We Never Told Read online

  “I have called at eight, I have called at nine, and now I am calling at ten. Tell your mother to call me. I want to hear from her.”

  “Okay, Grandma. I’ll do that.”

  “See that you do. I want to hear from her. Tell Violet that I want to hear from her.”

  Then Uncle Alan, who seldom phoned, became suspicious. “We’re starting to get worried about your mother,” he said. “We haven’t been able to get ahold of her. Is everything all right?”

  “Sure,” I said sitting on my bed surrounded by my books. “Yes. Fine.”

  “Is your mother ill?”

  “No! She’s just really busy.”

  “Will you have her call me, honey?”

  “I sure will.”

  “How’s school going? Getting ready for the SATs?”

  “No. I don’t take them until next year. Joan is though.”

  “Does she have her college picked out?”

  “I think she wants to go to Carnegie Tech.”

  “And what about you. Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even care. They all seem the same to me. Probably Northwestern. Then I could visit you.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Me too.”

  “How’s the violin coming along?”

  “I don’t play anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just lost interest, I guess.”

  “That’s a shame. You were a promising student.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Your mother.”

  “She thought I was a promising student?”

  “Sure she did. She was real proud of how you played the violin.”

  “She never told me that.”

  “Well, sometimes parents don’t always say the right thing.”

  “You’re telling me!”

  We both laughed. “How are your grades?”

  “I’ll get into some place decent probably. What’s up with you, Uncle Alan? ”

  “Fine, honey. Just fine. You tell that mother of yours to call me.”

  The third month Grandpa Greenstone phoned, and this was unusual. He never chatted on the phone, left keeping in touch to his wife. Of all my relatives, I believed Grandpa saw what was good about me. What he saw, I had no idea but it felt like an honor to be respected by such a successful man. “Grandpa? Hi! How are you?”

  “Fine, honey. I’m just fine. Honey, put your mother on.”

  “My mother?” Silence. “She isn’t here.” Silence. “She’s just been so busy. I’ll tell her to call you.”

  “What’s she up to?”

  “My mother?” He did not help me. He left me in the vibration of his silence. I forced myself to say, “She’s at a class.” Again he said nothing.

  Just as the silence was becoming unbearable, he said, “Aw right, honey. Anything you’d like to tell Grandpa?”

  “No,” I said. “I … ” A quiet click. “Grandpa?” He hung up on me. My heart ached.

  My mother’s sister Dovey Lee phoned again and said in her musical tinkling voice, “What’s cooking?”

  “Nothing much. School.”

  “And how’s that going?”

  “Good.”

  “Is it cold there?”

  “Yes. But at least it isn’t getting dark at four anymore.”

  “It’s freezing here. We went skating yesterday, me and the kids. I’m not much of a skater.” She lived in a big house a block from Lake Michigan.

  “You have a distinctive style.”

  “Ha ha! Now that’s certainly a diplomatic way of putting it.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “You push off with one foot and glide with the other.”

  “Yes I do, come to think of it. Never thought to call it a style.”

  “What do you call it?”

  “Ineptness.” We laughed.

  “Well, if you think of it as a style, you’ll be happier every time you go skating.”

  She laughed again. “That is certainly true. Sonya, is there something you’d like to talk to me about?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything. You know you can talk to me. I’m always here for you. You know that don’t you?” Should I tell her? It would be such a relief to tell someone how scared I was that my mother was going to die, that they’d take the tumor out and it would be too late. “There’s no hard feelings twixt your mama and me are there? Did I do something?”

  “No, Aunt Dovey Lee! No!”

  “Well, you know sometimes I say too much, don’t always bite my tongue.”

  “No, no. Not at all. Not at all.”

  “But, honey, it feels like she’s avoiding me. I was thinking of flying there, have it out face to face.”

  “No, no, Aunt Dovey Lee. She’s not mad at you at all. Not at all.”

  “Will you ask her to call me?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Is she there now?”

  “No, she’s at a class.” Silence.

  “I can’t help thinking something’s wrong, that you’re mama’s sick or something. I wish you would confide in me, Sonya.” I couldn’t speak. At last she said, “You would confide in me, Sonya, if you could, right?” I said nothing. “Yes. I can see your heart, Sonya. Even from here in the windy city. You’re a girl who keeps her word.” I felt tears welling up. “Okey dokey, honeybunch. You take care.” When I said bye, it came out a croak.

  One evening, as I was writing a short story for English class, my mother phoned from Louisville. Thinking that she was calling to reassure me about her health, I was surprised that she immediately began to grill me about my replies to her relatives. The call was not to reassure me, but to reassure herself that Joan and I were continuing to lie about her whereabouts. It was bad enough to turn me into a liar without suggesting that I might betray her either on purpose or because I was a dope who let important information dribble out by mistake. She didn’t seem to appreciate the effort it took to lie to my relatives and thus belittle my loyalty to them.

