Riggs Park (5 page)

“Yes, but I think Robin was better when she left. Truly. Or at least getting there.”

Marilyn’s sharp gaze blurred. She was on her fourth glass of wine, maybe her fifth. “Bob was a schmuck anyway.”

I raised my glass in a toast. “To being rid of schmucks.”

We clinked glasses so energetically that mine sloshed over.

“I’ll tell you,” Marilyn confided as she refilled it to the brim. “You’re lucky you can work at home. Don’t have to face the competition. Otherwise they come after you.” Always quick to claim she wanted only a job, not a career, Marilyn had nevertheless worked part-time on Capitol Hill for years, and loved being a political insider more than she admitted.

“Come after you how?” I slurred. “You’ve been hearing too many political intrigues.”

“No I haven’t.” Marilyn shook her head emphatically. “Every pretty little college grad in the country comes to D.C. and wants your job. A bunch of ambitious little Monica Lewinskys. They check you out, and you can see just what’s going on behind those glossy young eyes. They’re thinking, ‘No problem, I’ve got her job inside of six months, that babe’s over the hill. I’m the future and she’s the past.’”

“Oh, Marilyn!”

“Well, it makes me mad as hell. I hate those kids. I do.” Marilyn put on a fierce expression and emptied her glass. “Then one day one of them came into the office and you know who it was? Andrea Grossman.”

“Who?”

“Remember Joan Engle and Larry Grossman? Got married right out of high school? This is their daughter.”

“Oh.” I shook my head to clear the buzz. I couldn’t picture Joan Engle at all.

“So I realized who’s coming after us,” Marilyn went on. “Our kids. How much can we hate our own kids?”

I laughed, which seemed the only alternative to weeping, clearly not the protocol of the evening. “Here’s to staying
on
the hill, politically and personally,” I said, raising my glass for another toast.

“Hear, hear,” Marilyn agreed, and drank.

Then, through the blur, I remembered. “So what’s this about Penny?”

Marilyn shook her head. “Too drunk,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

In the morning, I woke up with the expected headache, but meant to get out of bed anyway so I could run one errand before Marilyn roused herself: visit my parents’ graves.

I couldn’t make myself budge. The weight behind my eyes and the warm quilt tucked over my shoulders seduced me into another hour’s sleep. Then I opened my eyes to too-bright sunshine and a head clear enough to admit a couple of new, niggling worries: Why would Marilyn make me come all the way to Washington to tell me she was going to have a face-lift? Why not say that on the phone? Why lure me up here on the pretext of secrets about Penny and then not reveal them? None of it made sense. I forced myself out of bed and into some clothes, and wandered groggily into the kitchen.

Bernie was sitting at the table, reading the Sunday
Washington Post.
“Sneaking around at dawn?” he greeted me.

“Hardly dawn.”

After plugging in the coffeemaker, I gulped two glasses of water, took two aspirin, and watched the black liquid seep into the pot.

“Marilyn’s still sleeping?”

“She’s pretty tired lately.” Bernie studied the paper, rubbed his stubbly chin. Even as a teenager, he’d had such a heavy beard that he had to shave twice a day. Then, the ever-present black shadow had made him look older. Now the whiskers were white, he was twenty pounds overweight, and in his baggy gray sweatpants and sweatshirt, he looked not just “older,” but
old.

I poured coffee when the brewing stopped, and slid a cup across the table to him. “Why does she really want me here, Bernie?”

Shrugging, professing innocence, he finally looked up as he shook a packet of Sweet’n Low into his cup. “She’s lost her mind is all. Or maybe I have. Either the face-lift is crazy or Bernie Waxman is crazy. Which?”

My worrisome idea of the body healing at the expense of the mind threatened to surface again, but I suppressed it. “So you think she just wants me here as defense against your poor attitude? For moral support? That’s what she told me. I don’t believe it.”

“For moral support she could call Andrew,” he said, speaking of their younger son, a luminously sweet child who’d grown into a kind and generous man. Bernie sipped his coffee, then put down the cup, but kept his eyes on me, his round, stubbled face etched with worry.

