Silent to the Bone (22 page)

Amedeo said, “I'm impressed.” He was.

Mrs. Zender said, “I'm pleased that you are.”

And for reasons he did not yet understand, Amedeo was pleased to have pleased.

Mrs. Zender swept her arm in the direction of the back of the house. The hallway was wide enough to allow them to walk side by side, but Mrs. Zender walked ahead. She was tall, and she was zaftig. Definitely zaftig. She was also majestic. She moved forward like a queen vessel plowing still waters. Her kimono corrugated as she moved. There was a thin stripe of purple that winked as it appeared and then disappeared in a fold of fabric at her waist.

Amedeo was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt and shorts, but the air inside the house was as thick as motor oil, and perspiration soon coated his arms and legs and made his clothes stick like cuticle. Mrs. Zender seemed not to be sweating. Maybe she followed the dress code of the desert and insulated herself with layers of clothing. Arabs and motor oil had been in the news a lot lately.

The combination of heat, music, and the mesmerizing rock-and-roll of Mrs. Zender's hips made Amedeo worry about falling unconscious before reaching the door at the end of the hall. What were the names of clothes that desert
people wore?
Burnoose . . . chador . . . chador.
His mother did not approve of chadors.

The rock-and-roll stopped when Mrs. Zender arrived at the door at the end of the hall. She waited for Amedeo to catch up, and then with a flutter of sleeve and a swirl of pattern, she lifted her right arm and pushed the door open. For a minute, she stood against the door, her arm stretched out like a semaphore, beckoning Amedeo to pass in front of her.

He walked into the kitchen, and Mrs. Zender quickly closed the door behind her.

The music stopped.

An air conditioner was propped into the kitchen window and was loudly battling the throbbing pulse of heat that bore into the room. Like his house, Mrs. Zender's faced east. By August, the afternoon sun was too high to make a direct hit on the kitchen windows, but was still strong enough to bounce off the river and push yellow bands of heat through each of the slats of the Venetian blinds.

The kitchen itself was a time capsule. The counters were edged in ribbed chrome and topped with pink patterned Formica that was peeling at the seams. Near the sink sat a set of metal cylinders labeled
FLOUR, SUGAR, COFFEE.
There was a toaster oven, but no microwave. The stove was the width of two regular stoves, eight burners,
two regular ovens, and a warming oven. It was gleaming bright, clean, and obviously had not been used in a very long time. It would take courage to turn it on. Cold cereal and vichyssoise would be better menu choices.

On the countertop in the corner of the kitchen near the dining alcove, there was a small telephone. Turquoise. Rotary dial. Not touch-tone. Amedeo had seen people in the movies use a rotary phone, and he knew the phrase “dial a number,” but he had never done it.

Mrs. Zender said, “That's a princess phone.”

“Does it work?”

“Of course it works. Except for my cleaning service, which is not here today, everything in this house works.”

Amedeo lifted the receiver. The part of the phone he held to his ear had yellowed from turquoise to a shade of institutional green.

Mrs. Zender sat at the kitchen table. Amedeo felt he was being watched. He turned to face the wall of cabinets.

The cabinets reached to the ceiling. It would take a ladder to reach the top shelves. The cabinet doors were glass, and Amedeo could see stacks and stacks of dishes and matching cups hanging from hooks. Behind other glass doors there were platoons of canned soups—mostly tomato—and a regiment of cereal boxes—mostly bran. Everything was orderly, but the dishes on the topmost
shelves were dusty, and the stemware was cloudy, settled in rows like stalagmites.

Finally, he heard, “Your call may be monitored for quality assurance,” and was told to listen carefully “to the following options.” He realized that he could not exercise any of the “following options.” He could hardly press one or two when there were no buttons to press. He held his hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, “I'm supposed to push one for English.”

Mrs. Zender smiled wide. The last of the red runes had been washed away. “Do nothing,” she said. “Just hang on. When you have a dial phone, they have to do the work for you.” She threw her head back and laughed.

Amedeo didn't turn his back on her again.

As soon as the call was finished, they returned to the long, dark hall, where the heat and the music swallowed them. Mrs. Zender paused to say, “I suppose you put central air-conditioning into your place.”

Amedeo hesitated. Until that moment, he had never thought of central air-conditioning as something a person put in. He thought it came with the walls and roof. “I suppose so,” he said.

“Sissies,” Mrs. Zender said. Then she laughed again. She had a musical laugh. “I chose a sound system over air-conditioning.”

“But,” Amedeo replied, “I think you're allowed to have both.”

“No,” she said crisply. “Karl Eisenhuth is as dead as my husband.”

“Oh, I'm sorry.”

“Yes, a pity. There never will be another sound system like this one.”

Reluctantly, Amedeo left Mrs. Zender, her veils, her house.

Now, Amedeo watched William walk through that peeling, painted front door without stopping or knocking and enter Mrs. Zender's world of sound and shadow.

Don't miss TALK, TALK, a selection of inspiring speeches given by E.L. Kongisburg over a period of 25 years.

Turn the page to read E.L. Konigsburg's 1968 Newbery Medal and Honor acceptance speech for the beloved From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth.

You see before you today a grateful convert from chemistry. Grateful that I converted and grateful that you have labeled the change successful. The world of chemistry, too, is thankful; it is a neater and safer place since I left. This conversion was not so difficult as some others I have gone through. The transformation from smoker into nonsmoker was far more difficult, and the change from high-school-graduate-me into girl-chemist-me was more revolutionary. My writing is not a conversion, really, but a reversion, a reversion to type. A chemist needs symbols and equations, and a chemist needs test tubes and the exact metric measure. A chemist needs this equipment, but I do not. I can go for maybe even five whole days without thinking about gram molecular weights. But not words. I think about words a lot. I need words. I need written-down, black-on-white, printed words. Let me count the ways.

