Other People's Lives

by Johanna Kaplan

  Dr. Lichtblau’s name means light blue, but the way he rings the bell is gray, heavy, and nervous. In his whole life put together, he said only one funny thing, and even that was only because I asked him a question. I wouldn’t have asked it either, but I was sitting in his office waiting for him to fill out my medical form for camp, and all he did was stand by the window in his white coat and peek out through the Venetians to see who he could catch sitting on top of his car. Outside children were skating and screaming, upstairs someone was practicing the accordion, but inside Dr. Lichtblau’s ground-floor office there was such a strange, snowy quiet that I looked at the medical form and said, “What’s St. Vitus Dance?” “St. Vitus Dance, hah!” Dr. Lichtblau said to me. “With the camps your mother sends you to, the only dance you’ll ever have to worry about is the Horah.” And then, because I gave him a dirty look, “Not that I have anything against Zionism. I wouldn’t want you to think so. As a matter of fact, and this is the truth, somehow, somewhere, distantly by marriage I’m related to David Ben-Gurion.” It’s not David Ben-Gurion’s fault if in a big family some distant cousin somewhere goes out and marries a moron.

  In my room, seeing the books on my bed, Dr. Lichtblau says, “What are you reading there—Nancy Drew?”

  “No.”

  “What then? Sue Barton? No? What?”

  What I am reading is this: It was a warm, sunny day in Düsseldorf, Germany, in the year 1809, but the gray, stuffy classroom held no hint of the lovely spring morning without. Throughout the long rows small, diligent heads were bent over the copybooks on the desks, and over the sound of busy, scratching pens only a clock ticked. Occasionally, one of the bolder, more daring lads would stealthily look about him, hoping that his raised head had not aroused the stern eye of the severe Prussian schoolmaster, for stiff, exacting discipline was the unquestioned standard of this sunless room. In the back, however, in the row closest to the windows, sat a pale, thin youth whose dark, brooding eyes turned not to his copybook but to the green, budding world beyond the window. He stared longingly, his gaze seeming to fix on a point so distant that only he could see it, and suddenly as a wave of light burst across his gentle face, he grabbed his pen and began to write furiously. But before he knew it, a dark figure was looming over him, snatching the very paper from his hand.

  “Ah, and what have we here?” said the schoolmaster, lifting his pince-nez as he glared mercilessly at the dismayed youth. And as the titters of the class rose, the schoolmaster, his voice harsh and mocking, read aloud: “‘Du bist wie eine blume—You are like a flower. So pretty, pure and sweet.’ You are like a flower indeed! How dare you scribble such twaddle in my classroom? Heinrich Heine, explain yourself!”

  He doesn’t, though, so finally I tell Dr. Lichtblau, “What I’m reading is a story with a poem inside it.”

  “As far as my daughter is concerned,” the doctor tells my mother, “Nancy Drew is the one and only. Not that she’s such a big reader, Andrea, but when it comes to Nancy Drew, she even has trouble eating if she didn’t finish it.”

  “Andrea,” my mother says very slowly, her mouth making it sound as round and ridiculous as a clown who flops around on TV shows. “She must be in Junior High by now, your daughter. How does she like it in Mount Vernon?”

  “As a matter of fact, right now she’s in Miami with her mother, but what their schools are like down there nobody told me.”

  “Such an adorable child,” my mother says. “All ninety-fives in Florida-going and her mother the same in mink-wearing.”

  When the Lichtblaus lived in the building, before they moved to Mount Vernon, Andrea’s mother used to come back from Alexander’s and Loehmann’s with so many packages that she had to take a taxi. These taxi-takings were counted up by Eva, but could be seen by anyone who was outside. Sometimes Andrea was in on them too, but most of the time she wasn’t, because in the whole neighborhood Andrea was a girl who was famous for always being busy. Once she was busy trying to be very smart so badly that she went to the library every single day after school, looking so hard for smartness that she forgot to see if she was getting good books. Then she decided to be a brilliant pianist, and practiced “Spinning Song” day and night, till people in her father’s waiting room got dizzy and complained. Then she tried to be a brilliant Girl Scout, but not many people in the building had sympathy for her cookies because they knew that where the Girl Scouts met was the Catholic church. Finally, just before she moved, she tried to be very religious, waiting around for Jewish holidays to come and crying because her mother wouldn’t send her to Hebrew School.

  After she moved, I saw her only once and that was in Alexander’s on the Girls’ Wear floor, where my mother was bending over a counter of marked-down polo shirts and picking out the ones in my size, saying, “I know it says seconds, Miriam, but they’re only polo shirts and besides I can’t find any imperfections.” “I can,” I said. “They’re all ugly and how much more imperfect than that can you get?” Just as she was starting to tell me what a bitterness I made of her life, Andrea’s mother, her arms so full of packages that she needed a taxi on the spot, came running over and without even bothering to say hello, immediately said, “I don’t know how I’m ever going to get out of here. With all the building that they’re doing and the banging and hocking, you can’t get anywhere near an escalator.”

