Cures for Heartbreak (5 page)

I held on to the straps of my book bag. Richard led us to the place where we'd been sitting before. He stared over our heads and stood beside us, as if waiting for something. I wanted to speak to him, to tell him that it wasn't my father
in that bed—to let him comfort me, wrap me in his arms and keep everything away—but I couldn't say it; I didn't even know how to begin.

Richard's eyes focused on something down the hall; I turned to see what it was. I heard Gina Petrollo's shoes clicking toward us even before her figure came into view.

“How did it go?” she asked, out of breath.

“Wonderfully,” he said. “No complications—everything's fine.”

He stretched out his arms; his hand touched the edge of her back. It was the tiniest gesture, a flick. If I hadn't been replaying his every movement again and again in my mind over the past three days, I'd have missed it. But there was something unmistakable in the motion that was intimate and familiar, the way my sister and I would sometimes pick a bug off each other; it was a touch that indicates more.

“I'm so glad,” Gina said, grinning at us. “We were so worried about you.” She reached over and enveloped my sister in a tight, long hug. Then she hugged me.

For a second I thought I'd suffocate, and I wanted to wrench myself away. But gathered into the pillow of her marshmallowy chest, inhaling her perfume, I almost didn't want to be released. I couldn't remember when I'd last been hugged—really, tightly hugged. Once clutched to her body, it almost didn't matter who she was, until she let go.

She stood beside Richard, who smiled at us.

“Thanks, for everything,” Alex said quietly.

I couldn't speak. Richard and Gina said “you're welcome” with a kind of finality to their voices, and Richard shook our hands as he said good-bye.

As they walked off down the hall I started to cry. It was the first time I'd cried openly in the hospital. My body shook, my hat fell off, and some of the cotton balls roamed toward the middle of my chest; my rouge ran, and the eyeliner, the fake eyelashes, the whole great mass of it smeared off until I must have looked like modern art, a twisted Picasso, features falling all over the place.

“Look, you're shedding,” Alex said, and plucked a hairy blob of false eyelash off my cheek. She held it up, like a spider.

I couldn't stop crying. I knew it was the wrong time to cry publicly now, so late for my mother's death, so prematurely for my father's. What no one ever tells you is that people don't die all at once, but again and again in waves, before their deaths and after. And I wasn't just crying for watching Richard leave with Gina, or seeing my father's body, or the fight with my sister, or even my mother. It was everything, suddenly—every person and object and speck of existence in the world seemed as if it could be lost. I kept crying until my sister put her arms around me, my fallen eyelashes folded inside a crumpled tissue, and said, “Come on,” and took me to the cafeteria to eat.

I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

—Margaret Atwood

Cat's Eye
               

T
hat summer, I kept dreaming about the man who was my mother's first love. In the dream I followed him, detective-like, slinking through museums, coffee shops, libraries, subway trains, hoping he'd lead me to my mother. He strode like a movie star, confident and oblivious to the rest of the world; at dusk he wound his way through Central Park, down narrow paths along patches of forest to a small, secluded lake. There, drying off by the shore, stood my mother. She looked nothing like she had when I last saw her, with her hair matted against the hospital pillow and her belly bloated with growths. By the lake her black hair gleamed like velvet; her stomach looked taut and smooth.
At last you've found us,
she said, reaching for my hand.
I've been waiting.

The dream had started in my summer English class, when Ms. Poletti asked us to write a story about true love.

Groans all around. Billy Marino sailed a spitball at the blackboard. “I don't
know
any love stories,” whined Luisa Rodriguez. Eddie Silva muttered “Bullshit” through his gold teeth. Marisol Peters ignored the class altogether to doodle across her No Guns in School! bookmark—a gift we'd all
received from the Board of Education. I stared out the barred windows to the rolling pavement of the Bronx. I was in summer school for history and English; the only spring-semester class I'd excelled in was hygiene.

“Love is beauty,” Ms. Poletti sighed, off in her own reverie. We'd just finished reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning in class; Ms. Poletti had recited each stanza in a Britain-meets-Bronx accent, her flower-patterned dress dipping frightfully low as her bosom heaved. She was an anomaly at our school, flitting about like a robin, perching on our desks to impart to each of us seeds of hope. Rumors about her abounded: Luisa swore she'd seen Ms. Poletti adjusting her G-string in the girls' bathroom; Billy had spotted someone on the subway reading a romance novel by a Madame Poletti. In the cafeteria and on the walk to the D train after school we made fun of her, arching our eyebrows, shrilling our voices, but the consensus was that she was an improvement over Mr. Tortolano, the English teacher we'd had that spring. He had been fired in May after his membership in the North American Man-Boy Love Association had been confirmed. Everyone was passing now—that is, everyone but me.

Failing English again was a particularly remarkable achievement, considering that I was the only native English-speaker in the class. I wasn't a terrible writer; my subjects were the problem. For the how-you-overcame-your-deepest-loss assignment I'd written “Snuffy: Better Off Dead,” about my departed overweight gerbil, who'd suffered a slow and painful
demise after getting stuck in the Habitrail. Most recently, for the topic of great social and political import, I'd completed “Plaid Pants: Should They Be Outlawed?” which had garnered a round of applause when I'd read it to the class, but received yet another U.

