“Right this minute?” Miriam said. “I wasn’t speaking anything, can’t you even tell?” How he could be smart enough to fix tractors or fool Arabs, let alone write plays, Miriam did not see, not that she said it.
“No, no,” said the Israeli playwright. “Bring me please your counselor.”
“She’s right over there with the garbage,” Miriam said, but because she was not at all sure of how words came out of his mouth or went into his head, walked over with him to Fran, who was going around with the basket.
“Amnon!” Fran screamed with her thin sparrow’s voice, and immediately dropped the basket and the empty milk containers like people on TV shows who walk backward into sewers. Miriam had never seen her look so lively: Fran’s flat paper face was like the front of a brand-new apartment house, and even though she was nineteen years old, did not wear lipstick. Instead, she got up very early in the morning, before any of the girls in the bunk, just to make sure that she would have enough time to stand in front of the mirror and put on all her black eye makeup. It was how Miriam woke up every morning: Fran standing at the mirror, patting and painting her eyes as if they were an Arts-and-Crafts project. Right after that, Gil Burstein, a Senior boy, went to the loudspeaker to play his bugle, and from that time on there was no way at all to stop anything that came after. Every single morning Miriam woke up in the cold light of a strange bed.
From behind all the black lines, Fran’s eyes looked as if she was already set to start flirting, but even so her arm would not let go of Miriam’s shoulder. It was just another thing that Miriam did not like. Simply going from one activity to another, the whole bunk walked with their arms linked around each other’s waist; at flag-lowering, you joined hands and swayed in a semicircle; in swimming you had to jump for someone else’s dripping hand the second the whistle blew; and at any time at all there were counselors standing with their arms around kids for no particular reason. They were all people you hardly knew and would probably never see again; there was no reason to spend a whole summer hugging them.
“Miriam,” Fran said, smiling at her as if she were a new baby in somebody’s carriage, “do you speak Yiddish?”
“What do you mean?” Miriam said. “Every second? I can, if I have to.”
“It’s all I ask you,” Amnon said and, for the first time, smiled too; from way above his long legs, his face crinkled and seemed smaller, as if he wrote most of his plays right under a bulb that was going bad.
Fran said, “I don’t see it. She’s very quiet—her voice is much too soft.”
“It’s not making a difference. In America you have microphones falling from the ceiling even in a children’s camp you’re using only for summer.”
“On that huge stage? Are you kidding? She’d fade into the woodwork. Nobody would even see her. I told you—she’s very quiet.”
“She is not quiet,” Amnon said. “Not quiet, only unhappy. It’s how I am choosing her. I see her face: unhappy and unhappy.”
It was the last thing Miriam wanted anyone to think of. “Everything’s perfect,” she said, and with all the tightness inside her, quickly gave Fran a smile that tired out the corners of her mouth.
“Probably she wouldn’t forget lines. But if she doesn’t remember to scream when she gets up there, you’re finished.”
“I don’t believe in screaming,” Miriam said, but not so that anyone could hear her. Beneath the ceiling, there were Ping-Pong balls popping through the air like mistaken snowflakes, and behind her, some girls from her bunk were playing jacks. In the close, headachy damp, Miriam looked at Fran and hated her; in the whole canteen, that was all that there was.
It was getting to Amnon, too; the whole sour room seemed trapped in his face.
“Frances Wishinsky,” he said as he watched Fran walk away with the basket. “In England are boys named Francis. In England, Wishinsky would already be Williams. England is a worse country, it’s true. I have suffered there for eleven months.”
Miriam said, “I read that it rains a lot in England,” and wondered if the rainy day and gray, stuffy room were what was reminding him.
“Weathers are not so much important to me,” Amnon said. “Other things I don’t accustom myself so well. For me, terrible weathers I find not so bad as terrible people. For example, I think you’re not liking so much your counselor Fran.”
But Amnon was a stranger. “She docks us from movies a lot,” Miriam said, “but with what they’ve got here, it doesn’t even matter. The last time we went, all they had was Martians. An entire movie about a bunch of miniature green guys running around in space ships.”
