Love Invents Us (3 page)

“Long life here,” she said, one thick, twisted finger digging into the middle of my palm. “Love affairs here. Did you bring Mrs. Hill some pork rinds?”

Dr. Hill had sent a note that Mrs. Hill had all sorts of things wrong with her heart and that salt and fat were out of
the question. Mrs. Hill and I had a deal: one palm reading for a bag of Salty Jims Pork Rinds. Mrs. Hill told me that Salty Jim was really Jim Buckton, who played trumpet with Duke Ellington in the fifties and had gone to high school with Mrs. Hill. Out of respect and school loyalty, we usually ate Salty Jim’s, but when the Red Owl Supermarket carried Li’l Pig Bar-B-Que Pork Rinds, we had to give old Jim the heave-ho and stock up on orange-speckled, amber clouds of pork fat.

“Open up that bag and set it right here. Let’s have that hand.” I popped open two cans of grape soda.

Mrs. Hill bent over my palm, and I could smell the greasy fruit smell of her hair pomade and the piercing eucalyptus of Vicks VapoRub, which she used prophylactically.

“The love affairs startin’ early.” She jabbed my palm and then held my own hand up to me, showing me the point at which the love line joined the life line.

“Really?” I said. I didn’t think of Mr. Klein or Mr. Canetti as love affairs. I knew that they had loved me and I had loved them back, but there wasn’t any sex, and you couldn’t have an affair without sex. When I was in fifth grade I had had a little sex with Seth Stern, but it wasn’t what I thought a love affair should be. We were playing James Bond, and he pulled down my underpants and stuck his hand between my legs. He was only in sixth grade, but he was shaving already, and I found the red nicks on his throat and chin mysterious, alluring tribal scars. He stuck one long finger inside me and rocked me roughly on his hand until we heard our parents gathering coats in the front hall. He pushed me back onto the bed and yanked up my panties while running his thumb along the inside of my thigh. My parents called for me, and we went
downstairs, all my attention on my bruised, wet center and on Seth, who insisted on shaking my fathers hand as we said good-bye. The tension and excitement and shame I felt were terrible and vivid. This was
life
. Out of remorse, or indifference, he wouldn’t answer my phone calls, and my parents had just about dropped the Sterns anyway, so I kept my virginity quite a while longer. I dreamt of his hands.

Mrs. Hill leaned back in her recliner and twisted her face away to watch me.

“In my closet there’s a hatbox, an old red hatbox. Bring it to me, sugar.”

Mrs. Hill only used endearments when she was asking me a favor or criticizing me.

The closet would have been my mother’s worst nightmare: blouses lying on the floor in their own wrinkled, dusty puddles, single shoes turned heel up, sticking into piles of sweaters and pants. On the top shelf were three hatboxes, one faded red, one with green and white stripes, and a yellowed one with grimy ivory tassels hanging from the sides. Mrs. Hill was much shorter than I was and could barely hobble from room to room; the hatboxes and the shelf they sat on were covered in dust.

Mrs. Hill rested the red hatbox in her purple velour lap, her bony knees hunched up to keep it from sliding to the floor. “Some pretty things in here. If I kept them out, a burglar might get them. No burglar’s going hunting through an old lady’s underthings, through a messy old closet.” I was always looking to justify the mess in my room, too.

Mrs. Hill lifted off the lid and handed it to me, the thick dust rippling slightly.

“What about these, miss? You don’t see these anymore.”

They were eight long silver straws with filigreed hearts at their ends. Mrs. Hill handed them to me one by one, and I ran my fingers over the thin silver lacework around the hearts’ edges. She waved one straw in the air.

“Spoons for iced tea. Plus the stems are hollow, so you can sip too. Wedding present.” She closed her eyes. “Wedding present from Alva and Edna Thomas, he worked with Mr. Hill. Iced tea and strawberry shortcake in the summer. And brandy cup and lemon cake with burnt sugar frosting at Christmas.”

I had never seen anything so fancy and frivolous in all my life. My parents’ house was all handsome, angular teak and tautly rounded leather, and each decorative piece had the added weight of culture or art or good taste. These were just pretty and gay, and as I held them I could feel that if I pressed down any harder at all, the hollow stems would give way.

