Riggs Park (10 page)

“Any word?” I asked. He was alone in the waiting room. The patients from the earlier surgeries must have gone home.

“She’s in the recovery room. We can see her pretty soon in ‘post-recovery.’ So far so good.”

I picked up
People
magazine and flipped through the pages, not seeing a single picture. After an eternity, a nurse emerged, wearing green scrub pants and a cheery white smock decorated with smiley faces. She led us across the hall into ‘post-recovery,’ where a series of cubicles were shielded by aqua curtains.

The minute we stepped inside the one she indicated, I understood why Penny had fled in tears years ago when Marilyn and I had had our noses done. Sitting in what looked like a cross between a recliner and a hospital bed, Marilyn was moonfaced and pale, barely recognizable, a huge pressure bandage covering her entire head except for her face. It seemed clear that she’d made a terrible mistake. The corners of her mouth were pulled back toward her ears; her wrinkles, if she’d ever had any, were hidden beneath the bloated swelling. What threatened to be a nasty bruise had begun to form in the area that had once been her right cheekbone. If there had been jowls…well, jowls no longer seemed to be the issue.

Bernie bent over and mimicked kissing Marilyn on the lips without actually touching her. “So?”

“No pain to speak of. I wasn’t nauseous when I woke up. Thank God for modern anesthetics. They keep trying to get me to eat a cracker so I can take medicine by mouth and get rid of this IV.” She gestured toward the line that ran from the back of her left hand toward a bottle of saline solution. “But I can’t. It hurts too much to chew. Nobody told me a face-lift would make your jaw sore.”

“Maybe because of the incisions behind your ear,” I said, having been treated to a complete clinical description of the surgery the previous night.

Marilyn eyed Bernie suspiciously. “I thought you were going to work.”

“I did,” he said, and consulted his watch. “It’s after five.”

Marilyn considered this, accepted it. They chatted a while longer before she shooed him out. “Barbara can drive me home.”

Reluctant but obedient, Bernie agreed he’d see her at home later.

“The worst part,” Marilyn confessed after he’d gone, “was my heart beating so fast. It scares you.”

“Your heart was beating fast?” Mine was, too.

“After I woke up. They said it was all right on the operating table. They gave me something to slow it down. It’s a little better now. I’ll be fine.”

Why hadn’t Marilyn mentioned this in front of Bernie? The thought made me slightly woozy. I had never been good in hospitals. Maybe I was only hungry. I’d eaten nothing since that ratty snack-bar sandwich at lunch. Another nurse came in (this one with yellow daisies on her smock), and handed Marilyn a can of Sprite.

“How about a sip for a thirsty friend?” I asked when the nurse disappeared.

“Have at it. I don’t want it anyway.”

I drank half the can in a giant gulp. Waited for the sugar rush to steady me. Felt better.

“So tell me. What did you do today?” Marilyn asked. “Did you get to the cemetery?”

“I did.” I would have told her about the traffic tie-up on the way back, but Marilyn looked too pathetic to care. She raised the hand free of IVs to her neck, found the pulse, pretended she was scratching rather than checking it.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Marilyn, tell me.”

“I just wish my heart would beat a little slower.”

Why weren’t they monitoring her more closely? Wooziness replaced by anger, I stood and marched out to find the nurse.

“It’s probably from the epinephrine,” the nurse said, unsurprised. “It’s used during surgery to keep the bleeding down, but it increases the pulse. The maximum reaction comes a couple hours later. The doctor gave her something.”

“You need to check her pulse right now,” I demanded.

The anesthesiologist showed up next, a George Stephanopoulos look-alike with dark hair hanging in his eyes. “Nothing serious, just scary,” he drawled, though he seemed mildly alarmed. “You’re full of different kinds of medicine. I guarantee you by tomorrow morning it’ll be better.” Then he adjusted his stethoscope. “But I’ll tell you what. The clinic closes in an hour. It isn’t really set up for overnight stays. Considering your history, I bet you’d be more comfortable if we sent you over to the hospital for the night instead of sending you home. It’s a good precaution.”

Precaution, hell. Who did they think they were fooling? The too-casual attitude. The nonchalant drawl. What the hell was wrong with them? They had messed up.

