We Never Told Page 7

  I had never imagined my grandmother being young. “Pa Adler used to give credit to everyone,” Aunt Maggie said. “He was a soft touch. Ma used to throw your father into his snowsuit and drive the wagon to the construction site and demand that the people pay what they owed. Mostly women. The men were all shoveling dirt and smashing stones with pick axes. Every woman had a different hard luck story, including my own granny. She had eight kids all stuck in that sod shack. Manure all over the place from the mules. She told me the men got drunk, took advantage of the women left alone all day. Said there were prostitutes, gamblers, every sort of riff raff. You girls know what a prostitute is, right?” Joan and I exchanged a shocked look. Aunt Maggie said prostitute!

  We parked next to Seymour and set out for our usual amble across the top of the dam. This time though, when we stopped in front of the sign that read Wauchusett Reservoir Dam completed in 1906, I read the description, how the dam was built to provide water for the city of Boston thirty miles away, how railroad cars carried away the dirt that the men dug. I read about how schools, cemeteries, churches, and houses were leveled in Woodbridge by the construction, how the population of the town, New Englanders whose families had been there since the days of the colonies, was changed forever by the influx of immigrants who came to work on the dam then stayed after the dam was completed. My father was surprised, I think, that I took his hand when we did our annual promenade across the top of the dam then stood looking down at the water in the reservoir.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  To make my father want a divorce, my mother abused her charge accounts. Her lawyer, a blustery bully named Saul Ruben, said she should get at her husband through his bank account. A husband was responsible for his wife’s debts. Mother was out shopping every day. She returned home with boxes from Bergdorf Goodman, Bonwit Teller, and Saks. Sweaters, bathrobes, skirts, suits, blouses, shoes with high heels and shoes with low heels, shoes with straps and shoes with bows on the toes. I climbed up on her high canopy bed and watched her unwrap the new things and put them away.

  He canceled her charge accounts. It was as if my father thought his wife would outgrow this combative stage of life. All he had to do was wait it out. He never complained to Joan and me or confided in us. Perhaps he thought involving us was bad form. Mother, on the other hand, pulled us into each new skirmish. I knew that her father was sending her money so she wouldn’t need her husband’s charge accounts. “Why don’t you just grant her a divorce?” I said to my father who never replied except with an injured expression that I took to mean I didn’t know what I was saying.

  Home was not a sanctuary. There was no relief from the anxiety of junior high, the horror of those long corridors, the clanging bell that meant I had to find the room for the next class, those big teenage hoods slouching in the hall, the tough girls in the bathroom, a different teacher for each subject, and a weird holding cell called homeroom full of people who were not in any of my classes. Plus, my best friend from sixth grade took up with some girls who were more popular and didn’t invite me to sit with them in the lunch room.

  Though I had Ravel’s Pavanne for a Dead Princess perfected enough for the junior high orchestra audition, I was almost sick with anxiety on the day of the tryout. There would be ninth graders in that orchestra. They would be better players, and I wouldn’t stand a chance. I’d never get the solo, I’d never make first chair; I’d be stuck in the second violin section never playing the melody, hidden from view whenever the orchestra performed. Humiliation was waiting to attack me even in this realm of life. For all I knew, I wouldn’t even get into the orchestra. By the time I’d finished lunch, sitting with a new girl who just moved to New Rochelle from Indiana, I had decided to quit violin. I would locate the music teacher, he would scan his long list of people about to audition, find my name and cross me off. Then I’d go home and be done with it.

  The music room, maybe because it was noisy and needed to be far away from classrooms, was not easy to find. It was in the basement at the end of a corridor that was littered with janitor supplies. The door was closed. Violin case in one hand, I knocked. No one responded. I tried the doorknob and the door opened. I stepped into a dimly lit room with instruments all over the place, violins and clarinets and drum sets, an upright piano against the wall and cymbals lined up on a shelf. A tall man with gray hair was sitting at a small desk in a corner, writing. He looked up when I came in but said nothing. I stood where I was and said across the room, “I’m quitting.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m quitting the violin.”

