When Madeline Was Young (19 page)

When I was pushed I did feel the hand, the nudge that tipped me over. I didn't at first know it was Jerry Pindel I was on top of, both of us tangled in each other, both sinking to the black line. When we blasted up, Jerry's arm was around my neck. "You fuck!" he spat.

The lifeguard was standing on his platform, blowing his whistle as if he were screaming into it. For an instant I was as startled by Jerry, by his face, as I was by being in the water. His hair was slicked back, so for once he was visible, a kid with enormous dark eyes, wide-set, his skin brown and clear, his mouth, two peaks at the upper lip, the slight downturn of the full lower lip, the feature that probably drove the girls crazy.

"Sorry," I said to Jerry. "Someone pushed me."

"Nigger." He splashed me with both palms, the bitter wave going down my throat.

It was after I got out and lay on the cement that I began to feel the heat of the broad hand that had been on my back. Had it been an ordinary shove? It wasn't that it had been unusually forceful but that there had been keen feeling behind it, a reason beyond playfulness or even regular old retribution. I had been dunked and launched against my will into the water hundreds of times, but I came to know slowly that the push had been different. There had been malice in it, I was sure; the hand had burned.

When the Simonsons climbed out, they settled several yards from me, lying on their stomachs, shivering, their arms tucked under themselves. If I closed my eyes halfway, my wet lashes served as a curtain, veiling the guests in my field of vision even as I looked at them. Cleveland had known what I'd been thinking as I'd hesitated at the water's edge, and what better way to serve me right than to make me drink his bath, to choke on it. While we were still wet, the lifeguards blew their whistles for rest period. The mothers put on their white rubber caps, buckled the straps by their ears, and began their languid crawls down the placid lanes, fifteen minutes for their exercise. Cleveland sat up and cocked his head slightly, once, twice, so that at first I thought he had a nervous tic. When he did it again with irritation, I understood it was time to go. He was annoyed that I had to take a moment to talk to Madeline, to tell her we were leaving, to remind her to look both ways crossing the two streets between the park and home. It wasn't often that she went past our block by herself, but she was capable of it, at the curb turning this way, that way, checking again, the hard gaze along the empty street. When she was sure there were no cars in sight, she ran as fast as she could.

The Simonsons and I had been quiet before, but after we left the pool our silence thickened. We moved around each other as if none of us were there, as if we believed that if we could shut our mouths a lit-

tle tighter and stare harder straight ahead we would gratefully find ourselves alone. My mother expected me to show them the town, and we began an aimless walk. She must have thought I'd suddenly become like a middle-aged docent, explaining the salient features of the Prairie Style architecture: the leaded windows, the low roofs--isn't it interesting, and they all leak! Remember the great Frank Lloyd Wright's idea of organic architecture, you know the concept, boys and girls, integrating the site and the structure, just as the fellow surely did who built your cold-water firetrap in the city.

The Simonsons did not glance up on the block where there were several famous examples, including Wright's home and studio--heads to the pavement, all of us walking as if we were shackled together but five feet apart. We went on to the monkeys in their sawdusty cages at the department store, and because the air was still and heavy upon us we drifted into the library, down the cool dim hall to the drinking fountain. And out again into the scorching sun. That was as much fun as I could provide for the underprivileged. In a moment of willful charity I supposed that they had as much interest in staying with the Macivers as I had in being their host; I was sorry for the three of us. When we got back to the house, Uncle Harv, the mailman, was stuffing our letters into the slot on the porch. He reacted just as the women at the pool had, turning, gaping, and then, when he'd gathered himself, becoming hearty in his tolerance--nay, his affection, his abiding love--for the Negro. "Greetings!" he cried, a stiff grin on his face.

"Uhh," one of them said.

Cleveland went up to my room and shut the door, and I went down the basement to sit on the beige-and-brown-speckled linoleum behind the bar. Why had my mother sicced the Simonsons on us, on the neighborhood, on Uncle Harv? Why? If she so dearly wanted to do grandiose deeds, why hadn't she been swimming in the piss water with the poor children? Why hadn't she taken the burn of that push? She was the worst of the suburban do-gooders--Louise was right about her hypocrisy. When she called me for dinner I didn't come, no
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ntil they were all finished, and I didn't go along with them to the park to hear the Kiwanis playing patriotic music in the gazebo. I didn't feel well, I said, unable to look at her, unable to look at any of them.

