Keeping Secrets (21 page)

“So how’s school?” he asked.

“Fine.” She smiled again and took a sip. “But it’s harder than I thought. I am really having to work.”

“I’m sure it couldn’t be that bad. Not for a smart girl like you.” Rosalie placed a loaf of fruitcake on the table as she said the words. It, like the silver tree, had been on sale at the dime store.

“No, thanks,’” Emma gestured and then pushed back a forelock of her blonde hair. It was getting longer, gave her a different look. “Everybody in the program’s smart. But they all went to better schools.”

Rosalie stiffened, her lips tight. “I’m sure you got a perfectly good education at Cypress State. After all, you won all those honors.”

Emma spread her hands on the tablecloth and looked up at Rosalie. “You don’t understand. Some schools
are
better than others.”

“I’m sure I don’t know. It seems to me that all you have to do is apply yourself.”

Emma’s hand trembled as she lifted her cup of tea. She always sees things her way, Emma thought. It’s as if she looks at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, so that everything is smaller, not larger.

But already, just four months away from home, Emma knew that the world was so much bigger than West Cypress—just as Herman had always promised.

She’d have to go see him while she was home. She’d have to explain how she felt about Bernie. Would he understand that it was all tied together, getting away, looking forward, looking backward?

Atlanta was huge—it seemed to go on forever. And everything was different. She wasn’t getting A’s on her papers in graduate school. But on the other hand, she was swamped with calls for dates. She’d hung out in Manuel’s Tavern, with paintings of naked women on the walls. She’d eaten Chinese food. She’d met a poet in one of her classes who had long hair, smoked marijuana and lived with a bunch of other strange-looking people in a house they called “the commune.” She’d seen a Fellini movie and another by Bergman,
The Seventh Seal
, she hadn’t understood a word of. What did all this have to do with Bernie? Maybe the point was that it had
nothing
to do with him. She felt like she’d been given one tiny bite of strawberry shortcake. She wanted more.

She knew that she was breaking Bernie’s heart, and she was sorry. She truly was. But she simply didn’t have any choice. She couldn’t keep pretending that she was going to marry him in June when every single fiber in her body said, “No, you’re not.” It was as clear as if she had a radio signal in her head that broadcast the words:
You’ve only begun. Keep going.

“Well,” Emma said brightly, “I’ve made lots of friends. And Atlanta’s
so
beautiful. It’s too bad when you were there we didn’t have time to drive around and see the gorgeous old homes.”

“Rich people.” Rosalie said the words as if she were spitting something nasty out of her mouth.

“I beg your pardon?” Inside, Emma started to shiver. This house made her feel cold and deprived. The windows were battened down, the rooms clammy with the stench of arrested time.

“Rich people,” Rosalie repeated. “Not for the likes of us.”

“Well, it doesn’t hurt to look.”

“Just as long as you keep in mind who you are and where you’re from.”

Emma stood then, pushing back her chair. She had to get out for a minute. “Excuse me,” she mumbled, “bathroom.”

She stood at the sink and scooped cold water on her face. She stared at her dripping image in the mirror and whispered, “Calm down. You’re letting her get to you already.”

And then she asked herself, Why are you here, Emma? You finally got away. Why didn’t you stay gone?

She hadn’t come back for Christmas, when Jake would sleep late and leave his presents untouched under the tree for days.

“He hates it,” she’d told Rosalie for years. “Jews don’t do Christmas.”

Rosalie sniffed, “He just does it to be mean.”

It certainly wasn’t for the Christmas meal, a fatty hen masquerading as a turkey, devoured in silence, as all their family meals were, in ten minutes.

It wasn’t because she missed Rosalie, her
stepmother
, to whom she’d never said that word.

No, she’d never confronted her daddy and Rosalie with their secret. It was as if the knowing of it was enough. And once she knew, she’d rolled it up and swallowed it and kept it deep inside in a little room, shut off. It was as if their secret had become
her
secret. She knew, but she wasn’t going to tell them.

And through those two years that she’d nurtured the secret inside her, her affection for Jake and disaffection for Rosalie had grown. He lied, too, she told herself when she thought about it. And he was the same distant, difficult, silent, mercurial Jake. But he’s your
daddy
. He’s your
blood
. And he married Rosalie, she’d begun to figure out, for
your
sake.

Back in the kitchen, Rosalie blew on her tea and said, “She’s just wasting her time at school. Wasting her time and our money.”

Jake shook his head. He didn’t agree with that.

“I knew that’s what would happen the minute she got away. She’s gone over there to play. And Lord only knows what else.”

“Ro…” he began to answer that playing wasn’t such an awful thing, but Emma walked back in and he stopped.

Emma’s voice was light again, though tight. If she were here to talk to Bernie again, and to Herman, and to say hello to Jake, she’d grit her teeth and make the best of it with Rosalie. You can do it, Emma, she cheered herself on, you’ve had lots of practice.

“I’ve been tutoring too, in Atlanta.” She picked up her tea. “Helping kids who are behind in school.”

“Where do you find the time to do all this?” Rosalie shot Jake a look: See, it was just as I thought.

“It’s only a couple of hours a week. Some of us take a bus to their neighborhood from the campus.”

“Children don’t try very hard these days. Most of them need a paddle, not a tutor.” Rosalie stood from the table then and rinsed their cups in the plastic basin of saved tepid water that stood in the sink.

“These kids need special help.”

Emma knew she was heading down a path toward trouble. But hadn’t she known, since she started this conversation, that the punch line was something that Rosalie wasn’t going to like? Big surprise. There was no completely neutral territory. Every conversation they’d ever had was laced with mines.

