Either Side of Winter (27 page)

Reuben had altered it after the divorce. Rachel at eighteen came into the apartment and various portfolios of stock. A cash fund, too. To be managed at her own discretion: she was free to do what she liked. As he said to her that night over dinner: ‘Not now, but later, I want you to consider what I’ve said. What I’ve worked for all my life offers you real freedoms; do what you want with them, that’s all I ask. Don’t confine yourself for form’s sake.’

She remembered the way she covered her ears. ‘I don’t want to talk about money, I don’t want to talk about money.’ But she was growing up: she paid close attention now. An independent woman, if she wanted she could cut herself free from Tasha entirely. That night she made her father’s bed herself and slept there. She wondered what to do with her wealth: how could she live, as her father wished, freely, without any attention to ‘form’? He can’t have been happy, to have worked so hard all his life in order to give his daughter a life without work. Tasha was heartbroken and rang at all hours. Rachel herself was surprised at her own coldness: perhaps she had something to forgive. The way Tasha moved in at the end disgusted her: she couldn’t even let him die in peace. She blamed her mother obscurely for Reuben’s death.

She did in the end visit Miss Bostick at school. Few of the girls liked Miss Bostick. Not that she flirted too much, though she did, subtly, favour her boys. Rather, she relied too often on certain sisterly appeals: as if she said, you know what I’m talking about, girls. You know what it’s like; help me out here. Simple weakness: it did them no honour. Rachel, at
least, never warmed to her. But she stepped demurely into the L-shaped office during lunch, and asked to see Miss Bostick. Mr Peasbody, one of the older men, generally loved for his dry manner and easy authority, gestured to the back of the room. And Amy stood up and took Rachel in her arms. Her manner initially tender; her concern oversweet.

‘Trust me,’ she said at one point, ‘I know what a father is to a girl. I know how much he means. I couldn’t get any food down at the reception, I was so wound up.’

Later, ‘Still, I think we need to have a conversation.’ Rachel sat with her hands on her lap and distantly noted these phrases. ‘I’m worried about you.’ A phone directory held open the window. ‘Life goes on.’ A little wind went off and on, unsettling the pages of a textbook. She had forgotten the pressures of school, the strong constriction of enforced childishness. ‘Women’, Miss Bostick explained, ‘need to be strong. Even a little cold.’ She sat with her legs crossed, leaning forward. Her legs, it’s true, were long and elegant: enviable. ‘This is an important time for you. The way you’re going, I don’t see how I can graduate you.’ Rachel noted an engagement ring on her finger, a platinum band, the bright clenched fist of a diamond. Yes, Miss Bostick had changed in the course of the year, grown more sure of herself. There were rumours she was leaving the school. Rachel thanked her sweetly, said she would do her best.

In the hallway afterwards, she felt a rough hand on her arm. Mr Peasbody stood there in a sweat; she was shocked to see him, she could still feel his fingers on her skin. ‘Take all the time you want,’ he said. ‘I want you to know that none of this matters, none of this matters at all. Don’t listen to any of us.’ He loomed over her rather unsteadily, and smoothed his thin hair with a damp palm. He’d put on weight; there was hardly any colour in his face at all. ‘None of this matters,’ he repeated. And then, more spitefully, ‘She’s one of those girls, marriage has gone to her head.’

Rachel knew who he was: Frannie’s father. Her friend had
quizzed Rachel about him, though she had little to offer: a well-liked teacher, clever, disrespectful. Lately, he’d let himself go: the sour smell of the dissection lab still clung to him. For once, she stood her ground. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to be told any more what matters and what doesn’t.’ Even she guessed it was the wrong thing to say, and which is worse, not quite true. And the wrong person to say it to. He looked at her, large-eyed, his heavy head tenderly nodding. ‘No,’ he said laughing at last, ‘I don’t suppose you do.’ She walked slowly her narrow line along the hallway; when she turned at the steps, he was still watching her.