“The face-lift will be all right,” I assured him. “Weird, but okay. The idea of it cheers her up.” But it doesn’t cheer
me,
I thought. “We’ve always been women who believed in plastic surgery.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“She’s not doing it because of the way it will make her look on the outside. It’s for how it will make her feel on the inside. Especially right now.”

“She’ll feel like shit. She’ll be bruised and swollen and have to take three naps a day.”

“Not forever,” I told him.

But I was worried, and all the more because I knew the genesis of Marilyn’s decision. During Easter vacation our junior year of high school, the two of us had had our noses done. We’d shared a room at the Washington Hospital Center and scheduled back-to-back operations so we could commiserate, in case it turned out to be worse than we thought. Despite the evidence of friends who’d survived, both of us had been terrified.

For a long time I believed we’d subjected ourselves to the ordeal mostly because in Washington, D.C., in the fifties, if you were Jewish and your nose was not perfect like Penny’s or my sister Trudi’s, having it surgically altered was simply what you
did.
Years later, a truer, darker motive occurred to me: that we had been living under such a deep cloud of misgiving about ourselves that it was stronger even than our fear. If we didn’t go through with it, what kind of lives would we have? Who would want us? If we didn’t marry, we’d end up as old-maid secretaries or teachers, not administrators like our brothers. Being desirable was smarter.

Yet there we were, on the threshold of womanhood, our faces imperfect, our figures too round, failings we’d discovered while poring over the pages of
Seventeen.
If recent history meant anything, there were even places in the world where our Semitic noses would have doomed us to the gas chambers. Why take the chance? Without plastic surgery, we would never look quite as the world thought we should. Our disfigurement would stay with us all our lives.

In retrospect, that seemed a shabby way of thinking—and if we’d been born seven or ten years later, we might have been braver. Might have scorned makeup, felt free to spurn marriage in favor of careers, bed down with anyone we liked. But we were children of the fifties, living on the cusp of a revolution we would never fully embrace. At sixteen, we knew we’d better start correcting our flaws.

My mother very nearly forbade it. Ida said the quality of my life would be determined by my character and not the shape of my nose. I didn’t believe it, or at least wouldn’t admit it. An electric tension vibrated between us for weeks. Finally Ida blurted out in frustration, “There’s nothing wrong with your nose!” and I replied, “That’s just pure bullshit!”—an unheard-of retort to a parent in those days, so astonishing that my mother almost slapped me, but lowered her hand just in time. I burst into tears, ran to my room. Nothing wrong with my nose! Of course there was. It was too long and too high-bridged for my face. Anyone could see that. Period.

And Marilyn’s was worse, a true hook. On that point even my mother and I agreed. Years later, when the movie
Patton
came out, Marilyn claimed that George C. Scott had the exact nose as her own original. And damned if Marilyn wasn’t right! By then we had some miles on us and could laugh about it; and later we would wonder how our children (my daughter Robin and Marilyn’s elder son, Mike) had inherited our noses and looked just fine, when on us they had seemed so hideous. But at the time we saw no choice but to change them.

Parental permission secured, we went to Dr. Arthur Dick, Washington’s Michelangelo of rhinoplasty, known for customizing his work to the face in question so that the results always looked natural, never “done.” In addition to his technical genius, Dr. Dick had a genuine affection for his patients. He did not believe plastic surgery was an act of vanity. He thought it was a sign of mental health.

But despite his gentle manner, we were not reassured—especially when we learned that, during the procedure,
we would be awake.
“That’s so if you swallow any blood, you can cough it up more easily. You’ll get some sedatives, then a local anesthetic.” Shots! In our noses! This was almost too horrible to imagine. We dug fingernails into our fisted palms to keep from fainting. We might have fled except that we were sixteen and our very futures were at stake. Others had lived through it. Maybe we would, too.

No one told us we’d be given so much Demerol before surgery that someone could have said, “Okay, we’re cutting you open from neck to navel now,” and we would have smiled lazily and murmured, “Have at it, guys,” before peacefully dozing off.

I remembered very little. A white operating room, robed nurses handling silvery instruments, surgeons wearing what looked like shower caps over their hair. For a while I heard a hammering sound but had no sense that what was being hammered was
me.
Once, I woke up to cough. The next thing I knew I was being wheeled back to our room.

