We Never Told Page 10

  One evening, she cooked dinner for Joan and me, badgered into it by my father probably. He would not relax his prudishness, continued to insist that she was his housekeeper. Annabelle knew nothing about cooking. She was a New Yorker. She went out or she ordered in. But, good sport that she was, she boiled some chicken pieces and set them on the dining room table. The divorce was in the absence of things, the good silverware and the crystal chandelier now in a box in Scarsdale. The inexpensive fixture that replaced it sent down unflattering light. It was odd to set the table with stainless knives and forks and ugly dime store glasses. The only thing that remained of my mother in the dining room was a sterling silver tea set on the sideboard, a wedding present. Her mother was always nagging her to go retrieve the tea set, but my mother didn’t want to store it.

  At first, Joan and I hung back to give Annabelle space as the producer of the cozy dinner show, but soon it became apparent that she did not intend to wait on us. So we helped bring the butter and slices of Wonder Bread to the table, dumped a can of cranberry sauce into a bowl, found place mats, and at last the four of us sat down to stare at the bald chicken pieces. On her own, Annabelle ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches in the living room in front of the TV.

  She wasn’t the only one who gained weight. Our cat, used to stalking in the woods behind our house and pouncing on chipmunks, grew into an enormous blob, big as a beagle. Annabelle brushed him and brushed him and he closed his eyes and let this happen like a pasha being fanned by slaves. She showed him to me like a cat show judge, lifted Rinso up by his armpits, stretched him out, and held him high above her head so I could see how she had improved him.

  I didn’t care that she was a person adrift. I was glad she was there in the house with my father, glad to think of her sitting on the sofa next to him watching his favorite show, The Beverly Hillbillies. I saw home movies of visits to Woodbridge, Annabelle brushing cousin Claire’s blond hair into a French twist, Claire with her eyes half shut from the pleasure of it and the result, a shy Claire obeying the instructions of her Uncle Seymour to turn right, then left, then look straight into the movie camera lens. I saw home movies of Seymour and Annabelle’s road trips to see foliage in Vermont.

  That Seymour Adler continued as a corporeal man came as a shock to my mother. As far as she was concerned, he vanished when she was done with him. He was an irritant she once endured, a boil that got popped. One evening, when we were eating in the kitchen of the apartment Mother said, “Who is that woman?”

  “What woman?”

  “The one in your father’s house.”

  “Who, Annabelle?”

  “I don’t know her name. Some woman. She came to the door all gussied up in a cape.”

  “She’s his housekeeper,” Joan said.

  “Does she live there?”

  “She’s an opera singer,” Joan said.

  “An opera singer? What kind of opera singer?”

  “Mezzo.”

  “But why is she there?”

  “Waiting for Maestro Bocabella.”

  “She lives there?” Here was a power shift she hadn’t expected. She liked to say that Seymour couldn’t love anyone, liked to say it takes two to tango, meaning she was blameless. Perhaps she took pleasure thinking of him punished for his bad behavior. Alone in the house that he wrenched away from her, he would wish Violet would return to give him a second chance. Their problem, as my mother saw it, was that she was lovable but he wasn’t. Here was proof of the opposite. He’d replaced her. Just like that. Snap of the fingers and another woman was standing at the front door of the house, her house.

  “She sleeps in the attic, supposedly,” I said.

  “But who is she?”

  “Annabelle.”

  “Annabelle?”

  “His housekeeper,” Joan said.

  “She must have been interested to meet you,” I said.

  “She lives there?”

  “What happened?”

  “She stood there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She came to the door and just stood there.”

  “You mean she wouldn’t let you in?”

  “She made me stand outside.”

  “She didn’t let you in the house?”

  “She wouldn’t open the door. Who is she?”

  “You mean she talked to you through the closed door?”

  “She opened the top of the Dutchdoor.”

  “You told her you just wanted to take the tea set?”

  “Yes. She said she’d have to ask Seymour.”