In the ambulance, I held Marilyn’s hand. For once—maybe the first time in her life—Marilyn didn’t try to make jokes.

S
ometimes, when a heart beats too fast or a cell begins dividing too freely, the danger is not from the activity itself but from its continuing too long. At least this was my theory as the ambulance raced toward the hospital. Since my own heart skipped beats and raced and scared me half to death when I lied, it comforted me to think that as long as the unwanted behavior stopped soon enough, it was no problem. The peril was only in the habit.

At the hospital, everything was fast, efficient, cold. Marilyn was whisked off to a room, poked, prodded, EKG’d. A thin balding doctor took charge like a general directing a war, white lab coat flapping as he barked commands. Outside the room, I paced and fidgeted. When Bernie arrived, he looked like he’d run up the stairs. The doctor—Walter DeLoach, his name tag read—finally stepped out, chart in hand, to talk to us.

“I know you’re worried, but all the tests are fine so far. If it weren’t for her history they probably wouldn’t even have sent her. An episode of tachycardia—” he paused and adjusted wire glasses on his sweaty nose as if trying to assess our intelligence “—that’s a fancy term for rapid heartbeat—isn’t dangerous as long as it doesn’t last too long.”

My theory confirmed.

“So what caused it?” Bernie asked.

“We’ll probably never know for sure. It could be some of the medication or a mild drug allergy. Or—who knows?”

Bernie was so ashen that the doctor added quickly, “She should be out of here tomorrow. Think of this as a wise precaution. One step away from a false alarm.”

“Does that make you feel better?” Bernie asked when the doctor left.

“Not even a little bit.”

“Me, either.”

But Marilyn seemed no worse; in fact, grateful for the institutional security of the hospital with its high-tech equipment. The Waxmans’ younger son, Andrew, arrived after work, a young man with Marilyn’s face and Bernie’s thick body, but taller and bulkier than either of them. He resembled a large, gentle teddy bear. “So tell me, Mom. How is it that you make it home in record time after your cancer surgery, but a face-lift does you in?”

The corners of Marilyn’s overstretched mouth turned up. “It’s more like a controlled weight-loss program,” Marilyn maintained. “If your heart beats fast enough, your metabolism goes through the ceiling.”

Andrew soon left, but Bernie and I kept our vigil. By late evening, Marilyn’s pulse was down to ninety. “You can go home now,” she told us. “I’ll be fine.”

Bernie’s complexion metamorphosed from flushed to beety. “I’ll decide when to leave.” His tone was gruff. “No more pretending. What if this had been serious? Am I supposed to lose you to something stupid like a face-lift because we’re acting like you’re only having an ingrown toenail fixed and I ought to be at work? What the hell is the matter with us?”

Marilyn looked to me for support, but I shook my head. “He’s right, Marilyn. We’re here because we care about you. Why do you keep trying to send us away?”

“When you start that cancer treatment,” Bernie added, “don’t ask me to pretend it’s not happening. Don’t behave like it’s business as usual. I’m coming with you. If the mood strikes, I’m going to damn well sit there the whole time and hold your hand.”

Having made this unaccustomed speech, Bernie settled into the recliner provided for relatives who planned to stay the night, and ten minutes later was sound asleep. When he started snoring, I took Marilyn’s hand. “Tell me,” I said. “How do you really feel?”

Marilyn settled against her pillow, let her swollen features relax. “You know, when my heart first started racing, they thought I was nervous. They asked if I wanted to hear some music and they gave me this little Walkman with earphones that fit over the bandage.”

She mimicked placing earphones gingerly over her ears.

“It was a nice tape. Not one of Steve’s, but not bad. But when things inside you aren’t going right, you can’t concentrate enough to let music calm you down. You get too turned in on yourself to listen. All you can concentrate on is…your own internal
stuff.
”

She turned to me for confirmation. I nodded.

“Today after my heart calmed down, you know what it made me think about? Penny. Not just because of everything we’ve talked about the past couple of days, but because—”

She stopped. I waited.

“—because by high school that’s how Penny was, wasn’t it? Listening to all the bad stuff inside her. She didn’t really hear anything else. Don’t you think?”