Later that day, after we’d slept off most of the sedatives, we inspected ourselves in the mirror. Great white bandages swathed our noses, reached up onto our foreheads, clung to our disarranged hair. Our eyes were blackened and bloodshot, our faces so swollen our cheekbones had disappeared. Luckily, we felt better than we looked. We admired the spray of flowers that arrived from some of the girls in our sorority. We oohed and aahed when Bernie appeared with a giant teddy bear for Marilyn. And then Penny tiptoed in, tentatively, with our other friend, Francine Ades. Penny took one look at us and ran out of the room.

“Do you think we made her sick?” Marilyn asked.

“Probably. You know Penny.” Francine sounded long-suffering and impatient, but she went out to see what was wrong. When they returned a moment later, Penny was wiping away tears, her freckled white face splotchy from crying. Francine held her elbow and guided her to the foot of my bed.

“Look. Barbara is the blonde.” She tugged Penny’s elbow and faced her toward the second bed. “The other one is Marilyn.”

Struggling to compose herself, Penny sniffed, fidgeted, spoke in a small, apologetic tone. “With all those bandages, for a minute I didn’t know which of you was which.”

“We look a whole lot worse than we feel,” I said. Even allowing for our grimy hair and massive dressings, I didn’t see how Penny had failed to recognize us. Penny was so shaky, so frightened, that both of us felt sicker when she left.

Despite a bout of nausea during the night from swallowing blood, I left the hospital the next morning bruised but not in pain. Marilyn felt even better. We had walked through the fire; we had emerged unscathed. If Marilyn’s new look also called attention to her heavy jaw and mine to my slightly protuberant eyes, neither of us noticed. After the bandages came off, we loved our noses absolutely.

After weeks of black eyes and swelling, when our faces returned to normal (except that our noses were still numb, and would be for a year), Marilyn and I decided it was time to show the finished product to Essie Berman. Essie examined us from every angle, nodded gravely, lit a cigarette. “You’re pretty girls,” she pronounced. “Enjoy it in good health. Use it while you can. The looks won’t last. Nothing does. It’s all on loan.”

Coming from anyone else, we would have suspected jealousy, especially from someone whose nose was as gargantuan as Essie’s, whose hair was unkempt, whose sense of style rivaled that of Golda Meir. But if Essie said it, it must be true. I’d cherished the word,
pretty,
but from that time on never forgot it was only on loan.

And like Marilyn, I’d counted on that loan lasting as I long as I needed it, using my looks as a crutch well into middle age, even crediting them with bringing me Jon. An image of Jon’s face rose up before me, seamed and distraught as it had been these past weeks every time we spoke of Robin’s divorce and miscarriage. I shivered. Was he really as solicitous and fatherly as he seemed? And if he was, why did it bother me so? Now it struck me that Robin looked much as I once had—but fresher, earthier, more natural, with my original nose.

Maybe Jon was seeing in Robin the younger version of her mother. The younger woman he’d rather have.

No!

How could I be jealous of my own daughter?

The thought filled me with disgust.

But it also made me understand why, even in the grip of cancer, Marilyn was having a face-lift. Why she had chosen it even after four surgeries, including the painful tummy tuck she swore took two years to recover from. I understood as Bernie didn’t why someone would opt for that in spite of what she’d been through and what might still be to come. We hadn’t bought beauty when we’d had our noses done at sixteen, but we had borrowed it. And our youthful transformation had provided us with a spark and a confidence that had allowed us to face the world in all the years since. Now, approaching sixty, paying back the loan wrinkle by wrinkle, we knew that if we borrowed again—borrowed youth, borrowed beauty—the results would be superficial, the risk would be great, the price would be pain. What kind of pathetic women would even consider it? Yet what were the choices? And what difference did it make? If it took a face-lift to rekindle the light in a world suddenly stalked by darkness, how could Marilyn settle for anything less?

