Replacement Child (20 page)

“Can you get out tonight?” he whispered.

“I have no idea. What do you mean?”

“In an hour. Sneak out of your room and meet me by that oak tree at the top of the hill over there.”

“Really?”

“I don’t want to let you go yet.”

No one had ever said anything remotely like that to me before, and I wanted more. When I got back to my room and told my bunkmate, she said, “You have to go! I’ll help you.”

So after lights-out, she helped me stuff my blanket and use one girl’s wig to make it look like I was in the bed when they came around to count heads. I snuck down the stairs with my shoes in my hand and out to the oak tree.

Dean was waiting with a blanket spread out on the grass under the tree. It was a clear, cool, New England summer evening. The stars were in collusion with his plan, softly lighting our rendezvous. We talked for a while before Dean pulled me toward him and kissed me—the most kissing I’d ever done before. I tried to be nonchalant, like it was just another day in my glamorous life, but my heart was racing when I ran back to my room.

That summer I found a new confidence in being Dean’s girl. It was the start of my looking to define myself through men who saw something special in me.

1968

I
N JUNIOR HIGH
, when kids in my class were going steady for a week at a time and then moving on to the next, I collected ID bracelets from anyone who gave me a second look. Some of my girlfriends were more discerning and chose their steady guys with much more thought; some even passed on an invitation. I could never do that. I always felt that if I refused, it might be my very last chance. This, after ten or twelve boyfriends over a few months. Gratefully, going steady in seventh grade back then mostly entailed walking home from school together, letting the boy carry your books, and maybe partaking in some tentative closed-mouth kissing. Occasionally, there would be a school dance where you were expected to dance the slow dances with your steady. But by the end of the night, I had usually switched boyfriends anyway. The strobe lights and loud music made it surreal. Your life could change at one of those dances.

Music had also become a way for me to infiltrate the maledominated garage band scene. There was only room for one girl singer in a band, even if I was grudgingly included to sing the Jefferson Airplane or Janis Joplin tunes they wanted to play. I
liked being the only girl in the room at rehearsals. I could imitate Grace Slick pretty well, but the growl of Janis was something that eluded me—and got me kicked out of a few groups.

In high school, I finagled my way into the band with a lead singer I had a crush on. I’d seen him in a play at school and was instantly in love. His band played lots of Crosby, Stills, and Nash tunes, and I knew I could help them out on the harmonies. But really it was Ray I was after. He was a senior and I was a freshman, but I didn’t think that should matter. He looked like a scruffy Robert Redford, with red-blonde shaggy hair and a drooping mustache that tickled when we kissed.

Going out with him was a big topic in our house. My parents went ballistic the first time Ray pulled up in his bright yellow VW van with its white roof. My father shook his head and muttered; my mother worried her eyebrows into one big wrinkle. But when Ray came in and met them, he was very charming. I was just glad they didn’t look into the back of his van; Ray had taken all the seats out and put in a big mattress.

Ray was very much a gentleman. No one would have believed it to look at him, or his van, but he always stopped short of getting really physical with me. He kept telling me I was too young, and when things would heat up, he would distract me with one of our philosophical discussions about whether the Beatles or Rolling Stones were the fathers of modern rock ’n’ roll. I knew nothing at all about sex, or even the preliminaries. If Ray had pressed me at all, I probably would have done anything to keep him around telling me how pretty and talented I was.

One late afternoon, coming back from rehearsal and a little bit of a party, Ray and I pulled up to my house to find chaos. Two police cars flashed red over my front yard, the sound of their radios crackling.

“Oh my God! The cops are here!” was all I could register in my brain as Ray pulled the van into the driveway. I sat paralyzed, thinking something had happened to my parents or Linda while I was out partying.

“Let me just pull myself together before I get out,” I told Ray. I realized I was looking a little too disheveled to face my parents and the police. I wanted to get into the bathroom and brush my teeth, splash my face, and find something to cover the smell of the grass we’d been smoking.

But Linda was running toward us, barefoot. She was never barefoot. She looked a mess, with her hair flying and her shirt hanging out of her pants.

“Where the hell have you been? We got a call that said it was you, and you had been hit by a car. Did you call?”

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m right here!”

“Well, you better go in and explain where you were. We couldn’t find you anywhere. Mom and Dad are frantic.” She gave Ray a dirty look.

“Just let me get into the bathroom first, okay? Before I have to talk to anyone.”

“Okay, I’ll cover for you.”