  “What?” my mother said. “You mean they’re expanding again? God Almighty, I can remember when Alexander’s was only a lousy little Sephardi dress shop.”

  “I’ll never make it to the elevator with all I’m carrying,” Andrea’s mother said. “And even if I could find the stairs, how can I manage when I’m so loaded down?” All the time she was saying this, Mrs. Lichtblau kept going up and down on her tiptoes, looking around her in the same nervous way her husband does when he’s worrying about who’s standing on his car. And all of a sudden, right in the middle of Alexander’s, Andrea’s mother started crying. Andrea, whose hands were also all full of packages, was standing on the opposite side of the polo-shirt counter, and as soon as her mother started crying, she moved about two baby steps away from her so that she was facing me almost exactly. Except that she was taller and had different glasses, I couldn’t see that there was any new and special Mount Vernon feeling about her.

  “Hiya, Miriam,” she said. “Are you still so smart or did you get a little dumb yet?” Especially since her mother was crying I didn’t think it would be nice to tell her that anyone who could think up a question like that had to be on the dumb side herself, so I only said, “You got new glasses.”

  “They’re not new,” Andrea said. “It’s just that I don’t live in the disgusting Bronx any more, so you don’t know what things I have.”

  “What things do you have?”

  “A bra, for one. And as a matter of fact I needed to get a bigger one so badly that we had to come straight to Alexander’s. I don’t think you’ll need anything like that for a couple of years at least.” This immediately made me start worrying about the Song of Songs: What shall we do for our little sister, for she has no breasts? If she were really only a little sister, naturally she wouldn’t, but what if they were just being polite and she wasn’t so little any more?

  “What else do you have?” I said.

  “Gorgeous underpants. And I just got a whole bunch of new ones that are even more gorgeous.” Although you’re not supposed to open up your packages in the middle of the store because if they see you they might think you haven’t paid yet, Andrea tore open one of her top bags and pulled out a whole pile of underpants that were all exactly the same: white nylon with two bright red hearts stitched on in the middle. Holding them up nearly over her face, Andrea said, “If you think they’ll run, you’re all wrong. It only happens with the cheap kind.” Because it seemed to me that these nylon underpants with two little hearts dancing over the crotch were the most ridiculous things I had even seen in the whole of Alexander’s, I began to stare at Andrea and the underpants as she held
them to her face, and suddenly I got the idea that if Andrea had underpants with two hearts embroidered on them, maybe if someone ever got a good look at her heart, they would find two little pairs of white underpants stitched on it. Though it’s not exactly a medical question, it’s something I still wonder about whenever I see Dr. Lichtblau and think of Andrea. But Dr. Lichtblau is not very talkative. Finally, as he’s getting ready to leave, he turns to my mother and says, “She looks a lot better to me today than she did yesterday. I’m not saying that she still doesn’t have the measles, but between yesterday and today there’s a difference between a very severe condition and an ordinary case running its course.”

  “Between yesterday and today,” my mother says before he’s even slammed the door, “he either looked up a medical book or else called a doctor. Or who knows? With a man like him it could simply mean that he won’t make any more housecalls.” Still, she closes the Venetian blinds as he told her to and warns me about no more reading.

  “When I think of how my older sisters were blind for days and days when they had scarlet fever,” my mother says. “And who ever thought they would be able to see again?”

  “What I have is the measles,” I tell her. “Nobody gets scarlet fever any more besides.”

  But she isn’t listening to me; the look on her face is all Poland. “They just stayed there in the bed, all three of them together, till they couldn’t walk and they couldn’t move and if you looked at their faces you could see they were burning up, and if you looked at their tongues, what you saw was strawberries. I couldn’t stay with them in the room any more even though it was my room, too, so I used to stand outside and watch them lying in the bedclothes. The room was so dark they thought it was always night, and they would cry out such strange things, things that didn’t make any sense to me, till I started to think that everything in the room was black—the windows, the air, the bed, the blankets, and even my sisters. When they couldn’t even see any more, something had to be done, so my mother decided to give them castor oil, but because of the terrible taste, they twisted and turned in the bedclothes and wouldn’t take it. As sick and weak as they were, my sisters, they simply fought her off. And all day long the same thing went on till my mother became frantic. Finally, very late that night, my father came home and without saying anything, he pulled out from his pocket an orange. How he managed to get it, he never told us, all I can tell you is that it was the biggest orange I have ever seen in my life—a Jaffa orange from Palestine. Of course Palestine was nothing then—no country, no people, hardly even a place, but even at that time they had Jaffa oranges, and they were so big that just to hold it for a minute, I had to use my two hands. I can still tell you how it felt: very round with a thick, bumpy skin and a strange smell—deep and sweet and very distant, the first fruit God created on earth. My father went right in with it to my sisters and gave it to them with the castor oil, and I stood at the door and watched them eat it, and because I was foolish I stood there and wished that I could get sick too.”