There was a long newspaper strike the first winter we moved into metropolitan New York. Saturday used to be my day off, and I used that day for taking art lessons in the morning and for exploring Manhattan in the afternoon. Our suburbs were New Jersey suburbs then, and my last piece of walking involved a cross-town journey toward the Port Authority Bus Terminal. On one of those Saturdays, as I was
in the heart of the theater district, a volley of teen-age girls came larruping down the street bellowing, “The Rolling Stones! The Rolling Stones!” Up ahead, a small bunch of long-haired boys broke into a run and ducked into an alley, Shubert Alley. The girls pursued, and the Rolling Stones gathered; they pushed their collective hair out of their collective eyes and signed autographs.

I told my family about this small happening when I came home, but that was not enough. The next day I wanted to show them an account of it in the paper. But there was no Sunday paper then. It didn't get written down. I had seen it happen, and still I missed its not being written down. Even now, I miss its never having been written down. I need to see the words to make more real that which I have experienced. And that is the first way I need words. A quotation from my old world of science explains it: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Each animal in its individual development passes through stages in which it resembles its remote ancestors. I spread words on paper for the same reasons that Cro-Magnon man spread pictures on the walls of caves. I need to see it put down: the Rolling Stones and the squealing girls. Thus, first of all, writing it down adds another dimension to reality and satisfies an atavistic need.

And I need words for a second reason. I need them for the reasons that Jane Austen probably did. She told about the dailiness of living. She presented a picture that only someone both involved with her times and detached from them could present. Just like me. I am involved in the everyday, cornflakes, worn-out-sneakers way of life of my children; yet I am detached from it by several decades. And I give words to the supermarket shopping and to the laundromat just as Jane Austen gave words to afternoon visiting and worry about drafts from open windows.

Just as she stood in a corridor, sheltered by roof and walls from the larger world of her century, just as she stood there
and described what was happening in the cubicles of civilization, I stand in my corridor. My corridor is my generation, a hallway away from the children that I breed and need and write about. I peek into homes sitting on quarter-acre lots and into apartments with two bedrooms and two baths. So I need words for this reason: to make a record of a place, suburban America, and a time, early autumn of the twentieth century.

My phylogenetic need, adding another dimension to reality, and my class and order need, making record, are certainly the wind at my back, but a family need is the directed, strong gust that pushes me to my desk. And here I don't mean
family
in the taxonomic sense. I mean
family
that I lived in when I was growing up and
family
that I live in now.

Read
Mary Poppins,
and you get a good glimpse of upper-middle-class family life in England a quarter of a century ago, a family that had basis in fact. Besides Mary there were Cook and Robertson Ay, and Ellen to lay the table. The outside of the Banks house needed paint. Would such a household exist in a middle-class neighborhood in a Shaker Heights, Ohio, or a Paramus, New Jersey? Hardly. There would be no cook; mother would be subscribing to
Gourmet
magazine. Robertson Ay's salary would easily buy the paint, and Mr. Banks would be cleaning the leaves out of his gutters on a Sunday afternoon. No one in the Scarsdales of this country allows the house to get run down. It is not in the order of things to purchase services instead of paint.

Read
The Secret Garden,
and you find another world that I know about only in words. Here is a family living on a large estate staffed by servants who are devoted to the two generations living there. Here is a father who has no visible source of income. He neither reaps nor sows; he doesn't even commute. He apparently never heard of permissiveness in raising children. He travels around Europe in search of himself, and
no one resents his leaving his family to do it. Families of this kind had a basis in fact, but fact remote from me.

I have such faith in words that when I read about such families as a child, I thought that they were the norm and that the way I lived was subnormal, waiting for normal.

Where were the stories then about growing up in a small mill town where there was no one named Jones in your class? Where were the stories that made having a class full of Radasevitches and Gabellas and Zaharious normal? There were stories about the crowd meeting at the corner drugstore after school. Where were the stories that told about the store owner closing his place from 3:15 until 4:00 p.m. because he found that what he gained in sales of Coca-Cola he lost in stolen Hershey Bars? How come that druggist never seemed normal to me? He was supposed to be grumpy but lovable; the stories of my time all said so.

Where are the stories now about fathers who come home from work grouchy? Not mean. Not mad. Just nicely, mildly grouchy. Where are the words that tell about mothers who are just slightly hungover on the morning after New Year's Eve? Not drunkard mothers. Just headachey ones. Where are the stories that tell about the pushy ladies? Not real social climbers. Just moderately pushy. Where are all the parents who are experts on schools? They are all around me in the suburbs of New Jersey and New York, in Pennsylvania and Florida, too. Where are they in books? Some of them are in my books.

And I put them there for my kids. To excuse myself to my kids. Because I have this foolish faith in words. Because I want to show it happening. Because for some atavistic, artistic, inexplicable reason, I believe that the writing of it makes normal of it.

Some of the words come from another family part of me. From being a mother. From the part of me that urges, “Say something else, too. Describe, sure, describe what life is like
in these suburbs. Tell how it is normal to be very comfortable on the outside but very uncomfortable on the inside. Tell how funny it all is. But tell a little something else, too. What can it hurt? Tell a little something else—about how you can be a nonconformist and about how you can be an outsider. And tell how you are entitled to a little privacy. But for goodness' sake, say all that very softly. Let the telling be like fudge-ripple ice cream. You keep licking vanilla, but every now and then you come to something darker and deeper and with a stronger flavor. Let the something-else words be the chocolate.”