“You’re not liking science fictions? Which kind of films you like to see?”
“All different ones. I just don’t see why they can’t find enough movies to make up with real people’s colors and sizes in them.”
“Ah,” said long, stretched-out Amnon. “Look here, Miriam, you have been ever in a theater?”
“A children’s theater,” said Miriam. “They took us once from school.” The children’s theater, in the auditorium of a big high school in Manhattan, was in a terrible neighborhood: in a building right across the way, a left-alone little girl was standing up completely naked, her whole dark body pressed right against the window in the cold. “She’s only a little baby,” Miriam had said, but there were people who giggled all the way through the play and couldn’t wait to get outside again just to see if she would still be there.
“Children’s theater,” Amnon said, nodding. “This play we do is also children’s theater. Only because it’s in Yiddish, the children here will not understand. But what can I do? I am not choosing it, it’s not my play, it’s not my language.”
It was not Miriam’s language either, so she said nothing and watched Amnon stare around the room, more and more dissatisfied.
“It is not my medium. I am playwright, not director. What can I do? Many people are coming to see this play who are not interesting themselves in theater and they are not interesting themselves in the children. They are only obsessing themselves with Yiddish. For this they will come.”
“For what?” said Miriam. “What are they all coming for?” There was a program every Friday night—nobody special came and nobody ever made a fuss about it.
“It will be performance for Parents Day,” Amnon said. “In two weeks is coming Parents Day. You know about it, yes?”
But more than yes: Miriam was sure that any parents, seeing what camp was like, would be only too glad to take their children out of it. How much more than yes? It was the one day she was certain of and waited for.
Even before she got there, Miriam had a feeling that camp might not turn out to be her favorite place.
“It’s terrific,” was what her cousin Dina told her. But it was the same thing that Dina said about going on Ferris-wheel and roller-coaster rides in an amusement park. Coming home from school, her arms full of all her heavy high-school books, she would tell Miriam, “Wait till you start doing things like that! Everybody screams and it’s terrific.”
“I get dizzy on the merry-go-round,” Miriam said, and was very suspicious. Only a few years before, Dina used to lie around on her bed, setting her stringy strawberry-blond hair and reading love comics. With her extra baby-sitting money, she would buy different-size lipstick brushes, close the door in the bathroom, and completely mess up all her perfectly good but strange-colored brand-new lipsticks. Naturally, Dina’s mother did not approve, but all she said was, “All the girls are like that. They all do it, and Miriam will be like that, too.” But because she was not like Dina, who and what she would be like was in Miriam’s mind very often; it was the reason she looked so closely at people’s faces on the street.
“If you’d only smile once in a while,” Miriam’s aunt said, “you’d look like a different person.” But her aunt was a liar, a person who spent her life thinking there was not much children could understand. Just to prove it once, when Miriam was in kindergarten, she gave her aunt
a special lie test on purpose: on the day that Israel got started as a country, everyone had the radio on all day and many people put out little flags in their windows.
“Why do they have Jewish flags out?” Miriam asked, very pleased with herself because she had thought up the trick and knew the answer.
“What Jewish flags?” Her aunt’s arms were all full of bundles and her fat, soggy face looked very annoyed. “Where? In the window? They’re left over from Shabbas.”
So Miriam saw she was right, but even when she got older said nothing, because she knew that for the times her mother was sick, she would still have to stick around her aunt’s house, listen to some lies, and watch Dina fool around with her friends or do her homework. Whenever her aunt bought fruit, she would say, “It’s sweet as sugar,” even if it was unripened grapefruit; and when she made lamb chops, she said, “Don’t leave over the fat, it’s delicious,” even though it wasn’t.
