As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (10 page)

She and I glanced at each other with suspicion as Howard repeated, “I’m not going to pull it off.”

He lunged forward then, onto the bed. We screamed.

“You dumb girls,” he muttered as he settled himself behind us where he could lie prone. “You dumb girls have it so easy.”

The weekend with our father ignoring him had clearly taken its toll, as did, I figured, Howard’s business as the eldest son, the child required to bear the most responsibilities.

That may have been what he was referring to, but that’s not how he’d put things.

“Dumb? Easy?”
Nina twisted at the waist to confront him. “Honestly, Howard, sometimes I think you don’t know anything. Or see anything. Or hear anything. What’s easy, Howard, is that
you’re
dumb.”

Howard wasn’t trying to anger us, I could see, but rather attempting with this visit to soothe himself. But his words were poorly chosen and just his presence set Nina on edge. Though I’d witnessed their wrangling before, the rancor between Howard and Nina, a visceral thing, always surprised me when it flared. As Nina challenged Howard she crossed her arms over her chest as if the dress exposed her rather than me, as if Howard were still pointing at her as he had the day of our arrival and commenting on her “bazooms.”

Howard rose, rolled past us, and took to the floor. “I know something, Nina,” he said, standing before us. He nodded at me in the dress then thrust his chest out, clearly implying breasts. Holding that posture, he strutted about the room. “Too big,” he teased again and again.

“You’re disgusting,” Nina yelled. “Stop it.” When he didn’t she added, alluding to his many past romances, “I can’t believe you’ve ever had a girlfriend.”

Howard sighed, almost happily. “Ah, you know I don’t mean it,” he told Nina a moment later, with particular kindness. And there it was: the charm that generated the girlfriends. In this instance it worked again, even on Nina in all her anxiety.

She was just about to relax her folded arms when Howard, pursing his lips, made a series of loud smacking noises.

“Disgusting!” she said.

“Think I don’t know anything?” Howard continued. “Well here’s something everyone knows: Nina’s never been kissed!”

Seeing the depth of the blush spreading on Nina’s face and neck, Howard pushed further. He pursed his lips again and the ugly smacking sounds followed. He finished his performance saying, “Kissing’s fun, Nina.
Fun.
Don’t you wish you knew about
that?
”

Then he left, slamming his bedroom door once he reached it. Through the wall we heard him complain, as he had before, “You dumb girls have it easy!”

Moaning, Nina fell back on the bed. As I stepped out of the dress and rehung it I could see she was thinking something, not speaking but sporadically kicking her feet, still upset.

Once I’d changed into my own clothes I joined her on the bed, laying my head on a pillow beside hers. “I guess it’s too big,” I said of the dress, sighing with resignation.

“What’d you think?” Nina said, irked suddenly with me.

“I thought maybe it would fit,” I answered.

“And then what? I’d let you wear it? Just like that?”

“I don’t know. I thought it might be fun to wear.”

“Well now you know it isn’t,” Nina concluded. After another bout of kicking her feet, she added, “Besides, Molly, what do you know of
fun?
”

That evening we ate dinner in near silence, the sisters seated in the chairs on the porch, we kids spread out on the steps. Howard ate at one end, Nina the other. Davy, who’d been fishing all afternoon with our father, was exhausted and irritable, not quite liking the egg salad, or the half-sour pickles. When my mother asked if he’d rather have chicken salad, he squawked senselessly in response, a weak imitation of gulls, which caused my mother to roll her eyes then sit herself down beside him, pulling him close. “Eat,” she urged, but Davy stopped eating to rest his head in her lap. “Howard, could you carry him upstairs?” Ada then asked.

Later, I heard her talking to Howard. They were back on the porch steps, where Howard had returned after dinner. Over the water, the sun, sinking lower, neared the horizon line.

“It’s my fault,” she told him. “I should have given you a curfew. I shouldn’t have left you boys to your own devices. Live and learn.” She wrapped an arm over his shoulder.

“It’s not your fault,” Howard answered. “I’m eighteen, for God’s sake.”

“Eighteen,” Ada repeated. “Lord knows I made one hell of a decision when I was eighteen. And that’s how come, soon enough, I got
you.
” She laughed, which caused Howard to nod then finally smile.

While Howard and my mother talked on the porch steps, Vivie sat in silence at the table with Nina. The two sipped tea. “Walk with me?” I heard Vivie cautiously ask Nina.