Cleveland and I were supposed to share my room and the sleeping porch, but I chose instead to lie awake on the basement floor wrapped in an old army blanket. My mother had demanded I move my snakes downstairs, so why not sleep with the bedfellows to which I was accustomed? Let the Africans and the Anglos alike roast in their sheets upstairs, let them dream of their cultural experiences, let my mother stew in her own virtue, let the flame of her purity turn her black.

In her own way there was probably no one more racist than Russia. She was leery of the project and kept her distance from the guests. Even though there were a handful of middle-class minority families in town, Russia didn't like to see the coloreds on our streets, in a place she felt they didn't belong. I remember more than once walking with her to the grocery store and her saying under her breath, "What's that spook doing here? Where's he think he's going?"

On the third day of Project Share, Buddy arrived. My cousin strolled through the door, took one look at Cleveland slumped on the sofa staring at nothing, and said, "Hey." There was the short flurry of hellos for the rest of us, and then Buddy, harking to the sound of the dribbling ball, suggested they go out into the alley. So obvious, so simple. He had been on a bus for ten hours, and had no wish to sit in the living room answering my mother's questions. The neighborhood boys with their St. Christopher medals around their hot necks opened out and drew Buddy and his friend into their heat. "Great to see you," Buddy said, as if he'd known them all for a long time. He peeled off his shirt and threw it on the trash can, his summer skin the color of a glazed ham. The game began.

That was the year my parents were trying to remodel the kitchen. As if it weren't enough trouble having visitors, the downstairs was torn apart, the laths and studs exposed, the sink standing alone without countertops, the stove and refrigerator on the back porch. I never ha
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he sense that money was tight; in fact, I never thought very much about how my parents managed. It wasn't something they talked about in front of us, but they were careful, I later realized, planning for the things we needed, saving for our college, and they had a stash for Madeline, too, if the time came when they couldn't care for her. There was starter money from the Schillers, but my father was dutiful about adding to it. As part of their remodeling economy, he brought home a discarded countertop from the museum with cabinets that had been used in a hands-on exhibit about Turkey. No one had bothered to clean any of it out, and so you'd open the cupboards or a drawer to find a replica of a pitcher, a stone shovel, or a jar of beans, what the Hittites might have had for supper, a slab of dried fish from the Bosporus, a vessel filled with fossilized lamb meat. A shame to waste the perfectly good pine cupboards and the long red Formica, the dream kitchen of the ancients.

Once Buddy was around, the days with the Simonsons fell into a sluggish order. There were some mandatory educational trips that my mother planned for all of us, excursions to the zoo and the arboretum, but when we weren't on those forced marches, Buddy was out in the alley with Cleveland or exploring the town with Malzena in tow, buying lunch at a joint called The Beef, and going to movies. Buddy and Cleveland took over my room, their underwear and socks and wet towels and comics on the rug, the desk, the beds, the closet floor. I remained in the basement. I had a job three mornings a week at the Field Museum and a regimen of tennis practice, but even when I was around, the dynamic threesome seemed to forget I was living in the house. It didn't matter. I didn't care. I had a freshly dead male baboon to work on, and in the long afternoons I'd take him from his plastic bag that filled the basement refrigerator and disassemble him bit by bit on the bar.

The first time Malzena saw him, I was slicing open the abdominal cavity, and the intestines, which I'd nicked, were predictably foul-smelling, the stench rising into the room. She narrowed her eyes
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plugged her nose, swore, told me I was sick in the head, and retreated into the TV corner. At that point in the visit, she'd gotten bored with the array of Madeline's dolls, which had held her interest, as old as she was, for a day or two. After she'd exhausted that entertainment, and after Buddy arrived and the boys were outside in the alley, she often came downstairs and turned on the TV, an activity we were ordinarily not allowed before nightfall. The few Maciver rules were breaking for the wretched of the earth: dessert before dinner, and also after; chewing gum in the art museum; candy in the bedrooms; TV by day. I examined my baboon to the flickering light of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

Because Mikey was gone, Madeline stood by during the dissections. She was just as surprised as I that the stomach smelled like a salady mix of leaves and fruit. She wasn't exactly interested, but she wasn't repulsed, either. It was something to do, sit at the bar as I worked. While I was at it I'd talk, explaining the systems both to her and to myself. I'd make an incision and draw back the layers of skin and muscle, and she'd bend forward to see, dutifully saying, "What's that for?" She asked the same questions on most days, which helped me refine my explanations. Every now and then she'd remember the animal--"Poor monkey," she'd say in a pouty voice--but on the whole her pity was perfunctory.

