Other People's Lives

by Johanna Kaplan

  “I know I’m not like Erica Jaffe and I know you don’t like me, but if it gets you so angry to be with people like that, I don’t see why you do it.”

  Mrs. Marshak began dumping everything in her purse onto the table and, frantically counting out change, she said, “Are you ever free in the afternoons? After school? Because sometimes I like to go bird-watching.”

  “You don’t have to walk me to the subway, Mr. Marshak,” I said.

  He was standing at the side window, the one that almost looked out onto Central Park, and without turning around, he said, “Octagonal.”

  “What?”

  “Octagonal. The paving stones along Central Park West are octagonal. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  The next week I did get a call from Mrs. Marshak. Just as she had said, she was asking me to come after school; she wanted to go bird-watching. “Ted’s out on the Coast,” she said. “Big Sur, he’s not sure when he’ll be back.”

  Since this meant I would be going in the same direction as Simone, I decided I might as well tell her. She was standing outside her locker, finishing up an argument with her lockermate about socialized medicine.

  “My father does not rob anyone,” the lockermate was saying. “He sometimes works in a clinic and he even makes housecalls after dinner.”

  “You can never justify what your father does. He dares to take money for what are simply the givens of human existence.”

  “Simone,” I said, “I’m going to be in your neighborhood this afternoon. I’m baby-sitting for Ted Marshak, and they live right around the corner from you.”

  “Oh, I know that building,” Simone said. “It’s a slum. I baby-sit for someone there, too. Anita Selden—she’s divorced and she’s very boring. She keeps all her old love letters in one corner of her drawer and all her divorce stuff in the other, and all she ever has in her diary is what she says to her analyst.”

  “In her diary? What does she say?”

  “She has these fat twin boys, and she keeps worrying that they’ll have buck teeth. And now she has a new one. She’s afraid that they’re stupid and they won’t get into any private school.”

  “Are they stupid?”

  “Oh, you know. Bourgeois. Trivial. Like her.”

  In the Marshaks’ apartment, a confusing variety of cartoon animals were quacking and meowing their way across the TV set. They fell down cliffs and pounced on each other while Sascha slept on the floor and Pietro played with his dump truck. Only Mrs. Marshak, field glasses around her neck, stared at the screen and laughed as if she would not be able to tear herself away.

  “I just love him,” she said, finally walking off toward the door. She put on an old trench coat and still managed to look as if she were about to go fox-hunting.

  Who? I wondered. Who did she love? I knew I would not be able to figure it out, but as for the rest of it, there was a certain logic: while she was out spying on birds, inside her house I would do some watching of my own. Most of all, I wanted to know what was happening to Murray Tabak, and in what way his Chemistry was Set, but with the children around, I did not dare. I walked over to the raffia basket by the phone; there was the same rotting apple, but beside it was a foreign airform I had not seen before.

  Dear Sunny,

  You can’t imagine how excited I am that you’re coming to England! It’ll be a great place for Ted to finish his book, he’ll have no trouble getting Dex. Rafe is at the studio all the time and I hardly get to see him. I sit in the park with the kids and am practically the only actual mother here. All they have here are Nannies, or worse, au pair girls—gorgeous and foreign who make me feel like an ancient hag. When you come, we’ll be able to sit in the park together, we’ll help you find a place. How much $$ did Ted get, it’s not cheap here, not like Greece. Let me know details and plans.

  Love,

  Barbara

  P.S. BBC people are awful, they keep saying I have a southern accent which is ridiculous since I haven’t lived there since I was a baby practically.

  So the Marshaks were going to England and this was my last chance. I was just deciding to go into Ted Marshak’s study when I heard the front door open. What had happened to all the birds? Was this the only time they could think of to fly South and brush up on their accents?

  But it was not Sunny. Instead, holding on to an old duffel bag, and wearing a bright yellow slicker, was Ted Marshak. He stood in the dim entrance, the shininess of his slicker the only light in the whole hallway.

  “Where’s Sunny?”

  “She went bird-watching. How was Big Sur?”

