The Appetites of Girls (41 page)

A series of slow, fluid notes concluded. A far livelier section commenced. But moments into this new rhythm, my breath froze in my lungs. Despite the warmth of Toru’s room, I was too rigid with cold even to shudder as I heard a sound I recognized, a sound as familiar as my own heartbeat. How was it that I had confused the two? How could I have missed my own playing? To be certain I was not mistaken, I consulted the notes Toru had taken on that day. And there it was—in Toru’s own scrawled hand—an accounting of his progress and below that, an
accounting of mine. Here was proof of the things he had hidden. Here were all of the truths he had denied. For Toru had known then what I had been unable to see. And he had made me believe what I had been too ready to accept.

The bitterness that had contorted Toru’s face as he drifted off had not lessened; even in sleep, angry lines cut along the sides of his mouth. On shoeless feet, I replaced the tapes and pads in the drawer where I had found them, then crossed Toru’s room and slipped through the open door. Against a wall in the guest bedroom lay my violin, the top-facing side of its case flecked with dust from lack of use. Gently I took the instrument into my lap. I brushed my palm over its blond-brown wood, ran my finger over its bridge and around the scroll at the tip of its neck. Then, for a moment, I clutched it to me, as if somehow by gripping to stop the flood of regrets—the stretch of years I had lost, the wasted possibilities, the many things that might have been. But when I lifted my violin to my shoulder, fitted my chin into the smoothly cupped rest, a melody seemed to rise up from the center of me—Pachelbel’s Canon in D, a piece I had adored as a child. “To be the daughter of two musical parents! So lucky! Surely you were born with a gift, Setsu,” my adoptive parents had told me long ago when I was very young. Then I had nodded shyly, tentatively, only beginning to believe. But now I would say it aloud. I would whisper it to the empty room. “Yes, Setsu, yes. This,
this
is the truth of you.
This
is who you are.”

My breakfast that morning had been a mere handful of crackers, a weak cup of tea, not nearly enough to fill me. And suddenly I was aware of a great gnawing, as if my stomach panged from years of portions that hadn’t satisfied, from every missed meal. So making my way to the kitchen, I fished through the refrigerator for a package of maple ham, a wedge of cheddar; I plucked a bag of sesame rolls, hazelnut cookies, and a container of cocoa from the cabinet shelves. Not Toru’s favorite things, but mine. As I layered a roll with slices of sweet ham and cheese, poured milk into a small pot for hot chocolate, I hummed the notes of the Canon
in D. Then of a Strauss waltz, a Vivaldi concerto, a Tartini sonata. The pieces bubbled up in me like the steam rising from my saucepan. I returned my violin to its case then set it near the front door in preparation for my lesson that evening, and as I did, the aromas from the foods caused a small pool of water to form beneath my tongue. In just moments all would be ready. And this time I would eat and eat. And I would not cease until I had swallowed away the very last throb of hunger, until I’d had all that my body could hold. Until the music in me came out in sound that could be heard.

(My Story)

•
1992
•

F
or some time, I tried. To be agreeable. To be acquiescent. But an eddy of agitation had stirred in me, and it was growing. Until, one evening: “For God’s sake, Ma! I’m almost a college graduate! Twenty-one years old!
Wake Up!
I’m no longer a baby!”

Since the close of my freshman year, a time Mama and I never referred to, I had watched with envy as my friends tasted new freedoms—semesters spent overseas in cities I’d seen only on maps, unsupervised vacations on islands off the New England coast. Setsu disappeared for a summer to Rome, Francesca to Madrid. My suitemates knew never to ask my plans. Knew, of course, none would be made. All of them seeing—since what had occurred—how my reins had only shortened. During my remaining years at Brown, Mama and Poppy had begun to make more regular visits to campus and to find reasons, every two to three weekends, for me to return home—a wedding for my second cousin Miranda, a bar mitzvah for Aaron, the Schafers’ middle son. “How are you feeling?”
Mama now had the habit of asking offhandedly, attempting nonchalance when we were together. But I caught her running her tongue along her teeth and peering into my eyes for signs of fatigue, or frowning at my breasts or abdomen for evidence of sudden swelling. Always Mama had kept careful track of the foods I consumed, but now, when in her presence, I felt her eyes on me with every forkful I lifted to my lips, with every bite I swallowed. All this, for a time, I had endured in silence. What choice did I have? “You reap what you sow,” people say, and I had sown seeds of foolishness, carelessness.