  “So what’d you say?”

  “I came home and called Saul Ruben.”

  “What did he say to do?”

  “He’s going to write a letter.”

  My mother seemed as if waking from a deep sleep, rubbing her eyes perplexed like Rip Van Winkle. She was sure she had been right. Seymour was unlovable. He was impossible to live with. “How long has she been in the house?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “A year maybe.”

  “She was there last year? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You never asked.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “Why?”

  “So I wouldn’t make such a fool of myself going over there and standing like the Fuller brush man at the front of the door.” It didn’t seem normal to me that she would imagine that Seymour would cease to be a man in trousers with a sex drive just because she no longer had any use for him. She got up from the table, dazed as if someone had punched her.

  Mother had to go to court. She returned with an order saying she was allowed to enter the house to retrieve her tea set but was not allowed to touch anything else nor was she allowed to go there unless Seymour was home. I heard her crying behind her closed bedroom door, wanted to go in and comfort her but knew she’d hastily compose herself and deny that anything was the matter. She had been marginalized as nothing more than a pest. It would have been so easy for my father to invite her to come get the tea set, a wedding present from her aunt that he never used. He chose war over peace, made her appear before a judge as a supplicant. He’d made her cry over a stupid tea set that neither of them wanted.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  One evening during the winter of junior year, my mother was standing at the kitchen sink washing lettuce and I was sitting at the kitchen table taking a Seventeen quiz with her. “Okay,” I said. “Here’s the next one. ‘What do I do when I make plans with a friend and they cancel on me? One. Do I ask them why? Two. Do I make fun of them then call up someone else? Three. Do I feel hurt because I was looking forward to tonight? Four. Do I say doesn’t matter, I kinda wanted to stay home anyway?’” I looked at my mother as I waited for her answer. We had already discovered that her dream prom date was Clint Eastwood while mine was Roy Rogers. The evening sun was coming in the window in a way that lit Mother’s profile. Her apron was bulging in front.

  She said, “I say doesn’t matter, I wanted to stay home anyway.”

  “How come you’re getting so fat?”

  Startled, she said, “What? Am I?”

  Surely mirrors showed her what I was seeing. Her stomach was sticking out. Why didn’t she say no more sticky buns? Cottage cheese and peaches from now on. Her expression wasn’t scolding for my lack of tact, but alarmed. Later, when we were about to watch Gunsmoke she said, “Sonya, I want to talk to you about something.” I expected a lecture about calling attention to a person’s faults. She couldn’t help having a slow metabolism. “Get Joan,” she said as she sat on the sofa. “I want to talk to you both.”

  “What about?”

  “Get Joan, please.”

  I went to Joan’s room, knocked on the door. “Come,” she said. She was on her bed with the nail polish brush poised over one toe. “Now?” she said. She put aside her pedicure and came with me into the living room walking on her heels, toes in the air separated one from the other with wads of cotton. Mother’s expression was
pure distress. “What’s the matter?”

  “Sit down, both of you,” she said. We sat at attention across from her on the matching chairs. “The doctor,” she said, “has discovered a tumor.”

  My heart leapt. “You have cancer?” Was my mother going to die? Was I going to have to go live with my father?

  “They won’t know until they remove it,” she said.

  “They can’t tell while it’s in you?”

  “No, they have to examine it.”

  “Is that why you’re getting so fat?”

  “Yes. It’s in my stomach.”

  “Does it hurt?” I thought if she said she was in pain, my feelings of compassion might be stirred. So far all I could think about was myself. I didn’t want to be without a mother. Not only would I be lonely, but I’d be deluged with pity. Was this shame going to be added to the shame of divorced parents? Was this why she was crying at night behind her closed bedroom door?

  “No. It doesn’t hurt. But it does have to be removed.” She looked from Joan to me and when we didn’t speak, she said, “It’s growing and has to be removed. It’s a very delicate surgical procedure that very few doctors know how to perform. There’s only one hospital in the country where they do it.”

