Pat Boone Fan Club (3 page)

But meshed with this love is loss. In
Limelight
Chaplin’s character dies. He leaves both Thereza and me behind. She dances alone on the stage. I stand here on the sidewalk outside the theater, unmoving, unsure where to go. This loss is almost too terrible to bear.

Since we first moved to the island, I have taken ballet lessons from Madame Caron at the Virgin Isle Hotel. She is the mother of French actress Leslie Caron, star of
Gigi
. I’ve never seen Leslie Caron in person, but her brother sometimes visits the island. The other girls and I, while practicing pliés and arabesques, watch for him outside the hotel windows. He struts around the swimming pool in a French-cut bathing suit, a Gaulois Disc Blue aslant between his lips. We girls dance as if for him, hoping to be noticed.

Today, however, after seeing
Limelight
, I don’t watch for him. Nor am I able to chatter with Vicki and my friends as we change into Danskin leotards and pink tutus. I sit on the floor in the dressing room, my Selva ballet slippers in my hands. I mold the
rabbit fur into the toes, then slide my feet inside the soft cushions. I crisscross the pink satin ribbons up my ankles and calves.

Once I’m ready to dance, I feel transported to London. The scent of trade winds ebbs as I inhale a cold, damp winter. As all the girls trail down the corridor to the hotel ballroom, I, Thereza, enter the stage of the Empire Theatre. Charlie Chaplin waits for me in the wings. My adult eyes are lined with mascara and kohl, my cheeks and mouth rouged.

The orchestra tunes in the pit.

One night a few months later, my father out of town, I’m awakened by a loud rapping on the shutters. It is Vicki and her mother, who carries Vicki’s younger brother. Vicki and her mother are bruised, their clothes ripped. When her husband fell asleep, Vicki’s mother grabbed all the money in his wallet. They fled here on foot.

My mother settles them in the kitchen, pouring cold sodas. Vicki stares at the fizz of 7-Up in her glass.
We have to leave
, Vicki’s mother whispers, as if her husband can hear. But she needs more money. She needs clothes for her children. Cold-weather clothes. She worries if she waits for the 8:40 a.m. flight to San Juan, her husband will be awake, looking for her. Now, tonight, she needs a boat to carry them away to Puerto Rico, the first stop on their journey home.

My mother directs my sister and me to the storage closet where our stateside clothes are packed in mothballs. When I pry open the box marked with my name, I’m surprised to see my blue sweater, my yellow-quilted skirt, my winter shoes. It’s as if these clothes have been slumbering but now are startled awake.

My mother snaps open a set of leather luggage, filling it with clothes, shoes, blankets. She empties purses, gathering as much money as she can find. I crack open my piggy bank with a coral rock I once found at the beach. I wrap nickels and pennies, as well as my one silver dollar, into my best lace hankie. I tie the
corners in knots. I’m too shy to hand it to Vicki, so I tuck it into a parcel for her to discover later.

We finish packing, and my mother wakes Sylvanita, whose cousin lives on a skiff in the harbor. I’ve never seen my mother so energized, so focused. I wonder if she ever thinks about grabbing her own children and fleeing?

My mother piles us all into the car even though she’s scared to navigate narrow mountain roads, especially at night. She drives about five miles an hour, and I can tell Vicki’s mother wishes she’d hurry, though she says nothing.

We park close to the harbor, by the Grand Hotel. Vicki’s mother carries her son, while the rest of us grab the luggage. Our footsteps are the only sound except for boats knocking the dock in the small swell of waves. When we reach Sylvanita’s cousin’s skiff, she motions us to wait and climbs aboard. We hear her murmuring. Vicki stares out across the sea, her back to the island, her hands tight fists.

Sylvanita calls us to load everything onto the boat, hurry. My mother places all her remaining money in the cousin’s hand.

We stand on shore watching the boat glide across the water into the night.

Goodbye
, I think.
Goodbye Vicki, goodbye winter shoes, goodbye silver dollar, goodbye lace hankie
.

Several weeks later I awake early and slip from the house before my family is up. I walk toward town. Across the island, curds of mist hover mid-mountain, mountaintops floating free of the earth. Clouds of ibises rise like ghosts, winging from trees. Mica glints off the mound of yellow bauxite down by the harbor. In the distance, a pontoon plane passes Hassel Island.

I sit in Emancipation Park, waiting for my ragged savior.

