Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth Page 11

  The Saturday-night parties were filled to capacity now, and standing/crouching/cross-legged bodies spilled over into the kitchen, hallway, and front room. The boys who wanted Rosie to themselves sulked or glared as she danced with their rivals. They tried not showing up but never stayed away for long, because staying away didn’t work: they neither forgot her nor succeeded in manipulating her to seek them out.

  Sometimes Rosie disappeared into her bedroom with a disgruntled suitor, to “have a talk.” One night, after everyone had left, I learned, to my—to my what? What’s the word I want?—I learned that “have a talk” was a euphemism for sex. It was as if I’d come across a quivering kitten in a storm, cowering in a place I couldn’t reach.

  Haight Ashbury’s Summer of Love had come and gone, leaving in its wake a glorification of promiscuity. We were, the media told us, in the midst of a sexual revolution; communes and youth clinics were springing up everywhere, and men in their twenties and thirties had only to grow their hair and sport Rasputin beards if they wanted to have sex with fourteen-year-olds and not feel bad about it.

  But none of these developments reached Eden, and though the free-love mythology must have provided some degree of camouflage, it wasn’t what led Rosie, in the middle of a party at her parents’ house, to have sex in her bedroom while the rest of us played charades.

  There had been other clues that a more complicated state of affairs lurked beneath Rosie’s easy benevolence. Even her attachment to nursery rhymes was suspect. She couldn’t fall asleep without her Mother Goose album crackling through the small speakers of her record player. Cobbler, cobbler mend my shoe, Have it done by half past two … Everyone knew about her Mother Goose record; Rosie herself laughed at her dependency. But at the same time she was a miniature adult, and the nursery rhymes were pieces of an unattainable world that mocked her in the slippery darkness, like a puppet show turned sinister in a bad dream.

  The loneliness of the Mother Goose ritual reached me as I lay on the teetering sofa bed in the living room, listening, or trying not to listen, to the trained voice on the record. Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross—Jack and Jill went up the hill—Cock-a-doodle-doo, my dame has lost her shoe …

  But when it came to the conferral of her body, I really was too inexperienced to see things for what they were. It wasn’t only me—no one at the party was astute enough to recognize the signs: the way Rosie came out of her bedroom and headed straight for the bathroom with an air of sudden, fatalistic solitude; the boyfriend’s confused departure; maybe even some faint, unfamiliar odour. Rosie must have set conditions, she must have told the guy he had to be discreet. But the Michaelis couldn’t have been oblivious. I have to assume they were aware of what was happening and said nothing.

  I’d thought, before her confession, that her sexual encounters were limited to a few poetic gestures: hands on thighs, maybe even breasts. But one Saturday evening, after the guests had gone, she said, “Things didn’t go too well with Kris today. He got all mad … he said I was thinking about other things during sex, not about him.”

  “Sex? What do you mean?”

  “It’s no big deal,” Rosie assured me.

  “You mean you do it?”

  She nodded, and her face was blank, unreadable.

  “Just with Kris?”

  “No, that’s the problem … they want me to themselves.”

  “But you’re only fourteen,” I said.

  “Fourteen isn’t that young. My father was performing with orchestras at fourteen.”

  “But…” I was hazy about sex; I didn’t really know what it was all about, didn’t want to know. It seemed ridiculous, basically—a strange rite, strange enough to give a person the willies. Reading the nasty, demeaning seduction scene in chapter two of The Group (which the Atwater Library refused to carry—“Trash,” the head librarian sniffed, but Esther lent me her copy) had only confirmed my suspicions.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Rosie said. She draped her arm around my shoulder, and the warmth of her body surrounded me like a swirling genie. “I wish it did, but it doesn’t. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Oh, Maya, I’m so glad we met.” I didn’t dare move. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.

  “What if you get pregnant?” I asked, thinking back to the letters she’d shown me. They seemed menacing now; decoded missives from the enemy. There were clues in the letters that I’d missed at the time: When I felt you shivering …

  “I make them put on a safe.”

  “A safe? What’s that?”