“Even before high school,” I agreed. “Penny was turned in on herself right from the beginning.”

“So we couldn’t really have helped her, could we? I know we made some mistakes, but maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference.”

Marilyn shifted in the bed, agitated again. What was I supposed to say? Both of us had always felt we could have done better by Penny. I squeezed Marilyn’s clammy hand.

“I still wish we’d had the guts not to pledge that sorority,” she said.

“Me, too,” I told her, and meant it.

It had been the fall of 1956, just after Penny had returned from New York and discovered the joy of boys, just after the three of us had begun tenth grade at Coolidge High School. Clubs like Young Judea served both genders from both sides of town. For boys who preferred the fraternity route, AZA was the religion-oriented choice, while ULPS and Mu Sig were the social ones. For girls, there were two Jewish sororities. Marilyn and I had been planning to pledge for more than a year.

We’d arrived at this decision through what I later saw as convoluted thinking, but at the time believed was perfectly logical. As children of Riggs Park, we’d been taught that the important things were what we carried with us—intelligence, learning, talent, skills. Material things, as the Germans had so skillfully shown during the war, could easily be taken away. On the other hand, our parents had hinted, since the Depression had kept them from developing their own talents fully, we should try to catch up. We must not forget the Germans, but we must forge ahead.

Pledging a sorority, Marilyn and I believed, was the way to do this. At Paul Junior High, where for the first time we were no longer segregated by neighborhood, we met classmates from Sixteenth Street and North Portal Estates whose fathers were doctors, dentists, real-estate moguls; who were, by Riggs Park standards, rich. Their luxurious lifestyle must be what our parents meant by “catching up.”

Just look! Our new friend, Rozelle Goodman, lived in a house with not one but two remarkable features: wall-to-wall carpet and central air. Rozelle, we were sure, was the type to pledge sorority in tenth grade.

“Well, it might be very nice for you girls to see what a sorority is like before you make a big commitment like living in a sorority house when you get to college,” Marilyn’s mother, Shirley, surprised us by saying one day. Marilyn and I eyed each other. We all knew none of us would ever live in a sorority house. We would go to college in D.C. and live at home. There was no money for anything grander. Seeing Shirley so starry-eyed touched us. While my own mother had an independent life as a musician, Shirley had only her hopes for Marilyn. Steve was never going to be a scholar. Shirley had never gone to college. She wanted Marilyn to have all the education and social life she’d missed, beginning with a sorority membership at Coolidge High.

When Marilyn and I posed the idea of pledging to Penny, she was indifferent. “What do I need with a sorority? I don’t even know any of the members all that well.”

“Of course you do,” we told her.

“Well, who?”

I struggled to name a few, but Penny wasn’t convinced.

“The truth is, she likes people’s approval,” Marilyn told me in private. “Why else would she bed down with all those boys?”

After the wild end of summer that had earned Penny her bad reputation, we reasoned that if a whole sorority gave her its blessing, Penny would feel less need to offer up her body.

Besides, by the time school started, she was dating Joel Gordon, the quarterback on Coolidge’s football team. As Steve pointed out, this could be an important plus. “Your snazzy sorority buddies won’t care what she does with Joel in private as long as she shows him off at their social functions.”

“Very nice, Steve. Very delicate,” Marilyn sniffed.

“Watch. Somebody’ll offer to bring her up. Wait and see.” Steve turned out to be right. Joel Gordon was as socially desirable as Penny was questionable. Three upper-class members offered to “bring up” Penny, when she needed only two.

“You owe it to yourself to pledge,” Marilyn and I urged when Penny still hesitated. We were convinced of the rightness of this move. Penny was often too dreamy to act in her own best interests. “Think about us, if not yourself,” I said. “How will we feel if our best friend won’t pledge with us?” Outmaneuvered, Penny finally agreed.

We had been told how annoying pledging could be: carrying gum and mints for the members at all times, carrying a little notebook where demerits could be recorded if we failed to comply. But the activities were more fun than we expected. While the members planned the big Christmas Night Dance at the Sheraton Park Hotel, the pledges manned bake sales, visited an old-age home, helped handicapped children into their coats after class and wheeled them down ramps to waiting buses. On Wednesdays after school, we discussed these charitable efforts at our pledge meetings. Elaine Marshall, the pledge mistress, was as sweet as she was cute. Marilyn and I were elected co-vice-presidents of the pledge class, and Francine Ades, who lived across Riggs Road on Chillum Place, became the treasurer.