Again, he and I are at the end of the street, the end of pavement, the end of marl alleys that ebb into fields of fever grass.
I know this is the place where I should stop, turn around, go back. I don’t. Despite stories I’ve heard, this place seems the opposite of dangerous. Nor do I worry about getting caught. Surely no one sees him, or me. Maybe that glimpse of red—really my French madras shorts—is a scarlet tanager or a flower, some observer might think. I am determined to follow wherever he might lead me.

I walk deep into the forest trailing the tramp in all his clothes, layered, perhaps, to protect him from the wildness of the island. He reminds me of a mampoo tree, which hoards water in its trunk, safe from drought. So maybe the tramp is able to wander long distances without need of refreshment.

We pass remains of stone windmills, once used to grind sugarcane, and chimneys of abandoned sugar mills. Antillean euphonias and indigo buntings dart among leaves. Cerise bougainvillea and blue-white tree orchids tumble, seemingly from the sky. Divi-divi, shaddock, lantana trees shadow the donkey path. The air hums with tree frogs and crac-cracs. Sweat drips down my arms, while sticker weeds catch my bare legs. I don’t care.

One moment I’m following him. The next, the tramp disappears from sight as if he’s a spirit dispersed into mist. I no longer hear his triangle.

Still I continue on until I reach the mangrove swamp. Here, even the path ends. And while I know the swamp is a maze of red, black, and white mangroves—and that if you know how to recognize each you can find your way out—I’m not sure I do. Instead, I sit by the edge, my back in sunlight, my face in shade. I kick off my sandals, pushing my toes into cool, brackish tannin.

One winter night at college in Boston, years later, I attend Charlie Chaplin’s movie
City Lights
, showing at an art cinema on Exeter Street. In it, the Little Tramp, penniless, tries to save a blind girl. He wants either to earn or steal enough money for an operation, so she can see.

After the movie I sit in the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria with a cup of tea, watching ancient homeless men sip cold coffee, their clothes creased with dirt. Their hands shake. They smell of exile, of the hour just before dawn. . . .

The Caribbean tramp, his feet bare, is here with me as well. I don’t know how he discovered this place first, but clearly he has. He will always be ahead of me, compelling as an oasis mirage that only I can see.

Charlie Chaplin also sits across from me, in his battered hat, his tattered jacket, his oversized shoes, toes pointing in opposite directions.

Back then, I simply had no choice but to love Charlie Chaplin—who was both the promise and the essence of that year—the year of tramps and triangles, tales and movies, ballet and Leslie Caron’s mother, a mountaintop hotel, Vicki fleeing. In the confluence of island isolation and restless movement, I wanted, more than anything, to be the ballerina Charlie Chaplin noticed, the girl he taught to dance, the young girl he saved. Instead, I learned how to walk, not exactly
upon
water, but beyond, to where I both lead and am led . . . wandering with mystics and seers, seeking—not the meaning of life but the meaning of
my
life—as I look forward, as I glance back.

The Mercurialist

Evenings, as a little girl, restless and sweaty, I wander across the verandah of our house, past the metal cistern, to visit Sylvanita. Sometimes we sit on her stoop in silence, slapping at mosquitoes. Other times she fetches her vial of mercury, pouring a puddle into my hand. My skin cools, even in West Indies heat. I press a fingertip against the plump, wobbly surface. I swirl it, small dimes segmenting from the quarter coined in my palm. Or maybe it looks like stars shooting off from a galaxy. I twist my wrist. Oblong shapes shiver toward the cracks between my fingers, seeking escape, until they portage back to safe harbor, anchored in my hand.

I return it to the vial.

Sylvanita grips my hand to study the palm lines where slivers of mercury remain. Her chiromancy itself seems to arise from trade winds, or from the rattle of woman’s-tongue pods, swaying from tree limbs: If mercury trails my life line, I will live to be an ancient woman. If, on another evening, bubbles cling to my love line, I will be rich in romance. I imagine my pockets overflowing with Mercury-head dimes when wealth is promised. All her predictions strike my heart with such vivid lightning and longing that I am drawn again and again to this depthless pool of knowledge.

Other times, maybe the air is too dark, too hot—or maybe too many bat wings flutter spirits from flame trees—but I am reluctant to relinquish the mercury. Its denseness weights me to this island cuffed in foamy lace, while at the same time I feel almost light-headed. The surface of mercury blues as if steeped in the nighttime Caribbean Sea. I dribble it from palm to palm,
back and forth, absorbing its properties, as if it seeps beneath the membrane of skin.