  He got up from the desk and came toward me saying, “And you are?”

  “Sonya Adler.”

  Standing next to a cello, he took off his glasses, huffed on them, then wiped them with a handkerchief. “From Roosevelt? Mr. Freedman?” How did he know what school I was from? How did he know the name of the orchestra conductor at my grammar school? “What do you mean you’re quitting the violin?”

  “I don’t want to play any more.”

  “Do you always do whatever you want?” When I didn’t answer he asked again, as if I hadn’t heard him. “Do you always do whatever you want?”

  He stood there, waiting for me to answer him. I had to think about that for a minute. Did I always do whatever I wanted? Sort of. Joan and I didn’t have much supervision but on the other hand I was a child with whole days of school full of things I didn’t want to do. That’s why I looked forward to growing up. Anyway, what business was it of his? He stood there waiting for me to answer, but I knew his question wasn’t really a question. He was saying something else. Heart pounding, I heard him say it more directly. “What kind of parents do you have? Do they let you do whatever you want? What kind of parents are those?” Frozen, I said nothing. “Get out of here,” he said in a loud voice. “Just get out of here. Go on. Get out!”

  At home, no one asked about the audition. I put my violin in a closet in the attic and my sheet music in the piano bench. After dinner, I went into my mother’s room. She was sitting at her desk looking at a book entitled Nebraska Divorce. I noticed a brochure entitled Where To Stay in Reno. She looked up. “I want to quit violin,” I said.

  “You don’t want to play anymore?”

  “No.”

  “All right,” she said. “If that’s what you want. I’ll cancel your lesson.” Then she went back to reading her book. “Close the door all the way,” she said as I went out.

  I went into Joan’s room. She was peering into a magnifying mirror looking for blackheads to squeeze. “I quit violin.”

  “What’d you do that for?”

  “I don’t know.” I never bothered to tell my father, and he never seemed to notice.

  Seventh grade eventually ended, and Joan and I went to camp. The year wasn’t all bad because my English teacher encouraged my writing, gave me A’s, and told me I had talent and should keep on writing. I loved him. The next year, the English teacher also encouraged me and told the class I was an “avid” reader, which was the first time I ever heard that word. Then eighth grade ended, and Joan and I went to camp again, but this time when we got home our parents were divorced. After fighting for almost three years over the house, my mother gave up. Joan and I moved with her to an apartment in Scarsdale.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The apartment in Scarsdale was in a new building close to stores and to the commuter train. Since I had no idea how much an apartment in Scarsdale cost, I thought we’d moved not exactly to the slums but to an embarrassing part of town. My friends in New Rochelle lived in big houses framed with hedges and oak trees. They didn’t get mail out of a cubby hole in a wall of brass boxes or go up to their home in an elevator and walk down a hall of closed doors. I knew only two people my age who lived in apartments. I wondered how they could stand such small places with the sounds of other people and the smells of cooking.

  I saw the inside of Sydell Canter’s apartment in downtown New Rochelle when I was in fifth grade. She was the re
ason I knew the word prodigy. We had the same violin teacher. She suggested that Sydell and I play a duet. Sydell was not only talented but very nice too so I always left her apartment confused about what money buys. Just being near her while she played felt like a gift though the sofa was torn and the walls dingy. Her clothes were not new but she was much more accomplished than I was and had an inner seriousness that I hoped could be acquired by someone like me even though I wasn’t poor.

  The other person my age who lived in an apartment was Teresa Kanopka. Her hair was dyed blond and teased into a disheveled mane, an announcement by hair that she was unsupervised. She and her gang bullied girls in the hall, wore flats and stockings instead of bobby sox and oxfords, tight straight skirts instead of full skirts. They did not consider themselves too young for eye shadow. We met the day Teresa sat behind me in assembly when I was in eighth grade. Her neck was bruised as if she’d been strangled. I didn’t know anyone else who had been strangled so I turned to ask her what happened. She whispered, “What? You mean this? No, it’s a hickey.” She said when a boy sucks on your neck you get a mark there. I said, “Why would he suck on your neck?” She must have explained in a gentle way because I brought her home and introduced her to Ruby in the kitchen and brought her upstairs to my bedroom where she read some of the autographs on the movie star photos.