  One Wednesday night during the third month of Mother’s absence, we picked up the intercom expecting to hear that our father was waiting in the lobby, but the doorman said, “Mr. Adler is on his way up.” This was unprecedented. “Ruby!” I shouted. “Daddy’s coming up!” She was a grown-up; she’d know what to do. She opened her bedroom door dressed in a gray bathrobe, shook her head slowly saying, “Sha,” then closed her door just as the doorbell rang and my sister came hurrying from her bedroom.

  It was very odd to see Seymour standing at our door in his tweed coat with a navy scarf tied like an ascot. “Come in,” I said as he peered around me. “She’s not here.” He entered, embarrassed like an uninvited guest, and darted his eyes here and there as if trying to hide that he wanted to look at everything.

  “Spiffy,” he said. I went to the closet to get my coat. “Your mother not home?” This was why he’d come up. How did he know? “Seems to be keeping busy,” he said. Had to have been Kyle, the doorman. Maybe he felt sorry for a father who had to come calling on his own daughters. Seymour’s age showed that he had waited a long time to have children. Maybe during those moments of fanning cards and asking the doorman to pick a card, any card, Seymour got information. Maybe this time Kyle said, “The missus ain’t in, Mr. Adler. Go on up. She ain’t been there for weeks.”

  I stepped into the hall, he followed, and Joan shut the door behind us, tested it to be sure it was locked. “Leaves you alone, does she?” he said. But if it wasn’t Kyle, when exactly had we slipped? “Will she be here when you return?” It was one thing to lie into a telephone but quite another to lie to my father’s face. Neither Joan nor I could answer except with a noncommittal shrug. “Tisn’t right,” he said stepping into the elevator. “Tisn’t right to leave girls alone in an apartment building.” The elevator door slid shut and we descended. “What do you know about the people who work here?” he said, “Do you have any idea who they are?”

 
Annabelle wasn’t waiting in the car. “Under the weather,” he said, but he said it with no warmth, so I took that to mean either she didn’t want to join us or he had asked her not to. Did he know before he set out that he was going to come up to our apartment and find our mother absent? How long had he suspected that she wasn’t home? Why weren’t we allowed to tell him? What was so shameful about a tumor? Maybe she thought he’d try to get custody of us, though he never said he wanted custody, often said girls need their mothers.

  We sat in strained silence at the Colonial Inn only long enough to give our dinner orders to the waitress. Then he began to fill up the space by telling us about a movie he was casting about juvenile delinquents. To give the film authenticity, the cast was to be mostly unknowns so a casting call had gone out. “A kid comes in,” he said, “wearing a motorcycle jacket, tough, talking like he comes from the streets. I say to him Paul, just be yourself. Just be yourself and read the lines. He’s got a baby face, and he’s trying to sound like Al Capone! So he starts off with an Italian accent. He’s a Jewish kid. I said to him do you have any experience, Paul? He says no. I said to him what are you doing to support yourself? He says bar tending. I said what will you do if you don’t get this part? He said, I don’t know Mr. Adler, probably cry. Sweetest kid you ever met. A good little actor too. I told him if he’d just remember to be himself he’d go far. Then in comes another one, Vic something. This one really has bad boy inside. This kid could be the next Brando. I said to him if I send you to the coast, Vic, you have to promise me you won’t go Hollywood. I said to him the minute you lose your tough-guy pose and start wearing business suits you’re finished.”

  Intending to continue, my father opened his mouth but then closed it and fell into a kind of reverie. He looked at Joan and me in a worried way. I sat with my eyes lowered, wishing with all my heart that he wouldn’t make us tell on our mother. I had promised not to tell. A promise was sacred. Eyes on my plate, dividing up the cranberry sauce so the amount would come out even and I’d have some for my last bite of turkey, I peeked at my father across the table. He swiped his front teeth with his tongue then sucked some food out of his side teeth. Then he fished a quarter from his pocket and in an abstracted way, not paying much attention to it, he began to manipulate it from one finger to the next as if it had wheels and could roll across the back of his hand.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Most nights, Pete and I talked on the phone for hours. When we moved to the apartment Mother installed two phone lines, one for her and the other for Joan and me. While she was in Louisville, we used her number so Joan and I never had to argue about the phone, could stay on as long as we wanted. I talked to Pete and she talked on the other line to her boyfriend sometimes until two or three in the morning. I was grateful to Grandpa Greenstone for giving Violet enough money to afford two different numbers, and I loved my mother for using the money in this way, for understanding the importance of the telephone to high school girls.

  One evening I was sitting on my bed working on a book report about Main Street. The main character, Carol Kennicott, was taken from her childhood home by her new husband and thrust into a house she didn’t like in a prairie town full of people she didn’t like. Her task was to adjust and she couldn’t. With every turn of the page, I hoped she would escape and, at last, she does. In Washington D.C., she finds what she imagines are like-minded friends. That ending would have been the easy one but Sinclair Lewis chose the more difficult. He had to show us how slowly but surely Carol Kennicott begins to miss her husband and the simple structured life of a small town. She ends up just like all the other women in town, rocking on her front porch gossiping about neighbors. The theme of my paper was that Carol Kennicott was just like all the others to begin with but she didn’t know it, thought she was better than they were because of false ideas about herself that only experience could knock out of her. I ended the paper with a direct quote from the book. “She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.” I loved Sinclair Lewis’s writing. I was copying another of his sentences into my notebook when the phone rang.