They left the cottage and headed toward Hillside Avenue. I rose from the living room couch to watch them go. Nina walked with her arms crossed over her chest, as coiled as when Howard had come into the bedroom. But with a tug, Vivie linked arms with Nina. They headed east, toward Sloppy Joe’s and the Villa Rosa, and past that, toward the evening crowd at Anchor Beach. Minutes later, I knew, they’d turn onto Beach Avenue and arrive at the Anchor, where, arms still linked, standing before Sal’s Good Humor truck, they’d confer, mother to daughter, daughter to mother, as they decided which treat to share.

Later, Howard, Ada, Nina, and Vivie found themselves by chance in our cottage’s kitchen. By then a kind of truce had descended between Howard and Nina, each of them having been successfully consoled by their respective mothers, who, backs against the new washer, seemed pleased to be standing beside each other. But for that curious space, a body’s width, between them, you’d think that all was truly and finally well.

T
welve years old—my age when I lost Davy—is an interesting time of life. You’re still a kid at twelve but at the same time you’re on your way toward physical and emotional maturity. At home you grasp things, invisible things that used to pass you by: that your parents aren’t as perfectly happy as you’d always assumed; that your beautiful cousin isn’t comfortable in her beautiful skin; that you were born in Middletown, Connecticut, and spend the summers in Woodmont, Connecticut, but that all this might have been otherwise. There’s such chanciness to the business of life, you suddenly know at twelve. For example, you might have been born to other parents, in other states, maybe even other parts of the world. You’re Jewish, but you just as easily could have been born Catholic or Congregationalist or even Buddhist. Or you could have been born in another time, all those years back, like your grandparents were, in Russia. Or, easily enough, you might never have been born at all. At twelve you know the facts: one egg, one sperm, one life. But what are the chances of its being
your
life, right then, right there? The probability of you is so rare, in fact, that you’re nothing short of a miracle. And so you silently tell yourself,
I’m a miracle. I’m a miracle.
Which isn’t bragging. At twelve you understand this miracle for what it is: just another plain fact of life.

Another plain fact that summer, when I was twelve, was that in addition to my growing awareness that Nina was uncomfortable in her skin and consequently vulnerable to Howard’s worst insults—the ones about the female mind and body—she was also preoccupied and wouldn’t be making much time for me. She was reading and reading and reading. She’d read a lot the summers before, but this summer she was particularly unstoppable. Whatever Darwin was trying to tell her, I assumed, must have been just as she’d originally said—“fantastic”—because she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pull herself away.

My life, then, during those early days of that summer, had a surprising solitariness to it, despite the crowdedness of the cottage and despite the fact that I knew any number of kids in the surrounding cottages. Yet even more than friends in the neighborhood I wanted a friend right there, at home, just like my mother had in her sisters. Like my mother, I wanted to wake up humming rather than yearning. But over a week into it and Woodmont, so far, hadn’t worked this transformation on me. The sister I wanted in the form of Nina was still elusive.

Looking back, I’m surprised to realize how often during those days Davy filled the hole I was hoping Nina would fill. But after breakfast, when Nina took to one of the metal chairs on the porch to start in with her reading, and I would sit on the porch steps, waiting, as if this day, unlike the day before or the day before that, she’d actually put the book down and join me for a walk or a chat or a swim, Davy would invariably land beside me, with Samson Bagel on his left hand.

Nina, Davy, and I had made the Bagels three summers before, when Bec arrived from New Haven with a set of four cotton mittens, the puppet equivalent of bare bodies, and a bag full of fabric scraps, buttons, sequins, and yarn. Davy’s Samson, like the Bible’s, had a good head of hair and was exceedingly strong. Though the men in our family hadn’t fought the war’s battles—one too old, another too fat, another too sick—the heroic exploits of Samson Bagel could make up for all that. Moreover, the Germans would never have imprisoned Samson Bagel, Davy insisted. This was just when we’d learned of our cousin Reuben from Poland, who in fact had been imprisoned but was just then in a displaced persons’ camp, homeless but free. Davy was also the maker of Lenny Bagel, the father, who, like our father, ran a small department store. “Good God, another day,” was one of Lenny’s habitual sayings. Nina was the one to create Esther Bagel, the mother, and though Nina gave Esther characteristics a bit different from our mothers’—Esther was a part-time journalist who, whether at home or on the job, wore pants—Esther was nevertheless as fussy about household matters as the real mothers in our lives. My puppet was a girl, Linda Bagel, obedient and content. What I knew about Linda I knew about myself: she’d grow up, get married, have children, be even more satisfied. I was nine when I invented her and I loved her like crazy. When I was ten and eleven I felt pretty much the same. By twelve, though, I’d stopped thinking about Linda Bagel.