My outburst that evening had broken from my mouth unplanned, unchecked, but I’d felt a certain rush, a bristling of pride mingled with nerves, at my own defiance.

Now Mama’s face was red as ripe currants. “After
all
Poppy and I have done for you? That’s what you have to say! Tell me, Ruth, exactly when did it become a crime for a mother to look after her own?” She let her knife and fork drop from her quaking hands and clatter against her plate. “If you’re so ready to take on the world, why don’t you act like it?”

In her opinion, my last four years had been a series of fits and starts, with no sensible plan emerging. “It’s just a matter of finding what’s most worthwhile and then persevering,” Mama had said when I’d called home with news of my classmates’ decisions to be premed, to practice law, to follow the trails their fathers had forged into the world of finance. I had heard the knot in her voice, her ears closed to my hints at what I loved most of all—the writing classes I’d enrolled in, despite her reminders they held no relevance to my major.

Sarah and Valerie raised their napkins to shroud their smiles, their eyes darting, skittish as minnows, from Mama to me. This, from them, I would have expected. But even Poppy said nothing, scraping hurriedly at the remains of his supper. Mama pulled a balled tissue from the sleeve of her blouse. She sniffed nasally, and as she pressed her fingertips to her pinkish eyes, I sensed it. The turning in the rest of them, a flowing of
sympathy from each of them to her. It occurred to none of them that there might be truth to what I’d said.

This moment of brazenness only made my family scrutinize me more suspiciously. “Who was that?” Mama asked after I’d received two phone calls in a single weekend from Brad Lewitt, the class above mine in high school, who, to the Lewitts’ dismay, now managed the Red Moon Diner in midtown.

“The Red Moon Diner? That grease-spattered eyesore on Tibbett Avenue,”
neighbors wondered.

“No. No, some place in Manhattan.”

“I bet his parents wish they could get a refund on all that private-school tuition!”

So went the gossip in town. And Mama had known it was Brad who had called, only she wished it wasn’t and awaited some confirmation that Brad and I would not be
dating
.

During our teen years, my friends from Temple Beth Immanuel had complained about the ways their mothers were already probing for husbands, like gulls eyeing every silver ripple of water for fish. “You’re lucky, Ruth. Your mother leaves you alone,” they’d said, not realizing that it was only a trade-off, other things—my standardized test scores, my grades in trigonometry—occupying her thoughts instead. But now, suddenly, she seemed intent on finding some suitable relationship for me—someone with ambition, someone who shared our values, as if this would not only prevent me from veering wildly off track, but inspire me to pursue some worthy goal of my own. As if, then, my future would extend before me, a clear path solidly paved. So whenever I was home and accompanied her to services, she would point out someone new. Did I know Robbie Melzer had returned to Riverdale? Had she mentioned Lizzy Samuels’s oldest son—the one who’d just renovated a beautiful apartment in Park Slope—always asked about me? According to Lizzy, he’d been a political science major, too.

“Oh, I don’t know, Ma.”

“Really?” She was surprised. She happened to know that Alice Berger was interested in
both
of them. And Robbie Melzer had just started working in his father’s insurance brokerage firm, taking over the entire personal lines department. “He’s always been so refined. Besides, how many Jews are there to choose from in this world, Ruthie? A piddling fraction. That’s it!”

A circle of pink shone at the back of Robbie Melzer’s head. By thirty he’d be as hairless as a newborn mouse. And there seemed something grim about David Samuels, dressed always in black suits, his cheeks long, as if he were perpetually sitting shiva. But when I wrinkled my nose at one after another, Mama cleared her throat, and I knew what she was swallowing down.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Don’t bring me to temple if you find it an exercise in frustration. I can find someone for myself.”

