We Never Told Read online

  “I was watching!”

  “Well, watch harder stupid!”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “You shut up. Just keep your eyes out for the sign. I can’t be looking for the signs and driving at the same time. That’s your job. Just do it.”

  “Oh, shut up. I am doing it.”

  “Well, if you were doing it I wouldn’t have to be driving around this stupid place ten times. You think I like doing this? You think this is easy?”

  “There it is!” I said. “Turn there! Joan! Turn there!”

  “Where?”

  “Where it said American!”

  “Where did it say American?”

  “Back there where I said.”

  “But you said it too late! I was already a million miles away from it.”

  “No you weren’t. You could have turned.”

  “How could I have turned? I was way over in the left lane!”

  “So we have to go all the way around again?”

  “Yes, stupid. We do.” I felt miserable. We were already a half hour late.

  Amid the rivers of people hurrying along the corridors and the loud speakers announcing departures, arrivals, gate changes, she was standing by the gate searching for us with a mixture of worry and impatience. Expecting that I’d run to her with open arms, be relieved that she was still alive and home, I was astonished by the loathing that welled up at the sight of her. My revulsion was involuntary. It was in my body, and I didn’t know why. When she caught sight of us, her face lit up with joy. She pushed through the crowd blind to everyone else, rushed to me with open arms, “Darling! Oh, my darling! It’s so good to see you! I missed you so much!” and clasped me hard, then let go quickly when she felt how rigid I was. She shrank into herself like an injured turtle. Joan allowed herself to be clasped but didn’t hug back. Mother’s surprise at being thus greeted infuriated me. How did she think we would feel? She’d turned us into liars, trusted her dressmaker more than she trusted us, and only contacted us twice in the four months she was gone just to reassure herself that we were not betraying her secret. She seemed to have expected the excited chatter of a reunion but we said nothing. She didn’t ask about Ruby. Instead, walking as a group toward baggage claim, Joan and I stood close to each other in an exclusive way and hurried along the corridor as if Mother was a tag-along. This was not planned. I was as surprised by our chilly reunion as my mother was. What exactly had she done wrong? We stood at baggage claim watching suitcases plop onto the conveyor belt then go around until someone yanked them up. We watched without speaking. After a few minutes, I glanced at my mother and at that exact second, she glanced at me and our eyes locked, both of us drenched in confusion.

  “What do they do with tumors?” I asked from the back seat as Violet drove toward home. “Throw them away?”

  Joan said. “Don’t be gross.”

  “Did they show it to you?” My friend Ellen told me they showed her her appendix.

  “No,” Mother said.

  “Didn’t you want to see it?”

  She glanced at me in the rearview mirror with a look that was too penetrating for what I thought was a frivolous question. “No,” she said. “No, I didn’t.”

  Joan and I helped lug our mother’s bags from the elevator into our front hall. “Where’s Ruby?” Without waiting for an answer, she strode into her bedroom. We heard her pulling up the shades. At her door she said to us as we stood in the hall, “What’s going on?”

  Joan said, “As if you care.”

  “Where’s Ruby?”

  “Home,” I said.

  “What are you talking about? Where’s Ruby?”

  Joan carried one of the suitcases into Mother’s bedroom and heaved it up on the sofa bed. Then she went out of the room and into her own bedroom and closed the door, leaving a trail of chill.

  “What’s going on? Where’s Ruby?”

  “She had a heart attack.”

  “Ruby?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. A while ago.”

  “Have you been here by yourselves?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is Ruby in the hospital?”

  “No.”

  “Well where is she? You’re making me pull teeth. Why don’t you just tell me? Where’s Ruby? What happened? Why didn’t you go stay with your father?”

  “And tell him what?”

  “I don’t know. You could have thought of something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, you’re impossible, Sonya. You’re just impossible. Tell me what happened to Ruby.”

  No. I would not tell her. I left her standing in her room and went to my room and closed the door. I was ashamed of being so cold. Feeling miserable, I put on Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, turned the volume up to huge, and felt comforted being enveloped in the sound.

  Later, when we all got hungry, we came out of our rooms and met in the kitchen. “Shall we go out?” Mother said. “Get Chinese?” We nodded and went back to our rooms to get a jacket. “Come in here a minute,” Mother called from her room. “I’ve brought you a present.” She handed me a package. I pulled the wrapping off and saw a light blue cashmere sweater. How could I ever wear that thing? It would be like buttoning myself inside the trauma of the last few months. It reeked of lies and hospital and worry. “They call that color robin’s egg,” my mother said. I just stood there with it in my hand. Joan’s present was a sweater but not the same color. “They call that one toffee.” Joan said nothing, just set the sweater down on Mother’s bureau and went out of the room and back across the living room to her room. Apparently, Frau Waldman never told Mother about Ruby. I was sure that if Mother had known, she would have returned to continue her cancer treatment at a hospital in New York. I said, “Thank you,” and carried the sweater to my room and closed the door.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Like a dust storm, the SATs rolled toward me and my classmates. We were helpless to avoid them. We believed our lives would be ruined if our scores were low. Getting into a good college was vital to existence. It was impossible to complain about the pressure to my mother because to her everything about college was touched with glamour. Her daughters would go to that shimmering, elusive place and never suffer the humiliation that she did. “Oh, you’ll do all right,” she said. She was proud that I was smart enough to take the SATs, had no idea how it felt to be made to choose a college without knowing one from the other and without wanting to go to any of them. My father said everything there is to learn is learned after college.

