Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth Page 9

  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 In my daydreams I’d focussed on the female models who’d posed in studios over the ages; now those anonymous women had been replaced by Rosie, and my passive appreciation by dramas, or rather melodramas, in which I played a heroic role.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?”

  “‘Ode to Billy Joe,’” Rosie said.

  “What’s the thing they throw off the bridge?” I asked.

  “Her baby,” Rosie said.

  “Oh no!” Earl looked horrified. “It’s a g-gun. He’s killed the man who attacked her and got her pregnant.”

  “It’s her blood-stained clothes. She’s had an abortion,” Avi said with unZenlike relish, as his hand slowly rotated on Rosie’s midriff.

  “Anyone see the moon landing?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Big deal,” said Avi.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did they have to put up that flag?” Avi complained. “No imagination—just ego, ego, ego. Couldn’t they have put something universal, like a peace flag?”

  “Or Masaccio’s Adam and Eve,” I suggested.

  “It ruins looking at the moon, thinking that flag is up there,” Avi said.

  “It won’t l-last,” Earl assured him.

  “It’s probably flown away already,” Rosie said.

  “Yeah, well,” Avi grunted. “They’re in competition with the Soviets. You have to give up desire to reach the realm of the True Self.”

  “‘The ants go marching one by one,’” Rosie sang, and we all joined in, improvising silly, stoned rhymes.

  Meanwhile, back home, my mother was talking to two policemen in our living room: three in the morning, she wailed, and not a sign of me, not a word. The policemen nodded. What did they make of my mother? And what had she told them on the phone to induce them to pay a house call? I don’t know. But they did have words of warning for her: “She could be on LSD. Parents are the last to know.” For days afterwards, my mother watched me fearfully, and it took a concerted effort to convince her that LSD was not being passed around, along with Dvora’s toffees, at the swimming pool.

  When you’re young and it’s summer, time melts away. If not for Rosie’s Saturday-night parties we would have forgotten what day it was, but the countdown began midweek: three days to go, then two, then one. The parties were an extension of the Michaelis’ distinct vision of family life: filling the house with teenagers was part of a larger plan we gladly accepted, though we didn’t quite understand it. Rosie’s parents remained in the background, sitting in the kitchen or paying for the pizza or collecting paper cups; whenever possible, they tried to direct our focus onto Rosie. But the parties were a family project, a staged event in which the rest of us had been cast; and the
point was to include Mr. and Mrs. Michaeli, satisfy a private need of theirs. We didn’t care. On the contrary, the depth and breadth of their need made us feel wanted.

  The food never varied. We could expect two large plastic serving bowls filled with Cheezies, four cut-glass candy dishes containing white and pink sugar-coated almonds, and several bottles of soda. Dvora, Earl, and some of the others brought additional drinks and bags of pretzels. At eight o’clock the extra-large pizzas arrived at the door, their cardboard boxes almost too hot to touch and starting to warp from the sogging steam. We ate politely, using napkins, but sometimes tomato sauce dripped onto the sofa or carpets, leaving stains that gradually faded from copper to dark grey.

  As we ate, Rosie performed for us. She sang songs by Schubert in her pure, faraway voice, with her father accompanying her on the piano. She sang Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and Pamina’s magical aria from The Magic Flute—ach ich fühls, es ist verschwunden. Now I know that love can vanish.

  Classical music! No one else could have got away with it. But if Rosie sang Schubert or Mozart or Berlioz, it was because she was even better than you thought. She wasn’t showing off, she was doing it for you, handing you—or her parents, through you—the luminous overflow of what she had to offer.

  Occasionally, on request, she also performed the family dance. She must have been fooling around one day in the living room, with her father playing wacky, jazzy Bach to match her odd moves while her mother watched. Over the years, the Bachanova, with its stooped arm-swinging and fake tap-dancing, had evolved into family tradition. No one tried to imitate it; no one would have succeeded.

  At regular intervals, Mrs. Michaeli retreated into her bedroom to smoke. She left the door open and I often saw her sitting on the bed with an ashtray on her lap, staring into space. If she happened to glance my way, she’d smile and say, “Will you stay tonight, Maya?”

  I did stay. More and more frequently I slept over on Saturday nights. The sofa in the music room opened into a hard, slightly wobbly bed, and Mrs. Michaeli brought me ironed sheets and a pillow from the closet. She would light a cigarette and sit on the piano stool as Rosie and I tucked sheets under the sofa cushions. “Poor Maya,” she said. “We have no room for your legs.” She was postponing her own bedtime, and we tried to be helpful by talking about the small mating dramas that had taken place during the party. But it was hard going, and as we spoke Mrs. Michaeli stared at the carpet and nodded vaguely. When the bed was made, she would sigh deeply, stub out her cigarette, and say goodnight.

  We moved to the bedroom to change. As Rosie undressed, I couldn’t help noticing the perfect triangle of dark hair springing like a miniature meadow from the curve of her thighs. Mine, a ridiculous orange, was unruly and wiry; I had not realized there were such variations. She had round breasts while I was as flat as a boy; she was slim but her body curved gently. I felt angular and overly solid next to her, like a child’s drawing of a robot next to Titian’s Venus of Urbino.

  “Look at me,” I said, the first time I slept over. “My body proves that God has a sense of humour.”

  “You’re a riot, Maya. It’s nice to be tall. And everyone loves red hair and grey eyes. I wish I had your grey eyes!”