Sometimes, when Dina and her mother had fights, or when her uncle was yelling on the phone about Socialism, it would seem to Miriam very funny, so to stop them from noticing her giggles, and also to drown out the screaming, she would go into the living room and play the piano. She played from her head songs she had learned in Assembly or Hebrew School, or, even better, melodies that came into her mind like ideas: not real, official songs that people knew, but ones she made up on the spot and could change and fix up if she wanted. It was separate from things that she knew about and completely different from people; often when she played the piano, it seemed to Miriam like reading Chinese in a dream.
“I don’t see what’s so great about playing without piano books,” Dina said. “You can’t even read music. Just wait till you start taking lessons from Mrs. Landau and have to start practicing from books, then we’ll see what a big shot you are.
“I’m not ever going to take from Mrs. Landau,” Miriam said. “My mother says she’s a very limited person who shouldn’t be teaching anybody anything.”
“Your mother tells you too much,” said her aunt, but in what way this was true she had no idea. “Stalin” was what Miriam’s mother called her uncle, and what she said about him was that he simply had nothing in his head and had no way of telling what was true from what wasn’t. For this reason, all of his talk about Socialism was just noise-making, and all he was, she said, was a big talker who would believe anyone who was a bigger faker.
The other thing Miriam’s mother most often told about was her own life when she was a child, but when she got to that, she talked only half to Miriam and half to someone who wasn’t there at all.
“Who could have believed that any place could be as big as Warsaw?” is what she would say. “Streets and more streets, I couldn’t understand it. I was the first girl from my town ever to be sent there to school, and I was so smart that when I got there I was the youngest in my class. But all my smartness did me no good—I looked at all the stores and the people, the streetcars and the houses, and all I did was cry constantly.” This, Miriam never had any trouble believing; it was a habit her mother never got out of. Whenever the boiler broke down for a day, her mother cried all the time that she washed in cold water, and if the butcher ever sent the wrong kind of chicken, or one with too many pin-feathers on it, she cried for hours after and then started all over again when they were ready to sit down and eat it.
Still, with all the things that she did tell, when it came to camp Miriam’s mother said very little.
“You’ll meet children from all over. When Dina went, there was a girl from Winnipeg, Canada.”
“Was her father a Mountie?”
“How could he be a Mountie?” her mother said. “Ask Dina, I think he was a dentist.”
“Then I don’t see the point.”
“It isn’t a question of point, Miriam. In camp you’ll have grass and trees and get away. Here all you’d have is the hot city.”
But it was the hot, empty city that Miriam loved. The flat, gritty sidewalks, freed of people, widened in the glassy, brilliant glare and in the distance fell away like jungle snow. Hard, strange bits of stone came bubbling up through the pavements: glazed, heated traces of another city that once drummed and droned beneath. In front of all the buildings, just where landlords had planted them, low, wiry shrubs pushed themselves out like rubber plants, and the buildings, rougher and rocklike in the ocher heat, seemed turned into brick that was brick before houses, brick that cooked up from the earth itself. From the sky, the city’s summer smell sank into Miriam’s skin, and walking along with the slow air, she felt her thin, naggy body skim away to the bricks and the pavement that streamed, in belonging, to the sun. What she would do with a bunch of trees, Miriam did not know.
Only dodge ball, it turned out, could have been invented by human beings: if somebody kept throwing balls at you, it was only natural to try to get away from them, and if you would just be allowed to go far enough, there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. This was what Miriam decided on for all games, so in basketball and volleyball she let other people push and scream for the ball as if there were a sale, and in badminton she watched them jump and yell, “Look at the birdie,” like photographers with black cloths in an old-time movie.
Folk dancing was no improvement. “Right over left, left, step, right behind, left, step,” Naamah the Yemenite folk dancer sang out instead of words in her dark Yemenite voice, while all her heavy silver jewelry sounded behind her, a rhythm as clear and alone as somebody cracking gum in an empty subway. In a way, Naamah was the most Israeli-looking person Miriam had ever seen; with her tiny, tight, dark features and black, curly hair, she flew around the room like a strange but very beautiful insect, the kind of insect a crazy scientist would let loose in a room and sit up watching till he no longer knew whether it was beautiful or ugly, human or a bug. Sometimes Naamah would pull Miriam out of the circle and sing the special right-over-left song straight into her ear as if Miriam were the one who couldn’t speak English.
