“It might be better if you did throw up,” Aunt Kate said, not unkindly. “Car sickness is your specialty.”
“Vomiting is not my specialty,” I reminded her, though I spoke into my skirt and probably couldn’t be heard. I can still remember that ugly plaid — turquoise and peach. At the time — we were ten — I thought it gorgeous. My nausea at last subsided. I thought of the delicacies that awaited us: clams and lobster. The streets of Boston were paved with them, my father had said.
My car sickness had something to do with my inner ear, our pediatrician had told us: I had an atypical vestibular canal. Willy’s vestibular canal was less atypical, the doctor had tactfully said, when pressed. More normal, better — but he didn’t say those things. Who cared? I had a more atypical memory than Willy. That is, she remembered a lot and I remembered almost everything.
Otherwise we were pretty similar in aptitudes and tastes, though we don’t look alike — I am dark and she is fair, I have a blunt short nose and she has a long thin one. In those days we both wore braids.
I didn’t throw up, not once on the two-day journey to Boston. My father had thrown up at the beginning of his illness, when the headaches began. He and my mother were already in our new home while we were driving and I was not throwing up. Our new home was a rented flat in a three-decker section of the city. My parents had flown ahead with two suitcases and my father’s violin. “The doctors in Boston are better than the ones at home,” my mother had explained. “No, not better — more experienced in Dad’s disease.”
“It’s all that shellfish they eat,” my father had playfully added.
WHEN NOT IN THE HOSPITAL for treatments given by those fishy doctors, my father slept in the front bedroom with my mother. A congregation of mahogany furniture kept them company. On the highboy stood a stag line of Dad’s medications. Mom’s perfume bottles flared their hips at the pills. The violin in its case lay flat on top of a lower dresser. We didn’t ask who was substituting for Dad in the quartet — maybe old man Premak. He, too, played in the symphony.
Aunt Kate had the middle bedroom. Willy and I shared the back room. Our window looked down on an oblong of brown earth rimmed with pink geraniums, an abscess of a yard. The view horizontally at our third-floor level was more encouraging — clapboard three-deckers like ours, their back bedrooms close enough to see into at night. These were children’s rooms. We gave the children epithets: Nose Picker, Curls, Four-Eyes, Amaryllis. Amaryllis was a stalk of a girl with a beautiful drooping head. She was about thirteen. Beyond and between these nearer houses we could see bits of the other side of their street — more houses with front porches — and beyond that row still another set of back windows. “Like scenery,” Willy said. I knew what she meant: the flat, overlapping facades destroyed perspective, turned the daytime view into backdrop. At night, though, when the near windows were lit, the rooms behind them acquired depth, even intensity. Nose Picker practiced his perversion. Curls read magazines on her bed. Amaryllis smiled into the telephone.
There were black-bellied hibachis on some of the porches. It was the era of hibachis. It was the era of consciousness-raising. The previous year our third grade had been told that women could be anything they wanted to be. We were puzzled by this triumphant disclosure; nobody at home had hinted otherwise. It was the year of war protests and assassinations. Hubert Humphrey kissed his own face on a hotel TV screen. There were breakthroughs in cancer therapy.
Whenever my father went into the hospital for his treatments he had to share a room with some other patient — sometimes an old man, sometimes a young one. They, too, were recovering from surgery and receiving therapy. My father wore a turban, entirely white, though with no central jewel. He and Aunt Kate, siblings but not twins, resembled each other more than Willy and I did — the same silky red hair, the same soft brown eyes. His eyes were dull now, and his hair had vanished into his sultan’s headgear.
MOST MORNINGS Willy and I would find Kate and my mother at the kitchen table, silently drinking coffee. During the fall some brown light often made its way through the one spotted window, but by winter the only light came from a table lamp: a dark little pot whose paper shade was veined like an old face. We owned no appliances — a fortunate deprivation, for the kitchen had no counters. We kept crockery and utensils in a freestanding cupboard, drawers below, shelves above. Our canned goods marshaled themselves on a ledge above an ecru enameled stove. The enamel had worn off the stove in some places; it looked like the hide of a sick beast. Kate and Mom said that the atypically patterned stove was a period piece, a survivor; they seemed to feel a pet owner’s affection for it.
A brand new refrigerator occupied most of the back hall. It was too big for the blackened space in our gypsy kitchen where a smaller refrigerator had once stood. In place of the vanished fridge my mother installed her Teletype. She nailed corkboard onto the wall above the instrument. From the corkboard fluttered pages of computer code. The Teletype was usually turned off in the morning, but when she was expecting a printout she turned it on, and when we came into the kitchen we could hear its hum. During breakfast the thing would seem to square its shoulders against an onslaught. Then the message would begin to type out. Paper rose jerkily from the platen. Sometimes what scrolled into our kitchen was a copy of the program my mother was working on, with its three-letter instructions and fanciful addresses:
TAK FEEBLE
PUT FOIBLE
TRN ELSEWHERE
We knew that such a series represented the transfer first of information and then of control. We understood the octal number system and the binary number system and their eternal correspondence. Fractions and decimals, however, were still terra incognita to us, and Willy, invoking her not atypical memory, hadn’t yet bothered to learn any method of long division.
At breakfast Mom and Kate wore flowered wrappers trimmed with lace. They lingered over their coffee as if they had all the daylight hours to kill. Early in the fall, when Dad was home more often than he was in the hospital, when he was still getting up for breakfast, he told them that they looked like demimondaines and that Willy and I looked like semi-demimondaines and that we were his harem and the Teletype his eunuch.
When the New England winter settled in, my mother bought oatmeal, and on those dark mornings it bubbled on the stove. We hated oatmeal. But it was the glue of normality, the stuff that was supposed to stick to kids’ ribs through a morning of math and grammar. So we spooned some into bowls and joined our mother and our aunt at the round table. They had already divided the newspaper between them; now each divided her section with one of us. The Teletype throbbed. Kate got up to pour more coffee. Her hips were as slim as a boy’s. She sat down. The Teletype spat. After a while Mom got up. She bent over the machine, hair falling forward, hand splayed on lace-covered bosom.
It was not usual in those days for a programmer to have a Teletype installed in her home. But my mother was not a usual programmer. Her mind could sinuate into the circuitry of a machine. She understood its syntax and could make use of its simple doggy logic. “I have a modest gift,” she earnestly told us. “I was just born with it, like freckles.” Fifty years earlier — ten years earlier, even — a person with such a faculty would have had to divert it to accounting, or weaving, or puzzles. My mother had been born into the right generation for her talent. In that regard she was lucky.
She had landed a part-time job the week after our arrival. A month later she was offered the home Teletype and told that she could work as many hours as she pleased, at twice the original rate of pay. She had to attend the weekly staff conference; that was the only requirement made of her. But she considered contact with her fellow workers important, and anyway she always did more than people asked. So she and we went into the office two days a week, often staying until midnight. On those days she’d visit my father in the morning and then drive home to pick us up. I sat stiffly in the front seat and willed myself not to get carsick.