  My boyfriend Pete’s future was clear to him. He would major in physics and that would lead to a career in science. I would major in English because that was the subject I found easiest. That major would lead exactly nowhere, and it wasn’t even supposed to. College was supposed to lead to a husband and marriage. I was supposed to meet him during those four years and marry him when I graduated. Pete couldn’t decide between MIT and Cornell. “Opportunity keeps knocking,” he said. “It’s banging and banging! Shut up, opportunity! Leave me in peace!”

  I had to write application essays saying why a particular school was right for me. Who was me? Which me did they want to hear from, the one who got A’s on her English papers, the one who was a good swimmer at camp, or the me who sat in front of a full-length mirror with legs apart hunting for the hole where the Tampax was supposed to go? How many holes were down there? Three? One for pee, one for poop and one for babies? Is that how it worked?

  University of Chicago was right down the street from Grandpa Greenstone. Being close to relatives seemed a good reason for choosing a school. I made an appointment for an interview and got myself from Scarsdale to the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan. A gilded ballroom with high ceilings was full of long tables with young supplicants on one side and their interviewers across from them each pair leaning toward each other in an
effort to shut out the discussions on either side. I’d never seen so many people my same age gathered in one place. There were hundreds of them sitting in chairs next to the walls waiting for their name to be called. I was the only one dressed up in heels and basic black. The other girls looked like they knew how to do orienteering. The boys were scruffy, in jeans and plaid shirts. The interviewers were men young enough to have been recent graduates. They set themselves apart by wearing suits and ties. I didn’t want to be interviewed by someone who could be my boyfriend. I wanted an older man who would ask me easy questions in a tender way and be smitten by my clear complexion and sparkly eyes, a man so old I’d be free to pour out my entire personality on him.

  After I waited quite some time in one of the chairs lined up against the wall, my name was called out. It was humbling that I was so real to myself, so important to myself, yet the usher had no idea which person was Sonya Adler and looked from one girl to the next to see which one would stand up and identify herself. I’d never been so anonymous before. The wide world had no idea who I was and couldn’t have cared less. I followed the usher to an empty chair at one of the long tables. Across from me was a dark-haired young man with sideburns, steel-rimmed glasses, tweed jacket, and a bow tie. On my right the applicant and the interviewer were laughing about something and on my left the applicant was saying sentences that sounded brainy. My interviewer glanced at my application then asked a most reasonable question because he’d just seen that this candidate intended to be an English major. Who was my favorite author? Blank. Author? Nothing. A blizzard of snow in my mind. “Who is my favorite author?” I couldn’t think of one name. Not one. Then, “Hemingway!” I’d never read one word of Hemingway. Not one word.

  The interviewer said, “Do you think Nick Adams is kble ystobblu, or more mskdlek sleifjkdls when he flaidhen and the taldkure gjakdles?”

  I had no idea what the man was saying, had never heard such big words. He waited for my answer. I said, “No.”

  He said, “No what?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  As surprised by my answer as I was by his question, we were done. He had nothing more to say to me. We were supposed to converse for ten minutes and during that time he was supposed to discover if I would be a credit to the University of Chicago, but he’d discovered upon his first question that I would not be. While others around us talked, bantered, laughed, I sat there in silence because the interviewer didn’t ask me anything else. When our ten minutes was finished, he blushed when he stood up and shook my hand.

  On the train back to Scarsdale, I told myself that being pretty or smart or clever or talented is not what matters. What matters is how a person handles herself under pressure and I’d failed. I was weak, useless, an idiot. And this wasn’t the only interview. There would be others, each one more humiliating than the last. No one was in the apartment when I got there. Joan was in Pittsburgh at college.

  Fall turned into winter, the college essays were done, the application fees sent in, and now all we had to do was wait. My mother and I had lived in that Scarsdale apartment alone together for about six months. We had dinner together most nights and watched TV together, but we never spoke about anything important. One night she came into my room while I was blasting the Scheherazade Suite. “Turn that down,” she said.

  “You.”

  She fiddled with the knobs, made it go all treble, then all bass, but found the right button at last and muted the music. She sat on the edge of my bed. “Aunt Dovey Lee is moving to Rome.”

  “I know.”

  “She has to sell her house.”

  “I know. Wiley’s mad.”

  “It won’t matter to Wiley. He’s in college.”

  “Where’s he going to go on school breaks?”