“T
hought you’d be out of here before I got up, didn’t you?” Marilyn bellowed, jolting me out of my reverie. Striding into the kitchen in baggy pajamas, hair tousled and dark circles under her eyes, she looked more hungover than her voice suggested. “I know where you’re going,” she accused. “Not that I mind. But to be too cowardly to tell me—”

“What are you talking about?” Bernie asked.

“She’s going to the cemetery.”

“So? I always go to the cemetery. My parents are buried there. Is that a crime?”

“She didn’t want to say the word in front of me,” Marilyn told Bernie. She shot us an evil smile. “
Cemetery.
She was going to sneak out.”

“I wasn’t sneaking.”

“Go to the cemetery later,” Marilyn said. “I have a little outing planned for us this morning.”

“An outing where?”

“Riggs Park.”

“Riggs Park!
Why?
” Since the midsixties, after the phenomenon of white flight had swept all our families into the suburbs, the neighborhood had been almost entirely black.

“I don’t know. Just to see it. Out of curiosity.”

“After all this time?”

“Well, why not?”

In all the years I’d been coming to visit her, Marilyn had never suggested a sentimental journey to the old neighborhood. The only reason she’d be doing it now was because she thought she wouldn’t get another chance.

“Sure. Okay. Why not? Bernie, you come, too,” I pleaded, looking for an ally. “You probably haven’t been there in ages, either.”

Marilyn didn’t give him time to answer. “On Sunday morning? Are you kidding? He’d miss every news show on TV.”

Bernie and I exchanged helpless glances. Marilyn strode toward her bedroom to dress.

“I’ll drive,” I said when Marilyn reappeared, looking like she ought to go back to bed.

It was a quintessential October morning: sunny, dry, a bit of a breeze. Our dispositions gradually improved. As we drove down New Hampshire Avenue toward the District Line, my headache notwithstanding, I marveled in the glory of gold and russet trees and gentle hills, all of which I urgently yearned for this particular fall.

At the District Line, the sight of the bus stop on Eastern Avenue made me forget my throbbing temples for a moment as I entertained a nostalgic vision of days past: the rich tapestry of city life when Washington, D.C., was not the crime capital of the nation but a small, manageable, southern city that was also, as far as we’d understood, entirely safe.

“We rode those buses alone from the time we were—what? Ten? Eleven?” I asked.

“Maybe even younger,” Marilyn said. We’d traveled unchaperoned to ballet and tap lessons, to sessions in the warm indoor pool at the Jewish Community Center on Sixteenth Street, to the Capitol Theatre downtown. We’d swayed on streetcars down Georgia Avenue to see ball games at Griffith Stadium (not that we’d cared about baseball, but the boys had); we’d executed complicated transfers to buses that had taken us to “the other side of town,” a term that had meant, very specifically to Washingtonians of that day, “the other side of Rock Creek Park.” Our horizons had seemed boundless, unlimited, compared to the complicated, menacing world of our children.

“Oh, look at the trees!” Marilyn exclaimed as I turned onto Oneida Street, our old block, and drove down the steep hill that pitched precipitously from New Hampshire Avenue, past Third Street, into Sixth Street at the bottom. In the early days, the trees had been nothing but tender stalks springing from patches of ground along the sidewalk (required, we’d been told, by the FHA), and later healthy adolescents with lanky trunks. Now they were mature, huge, casting the block into shadow while the street of our childhood had been relentlessly sunny.

“Yes, but the houses—” They looked amazingly as they had half a century before, yet shrunken, too, as the dwellings of childhood always are: long rows of two-story brick duplexes we’d always referred to as “semidetached,” with ugly, chipping concrete patios we’d proudly referred to as “front porches,” and closet-sized patches of lawn.

“So tiny,” Marilyn whispered. “I’d forgotten.” Oneida Street had been among the first streets in Riggs Park to be developed, to sprout postwar homes for growing families who (we were too young to know then) would never be rich. But Marilyn and I had been small, too, and the rooms had seemed enormous; and after all this time it was a shock to our older, knowing eyes to see the truth.

“Functional, unimaginative boxes,” I said. It was the best our hardworking parents, children of the Depression, survivors of the war, could afford.

“Not exactly North Portal,” Marilyn agreed, naming the stylish neighborhood where, in high school, our richest friends and sorority sisters had lived.

