Prayers for the Living (38 page)

Physically she changed too, from the Little Miss Roly-Poly to the thin girl, almost tall, still always though with her mother's coloring, the pale red hair, the freckles—oh, and does she hate these freckles! When they first came out she once asked me if she could use tarnish remover like from the silverware to get rid of her freckles.

“Tarnish?” I say to her. “What's with the tarnish? You got no tarnish to remove, darling.”

“I do,” she chirps up like a little bird. “I do, I do.” And she rubs her knuckles into her freckles, and she starts to cry.

“You're a beautiful girl and you don't need to remove nothing,” was the way I comforted her. And I wasn't lying. I was saying the truth. She's got her mother's height, just as tall as her father who is a man of medium height, wouldn't you say? But the men tend to be taller than the women, and here she is getting almost to be a woman and nearly as tall as her father, which is all right, don't you think? And no more Miss Roly-Poly, though. In fact, I wish she would eat a lot more than she does. Thin is the god these girls worship today—not like in the old days when a man wanted to feel a pinch of fat between his fingers when he gave your waist a good squeeze. But nowadays, modern days, you never can tell one minute from the next what's going to be in fashion and what's not. So that for example my Manny's dark suits, the kind he's always worn ever since he got out of the seminary, these too may be in fashion for the men in the big companies when they see year after year how he wears only these and how it brings him success.

But oh yes, the move, the girl. I was telling, before I got caught up in the ride in the elevator, the heights up here, the view, did you see the view? I used to see it before more clear than now, it is so beautiful, at night especially, I don't need my eyes, I got my memories. The girl? Yes, where's the girl? She's out now in the night, the dark, she should get back, she should come home. She's not a child now, I know, she's in the college. The college. That was what I was going to talk to you about. Not the college she attends but the college where the boy went. Or still goes. Him I never heard nothing more about after this, at least not from her. But from you I hear plenty.

This was just after the move. The move back across the river and up, up onto these floors. High above. And you know, we should have known how children hate to move, they don't want to leave their friends? they don't want to leave their school? Well, we should have known because she was so happy to hear about the move. We saw
that she was happy and we should have thought—the mother, the father, the grandmother—we should have put our heads together and figured it out, if she is so happy to move from Jersey to the city, it means only one thing, that she is miserable here, and if she is miserable here there must be reasons. But what if we had figured that out? and we discovered we were the reasons? What would we have done? Could we have changed ourselves, changed our lives so that we could make her life better? Who could have the power to do that? Who could find the strength? Who could say, I live this way but it is doing this and that to my child and so I will live another way? You could change? Could I? When the way we live is fixed in the time we live it that goes back to our own parents and their parents and all the way back to Adam and Eve, the first family that ever lived together. They had a nice place to live, they had a garden I understand was very lovely. And they made trouble for themselves. They wouldn't listen to their Father, God. He spoke to them, told them what to eat, what not to eat, but they wouldn't listen. And look at the mess they made for their children. But what if—what if it was God who made the mess for them because He had a mess made for Him by His own parents? If God had parents, I'm telling you, they
must
have made a mess. And if that's not how the world got to be the way it is, then I have no way of explaining.

So. We moved. Up high. Up here.

And Sarah's in her senior year at Dalton School—fancy, schmancy. A uniform even she's got to wear. Like in the Brownies. Miss Schoolgirl.

You can imagine how she looked when she left school that afternoon and took a bus across town and then a subway downtown and got out at Canal Street and stood at the entrance to the tunnel and stuck out her thumb. That's right, stuck out her thumb. When she was little I used to say, stick out your finger, don't let me linger, stick out your thumb, chew me some gum. And she would always say, jumping up and down, up and down so excited she was, stick out your thumb, gee, but you're dumb! Oh, and I'd grab her and tickle her and she'd laugh she'd have so much fun, laugh and laugh
and laugh. So. There she was, sticking out her thumb. And gee, was she dumb? Twenty minutes went by before anyone would stop. They drove by, they slowed down, they looked. You'd think a father would have stopped, some man who had a family and noticed that this girl in her uniform she was so young she couldn't have driven through the tunnel if she had had a car.

Finally a car stops and it's a man in uniform.

“Get in,” he says, opening the door.

She wants to run, but she's trying to get to Jersey, so in she gets and he tells her,

“Close that door.”

And they're driving through the tunnel into Jersey.

“What do you think you're doing,” he's scolding her. “Standing there with your thumb out. Where do you think you're going?”

She's scared. She's thinking, oh, no, he's a Jersey cop and he's taking me over to the other side of the river to arrest me and book me—she knows all the lingo, let me tell you, booked, she knows, and all of those things, from the books she gets it, from the TV, from living in the city—and what am I going to tell Papa?

“Where you going?” the uniformed man behind the wheel asks her in a mean, mean voice.

“To see my brother,” she says.

“Where's your folks?” he shouts again.

“Back there,” she says, jerking her thumb in the direction of the tunnel entrance. Now they're rolling under the river, and she's looking forward at the long tube ahead, the pale yellowish lights on his face, the strange color of his complexion. Suddenly she takes a good look at the patch on the shoulder of his uniform coat.

“You're not a real cop,” she says.

“I am security,” he says. “Now you keep quiet. I want to ask you a few questions.”

She's quiet for a minute, as if waking from a dream and looking around. Or falling into one and looking around. What has she got herself into? she's wondering.

“Now where are you going?”

“To New Brunswick,” she says.

“And do you live there?”

“My brother's there,” she says. “He goes to Rutgers.”