The graduation itself was another grand affair. Bleachers lined up around the baseball field. Rows of blue cafeteria chairs in the middle for the students. A podium at one end, by the road where the school buses parked. Tables under a canopy with squares of cake, punch, plastic cups. Flowers blowing away, a scratchy microphone. A cloudy morning gave way to windy sunshine, one of those days no matter how you dress, you’ll end up in a sweat from time to time, you’ll suffer a chill. Dr Holroyd, apologizing for Miss Bostick, had promised Rachel an honourary diploma; nobody needed to know, she could make up the work in the summer. Rachel wasn’t sure how she felt, but went along. She went along with everything; she was drifting free.

Tasha came, and Rachel’s heart, for once, went out to her: the care she took. Her hair cut short, her long mottled neck exposed, unashamed. A simple blue dress and pumps, no shades. Her vivid flat eyes took everything in. Too nervous to gossip with the other parents, she held her purse tightly on her lap.

Rachel sat at the end of a row of Ks. Summer grass underfoot; she took off her shoes. The ground was still a little wet, cold. She could see the back of Brian Bobek’s head, the confident crewcut coloured vaguely by the pink of his scalp. A few weeks ago, after a late meal, they’d been caught out in a summer
shower. She took him back to
her
place, as she called it, and offered him some of her father’s clothes. Nothing would fit, of course, apart from his undergarments. Still, they spent a giggly tearful hour trying things on. Reuben’s working suit. The jacket hunched large around Brian’s shoulders, his wrists stuck out, he looked like an ogre, a bear. Reuben’s ties. In the end he wore only a cravat around his bare neck and a pair of spotted shorts. They slept in her father’s bed. Rachel consciously exposed herself to him, taking off her wet blouse, her bra, her shoes, her skirt, her stockings. Looking for her nightgown under the pillows and pulling it over her head in front of him, feeling the play of her breasts under the silk.

She couldn’t sleep and turned on her side towards him. Her freedom in the world seemed extraordinary, terrifying; no one was watching them. Whatever she did no one was watching her. Her privacy was enormous. Brian’s cheeks, his hairless breast, his strong thighs, were perfectly pink and white. She remembered what she thought was a nursery rhyme: strawberries swimming in the cream. Schoolboys playing in the stream. His voice was thick in his throat, a little burdened, as if by humid weather. And in fact the night air was heavy and oppressive. Childishly, she wanted to put her small hand against his shorts to see if it moved. She didn’t yet dare to pull them below his hips. Instead, she held her hands against her belly, and thought of her father’s words:
everything inside desires a human touch.
Brian complained he was coming down with a cold; perhaps they shouldn’t kiss, he didn’t want her to catch it. Really, the smell of sour rainwater between her legs, the little loose hairs he saw as she undressed, appalled him. Years later, he confessed to her: he’d begun to dream about boys. They slept side by side, restless and silent. She had never seen him so cast down; he could barely face her in the morning, over milk and cereal. The sound of him gulping unhappily stuck in her mind all day.

She decided she couldn’t go through with another ceremony
– put on her shoes and slipped out between the bleachers. The press of people was too great, her insignificance and false position. One among many was the rule of each thing; she wanted to break apart. If only she could get a note to Tasha. They could have a bite to eat instead, the two of them. She hadn’t felt so hungry in weeks. Another memory moved her. Once, coming home from school, she found her parents fighting over a piece of carrot cake. Tasha had bought it for him specially from Le Pain Quotidien, a baker on Madison. By such small gestures she used to ornament her love. Tender curls of carrot shred, a thick cream icing. A large wedge toppled and stuck in a paper box. Late in April, Reuben was very bad, but had made it to the sitting room and lay on the red sofa. Tasha was picking at the cake from the wooden chair – licking the frosting off her finger, and breaking a piece in crumbs to put in her mouth. Tears streaming down her face. ‘I won’t give you any more, you haven’t been good to me. You haven’t been a good boy.’

‘Come to me, Tasha,’ he said. ‘Sit here. Don’t be silly.’