  “Ho, ho, ho, and a bottle of rubbish.”

  “Listen to this, Pete. Listen to this sentence. This is what Carol Kennicott’s husband says to her. Listen to this. ‘No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You’re all the things that I see in a sunset when I’m driving in from the country, the things that I like but can’t make poetry of.’”

  “Nice. You’re my soul.”

  “I am?”

  “If I had a soul, you’d be it.”

  “You don’t think you have a soul?”

  “No.”

  “What do you think you have?”

  “A body.”

  “But your body isn’t everything.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “No. What about the part that listens to music and the part that has feelings?”

  “Brain functions.”

  “Can’t be. When you swoon to music, the feeling is in your torso.”

  “Be that as it may. Fry that inferior frontal gyrus or the dorsolateral frontal cortex and goodbye swoons.”

  “Okay. What about love?”

  “All of it. You can’t do any of it without the brain.”

  “You mean you think those people who are brain damaged and drool can’t love?”

  “Some probably can. But the ones with damaged amygdala can’t.”

  “Who’d you do your book report on?”

  “Steinbeck.”

  “Which one?”

  “Grapes.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “Too many words.”

  “How could it be too many words? It’s Steinbeck!”

  “It’s too many words.”

  “Which words were too many?”

  “The scene with the grown up man nursing on her boob.”

  “I know. Wasn’t that so disgusting? Did you mention that in your paper?”

  “No. Just wrote about how East of Eden is better and why. Did you get the Algebra?”

  “No. Did you?”

  “Which problem stumped you?”

  “The third one.”

  “You have to clear out the parenthesis on each side then simplify each side.”

  “Then what?”

  “Add 18w and 4 to both sides to get all the w’s on one side and the terms without a w on the other side.”

  “Then what?”

  “Divide both sides of the coefficient of the w.”

  BANG! A sudden loud thud and clatter of broken china. “Wait a second, Pete. Hold on.”

  I hurried from my room into the kitchen and saw Ruby crumpled on the floor, broken dishes around her. “Ruby!” The water was running in the kitchen sink. “Ruby!” Her eyes were closed and she was inert. “Joan! Joan!” I put my hands on Ruby’s shoulders to shake her softly, hoping she’d open her eyes and stand up. “Joan!” I screamed. “Joan!” I ran to Joan’s room and burst in, “Joan!” From behind the closed bathroom door Joan said in an annoyed voice, “What?”

  “Ruby. Something’s happened to Ruby.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Come out of there.”

  “Can’t. I’m pooping.”

  I ran back to the kitchen. Ruby’s dark skin had become ashen. I ran back to Joan’s room and screamed through the bathroom door, “Should I call an ambulance?”

  The toilet flushed and Joan came out in her pajamas, her face dotted with medicated acne patches. We ran to the kitchen. “Oh my god. Ruby! What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. What are we supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We have to do something.”

  “Call an ambulance,” Joan said.

  “How do you call an ambulance?”

  “I don’t know,” Joan sai
d.

  “I don’t know.” Her chin started to tremble. “What are we going to do?”

  I yanked up the receiver of the wall phone, heard no dial tone, then remembered Pete was on the line. “Pete. Hang up.”

  “Why. What’s the matter?”

  “Something’s happened to Ruby.”

  “What happened?”

  “Hang up. Just hang up.”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  Even Pete didn’t know. “Just hang up. Just hang up.” He did. I dialed the operator, told her we needed an ambulance. The operator connected me to an ambulance service. The man on the other end kept asking questions, wanted to know where a responsible adult was, was I sure I got the address correct, did I understand this was not a free service, and at last promised that an ambulance would arrive. Some liquid started to seep out of Ruby’s mouth. I ran out of the apartment, pushed the elevator button, it didn’t come and it didn’t come, so I began running down flight after flight of stairs and, midway, realized I could have just picked up the intercom and alerted Kyle in the lobby, but I was already on floor three so I just kept going and finally burst out at the far end of the lobby and ran to the switchboard where Kyle in his brown uniform was sitting. “Kyle,” I said. “Ruby’s sick. Ruby’s on the floor. Something’s happened to Ruby!”

  “Slow down, slow down!” he said. “Who did what?”

  “Something’s happened to Ruby!”

  “Ruby? Your maid?”

  “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do!”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Why would I call the police?”

  “For an ambulance.”

  “The police have an ambulance?”

  The switchboard buzzed. Kyle put the plug in the hole and said, “Yes, Mrs. Weiner?”

  “Kyle!” I said, “I don’t know what to do!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said into his headphones. “They delivered it this afternoon. Yes, ma’am. I did sign for it.” He pulled out the connection and said to me, “I can’t leave the switchboard, Miss Adler. I’m the only one here.”