Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (11 page)

“Not really. But I like you.”

“I’m sorry I have to go. Will you come over tomorrow?”

“When’s the earliest I can come?”

“I usually sleep in until ten or eleven. But don’t worry—even if I’m asleep, Mummy and Daddy are always up early. They’ll be happy to see you.”

“I’ll walk you to the bus,” I said. “I could ride back with you, to keep you company.”

“And then I’ll have to come back with you! We could do that all day. Really, I don’t mind. I like buses.”

“Okay, I’ll just wait with you.”

We walked to the bus stop and waited together in silence. There was nothing more to say. We both knew that Rosie’s benevolence was an equal match to my desire, and that this would be the basis of our friendship. I would give her my need and in return she would give me as much as she could of herself. And if she was enlisting me for reasons of her own, reasons that had to do with her parents, that was fine with me.

The bus arrived and took her away from me. I walked home slowly. Alone in my room, tucked in bed, I let the day’s pleasures billow like a sail in warm wind. I had a friend. This was what it was like to have a friend, a friend for life. Rosie’s monastic house, the
abandoned school, Rosie on my flowered bedspread: with these things in my life, nothing but their disappearance could ever make me unhappy again.

Rosie kept her promise. She drew me into her life, introduced me to everyone she knew. “This is Maya, my new friend. She wants to go to Eden next year, so she’s going to learn everything in one summer. She’s really brainy.”

“I’m not—I practically flunked out,” I said, but no one believed me.

The designated centre of the world that summer was the local swimming pool. DJ Doug Pringle with his sexy English accent on the radio, lifeguards with sun-bleached hair, wet feet running on wet cement. It was noisy and crowded, but when Rosie emerged from the dark, dank locker rooms, currents of excitement travelled through the pool crowd. She was beautiful even in her striped navy and zinc-yellow bathing suit, beautiful even in the rubber bathing caps we were all forced to wear. But she was unimpressed by the impression she made, and thought we were only humouring her.

It would have caused my mother no end of anxiety had I removed one of our colour-coordinated bath towels from the house, especially for a venture as dubious as public swimming. With a handful of coins from the money jar in the linen closet, I bought a beach towel at Woolworth’s. My mother was convinced that tuberculosis lay in wait for me at the pool: I’d end up spending half my life at a sanatorium. When I came home, she took the towel—on which Rosie had knelt as she spread suntan lotion on my back, on which I had lain as I delved into the mysteries of Hebrew vocalization—and boiled it for several hours in the tub. The oversized image of a sailboat soon faded into a masterpiece of abstract art.

My notion of Judaism up to then had been foggy. At our place, as in a futuristic story in which the last Jew clings irrationally to the single surviving remnant of a forgotten past, we had an aquamarine
menorah with a gold Star of David etched in front. Bubby had brought it with her when she came to us, and had set it prominently on the television cabinet. It remained there for the next few days, expanding under my mother’s glare. At last, unable to bear its presence any longer, she picked it up by the stem and removed it to a more secluded location, between the toaster and the sugar tin.

Now, as Jeff and Freddy and Kris strolled over and settled themselves along the perimeters of Rosie’s towel, I read about the beginning. In the beginning, God created the heavens (plural) and the earth (feminine) and the earth was (feminine form of the verb) chaos, and darkness was (implied verb) upon the void. In Hebrew, it rhymed, alliterated, pulsed. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. A language of abbreviations, blunt and evasive at the same time. The words were everything and nothing.

I worked hard, though there were also days when my brain seemed to be waterlogged. If Rosie were a Catholic, I’d be studying
The Lives of the Saints—
it was all the same to me. But what exactly was Judaism? Clearly it was more than Adam and Eve in the garden, Cain and Abel outside it. I had no one to ask. The Michaelis, like my mother, were removed from the more tangible aspects of Jewish life, and my questions were too vague for my new pool friends. I found a dusty one-volume Jewish encyclopedia at the Atwater Library which I was allowed to check out, and I began to read entries at random. A spiral of festivals and significant food entered my consciousness, and I filled several Hilroy notebooks with complex stories involving miracles and violent death, all of it as foreign as the fat alabaster Buddhas in Mr. Wong’s gift shop. I read until late at night, but no coherent picture emerged, and when I put away the encyclopedia and closed my eyes, I had visions of the disparate pieces falling in slow-motion through the air, a shower of plagues and horseradish.

