In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (32 page)

And this was the puzzle that occupied my mind in the camp house that morning: How could I prove how special I was if no one required the knowledge I had gleaned from my book? I lay on my back, studying the baffling words above the toilet, preparing for the day I would be called upon to translate some other warning God had written on a wall, as Daniel, my hero, had been asked to explain
MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN
to wicked King Belshazzar.

“Attention, attention!” My mother’s voice rang from loudspeakers on poles all over the Eden’s grounds. “Ladies and gentlemen, the pool is now open for your aquatic enjoyment.”

I replaced my book in its cubbyhole and jumped down the four steps. Slowed by my flip-flops, I left these behind, two bright crimson footprints in the middle of the walk. Beside the pool, I paused on the hot concrete deck—good training, in case I was ever flung into a burning furnace, like Daniel. Then, with a cry, I raced to the edge and threw myself over.

Cold as perfection. I frog-kicked underwater. When I emerged I felt cleansed, though of what I wasn’t sure. Maybe the chlorine would sterilize my skin so no ugly hair would sprout between my legs, as it did from the crotches of the women on the lounge chairs, black tendrils creeping down puckery thighs. I levered my body to the deck, exalting in the strength of my lean, freckled arms. I pinched my nose, rubbed it—if Arthur saw snot, he would blow his whistle and call out his findings to the busboys. The pool walls were painted turquoise, the water reflecting the sun like an enormous gem sunk in the pillowed acres of the Eden. The pool didn’t have a lifeguard (
SWIM AT OWN RISK
warned a sign), but my brother had the job of keeping the water clean, and he cleared debris from the surface as obsessively as he scrubbed blackheads from his face. He dumped in chlorine until any moth or beetle fluttering too near dropped like a stone.

I breathed deeply, then dove. Emptying my lungs, I sank to the bottom, where I lay with the rough concrete scraping my belly. My blood throbbed loudly in my ears, the watery world pulsated with the question:
How long can you stay here, how long, how long
…

Forever, I answered, I could live without breathing, explore the world’s oceans with no need for tanks. I flipped onto my back and floated there, between the bottom and the surface, the sunlight a spatter of gold drops above, the fir trees curved wings. I told myself that no one had seen the world
this
way.

When I grew bored with floating, I climbed from the pool and tossed a penny over my shoulder. “Arthur! Hey, Arthur! I bet I can find it in less than a minute!”

Not that my brother ever would time me. Not that he ever paid attention. Like most children, I equated attention with love. But my brother thought the highest form of attention a brother could bestow was relentless correction. And because he did love me, he feared that I would become what he most hated: a woman who thought she was special. He classified people according to whether they demanded special treatment—“Waiter, make sure the fish has no bones!” “I want colder water!” “Artie, get me a fork whose tines aren’t bent!”—or whether they sat quietly and ate what they were given. I knew I couldn’t please him. From my orange hair to my feet, whose nails I painted red, I was too loud, too brash. But praise is most precious when given by those who dispense it most rarely. If my brother had commended me for finding that penny, I might have become a pearl diver. And when I rose from the depths and saw his turned head, I felt cheaper than the coppery coin in my fist. With no special talents, I must be the same as every other girl, as one drop of water is exactly like the other drops. This scared me so profoundly I had no other choice but to turn to the staff, who paid me attention because my last name was Appelbaum, a fact I tried hard to forget.

I climbed from the pool and shouted insults at the busboys until two of them grabbed me by the ankles and the wrists and—one, two,
three
—tossed me in the depths so water rose from the pool and flattened the hairdos of the women playing cards.

“Lucy! Don’t splash!”

To protect their bouffants these women wore kerchiefs with hundreds of petals or tall hats whose filaments waved in the wind like the tentacles of spiny sea creatures. Some women played canasta, tapping spiky heels as they waited for their cards. (Their legs were shot blue, like the celery stalks my teacher had propped in an inkwell the year before, in third grade.) Other women played mahjongg—fast fingers, fast tongues, the ivory tiles clicking: “Two bam,” “Red,” “Two dot.” But if I drew too near their table, one of these women would grab me by the shoulders, exclaiming
zise mammele tayere
—sweet, dear little mother!—while the other women chimed:

“What bottle did that red hair come from!”

