Goodbye, Columbus (2 page)

“I love carrots,” I said, “I love them.” And to prove it, I dumped half of them down my throat and the other half onto my trousers.

“Pig,” she said.

Though I am very fond of desserts, especially fruit, I chose not to have any. I wanted, this hot night, to avoid the conversation that revolved around my choosing fresh fruit over canned fruit, or canned fruit over fresh fruit; whichever I preferred, Aunt Gladys always had an abundance of the other jamming her refrigerator like stolen diamonds. “He wants canned peaches, I have a refrigerator full of grapes I have to get rid of …” Life was a throwing off for poor Aunt Gladys, her greatest joys were taking out the garbage, emptying her pantry, and making threadbare bundles for what she still referred to as the Poor Jews in Palestine. I only hope she dies with an empty refrigerator, otherwise she’ll ruin eternity for everyone else, what with her Velveeta turning green, and her navel oranges growing fuzzy jackets down below.

My Uncle Max came home and while I dialed Brenda’s number once again, I could hear soda bottles being popped open in the kitchen. The voice that answered this time was high, curt, and tired. “Hullo.”

I launched into my speech. “Hello-Brenda-Brenda-you-don’t-know-me-that-is-you-don’t-know-my-name-but-I-held-your-glasses-f or-you-this-afternoon-at-the-club … You-asked-me-to-rm-not-a-member-my-cousin-Doris-is-Doris-Klugman-I-asked-who-you-were …” I breathed, gave her a chance to speak, and then went ahead and answered the silence on the other end. “Doris? She’s the one who’s always reading
War and Peace.
That’s how I know it’s the summer, when Doris is reading
War and Peace.
” Brenda didn’t laugh; right from the start she was a practical girl.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Neil Klugman. I held your glasses at the board, remember?”

She answered me with a question of her own, one, I’m sure, that is an embarrassment to both the homely and the fair. “What do you look like?”

“I’m … dark.”

“Are you a Negro?”

“No,” I said.

“What
do
you look like?”

“May I come see you tonight and show you?”

“That’s nice,” she laughed. “I’m playing tennis tonight.”

“I thought you were driving golf balls.”

“I drove them already.”

“How about after tennis?”

“I’ll be sweaty after,” Brenda said.

It was not to warn me to clothespin my nose and run in the opposite direction; it was a fact, it apparently didn’t bother Brenda, but she wanted it recorded.

“I don’t mind,” I said, and hoped by my tone to earn a niche somewhere between the squeamish and the grubby. “Can I pick you up?”

She did not answer a minute; I heard her muttering, “Doris Klugman, Doris Klugman …” Then she said, “Yes, Briarpath Hills, eight-fifteen.”

“I’ll be driving a—” I hung back with the year, “a tan Plymouth. So you’ll know me. How will I know you?” I said with a sly, awful laugh.

“I’ll be sweating,” she said and hung up.

Once I’d driven out of Newark, past Irvington and the packed-in tangle of railroad crossings, switchmen shacks, lumberyards, Dairy Queens, and used-car lots, the night grew cooler. It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those of us outside, regulated with a dial the amounts of moisture that were allowed access to their skin. It was only eight o’clock, and I did not want to be early, so I drove up and down the streets whose names were those of eastern colleges, as though the township, years ago, when things were named, had planned the destinies of the sons of its citizens. I thought of my Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max sharing a Mounds bar in the cindery darkness of their alley, on beach chairs, each cool breeze sweet to them as the promise of afterlife, and after a while I rolled onto the gravel roads of the small park where Brenda was playing tennis. Inside my glove compartment it was as though the map of
The City Streets of Newark
had metamorphosed into crickets, for those mile-long tarry streets did not exist for me any longer and the night noises sounded loud as the blood whacking at my temples.

I parked the car under the black-green canopy of three oaks, and walked towards the sound of the tennis balls. I heard an exasperated voice say, “Deuce
again.
” It was Brenda and she sounded as though she was sweating considerably. I crackled slowly up the gravel and heard Brenda once more. “My ad,” and then just as I rounded the path, catching a cuff full of burrs, I heard, “Game!” Her racket went spinning up in the air and she caught it neatly as I came into sight.

“Hello,” I called.

“Hello, Neil. One more game,” she called. Brenda’s words seemed to infuriate her opponent, a pretty brown-haired girl, not quite so tall as Brenda, who stopped searching for the ball that had been driven past her, and gave both Brenda and myself a dirty look. In a moment I learned the reason why: Brenda was ahead five games to four, and her cocksureness about there being just one game remaining aroused enough anger in her opponent for the two of us to share.

As it happened, Brenda finally won, though it took more games than she’d expected. The other girl, whose name sounded like Simp, seemed happy to end it at six all, but Brenda, shifting, running, up on her toes, would not stop, and finally all I could see moving in the darkness were her glasses, a glint of them, the clasp of her belt, her socks, her sneakers, and, on occasion, the ball. The darker it got the more savagely did Brenda msh the net, which seemed curious, for I had noticed that earlier, in the light, she had stayed back, and even when she had had to msh, after smashing back a lob, she didn’t look entirely happy about being so close to her opponent’s racket. Her passion for winning a point seemed outmatched by an even stronger passion for maintaining her beauty as it was. I suspected that the red print of a tennis ball on her cheek would pain her more than losing all the points in the world. Darkness pushed her in, however, and she stroked harder, and at last Simp seemed to be running on her ankles. When it was all over, Simp refused my offer of a ride home and indicated with a quality of speech borrowed from some old Katherine Hepburn movie that she could manage for herself; apparently her manor lay no further than the nearest briar patch. She did not like me and I her, though I worried it, I’m sure, more than she did.