Rachel went to her room; she couldn’t bear to watch. Their voices muffled by the wall between. She sat perfectly still, an emblem, it seemed, of her general condition: she kept quiet to hear how other people were living.

‘You haven’t been a good boy. You left me. You shouldn’t have left me. You’re leaving again.’ Tasha’s voice both motherly and complaining; and yet, even so near the end, she couldn’t refrain from coaxing a little, at her most womanly. She was an old flirt; even in her grief she played up to him. She wanted him to agree: he had abused her terribly. As if whatever they did to each other, it was her job to suffer. She had the more difficult role.

‘But you bought it for me, you bought it especially for me. A gift, a kind thought.’ Reuben pleaded with her, as you plead with a child, painfully dependent on his own powers of consolation. He had often fallen short; whereas she could console him, he sometimes thought, at will. Perhaps he overvalued
her moments of sweetness, his own affection involved such deliberations. But they did seem very sweet to him, her happy impulses. What moved him most was her own happiness. This had at one time seemed particularly necessary to him, to his interest in life.

Tasha, still licking her fingers, still breaking off crumbs. ‘I don’t want you to die, you fool. I don’t want you to die. What am I supposed to do with myself after? What will I do?’

Rachel couldn’t hear what her father said, his tone low and consoling. Even in these circumstances, he tried to comfort.

‘It’s better I go now,’ her mother said, these heavy assumed tones of the matter-of-fact. ‘That way I won’t be so miserable afterwards.’ She inhaled and brushed her hands together and stood up; looked sharply round for her purse. And then hesitated. If she found it, there was nothing left to delay her. The only thing they had left was delay. Rachel could hear her, putting on her ordinary exasperation. ‘What have you done with my handbag?’ she muttered implausibly. ‘I can never find anything when you’re around. I remember that much.’ She was losing steam. The world had appeared to her in its more durable form: when she had nothing to complain of, no one to resent. When he was dead.

‘It’s always been this way with you,’ Reuben protested. ‘We were happy a minute ago. Eating cake. And now you suffer for it. It takes you completely by surprise; as if you forgot you have to pay for everything. I can’t bear it.’

‘You can’t bear it!’ Tasha screamed, giving way at last and losing her voice. ‘I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it!’

Rachel put her fists over her ears, sitting in her bed with her shoes on, sitting so her shoes didn’t touch the bed. She could never stand the way her mother shouted, her father’s calm voice, perplexed. How much of her life had been spent listening to these two bicker? On her own; out of the heat of it; left out. Thank God, at least, they were running out of fight. And then she shivered in the coldness of that thought. Later, when she came out, they’d gone to the bedroom. The box of cake
empty on the coffee table. The urgent hush of their privacy next door. It was impossible to ignore any longer, much as she tried to: her parents’ love. She was the child of love. In the years to come this fact seemed increasingly significant.

She stood in the outfield now hoping to catch her mother’s eye. Let’s get out of here, she thought; mother, can we please get out of here. Tasha, her head erect, sitting high up in the bleachers. ‘Mother,’ Rachel urged into the summer skies, ‘mother.’ They could go for coffee and eggs at the bottom of the hill, a little Spanish diner. Dr Holroyd squeaked a little on the microphone, testing it. Her magnified voice broadcast in the open air suggested vast distances; the wind caught it. ‘Well, we just about got through again. One more year.’ The tone false, jolly. Wide applause. Rachel was weeping freely, while Tasha bent to look for something in her purse. ‘Mother!’ Rachel called, a half-call, into the breeze. You silly woman, she thought, turn around, turn around.

Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics. Since then he has taught high school English, edited a left-wing cultural magazine and written essays, stories and reviews for, among other publications, The New York Times, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and the Paris Review. He has written four previous novels,
The Syme Papers
,
Either Side of Winter
,
Imposture
and
A Quiet Adjustment
. Markovits has lived in London since 2000 and is married with a daughter and a son. He teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.