Yet there was little else to do, those first lonely mornings at Woodmont, but to pull her out and join Davy in his antics. Sometimes Davy simply donned one of the puppets and waved the thing around, senselessly, and I’d don Linda and wave her senselessly back. Other times he’d rope me into enacting a scene: the Bagel family drives to Woodmont (Samson and Linda secretly kicking each other in the backseat), the Bagel family takes a swim (Mama Esther runs from Papa Lenny, who insists on splashing), the Bagel family lights the Sabbath candles (Mama Esther inexplicably forgets the words of the Hebrew blessing and cracks up in giggles). The most fun, though, was when I served simply as Davy’s audience, listening as he picked up one or another of the puppets and began a spontaneous monologue. “What did I ever do to deserve such horrible kids?” Lenny Bagel grumbled one morning, and even Nina put her book down and laughed. It was obvious where Davy got some of his material—Mr. Weinstein had howled those very words the day before when his son Arthur had gotten into yet another fight—but often I never knew. And I didn’t care. I’d assumed all that play was but a substitute for the real stuff that would surely come when Nina finished her book. But then, weeks later, we lost Davy. And I suddenly grasped that all that time with the puppets
was
real stuff, for without Davy I was more alone than ever before.

Throughout this fall about once weekly I’ve stopped by Bec’s house to continue exploring it, piecing the past together as I do as if it were here, in the walls and floors, notebooks and photograph albums, of this youngest Syrkin daughter. I’ve come here alone because I am alone, more than ever before, and I mean that this time quite literally. Bec was the last to go of her generation. Of my generation only Nina is alive, and she long ago left New England for California. I’ve been divorced for more years than I want to admit from Howard’s best friend, Mark Fishbaum, and we never had a child. I’ve not remarried.

September came and went, and now it’s mid-October, the leaves mostly fallen, the air cool. Still, each visit I take some time on the front porch, sitting, thinking. Bec kept two rockers on the porch, and though I don’t recall ever seeing her sitting out there, I’ve nevertheless felt something like her presence beside me during my time here. She’d set flower boxes on the porch as well, which, all blooms gone, I’ve emptied, and as I’ve stared at the boxes I’ve begun to imagine them filled once again come spring, perhaps with impatiens, perhaps petunias. The place, I’ve told Bec in my thoughts, will bloom again.

This morning it drizzled but that didn’t keep me off the porch. I had my sit, waved to a neighbor whom I’ve yet to officially meet, a middle-aged woman like myself lifting groceries from her car and rushing them inside, and then I came inside too to warm up. Bec’s kitchen table is actually a booth, just like in a restaurant, wooden benches padded for comfort, a wooden table set between them, and all of it tucked against a wall. There’s a window there too, with a view of a Japanese maple tree outside, something Bec planted to remind her of a particular Japanese maple she loved to walk past in Woodmont. As I sipped hot tea I also browsed through an old photo album, something I pulled from a shelf in the front study. The album began with a photo of Bec, my mother, and Vivie, taken when the sisters were still young, still wearing identical bathing suits and identical braids. In the shot they’re at the beach, the water glistening behind them. Vivie, eleven, and then still the tallest, poses with her arms crossed over her chest, her body erect, as if dutifully waiting for Maks to snap the picture. But Ada, eight, has stepped past her, closer to the camera. Already the prettiest of the three, she smiles exuberantly, though the fullness of her grin is partially obscured by the slight turn of her head toward the big sister behind her. Bec, six years old and crouching, stares not at the camera but at the formation of sand her hands are sunk into. She looks relaxed and, unlike her sisters, genuinely happy. She must have been digging, or building something, a maker in the making, I thought, as I stared at the photo.

It seemed to me she was born to be the dressmaker she became, that the seeds of the endeavor, or the temperament for the work, were there all along. And I believe she’d agree with that sense. In fact she told me once that we disregard our authenticity at our own peril. But that’s not how she put it. Her words were simpler. “Molly, you have to be yourself,” she said. “You
have
to. Or something in you dies.”

Years before she’d written:
I could die. No, no, am already dead.

She’d stopped sewing then, stopped designing those dresses that only she could make.

Go on, I told the spirited girl in the photo. Go on and dig in the sand and create whatever you want. I didn’t say this as if I could remake history, erase those awful words on the note I’d found. I said it because it was impossible to look at her in her youth, messy, happy, confident—not so different from the way I once looked—and not cheer her on.