“Someone is going to wake up and find herself with a lovely little shape any day now!”

I was desperate to grow up, but the crêpe-papier skin hanging from their necks made me queasy, and I had to admit that growing up didn’t stop at fifteen, or even at my parents’ age, but kept on and on until you began to grow
down
, the women’s spines curving until they were shorter than I was.

My only hope that old age needn’t be frightening came from the Feidels. Each afternoon they appeared at the pool, Shirley in a trim maroon one-piece, Nathan in trunks neither baggy nor too tight. Shirley had the figure of a much younger woman, with smooth skin and long white hair, which she wore in a bun. Nathan had a thick square-cut silver mustache, a cleft chin and a nose that came straight from his brow. He and his wife would step down the ladders on opposite sides of the pool and, without hesitation, even on the chilliest day, slip into the water and swim toward one another, pass and keep swimming, twenty laps in counterpoint, strong rhythmic strokes, as the numbers on their wrists, written in an ink that never washed off, rose, from the water again and again.

When they finished their swim, Nathan and Shirley climbed from the pool. Nathan draped his wife’s shoulders with a thick purple towel they must have brought from home since the towels at the Eden were threadbare and white. Then Nat kissed his wife. No parts of their bodies touched except their lips, but I felt so unsettled that after they had gone I was attracted more strongly than ever to the waiters sunning on the deck.

An outsider might have thought the boys were sleeping, but I knew that they were actually using the sun’s rays to recharge their batteries. How else could they find the energy to work seven days a week: out of bed at six to get ready for breakfast, clear the tables, serve lunch, set up for the next meal, a few hours’ break before serving dinner, which took until eleven-thirty to clear? The steel trays they brandished might have been shields for an army of knights. Loaded with dishes, such a tray couldn’t be lifted by two ordinary men. But a waiter could swing a tray to his shoulder and dart between the tables so the steaming soup flew above the heads of the indifferent diners. I didn’t think it fair that the guests, who did no work, should lounge on cushioned chairs while the staff were forced to lie on the concrete deck. When I ran the Eden—and I never doubted that I would—things would be fair.

I stood above Herbie, the knight I loved best, Sir Herbie the Scrub-brush, bristling with black hairs. Beside him lay Larry, with a pink hairless chest and two tiny nipples like pink candy dots, and Steve, Michael, Bruce, all of them sleeping so soundly that I almost regretted what I had to do.

Almost. Not quite. The night before, the busboys had finished work early and decided to hitch-hike to town for ice cream. When I begged to go with them, Herbie said, “Loose, you won’t miss much. The waitress at HoJo’s will bring us our sundaes. We’ll try to imagine what she looks like without that hair net, we’ll pass out in our butterscotch syrup, and when the place closes, we’ll get up and crawl home.”

So why didn’t they stay at the Eden, with me, and go to sleep early?

“We have to, that’s all.” He rubbed the bristles on his chin. “When guys get together, they do certain things. Maybe those things aren’t so great. But it’s worse for a person to be alone.”

This
I understood. When no one was watching me, I felt as if my life were a movie projected on thin air.

I scooped icy water from the pool, then uncupped my hands above Herbie’s belly. Though he tightened his muscles, his eyes remained shut. I hated myself, but I had to keep going.

The third scoop of water made Herbie reach out and pass me on to Larry, who, in his sleep, passed me on to Steve, who passed me on to Michael, who passed me on to Bruce, whose arms closed around me, a carnivorous plant with a fly in its leaves. I squealed and squirmed with pleasure, flesh to hot flesh, until I heard a whistle.

“Stop that!” Arthur commanded from his lounge near the diving board. “Don’t pester them, Lucy. Go and play with your dolls.”