“Are you going to give them to your daughter?” I asked, sure that the Dr. Vivian Hill in the pastel-tinted eight-by-ten on the mantelpiece, with one manicured hand on the hood of a big white Mercedes, black eyes flatly daring us to wonder how she got from here to there, would not want the spoons, or anything else from this small house with the rutted floors and soiled lampshades. Dr. Hill’s old bedroom was now the storage room—wire hangers, dresses from twenty years ago, shoes slit for corns and bunions and still not right, cat food for the cat that died six months before I came, cookie tins filled with rubber bands and green stamps. The only bit of Dr. Hill left was the graduation tassel used to pull down the window
shade. Dr. Hill stayed at the Great Neck Inn when she visited.

Mrs. Hill made a feeble grab for the spoons, snatching at the air to my left. “Give them to Vivian? Why should I give them to anyone? I’m not dead. Gimme those spoons, girl.”

I put all but one of the spoons back into her hands; they stuck out like silver pins in an old brown cushion. She sorted them and wrapped them in the tissue paper. Before she could count them up and accuse me, I handed her the last one.

“Don’t forget this, it fell off your lap,” I lied.

She gestured for the lid. “Next time, we can look at some more treasures,” she said.

I put the red hatbox back and quickly lifted out the striped one. Inside were twelve silver spoons with short, thickly twisted stems, the ends crowned with tiny enameled portraits of long-haired, biblical-looking men. Each little white face was touched with two pink dots for cheeks and pairs of blue or brown dots for eyes. Their hair was several different shades of brown.

“Don’t be goin’ in my things, now.”

“I’m not, I was just trying to get this put back where it belongs. I was tidying up your closet, as a matter of fact.”

“Uh-huh. Snooping and spying is more like it.”

I knew she didn’t mind; it wasn’t like there were millions of people interested in Mrs. Hill’s life, never mind the contents of her closet.

Mrs. Hill had two cookbooks:
The Joy of Cooking
and
The Paschal Lamb
, which was put out by the Greater A.M.E. Zion
Church of Philadelphia and was almost as long as the gravy-stained Rombauer bible. I read them both, and once Mrs. Hill showed me how to light her chipped gas stove, I was fearless. I didn’t see what harm I could do. No Limoges plates to break, nothing to stain or put back the wrong way, no system to throw out of whack. Mrs. Hill’s spice rack was six tins of Durkee’s in a shoebox on the counter. I put my hair in a ponytail, and Mrs. Hill wrapped a pink gingham towel around my waist. I made chicken-and-dumplings. I used lard and cornflake crumbs, and when Mrs. Hill said she’d loved Brunswick stew as a girl, I turned to this page in the
Lamb
and said, “All I need is corn. And a squirrel.” I made sweet potato casserole and angels on horseback for Mrs. Hill’s birthday. I made lasagna and divided it into four little loaf pans so Mrs. Hill could just heat them up during the week. I precooked them so if she didn’t have the energy to put them in the oven she could eat them cold without getting some kind of uncooked-meat disease.

At school on Monday, I asked Mimi Tedeschi, who practically lived in church, who she thought the men on the spoons could be.

“The apostles. Don’t you know who the apostles are? Peter, Andrew, John, Matthias, James the Greater …” She rattled off all twelve names. “I guess being Jewish you didn’t learn about them. My grandmother has a set like that. Apostle spoons. Hers are all on a little wood stand over the fireplace.”

After a few Saturdays, Mrs. Hill and I had gone through all three hatboxes. Besides the apostles and the iced tea stirrers, there were two small bowls of cranberry glass set in baskets of
braided gold wire; four monogrammed silver napkin rings; six half-size teacups and matching saucers, each with a different flower garlanding the sides of the cup and the face of the saucer, each with one coy bud resting at the bottom of the cup. I loved them all. Mrs. Hill would hand them to me to admire, and then we’d rewrap them in tissue and I’d put them back in the closet.

In November, Mrs. Hill was always cold. She was tired of the hatboxes, tired of reading my palm, and tired of lasagna. She would fall asleep around two and wake up as the sky was getting dark.

“Don’t you leave while I’m sleeping. Elizabeth, you hear me? Don’t you leave if I’m not awake.”

“Okay. I mean, even if I did, you’d be fine. I mean, nothing would happen.”

“Don’t tell me what’s gonna happen in my own house. You come and wake me up before you leave.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The next Saturday, she fell asleep in her chair right after lunch. I went into her bedroom and stood in the mouth of the closet, staring up at the row of hatboxes. I took down the apostles and chose one whose eyes seemed to tilt up at me beneath lashes as dark and spiky as Seth Stern’s. I put him into my backpack and changed Mrs. Hill’s bed, trying to hold my breath until I got the clean sheets on and the old ones stuffed into the washer.