In our teen years, Oneida Street had always seemed too narrow for two-way traffic and parked cars, too, and spaces had always been at a premium. But there was plenty of parking today. “Sunday morning,” I mused as I pulled into a spot just above the alley. “People must be at church.”

“Yeah, or in jail.” Marilyn pointed to a sporty black Mustang, its tires held in place by a bright orange boot. “You can’t move your car if you’re incarcerated.”

Ignoring her, I unlocked the doors. “Does this mean you’re afraid to get out?”

“Certainly not. I’ve already been slashed and poisoned—” Marilyn’s favorite terms for surgery and chemo. “What’s a little assault and gunfire?”

“Stop it, Marilyn. It looks perfectly safe.”

Outside, the sidewalk was dappled with light and shadow under the bright, blowing trees, but except for a woman in an exquisite red suit getting into a car, the street was deserted. I imagined spectators peering at us from behind drawn curtains, wondering why two white women were wandering their block on a Sunday morning.

Marilyn and I had lived two doors apart, in houses with identical floor plans: living room/dining room/kitchen, three bedrooms upstairs, an unfinished basement. Both houses were still intact, and in roughly the same state of disrepair—wrought-iron porch railings rusted and aslant from fifty years of being leaned against.

Back in the forties, our parents had saved for awnings to shelter the front porches. The women had moved their canasta games outdoors on summer afternoons, savored the shade, and had hoped that even in Washington’s notorious swamp heat, there might be a hint of a breeze. Marilyn’s house still sported what might have been the “permanent” awning her parents had installed, some of its green-and-white plastic slats warped and discolored. But at my house, where the original canvas awning had been torn from its frame by Hurricane Hazel in 1956, there was still no replacement. In front of the house, the FHA tree had been cut down, leaving a slash of reddish soil beside the sidewalk and nothing to soften the sunshine or the view.

“They have a word for this,” I said. “Slum.”

“Don’t say that,” Marilyn whispered, though clearly it was. All up and down the block, for every freshly painted slab of woodwork, two were rotting. For every patch of tended yard, two were overgrown with ancient shrubs. For every set of shutters that hung securely at a window, another was falling off. At the house that shared a wall with Marilyn’s, a window air conditioner hung precariously from the master bedroom, looking as if it would come unhinged in the next brisk breeze. Someone had tried to paint the trim but had obviously given up—out of money? Paint? Time? Only the old red brick had held up well.

“Hardly the Historic District,” Marilyn noted. She crossed her arms in front of her, hugged herself into her sweater. “Were we ever this poor?”

“The houses were new then. We were upwardly mobile.” I tugged at her arm. “Come on. Let’s check out the alley. Remember Mrs. Warner?”

At the mention of the name, Marilyn revived. “The one who slept in the buff?”

“She didn’t think anyone could see her.”

“I don’t believe it. She was an exhibitionist. She knew.”

We turned into the alley, once the early morning domain of milkmen and garbage trucks, but a sheltered haven nevertheless, where in the neat rectangles of yard my father had erected a swing set and Marilyn’s mother had planted, against the ugly metal sheathing of the window well, lily of the valley that bloomed white and fragile every spring. In autumn, the Malkins next door built a
succah
hung with fruit and gourds, where everyone was invited to eat honey cake while looking up through the greenery to the harvest sky.

Now the alley was full of potholes, the chain-link fences that had enclosed our yards were falling down, and most of the lawns had been partially paved to make room for cars people must not have wanted to leave out front.

“Look.” I pointed across a sea of trash cans to the window of the room where the Warners had slept, directly across the alley from my childhood bedroom.

“She was such a hussy!” Marilyn laughed.

Younger than our own mothers, more carefree and daring, Jessie Warner had often left the light on while she undressed, and had never closed the shades. The spring we were ten, Marilyn and Penny spent the night at my house as often as they were allowed, where the three of us crowded in front of my darkened bedroom window and spied.

“She’s so
flat,
” Penny whispered as we examined Jessie Warner’s nude form, her narrow torso rising toward small, perky breasts.