  “Mount Sinai?” Joan asked. Her friend’s father was a surgeon there.

  “No. It’s a hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.”

  “In Kentucky?”

  “I’ll be gone three or four months,” she said. “It’s the sort of thing they have to monitor. Ruby will come stay with you two. You are to tell no one. Do you understand?”

  “What?”

  “You are to tell no one. Especially not my mother.”

  “But isn’t your mother supposed to know if you catch cancer?”

  “Don’t argue with me, Sonya. You are to tell no one.”

  “But suppose they call up while you’re gone?”

  “You’ll say that I’m in the tub.”

  “But you can’t always be in the tub.”

  “Then say I’m at a class or at a show. It is very important that you tell no one. I want to be sure that you understand.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. Because I don’t want my mother nagging me, and I don’t want them all worrying over me. It’s hard enough without their interfering. Now promise. Both of you. Promise you will tell no one.”

  “Okay.”

  “No. Promise me.

  “I promise,” I said.

  “Joan?”

  “I promise.”

  “Bills will come for me while I’m gone. You are to forward all my mail to Frau Waldman.”

  “Frau Waldman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why can’t we just forward the mail?”

  “Don’t argue with me, Sonya. Just listen. Frau Waldman will forward all bills and letters to me, and I’ll send the necessary money and replies to Frau Waldman. That way my correspondence will have a New Rochelle postmark.”

  “But Joan and I go to New Rochelle every day. We can forward your bills and drop your letters in the mailbox at the bus stop.” I was fifteen, I could take care of something like this. Why didn’t she trust me?

  My mother had no friends, but I thought that was because older women didn’t have friends. Friends were something young people had because of school. But just how alone my mother was, how isolated, now dawned on me. She had to call upon her dressmaker in her time of need. Frau Waldman of all people! Joan and I also had dresses made from fabric that Grandma Greenstone brought back from Europe, so I knew the drab inside of Frau Waldman’s apartment and the gray feel of the woman as she folded under the hem of the dress she was making for me and secured it with pins she took from between her lips. In downtown New Rochelle, you entered a cramped lobby then walked up smelly stairs to her one big room, the kitchen at one end with pots and pans showing above the rim of the sink, and a long table in the middle for her sewing machine. There was always a plate of store-bought cookies on the table, hard vanilla cookies smeared with sugary icing that was so sweet it made my teeth thrill. I thought it polite to eat one and say, “Thank you, Frau Waldman.” She never spoke except to say, “You vill to turn please.” This woman, whose windows were so dirty you could hardly see the marquee of the Loews Theater below on Main Street, who didn’t brush the dandruff off her shoulders, who reeked of despair, this was the one person on earth my mother could trust.

  “Ruby will take care of you two,” my mother said. “She will live here while I’m gone.”

  “Can we tell Daddy?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Suppose he finds out?”

  She looked at me in a menacing way. “Make sure that he does not.” She must have thought he would use her affliction against her in some way, and I too thought he might.

  The day my mother left with her largest suitcases, Ruby arrived looking like a nun or a Jehovah Witness person in her drab black coat and hat. Did Ruby know? Were we allowed to talk about the cancer with her? As my mother lugged her suitcases down the hall to the elevator, Ruby lugged her suitcase into my mother’s bedroom and closed the door.

  Sometimes, sitting in homeroom, or riding on the bus, or walking down the causeway that separated the two lakes in front of the high school, my heart would suddenly leap and I’d be filled with dread. They would take the tumor out and it would be crawling with maggots and my mother would die.

  With Mother in Louisville, Joan and I had the use of her car to drive to school. We didn’t have to worry about affording gas because all we had to do was present our Greenstone Enterprises charge card. I was too young to drive but Joan had her license. Dressed in our Loden coats, we set out after eating the breakfast Ruby prepared for us. “How come she won’t sit with us?” I asked Joan as she drove up the garage ramp and out onto a road bordered by high mounds of snow left by snow plows. Pedestrians were huddled in their coats, scarves wrapped around the lower part of their faces. “She just serves us and stands there and won’t sit down. Do you think Mommy told her not to sit with us?”

