Other People's Lives

by Johanna Kaplan

  Rebecca’s arm was still around Maria; they had reached the house, but continued standing outside it. In her cold and discomfort, Louise concentrated on the odd quality of Rebecca’s voice: she had quacked French verbs at students for so many years that now, without knowing it, she could not stop the quacking. Worse, she plowed down on words and consonants with lingering lopsided lips and with her tongue emphasized the sounds that students, in a dictation, might have forgotten to underline.

  Maria said, “It’s all, I think, different here now, Rebecca. You had always on the left side your studio.”

  “Studio! Please, Maria! You think I didn’t know what I had there? It was a shed! A shed is a shed. And it was all right for the summers, but as soon as I decided that I would really be up here I knew I had to have something different. And Leon wouldn’t let me sit all day in what was practically an outhouse, so I’m building a marvelous showroom that’s an addition to the house, and it was designed by a brilliant boy from Yale Architecture School. You probably know him—Jesse Sandweiss. He’s young and marvelous and full of wonderful, creative ideas and he comes from a wonderful family, I always loved him and told them to have faith in him, no matter what! And I did, and I was right, and there’s nothing he won’t do for me. But there’s nothing he can do about the builder! Who’s a crook and a reactionary, you should see his pig eyes and his German wife and it frightens me to even think of their children someday in a ballot box. And that’s why you have to forgive me—because most of my good stuff is still in the shed, and all because of that lousy builder the showroom is freezing and you won’t have anything to see.”

  “I can’t anyway afford things, Rebecca. It’s not why I came.”

  “I know, darling. Who can? It’s a terrible time and I saw it coming—I lived through one Depression and now I’m living through another! I warned Leon. We lost so much money, I saw all the signs and our broker feels terrible. He’s a wonderful boy—Bobby Meltzer. We’ve known his father since God knows when and you can imagine how he feels! He gave him all his business—and after all that, Bobby lost everything. Everything! Of course it’s not his fault—it’s the times, it’s economics. But he’s a very sensitive boy, Bobby. Not that he’s a boy any more. He has a wife and three little babies. And his wife is marvelous. From a very wealthy family. And with her taste and her background she can’t stay away from me and my beautiful things. She loves my attitude about life—you know, with that kind of money there isn’t always a lot of warmth in the home—Ooh! Did you hear that? It’s the phone! I can hear it through my earmuffs. Let me quick run and answer it! Come on!”

  Inside, stamping her feet from the snow and the cold, Rebecca disappeared—even more like Rumpelstiltskin—through a swinging door, leaving them all in her large, chilly showroom. It was wood-beamed but mostly empty-two small antique chests and a highboy stood to one side, and several sets of andirons were laid out before an unfinished fireplace. Exactly in the center, like a stage set, were an old kitchen table, a few ordinary chairs, and a potbelly stove.

  “A Koche Ofen!” Maria said. “It’s what we had at my cousin Klaus’. You heat up the bricks and it makes you then very warm. Not, you know, so warm, but better.”

  Matthew said, “Mommy, Jamie Laufer. When can we ask her?”

  “As soon as she comes off the phone, angel, I promise. You can have now the sandwiches, yes, baby?”

  Julie, who had zipped up her fatigue jacket and pulled her wool cap down so that it covered her face almost entirely, looked around the bare room and said, “Typical. Absolutely typical. Andirons and no fire! I can’t believe it—it’s exactly what my mother would do. Except that we did have a real fire and a fireplace. In the country.”

  “She would have, I think, a fire, Julie. Only she doesn’t yet have the fireplace finished. If you stand near to the stove you’ll be warmer.”

  Maria herself was not standing close to the stove but was sitting on a faded upholstered wing chair that she had pulled up to the table; to Louise she seemed suddenly faded, too. Her hair was disheveled, her shoulders were hunched, and the yellowish, lined raincoat that she always wore was half open as if she were unaware of the cold. Her arms were spread out on the table, but the heavy canvas sandwich bag still hung from one of her wrists. She seemed caught in an odd, unconscious oblivion: her face and body drained, her eyes far away. Had she sat this way once at her cousin Klaus’? When she was very skinny? Sleet began hitting the wide, unshaded windows and one of Matthew’s Magic Markers fell; the sounds were simultaneous.