“G’won, swallow it,” Sylvanita whispers, as if she reads my mind. She motions her own palm toward her mouth.

I never do, although I can’t imagine the harm in more completely knowing my shimmery, mercurial, otherwise-unknowable future.

The Endless Possibilities of Youth

Suicide as Just One Possibility

I happen to see a girlfriendfrom high school in the rotunda of the Capitol who tells me that, shortly after graduation, Lynn committed suicide. Hearing Lynn’s name I also think of Christopher, my (our) ex-boyfriend. During much of junior and senior high schools, he arced between us—two rail-thin girls, one Christian, one Jewish—like an electrical charge between positive and negative poles. Now, after work, I catch a
DC
Transit bus outside the Longworth House Office Building where I’m a legislative aide. I sway in the crowded aisle, forward and back, gripping the metal handlebar. Christopher might not even recognize me now in a minidress and leather sandals, much like other hippies, so different from the primly starched shirtwaists Lynn and I both favored in our suburban high school.

Steamy air, gray with city grit, obscures white government façades. Even my face, glimpsed in the smudged windows of the bus, darkens with every block, the way I appeared to myself in high school. Then, afternoons, I leaned close to the bathroom mirror. I wanted to mystically command Lynn’s sleek ponytail and pale, snub nose to reflect back . . . to
be
me, mine. But my frizzy hair, my intractable Jewish appearance, remained. Only when Christopher smiled at me, I no longer felt gloomy, an alien Jew adrift in the tidy Christian world of Glen Rock.

I
was
alien back then, for I wasn’t a denizen of my own home, either. I always awoke to the arthritic shuffling of my Russian grandmother in her terrycloth slippers. Unable to live alone in her own apartment, she invaded my family with a black babushka, rolled wool stockings, a gnarled Yiddish tongue. She even cleared her throat in Yiddish. She skulked suburban streets as if still fleeing pogroms, even though she’d immigrated to America decades earlier. Or she prowled our neighborhood trailing the scent of boiled cabbage as if
she
, now the pursuer, hoped to capture
me
, save me from the Christians whom I emulated and desired.

From the balcony of my high-rise apartment, I watch the oval dome of the Capitol gleaming white and familiar, like the moon. My family left Washington
DC
years ago, but now, a recent college graduate, I’m drawn back to my birthplace: the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the White House, the ellipse, the rectangular reflecting pool, columns, domes, pentagons, ovals. It’s a city built upon the irrefutable, reassuring logic of geometry.

But tonight the marble seems too cool, the breeze off the Potomac moist. A thin chill shivers from my palms up to my scalp. Brain freeze, like that sharp yet numbing pain in my temples when I once sucked on Kool-Aid ice cubes on summer afternoons.

As if my brain
is
frozen, I now can’t remember my girlfriend’s exact words: did she say that Lynn “killed herself” or did she say “committed suicide”? The words “committed suicide” sound more exact, each letter chiseled in stone. No margin for error. No different ending.

You walk into your garage. You close the car door. You turn the key. Exhaust billows.

No going back.

The Love Triangle as a Problem of High School Geometry

Mornings, when I arrive at school, I go into the girls’ room and bolt the stall. I unhook the Star of David from the gold chain around my neck. I slip the black-and-white saddle shoe off my left foot, dropping this present from my grandmother inside it. I retie the lace, taut, double knotting it.

Later, in class, I grip my pencil, ruler, and protractor to draw circles and parallelograms on a piece of graph paper. Equilateral, isosceles, obtuse triangles. Here in geometry I’m able to prove, at least on paper, that
if
I am point B on a scalene triangle and Lynn point C, then I am the one who stands closer to Christopher, at point A. And
if
I stand closer to Christopher (the antecedent),
then
that means he loves me (the consequent).

Or:
If
Christopher smiles at me even once during the day
then
he loves me—not Lynn.

But suppose this geometric proof of love is merely a postulate? For
if
Christopher smiles at Lynn
then
______.

I don’t want to fill in the blank.

Memorize the following equation as if it’s hard evidence:
Lynn hates me as much as I hate her. This hate = the amount we both love Christopher.

Without turning around, I sense Lynn a few rows behind me wearing the pink dress she sewed in home-economics class. Her stare needles my back.

Lynn, Christopher, me. Really, we’re an equilateral triangle: Lynn and I, equal sides, lean inward, reaching up toward Christopher at the apex.