  Dovey Lee and Jack were moving to Italy because Grandpa Greenstone had selected his son Alan to be the next president of Greenstone Enterprises even though his son-in-law Jack was a better businessman. Furious, Jack quit. It was Jack who opened up foreign markets. He was energetic and risk-taking. Uncle Alan was conservative, believed a penny saved is a penny earned. Dovey Lee owned twenty-five percent of Greenstones and demanded that her father buy her out. With that money, she and Jack bought into an international poultry company, Agricola Lazio, with headquarters in Rome.

  “Dovey Lee is afraid that if she leaves her house empty vandals will break in. I’ve agreed to stay in the house until it’s sold.”

  “What?”

  “There’s nothing for me here. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  “But how long will it take to sell?”

  “Dovey Lee has arranged a membership for me at Highland Acres Country Club.”

  “What?”

  “You know that house. It would cost a fortune to leave the lights on in every room every night. Someone needs to be there when the brokers show it, someone has to keep it looking lived in. I’m flying out on Tuesday. I’ve asked Ruby to come stay in the apartment with you. I was lucky to get her. Would you prefer to stay with your father?”

  “You’re leaving me here by myself?”

  “No. I just told you. Ruby will cook your dinner and make breakfast for you. You have your boyfriend Pete, you have your school work.”

  “But suppose she gets sick again?”

  “She won’t. She’s in good health.”

  “But suppose she does.”

  “If anything like that happens, I’ll come right home.”

  I got up from my bed and turned the volume on my record player up to earsplitting. On the one hand I was angry, but on the other I could see my mother’s point of view. There really was nothing for her in Scarsdale and she wasn’t getting any younger. She had to get re-married. A grown woman without a husband was a disgrace, so we all thought. The suburbs of Chicago would be fresh hunting grounds.

  My concern was getting into college. My first choice was Connecticut College for Women. My guidance counselor suggested it. She said I should apply to the University of Wisconsin as my safe school. I dreaded going there. I’d be lost. Also, it was taken for granted that I’d meet my husband at college. The joke was that girls went to college to earn their MRS degree. I thought this was insulting but believed it. I figured that if I went to the University of Wisconsin and got engaged, I’d end up living in Wisconsin, and I didn’t want to live in Wisconsin though I’d never been there. My boyfriend Pete was immune to the worry about college. He’d been accepted early at Cornell so all he wanted to do was get drunk on the weekends. His father told him that if he learned how to fix a car, he’d buy him one. We drove in Pete’s old Ford, whose every shake and rattle Pete understood, to the Candlelight Inn in Scarsdale where the waitress examined my driver’s license doctored by me to say that I was not sixteen but eighteen, the legal age for alcohol. We ordered screwdrivers because we liked the taste of orange juice better than the taste of whiskey. We couldn’t taste the vodka in our drinks and drank them down like soda. There was a jukebox, and Pete and I danced close. I loved feeling how excited he was. He whispered that I smelled delicious and I could hear him breathing in my ear on that small wooden dance floor surrounded by couples at small round tables each with a candle lit in the middle of it. We were both plastered when he drove me home. We arrived safely only by the grace of the invisible guardian who watches over drunk teenagers. Pete believed as I did that it was forbidden to have sex before marriage so this was never an argument. We just kissed and rolled around on my bed and then he went home. Getting into my pajamas, I wondered at the slimy stuff in my underpants, touched it then gave it a sniff. Yes, it did have an odor unlike any other. I wondered why Mother Nature made sexual smells so much less pleasant than the smell of lilacs or ripe melon or mowed lawn. Tigers, for all their majestic symmetry, smelled horrible up close at the zoo. When I took the lid off of my mother’s hamper, a pungent female smell came up from the clothes inside.

  Joan had not waited for marriage, she told me on the phone. “You did it? You
went all the way?” That she would break this rule, that the rule could be broken and by a nice girl who wasn’t the least bit cheap, gave me a teetering feeling. “With Freddy Rosenthal?”

  “No. Buddy Wingate.”

  “Who’s Buddy Wingate?”

  “A communist.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Yes, sort of. You have to get used to it. Is Mommy still in Evanston?”

  “She doesn’t call you?”

  “Never.”

  “Why?”

  “She says she doesn’t want to bother me.”

  “How’d you meet a communist?”

  “In the bookstore.”

  “Where’d you do it?”

  “He has an apartment off campus.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to marry him?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m never getting married.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “Not if I can help it. Did you hear from Connecticut?”

  “No.”

  “Why on earth would you apply to a girls’ school? You must be out of your mind.”

  A skinny letter from a college was bad news, and a fat letter with forms inside meant acceptance. All we talked about at school was who got in where, who was on the wait list. Some of the girls in my class received rejection or acceptance letters from Connecticut College, so I knew such a letter would be waiting for me, yet when I went to the mailbox it was empty. “Wasn’t the mail delivered today?” I asked Kyle.

  Kyle showed me a wicked smile. “Yes. It was delivered.”

  “Wasn’t there any for Adler?”

  “Might have been.”

  “But was there?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  “What are you talking about? Was there or wasn’t there?”

  “Could be, couldn’t be.”

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  “What would your mother say if she knew what time your beau left the apartment?”