Love Invents Us (2 page)

He smiled, just slightly, and I laughed out loud. He’s on my side.

Almost every morning now, he gave me a ride to school. Without any negotiating that I remember, I knew that on Monday afternoons I would miss my bus and he would pick me up as I walked down Arrandale Avenue. I would keep him company while he did whatever he did in the back room and I tried on hats. After a few Mondays I eyed the coats.

“Of course,” he said. “When you’re grown up, you’ll tell your husband, ‘Get me a sable from Klein’s. It’s Klein’s or nothing.’ ” He waggled a finger sternly, showing me who I
would be: a pretty young woman with a rich, indulgent husband. “Let me help you.”

Mr. Klein slipped an ash-blonde mink jacket over my sweatshirt and admired me aloud. Soon after, he stopped going into the workroom, and soon after that, I began taking off my clothes. The pleasure on Mr. Klein’s face made me forget everything I heard in the low tones of my parents’ conversation and everything I saw in my own mirror. I chose to believe Mr. Klein.

At home, to conjure up the feeling of Mr. Klein’s cool round fingertips on my shoulders, touching me lightly before the satin lining descended, I listened to classical music. My father made approving snorts behind
The Wall Street Journal
.

I lay on the floor of the living room, behind the biggest couch, and saw myself playing the piano, adult and beautifully formed. I am wearing a dress I saw on Marilyn Monroe, the sheerest clinging net, with sparkling stones coming up over the tips of my breasts and down between my legs. I am moving slowly across the stage, the wide hem of my sable cape shaping a series of round, dark waves. I hand the cape to an adoring Mr. Klein, slightly improved and handsomely turned out in a tuxedo cut just like my father’s.

My mother stepped over me and then stopped. I was eye to toe with her tiny pink suede loafers and happy to stay that way. Her round blue eyes and her fear of wrinkles made her stare as harsh and haunting as the eyeless Greek heads she’d put in my father’s study.

“Keeping busy, are you, Elizabeth?”

I couldn’t imagine what prompted this. My mother usually acted as though I had been raised by a responsible, affectionate
governess; guilt and love were as foreign to her as butter and sugar.

“Yeah. School, books.” I studied the little gold bar across the tongue of her right loafer.

“And all is well?”

“Fine. Everything’s fine.”

“You wouldn’t like to study an instrument, would you? Piano? Perhaps a piano in the library. That could be attractive. An older piece, deep browns, a maroon paisley shawl, silver picture frames. Quite attractive.”

“I don’t know. Can I think about it?” I didn’t mind being part of my mother’s endless redecorating; in the past, her domestic fantasies had produced my queen-size brass bed, which I loved, and a giant Tudor dollhouse, complete with chiming doorbell and working shower.

“Of course, think it over. Let’s make a decision next week, shall we?” She started to touch my hair and patted me on the shoulder instead.

I didn’t see Mr. Klein until the following Monday. I endured four mornings at the bus stop: leaves stuffed down my shirt, books knocked into the trash can, lunch bag tossed from boy to boy. Fortunately, the bus driver was a madman, and his rageful mutterings and yelping at invisible assailants captured whatever attention might have come my way once we were on the bus.

It was raining that Monday, and I wondered if I should walk anyway. I never thought about the fact that: Mr. Klein and I had no way to contact each other. I could only wait, in silence. I pulled up my hood and started walking down Arrandale, waiting for a blue streak to come past my left side,
waiting for the slight skid of wet leaves as Mr. Klein braked to a stop. Finally, much closer to home than usual, the car came.

“You’re almost home,” he said. “Maybe I should just take you home? We can go to the store another time.” He looked rushed and unhappy.

“Sure, if you don’t have time, that’s okay.”

“I have the time,
tsatskela
. I have the time.” He turned the car around and drove us back to Furs by Klein.

I got out and waited in the rain while he unlocked the big black doors.

“You’re soaking wet,” he said harshly. “You should have taken the bus.”

“I missed it,” I lied. If he wasn’t going to admit that he wanted me to miss the bus, I wasn’t going to admit that I had missed it for him.

“Yes, you miss the bus, I pick you up. Lizbet, you are a very special girl, and standing around an old man’s shop in wet clothes is not what you should be doing.”

What I usually did was stand around in no clothes at all, but I could tell that Mr. Klein, like most adults, was now working only from his version of the script.

