposite Mary, throat tight, acid inching up from my gut, with Annie’s words ringing in my ears. Mary knew. She had to. But no, I thought—not even tasting the consommé that Agnus and Annie brought out first. I ladled it quietly into my mouth, one shallow spoonful at a time, a reasonable excuse to avoid conversation. Mary couldn’t possibly know. Look how happy she was!

  When the crab cakes were brought in—looking down, I missed that first moment when my parents each took a taste—the conversation turned to differences between Atlantic coast life and the Middle West, Chicago in particular, where Mary and John had first met.

  “And how did you come to Chicago, if you weren’t born there?” Mother asked.

  “I was sent there to live with relatives, when my mother died,” Mary said brightly, earning my mother’s cooing condolences in response. Orphans’ tales never failed to excite Mother’s sympathy.

  Opposite her, my father made a sort of closed-mouth, gargling sound—a less skilled note of condolence, I thought at first. But then I realized it was the food he was reacting to. The possibility of what he was tasting had just hit him, and he lifted the napkin to his mouth, coughing.

  “That’s so tragic. You poor dear,” my mother said to Mary, at high volume, eyes widening as Father turned in his chair, face hidden in his napkin.

  “Tickle in the throat,” my mother explained loudly on his behalf. “Don’t eat so fast, dear.”

  His hand darted up in silent apology and he started to rise from his chair, napkin still over his mouth. Mother’s eyes tracked to the doorway, urging him to get as far away from the dining room as possible. When he was safely around the corner, she nearly shrieked with relief, “What a wet winter we’ve had!”

  “Lousy, hasn’t it been?” Mary agreed, head cocked, cheeks rosy. She did look like a film star, like someone who might have been discovered on a street corner.

  “Terrible!” mother agreed explosively. “Terrible for the lungs. But you were saying, Mary, about your poor mother. And your father, it was too much for him?”

  “You don’t have to worry about Mary,” John said at his wife’s elbow, food in his mouth, focused on shoveling. “Children are more independent than you’d think. Mary was no different. When I first met her, she was a spitfire.”

  “When John first showed up at the University of Chicago,” Mary said, beaming as she turned toward him, fingers brushing the back of his hand, “he had to talk his way in. And he had to work for his tuition. As a janitor, isn’t that right?”

  I could see from the way his grip tightened around the fork that he didn’t care for the janitor bit, not in front of people he’d just met, though it was true. “Nothing wrong with work.”

  “Absolutely not,” my mother said. And the
n, celebrating the swift maneuver with which Annie slid my mother’s barely touched plate of crab cake away from the table, banishing the last traces of that awkward second course, my mother said it again. “Absolutely not. You’re an American success story, the two of you. What’s his name? Rosalie, it’s at the tip of my tongue.”

  Horatio Alger. But I didn’t have time to say it.

  “John was the youngest-ever PhD in Psychology from the University of Chicago,” Mary enthused.

  “Is that right?”

  John—never averse to flattery, even from his own wife—smiled at this. The weight of their backstory, the ineradicable shared heritage of some fifteen years, nearly as long as my own life on this earth, bore down upon me. If I lifted my heels off the floor and pointed my toes, I might just slip under the table—bump, bump, until silently and mournfully prostrate on the oriental rug laid over the parquet flooring—and not be missed at all.

  When my father returned at last, my mother turned toward him, inhaling deeply. He settled into his chair and took a long swallow of water, clearing his throat again.

  “I have to say,” he paused, “this is a little awkward . . .”

  My mother lifted her chin, erect torso an inch from the edge of the tablecloth, shoulders pressed back. She glanced over at me with a tense smile.

  “Father,” I said, trying to help, “It looks like you lost your napkin. Do you need me to get a fresh one from Annie?”

  He blinked once, shaking off my trivial interruption. “A little awkward,” he started again, “not knowing your own inclinations or your feeling on the temperance issue, Mary. But I’ll be honest. The next course would taste much better with a glass of wine.”