  “No! Mommy would never say that.”

  “Should we ask her? I could say, Ruby, how come you don’t sit with us?”

  “You could I guess,” Joan said. We drove slowly by the comfortable houses of Scarsdale, swing sets decorated now with snow, front paths shoveled, a snowman in a yard with a carrot for a nose. Still a new driver, Joan drove so cautiously that cars behind us got impatient, honked, and pulled ahead of us with their snow chains clanking. “These windows keep fogging up,” she said. “There’s some gizmo thing you can spritz the windshield with. Wait. Here it is.” Joan pressed the button and water flew up over the windshield freezing immediately, obscuring our view entirely.

  “Pull over! Joan, pull over!”

  “I am. I am!” She slowed the car and we skidded to a stop by the edge of the road. Ice made the windshield opaque. We should have been able to predict that the water would freeze. When we had finished laughing our heads off, we got out of the car and opened the trunk. There was only one ice scraper in the trunk next to the spare tire. With that, and a ruler from my book bag, we chipped away at the ice on the windshield. On both sides of the road the trees were coated with icicles. Joan said, “Isn’t there a defroster thing?” We got back into the car and Joan searched the dashboard. She pushed a button, nothing happened. “Maybe the car has to be turned on,” I suggested. She turned the key but only cold air blasted out so we continued scraping until there was a patch on the windshield big enough for Joan to peer through. Hunched forward over the steering wheel, she strained to see as we drove slowly on the icy streets. “Do you think she’s going to die?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Will we have to go live with Daddy?”

  “Oh! Wait!” Joan exclaimed. “Elvis! I love this song. Turn it up!” I did and we sang “Love me Tender” together.

  Joan and I collected the mail from the brass cubbyhole in the lobby and forwarded it t
o Frau Waldman. My boyfriend Pete now had his license so he could visit me in Scarsdale. Joan’s boyfriend also had a car. On weekends, our boyfriends stayed in our rooms until midnight or later. The only person who saw them depart was the night doorman Kyle, who said suggestive things to me. “When the cat’s away, huh? What Mother don’t know won’t hurt her, huh?” He seemed to actually expect me to engage in that conversation with him, to gloat about my freedom, but I was appalled by Kyle’s lewdness. I was a virgin and intended to remain one until I got married. My mother said a girl cheapens herself if she does it before marriage.

  One day I went to the door, and a handsome black man was there. At first, it was jarring to see a black person in the hall. Scarsdale didn’t have black people, at least I never saw them. In a gentle manner, he asked for Ruby just as she hurried from her bedroom. He refused my invitation to come in. “No, it’s okay,” I said. “Come in.” But he would not. There was some unwritten code that he refused to defy. Why? Why couldn’t he just come in and visit Ruby? As I retreated to my room, I heard that Ruby did not invite him in though they were obviously fond of each other. She lit up when she saw him. I left her to speak privately with him at the open door. Was that her boyfriend? Was that her husband?

  At first, making excuses for my mother was easy. But by the second month, Grandma Greenstone became suspicious. Calling from Chicago, she said, “Not home? She is never home when I call. I have called three times in the last week, and three times you have said the same thing.”

  “I know, Grandma, but she’s taking all these classes in New York.”

  “I have called at eight, I have called at nine, and now I am calling at ten and still you say she is at a class.”

  “I know but she has to take the train home. She doesn’t drive into the city. It’s hard to park in New York, and it costs a fortune to leave the car in a garage so she takes the train, and the train only goes at certain times and if she misses it then she has to take the next one so sometimes she doesn’t get home until late. And sometimes she gets a bite to eat afterward. So she doesn’t always get home right after her class.”