Dvora and Sheila/Dominique came to the pool nearly every day. Yes, Sheila—my former bunkmate! Her memories of Camp Bakunin were different from mine: “What a pretentious assort
ment of neurotics,” she said, referring to the counsellors. If she remembered that I’d washed her underwear, she didn’t let on.

Along with her new name, Sheila had adopted a particular style of hippie cool—sombre, skeptical, sophisticated. I rarely saw her smile, though her comments were often amusing. She wore a long black skirt and stayed away from the water; she said she was hydrophobic, but the real reason, I discovered, was her conviction that kids were peeing in the pool. “You’d have to put a gun to my head to make me go into that piss-pot,” she confided. She couldn’t bear direct sunlight and never stretched out to tan like the rest of us. “I must be part-vampire,” she liked to say.

Sheila—I could never think of her as Dominique—occupied herself in other ways. In a small black notebook she jotted ideas for use in a future film or novel. She also knew how to crochet. “I crochet because I’m high-strung and compulsive,” she said, her arched eyebrows arching even higher. She sold doilies and tablecloths to her parents’ friends, and she’d buy us all pepperoni pizza with the money she made, not because she liked pepperoni, but because she wanted to prove that God didn’t care what anyone ate. “Have a kid in its mother’s milk,” she’d say wryly as she handed us slices. I had read about dietary restrictions in the Jewish encyclopedia, but the article hadn’t mentioned that decisions about which ones to follow depended on whether you were Very Strict Orthodox, Strict Orthodox, Religious But Not That Strict or Not Religious.
Do not eat a kid in its mother’s milk:
a moving directive, thin and exotic, almost a plea.

One day, Sheila gave me a seashell shawl she’d been working on. “I’ll keep this forever,” I said, embarrassing her. “Don’t exaggerate,” she chided me in her usual sardonic drawl. But in fact, I still have Sheila’s shawl; I’ve spread it over my DVD player.
Study in Metal and Lace
, by M.L.

In spite of her cultivated nonchalance, Sheila’s life was hard. She could never stay at the pool for more than an hour or two because she had three younger siblings to look after. Her parents
worked long hours at a store, six days a week, and Sheila helped with the cooking and childcare. I offered to lend a hand—we all did—but she put us off. “I like being captain of the ship,” she said. Possibly she didn’t want us to see the chaos in her home; there were rumours of a cramped, squalid apartment, with diapers soaking in pails.

Dvora in her ruffled bathing suit was round and bosomy; the ruffles matched her Little Lulu curls, which bounced like Slinkies when she moved. An expert on the Top 40, she brought her transistor radio to the pool and always knew who was singing and for how long they’d been on the chart. A flyer from the local radio station helped her keep track, and she ticked off the songs as they came on: “Mrs. Robinson,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Angel of the Morning.” Between hits she furtively handed us small, individually wrapped toffees she’d snuck past the guards. Sheila broke pool rules as well: we weren’t allowed to bring furniture with us, but Sheila sat on her own portable lawn chair. She told the lifeguards that she’d had polio as a child and that her back was damaged. I doubt they believed her (we’d all been vaccinated against polio), but it was easier to let Sheila be. Her Madonna eyes and pale oval face, partly hidden by stray strands of hair, discouraged confrontation.

It seemed as if everyone but me knew how to swim. They’d had lessons, or their parents had taught them, or they’d somehow taught themselves. But I was afraid of the deep end, and there wasn’t any marker to show where the floor of the pool dipped—you could be wading in the shallow part and suddenly your footing would be gone. Occasionally I lowered myself into the pool in order to cool off, but I didn’t let go of the ladder, and after a few seconds I climbed back out and returned to my towel and books.

My determination to attend Eden so I could be with Rosie transformed the decoding of Hebrew into an impassioned undertaking. I studied amidst an unabating soundtrack of shrieks, splashing, and radio hits. At times a particular song served as a mnemonic.
Stoned Soul Picnic
came to be associated in my mind
with the deep abyss of Creation,
tehom
, while “Honey I Miss You” was to be forever linked to God’s plan for interminable reproduction,
pru urvu
.