I sat down uneasily at the little table with the swiveling gilt-framed mirror, ready to try on hats. Without Mr. Klein’s encouragement, I wouldn’t even look at the coats. He didn’t hand me any hats.

He pressed his thin sharp face deep into the side of my neck, pushing my sweatshirt aside with one hand. I looked in the mirror and saw my own round wet face, comic in its surprise and pink glasses. I saw Mr. Klein’s curly grey hair and a bald spot I would have never discovered otherwise.

“Get your coat.” He rubbed his face with both hands and stood by the door.

“I don’t have a coat.”

“They let you go in the rain, with no coat?
Gottenyu
. Let’s go, please.” He held the door open for me and I had to walk through it.

The chocolate wasn’t my usual Belgian slab. It was a deep gold-foil box tied with pink and gold wisps, and topped with a cluster of sparkling gold berries. He dropped it in my lap like something diseased.

I held on to the box, stroking the fairy ribbons, until he told me to open it.

Each of the six chocolates had a figure on top. Three milk, three bittersweet, each one carved with angel wings or a heart or a white-rimmed rose. In our fat-free home, my eating habits were regarded as criminal. My parents would no more have bought me beautiful chocolates than gift-wrapped a gun for a killer.

“Lizbet …”

He looked out the window at the rain and I looked up at him quickly. I had obviously done something wrong, and although my parents’ anger and chagrin didn’t bother me a bit, his unhappiness was pulling me apart. I crushed one of the chocolates with my fingers, and Mr. Klein saw me.

“Nah, nah,” he said softly, wiping my fingers with his handkerchief. He cleared his throat. “My schedule’s changing. I won’t be able to give you rides after school. I’m going to open the shop on Mondays.”

“How about in the morning?” I didn’t know I could talk through this kind of pain.

“I don’t think so. I need to get in a little earlier. It’s not so bad, you should ride with other boys and girls. You’ll see, you’ll have a good time.”

I sat there sullenly, ostentatiously mashing the chocolates.

“Too bad, they’re very nice chocolates. Teuscher’s. Remember, sable from Klein’s, chocolate from Teuscher’s. Only the best for you. I’m telling you, only the best.”

“I’m not going to have a good time on the bus.” I didn’t mash the last chocolate, I just ran a fingertip over the tiny ridges of the rosebud.

“Maybe not. I shouldn’t have said you’d have a good time. I’m sorry.” He sighed and looked away.

I bit into the last chocolate. “Here, you have some too.”

“No, they’re for you. They were all for you.”

“I’m not that hungry. Here.” I held out the chocolate half, and he lowered his head, startling me. I put my fingers up to his narrow lips, and he took the chocolate neatly between his teeth. I could feel the very edge of his teeth against my fingers.

We pulled up in front of my house, and he put his hand over mine, for just one moment.

“I’ll say it again, only the best is good enough for you. So, we’ll say au revoir, Lizbet. Elizabeth. Not good-bye.”

“Au revoir. Thank you very much for the chocolates.” My mother’s instructions surfaced at odd times.

I left my dripping sneakers on the brick floor, dropped my wet clothes into my lilac straw hamper, and took my very first voluntary shower. I dried off slowly, watching myself in the steamy mirror. When I didn’t come down for dinner, my mother found me, naked and quiet, deep in my covers.

“Let’s get the piano,” I said.

I started lessons with Mr. Canetti the next week. He served me wine-flavored cookies instead of chocolate. One day he bent forward to push my sleeves back over my aching wrists, and I saw my beautiful self take shape in his eyes. I loved him, too.

I
found comfort in the red, shy eyes of Mr. Klein and Mr. Canetti, and I found it in Franks Five and Dime. I didn’t think of it as stealing; I didn’t brag about it to other kids, not that I talked to them anyway, and I didn’t pray for forgiveness. It was just Taking. Every school day I took Necco wafers and a Heath bar from Frank’s. It was a long, dim box of a room; the candy racks were in front of the cash register, halfway down the left wall facing a heavy glass case, five shelves filled with Madame Alexander dolls and their hats and shoes and luggage sets. I walked in ten minutes before school started most days and cruised the shop, pausing in front of the doll case, looking for the little knot of businessmen and newspapers to stand behind. I was a terrible thief, slow and sticky and predictable. Without my round, trusting face and geeky glasses, I would never have gotten as far as I did. I put the Neccos, shifting in their glassy opaque tube, into my lunch bag and held the Heath bar in my coat pocket. It was easily unwrapped, one blind finger sliding under the smooth brown back flap. Once, my pocket lining was torn and I had to tuck it in the waistband of my panties and get it out during coatroom
time. I smelled of anxious sweat and chocolate all day.