  “I love fireplaces,” Julie said. “I really love them. I mean the real kind—with a fire in it, like the one we had in the country. It was so beautiful—I used to sit there in front of it, watching it for hours and hours. You know what I just flashed to? The pictures in children’s books! I used to just stare and stare at the fire and sort of turn the pages in the books and get so high that I would really get into those pictures. I mean really into them, like I was inside of them. They were very stoned.”

  How do you like to go up in a swing,

  Up in the air so blue?

  Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing

  Ever a child can do!

  It was what Louise’s mother had read to her—and read very quickly, in obvious annoyance. Her accent had been more noticeable even to Louise, and seemed so especially now in remembering it: her fair-skinned, distant mother in a blue-green suit, sitting on a park bench in the playground, with one hand rapidly turning pages, with the other shielding her eyes—not from the sun, but from the sight of the sandbox, which offended her. The noises offended her, too: the gossiping women, the crying children, the planes overhead, the trains underneath.

  “We had for children terrible books,” Maria said. “Always ugly, always punishings. Struwwelpeter! Max and Moritz! Only bad children and only terrible things to happen to them. Fairy tales, too. Not like here—Grimm stories they make very different in America. I know—from reading them to Matthew. Do you remember, Matthew? When I read to you those witches stories? No? I think probably you’re only hungry, that’s maybe the trouble. Yes, baby? What do you think?”

  “Maria, guess who that was! It was Leon!” said Rebecca, pushing through the swinging door with the force of her clothes and her voice. “I told him you were here and he sends his love and I told him how amazing it was that you’re here because I was just thinking of calling you this morning because of Elliot. And I said, ‘See! You can never tell what’ll happen!’ but he wasn’t surprised at all because I can always tell. And we’re so proud of Elliot! I said, ‘Call up Elliot right now and tell him that Maria will be glad to tell him everything that he needs to know.’ Because I know you would, I don’t even have to ask you, and anyway you’re exactly the right person.”

  Maria was unwrapping the sandwiches. She raised her head and said, “Rebecca, this is Julie Dresner and this is Louise Weil. But I think I don’t know who is Elliot.”

  “Maria! You know Elliot—my wonderful, brilliant nephew—really he’s Leon’s nephew, and we’re so proud of him and we always were, even when his mother used to complain that he was too quiet and he wouldn’t talk to her, and who could blame him! I wouldn’t talk to her, either, she never shuts up, she’s one of those really over-protective, you know what I mean—smothering mothers, so naturally he had to retreat into his books and his studies, and now even she has to admit that she’s proud of him for what he got. But we’re even more proud of him because not only did he get it but also now, finally, he’ll really be able to get away from her. And you’ll see how he’ll flower! I told him never mind if she carries on before he goes, it’ll be good for her.”

  “What did Elliot get?” Matthew said. His voice was high-pitched, his mouth was thick with peanut butter and jelly; he looked, Louise thought, like a little boy just checking up on someone else’s special present.

  “Look at him, Maria! Just look at that face—that adorable, precious facet He looks exactly like Dennis…But what
are you feeding him, darling? Peanut butter? I feel terrible! You know me with my cooking, I love it, I would have made you anything. Never mind the limitations I have to put up with here and the broken boiler.”

  “It’s all right, Rebecca,” Maria said. “I didn’t anyway know where we would be coming and I don’t believe ever to stop in the highway places.”

  “Darling, I know it. The food is inedible, it’s American Bland—that’s what I call it, and who knows what crap they put into it! I always took along my own wonderful things. Breads and meats and cheeses and pt! Of course, now everyone does it, but they buy them from Zabar’s and they think they’re being so original. And they don’t even believe me when I say that I made everything myself. Because I wasn’t afraid to experiment, and as far as foods go, in my opinion, all they are is Nouveau Gourmet.”

  “An apple, Matthew, baby? Or a tangerine? Which?”

