Other People's Lives (18 page)

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.

W
HAT 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 away 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?”

“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.”