  Mary giggled. Actually giggled. “Or a few glasses, even.”

  “Lovely!” my mother called out, grasping the tinkly little bell at the table’s corner—the bell that was mostly for show, since Agnus, Bertha, Annie, or Frank nearly always sensed our needs ahead of schedule and didn’t often need to be roused. Annie came loping in, looking startled, with Frank at her heels.

  I was the only one embarrassed: by the little bell, and even more, by the transparent desperation for liquor. “Four glasses, Frank,” my father ordered, jumping up from his seat, “and I’ll get the bottle myself. I’ve got something or other stored away.”

  Something or other. He had a perfectly good cellar, as did any other self-respecting Baltimorean who entertained.

  Mary had caught the tally of the glasses. “I don’t think I could take a sip if Rosalie didn’t. You’re not a teetotaler, are you, darling?”

  “I tolerate a drop, now and again.”

  “Oh good,” Mary said, clapping her small hands together. “If it’s to be a party, we can’t have anyone left out. And the first toast must go to Rosalie. I thought the lab was doing well before, but it was nothing compared to what it’s been this winter. I haven’t seen my husband this productive in years. And the second toast must go to John . . .”

  She paused for effect, an effect that John and I noticed, and I counted my breaths, though my mother remained smiling, unaware.

  “To John,” Mary continued, though Father wasn’t even back with the bottle. “Who recently got a raise, which we’ve never toasted properly.”

  John stabbed her with a look, which I took to mean, Can you stop referring to money?

  But Mary only took it further. “And when you get the next raise, soon, when you’re paid what you truly deserve, then we’ll have a party. A wonderful party. Won’t we, John? And our new friends can come.”

  After dinner and a postprandial drink in the opposite parlor, there was a final, customary tour of the house. Mary insisted she was fascinated by architecture, and she seemed determined to win over my father with increasingly detailed questions.

  “You must know just everything about buildings,” Mary purred.

  Father looked down at his feet. “Maybe a thing or two.”

  John said that due to the prolonged renovation of the Phipps Clinic, he’d been on enough building inspections to last him a lifetime. “Go ahead, Mary. Fill me in later.”

  “Oh he’s just tired,” Mary winked. “Too many late nights at the lab. I guess that’s just his constitution, but you better watch he doesn’t overwork your daughter.”

  At the foot of the winding staircase, Mary pushed her hand into the crook of my father’s arm, like a bride preparing to commence to the altar, while my flustered father—what on earth was that expression on his face?—jolted to attention.

  Glancing up the staircase, Mother said, “I’ll leave you with the expert, Mary.”

  But father turned stiffly, grinning over his shoulder. “No, no. It’s all for one, and one for all.”

  “Yes, Mother, do go,” I said, the only energy left in me heightened by sudden pangs of suspicious alarm, not only about what Mary seemed to know but by what she seemed willing to do, in the spirit of getting even. The dazzled look in my father’s eyes whenever she addressed him was making me sick.

  Up they went, Mary and Father in front, Mother trailing behind, to study the details on the upper hallway moldings.

  “Now this,” I could hear Mary say from the upper landing, with crisp articulation, as if she were in a speech class or play, “reminds me of the hotel downtown, the new one?”

  “I haven’t been,” my mother said. “Do they have a good lunch service?”

  “You should ask Rosalie,” Mary said brightly.

  The Regent. Where John and I had been going for lunch. The hotel where—and I balled one fist and felt the fingernails bite into my palm—we certainly wouldn’t be going again.

  Mary explained. “John takes all the lab staff out for lunch, on occasion. To keep the spirits up. It’s the least he should do, considering the hours he imposes. I hear they serve a beautiful Sunday brunch. I keep asking John to take me, but he hasn’t yet.”