  “Oranges get caught inside your teeth and make your fingers sticky,” I tell my mother, but she doesn’t answer me because I’m a prima donna and there’s nothing that pleases me. She keeps standing by the window, though what she can see there I don’t know; with the Venetian blinds drawn, I hardly know if it’s night or day. All I’m sure of is that it’s after school: from downstairs you can hear Mindy Simons practicing the piano, playing “Für Elise,” and Richie Lazaroff with his cheap and noisy trumpet playing “Malagueña.”

  Because it’s so dark in my room and I can’t read, I decide to tell myself my favorite story in the book, the story of Chayim Nachman Bialik, another one who sat around in school all day just staring out the window, and then after that turned out to be a poet. Not that he was like Heinrich Heine, who couldn’t wait and had to rush into writing a poem the second he saw a flower. Chayim Nachman Bialik had it much worse: his dreaming in school got so bad that he practically couldn’t learn how to read and because of that the rabbi used to beat him. His trouble was that every time he saw a Hebrew letter, it would look to him like a person—a man chopping wood or a woman washing clothes, and in his head he would make up stories about whatever person the letter made him think of instead of just reading the letter aloud the way it was. And not only in that way did he have it worse; his family lived in a tiny town in Russia and was very poor, and the only thing he really liked was running around in the fields outside the town. His father worked in a tavern and hated his job so much that he used to sit there reading the Talmud while he was pouring out drinks. Meanwhile, Chayim Nachman Bialik sat upstairs in his room, and when he heard the noises from the tavern—the screaming, the yelling, and the horsing around—he got terrified.

  Things did not get better—his father died and he and his mother had to move to another town. When this happened, he felt so miserable that all he did was think about the field he used to run around in and wish himself back into it. Naturally, this didn’t do him any good, he wasn’t Mary Poppins. Besides, by this time they were even poorer. His mother tried to make some money by doing little things around in the village, but she had no luck. She used to get up so early and work so hard that every time he looked at her, her hands and face seemed so thin, weak, and tired that he was afraid she would get worn away. Because he was suffering so much, he started to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and it began to seem to him that all his mother’s suffering and his own were like all the years of suffering of the Jewish people, and the more he thought about it, the whole thing from beginning to end made him sick. He wished that the Jews would snap out of it and get back to the good things they had going for them in the time of the Bible.

  One day while he was sitting around dreaming as usual, he fell asleep and had a real dream. In this dream, he was in a land so strange and desolate that it could have been another planet or even the middle of the moon. All there was around him was a desert—terrible, hot, empty sands, orange-brown and wasted. Occasionally there was a squat, ugly palm tree and sometimes a rock. Vultures were screaming somewhere or maybe jackals. Above, the sun was so hard, yellow, and unending that it wore away the sky and left you with nothing to look at. After a while he realized that there were people walking through this desert—a bunch of hideous, broken-down old men. They all had beards, long cloaks, and staffs, and kept walking and walking in a slow, sickly way as if they were blind or didn’t know where they were going. He tried to call to them, but they paid no attention, and when any of them came closer they were so old and disgusting, with sour phlegm on their beards, that it made him sick. The old men walked away, but the sun kept burning and draining him like a fever or a terrible sickness, and he lay stretched out in the sand helpless with thirst and with sweat. Suddenly, from the slow pull of my legs and the sweat running through my body, I realize that I’ve been sleeping, too, and cannot tell whether this was all the story’s dream or my own. I get up and look around my bedroom, but there are no hints. Through the wall next door, Stuie and Arlene Greenzweig are watching Howdy Doody, and outside, past the Venetians, the last of the sun is getting itself together over all the roof antennas in the Bronx. A thick orange globe, it floats in the sky like a bumpy Jaffa orange, a streaky golden desert, the land of Israel itself.

  Sour or Suntanned, It Makes No Difference

  WHAT COULD MAKE SENSE? The Israeli playwright had such long legs it was hard to believe he was Jewish.

  “Little girl,” he said, coming up to Miriam with his very short pants and his heavy brown sandals that looked like they were made out of a whole rocky gang’s Garrison belts, “little girl, which languages you are speaking?”

  But Miriam had not been speaking to anyone: she was walking around the canteen with a milk container going gummy in her hand, and waiting by herself for all the days of camp to be over. There, in the rain, the entire room was sour from milk and muffled from rubber boots and raincoats. The sourness clung to her tongue and whined in her sinuses; locked awa
y from rain and from mud was the whole camp. Soon, some other day, it would get sunny and Snack would be outside on long wooden picnic benches. If you made a mistake and sat down on these benches, splinters crept into your thighs, and if you sat down on the grass instead, insects roamed your whole body. For milk containers and Oreos, this was summer.

  “Listen to me, please, little girl. Why you are walking away? I am asking only a simple question. Which languages you are speaking?”