  “Tangerines, tangerines—that’s the one thing I have plenty of,” Rebecca said, hopping again through the swinging door. “That’s the least I can do for you, and don’t think I forgot about Matthew and his peanut butter. Remember when he was little? How I always kept a jar of peanut butter waiting specially for him? Because who else do I know who would touch it?”

  “Rebecca,” Maria called out. “Your nephew Elliot. What do you want him to ask me about?”

  “Oh, Elliot? I told you, Maria. He’s going on a very special scientific exchange program to the Soviet Union, and he’s going to be in Leningrad and he was practically hand-picked. And it’s absolutely marvelous and exciting and I knew you’d be able to tell him everything.”

  “Leningrad I think is very cold,” Maria said. “I wasn’t ever there. Where it’s warm, I think, is the Crim? Crimea? I don’t know how you say it—they took us only to Moscow, also very cold, but people said always where it’s nice, pleasant, is the Black Sea.”

  “Oh, it’s all wonderful, I knew you’d think so. You’re exactly the right person to ask and I’m so glad I thought of it.” Rebecca returned with a cellophane bag of tangerines which she cradled under her layers of clothing.

  “Tits,” Matthew whispered to Julie, giggling. “Look at all her titties.”

  “Aren’t children wonderful, Maria? Even in times like these they can find things to laugh and be happy about. And we’re the ones who take it away from them. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, but it’s something I was always very careful about and people can say I have a childlike nature, I don’t care. Because it keeps me young in my attitudes and that’s what everyone always appreciates about me.”

  Rebecca put the bag of tangerines out on the table and said, “I know this isn’t very fancy, I didn’t put it in a bowl or anything, but I never believed in being bourgeois. Come on, girls, aren’t you eating?” It was the first time she seemed to realize that Louise and Julie were there. But it was not Louise whom she was looking at. Naturally. “Darling,” she said, turning to Julie, “you look very familiar to me. Tell me your name again. How do I know you?”

  Pulling her wool cap down as far as it would go, Julie stared straight at the andirons. She looked extremely sullen, but clearly didn’t worry that other people might think so. Why should she? It wouldn’t make them wonder about her mental health…

  IV

  Louise’s new doctor, who was two bus rides away, was named Dr. Vinograd. On the New York City busses, which she had forgotten, his name chuffed toward her like a Russian train station—Vinograd Vinograd (whistles blew in the icy expanse)—and when he came out into the waiting room to greet her—balding and heavy-set—he seemed to be chuffing, too: last train out, the barrier down, the station-master swaying with his lantern in regret and stamping his feet in the cold. His size surprised her: so large and broad-shouldered amid the exact neatness of scaled-down, precise waiting-room furniture, how did he not bump into things? Intent on keeping her thoughts in one line, she looked up into the roundness of his face—expanding, creasing forehead and unending, puffed-out cheeks—and tried to find in it a map of Russia. Other than a vague idea of vast and lonely endlessness, she did not know what the map of Russia looked like.

  In fact, though she had been given very exact directions, Louise had missed her stop. In the late-afternoon January slush, she had been watching two sets of children coming home from school, carrying notebooks and art projects, each with their mothers. Louise noticed the first set as soon as they got on the bus: a small, dark-haired, small-featured mother and her two daughters. One of the girls had short, dark, curly hair like her mother’s and the other’s long, straight hair, clasped back in a pony tail, came out in child’s runny strands beneath her rain hat. The mother, to Louise’s eye, was obviously European. She spoke very quietly, with a trace of a British accent, and smiled at her two little girls in a kind of wonder as they chattered together, unaware of the bus or the rain. The girls’ voices, excited but indistinct, rose occasionally in the bell-like shrillness of childhood.

  “Rachel! Evie!” their mother said, as she half raised a finger to shush them. She smiled as she said it, and seeing that Louise had taken it in, she looked up directly and smiled at her, too.

  Because of this smile, Louise could not look at them any longer and finally, having passed her stop, she stood up to pull the cord and saw that Rachel, Evie, and their mother were no longer there. They had secretly climbed out of the bus before she could climb into their lives.