Despite Herculean efforts, by mid-August I had only reached the sixth chapter of Genesis, though I’d skimmed the rest of the Bible in English. And even those six chapters—up to God’s instructions to Noah—were only partly intelligible; I was stumped by some of the verses, and no one could help me. Rosie didn’t know; Sheila, sighing and looking bored, occasionally agreed to take a stab at the problematic passages, but though her Hebrew was better than Rosie’s, most of the time she handed back the Bible with a triumphant “I don’t know what the fuck this means.” And there was no point asking Dvora, who had never once passed a Hebrew exam.

Like Judaism, though far more hopeless, heterosexuality took shape that summer, summoned not from an inchoate state but from non-existence. Rosie acted as matchmaker: Avi Ozier, the sought-after lifeguard, was taking her out on Friday night, and she invited me and a bony boy named Earl Margolis to come along. Earl, it seemed, had a secret crush on me; he’d confided in Rosie, and she had promised to do what she could.

My fantasies had changed, now that a real-life object of desire had risen from the mist. In my daydreams I’d focussed on the female models who’d posed in studios over the ages; now those anonymous women had been replaced by Rosie, and my passive appreciation by dramas, or rather melodramas, in which I played a heroic role. Rosie was drowning in a lake; I reached out for her, lifted her soaking body onto a boat, bundled her up in a towel. She was wrongfully accused of a crime, and I found the evidence that freed her. Inspired by
Persona
, which I’d seen on late-night television, I imagined the two of us marooned together on a desert island …

I had remained more or less impervious to jealousy; Rosie’s Friday-night dates were, I felt, a trivial part of her life, even an aberration, like a cold that comes and goes, or the pool closed for
cleaning. I was, however, annoyed that her boyfriends took up time she might have spent with me, and I often wished I could trail along as she and her guy-of-the-evening went roller-skating at the Récréathèque. It had never occurred to me to be interested in members of the opposite sex; vaguely and instinctively, I knew a date with a boy would lead to exactly nothing. But the prospect of joining Rosie on one of her evenings out was, quite literally, a dream come true.

The four of us were supposed to see a movie, but Avi was late, so we bought a large bag of barbecue chips and made our way instead to Earl’s place. Earl was the only one of our circle who lived in the Town of Mount Royal, known for its affluence and homogeneous Updike-white population. The basement of Earl’s house was more like a clubhouse than a room in a someone’s home, with its bar, ping-pong table, beanbag chairs, rows of records leaning inside built-in cabinets, shaggy off-white carpets on a dark red linoleum floor and, permeating everything, the innately nostalgic smell of cedar and mothballs.

“This basement is great,” I said.

“Groovy,” Avi agreed.

We sprawled on beanbags, and Avi, who was enterprising as well as handsome, produced a small piece of hash, lit it until it burst into flame, trapped the smoke with a glass, and used a hollow Bic pen to toke up. I watched as Rosie and Earl inhaled the delicate smoke but declined when my turn came. What if I got so high I ended up soaring straight into the worm museum?

Nevertheless, I was the keeper of the toking pen, because I was the only one who carried a reliable knapsack wherever I went—you never knew when you’d need soda crackers, tissues, tampons, safety pins, scissors … Every once in a while I come across that dismantled pen at the back of a drawer I’m cleaning out; for years it kept its musky smell, but now only the stained yellow insides of the barrel remain as evidence of its glamorous past.

Avi hung his arm around Rosie’s waist. He was brimming with
the confidence of recently acquired enlightenment, brought on by readings in Zen that had raised him from ordinary mortal spheres to Olympian heights. Avi: dark curly hair, blue eyes, Jimi Hendrix bandana, purple gossamer shirt, embroidered vest—oh, the eros and esteem one could secure simply by means of an embroidered vest! Breezy with his mind-blowing, consciousness-altering perceptions, he kissed Rosie’s hair, and she smiled. Earl sat next to me, wanting to touch me but afraid. “Well, Earl, what do you usually eat for breakfast?” I asked him, trying to make conversation.

“T-toast and jam,” he stammered.

“That’s
sweet
,” I said. What do you do when you’re given power over another person’s happiness? How is it possible not to sink under the weight? I had so little to offer Earl—barely even friendship.

Earl blushed and ducked his head inside the record cabinet to hide his excitement and misery. “What d-do you want to hear?”