Peep Show (16 page)

“Marty,” she says. “I'm here. I'm here now.”

“You can't all stay,” the doctor says.

Ira hands him some cash but the doctor won't take it. “I'm going back to bed, Ira. Only one of you can stay. Please.”

It's very hard for me to walk out of the place without my dad. But Leo and I listen to Brandi and decide to go back to the hotel. She stays. When we get there, I feel like I've been punched in the chest. Rubbing it doesn't help. Leo suggests we go home and I agree. In the car he tells me to take deep breaths and tries to put my seat back. I wish I could cry. The wheezing in my father's breath. The sound of his head on the floor.

“He's gonna be okay,” Leo says. “Your dad's one of the toughest guy I know.”

The rain on the windshield is light at first but soon the road grows slick beneath the tires. The wooshing sound is soothing somehow and I close my eyes.

“You want the radio on?” Leo says.

I shake my head and neither of us speaks for an hour or more. In the dream I see my dad and my mom on our front lawn. She's planting seeds with green rubber gloves and he's yelling at her, telling her she's doing it wrong. “I didn't
drop out of my mother's bunny-hole yesterday,” he yells. “I know how to swim! I know how to fuckin' swim!”

“Help me, Marty. Help me. I'm trying to get us there.”

“You couldn't get us there if you tried, baby. You don't have the balls.”

Leo has his hand on my elbow. “You're talking all crazy,” he says with a smile.

“I am?”

“What are you dreaming about?”

Out the window the rain picks up. Leo's windshield wipers fight hard but seem fatigued by the quick back and forth.

“My parents. My mother.”

“Did you know I lost my mom,” Leo says. “She didn't make it to forty.” A teacher, a churchgoer, a mother of five. But always a sick person, lying in bed with swollen fingers. A “disease” he calls it and I picture her there, under the quilts, medicine bottles and paper cups he brought her with bendy straws. I feel so much sorrow for him as we drive, envisioning this little boy, watching his mother from the hallway, waiting for her to die. By one thirty we're back and Leo drops me at my father's apartment. The sounds of the city are louder with no one there. And the loneliness I dread is in every corner. In bed I see Brandi on a cherry picker. My father in a grave. Debra in a tinseled wig. My mother on stage. A poem. Everyone's an animal and I watch through the cage. This dream's about a row boat but my mother's not there. It's Brandi. My father kisses the hard
fabric on the front of her corset before jumping in the black lake water, pinching his nostrils. I wait for him to come up but he doesn't so I run to the edge and see the back of his head. The sweater he's wearing is wool and I grip the neck but it's too wet and heavy with soggy weight. I lift with all my strength. Please, please, help me. But I can't lift him out. The doorbell wakes me and the clock says 4:16 a.m. It's Brandi.

“Things got worse,” she says. “He's over at Roosevelt Hospital.”

T
HE DOCTOR IS
a woman with a Dinah Shore haircut and a chart and an easel and one of those sticks you point with. She speaks to all of us but only looks at my father.

“An adenoma is a type of polyp that is premalignant. They start out as small nodules on the bowel wall and are usually the size of a match head unless they go undetected or ignored for too long, then they can develop a stalk like the one pictured here. What concerns me with yours is the time it's been permitted to grow so look here, see this? Your polyp is larger than these and is sitting in an area of diverticuli.”

“Of what?” my dad says.

“This pocket here, see?”

“Is it cancer?” Brandi says.

“The biopsy will tell us all we need to know. But I do feel that you should prepare yourself for the possibility, owing to the size and placement.”

“Ffffuck,” my father says, and slaps the part of his stomach that betrayed him. Brandi sniffs twice and walks out of the room and into the hallway. I look at my dad and see tears in is eyes but instead of hugging him or crying with him, I lift a plastic watering can on the table and walk into the bathroom to fill it. I keep the water running hard and loud and see myself at my father's funeral. Standing there with Ira and Leo—and Harvey Corkman, at the cemetery, right next to his own father's grave.

“Hello?” my father says. “Arlene?”

“I'm here,” I say. “I'll be right out.”

“Where'd she go?”

“I'll go find her.”

“No. Come out here. I could really use . . .”

“What? You could really use what, Dad?”

“A cigarette.”

I smile at myself for a second and watch the corners of my mouth rise. But it's fleeting, of course.

“We better tell your sister.”

N
O ONE PICKS UP THE
phone. I envision my mother sitting there, staring at it, boring a hole through the receiver while saying “We're not here” to Debra. “We're not here.”

But I'll find her. It's no problem. I'll be the one to find her and tell her. He's in the hospital. Not sure what's wrong. But he needs you. He needs family. No one picks up the phone. Pick up the fucking phone.

By noon the next day I'm driving to the Danowitzes' house in Vincent. I pull up in front and across the street, a neighbor with
peyos
and a furry black hat stares at my every move. I wave to him but he doesn't wave back. There's a small, yipping dog on the lawn next to theirs and I don't think I've ever seen a Hasidic dog, or a Hasid with a dog. This one barks at me and I try to tell it to go kill itself in my mind but it doesn't seem to hear me. As I step closer to
the porch, the dog moves closer to me. Shaindee, Sarah's sister, is at the door.

“Shut up, Kippy, just shut your stinkin' trap.” Words from a girl in a
sheitel
. The dog turns around quietly and disappears.

“Can I help you?”

“I'm David.”

“Oh. Hello,” she says.

“Hello.”

“Who is it, Shaindee?” A voice from beyond.

“It's David,” she calls, and I hear footsteps.

“What are you doing here, David?” Becca asks, with the screen door closed.

“I'm looking for my sister.”

