Hilda and Pearl (34 page)

She sat there for a long time. Moonlight made boxes on the blanket and half-lit her in her pajamas. “Hey,” she said, the way Mike would say it—awkwardly.

Then she drew me into the curve of her arm and lay down close to me. I was embarrassed, but I put my arm around her. Then I was so happy I tried not to breathe, as if she might think that the pressure of my chest moving in and out was a signal for her to go away. I wanted time to stop.

After that some things were different. I noticed that all three of us took off all our clothes without going into the bathroom. Every day Pearl and I went for a walk on the beach, usually with Frances. Gussie never came with us, but sometimes Frances stayed behind with her. “You two should be in pictures,” Gussie said to us when we came in laughing from the beach one day.

“In pictures?” I said.

“The Something Sisters. Hey, you're sort of sisters, aren't you? What's your last name again?”

We explained that we had different last names even though our husbands were brothers, that Mike had changed his name years ago. “Oh, I remember,” she said. I was confused; I didn't remember even telling her our husbands were brothers. Then I realized Pearl must have told her. “Pearl Lewis and Hilda Levenson,” Gussie said. “The L Sisters.” Her voice was slightly bitter.

Gussie thought we should sing, and somehow plans for singing began to be made. Harold, the man of the young couple, said he knew lots of good songs. He brought out a guitar and it turned out he could sing Woody Guthrie songs about electrical dams and power stations and we gathered in the evening to sing. One night somebody made popcorn. We were singing union songs when I went out to check on Frances, who was asleep, and when I came back Pearl and Harold were singing a duet, and then he kissed her. His wife wasn't there that night for some reason. I think if she had been, it wouldn't have seemed like anything.

After a while Pearl said “I'm sleepy” and leaned against me. I stroked her hair, but she stayed only a minute and then said quietly to me, “Let's go for a walk.” We walked out onto the lawn. It was a warm night, but I was chilly, and Pearl said she'd get sweaters and check on Frances again. While I waited, I sat down in the hammock, leaned back in it, looking at the moon, which was past full by now. The hammock felt rough under me. It was stiff canvas, not very wide. I pulled my feet in and tucked them under me. When Pearl came I didn't get up, and she tossed me my sweater, which I spread over me like a blanket. Pearl tried to climb into the other end of the hammock, but she spilled me out, and I fell on the ground. We both laughed.

“Stop it, they'll come running,” she said, and this time we held hands and lowered ourselves carefully into the two ends of the hammock, and pulled in our legs one at a time. “Okay, right leg,” said Pearl. “Now my left. Now your left.” When she pulled in her second leg the hammock was crowded and swayed hard, like a boat in a storm. We held on to the edges. The moon had gone behind a cloud and it was dark.

“I'm glad I came along on this vacation,” Pearl said.

“You gave Harold quite a kiss.”

“I wondered what you thought.”

“It's none of my business.”

“I'm not going to fall for Harold,” she said. “Don't worry. I'm inoculated.”

We rocked back and forth. “Did you ever get over Nathan?” I asked at last.

“Really get over him?”

“Yes.”

“No, I didn't,” she said. Then after a moment she said, “But I'd rather have you.”

“You can have me trouble-free,” I said.

“Yes. Nobody cares.”

I was silent for a while. “I care,” I said.

“That's not what I meant. You know that's not what I meant, Hildie.”

The next day was the last day of our vacation. On the beach we were alone. Gussie told Frances she was going through her old clothes and Frances could try them on and pretend to be a princess. They treated Frances a little like a princess there, in fact. She was always being singled out. I thought it made her shy, but she wanted to stay with Gussie.

Pearl and I walked slowly down to the beach. It was a chilly day and she was wearing striped pants—green and white stripes—and an old brown jacket. She leaned over for some shells and began sorting them. I looked out at Long Island Sound. It was gray and foggy, and I couldn't see very far. “My father brought me to a place like this once,” I said. It had just come to me.

“Around here?”

“I don't remember where it was.”

“Was your mother alive then?”

“Yes, but she didn't come. It was just my father and me. He carried me on a beach. I remember that the stones hurt my feet.”

We walked for a while. “I forget how old you were when your mother died,” said Pearl.

“Fourteen.”

“It must have been terrible.”

“By then I knew she'd die,” I said.

“Was she sick for a long time?”

“A year.” I thought I'd told her before, but I was pleased that she asked. I felt like talking about my mother. “I remember one of the last times she took care of me,” I said. “She was in bed, and she called me to come to her and sat up a little so she could brush my hair and braid it. But it was funny, I'd been braiding my own hair for a while by then and I didn't like the way she did it. You know how when you braid someone's hair from behind, the braids go down the back. Well, I thought it was more grownup the way I did it myself, down the sides.”

“I remember,” said Pearl. “I had braids, too.”

“Of course. That long braid.” I remembered when she had cut it off. I started to laugh at her. “That must have been so much trouble, cutting it off. You were such a fool, Pearlie.”

“I remember you thought so at the time.”

“I thought I'd have to go picking up after the two of you all my life.”

We had turned back. When we reached the house we stopped for Frances and then we all took a nap together. I was a little sunburned, though it had been cloudy on the beach. The skin of my face and arms felt tight and a little gritty. I lay happily in the lumpy soft bed between Pearl and Frances, who both fell asleep. I stretched my toes out, reaching down to rub away the sand that had caught between them.