Glen Rock as an Outpost of the Cold War

Next class, English, I watch the backs of Christopher’s wrists through lowered lashes. The winter sun, slanting through the
row of rectangular windows, casts the wispy hairs in platinum light. Last autumn, the sun tinged them a reddish yellow. By June (I know I’ll still be spying on him), after weeks of baseball, they’ll deepen to gold. I rest my chin in my palm, canting toward him, inhaling his scent of Ivory soap and Juicy Fruit gum. The overlap of his front teeth, this one small flaw, makes me want to kiss him, though he’s never even held my hand. I, with my darkness, feel almost inchoate in the presence of such incandescence.

Even the blunt shape of his hands appears all-American: exotically ordinary. Neither overly strong nor frail. His palms seem as at ease guiding a girl across a dance floor as pinning a wrestling opponent to the mat. His nails are neat, the lunulas pale as the tip of a day moon rising in a young summer sky. I long to touch his fingers, his wrists, those nails. I long for his sun-warm hand to lead me down Rock Road past Kilroy’s Wonder Market, People’s Bank, Mandee’s Dress Shoppe . . . the Nabisco plant on the edge of town exhaling the scent of pure vanilla.

I pay scant attention to the teacher, Miss P. Five days a week her vague voice instructs on themes, plots, similes. We read boring short stories, one about a child who eats too many pancakes. These stories teach me nothing of boys, of love, of triangles—or how aliens meld into an all-American life. During class, my gaze strays from Christopher only when I press the nib of my fountain pen to my gray cloth notebook. In cursive I write
Christopher, Christopher, Christopher
across the front, the back, the spine. I dot each letter “i” with a ♥. Ink from the letters bleeds into the fabric.

But now, with only minutes left of class, the light suddenly darkens. The pale hairs on Christopher’s wrists become invisible—or the same color as his skin—as if it’s possible to be bleached by an absence of sunlight. The once-glittery day grows mute, clammy. I stir in my seat, Christopher’s spell broken.

I glance around. My classmates’ faces remain turned toward Miss P., paying attention. Am I the only one to notice the windows darken, implacable as lead?

Then, with no warning, the words “iron curtain” invade my consciousness with such force I’m stunned, motionless in my chair. The four stony syllables thud the base of my brain. My breath feels shallow, tight.

Even in school, beside Christopher, I’m subverted by a foreign power, my Russian grandmother. The icy hem of Siberian winters clings to her skirt. She casts Old World spells scented with wood smoke, wrenched from crooked alleys of shtetls, to shadow the golden streets of my new world. Her unblinking evil eye is a searchlight. I am x-rayed in its glare.

The Star of David sears the sole of my left foot.

Sock Hop as Wish Fulfillment

At the Paradise of Hearts dance, after I watch Christopher for more than an hour, he invites me to dance. That hand with the warm palm holds mine as the
DJ
plays “Blue Moon” by the Marcels. I wear a sweater with fringes that (I realize too late) resemble tzitzits, ceremonial fringes on Jewish shawls. I’m reassured, however, when a swirling light casts into relief the filaments of hair on Christopher’s wrists, as if I, too, am now warmed in this glow. Except why, then, doesn’t Christopher hold me close enough to hear his heart beneath his cotton shirt?

Valentines and paper roses adorn the school cafeteria, in whose blossoming Christopher next asks Lynn to dance. He holds
her
tight. Tighter. His cheek brushes hers. Her shiny ponytail sways on her shoulders. Her crisp poodle skirt floats around her knees. Her snip of a nose wrinkles when she smiles. I glare, willing her nose to grow, her shoulders to droop, her cheeks to lose their bloom.

At the end of the evening, girls cluster outside the school entrance waiting for parents to pick us up. I huddle with my friends, Lynn with hers. She and I pretend to ignore each other. We rarely speak—though I think about her constantly. My father’s car stops beside the curb just behind her father’s. As
Lynn opens the door, the dome light shadows rather than brightens her father’s features. His sharp “get in” sounds like pebbles pitched against glass. Lynn and I close our doors. My father says I should have called earlier for him to bring me home. I lower the window of his black Fleetwood Cadillac, smoky from cigarettes. I feel his gaze on me in the rearview mirror. Headlights from a car behind us glint on his glasses. We slowly follow Lynn’s car along the driveway and onto Harristown Road, as if we’re in a procession.