  But no, she couldn’t be rambling just for my benefit. Was it for his? John’s face didn’t tell me anything. He was only staring moodily at the empty fireplace, hands in his suit-pants pockets, no sign of reaction to her words.

  They were still up there: How many light fixtures and moldings could there be at the top of stairs, anyway? But now they were talking about my father’s other building projects. I heard his low, usually humble voice becoming more formal as he responded to Mary’s interest in beachside resort construction and hooks and spits and alongshore currents and sediment and storm damage and the new automobile bridge to Ocean City, on the Maryland coast.

  “You haven’t been?” I heard my father ask, incredulous. “Well, you should go.”

  “We should all go,” Mary declared, then lowered her voice to ask something I couldn’t quite make out.

  In response, my mother sounded surprised at first—slightly off-put, but acquiescent, then warming to some idea. “They’re just ordinary bedrooms, but I suppose it couldn’t hurt. So you’re planning a redecoration of your own home?”

  My eyes dropped from the ceiling down to my feet when Annie trundled into the room with a large circular tray, loading it with emptied liqueur glasses. She glanced at me, then to the ceiling again.

  “You’ve got gardens out back?” John asked in a flat voice.

  “A few herbs. Nicer flower gardens in the front, where people can see them,” I said. “Logically.”

  “Gardens all the way down the street,” he said, with what I took to be sarcasm. “A little Versailles.”

  “That’s right,” I said, not appreciating his tone. “That’s exactly right. It was a very nice place to grow up.”

  He looked a little taken aback by the sharpness of my retort, and he turned his head, looking thirstily around the room—but the last of the glasses had been removed. “I’m sure it was.”

  The chandelier’s crystal teardrops danced as the tour proceeded heavily through my b
edroom, overhead. I was tired. I wanted everyone gone so that I could crawl upstairs and burrow under the covers.

  “So, what’s in the back?”

  “Not much. Used to be a coachhouse. Now it’s a garage.”

  “We’re thinking of adding a garage.”

  “I thought you didn’t even own a car.”

  Annie walked out but she was still within earshot, in the dining room opposite, clearing the table. She’d be busy for a while yet, changing the tablecloth and putting salt and pepper cellars in the cabinet and pulling aside the candlesticks to polish—the tasks she did, drawers opening and closing, sighs audible, when guests were taking an unusually long time to leave.

  “I could use a cigarette,” he said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  He lowered his voice. “Outside. Show me the garage, will you, Rosalie?”

  Just go home already, I wanted to say, hearing the low rumble of my father’s laughter upstairs, the little duet of ladies’ laughter in response.

  We were barely down the dark narrow hallway and out the back door when he grabbed me by the wrist and swung me around, pressing me up against the cold brick wall, knee cocked up and pinned against my leg, tongue plunged so insistently into my mouth that for a moment, I couldn’t catch my breath.

  I pushed him away. “I thought you were mad at me.”

  “Mad at you?”

  “From the way you’ve barely talked to me all day. And you’re in love with her. I can see it.”

  He recoiled. “What can you see? She’s intent on tormenting me.”

  He threw his head back: one silent guffaw. When I leaned in, studying his expression, wanting desperately for more explanation, something to hold on to, he pushed his tongue into my mouth again, and this time I let him for a moment, and then tugged away, squirming under his arm, smoothing my dress into place. My teeth were chattering. We hadn’t pulled on any coats. And there was a smell—a fishy smell. I looked around and saw, at the edge of the wall, the flick of an alley cat’s tail, black triangular feline head down, gorging on something Annie had set out in a wide metal bowl. The cat looked up, legs tensed and ready to spring, with the remains of crab cakes flecking its whiskers. The cat was thin except for a dragging pouch at its mid-section, a belly full of kittens, the weight of which pulled the back fur tighter over her knobby spine. When she went back to eating, the soft sound of the cat’s overeager scavenging turned my own stomach, but there was something else aside from revulsion—that smell of sex and desperation in the air.