The following Saturday, I took one with blue eyes, and the Saturday after that, another dark-eyed one. I wanted to take the lady’s-slipper teacup next.

Mrs. Hill said to me, “Could you come this Tuesday? Vivian’s coming by, for just a little while. I think we could do a little cleaning up before.”

I had to smile; when “we” cleaned up, Mrs. Hill put on an old plaid apron and sat back in her recliner while I scrubbed the backsplash and threw out dead plants and moldy bread.

I didn’t like cleaning, and Mrs. Hill never offered to pay me, and even if she had, Reverend Shales had made it very clear that I was not ever to take money from her.

“I can’t. I’ve got school stuff. The paper. I have to go to a meeting.” I didn’t think Mrs. Hill would know that the special ed class put out the school paper all by itself.

“I think you might have to skip that meeting, sugar. I don’t like to put you out, you know that, but I really do need your help on Tuesday. Can’t have my Doctor FancyPants shakin’ her head, talkin’ about putting Mrs. Hill in some
home
. I need you Tuesday.”

If I came Tuesday, I would be there all the time. I could feel her need for me reaching out like terrible black roots, wrapping themselves right around me, burying me in wet brown earth.

“I’m really sorry. I just can’t. I have to be at that meeting. Maybe there’s someone else from church.” The A.M.E. Zion Church seemed to me to be overflowing with neatly dressed gloved and hatted ladies eager to help.

“Have someone from church come in here? Don’t talk crazy. You’re the one I need. And I need you on Tuesday. It’s not too much to ask if you think on it.”

I didn’t say anything, hoping that she’d get embarrassed about being so insistent.

“Come here, sugar. It’s not too much to ask since you’ve got three of my spoons. Three silver spoons and you won’t come on Tuesday and help out your friend Mrs. Hill? I call that selfish. And stupid. I call that stupid. Steal from me and then make me mad? Don’t you think I’m going to go right to Reverend Shales and tell him that nice little Jewish girl he found for me is stealing my silver? Don’t you think I’m going to have to call your father and tell him that his daughter’s a thief, taking advantage of a poor old lady, half-blind and living all on her own?”

“Jesus,” I said, keeping my voice low, so she wouldn’t leap out of her recliner and attack me.

“Don’t
you
call on Jesus.” Her voice softened. “You can have the spoons. You can have a teacup too. I can’t get by with only Saturdays, and that’s the truth.” She leaned back in her chair, pressing her cheek into the ratty old doily she’d pinned to the headrest.

I went over to her, more ashamed that I had made her beg than about the stealing. I would make it up to her; I would walk in the pathways of righteousness every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday for the rest of her life.

E
llyn and Cindi, who had followed me faithfully every day through the winter of sixth grade yelling “Thou shalt not steal” and “Watch your stuff, here comes the thief,” moved on to boys and pretty, popular, less honestly aggressive selves. They said hi when we passed in the halls, to show that they were
nice
girls, but they didn’t say my name, to make it clear that I was not part of their group. There was only one person still interested in my criminal past, a big redheaded eighth-grader, arms like pocked marble, lashless blue frog eyes watching for me as she leaned, surefooted and excited, on the door of my locker. I was so far off the mainland of junior high that I couldn’t see she was barely one notch above me on the reject pile. I didn’t even know she was crazy, but I don’t think anyone did. I thought she was just mean and my destiny.

I tried to find safe corner seats at isolated tables for study hall, but every other day Deenie sat down across from me. The first Monday, she cracked her knuckles a few times and handed me a sheet of paper. She had drawn a picture of a fat little girl hanging from a gibbet, wavy lines indicating the swinging of her feet. In later pictures the girl was frying in the
electric chair, hair sprayed straight out from her head; one time she was lying in six pieces on the ground, with “Thief = Shit” carefully blocked out under her in strawberry-scented marker. Deenie smiled at me, clinically curious. I counted the dots in the grey ceiling tiles, wondering whether I would die or just be paralyzed for life if I jumped from the second-story window. I bit the insides of my cheeks to keep my face still and ran my tongue over the tiny grooved holes inside my mouth. Her notes got more elaborate, whole paragraphs describing my crimes, illustrated by drawings of my violent, Road Runner-like deaths. At the end of seventh grade she went to a private high school. Five years later, I saw her sitting across from me at the Aegean Diner, drinking coffee and poking at piles of change scattered over the tabletop. Her red hair was dyed black. She nodded vaguely, and I have to say I was a little hurt that she didn’t remember me.