  “A rubbery sort of cover they put on their thingie.”

  “Really!” I imagined a little cap and wondered how it stayed on. Maybe you tied it with string. “How did you find out about that?”

  “I saw it in that Head and Hands booklet. But I think I already knew—maybe Jeff told me.”

  “But do you like it?”

  “I don’t mind. It’s not a big deal,” she repeated.

  “Your parents…” I began, not knowing exactly what I wanted to say.

  “Aren’t they great!” It was a non sequitur. Rosie wasn’t saying that her parents were great because they let her do what she wanted. They were invoked because they were there, always—like deities who’ve renounced their power so they could live among humans.

  “Who was the first?” I asked.

  “Jeff. But it was my idea. I mean, I knew he really wanted to, and I’m the one who said he could.”

  “I’m never going to have kids. I’m never going to have to do sex with anyone.”

  “You’re so funny, Maya. Don’t be scared, it’s okay after the first few seconds.”

  “How do the safes stay on?” I asked. I didn’t know exactly what men looked like naked, but from what I’d seen in art books, there wasn’t much to it: Michelangelo’s Adam, for example, appeared to have something the size of a small whistle, or the head of a robin, resting on his thigh. Rosie unwrapped a discarded tissue to show me a condom, and though I tried not to show it, I was appalled—it seemed all those artists were exercising poetic licence, so to speak—and who could blame them?

  “I will never, ever do it,” I said. “Why do you let them?”

  Rosie shrugged and smiled. “It means a lot to them.” Leaning forward, she kissed me good night, her lips landing briefly on mine. Then she slid from her chair to the floor and pretended to die. I knelt down, placed my hand on her forehead. “My poor Rosie, can you be saved, or will algebra be the end of you?” And she whispered weakly, “Save someone else.”

  After that night, Rosie kissed me always: when we met and parted, at school, at bus stops, at her house when we said good night. She would raise her hands to my shoulders, stand on her tiptoes, and pull me towards her. A consolation prize that achieved its purpose: I was consoled.

  I was woken at eight-thirty this morning by a call from the department’s academic coordinator; she had a question about a form I need to fill in. My mother phoned at a more reasonable hour with questions about the new luggage regulations, though she won’t be leaving for her winter condo in Florida until next month. I promised to explain it all again tonight, when I go over for my weekly visit chez elle, but she said she needed to know immediately, she was packing. “Liquids and sharp objects are allowed in checked-in luggage,” I told her, as I’ve been doing for months. It’s not that she forgets or doesn’t believe me; what worries her is that the rules may have changed since our last conversation. Then I said, “I’m writing about Rosie Michaeli.” Yes, she said, she remembered her well—the girl you you loved so much—My mother is full of surprises, always.

  Lately—I thought this only happens in dotage—I feel the distant past moving closer as it becomes chronologically more remote. At times I can retrieve not only the narrative thread of the past but the contours of tone and colour and sound. I think this regeneration of memory is a craving for solace, because those times are prelapsarian—we had not yet sinned, not yet fucked up, not yet done all the things that wi
ll make us cover our faces with shame. A form of prayer, one could say.

  Time to walk Sailor and pick up groceries. I buy most of my food at three neighbourhood stores. That way, Sailor can see me through the window while I shop, and I can see him. I avoid the muzak-plagued, phosphorescent-lit supermarkets; the same hypersensitivity keeps me away from malls. I’m not bothered by warehouses, though, and every few months I drive to Costco and load my car with crates of dog food, detergent, and whatever else I can squeeze into my Mazda. I stock these essentials in the unoccupied, or temporarily occupied, apartment below me. Another advantage to keeping that flat empty.

  1970

  I met Patrick, or rather, I spied on him, on a Sunday morning in April.

  Sunday, let me explain, was no ordinary day in the Levitsky household. On Sundays, my mother disinfected the flat. She allowed me to dust our peat-brown, urethane-coated, delusion-of-wood furniture, but that only took ten minutes; she insisted on tackling the rest of the housecleaning on her own. With her pail and sponges and ladders, Fanya was as innocently indomitable as Charlie Chaplin.

