Nest (3 page)

“You know how much I loved to dance when I was your age, right, honey?” Mom asks, turning off the record player and sitting down at the table. She dances every day, practicing in the studio on her own or rehearsing with the Saltwater Dance Brigade, not
counting the last while, when she hasn’t been able to dance at all.

I nod, hoping she’ll tell me the story anyway.

“When I was in fourth grade at P.S. 16, a modern-dance troupe from another school did a performance at assembly. I’d never seen anything like it. All of those beautiful, strong girls dancing their hearts out. ‘That’s me! That’s me!’ I said to myself. I was so excited watching those girls that I could barely stay in my seat.” Mom taps her fingers fast,
tip, tip, tip
, on the table.

“I raced home after school and ran into the kitchen, where my mother was chopping onions. Isn’t it funny that I still remember that—the stained wooden cutting board, the pile of onions, the way my mother held that big knife?” I nod, but Mom isn’t really asking me.

“ ‘Mama,’ I said, running up to her, ‘I’m a dancer!’

“She didn’t even look up from her onions. ‘No, you’re not,’ she said. ‘You’re just a silly little girl who doesn’t know anything about anything.’

“I felt like I’d been slapped. Here I was with this amazing discovery, this fantastic news. And my mother didn’t even want to hear it.

“ ‘Mama,’ I tried again. ‘There were dancers who came to school, and they did a show for us, and—’

“And do you know what she said to me? ‘And I suppose if you saw the circus, you’d be telling me
you’re an elephant. Now go change out of your school clothes and pull the laundry in off the line.’ ”

Mom shakes her head slowly. She sighs. “My mother was a
chaleria
. That’s Yiddish for ‘a very difficult woman.’ She sure didn’t give me an easy ride.” Now Mom’s all drifty and sad. She’s talking to me, but I’m not sure she really sees me. I think she’s seeing that gloomy old apartment in the Bronx and her mean mother, who I don’t even have a name for, since she died four days before I was born; and maybe she sees the gray walls and gray floors of the orphanage where her parents dumped her when she was only three years old and picked her up two years later and never even said they were sorry. She had to stand in a long line of girls and have her head checked for lice by a lady who was probably as awful as Miss Minchin in
A Little Princess
. Poor little-girl Mom.

I touch her arm. She looks up, startled. “Mom,” I say, “so tell me about how you learned to dance
anyway
.”

“Oh, honey,” she says. Her voice is different now. Wiped out. Washed out. Done. “You already know the story. I took lessons in secret. Mr. Blumenstein, from the temple, paid for my classes. You’ve heard all of this before.”

I take the record off the stereo and hold it carefully by the edges. Mom doesn’t even open up the jacket for me.

“Mom?”

First she rubs her face. Then she looks around. Then she rubs her face again. It takes forever before she opens up the jacket. I slip the record in. On the album cover is a lady with whipped cream all over her body and a blob of whipped cream on her head. Mom and I look and look together. We’re careful observers.

Finally Mom smiles.
“Mmmm-mmm,”
she says. “Whipped cream.”

“Mmmm-mmm,”
I say, smiling, too. While it’s still just the two of us, just us and no one else, we turn off the downstairs lights. We flick the porch light on and sit together in the living room on the gold velour couch in the almost-dark and cricket-quiet.

D
AD BELIEVES IT
’
S CRUCIAL
that a family bonds together, so that means lots of talking, like right now at the dinner table, when I’d rather just look out the window and watch the tree swallows swoop down and catch horseflies while I eat my mashed potatoes.

“Naomi?” he asks again, and Mom looks at me like
Honey, please
, so I answer him that, yes, it’s a little hard that there are only two weeks left of summer vacation.

“And how are you feeling about the start of school?”

“Okay.”

Dad sighs and runs his hand through his wavy dark hair.

“Anything you’re particularly looking forward to?”

“Not really.”

Dad scrunches up his eyebrows. He’s probably
trying to decide how much he should push me to express myself, which he thinks is an important thing for me to learn to do better. On our last alone night, he bought me an ice cream sundae at Benson’s and asked a ton of questions, like
What is it about having just turned eleven that’s special?
and
Why do you like to watch birds?
I just wanted to eat my chocolate ice cream with hot fudge and whipped cream, but I made myself answer all of Dad’s questions. My answers weren’t long enough or deep enough, though, because I noticed Dad’s forehead all wrinkly with disappointment.

Rachel’s leaning forward in her chair, looking right at Dad and smiling. She reminds me of Sally, who always raises her hand in class and never blurts out, even when it’s a hard math problem and she’s the only one with the answer.

Once when I asked Rachel what she and Dad did on their alone night, she looked at me like it was the craziest question.

“We
discussed
things, Chirp,” she said. “
Important
things. That’s what Daddy and I always do.”

Now Dad asks, “What about you, Rachel? How are you feeling about the start of school?”

“Well,” Rachel says, setting down her fork and taking an excited breath, “it’s been a great summer so far, but there’s a lot about starting eighth grade that I’m looking forward to. I expect that I’ll learn all kinds of new things about—”

Dad reaches for his glass of red wine, sits back in his chair, and smiles.

I’m off the hook, and just in time. Two swallows dive-bomb for the same snack. I watch them shoot toward the ground, then do a U-turn,
urrrreeeeech
, like in the cartoons, and disappear into the purple-dark sky. Mom watches me watching them. I think she gives me the teeniest wink.

“Ready for our expedition?” Mom asks. She’s wearing her floppy orange sunhat and—just like me—her black one-piece bathing suit under her jean cutoffs.