  “I wish—” But I couldn’t tell her what I wished. What I wished was to sleep in her bed. I liked to imagine that if I had the same access to Rosie’s body as her boyfriends, she’d be impressed, because I’d be so much more passionate and appealing than any boy. In fact I was luckier than Rosie’s boyfriends: she never rationed herself with me. I had an open invitation to her place, and when I came over I had her to myself for hours at a time.

  “Here,” Rosie said unhappily, extracting a pile of letters from a dresser drawer and dropping them on the bed.

  The letters were from boys. Avi’s large, bold script obediently reproduced the conventions of cursive our teachers had modelled on the blackboard in third grade; Freddy’s letters were smudged and barely legible; Kris used a green fountain pen. They all pleaded with Rosie, pledged their devotion. I can’t live without you all I think about is you and if I thought that the future didn’t include you I wouldn’t want to be part of that future. The tone was at times accusatory but never aggressive: sensitivity was coming into fashion. See me, hear me.

  “What should I do, what will I do?” Rosie looked expectantly into my eyes. “I don’t want to hurt anyone … I just can’t give them what they’re asking for. They’re all jealous of each other.”

  “Who do you like best?” I wanted to be helpful, but I was also scouting.

  “I like all of them, that’s the problem.”

  “But are you in love with anyone?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think I am, then I think I’m not. I guess I’m not, really.”

  Rosie yawned, switched on her record player, blew on the needle, and placed the arm carefully on the shiny disc. The voice of a wholesome soprano filled the room: Old Mother Goose when she wanted to wander, would ride through the air on a very fine gander …

  I made my way to the sofa bed, and Rosie called out, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite!”

  It took me a while to fall asleep that first night. My sheets smelled of peanuts, the kitchen light had been left on, and the shrill, cheerful warbling of the Mother Goose singer rang eerily through the large room. Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep—

  At some point, I slid into one of those dreams you have when you need to pee: I was darting through a deserted beach strewn with transparent blue jellyfish, searching for a bathroom and trying not to step on the pretty but dangerous blue blobs with my bare feet. I woke up and realized that I really did need a bathroom—the salted pretzels had made me thirsty, and I’d helped myself to several tall glasses of lemonade during the evening.

  The light was still on in the kitchen, and I heard small, muffled sounds coming from there. On my way to the bathroom I saw Rosie and her parents sitting at the kitchen table, playing cards. They wore loose, shapeless pyjamas with Miracle Mart designs: blotchy cherries on white for girls, blue stripes for women, a swarm of brown paisley commas on grey for men.

  After that I remembered to use the toilet before I went to sleep at the Michaelis’. It turned out that they were all insomniacs, and the nighttime card games—round after round of Hearts—were routine. But though I didn’t leave my sofa bed, I was often aware of whispers and footsteps, and once or twice I heard other things, familiar to me from those pre-Seconal years at my own home—weeping, terror, disorientation. But whereas my mother was alone with her nightmares, for Bubby was a deep sleeper and I was only a child, the sounds of distress at the Michaelis’ were accompanied by soft voices and gentle coaxing.

  My mother accepted my nights away from home with surprising equanimity; she was satisfied that the Michaelis were looking after me. They came, her card-playing friends assured her, with impeccable credentials.

  Though the Saturday-night parties continued throughout the summer, Rosie told me they were smaller than usual, since most of her friends were either away at camp or staying in country cottages in the Laurentians. After shovelling snow for five months, Montrealers moved on to the next seasonal ritual, streaming by the thousands to summer cabins that lay scattered across the vast wilderness north of the city. Some of the parents in our circle followed the trend, but they preferred sturdy houses set in neat rows at the edge of a town, with the forest safely consigned to the sidelines. The women socialized on porches while the children attended a local day camp, and the men, who worked in the city, visited on weekends.

  Rosie was often invited to drive up with one of the fathers, but she refused to leave her parents, and in the end I was the one who spent a weekend with Dvora at her aunt’s country house. I didn’t bring my diary with me, and I’ve retained only a few memories from that visit: scores of ant hills underfoot, the smell of damp sand outdoors and damp carpets indoors, tiny shells that made a fine sound when you rattled them in your hands. On Saturday night, as we played endless
rounds of Chinese checkers on the screened-in porch, I was distracted by the thought that I could have been sitting on the sofa in Rosie’s music room, playing charades.

  In mid-August, Sheila disappeared, leaving behind a not entirely reassuring note on the kitchen table: I’ve hit the road, I’ll be back shortly. Her parents came down to the pool and asked us whether we knew anything. But Sheila had kept her counsel, and we were all amazed when she returned four days later with a chest cold, a folded picture of a radiant pink and blue Krishna in her back pocket, and the news that she’d been to Woodstock. Her parents consulted their rabbi; he recommended amnesia. “Just proves what a fake he is,” she said ungratefully. She’d caught a case of crabs, and her blasé response when she was diagnosed at the Ste. Famille Youth Clinic convinced me that she, at least, was not a fake. “Crabs from Woodstock. Too much.” I couldn’t begin to imagine such calm in the face of parasites.

  Despite our unpromising first date, Earl was still hoping to make some headway with me. He tempted me to return to his basement by placing at my disposal his extensive record collection, along with an endless supply of Black Magic chocolates (his parents owned a pharmacy). He tried to teach me ping-pong, but I was uncoordinated and easily frustrated. At Rosie’s parties he shadowed me with glum persistence, and when we danced his bony body made me sad. I kept him at arm’s length—literally. The idea wasn’t to flaunt my detachment. I wanted to thaw him out of wintry self-consciousness, prod him into understanding me, but he didn’t want to see me, hear me.