  “Big Sur,” he said as if he were simply repeating nonsense syllables. “Big Sur.”

  “Daddy! Daddy!” the children began yelling, running over and jumping up on him.

  “Daddy was in Milwaukee,” he said. “Daddy saw Grandma, and Daddy saw Aunt Marilyn, and Daddy brought you presents.” He unzipped the duffel bag and took out two matching sailor-style playsuits with the price tags still attached, and several large wrapped packages.

  “Guess which is from Grandma and which is from Aunt Marilyn.” His voice had become very cocky; he was not talking to his children, but to me.

  “And look what Grandma sent for Mommy! Another present!” Out of the duffel bag came a two-pound box of chocolate mint creams and a small bottle of dietetic French dressing. “My mother,” he said. “Jesus Christ. My mother.”

  “I guess I’ll go,” I said. “As long as you’re home, they don’t need a baby-sitter.”

  “Wait a minute, I’ll walk you to the subway. I have to get cigarettes.”

  “Are you going to leave them alone?”

  “For five minutes? To get cigarettes? Are you my mother?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m Aunt Marilyn.”

  All the way down in the elevator, neither Ted Marshak nor I spoke. Finally, not looking at me, he said, “We’re going to England.”

  I could not tell him that I already knew, so I settled on saying, “That’s very nice.”

  “Nice? Nice? Do you have any idea of what this means? Do you have any idea of what it could be like for me? Do you know what my father is? Do you know what he does for a living?”

  Of course I knew: he owned a hardware store in a bad neighborhood in Milwaukee.

  “He’s a glazier,” he said. “You know that old vaudeville joke—when someone’s standing in the way, they say: Did you think I could see through you? Is your father a glazier? That’s what it’ll be like for me in England. My father is a glazier.”

  We were already at the subway entrance; I took out my train pass and was trying to juggle it with my books, sneakers, and oboe case.

  “Good-by, Mr. Marshak,” I said.

  “It’s blinding.”

  “What?”

  “The glare,” he said. “The glare is blinding.”

  All the way down Central Park West, the sun, getting in its last licks of the day, was eating its way from one tall window to another, and flashing down off the high metal of cars and buses as they drove off—home and away.

  Anita Selden, the diary-keeping mother of the fat twin boys remarried: an eye doctor, so that if her sons have turned out to have astigmatism instead of buck teeth, they’re set for life.

  Simone Frydman, on a summer visit with her Milanese cousins, met a friend of theirs, an architect from Turin named Claudio Levi. She did not marry him, but decided to live in Italy; I still hear from her occasionally when she comes to New York.

  And Ted Marshak? For years afterward I looked in book stores for Chemistry/Set. I never saw it or heard of it, but if it was a good bookstore, I would find a copy of Knives in the poetry section just the way it always had been.

  That whole period in my life is not one I like to think about very often, but recently, going to the Shakespeare Festival in the park, I had to walk along Central Park West. The paving stones were still octagonal, and in the draining late-afternoon heat, what I saw all around me were girls with long hair a
nd dangling earrings slipping out from the side streets and the heavy, canopied buildings. They wore peasant blouses, serapes, Mexican belts, and chunky sandals: that uniform, once the peculiar distinctiveness of our adolescence, had passed into “fashion.”

  Bicycle-riding was in fashion, too, and looking out into the street, among the swerving riders, it seemed to me that I saw Ted Marshak. His hair, once so extreme and outstanding, would no longer set him apart, and the man on the bike, despite long, dark curls, was bald on the top of his head. I stared for as long as I could, trying to make up my mind, but the glare was blinding. In what place the Marshaks live now, I could not begin to guess.

  Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary

  ONLY A STONE COULD have thought up the waiting room of a psychiatric clinic as a place to meet for lunch. To make sure, at least, that nobody would think she was a patient, Naomi’s aunt wore a certain blue flowered outfit with velvet trim which, from years before, she was used to taking out only for the High Holidays or sometimes funerals. These clothes turned out to be not a good idea: sitting by herself in the empty light of a fall day, they brought back the beginnings of years that looked no better backward than forward. Luckily, there was nobody watching. At the Reception Desk the two Puerto Rican secretaries did not once look up, but went on drinking coffee from big paper cups. With their curly heads close together, they typed and giggled, giggled and typed, so that between the quick bells of their typewriters and the ringings of different phones, all they seemed to do was fill up the shiny, silent hospital space with ridiculous tropical bird calls. Aside from them, there was only one person who passed through the empty waiting room—a tall woman in a tan pantsuit and a beauty-parlor face, she wrapped a scarf around her head as if there were a mirror in front of her and, with this easy look, went right out to get a taxi.

  Finally, from the far end of the long hallway came a thin girl who did look like someone getting out of a psychiatrist’s office. Her walk was slow and distracted, and a loose smock or raincoat that was weighted down in the pocket kept waving out around her legs. One sloppy blondish braid was swinging on her shoulders, and with her head down, glasses kept slipping from her face. It was no surprise that she wore no makeup and, worse, had a long black pin clipped crookedly to the upper pocket of this odd raincoat that did not begin to fit. The thin girl got herself into the middle of the small waiting room itself, and Naomi’s aunt saw that the long white coat was no raincoat, and that on the crooked black pin it said, N. DUBIN M.D. PSYCHIATRY.

  “Naomi!” the aunt said, jumping up from a green plastic chair that could easily have come from the office of a dentist with no eye for the future.

  “I know,” Naomi said. “My pantie-hose are crooked. I’ll go into the ladies’ room and fix them.”

  “When did I—”

  “All right, then, I’ll go into the men’s room and fix them,” Naomi said, and pulling out a bunch of keys from the weighted-down pocket, she locked herself into a room that was only marked STAFF.

  There were no years in between: who but Naomi could so quickly, immediately, lock herself into a room, any room, and without any notice just disappear? She even looked the same—the same sleepy eyes and sharp features that always made her look like a girl you couldn’t quite recognize because she hadn’t come close enough. Even the messy hair and glasses were the same. People always said she must have been golden-blond as a child, but this was not true. The same dirty-blond braids hung down Naomi’s back in a picture from when she was five years old. In this picture she was sitting on a llama in the Bronx Zoo and, wearing a dress that had once been perfect on Toby, Naomi, with her braids and her glasses, sat making faces in the sun. Right in front of the llama, sweating and holding on to a bag—probably popcorn that Naomi never finished—was her father. His sleepy eyes and round glasses passed from his face to her face exactly, and what else could have come from him was hard to tell. Despite the calm, sleepy blondness that ran all through his family—stringing out on his side a line of anemic, whispering, dirty-blond children—it was his maniac brother-in-law who managed, in his off-duty cab on a Sunday, also in the fall, to jump over a divider on the Belt Parkway. Left in this cab was a new bed for Naomi and three dead people: both of her parents and the maniac brother-in-law himself. Not in the cab were Naomi and Michael, Bluma’s two children, one twelve, the other seven, both alive, both impossible, one a stone, the other a boy who in seven years had learned how to do one thing: kick.

  “Look,” their uncle tried to explain to them at the time, to try to make them feel a little better. “Look, you’re not the first ones this happened to. When I was a little boy in Europe, my mother died at the same time that I was born so that I never even knew her, and my father died when I was five.” But all the kicker did was kick the refrigerator right through the wall so that complaints came from the neighbors and the landlord, and he had to go and live with an aunt on his father’s side who had a private house in Jamaica. And the stone, already on her way out, already disappearing to a friend’s house, slammed a door and said, “In Europe that’s supposed to happen. That’s the whole point of not being there.”

  People also said she looks so quiet, she looks so serious, but these were not people who ever had to hear her open a mouth or slam a door, and did not stop to think that this was what, for twelve years, her own mother had had to put up with and did not have the energy or inclination to ever try to stop.

  “Naomi, are you the only one who feels bad?” the aunt had said on that day, having to run all the way out to the elevator just to catch up with her. “After all, she was my only sister. And what about your cousin Toby? The only aunts she has left now are on her father’s side, and both of them are in Argentina.”