“Ready,” I say. Every year Mom and I celebrate the end of summer by going for a hike on the Wood Thrush Trail, just a few minutes’ drive up Route 6. But this year Mom’s leg isn’t quite up to it. Our expedition today was my idea, which Mom says is proof that she can always count on me for creative solutions.

I’ve already schlepped the duffel bags with the fold-up kayak, my backpack with my binocs, and a canvas bag that Mom packed with hard-boiled eggs, cheese, Wheat Thins, and watermelon out to the car. Joey Morell watched me from his front porch. He’s always just sitting out there by himself. “Moving out?” he said, but I pretended not to hear him, because even though he didn’t throw rocks at me the
other night and actually was pretty nice, he chose Sean O’Keefe as his best friend, and Sean is definitely rough around the edges. Also, Joey has two nasty brothers, and you never know when they’ll rub off on him. Dad says that the Morells aren’t fully intact as a family, which probably means that they don’t have long discussions at the dinner table or take nature walks together. I think the Morells think Dad’s the one who’s missing some marbles, since he’s a Jewish headshrinker who doesn’t just vacation here in August, like all the others, but actually lives here year-round and doesn’t boat or fish or drink beer in cans and last month offered to pay Vinnie Morell to fix our broken porch step instead of just doing it himself.

“Let’s go, my girl,” Mom says, and tugs on the end of my braid. “Dragonflies, here we come!”

Today Mom can walk down the front stairs, but she has to hold on to the banister. “I’m still just a little wobbly,” she says, “but soon I’ll be leaping down these stairs. I can feel it in my bones.” I want to sing
“Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!”
like in the commercial, which I think Mom will think is funny, but just in case she doesn’t, I don’t. Mom manages okay walking across the front yard to the car; she’s just kind of slow.

The door handle on the car is hot, even though it’s still early. “Whew,” Mom says, “it’s going to be a scorcher!”

“Three
h
’s,” I say in my radio voice.

“Hazy, hot, and humid,” Mom says in her radio voice.

“The mother and the daughter roll down all of the car windows in an attempt to cool off the car before entering,” I say.

“Then, fearless and brave, they enter the car—”

“—hot as it is, and head off on their adventure!”

“Stay tuned for—”

“—the next installment of—”

Mom looks at me, giggling. “Umm … help me out here, honey.”

“Overheated Mama and Her Daughter, Toasty Roasty!”

Mom laughs. “Perfect.”

She pulls out onto Route 6. Since it’s summer, there’s plenty of traffic. The warm wind swirls around us. Mom’s smiling. I’m smiling. Mom turns on the radio.
I feel the earth move under my feet
.… I sing along, really loud. Mom shimmies her shoulders and hums off-key. I wish we could drive all the way to Hyannis. Or maybe we could keep on going right over the Sagamore Bridge to Boston. We could take a ride on the swan boats, like we did the last time we were there. We could eat a picnic in the Boston Public Garden. We could send a postcard home to Dad and Rachel:
Sorry for the short notice, but we’ve always wanted to see Canada, where the geese come from and men who don’t want to be drafted to Vietnam can go and live in freedom. Don’t worry. Chirp will learn
tons on the road. We’ll try to be home for the High Holidays. If not, please forgive us. All our love, Hannah/Mom, Chirp

Mom pulls off Route 6 onto a paved road that turns into a dirt road that turns into a bumpy sandy road that most summer people aren’t brave enough to drive on. Mom looks nervous, biting on her bottom lip, but I know she’s determined that we’ll have our expedition, since her achy leg already messed up our tradition of hiking on the Wood Thrush Trail and Mom is a big believer in traditions. “Here we go,” she says every time we hit a new bump or a blackberry bramble swipes our window. Even though Mom knows exactly where we are, this looks like the kind of road you could get lost on. Mom hates getting lost. Last Thanksgiving when we were going to visit Grandma and Grandpa, we took a wrong turn on the highway and Mom and Dad got in a fight right in front of us and Dad said, “You have
got
to work out this ancient fear, Hannah, because it’s absolutely impossible!” and Mom yelled, “I’m doing just fine, Mr. Privileged Childhood!” and Dad yelled, “Well,
this
is a good way to begin the visit with my parents!” and Mom yelled, “At least you
have
parents to visit!” because both of her parents have been dead for years. Rachel whispered to me, “Mom hates getting lost because of the orphanage,” which I still don’t really understand.

“Mom, is the reason you hate getting lost—”

“Shah, Chirp. I’m concentrating here,” she says,
just as the road gets wider and ends, right in front of Dragonfly Pond. “Ta-da! I knew it!” She pulls over and parks the car.

We get out, take off our cutoffs, throw them on the seat, and walk right over to the edge of the pond. The water is tons of shades of blue and green. It ripples and dances, shooting off more sun sparks than I’ve ever seen.

“Wow,” Mom says. She takes my hand and we walk a few steps into the water. The sand is soft. The water bumps, warm, around our ankles.

“It’s a mystery, Chirp,” Mom says. “Magic. A scorcher in August and we have this whole sweet pond to ourselves!” Her voice is peaceful and excited at the same time, like she’s blessing the Shabbos candles. Even though she gave up most of her family’s Orthodox Jewish traditions when she left home at sixteen to study dance, she still thinks Shabbos is a special time that should be passed down through the generations, and so we always light the candles and say the blessings. I’m about to ask Mom if we can just sit in the shallow water and watch stuff for a while when she reaches for my hand.