“Who is
she?
”

“Laura Simpson Stolowitch.”

“Why don’t you call her Stolo?” I asked.

“Simp is her Bennington name. The ass.”

“Is that where you go to school?” I asked.

She was pushing her shirt up against her skin to dry the perspiration. “No. I go to school in Boston.”

I disliked her for the answer. Whenever anyone asks me where I went to school I come right out with it: Newark Colleges of Rutgers University. I may say it a bit too ringingly, too fast, too up-in-the-air, but I say it. For an instant Brenda reminded me of the pug-nosed little bastards from Montclair who come down to the library during vacations, and while I stamp out their books, they stand around tugging their elephantine scarves until they hang to their ankles, hinting all the while at “Boston” and “New Haven.”

“Boston University?” I asked, looking off at the trees.

“Radcliffe.”

We were still standing on the court, bounded on all sides by white lines. Around the bushes back of the court, fireflies were cutting figure eights in the thorny-smelling air and then, as the night suddenly came all the way in, the leaves on the trees shone for an instant, as though they’d just been rained upon. Brenda walked off the court, with me a step behind her. Now I had grown accustomed to the dark, and as she ceased being merely a voice and turned into a sight again, some of my anger at her “Boston” remark floated off and I let myself appreciate her. Her hands did not twitch at her bottom, but the form revealed itself, covered or not, under the closeness of her khaki Bermudas. There were two wet triangles on the back of her tiny-collared white polo shirt, right where her wings would have been if she’d had a pair. She wore, to complete the picture, a tartan belt, white socks, and white tennis sneakers.

As she walked she zipped the cover on her racket.

“Are you anxious to get home?” I said.

“No.”

“Let’s sit here. It’s pleasant.”

“Okay.”

We sat down on a bank of grass slanted enough for us to lean back without really leaning; from the angle it seemed as though we were preparing to watch some celestial event, the christening of a new star, the inflation to full size of a half-ballooned moon. Brenda zipped and unzipped the cover while she spoke; for the first time she seemed edgy. Her edginess coaxed mine back, and so we were ready now for what, magically, it seemed we might be able to get by without: a meeting.

“What does your cousin Doris look like?” she asked.

“She’s dark—”

“Is she—”

“No,” I said. “She has freckles and dark hair and she’s very tall.”

“Where does she go to school?”

“Northampton.”

She did not answer and I don’t know how much of what I meant she had understood.

“I guess I don’t know her,” she said after a moment. “Is she a new member?”

“I think so. They moved to Livingston only a couple of years ago.”

“Oh.”

No new star appeared, at least for the next five minutes.

“Did you remember me from holding your glasses?” I said.

“Now I do,” she said. “Do you live in Livingston too?”

“No. Newark.”

“We lived in Newark when I was a baby,” she offered.

“Would you like to go home?” I was suddenly angry.

“No. Let’s walk though.”

Brenda kicked a stone and walked a step ahead of me.

“Why is it you rush the net only after dark?” I said.

She turned to me and smiled. “You noticed? Old Simp the Simpleton doesn’t.”

“Why do you?”

“I don’t like to be up too close, unless I’m sure she won’t return it.”

“Why?”

“My nose.”

“What?”

“I’m afraid of my nose. I had it bobbed.”

“What?”

“I had my nose fixed.”

“What was the matter with it?”

“It was bumpy.”

“A lot?”

“No,” she said, “I was pretty. Now I’m prettier. My brother’s having his fixed in the fall.”

“Does he want to be prettier?”

She didn’t answer and walked ahead of me again.

“I don’t mean to sound facetious. I mean why’s he doing it?”

“He
wants
to … unless he becomes a gym teacher … but he won’t,” she said. “We all look like my father.”

“Is he having his fixed?”

“Why are you so nasty?”

“I’m not. I’m sorry.” My next question was prompted by a desire to sound interested and thereby regain civility; it didn’t quite come out as I’d expected—I said it too loud. “How much does it cost?”

Brenda waited a moment but then she answered. “A thousand dollars. Unless you go to a butcher.”

“Let me see if you got your money’s worth.”

She turned again; she stood next to a bench and put the racket down on it. “If I let you kiss me would you stop being nasty?”

We had to take about two too many steps to keep the approach from being awkward, but we pursued the impulse and kissed. I felt her hand on the back of my neck and so I tugged her towards me, too violently perhaps, and slid my own hands across the side of her body and around to her back. I felt the wet spots on her shoulder blades, and beneath them, I’m sure of it, a faint fluttering, as though something stirred so deep in her breasts, so far back it could make itself felt through her shirt. It was like the fluttering of wings, tiny wings no bigger than her breasts. The smallness of the wings did not bother me—it would not take an eagle to carry me up those lousy hundred and eighty feet that make summer nights so much cooler in Short Hills than they are in Newark.

The next day I held Brenda’s glasses for her once again, this time not as momentary servant but as afternoon guest; or perhaps as both, which still was an improvement. She wore a black tank suit and went barefooted, and among the other women, with their Cuban heels and boned-up breasts, their knuckle-sized rings, their straw hats, which resembled immense wicker pizza plates and had been purchased, as I heard one deeply tanned woman rasp, “from the cutest little
shvartze
when we docked at Barbados,” Brenda among them was elegantly simple, like a sailor’s dream of a Polynesian maiden, albeit one with prescription sun glasses and the last name of Patimkin. She brought a little slurp of water with her when she crawled back towards the pool’s edge, and at the edge she grabbed up with her hands and held my ankles, tightly and wet.

“Come in,” she said up to me, squinting. “We’ll play.”