  “If you just keep crying onto the table, you’ll just have to keep on sponging it up,” and there, on the day of the funeral, she ran off to have supper at her friend Lenore’s.

  “You’re wearing your Tashlich dress,” said N. Dubin M.D., who had fixed up her braid and put on some lipstick and still looked no more than sixteen. “What sins were you planning to get rid of?” She twirled past the bathroom in her white coat, walked toward a new door, and was ready again to be disappearing.

  “Naomi, do you really remember that? When we went to the Reservoir and threw in the bread crumbs?” It was the one thing she would remember: she used to sit in the high, coarse grass near the Reservoir, getting her holiday clothes grass-stained and filthy, staring and staring for no reason at the plain blue water and the white concrete banks. “The Romans built reservoirs, only they called them aqueducts,” she said, without question on purpose to make Toby, who was older, feel bad for something she did not know. “Shh, not when you can see that people are praying,” was all her mother would tell her, because to Bluma only one thing had ever stood out—that her daughter had a “reicheh shprach.” A rich language. To whom she spoke this rich language was anyone’s guess. Inside, Naomi sat stone-silent like all the Dubins, looking out at people from her round, cloudy glasses, or if she happened to be standing in the sun, squinting up at them with the crookedness of a beggar. Not like her father’s family, whose pale, blurry quietness sat in her simply for the look—a disguise; finally, when you least expected it and when there was absolutely no reason, her whiny voice would sneak out like a mimic’s—that was the “reicheh shprach.” As it turned out, there was one way in which Bluma may have been right: Naomi was very good in languages, a girl to whom Hebrew teachers lent records and French teachers gave awards.

  “Do you remember how you and Toby used to run ahead sometimes and come back nagging for ice cream even though you knew you couldn’t have it?”

  She was paying no attention: despite her sleepy eyes and slow walk, Naomi pulled out a black notebook and looked at her watch.

  “The elevator isn’t quicker,” she said, and, taking out her keys again, unlocked a different door that turned out to be a stairway. Once, a few years before, when Mark Turkel, a neighbor’s son, had fin
ally gotten a part in an off-Broadway play, the aunt had gone backstage with his mother. Strange doors had opened and closed, pieces of staircases jumped out of the woodwork, and rushing people in costumes bumped into each other without apologies. It was this same feeling she had now, walking behind Naomi through shiny corridors that did not end. Arrows and signs flashed through the hallways, oxygen tanks got raced over tiles, and doctors and nurses, outfitted like children for Assembly, passed beside bodies on stretchers; sometimes they nodded.

  “Naomi, how do you know where you’re going? You—who could get lost on your way to the corner to get a loaf of bread. It drove your mother crazy. Remember?” Nearly running—heavy in her mistake dress—the aunt was trying to catch up with Naomi, who would not stop looking as if she had something else on her mind, something that had to be done in a hurry.

  “This is the Coffee Shop,” was all she finally said, and, pushing open a door that said EXIT, nodded in her colorless, distant way at a Chinese boy in a white suit and a stethoscope.

  “I heard that they have a lot of foreign doctors working in hospitals.”

  “He’s not foreign, he’s from San Francisco.” Naomi grabbed on to a table that was still loaded down with somebody else’s leftover lunch and said, “Decide what you want to eat or we’ll be here forever. Don’t get the tuna fish.”

  “I’m not really that hungry,” the aunt said, still not even sure of the round plastic chair she was trying not to slide out of. “That wasn’t my idea of this altogether. Anyway, since when do you eat lunch? The only thing you ever liked was French toast, and even that you threw away half of. Remember?”

  “BLT on toast and black coffee,” said Naomi to a waitress in a yellow dress who was there suddenly, and before the aunt could even say, “I think I’ll have an egg,” a redheaded girl, even younger than Naomi, was standing at the table, saying, “Dr. Dubin, there was a message for you. Dr. Fortgang wants you to prepare Mrs. Grossbard for ECT.”