“I bet she was a ballet dancer,” Marilyn observed. But though her body was more graceful than those of our own curvaceous mothers, we decided it was less interesting, too—a fact that made us feel superior and secure, suspecting as we did that we ourselves would probably grow into versions of our mother’s bodies and not Jessie Warner’s.

A week or two before school let out, we were regaled by the sight of Mrs. Warner’s husband entering the room during our Saturday-night spy session, where he shed his clothes and took his wife in his arms. It was the first time we had ever seen a naked man with an erection. We screamed, then clapped hands over each other’s mouths so my mother wouldn’t hear us, and whispered for hours afterward with horror and delight.

“I never thought Jessie Warner was a hussy,” I told Marilyn now. “I always thought it was because she wasn’t Jewish.”

“The way she looked, or getting undressed in front of the window? Or giving her husband a woody?”

“All of the above.”

Marilyn snorted, but I had actually believed this. Since my family didn’t keep kosher or go to services, for me Jewishness was essentially a social matter like belonging to a club. Almost everyone in Riggs Park was Jewish. We followed a certain code of behavior. Jessie Warner didn’t. Though I’d been glad for the few Christians who’d decorated their houses in the dark of December, who’d opened their curtains so everyone could view their spangled trees from afar, I’d seen them as exotics with strange and unusual customs. Like Jessie Warner, they might all believe not only in Christmas trees but in leaving the blinds open while they undressed.

Marilyn nudged me and pointed toward a yard farther down the alley. A white dog with a black patch around one eye was jumping against the fence, trying to get our attention. It was the first animal we’d seen.

“A pit bull,” Marilyn announced as she marched over and stuck her hand through the chain-link fence to pet it.

“A pit bull! Leave it alone!” I jumped back even though the beast was only slavering on Marilyn’s hand.

“Oh, Barbara, relax. It’s harmless.” Marilyn had always been the expert about dogs. Sometimes she’d owned three at a time when her boys were small, to make up for her parents never allowing her more than a parakeet. “Feel it,” she ordered. “Pit bulls feel tough, like a pig.”

Gingerly, I extended my hand. Sure enough, the hide was steely, as if strung over one long muscle. The dog wagged its whole hind end with happiness.

“I guess it’s supposed to be fierce and bark at us, but it’s just a puppy. Fine watchdog you are,” she crooned as she leaned over to let it lick her face. Marilyn’s last dog, a black Lab, had died just after her first diagnosis of cancer.

“If you like dogs so much, why don’t you get another one?”

“Bernie and I are both at work so much. It would be alone.”

“That never bothered you before.”

“You’re not the one who has to walk it. Who feels guilty.” Marilyn wiped her slobbery hands on her slacks as we headed back to the street.

“You have a fenced yard,” I persisted. “It might be nice.”

Marilyn tossed her head, annoyed, but then we were diverted by the sight of a young woman wrestling a toddler toward a house down the hill and across the street. The little boy wriggled and fidgeted until she put him down. Not much more than twenty, the mother was solid-looking and stylish, in jeans and an imitation leather jacket, hair pulled back into cornrows around her head, then hanging down her back in dozens of braids.

“The people around here look better than the houses do,” Marilyn whispered as I unlocked my car.

“Maybe that’s because the people are younger than the houses.”

Glancing in our direction, the black woman regarded us suspiciously. She minced her steps to let the toddler keep up with her—a tiny boy wearing new red basketball shoes of the smallest possible size.

Finally she swept the toddler into her arms and opened the gate of a chain-link fence that had been erected, hideously, around one of the minuscule front yards. It wasn’t until she disappeared inside that Marilyn and I realized, at the same moment, that the transformed, gated house was where Penny’s family had once lived.

“My God,” Marilyn gasped—whether because she hadn’t recognized the house at first or because it looked so awful, I wasn’t sure.

“I think aesthetics went out when the gate went up,” I said.

But Marilyn slid into the car and clutched her hand to her throat more dramatically than seemed necessary.

“Is this why we came here?” I asked. “To see Penny’s house? As a sort of lead-in to Penny’s big secret?” I turned on the ignition and gunned the gas as I pulled away from the curb.