His voice stung as smartly as if he had squirted chlorine in my eyes. I told myself again that my brother didn’t hate me, he hated the hotel. He was always complaining that the Eden was ruining his health and souring “his chances.” He couldn’t take time off to visit his roommate from his first year at Princeton, though this roommate’s family owned a house at a place called Martha’s Vineyard. No, Arthur was just too tired to let his love show. Seeing him now, twisting to massage his own knotted back, it came to me that he truly did need me.

I freed myself from Bruce, who immediately rolled over and dropped back to sleep. I took a few steps toward Arthur. I would rub his back and tell him the jokes that Maxxie Fox, the Eden’s new comedian, had taught me the day before.
I was wrong
, he would say.
The minute you touched me, the pain disappeared
.

I had just reached the diving board when Linda Brush scooted past and settled on the lounge right next to Arthur. How could he stand to have her that near? Linda Brush was one of the middle-aged mothers who brought their children to the Eden for two or three months, leaving their husbands to work and sweat in New York. Her hair was a shiny black ball; a person could poke two fingers in those black-circled eyes, a thumb in that round mouth, and send that head rolling. She wore a two-piece bathing suit much like my own, except black. A scar crawled down her belly. I grew ill, thinking where that scar led and how the two Brush twins had lived in that stomach until the doctor slit it open and lifted them out.

The twins were identical. As a younger child I had thought this meant they were alike not only on the surface but the same through and through. I couldn’t see them lying next to each other without feeling compelled to draw a blanket over one baby’s face. Having a twin cheapened your worth; for all anyone could tell, your twin was the real you and you were the fake.

As the Brush twins grew older, I saw, to my relief, that they weren’t the same. Samuel, the younger twin, followed Mitchell wherever he went, so dreamy and slow he seemed to be mocking Mitchell the way Arthur mocked me, repeating everything I said with a retarded child’s slur. (“Stop doing that!” I would scream, and Arthur, thick tongued, would mimic “thtop doing that.”) For as long as I knew him, Sam Brush retained an infant’s blank face, whereas even by six Mitchell had hardened his features, sharpened his gaze, as though to help people tell them apart. Today, he was pressing a scalloped bottle cap into Sam’s bare arm, as though cutting dough for cookies. Sam sat there and smiled.

Their mother didn’t notice. She was squeezing white lotion across my brother’s chest, teasing him about his dark skin and kinky hair. “Why, if Ah didn’t know bet-tah, Ah’d think one of the Appelbahms had slept with they-ah dah-kies.”

Why didn’t my brother slap her? He just grunted, and I saw Linda slip her pink nails beneath the waistband of his trunks.

I jumped in the water and started swimming. I wouldn’t touch the bottom or the sides. At four o’clock, my mother came to the pool for her one-hour break between managing the reception desk and managing the dining room. She stood beside the water in her rumpled yellow housedress.

“You’re chattering like a skeleton,” she said.

“Oh, Mom, how can a skeleton chatter? A skeleton is
dead
.”

“And you will be, too, if you catch pneumonia.”

I swam to the shallow end and climbed the steps as slowly as it is possible to climb steps.

“Quick! Go and change! If you stay in a damp suit you’ll end up a cripple.”

I rolled my eyes. “How could a damp suit—”

“Sylvia Siskind’s daughter got polio from just a quick dip. Of course, that was a public pool. But we don’t have to ask for trouble by walking around in damp suits.”

I had no intention of changing to dry clothes. I would get a snack. By the time I returned to the pool, my mother would have left or forgotten her order. I hitched up my bottoms, marched across the lawn and right through the lobby, defying a sign that said

NO WET SUITS
,

then I marched out the side door and up to a window in a ramshackle booth called The Concession.

“The usual,” I said.

Mrs. Grieben, the concessionaire and sister of the cook, who was also Mrs. Grieben, since the sisters had married brothers, reached one flabby arm into the freezer and brought out a chocolate-covered marshmallow stick so frigid it hurt my teeth to bite it. Then she opened the cooler.

“Orange hair, orange soda,” Mrs. Grieben said sagely, as if God had decreed that dark-haired children must drink Coke and blond ones cream soda.