On Sunday afternoons, the pledges had to attend regular sorority meetings at various members’ houses. Here we sat in a separate room waiting to be “brought down” and questioned. Though the waiting was tense, I believed it made us closer. Members and pledges alike arrived at the meetings dressed up in skirt-and-sweater sets and heels. We emerged from cars in groups of three and four, smoothing skirts, touching freshly painted nails to just-washed hair. Inside, the scents of our perfumes mingled—a fresh and interesting effect, never sour. Standing among the well-dressed, sweet-smelling girls who would soon be our sisters, Marilyn and Penny and I felt part of something large, secret, different from anything we had known. The perfume tickled our nostrils, the word floated on our tongues. We loved the sound of it:
sorority.

Members had such power over us that they could discuss anything about a pledge that seemed either outstanding or unbecoming. They could even blackball any girl they didn’t think would be an asset, though no one had ever heard of that happening. Marilyn and I felt as all the other pledges did, anxious never to do anything to make the members think we were unworthy. Penny didn’t seem to care as much, but mostly she went along.

All through the fall, there were more social events than any of us had ever gone to in a single semester. Mixers, teas, parties. Lacking a regular boyfriend, a pledge had to find a series of boys to escort her. This was never a problem, given the prestige of the sorority, though Marilyn complained it made her ask Bernie out more than she wanted.

“Why not admit it, you’re asking him because you like him,” I said.

“I’m asking him because he’s convenient. It’s not that I don’t like him. He’s okay. He’s not the love of my life.”

Hearing Marilyn say that, I suddenly knew that he was.

The social season culminated in the formal Christmas Night Dance, with a live band and a memory book that listed everyone and their dates. Penny was the only one I’d ever heard say anything against it. “We can rent the ballroom Christmas night because a Jewish sorority is the only group that wants it,” she asserted. “But imagine if you were part of the help. No one wants to work Christmas night.”

Penny’s comments seemed sour and unfair, a slur against the sorority. But they didn’t stop her from bringing Joel Gordon to the dance.

Marilyn came with Bernie, as I knew she would. And I got up the nerve to ask Wish, in that innocent time before I knew I was going to fall in love with him.

That night, Penny and Joel Gordon danced belly-to-belly even when the music didn’t call for it. Marilyn and I were both disturbed that she’d do such a thing in front of so many members. Most of the other pledges, wisely, didn’t dance close at all.

After the dance, everyone went home to change clothes before the party at the house of the sorority’s president. It was such a relief to shed long-line bras and layers of crinolines under semiformal dresses that by the time we reached the party, the mood was giddy. The basement was dim and cool. A few of the senior members, girls who were pinned or even engaged, started making out with their boyfriends. Bernie held Marilyn close during the slow songs on the record player. Marilyn admitted later that, under the spell of the soft music, her stomach had churned in such a pleasant way that she let Bernie press against her as tight as he wanted.

Wish and I danced, too, but we maintained a little distance since it was our first date. We stopped dancing when we spotted Penny sitting on Joel Gordon’s lap, kissing him and stroking his neck. Not a single other pledge was making out. Penny looked small and slender in her skirt and sweater, but her hair was disheveled and her face smudged with a serious, desperate expression that I supposed was the look people got when they were ready to have sex. There was something wrong with Penny—with the desperation on her face, with what she was doing, what she would do later. It occurred to me then that this—
this
—was why they called girls
bad.

Joel Gordon broke up with Penny a few weeks later. To Marilyn and me, this seemed inevitable, though we couldn’t have said why. Penny showed no emotion. Instead, she stepped up her social life, going out with one boy after another even on weeknights.

Whenever the three of us were together, I found myself picturing Penny on Joel Gordon’s lap at Christmas. It seemed wrong to behave so seriously and desperately about a person if you were not going to set aside even a single weekend to mourn him. For the first time since kindergarten, I didn’t feel sorry for Penny and want to protect her; for the first time, I wanted to give her a piece of my mind.