I got caught. Frank wrapped his huge hand around my wrist and squeezed until I dropped my lunch bag on the counter. He took out the candy, and I said, my mind blank with humiliation, that I had intended to pay for it.

“Sure you did. Every day you come in here. For this. Get outta here and don’t come back.”

Ellyn and Cindi Kramer stood in the doorway, listening openmouthed, and looked at me with real pleasure as I walked between them. It could have been worse; he could have telephoned my parents, who surely would have made me go to the psychiatrist I’d been ducking for the last year. I didn’t want to talk about what I did and why; I already knew I was crazy. As it was, I entered hell all by myself, like everyone else.

What I did at Mrs. Hill’s wasn’t stealing, either. Stealing was sneaking lipstick from Woolworth’s or blue silk panties from Bee’s Lingerie Shop. After Frank’s, after months of being called a thief by the whole bus, every single day, of being followed down the street by Ellyn and Cindi, catcalling until I reached the hedges that marked our property, I stayed out of candy stores, but I still stole. By the middle of seventh grade, I was casually lining up pens, fluorescent markers, and leather barrettes on one long table in study hall like it was the local flea market. But everything I took from Mrs. Hill I hid in my closet. Every time the doorbell rang I could see two big cops, hands on their guns, standing in my mother’s foyer and calling out my name.

Mrs. Hill was almost blind, she had something-retinitis; there was a hole in the center of her vision, as if someone had
ripped the middle out of every page. If she turned her head way to the right or left, she could just about see my face. When I walked toward her as she sat in the big red vinyl recliner, she would turn her face far to the right; the closer I got, the more she would seem to yearn toward the kitchen. When I was almost upon her, she would smile away from me.

Every Saturday I tidied up Mrs. Hill’s house and made her lunch and dinner. She was my good deed, courtesy of Samuel C. Shales, minister at the Beech Street A.M.E. Zion Church, Where Everybody Is Somebody and Jesus Is Lord Over All. At eleven o’clock on September 16, through the window of my algebra class, I heard gospel music for the first time. Those sweet, meaty sounds led me to a white wood church on a corner my school bus never passed. Each time I had to walk by Reverend Shales’ office, and each time he looked up and kept talking on the phone. I stayed near the church bulletin board, my eyes down, my heart singing like Mahalia Jackson.

Reverend Shales was shorter than I’d thought, and his glasses shimmered in the dusty light.

“Miss? You’re visiting our church again?”

I said yes. He asked my name, my parents’ names, my address, and my school, and however embarrassed I was to be caught lurking in his church hall, he was not sorry to have me there. His eyes shone like black pearls. I seemed like a girl who could offer a little companionship, he said. I could run to the corner store and bring back the right change, couldn’t I? I wasn’t above a little light cleaning, was I? He invited me to come and listen to the choir whenever I liked, and at the same time take the opportunity, the special opportunity to serve, to
offer Christian charity to a very sweet, very lovely elderly lady a few doors down. He led me out the church door and pointed down the street to the small white house with the patchy lawn and the listing porch.

“I’ll phone Miz Hill to say you’re on your way. You are on your way now, young lady.” And he put his big hand on the small of my back and pushed. He said Go, and I went.

Crinkly, lifeless grey curls floated up and across Mrs. Hill’s grey-brown scalp, winging out over her ears. What must have been round, brown eyes had become opaque beige slits, like two additional spots of smooth skin in her dark puckered face. She had seven housedresses, and her doctor daughter came home twice a year from the great, safe distance of California and replaced them all. Mrs. Hill did not rotate them as Dr. Hill intended; she wore the pink one all week, and when it was stiff with sweat and moisturizer and medicated cream for her eczema, she threw it in the hamper for me to wash. On Saturdays she wore the purple housedress, and I didn’t blame her a bit. It was the least practical of them; instead of a cotton-poly mix, it was soft velour, and the pull on the end of the zipper was a purple and yellow sunflower, as though van Gogh had gotten loose in the Sears catalog. In her purple sunflower robe, Mrs. Hill told my fortune.