“You're going to visit your brother?”

“That's right.”

Light at the end of the tunnel, and they're coming up onto the road that curves around in New Jersey, with the view of the city, and the rest of the way—a lot of people think this is sad—the rest of the way is Jersey.

“He goes to Rutgers?”

“That's right.”

“And you go to some fancy school in the city?”

“That's right.”

“Which school?”

“Dalton.”

“I never heard of that one.”

“It's just a school.”

“I'll bet.”

“That's all it is.”

“And your brother goes to Rutgers?”

“That's right.”

“And you're going to visit him?”

“You know, if you're not a real cop, I don't see why you think you can ask me all these questions.”

“I ask the questions. Now. What were you doing out there? Were you hooking? Or just playing games?”

“Hooking?”

“That's right.”

“Hooking? You mean . . . ? You've got to be kidding.”

“Am I kidding? You are kidding if you think I don't know what you was up to.”

“I wasn't up to anything except trying to get a ride to New Brunswick.”

“So now you got one.”

“Are you going all the way?”

“I'm going to take you where you want to go. I'm . . .”

“Security,” she finishes for him. This makes him laugh.

“You're a smart little bitch, ain't you?”

“Really,” she says. “What kind of a thing is that to say? This isn't some TV movie, you know.”

“What's that?” he says. “TV movie? What's that? You trying to bullshit me, girl? Well, forget about it, you hear? 'cause along with security, you know what comes?”

“No, what?”

“Along with security comes heavy manners, that's what.”

“What's that?”

“You never heard of heavy manners? At your Dalton School, you never took up the question of revolution in the Caribbean?”

“No, we didn't,” she says. “Next year we're supposed to study American history. We're doing Europe now.”

“Europe,” he says with a snort as they're turning onto the turnpike. Or maybe they're further down the road by now, I'm not sure of this.

“You don't like Europe?”

“Europe,” he says again with a funny sound in his nose. “
Old
shit.”

“My father was born there,” she says.

But the man from security doesn't pay attention to that. He's studying the oil tankers as they're driving past, the factories pumping out smoke, the bridges, the towers, as though it's them he steers by, not the road signs.

“New Brunswick,” he says.

“That's right.”

“I'll take you all the way,” he says.

“Hey,” she says, “thanks. You don't have to.”

“I know I don't have to. But I will.”

“Hey, good,” she says. “Hey, good.”

“Used to have a uncle lived there, in New Brunswick,” he says. “I know the place. University—lots of white kids, some black, a few spics, Italians. You know what I mean?”

“I guess so.”

“Mixed,” he says. “It's a mixed place.”

He glances over at her, as if giving her a sly look, and she notices that in the daylight his skin looks beautiful, like varnished wood. Dark wood. But wood that breathes. She looks at her own pale, freckled hand, the knuckles, the tiny cuticles. This hand she wants to dip in clay and make pots, she's deciding right then and there. Don't ask why. Maybe because she's riding down the middle of the ugliest part of Jersey and she wants to make beautiful things to stand against the filth and the dirt and the smoke and the fire. Could it be? She asked herself but didn't get an answer. Riding through this wasted land, she calls it, from a poem she's reading at the Dalton School.

“You like the mixed?” he asks her.

“Do I like it?”

“Do you like it?”

“I haven't thought about it.” Noticing that her school skirt, the green and blue plaid, has risen up over her freckled knees, she tugs it back down. “But I guess I like it.”

“The Muslims say no.”

“Do they?”

“They say no. And most white folks say no.”

“They do?”

“They do. You're a little girl. You don't know. You don't hear. But listen harder. You'll hear better.”

“I suppose.”

“You suppose right. And if they say no and the Muslims say no, I say, what the hell can the Muslims be right if they agree with the white?”

“I . . .”

“Not a question. That's my answer. I say the Muslims can't be right if they agree with the white.” He looks around and sees the exit sign he wants—see, they are further down the road than I thought. They are driving right off onto the highway for New Brunswick now, and Sarah is feeling all right—given the circumstances—but she still doesn't know what she's doing there, I mean, she just left school and
started off for New Brunswick, why? Does she know? She certainly doesn't. All she has is a feeling, go see Rick—Rick Sommer, your grandson, once the youth leader from the Purim dance.

First, he was political science, now you should be proud, Rose, an assistant dean at Rutgers, the youngest dean in charge of students, and things like that. He's told you, I'm sure, you've heard—this is the so-called brother she is lying about. But if she feels for him like a sister, this is something she has yet to find out. Maybe it's what she's going to find out.

All through high school she's gone out with a lot of boys, and they either want to take advantage of her or go with her because she's the rabbi's daughter—
oi,
remember the pale-faced boy from the city who smelled so bad to me? that's what he wanted, something like that, not me, but what I stood for in some dream of a delusion—but what? the farmer's daughter? but who can know? He's ashes, now, along with so many of the rest of them who stayed behind—and if he was alive, by some miracle, what would he say? He wouldn't remember, I'm sure, because the young boys, they don't remember as well as the young girls, this, of all the things I'm telling you, I believe more than anything, because the girls don't need things like the boys, souvenirs, like Manny's piece of broken milk bottle in the star shape, because girls have memories better than boys, don't ask me why, it has to do maybe with the fact that they bear children, they bear them instead of just planting the seed for them, and the garden remembers better than the seed or the sower. I don't know. Who knows? This is just what I think, what I believe. And I'm telling in the middle of this story, I suppose, because what comes next I don't like to remember, sure, because it's painful, for her, for me.