  As far as Louise could see, the most important thing to tell Dr. Vinograd first was the faces she kept seeing everywhere. Literally, they would not let her rest. In her room in Maria’s apartment, creases in the sheets and the pillows, cracks in the ceiling and the walls, each of them, all of them gave back strange, changing faces. First they were vague and cloudlike, but they changed immediately as she looked at them into odd, distorted, devouring shapes. They were not animals, not people, but freaklike pieces of features: a round, growing, man-woman’s cheek stretching into a smirk or a howl. It would dissolve into a small, sharp, barking dog’s single sharp, triangular ear. Or the curtain would stir and there would be a certain monkey’s lean, vicious face-leering, ridiculous—till the leer itself turned into a curling, switching, bodiless tail smelling of a zoo.

  “Don’t be afraid of the noises,” Maria had said the first evening. “He’s only crazy.” She did not mean the awful clang of the plumbing which went on constantly, vibrating through all the apartments on that line whenever it was used, but the nightly noises of the man in the next-door apartment, whose bedroom wall was on the other side of Louise’s. Every night he yelled the same wild karate commands and apparently knocked over large pieces of furniture. He kept it up for a long time and when the throwing and yelling part was over, he laughed in a loud, stupid, braying voice; beside it you could hear a girl’s voice giggling and shrieking, high-pitched and equally stupid.

  “It’s only foreplay,” Maria said. “I don’t know how he pays the rent. His father, maybe. He used to be in advertising, advertisement—I don’t know. Now he doesn’t have a job. He has a motorcycle. This girl has been for a long time, I think maybe she has a job. He has always the same maid—she has a job, the laundry also. From his parents, probably. I think.”

  At the bathroom sink, Louise did not arrange her toothbrush and face soap, but stared at the drops of water as they gurgled into the drain. They clung to the basin in groups, separating singly, dismally, as they were forced, without control, toward the drain.

  It was all this, Louise knew, that she had to tell Dr. Vinograd, but though she began to, he did not ask her to go on, nor did he ask her about dreams. He talked to her instead about registering for courses.

  “I can’t go to school,” Louise said. “I’m not ready. You know what happened before.”

  Dr. Vinograd pulled at his tie, it seemed to be a characteristic gesture. “It wouldn’t have to be for credit, you could do it non-matric. Take two or three courses and see what you like. You’re testing them, you know.”

  “I’
m not taking cello anyplace.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said, and smiling boyishly, pleasantly, seemed to mean it. The smile was inward; it fogged his glasses and gave his large, round face a momentary nostalgic look. “You could take history.”

  “I hate history,” Louise said, surprised at her own vehemence, and knew that what she meant was she hated her own. That was the other thing she had to tell him about, get it over with now, but Dr. Vinograd was on the phone. It seemed to go on ringing incessantly, and at each new call he scrupulously said, “I’m sorry,” or shook his head in what might have been genuine dismay.

  Louise was not sorry: she turned to look at the one wall lined entirely with bookshelves. It was the same wall of bookshelves she had been looking at since her early teens. What did familiarity breed? Dr. Vinograd’s voice went on at the telephone: a woman’s nightmare, maybe, had burst out into the middle of the day, a boy had flunked out of school and was going to be drafted, a girl’s father had died suddenly and she had run out of medication. Maybe. Maybe. Dr. Vinograd turned through the pages of his appointment book. Maybe they were just all canceling their appointments because something better had come up. It was more likely; in other people’s lives, it was always more likely.

  “About ten?” Dr. Vinograd said. “I thought you said about two. I know, I know, it’s only my own wishful thinking.”

  About. About. A-boat, was what he said. He had a Canadian accent.

  The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, the Ernest Jones biography, the Physicians’ Desk Reference, Psychosomatic Medicine, Childhood and Society, The Origins of Psychoanalysis, Organization and Pathology of Thought, Disturbed Communication, A History of Medical Psychology, Schizophrenia as a Human Process, Psychoanalysis of the Neuroses, Psychoanalytic Education in the United States, Community Programs for Mental Health…What familiarity bred was a dazed, dumb sense of safety and the giddiness of something slightly ludicrous.