Ms. Poletti called me to her desk that day after class. She sat there like a magistrate escaped from Las Vegas, her sequined glasses slipping down her nose. “Miss Pearlman,” she said, “are you familiar with the phrase ‘Attitude is everything'?” She tapped a pink fingernail on my compositions. “There's a
tone
to these essays that's not suitable for the assignments. Good writing isn't about glibness. It's about
life.
Think Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Think ‘How Do I Love Thee?'”

She smoothed the ruffled pages. “Now, this Snuffy piece—I see things to admire here. Clear language. Solid composition.” She removed her glasses. “Yet you haven't let your readers
feel
your triumph over this loss. What was your
connection
to Snuffy? What did he
mean
to you?”

I shrugged. I didn't know how to explain myself. All I knew was that after school and the subway ride home, when I put my mother's old typewriter on the dining room table, listened to my sister talk on the phone about logarithms, and heard my father snore in front of the TV (he liked to keep it on even while he slept, for company), the last thing I could write was something serious.

She surveyed the index card I'd filled in the first day of
class. Under
In your own words, why did you not succeed in English during the regular school year?
I'd written,
My mother died; my father had a heart attack.
It was strange to see it on the stark white card—name, address, Social Security number, grade-point average, dead mother, sick father, heading for the orphanage.

“I know that other things have been going on in your life,” Ms. Poletti said. “But if you fulfill the assignment just
one time,
you'll pass this class. I don't think you want to stay in high school an extra year.”

I said I didn't think so either.

She sighed. “You shouldn't have trouble with this. It should be a pleasure to write about love.”

That night Alex gabbed on the phone about sine and cosine curves, and my father wheezed on the couch while zebras leaped across the TV screen. The narrator droned on about mating practices as I settled in front of my mother's Smith Corona. The first thing that came to mind was my parents.

TRUE LOVE

On a cold, rainy night in March, over a year ago, Simon Pearlman gave his wife, Greta, their twentieth-wedding-anniversary present.

“Is it clothes?” Greta asked excitedly, clutching the huge box. “A case of wine? A crate of imported fruit?”

“Better,” Simon said.

Greta ripped open the cardboard to reveal a glimpse of shiny red enamel.

“what is it? what is it?” shouted the Pearlmans' two charming young daughters.

The packaging fell away to reveal—a fire extinguisher.

“It was on special at Sears,” Simon said, taking the extinguisher from her, stroking it lovingly. “Should we test it?”

Alex, the elder daughter, jumped up excitedly. “Yes! Yes!” she cried. The younger daughter, Mia, shook her head like her mother; neither of them was very interested in fire extinguishers.

“Simon,” Greta groaned, “we don't have time to test it. We're supposed to be at the restaurant
now
.
You
agreed
,
for
once
,
to go out tonight.”

Simon didn't hear her. “I think that hooks there,” he mumbled to Alex.

“
Simon
,
will you listen to me?” Greta screamed.

Simon didn't look up.

“For
once
,
will you just
listen
to me?!”

“Just a second—”

“Simon!”
Greta lifted a plastic ashtray off the nearest shelf. She threw it at him. It missed and bounced off the floor. She picked up a candle in the shape of a turtle—a Chanukah
present from her daughters years ago.

“Not the wax turtle!” the daughters shouted. “Not the wax turtle!”

I crumpled it up; this was not a love story. My parents had fought so frequently that eventually Alex and I removed all fragile objects from their shelves, and at night I'd lie awake listening to the arguing, my sheet wound in my fist as they screamed. In the beginning Alex and I had tried, in little ways, to repair our parents' marriage: we taped the praising
Queens Independent
write-up of our father's shoe repair shop to the refrigerator; we ordered two oversized laminated buttons made from their wedding photo. But soon my mother began to call her friend Fanny nearly every night (Fanny had divorced her husband, Irv, four years earlier) and whisper on the phone.

Fanny told my mother to give up trying to drag my father to restaurants and the ballet, and to take me instead. I loved being my mother's date: together at Lincoln Center we'd cascade past the outdoor fountain, through the main hall, past the rustling taffeta and swishing silk of the finely dressed ladies with their sweeping furs and wafts of expensive perfume. I pretended we lived there, in this mansiony hall with marble banisters and chandeliers like explosions of glass. Afterward we'd linger at the Pirouette Café across the street, heavily under the spell of the performance, not ready to go home. Queens—my father and his stories of hammertoes and plantar warts, my sister shouting at her calculator as she practiced
for Math Team—seemed like somebody else's life. For the first time, I began to wonder whether my parents should be married after all.

One night at the Pirouette last summer, seven months before my mother died, her mind seemed elsewhere. “I was talking to Fanny the other day,” she said. “She invited me to come visit, for a little vacation. I was thinking you might like to come too, and see Lucy.”