  I showed Teresa my mother’s bedroom with its wallpaper of roses and canopy bed and fireplace, and her separate dressing room with a wall of mirror and my father’s adjoining bedroom done in masculine gray. “How come they don’t sleep in the same room?” Teresa asked. “Because he snores.” This was my stock answer when asked, but I knew it wasn’t the whole truth. I took Teresa upstairs to the attic where there were closets full of my mother’s Spanish dancing costumes, flouncy gowns the color of tomatoes and black bolero jackets and shoes with chunky heels and lace shawls. “My mother studied Flamenco in Spain,” I told Teresa. “She was once on the cover of Dance Magazine.” I was aware of Teresa’s discomfort in my big house. We never repeated the visit, and I never did see the inside of her apartment above a bicycle shop. Our friendship became just a wistful smile in the hallway. When I asked her to stop picking on my friend Ellen in the girls’ room, Teresa called off her gang and I got a taste of the pride that comes from having connections.

  Now I was one of those pathetic people without a backyard whose front door was just like all the other front doors on a boring beige hallway.

  Grandpa Greenstone financed my mother’s divorce then paid for the apartment in Scarsdale. He expected her to remarry. This time she would marry a man who owned his own business, not a wage slave like Seymour. He was not impressed that my father was head of production at MGM headquarters in New York. If my father owned MGM, then Grandpa Greenstone would be impressed. He gave his daughter Violet an allowance out of company funds, put her on the books as a Customer Liaison Agent. We drove a new Thunderbird convertible and charged the gas to Greenstone Enterprises. He told his daughter to spare no expense when furnishing the apartment because “money attracts money.”

  I had never seen my mother so happy as she was when her divorce became final. She devoted herself to decorating, immersed herself in the selection of tile, wallpaper, sofas, chairs. She studied fabric swatches and carpet samples. She was creating the splendid stage set for her new life.

  Given that everyone decorating their home turns into a gigantic bore, even forgiving her being temporarily in the clutches of a cause, I felt her happiness was tactless. I wanted her to acknowledge that she’d upended my life. She didn’t seem to care that I was making uncomfortable adjustments. She attributed my sullenness to my age. This infuriated me because it let her off the hook. As long as she could see me as a sulky teenager, she could absolve herself and act as if she had nothing to do with my mood.

  The apartment in Scarsdale was so new the floors were still concrete and the walls raw plaster. I did my homework in a square room with one rectangular window. Not used to modern construction, it seemed a room appropriate to a motel. I was used to a bedroom that had an irregular shape, an alcove for the desk and a curved window that looked out at trees. When my mother said I would have to select wallpaper, a bed, carpet, and a bureau my reply was, “It’s your room, not mine. Do what you want.” Mother concentrated on the parts of the apartment that she could decorate without argument.

  There were three bedrooms. Mother’s would serve a dual purpose, that of sleeping quarters as well as sitting room for entertaining suitors. She didn’t want men to get the wrong idea, she said. The right idea was that just because she was a divorcée it didn’t mean she was desperate for sex. Instead of a regular bed, she chose a sofa bed. She had to store her comforter in the closet every morning and yank the thing out every night. Her bedroom looked like an office, all brown and beige. Though she said her goal was to remarry, her bedroom was quite off putting, downright unfriendly.