“She's not here.”

She's trying to smile. I can tell she doesn't know about yesterday.

“Isn't she with your mother?”

“No one picks up the phone over there and—”

“
Is ales git?
” the
peyos
guy asks, now standing in their driveway.

“Of course, Menachem,” Becca says, “Of course, everything's fine.”

Sarah is behind her mother. I can't see her face, just her elbow.

“If I hear anything, I'll call you,” says Becca. “Let me have your number.”

“Do you know where Dena is, Sarah?”

She emerges with her eyes on me. “She might be in Brooklyn.”

Her hair is gone. Like a marine but a girl. A Hasidic girl. Just a fuzz a half inch off her head. Becca glances at her daughter's scalp with nauseous disdain.

“
Is ales git?
” the neighbor repeats behind me.

“Yes, Menachem. Everything is fine. You can go back home now.”

“Where in Brooklyn?” I ask.

“Kingsford, probably,” she says, touching her head.

“I need to find her,” I say to Becca. “My father is sick. He's at Roosevelt Hospital. Can I please, please take Sarah to Brooklyn?”

Becca's eyes widen as she shakes her head. I can see the whole row of her bottom teeth. “Alone?”

Sarah says something in Yiddish and her mother responds in a higher, angrier voice.

Silence.

“If I hear from her, I'll tell her,” Becca says.

“Can you write down some street names in Kingsford?” I say. “Some directions.”

She's gone, off to find paper and pen, I hope. Sarah comes out toward the door.

“Like it?” she says. “I did it myself.”

I see a birthmark behind her right ear, and think about Peter Rabbi.

“My dad's sick, Sarah.”

“What happened?”

“I don't even know how bad it is. But I have to find her. Will you help me find her?”

She looks back into the house for her mother or sister. “I have an idea. Meet me at my school at one o'clock.”

“Today.”

“Yes. But not in the parking lot. On Posner Road. Across from the post office. It's one block away.”

Becca is back. But she doesn't have anything to write with. It's the Sabbath. When I look at Sarah, she turns her back to her mother and begins.

“Do you know how to get to the Kingsford Bridge?” she asks.

“Not really,” I say.

The dog begins to bark again, as if it's never seen either of us before. I sit down on the stoop and Sarah plops down next to me, her shoulder touching mine. Verboten 101. Menachem, the nosy neighbor, just stares us, gawking at Sarah's crew cut. He slowly lifts his arm to point and Becca moves us apart with her right shoe. “Asshole,” Sarah whispers. I look up at her.

“From Manhattan,” Sarah says. “You listening?”

S
HE'S NOT ON
Posner when I get there but then I see her, running toward me, between two trees, ducking now, as if she heard a gunshot. When she gets in she's out of breath and laughing. “We should go, I'm not sure if they
saw me.” I start to drive and she looks back at the school through the yard she came from.

“Did you just walk out?” I say.

“Recess,” she says, rolling down the window. “Just get me back by four.” She turns the radio on. Everybody is “kung fu fighting.” She starts to dance to the music, her shoulders seesawing.

I reach over her knees to get my map from the glove box.

“You won't need that,” she says, and when I face her, I am so close to her, so alone with her.

“I'll tell you how to go,” she says. “Do you have any gum?”

“No.”

“We should get some gum,” she says, and puts her head out the window. She keeps it out there for most of the trip, just grinning as the wind blasts her face. When I need directions, she calls out the highway numbers as we approach them. “Route 46 to the L.I.E., to West Thirty-fourth Street to Twelfth Avenue to Route 27 to East Fifth Street and on into Brooklyn.” The sidewalk, the street, all the stores are filled with people in black. I'm driving by a supermarket with Hebrew writing on the window, just a bridge away from Manhattan. Jewish book stores and kosher candy stores and an ad for toothpaste with Hebrew lettering. Two boys with
peyos
and yarmulkes play Wiffle ball on their driveway, just off the main strip. Moishe's Hardware has a sign that boasts of a
zumer
sale that'll “knock 10 percent
off any gas-run leaf blower and any forty-gallon trash can,” if you buy it before the end of
yuni
. The sign looks as if it were written by a child on the back of a large piece of cardboard. When we drive past the store, I see him, a little boy with
peyos
and
tzitzit
, sleeping in an easy chair. I see mostly women and children on the street and wonder if any of them know my sister.

“Where are the men?” I ask.

“In
shul.
They'll be done by four and you'll see them everywhere. Keep going straight and make a right at the light.”

I was picturing more of a city but the side streets are almost as suburban as Newstead. I do see redbrick brown-stones and cookie-cutter apartment buildings separated by narrow, overgrown driveways but it's quiet and the trees are lush with life right now.

I've seen ten girls who could have been Debra and we've been here five minutes. An elderly, bearded man in black stockings and what look like knickers, walks quickly down the street with a prayer book clenched against his chest.

“Can I see your hands?” Sarah says.

“My hands?”

“Yes.” She takes my right hand in hers.

“You have a short life line.” She runs her thumb down my palm.

“Oh yeah?”

“And this line here is for love.” The tips of her middle
and pointer fingers walk down my hand until my wrist, and I start to get a boner.

“Oh, oh, wait, stop, stop the car,” she says, and she's out and walking up to an apartment building. She speaks to a teenager on the grass, then jogs back to the car.

“She may be on this street. Just keep driving. That girl I just talked to,” she says, “Tzivi's her name. She goes to the compound in Maine. She once told me that as soon as she graduates from yeshiva, she wants to become a prostitute.”

Sarah laughs as she looks back at the girl. I keep my eyes on the road, don't even look at her.

“Her parents must be so pleased,” I say.