The dress Bec was sewing in July 1948 for Mrs. Arthur Coventry of New Haven was made of a stiff burgundy taffeta, a fabric that Bec had not used much before and found unyielding, trying. But its surface had a lovely sheen, which made it the perfect choice for the fiftieth-anniversary party with which Mrs. Coventry was planning to surprise her husband, the retired Yale law professor. He was a man of great dignity, Bec had been told by Mrs. Arthur Coventry. Many of his students had gone on to judgeships all over the country. Others were in distinguished practices. He had been a good husband, too. Very devoted, very kind, Mrs. Coventry had said. For example, he’d been sure to take her to Paris every third year, in June, for two weeks. There they would walk the banks of the river Seine and hold hands, as if they were still courting, as if time had never passed. Each afternoon they’d stop at the same patisserie to eat sweet Napoleons and sip coffee. Theirs was a marriage of simple joys, of uncomplicated compatibility. Mrs. Coventry had raised four children, but that was a long time ago, she informed Bec. Fifty years of marriage. She sighed wearily. She’d always hated Napoleons, she finally confessed.

The dress was somehow to live up to that accomplishment, that mass of time, and to reflect the dignity (or was it the costs, Bec wondered) of a life lived by the side of that professor, and to capture the repeated trips to Paris, their joys and limitations, and even to hint at the trial of raising those four kids, of keeping them quiet each evening so the professor could read. The dress was to be more than a dress. Somehow it had to reflect the complexity of a lifetime as surely as the lines on Mrs. Coventry’s seventy-two-year-old face did.

But that fabric—the stiff taffeta—was making it especially hard to shape.

That second week in Woodmont we could hear more than the occasional sigh of frustration as Bec sat at her Singer, her feet pumping its treadle, her hands splayed over the taffeta as she worked the fabric forward, running yet another seam. The portable radio that my father used on the weekends to listen to his baseball games while sitting outside was now on the dresser in Bec’s sunporch, and when the going got too tough for Bec, she’d stop with the Singer, face the ocean, and, ears pricked for Doris Day or Bing Crosby, she’d hum along for a while, the dress seemingly forgotten on her lap. Then we’d hear a resigned sigh, signaling that she’d turned away from the ocean and back to her Singer, where she resumed her struggle with the dress.

The air was especially good out there on her screened sunporch, or so Bec insisted no matter how hard the sewing project at hand was for her, and so it became a particularly cherished moment to be invited to join her there, which, on Wednesday of that second week at Woodmont, Nina and I did. We knew, like our mothers, not to enter the sunporch absent an invitation. We knew too that this was a working visit, no interruptions of Bec’s sewing allowed, and Nina, who was still reading
On the Origin of Species,
wisely brought the book with her. She plunked herself down on Bec’s cot, curled her legs underneath her, and soon enough the pages began to slowly flip.

I took the other end of the cot, curled my legs, and began to doodle on an empty notepad I’d brought along. I drew a starfish, then a seagull, then a whole bunch of seagulls picking at something on the beach, then a series of the wild rose bushes we saw throughout Woodmont, scrappy seaside shrubs offering the occasional scarlet bloom. As I drew, Nina’s pages continued to turn and the frenzied needle of Bec’s Singer continued to mount its attack on the stiff taffeta. But that afternoon things seemed to be going well for Bec. She’d finish a seam then triumphantly burst into a tune, something she must have been recalling from the radio, which that day, so Nina could better concentrate, Bec had turned off. As she worked, several times Bec turned in her chair to hold up a sleeve or a piece of collar for us to see. Other times she’d turn our way just to acknowledge the sea air. “The air’s nice here, don’t you think?” she asked us more than once. Each time she took a deep breath, not unlike the breaths my mother habitually took at Woodmont, though in Bec’s case I knew the fresh air she referred to was specific to her sunporch. Following her remarks, the three of us settled back into our respective occupations: the book, the doodles, the fiftieth-anniversary party dress.

That Wednesday was not particularly hot, but when the breezes swept past, they were as delightful a sensation as ever and seemed to carry with them all the good feeling that came with this quiet and industrious camaraderie. In this way the air circulating throughout Bec’s sunporch
was
good, uniquely so. Several times that afternoon my mother and Vivie walked through the living room, past the double doors leading to Bec’s sunporch, and they’d glance at us from the doorway with curiosity, even a longing, or so it seemed to me, to join us. But they’d made different life choices: they had no Singer, no vocation to speak of, no need for a bedroom that was as much a studio as a place to sleep. What would they do out there, even if we made the room to let them in? That afternoon it seemed clear to me that Bec’s sunporch was a world apart from Vivie’s and Ada’s, a world of our own, and though I wasn’t the intellectual that Nina so clearly already was, nor the master seamstress Bec was, I had a feeling that day that I was something,
something,
mere doodles and all, that even my own mother couldn’t understand.