  Groggily, while Bubby fried me an egg, I watched the Sunday offensive on unsuspecting germs. My mother, perched on the middle rung of the stepladder, reached up as if about to be carried away by a chariot swinging low and swished a soapy cloth back and forth several hundred times along the ceiling. “You missed a spot,” I shouted at her.

  When I was through with breakfast, I sprayed and wiped imaginary dust from various bits of furniture, but as soon as my mother turned on the vacuum cleaner, I escaped to my bedroom and shut the door against the deafening whine. My mother was engaged in an ongoing battle with the suction mechanism, which never seemed to work—even a hair it doesn’t pick up—and this meant the industrial noise would persist, on and off, all morning. I gathered my schoolwork and library books and made my way to Rosie’s.

  Rosie’s bedroom. White rays of sunlight slant in through the window and dust motes dance inside the beams. It’s the time of year when springtime showers revert overnight to ice, and all morning trucks have been scattering salt pellets on the streets. A mud and salt smell lingers in the air, the smell of winter dissolving. Rosie and I are eating plums and reading, while on CHOM-FM Joni Mitchell serenades us with songs about blue roses and men from mountains. I’m fourteen, Rosie is fifteen.

  Rosie was more watchful now that she was older, more attuned to detail; there was a searching quality about her, characterized by a slight furrowing of her brow, an almost startled look in her eyes. Possibly only I noticed the change, or maybe her parents had as well and for this reason had planned a surprise birthday party for her in December. Rosie’s birthdays usually passed without fanfare. There was a cake for dessert instead of the usual canned peaches, but there were no candles on the cake, no one sang “Happy Birthday”—the Michaelis all agreed that the nearly tuneless tune was musically offensive—and the unwrapped gift, a new record, wasn’t very meaningful, because Mr. Michaeli bought records all year-round. “We’re not really into holidays,” Rosie explained. “A day is just a day.”

  Rosie was expecting, therefore, only the usual Saturday-night party on the week of her fifteenth birthday. My job was to keep her at my place while the balloons and streamers went up. When I brought her back, the windows were dark and Rosie panicked. Her father must have had a relapse, she said—we had to hurry to the hospital. The door opened, the lights came on, and everyone shouted, “Surprise!”

  There were piles of presents. I remember a Mother Goose cereal bowl, a sexy nightgown, an anti-war T-shirt (Nixon, don’t make the same mistake your father did, withdraw before it’s too late), chocolates, candles, incense, and a red-and-white life preserver from Avi—either a private joke or a nostalgic nod towards the summer, when he’d watched Rosie from his lifeguard’s perch. Convinced that it would do her good to break away from the Michaeli tradition of bare walls, I gave Rosie two Toulouse-Lautrec posters for her bedroom. The gift that attracted most attention, and which oddly paralleled Avi’s, was a diamond and ruby ring from his adversary, Jeff. Jeff’s father was a jeweller, but even so, it was a charged gesture, and one that ended unhappily. When the party was over and only Jeff remained, Rosie told him she couldn’t accept the ring. He threatened suicide, Mr. Michaeli laughed at him, and I was dispatched to give solace as he wept in the bathroom. “Maybe you should go away for a while,” I suggested. He was older than Rosie and would soon be graduating. “Yes, yes,” he sobbed. “I’ll go to Morocco. I have a friend who’s already there.” He was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, and like someone groping in the dark he reached out for my belt. “Please,” he whispered.

  “No way,” I said, removing his hand.

  Jeff didn’t mind. “I know, I know,” he sighed. “I just wanted to save the little that’s left of my masculine pride.”

  Rosie’s party satisfied my birthday-celebration needs, and when I turned fourteen I chose to mark the occasion Michaeli-style. Bubby baked a two-layer chocolate cake, and my mother, dressed in a silver satin dress that made her look like a stuffed toy elephant from the Far East, ceremoniously presented me with a four-speed record player and three records. The records had been enthusiastically recommended, she assured me, by the salesclerk at Sam the Record Man. We plugged in the record player, slid one of the records on the turntable, and the three of us listened to Creedence Clearwater Revival; Bubby seemed quite taken by “I Put a Spell on You” and bobbed her head to the beat.