  In defiance, to get back at her for making us displaced persons, Joan and I tormented her when she made us go wallpaper shopping. We were as obnoxious as possible, called her Ma, spoke to each other in a thick Brooklyn accent with lots of oy yoy yoys thrown in, and kept a disgusted look on our faces as if each turn of the page of the wallpaper book showed us something even uglier than the one we just saw. “Holy mackerel,” I said. “Will you look at this? Who would put this on their walls?” Joan looked and said, “Well, you could barf on it and it wouldn’t show.” We were aware, of course, that our behavior made our mother look weak in front of the salesperson. Punishment by embarrassment. The worst part of this aggression, besides the shame of hurting my own mother, was how easy it was to do. She didn’t fight back. She didn’t take charge. She would not engage.

  Then Joan found wallpaper she liked. She chose twin beds, tweed bedspreads and flecked carpet. To that room Joan fled when arriving home from school and, in that room, she stayed with the door shut.

  Hunched over my books on the cot that would be replaced when I selected a bed, I heard my mother knock. The first time I saw a parent barge into a teenager’s room without knocking was in a movie and the dialogue didn’t mention how rude that was. The teenager in the movie seemed to expect that a parent would burst in so that’s how I knew my mother had good manners. She entered with her new wary expression that sized me up so she could brace herself if necessary. Dressed in her terrycloth bathrobe, she was holding a heavy wallpaper book. She had given up dragging me to the stores and now brought home heavy sample books. “You must choose something,” she said coming close to the cot and waiting for me to make room among my schoolbooks for the wallpaper book. “This cannot go on.”

  “I am doing my homework.”

  “You cannot continue living in an unfinished room.”

  “If you don’t like how the room looks, just keep the door closed. You don’t have to come in here.” I moved my books. She had lost much of her authority but not all of it.

  “Look at this,” she said setting the open book on the cot. “It’s a mural of a Paris café. It would fit on that wall there. Then we could pick up the pink and blue theme in the bedspread and curtains.” Why would I want a picture of French people on my wall? The figures in the wallpaper were carefree, breezy people sipping wine at a café with the Eifel tower in the background, the men in berets, the women with little poodles. They were more cartoonish suggestions rather than images of actual individuals. The dreaminess of the pastel mural was a painful contrast to the actual me whose belongings were in boxes on the concrete floor, the actual me who was trying to navigate Scarsdale High where I didn’t know anyone. My mother was seeing the room without seeing me suffering in it, almost as if she worked at Bloomingdale’s and had to design a room for display in the furniture department.

  I knew that in many ways I was a lucky person, a girl who lived comfortably, a person who could choose her own bed and not have to share it at night with sisters and brothers. But try as I might, I didn’t like anything that wasn’t my old room at home, m
y real home, my home with my father and my cat Rinso and my friends who lived down the street and my bicycle in the garage. This place where I found myself, this unfinished cube meant nothing to me. I said, “Do what you want.” My mother could be no comfort to me. And so my room was pink and blue with a mural on the wall of lighthearted French people.

  One reason my mother moved to Scarsdale was to give Joan and me the advantage of the excellent high school. Scarsdale High was rated the best public school in the United States. High school started in tenth grade and, by the time we moved to Scarsdale, Joan had already completed tenth grade at New Rochelle high. She had the right to continue in New Rochelle because our father was a resident there. Joan did not argue or scream. She simply said, as if speaking to an office coworker rather than her mother, “I am not going to Scarsdale High, so you can forget that.” She started her junior year in New Rochelle, figured out the bus schedule, and went there from Scarsdale every morning. It was an hour’s commute.

  Because I had never been to any high school, I decided to try Scarsdale because I too heard it was top rated. But when I entered that place I couldn’t figure out what was best about it. In New Rochelle, I was with all kinds of students. Some would study cosmetology, some would learn typing and shorthand, some would study auto mechanics, some would go on to play professional football, and some would go to college.

  Scarsdale High was different. It was as if the college prep level had been sheered off the top and placed in a building of its own. The rest of the school just wasn’t there. No one was learning to change spark plugs or how to perm straight hair. None of the boys wore black motorcycle jackets and slumped against the corridor walls. There was one black girl in the whole place, and the football team was easy to tackle. What was better about Scarsdale High? Was it better because there were no penniless kids who had to earn a living immediately after graduating?