There was one day early on in the visit when Buddy came downstairs, I suppose because he knew he hadn't talked to me much. "Why don't you play ball with the alley gang?" he said.

"I never got in the habit," I said, truthfully, the Pindels and the Lembergers and the Van Normans so feral and loud, they'd scared me when I was little. I glanced down at my mother's faded blue smock, which I always wore for dissections, wishing that for once I hadn't put it on.

Madeline was sitting at the bar kicking a foot against her stool. "How you doing?" Buddy asked her, both of us, I guess, his charity cases.

When she didn't say anything, I answered for her. "Madeline's friend is on vacation."

"My boyfriend!" she clarified, suddenly enlivened.

I knew Buddy was looking at me for verification, but I kept my eye on the glory of the liver, so darkly purple.

"Where is he?" Buddy asked, a question that could only make Madeline go off to cry for the rest of the afternoon.

Chapter
Ten

THERE CAME, ON ONE OF THOSE SUFFOCATING JULY NIGHTS
during the Simonsons' visit, an upset, a cruelty that I suppose I should have been prepared for, that Buddy, ironically, had made me think possible. The house had been closed all day against the heat, and at last, in the early evening, it had become warmer inside than out. The doors and windows were opened, the sodden air beginning the slow drift through the downstairs. My father had grilled hamburgers on the patio, and we were all sitting at the dining-room table, beaded up with sweat as if we'd been digging trenches in the noonday sun.

Louise, fresh from Stephen's air-conditioned bungalow, happened by, bringing along her musical soulmate. "Good of you," I said to her, "to stop in." She had been coming home late every night, sleeping on Madeline's floor, and was usually gone by breakfast.

Time held that meal in a single everlasting moment, the nine of us plastered into the leather seats of my grandmother's chairs, the nine of us spearing our pickles and coaxing the ketchup along the glass neck and blasting the mustard from the plastic bottle, the rectal spurts making Buddy & Co. plus Madeline laugh uproariously. The hilarity seemed to take their minds off the heat. Cleveland had three burgers spilling off his plate, and one full bag of potato chips from the Jay's box in his lap. There was no one like my cousin, as always, to mak
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he forest, the black night, or the dinner table a good time. He told his stirring anecdotes about schoolboy Buddy at the military academy, the beleaguered lad who must outsmart his captors. Cleveland nodded with great appreciation, as if Buddy were merely giving voice to his own experience. Whether I was sitting across from Cleveland or next to him or passing him in the kitchen, I felt the pressure of his hand on my back, the hot palm between my shoulder blades.

When Buddy paused to take a bite my mother said, "Louise, I'll bet Malzena and Cleveland would like to hear you and Stephen play after dinner. I don't think they've heard your music yet."

Louise thrust her knife into the center of her bun. For a few seconds she glowered at her sculpture as if it were a voodoo cello, as if she couldn't wait to slash up her instrument. She did remember something of her manners, and at last looked up to smile wanly at Malzena. I was beginning to see why my mother had wanted the Simonsons on our block, in our house, in our rooms, in our beds. She had said portentously, "It's possible they'll have something to teach you." She knew how I'd feel about the superficial cheerfulness of the neighbors, and she was sure it would do me good to watch the Simonsons bear the burden of our kindness. She also knew how I'd feel standing on the lip of the swimming pool fighting my base instinct, my revulsion at the water. Mid-course, I could see that Project Share wasn't for the Simonsons' education--no, not any of it. Project Share was for Louise and me, for the Maciver brats, to show us the world, to introduce us to our real feelings. Project Share would make us examine our limited viewpoint; Project Share would make us understand the shallow nature of any tolerance we might think we had. We would come to despise ourselves, and through that self-hatred rise up against all injustice, not with swords but with our sharpened pens and ancestral plowshares. Oh, what a skillful leader Mrs. Maciver was!