Suburban Glen Rock as Refuge from the Shtetl

The Christian street I live on, Lowell Road, is elliptical, a perfect oval. Evenings, after dinner, I ride my bicycle around and around, glimpsing inside houses, all the parted curtains. Each picture window frames a still-life living room, a painting of modern Danish furniture adorning a background of wall-to-wall Euclidean carpet. Lamplight etches damp weedless lawns, reflecting exact rhombuses. Moths beat wire-mesh screens, this golden perfection irresistible. Pedaling past neighbors’ houses, my heart quickens, too.

Later, inside, I stand by my bedroom window, a finger denting parallel slats in the venetian blinds, intersecting sight. If only I could conjure Christopher in his father’s red Rambler, tires swishing to a stop in front of my house. But the only sound is the scuff of my grandmother’s dirty terrycloth slippers, so frayed I imagine her wearing them in the shtetl, on the boat as she sails toward Ellis Island, all along the Lower East Side, tramping across the George Washington Bridge and into my teenage life.

As Technicolor Heartthrobs Take Suburbia by Storm

Christopher and I watch teenage movies such as
A Summer Place
. At the second-run, drive-in theater, as Molly (Sandra Dee) and Johnny (Troy Donahue) fall in love, I snuggle beside Chris
topher in my floral dress, our clothes damp against the seat of his father’s Rambler.

The camera pans in for a close-up of Johnny and Molly alone in a lighthouse.

Molly: “We’ve got to be good, Johnny.”

Johnny: “Good. Is it that easy to be good?”

Molly: “Have you been bad, Johnny? Have you been bad with other girls?”

She whispers the word “bad” with longing that swells from the base of her throat.

If “bad” is “good,” is “good” “bad”? How to prove the theorem? How to decipher who Christopher wants me to be?
Christopher, would you be bad with me, kiss me—do
more
with me—if I didn’t look Jewish, if I resembled Lynn or Sandra Dee?

When I audition for my high school play, everyone thinks I’m perfect for the role and laughs at the right lines. Well, everyone thinks I’m perfect but the drama coach, Miss M. I don’t get the part. Miss M., also my Spanish teacher, worships General Francisco Franco, who supported the Fascists during World War II. She brings photos of him to class. I squint, not wanting to see, willing the images to burn to vapor on a white-hot Iberian breeze. My mother says I didn’t get the part because I’m Jewish.

Now, disembodied voices crackle from the speaker box hooked on the car window. When I lean my head against Christopher’s shoulder, the movie sounds garbled, as if they’re speaking a foreign language.

Big-Time Wrestling as Metaphor for the Vicissitudes of Love

I sit in the bleachers, hands folded, watching Christopher wrestle. He’s captain of the team, and I long to wear his letter sweater. Sweat drips from Christopher onto the square red mat, a white circle in the center. His skin glistens. I don’t want him to get
pinned. Halfway through, when I think he might lose, my shoulders feel narrow, drawn. I focus on my kneecaps, pale between kneesocks and a plaid kilt.

Earlier, while dressing, I was sure he’d love my pearly nail polish and pink-bubblegum lipstick. With religious fervor, I shined the copper pennies wedged in the leather slots of my loafers. If only he’ll glance up in the stands, notice the lipstick, the Lincoln-head pennies.

I nervously scrape the polish from my nails before the match is over. Luminescent chips fleck my skirt.

Christopher drives me home. His good-night kiss brushes my lips, feathery, quick. After settling in the den of my split-level ranch house, I watch professional wrestling on our black-and-white Zenith. My grandmother hunches beside me. The Crusher. Black Jack Mulligan. Mad Dog Vachon. Killer Kowalski. Nothing like Christopher’s orderly high school wrestling. Nothing like the gentle—“good”—way he hugs me, either.

“No Jews are such
meshuganahs,
” she says. In this, at least, my grandmother and I agree as we watch gentile wrestlers slam off the ropes or plummet onto the mat.

Anna Karenina as Teenage Role Model

Saturdays, I ride the bus to the bookstore in Ridgewood to buy mounds of novels. The wooden floor smells raw, like a forest, in the damp morning air. I climb the rungs of the ladder on runners that glide past the floor-to-ceiling shelves. The words in all the books seem muffled, tightly packed together. Which ones most want to be released, read? In which ones will I discover the meaning of teenage life?

I ease a spine from the shelf and ruffle the pages. Words seem to spill everywhere. I must gather them. Believe every word I read. I leaf through
Anna Karenina
and
Madame Bovary
. Surely these women will teach me of love and all its triangles. Anna/Alexei/Vronsky. Emma/Charles/Rodolphe.