But there was one more night. We bought a big chicken and invited everyone. We hadn't been cooking with Gussie for several days. She'd made different excuses. That day she said she'd be sure to come, but she didn't. The rest of us ate together at the big table, and we had a good time. Gussie came in when we were nearly done, but she said she'd eaten. After dinner we all went into the living room and Harold took out his guitar and began to play, but it was as if someone had asked us to restage one of our other nights so it could be looked at. His wife seemed upset and I thought they might be having a fight. There was an older woman staying there then, Mrs. Engel, and she sat and crocheted and smiled at everyone, but insisted she couldn't sing. “I'm a good listener,” she said.

Frances was still up. She kept asking for “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and at last we sang it. We were Dodger fans, being from Brooklyn, but Gussie was a Yankee fan. She teased Frances about it, although Frances barely understood. Frances knew she was for the Dodgers, and she knew the song, but I'm not sure she knew what the Dodgers were, although Nathan often listened to the game at home.

As we sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” Gussie leaned over to where Frances was sitting cross-legged on the floor, and said, over and over again, “Yankees, Yankees, Yankees,” and sure enough, when we reached the line “Root, root, root,” we all sang “for the Dodgers” and Frances and Gussie sang “for the Yankees.” Frances noticed what she had said and looked startled; then I saw that she was crying.

“It doesn't matter,” I said, leaning over to talk to her. “Gussie's just teasing you. It's just a song.”

When the song ended Pearl said to Gussie, “Don't you think you overdid that a bit?” She sounded angry.

“Fran's my buddy,” said Gussie. “You don't care, do you, honey?”

Frances shook her head, but she still looked blubbery.

Then Gussie said to Pearl, “What do
you
care, anyway? She's not your kid.” I turned around. Gussie was looking at Pearl, her eyes sharp and cold. “Or is she? Or can't you keep it straight, who's who in your family—who are the husbands and wives, who are the men and who are the women?”

She said it in an ugly voice, and Harold turned and looked at her. A moment later he asked whether there was any popcorn and said he was finally going to learn how to make it. Mrs. Engel continued to smile and look around her. I stumbled out and went for some toilet paper to wipe Frances's nose. Then I picked her up and said over her protests that she had to go to bed. Pearl came in ten minutes later.

“What did you tell her?” I said.

“Now or before?”

“Both.”

“I didn't tell her anything. I've just been sitting there. I talked to Mrs. Engel.”

“But before,” I said. “You didn't say anything to Gussie about—about things that happened in the past?”

“Of course not,” said Pearl. “Why would I do that?”

“You must have.”

“But I didn't.”

But of course she had.

Frances was eight when we began going away for a month in the summer, not to Long Island but to a bungalow colony in the Adirondacks. Many people who stayed there were Jewish teachers. We went back every year. Frances learned to swim in the lake. Nathan half relaxed—there were people he could talk to. It was the start of the McCarthy years, and from the first, I think, he knew what was going to happen.

At a hotel near where we stayed, fund-raisers for the Teachers Union were held, and everyone would load up in a couple of cars and go. Folk singers sang old European songs and the political songs we'd grown up on.

There was some tension at the bungalow colony. People whispered about one person or another. The manager of the place was a charming bachelor whose name wasn't Jewish. People said he'd changed it and even that he was some sort of spy for the Board of Education, which had begun investigating Communists in the schools.

There was some suspicion of Mike, too—maybe even one or two people who remembered his taking notes at Party meetings years before. Or maybe it was just because Mike argued with everyone he met. “That's
ridiculous
,” I'd hear him say from across the beach, the pitch of his voice rising. He and Pearl and Simon would come for a week every summer and crowd in with us. Pearl and I would stay up late talking as if we didn't see each other all the time at home.

The spring before Nathan lost his job, I thought he was trying to slow time. He'd come home later and later each afternoon, and then not change out of his suit. There was always chalk dust on him, as if he wanted to save it. I thought I ought to gather it in an envelope, the way I'd saved Frances's baby teeth and, earlier, Racket's small white shoes, which were still in my bottom drawer; sometimes, searching for an old sweater, my fingers would touch the paper bag I'd put them into. The paper was old and soft, and when I felt it I wouldn't remember for a moment what it was.

When the term ended in June of 1953, Nathan was somber, and I could sense that each thing he did—mark the grade reports, fill out the forms teachers fill out at the end of the year—had taken on a sacred quality. He'd be back in the fall, but it might be his last June as a teacher—and in fact it was. “What will you do—” I tried to say. He shook his head. He had no idea what he'd do if he lost his job. I knew he thought he should have a plan, out of prudence, but he didn't.

I didn't want to worry Frances about Nathan's job. I didn't want her thinking Nathan was some sort of criminal. I didn't know what a child would think. She was eleven. Most of the time she seemed busy with her friends and dolls. Sometimes she was quiet. Once I found a sheet of loose-leaf paper that had fallen from her notebook. “Ways to Help Mommy and Daddy” she had written at the top. She'd numbered ten lines but had written down only two ways: “I. Help with the dishes. 2. Don't say things that remind them of things.”

One night when Pearl and Mike were with us at the lake, Pearl and I sat up talking. Everyone was in bed except the two of us. We were sitting on the steps of the cabin. It was the only place we could be alone, and there we were bitten by mosquitoes, but Simon was asleep (we hoped) on the screened porch behind us; we couldn't go there.

“You should tell her,” said Pearl. She was eating a peach in the dark, and I could hear each bite.

“What do you mean, tell her? What do you want me to say?”

“Tell her the whole story. Tell her about Nathan and the Party, in the thirties, and what's happening now.”

“Oh, she knows all that,” I said.

“I don't think so.”

“I don't want to worry her.”

“Hilda,” said Pearl, “Frances worries. She worries all the time anyway. Can't you see that?”