  The following day, the Michaelis gave me an illustrated edition of War and Peace, and that’s what I was reading in Rosie’s room that Sunday. Rosie lay sideways on her bed, leafing through teen magazines and an assortment of comic books: Archie, Supergirl, Casper the Friendly Ghost. Dvora, whose collection was the envy of many, had been forced by her mother to tidy up her room, and the next day Raphi had dropped by with a bagful of comic-book treasures. I sat on the floor with my new book, sucking on the pits of plums until their sugary insides leaked out, my back against the bed. Rosie had a habit of wriggling her feet as she read, and every now and then her toes brushed my upper back.

  “Is he good?” Rosie asked me, referring to Tolstoy.

  “Yes. I like reading about desperate people. I’d like Archie comics if Archie was struggling with heroin addiction.”

  Rosie smiled. “Is everyone desperate in War and Peace?”

  “Pretty much. Desperate or foolish. I can relate to the desperate characters and I get to feel superior to the foolish ones.”

  “Listen to this. ‘Dear Dianne, My boyfriend’s hair reaches down to his shoulders. I’m afraid to ask him over because I know my dad will make fun of him. We’re very serious and have been discussing marriage. What should I do?’”

  I said, “Dear Dianne, I feel very guilty because a boy liked me and I didn’t like him back, and I should have told him right away but I didn’t, because I liked his records and chocolates. What should I do?”

  “Don’t feel bad about Earl,” Rosie said. “I think it’s working out with him and Naomi.”

  Things had come to an abrupt end with Earl. I’d finally refused, one Saturday night, to dance with him. Rosie came over to me and pleaded on his behalf. “Maya, please talk to Earl. He’s really upset.”

  I had tried to be a good friend at least to lanky, hollow-cheeked Earl. He had so much already: a bunk bed, an extended family, an American mother with a Brooklyn accent, a father who was born in Winnipeg, a shelf of ping-pong trophies. Why did he need more? And why me, of all people? In all the hours spent listening to music and eating Black Magic chocolates in his clubhouse basement, we had not succeeded in moving beyond his craving and my resistance. He wanted my female body, but his desire only made me protective of that body, and it was Earl’s shyness, though he may have cursed it when he was alone in his bunk bed, that made it possible for me to hang out with him as long as I did.

  I took Earl to Rosie’s room, shut the door. He sat on the bed and I sat next to him. “Earl,” I
said, “You have to stop calling me.”

  “You’ve met someone?” he asked suspiciously.

  “No, of course not. It’s me, can’t you see? Look how long we’ve known each other—and we’ve never even kissed.”

  “Can we kiss now?”

  “Okay.”

  But when I felt his restless tongue against my mouth I drew away. “I can’t, Earl, I’m sorry. It has nothing to do with you. I’m never going to have a boyfriend.”

  “You’re just trying to get rid of me.”

  He stormed out of the room, and a few minutes later left the party with Naomi, who spent her free time browsing through bridal magazines.

  That was three weeks ago. Earl hadn’t spoken to me since.

  “I think—” But before I’d finished my sentence, the doorbell rang.

  “That’s Patrick,” Rosie said. “He usually comes on Friday, but he had to switch. He’s really funny.”

  I never visited Rosie on Fridays. Friday was her dating night, and also the day I was held food prisoner at the Levitsky Institute for the Work Deprived. The food tournament got off to an early start. At seven in the morning Bubby entered the kitchen and shut the door, dismissing me with a firm wave of the hand. By the time I came home from school my mother had joined Bubby. The kitchen remained off-limits until six o’clock, when I was called in for a multi-course meal, complete with tapered white candles, a bottle of oxidized red wine the three of us pretended to sip, and musical accompaniment in the form of an obscure melody hummed with vague urgency by Bubby.