Mama snapped her tongue in a way that implied,
A fine job you’ve done so far
.

But I held my silence, despite the drumming of my heart, the hot, pulsing anger.

•   •   •

I
n the fall of my final year at Brown, I won repeated high praise for my work in Advanced Fiction Writing—special attentions I had seen lavished on other students in other courses, but never expected to receive myself. Professor Wainwright, the author of
Blue Hill Sundown
and
The Pulling Horses
, read aloud in class my piece “Aside from Loss.” He complimented the discussion I’d led on Hemingway’s style as one of the most insightful he’d heard. And so I quickly forgot how, throughout the entire presentation, my words had echoed in my ears, trembling and thick, as if forming somewhere other than my throat.

During one weekend at home, I left “Aside from Loss” faceup on my
bedroom desk, its black-markered
Outstanding!
unmissable, even from some distance. Mama had come in and out more times than I could count, to return folded laundry, check the heat from the radiator, retrieve my emptied hot chocolate mugs. But even though I had caught her skimming the first page of my story, she made no mention of it. As if this were as common as pennies in a wishing fountain, as if I’d been bringing home victories like this every day for years. Nor did she betray any hint of having noticed, during one of my subsequent visits home, a handful of brochures given me by Professor Wainwright (duplicates of those I kept with me at school) for graduate writing programs around the country, though I’d fanned them out in the same prominent spot. So! I knew what she thought—that she could discourage me through indifference. But she’d underestimated me. I was no longer the self-doubting, malleable girl I’d been as a child!

•   •   •

N
o classes were held during the latter half of Thanksgiving week. I was home for five full days. So I interrupted Poppy and Mama late one evening as they took to their usual after-dinner armchairs. I had a question for them, I explained. Still in the pleated drop-waist dress I’d worn to dinner at Aunt Helena’s—the one I’d bought the previous spring on a shopping outing with Setsu because it slimmed my hips—I recited the proposal I had rehearsed repeatedly, animatedly, convincingly (I believed) in my room. But it was clear Mama had anticipated this, had already made her case. And this time Poppy was as unyielding as she. He worked his section of newspaper into a tight scroll. They were both impassive, their faces flat as earth.

Look how much had been handed to me, and I wanted to gamble it all on some remote seed of a notion a professor had planted in my head! It was the most unreliable of choices! Didn’t I want to have something to
show
for what I’d been working toward? “No.” Their answer was as simple
as that. It was
their
hard-earned money. If I had the means to send myself, well, then, they supposed they could not stop me. But a single decision could change the course of everything. Surely
I
should understand this, Mama said as Poppy turned his eyes from me, rapping his fingers against his rolled paper. And so I knew. Mama had broken her promise. Fired her surest weapon. Revealed to Poppy what she’d sworn long ago she never would.

For days, I fixed her with long stares, chilly as frozen snow, intended to fill her with guilt. But she only blinked at me placidly, unrepentantly, holding my gaze in a way that meant,
I do what I have to
.

•   •   •

S
hortly after I returned to school, Mama phoned with “great news!” She had made a call to Julie Guggenheim, the old friend of Nana Leah’s who ran the entire Manhattan division of the Northeastern Jewish Federation but who was now planning a run for state legislature. “She said she can offer you a paid position working on her campaign. She’s very connected. This could lead to all
kinds
of possibilities.”

Mama knew I had no further arguments, had come up with no better alternative. I had sat numbly when Dean Salkin had outlined for me the popular and logical choices for graduates with political science degrees: law school, business school, careers in policy analysis. How decisively my classmates seemed to claim what they were moving toward, easily and without looking back. But as Dean Salkin talked, I had wanted only to stop the days from tumbling forward, had wished the campus walls could rise up and enclose us, granting more time.