“The grapevine step,” she screamed over the music. “It’s necessary for all Oriental dance. Not just Israeli. Also the Greeks have it, and it’s found modified with the Druse.” But it seemed to Miriam like doing arithmetic with your feet, and finally Naamah let her go back into the circle, saying, “Westerners cannot do our dances. They do not have the body.”
“I don’t know what she acts so fancy about,” Miriam said in a half-whisper to no one. “Everybody knows that when the Yemenites first came to Israel, they never even saw a toilet before, and when the Israelis gave them brand-new bathrooms, what they did was go all over the floor.”
“Shush, Miriam,” said Phyllis Axelrod, a tanned, chunky girl in Miriam’s bunk. “Don’t answer back. If you feel bad, just cry into your pillow. I do it every night and it works.”
“What does your pillow have to do with it? That sounds like putting teeth under your pillow so that fairies will give you money.”
“You get dimes that way, Miriam. Don’t you even want the dimes?”
“If I want a dime, I ask my mother for it. I don’t hide teeth and expect fairies, that’s not something I believe in.”
“My mother wouldn’t just hand out dimes like that,” Phyllis said, and Miriam immediately felt sorry. She liked Phyllis, though she often seemed not too brilliant; sometimes they were buddies in swimming, and once they snuck out of the water together because Phyllis heard a radio playing inside the little cabaña that was only for counselors. It was the reason that Phyllis cried into her pillow at night: she missed listening to the radio and knowing what was on the Hit Parade, and this gave Miriam the idea that when Phyllis got to be a teenager she might spend all her time hanging around cars in the street, holding up a radio and looking for boys. Sometimes Phyllis also cried because she missed her oldest brother, Ronny, who had just come back from Korea and immediately got married.
“You’re not glad about being a sister-in-law?” Miriam asked her.
“It’s not that great,” Phyllis said. “I just
wish I had my regular brother back again, no Army and no wedding.” Still, she had a beautiful red-and-gold silk scarf that Ronny had brought back for her from Asia; once she wore it as a shawl when everyone, already in white tops and shorts, had gone out on the road to pick wild flowers for the Friday-evening table. On that road, outside camp but just behind the bunks, most of the flowers were tiger lilies, and when Phyllis bent over to pick one, she looked, with her straight black hair and broad brown face, like an Asian girl herself.
It was the closest Miriam got to “children from all over”: except for a girl from Teaneck, New Jersey, everyone in her bunk was from New York, mostly from Brooklyn or Queens, both places Miriam had not been to. Still, from what they said, the only difference she could see was that they called Manhattan “going into the city,” while people from the Bronx called it “going downtown.” Besides Miriam, that meant only Bryna Sue Seligman, who, because she came from Riverdale, would not admit it. Everything that belonged to Bryna, her recorder included, had specially printed stickers, made up by her father who was in the printing business, that said in giant yellow letters BRYNA SUE SELIGMAN, and her favorite book in the world was the Classic Comic of Green Mansions. On the very first day they were in camp she asked Miriam, “Don’t you wish you were Rima? Isn’t Green Mansions the most beautiful thing you ever heard of?”
“It’s OK,” Miriam said; she could not see constantly going barefoot in a hot jungle and having to depend on birds when you had any trouble. But Bryna liked the whole idea so much that just in order to be like Rima, she kept her long red hair loose and hanging down her back, walked around without shoes when she wasn’t supposed to, and blew into her recorder, which she couldn’t really play, when she lay in bed after Lights Out. Whenever there was any free time, Bryna the bird-girl spent almost all of it either brushing her hair or dusting herself with bath powder, all in her private mirror with the yellow label, moving it constantly from side to side so that there was no part of her she would miss.
Other People's Lives Page 14