“Why do they need help?” Rosalie turned from the dishes.

“They’re colored. You know how it is. They haven’t had a lot.”

“Niggers! You’re teaching niggers?”

“You know I hate that word!”

Rosalie felt a sick headache coming on. She wouldn’t sleep all night.

“Here I am giving up my teaching job that I’ve worked so hard at all these years, and you’re over there in Atlanta going out of your way to help the niggers. Emma, I swear, I don’t know what’s come over you!”

“Things are not the same everywhere as they are in West Cypress.”

“They have schools, don’t they?”

“Separate schools. And everybody knows they aren’t as good.”

“I don’t know why not. It’s their own who are teaching them. If they want them to be smarter, they ought to do a better job.”

“You just don’t understand.”

“I understand plenty. I understand that you’ve been gone four months and already you’ve turned into an integrationist—and I don’t know what else!” Rosalie could feel the tears rising. She knew that any minute she was going to start to cry.

“This isn’t new. It’s not as if you haven’t heard me say these same things since I was old enough to figure them out.”

“It’s all those books you read. And that Herman Graubart. You think I don’t know, all those ideas he put into your head?”

“He’s never told me anything but the truth.” And you? What have you told me? The words hung unspoken.

Rosalie knew that this wasn’t the time, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I guess he told you that it was all right to…to…sleep with his son, too?”

There. There it was.
All the cards lay face up on the table. Now let’s see how you play this hand, Miss Emma.

Emma looked as if she’d been slapped—which was what she ought to be, Rosalie thought, slapped until she had good sense.

“No,” Emma answered slowly then, staring Rosalie straight in the eye.
You want it? You’re going to get it.

She has no shame.
The thought took Rosalie’s breath away.

“He never told me sex was right. He never told me it was wrong either. We talked about it, though; we didn’t hide it in some closet like a dirty secret.”

Rosalie held a hand over her heart. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“I don’t want to hear it, either. I walk into this house five minutes, and you’re at me—picking at my underwear, for Christ’s sake.”

“Emma!” Rosalie was white around the mouth.

“Emma what? There’s lots worse things than taking the Lord’s name in vain, Mother.”

“Yes, and I guess you’re proud you’ve done some of them.”

Emma placed both hands flat down on the kitchen table. “What exactly is it that’s gnawing at you? What is it that you want? You want to talk to me about my underwear, about my ideas on race, religion, sex, education? Do you want to sit down and have the very first intelligent conversation we’ve ever had, or do you want to just stand there and pick at old scabs?”

Rosalie’s hands fluttered. “You’ve gone crazy! Off to school for four months and you’ve thrown Bernie over and you’re too good for us! But you always thought that…that you were too good for your father and mother.”

Three beats passed. Then Emma opened her mouth and said it: “You’re not my mother.”

Rosalie reeled back against the counter.

Then everything moved in slow motion, and it was like she was watching Rosalie from a far distance, as if she were standing on a faraway hill. This must be what it feels like to be in shock, Emma thought. I didn’t really mean to say that. I’ve walked around with it all these years, not knowing, then knowing, but not knowing how to say it, to ask it, once I knew it.

Yet
there
, as if the thought had birthed itself, it just plopped out.

“Emma.” Jake was standing now, moving toward her, his arms outstretched.

“No! Don’t touch me!”

Tears banked on Jake’s cheeks, then fell. He looked from Rosalie to Emma, then back again. “I told you it would never work, Ro. I told you that from the start.”

“My fault! That’s right, make it all
my
fault,” Rosalie screamed. “As if I haven’t suffered enough.”

Emma wheeled on her, furious. “Exactly what is it that you’ve suffered, Mother? Why is that you always think that you have such a monopoly on pain? Why do you think that your life is so much more terrible than anyone else’s? What about my mother’s life?” And then her voice climbed and broke. “Who the hell
is
Helen Kaplan anyway? Or
was
she?” Then, strangling through tears, she sounded like a little girl. She turned to Jake. “Where is my mother, Daddy?”

Rosalie wheeled and fumbled through the double hallway curtains that she’d nailed in place to keep in the precious heat. She ran blindly from the room.

Later, lying on her bed, Rosalie could hear Jake and Emma murmuring in the kitchen. Their voices rose and fell, but she couldn’t make out the words.

* * *

There wasn’t that much to tell, though Jake tried to answer Emma’s questions: No, he and Helen hadn’t known each other very long. They met in New York. He didn’t know exactly why she was there. No, he knew nothing of her past. A little town in Georgia or Alabama—he wasn’t quite sure where she was from. He didn’t know her relatives, didn’t know whether there were any. What she was like? Why, she was very nice. She was a very nice woman.

He didn’t have the language to describe how he’d felt about Helen. He couldn’t tell Emma that he thought about her every day, that her softness and her warmth still filled his daydreams and nights. To explain, he’d have to talk about himself, and he didn’t know how to do that.

He didn’t stutter when he talked about Helen, Emma thought. Though he fumbled when he tried to explain why they’d kept the secret so long.

“Rosalie loves you, Emma. She thought if she raised you as her own, it would be better.”

Emma shook her head. She still didn’t understand. She doubted that she ever would.

Yet she did feel easier toward her daddy, though not toward Rosalie. Rosalie—that’s what she’d decided to call her from now on.

Herman had warned her not to do this in anger. But that was what Rosalie always made her feel, anger, as if she were personally responsible for all of Rosalie’s hurt. Hell, she didn’t even know what the woman was hurting
about
. But whatever it was, she wasn’t going to feel ever again that it was her fault. Nope, not now that her daddy had told her all the secrets.