That Said (14 page)

The last of my friends, the last of the last.

No luck. I'd swathe myself again

in my neutral clothing.

 

When one morning I woke up,

two black ink blots staining my pajamas,

I dragged my mother out of bed to tell her.

We squeezed into the bathroom

as if into our clubhouse

and she was going to show me the secret handshake.

 

Blushing, leaking, I sat on the tub's rim,

as if poised over the mikveh, the ritual bath.

Stuffed inside my underpants,

the bulky Kotex, safety pins, and elastic sanitary belt

I'd stored in my closet for over a year.

My mother took a seat on the toilet lid.

“Ma,” I shyly said, “I got my period,”

then leaned over to receive her kiss,

her blessing.

 

She looked as though she were going to cry.

In her blue nylon nightgown, her hairnet

a cobweb stretched over her bristling curlers,

my mother laughed, tears in her eyes,

and yelled, “Mazel tov! Now you are a woman!

Welcome to the club!”

and slapped me across the face—

for the first and last time ever—

 

“
This
should be the worst pain you ever know.”

Side by side in matching plastic capes,

my mother and I were two from a set

of Russian dolls wearing the family brand

of hair—dark, wavy brown.

 

A graduate of beauty school

was frosting my mother's hair today.

Only a few years older than I,

she had a honey-blonde beehive,

teased and glazed,

and a married boyfriend twice her age.

 

She stuffed my mother's hair

under a punctured bathing cap.

Her crochet hook pulled dark strands

one by one through the holes.

At first my mother looked bald.

And then like one of those dolls

with rooted hair you can really comb,

clumps of hair plugged into the holes

drilled in rows around their skulls.

 

Pulling on her rubber gloves,

the girl painted my mother's head

with bleach, a greasy paste,

then kneaded and sculpted the hair on top

into a kewpie doll's one enormous curl.

She set the timer, as if boiling an egg.

If she left it on too long, the hair

would turn auburn, red, blonde, silver,

and my grandmother's snowy white.

 

I paged through the latest
Seventeen
.

April's Breck Girl gazed coolly back.

With her blonde pageboy

and pink cashmere sweater,

she looked as if she belonged

in the white Cadillac double-parked out front.

She
hated my babyish ponytail too!

 

A semester short of his degree,

the boss's son practiced on me,

bending my neck backward

onto the cold pink lip of the basin.

His every touch gave me a shock.

Even while he trimmed my hair,

I couldn't take my eyes off my mother's

bumpy rubber scalp stained with dyes

like bruises healing yellow-brown and plum.

 

If my mother had one life to live,

why not live it as a blonde?

Gone was her beautiful dark brown hair.

I had lost her

among the bottles of peroxide and shampoo,

rollers, bobby pins, rat-tailed combs,

and dryers' swollen silver domes.

 

We walked the block back to the store,

one dark and one fair,

passing the grocer, the butcher, the baker,

every window on the street a mirror.

Music minus the solo melody part—with the tapes or records providing the background music, you can play an instrument or sing along with the band, try your hand at Grand Opera, or even perform a concerto, surrounded by a full symphony orchestra.

—From the Music Minus One catalogue

 

Sunday afternoons, my father practiced

flute in the family room.

He warmed up, playing scales,

while my mother worked the crossword puzzle

in her wing chair, like a throne.

Three o'clock and she was still

wearing her nightgown and slippers.

Our store downstairs was closed.

She was sick of looking at dresses all week.

Sunday was her day of rest.

 

I sprawled on the floor with my homework.

Each in our little orbit.

My father gave it all up when he married her.

Abdicated, like the Duke of Windsor.

Music was no life for a family man.

During the War, he had led the band

in the Marine Corps, in the South Pacific.

In the photo, each man poses with his instrument

except my father, holding a baton;

clarinets and saxophones leaning against their chests,

like rifles at port arms.

 

It was my job to start the record over.

The sheet music, stapled to the album cover,

was propped on the music stand.

The needle skated its single blade

in smaller and smaller circles on black ice.

The needle skipped. He was a little rusty.

When he lost his place, it left a hole in the music,

like silence in a conversation.

 

You had to imagine his life before the War.

At fifteen, on the Lower East Side, he played

weddings and bar mitzvahs;

at sixteen, he toured with the Big Bands.

You had to imagine him before

he changed his name from Joseph Sharfglass

to George Shore; you had to imagine him

 

handsome in his baby-blue tuxedo

when he played with Clyde McCoy's orchestra,

lighting up hotel ballrooms from New York to California

and all the road stops in between.

One enchanted evening in Connecticut,

he saw my mother.

A week later, he shipped off to the War.

 

You had to imagine his life before the War—

the one-night stands, the boys on the bus,

and in its wake the girls

with plucked eyebrows and strapless dresses

surrounding him like the mannequins

as he stood behind the counter

of his store, waiting for customers,

in New Jersey on the Palisades.

You had to imagine him occupying the uniform

now folded neatly in his footlocker

under the telescope pocked with rust—or bloodstains—

a souvenir from the War.

The record spun. He caught his breath.

The music raced on without him.

The year I had the affair with X,

he lived downtown on Gansevoort Street

in a sublet apartment over a warehouse.

It was considered a chic place to live.

He was wavering over whether to divorce

his wife, and I'd fly down

every other week to help him decide.

Most nights, we'd drop in for cocktails

on the Upper East Side and hobnob

with his journalist friends, then taxi

down to SoHo for an opening and eat

late dinner in restaurants whose diners

wore leather and basic black.

We'd come home at four in the morning,

just as it was starting to get light

and huge refrigerator trucks were backing up

to the loading docks and delivering

every kind of fresh and frozen meat.

Through locked window grates I could see

them carrying stiff carcasses, dripping crates

of iced chickens. We'd try to sleep

through the racket of engines and men

shouting and heavy doors being slammed.

By three in the afternoon the street would be

completely deserted, locked up tight;

at twilight they'd start their rounds again.

The street always smelled of meat.

The smell drifted past the gay bars

and parked motorcycles; it smelled

like meat all the way to the Hudson.

And though they hosed it down as best

they could, it still smelled as though

a massacre had occurred earlier that day,

day after day. We saw odd things

in the gutter—lengths of chain, torn

undershirts, a single shoe, and sometimes

even pieces of flesh—human or animal,

you couldn't tell—and blood puddling

around the cobbles and broken curbstones.

On weekends, we'd ask the taxi

to drop us off at the door

so that no one could follow and rob us.

We'd climb to our love nest

and drape a sheet over the bedroom window—

the barred window to the fire escape—

which faced across the airshaft the window

of a warehouse—empty, we assumed,

because we'd never seen lights on

behind the cracked and painted panes.

In the morning, we'd sleep late,

we'd take the sheet down and walk

around the apartment naked,

and eat breakfast in bed, and read,

and get back to our great reunions . . .

One Sunday, we felt something creepy—

a shadow, a flicker—move behind a corner