I'd been friends with Lucy Gluckman since I was three, when she and her parents lived four blocks away; I hadn't seen her since the divorce. In her letters she said she liked Maplewood, in upstate New York, much better: the houses weren't attached, as they were in Queens—no more crazy Mrs. Fonchette scratching on the walls. And her father arrived for visits with presents overflowing from the trunk. Her boyfriend, Brad, was captain of the lacrosse team; in ballet class she was now working
en pointe.
Not wanting to feel left behind, I'd embellished my own life: I invented a passionate affair with Luigi, the handsome clerk at Cardially Yours, our corner gift shop; I told her that my recital at the Flushing Academy of Dance had received a standing ovation, when in reality I'd pranced across the floor twelve counts early, like an escaped jumping bean. But the embellishments never seemed entirely false—sometimes at the Pirouette, after a performance, a part of me actually believed that one day I would be a dancer, twirling around that huge stage, leaping into Luigi's arms.

“You'd like Maplewood,” my mother said. “There's shopping,
forests and lakes, and the community center, where Fanny teaches folk dancing. You could even take ballet there if you wanted.”

“It might be weird seeing Lucy—it's been so long,” I said, wondering how I'd explain my less-than-stellar ballet technique.

“Maybe at first. Then things'll be like before. Some of the people in Maplewood I haven't seen in years—old friends from Washington Heights. People I've been wanting to see for a long time. Fanny said she's surprised how little they've changed.”

Whenever we drove through Washington Heights my mother shuddered, remembering the grave-faced men and women shuffling from store to synagogue to their tiny, crumbling apartments, undecorated and bare—not like homes, my mother said. She told me once that her parents never hugged her; I couldn't even imagine it, our hugs were such an event. Even at fourteen I'd sit on her lap on the couch some nights, facing her, nuzzling my nose into her neck, talking as she kissed my hair—“huggies,” we called these moments, like they were a game or a performance.

“Why'd your old friends move to Maplewood?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I guess to be happier. To get away. To find a better life.”

Fanny and Lucy met us at the bus stop in a yellow Volkswagen Bug; Fanny lumbered toward us in her Birkenstocks. “Ya
look gorgeous!” she told my mother.

“So do you!”

“That's what they tell me. I say leaving Irv took ten years off my age.”

Lucy hugged me briskly. I didn't know what to say at first. “How's Brad?” I finally asked.

“Oh, good. You know. We're okay. And Luigi?”

“He's pretty good. Actually I haven't seen him much lately. He's really busy—selling those cards and all.”

“Brad's busy too. You know—we kind of broke up.”

“Really? Oh my God. I bet me and Luigi are going to break up too.”

“It's really not that bad. My mother says I'm better off.”

We stared at our mothers, giggling like teenagers in the front seat. They gossiped the whole drive, and all the way up the gravel road to the house. It was a gingerbread bungalow plopped in a sea of bright grass, the blades soft and cottony, whispering under my shoes.

“The block has a service that mows it,” Fanny said. “Can you imagine if we had lawns in Queens? I'd have spent half my life getting Irv to mow.”

My mother settled into the guest room while Lucy and I prepared the bottom half of her trundle bed. We dressed up for dinner at the Maplewood Grill: skirts and purses and high-heeled shoes. I gazed at the sky outside the restaurant, certain I'd never seen so many stars. We sprawled out in our
cushiony booth; our mothers lit cigarettes and let us take sips of their wine.

“I'm so glad you're staying two whole weeks—a week from Saturday is Summer Showcase,” Fanny said. “The whole town comes out. My class is performing first—four versions of the hora. I'm hoping the girls will dance too.”

“
Ma,
” Lucy groaned, “not the
hora.
”

“How are you going to get the boys to notice you if you don't shake your cute tush?”

“Ma!”

“These girls don't know how lucky they are—dinners out, dance classes. What did we have when we were their age? Boiled potatoes. Hopscotch. There was no music in our house. No dancing. No stomping around. No talking above a whisper. What did my father think—we'd be arrested by the Gestapo, lurking outside in New York?”

“Elsa became a dancer,” my mother said. “Remember Elsa? Elsa Goldstone. I think she even made it to the Joffrey.”

Fanny raised her eyebrows. “Then she danced her way out a sixth-story window. A little more graceful than Jack Cohen. You know, I ran into someone who knew his wife—said she came home one night, found him dead on the couch. Pills.”

I stared at Lucy, frozen in her seat. We had always frozen whenever our mothers' conversation turned to people they'd known—survivors or children of survivors—who'd gone over the edge. The stories made me fear for my mother's life; it
seemed suspended by a single thread. I couldn't make sense of her emotions: we had our nights out, the ballet, but then there were those hours she spent in bed, sleeping off an undefined illness. And there were the fights with my father, like sudden explosions, and her Wednesday-night trips to Dr. Mallik, her therapist, whom Fanny had recommended. Fanny shared many of my mother's quirks: the tote bags loaded with provisions, the way they kept track of Lucy and me, wanting intricate details of our plans at all times, as if once they lost track of us for a minute, they'd lose us forever. And the way, when they said good night to us, they told us they loved us as if they doubted that we'd still be there in the morning.