It turned out it was a crank call. My mother couldn’t remember if they even said my name—just that it sounded like me. It was probably her imagination. Imagining the worst that could
happen, as usual. Me, lying in a ditch bleeding, miraculously crawling to a pay phone, finding a dime to call her one last time before collapsing into a coma. The dangerous, random world sucking me in to a black hole.

2006

I
’
M TRYING TO
get organized. My office is a mess of newspapers, index cards, and photos. There have been various methods I’ve tried over the last year to do this. File folders, file boxes, a special binding system that lets you pull out pages and replace them easily. None has worked for me. Now, I’m trying my old method of using notebooks. For the news clippings, I’m using clear page protectors. So now comes the task of filtering through the stuff for the umpteenth time. Each time, though, I find another nugget that sparks a feeling, a story, or a memory.

I find a headline that stops me cold in
The Elizabeth Daily Journal,
January 24, 1952—two days after the crash: “Funeral Rites Held for Mandel Girl.”

The date of the article makes me realize that my mother would not have been able to attend her daughter’s funeral. She would have still been in the hospital recovering from her injuries. The burial could not be postponed, since Jewish law requires burial within twenty-four hours of death. Missing her last chance to say good-bye was undoubtedly one of many obstacles in my mother’s
grieving process that may have explained why she never fully healed, if it is even possible to heal from the death of one’s child.

My mother was denied all the usual paths for coping with grief. There was no way to go back to Donna’s room, reduced to ash, to look through her things and remember. No photos survived as a record of their life together, until they could later gather some from relatives.

Added to this, cremation is not recognized as a legitimate method of burial in the Jewish religion, though there was no choice where Donna was concerned.

Arrangements for Donna’s funeral, I knew, were entirely in my father’s hands. He would have had only a day to find a plot and a pine box, according to Jewish tradition, and to secure the rabbi. He managed it all mechanically, like a sleepwalker.

The morning of the funeral, I imagine my father went to the hospital with the rabbi to have the
keria
ribbons pinned on both himself and my mother. He would have taken her bandaged hand lightly in his as the rabbi said a short prayer and pinned them both with the black frayed ribbon. I can envision him leaning carefully over the bed and kissing my mother, their tears mingling.

The scene takes shape in my mind. On the winding narrow road to the grave site, the line of dark cars split the white-on-gray landscape. Tires rolled across wet tarmac. Only the whip-suck-whip of windshield wipers broke the leaden quiet.

The single plot nestled against a large oak tree, purchased in haste, was surrounded by deceased strangers, with no other Mandels nearby. My father told me the thought had never crossed his mind to buy cemetery plots for his young family.

Teachers and parents from Donna’s school came to pay tribute at the funeral. Many neighbors, some who escaped the crash or ran from the flames, were there: girls from Battin High; Karl Reuling Jr., who lived upstairs; the St. Mary’s kids from the candy store; Jack and Florence Earlman, whose daughter Sheila was still in intensive care. Some officials were there, including the Elizabeth mayor, the chief of the fire department, and the principal of Woodrow Wilson School.

It was unreal, unbelievable to my father that his precious girl was gone. Acting purely on autopilot, he was barely able to put one foot in front of the other and felt lost without my mother by his side.

The gathering at the grave was respectfully silent as the rabbi read passages in English and Hebrew. They joined him in saying the Kaddish, but my father would not have recited the part of the Kaddish that translates to “blessed is the righteous judge.” For him, this would have been a lie. He never saw the senseless death of his little girl as anything righteous. In fact, his faith was shaken to its core.

I follow my vision of the day through. As Donna’s pine box was lowered into the ground, my father made no attempt to wipe away his tears. His sisters, Sylvia and Ruth, flanked him and each took an arm. He was the first to place a stone on the grave— Jewish tradition to leave behind a marker to show the deceased is not forgotten by family and friends.

Most of the crowd then made their way to their cars, but my father’s sisters stayed with him until the last shovel of dirt was tamped down.

Afterward, the family gathered at my Aunt Sylvia’s house. Each person stopped to wash their hands from the pitcher of water at the doorway to purify themselves after close proximity to the dead. Inside, mirrors were covered with black cloth.

My father knew he couldn’t be away from my mother and Linda during the entire
shiva
period. At the end of the day, he found a bit of dirt from the garden outside Sylvia’s home and placed it inside his shoe, so as not to forget his mourning state, and returned to the hospital.

I
PUT ASIDE
the news clipping that placed me so squarely at my sister’s funeral.