Mama began, when we spoke, to refer cheerfully to the many things I would have to look forward to once I began work for Julie Guggenheim and returned to the apartment on West 256th Street, where it was assumed I would be resettling until I’d saved some income. “Over the summer, Ruthie, we’ll re-carpet your room and update the wallpaper. Maybe
a stripe? Would you like that?” As if this bit of redecorating could make up for any disappointment. And, oh, as long as I was home, I wouldn’t have to worry about meals. It was fortunate, too, our apartment’s proximity to the bus and the subway. Made for a cinch of a commute. She would chatter on in this manner until I lied, suddenly remembering I had a class to attend, allowing the phone to drop back on the receiver.

So the leaflets I’d placed on my desk at home remained in the exact array in which I’d left them, Mama and Poppy’s mute declaration that this conversation was closed. It mattered nothing to them that these were some of the country’s finest programs, the ones Professor Wainwright had specifically recommended and that Francesca (who had taken writing courses with me—“Whose life is it
anyway
, Ruth?”) had rattled off when I questioned her once earlier in the year. They did not know, did not care to know, that this was the thought my mind returned to obsessively, as if having discovered some new chink of light in a solid wall. But I could be as stubborn as they. Without a word, using a portion of money I had made from babysitting to pay for processing fees, I mailed seven applications—one to California, one to Michigan, the others scattered along the East Coast.

•   •   •

T
he letters arrived in early spring. But what was I to make of this? Was fortune playing games with me, or was this a blessing in disguise? A congratulatory letter from Georgetown University, Professor Wainwright’s first choice for me and the school where he had taught some years ago. But not only that—an attached page offering a generous scholarship. Georgetown—the one program I had applied to that did not provide a master’s in writing but in English literature. “This will give you broader options,” Professor Wainwright had explained. Georgetown’s program included courses on teaching writing, and he was certain he could arrange for me to study fiction independently with his
former colleague Professor Brennan—“Worth the whole lot of writing instructors you might be assigned elsewhere.” With this degree I would be qualified to teach either writing
or
literature afterward. So wouldn’t Mama and Poppy find this choice more acceptable? And perhaps overlook what blinked up at me from the bottom of my letter: a reference to the school’s Jesuit tradition, its foundation in beliefs we did not share. But Georgetown’s students came from a diversity of backgrounds. I’d definitely read that somewhere in one of its brochures. So it mattered less than other things, I could argue, couldn’t I? Though the very thought of what Mama and Poppy might say to this made me flush with cold then heat. Still, this time I would not buckle. No, I refused to fold! Not now. Now I had a new resolve.

•   •   •

W
e sat robed and hatted and tasseled in long rows, in folding chairs perfectly spaced across the Main Green, on the day of our commencement. “You are new promises, your young lights beginning to flicker here,” declared to us the Nobel Prize winner who had been invited to speak. “So, now, fling yourselves out, as if into the heavens. And set the world ablaze.” The faces all around me tilted back, listening, shining, believing. I smiled to be as eager as the rest, to forget how Mama had looked when I’d turned—still and blank as glass in her section behind me. “I can only hope you’ll find some sense and rethink this,” she had said when I announced my decision to Poppy and to her two months before, explaining the package Georgetown had offered and my plan to use my savings (the remainder of my babysitting money and my modest inheritance from Great-Uncle Eli)—to find a work-study job, too, if necessary—to pay room and board. She had kept her voice even as sanded wood, but I had seen how she struggled to control the wobbling of her mouth. Despite what I said about
options
, she suspected it was still my writing I planned to pursue above all else. If I wanted to teach literature
at the college level, I’d have applied to doctoral programs. She didn’t know everything, but
that
she knew. “It’s not enough to be able to turn a pretty phrase and put imaginings to paper, Ruthie. You could fill oceans with the littered dreams of men and women who’ve learned to do just that. And, you know, it’s still a
Catholic
university. It doesn’t matter all their claims about varied backgrounds. You want to abandon everything to chase some glittery dust your professor scattered in the air! How can you? Are you punishing me, Ruth, or punishing yourself!”