Computers were hulking giants then, with lights and switches and whirring magnetic tapes. Mom’s machine growled in an air-conditioned warehouse, surrounded by a warren of offices with fiberboard walls and desks that were just planks on iron legs. Programmers hung snapshots and party invitations and straw hats above their desks. My mother’s walls were bare; but in one corner of her office a pair of old school chairs with armrests sat at a 30 — degree angle to each other. She had picked them up in a secondhand shop near the hospital. Between the chairs stood an oversize tin bucket filled with books and games. Under it all was a small fake Oriental rug.
Whenever I see the word happiness I think of that corner.
Few of Mom’s coworkers were married, and none were parents. Some brought their dogs to work. One evening one of her fellow programmers took us to a wrestling match. We held our breath each time a fighter was pinned, sighed when he was resurrected. Later in the year a young woman took us to the flower show. Clubs from the suburban towns had created real gardens in real earth in front of painted houses. We brought home a pot of daffodils and a paper poppy. “I will extract some paper opium from this,” our father said in his weakened voice. “We will have such dreams … Dreams!” he suddenly shouted.
But field trips were rare. Mostly we spent Mom’s workdays in our corner.
An elderly secretary labored for my mother’s group. She kept conventional hours, and it was a while before we had any commerce with her. But one December afternoon at about five she stopped us on our way back from the sandwich machine. She was seated at her typewriter, and she didn’t lift her fingertips from the keys when she spoke to us, though the tapping ceased. “Harriet and Wilma,” she said by way of greeting.
All we had to do was say “Hello, Miss Masters” and smile and skedaddle. But: “Harry and Willy,” Willy corrected.
Miss Masters slid her hands onto her lap with an awful gravity. “Twins but not identical.”
“Fraternal sisters,” Willy said.
“What grade are you in?”
“Fourth,” I said at the same time that Willy said “Fifth.”
“My oh my,” was the extent of Miss Master’s reply, but her tone was inquisitorial.
“She’s advanced,” I said, my explanation ruinously coinciding with Willy’s “She’s retarded.” Then we did skedaddle. When we’d turned a corner I grabbed Willy by her bony shoulder.
“Do you want to go to school?” I demanded.
“Jeez. No.”
“Well then.”
My mother was sitting at her slab of a desk, writing code. Whenever she was bent over her work, her shoulder-length hair, abundant but limp, separated of its own accord and fell on either side of her neck. We settled down on our chairs with sandwiches and books, our presence unacknowledged. We understood that absorption, not indifference, made her ignore us, just as we understood that our father’s sudden explosions were disease, not rage. My mother’s pencil scratched. We read and chewed. She began to hum — a sign that she had solved a problem. She straightened and moved her chair outward, and it protested faintly, aagh. I looked up and began to sing the words to the tune my mother was humming. The song was “Good Morning,” from the movie Singin’ in the Rain—we’d seen it twice in the revival house back home and once on somebody’s television. Willy joined in, a third higher. We sang the words and Mom abandoned the melody and hummed continuo. The wrestling programmer, walking in with a flow diagram, stopped to listen to this makeshift serenade.
WHEN WE DIDN’T GO TO WORK with Mom we went to work with Kate. After my mother left for the hospital, after we had finished the housecleaning (Kate wore a blue bandanna over her hair) and had made a trip to the library and the Civil War monument and had perhaps listened to the organist practice in the little brick church or visited chilly Walden Pond, traveling by bus, or inspected the daily catch up in Gloucester, traveling by train, or curled up at home, listening to our aunt read her own translation of Ovid … after that, we set off for the Busy Bee Diner. Aunt Kate did a half shift at the Busy Bee, from four until eight.
On our walk to the diner we saw the children of the neighborhood engaged in their various childish activities: practicing hoop shots, or minding toddlers, or, at the variety store, fastening powerful gazes onto the candy counter so that Baby Ruths would leap into their pockets. Often we recognized the young people we’d spied on from our window — Nose Picker, his hands safe in his pockets; Curls, pretty; Amaryllis, gorgeous. Other kids, too. They wore hand-me-down clothes and they looked strictly brought up. They were all white, and most were fair. Not Amaryllis, though. Dark brows shaded dark eyes: a Mediterranean siren in this Hibernian tract.
We looked at the familiar strangers, and they looked back at us. Did they wonder about us? Parochial school students probably thought we went to public school. The public-schoolers knew we had never been seen in their cinder block building; did they notice that we didn’t wear the pleated skirts and white blouses of Catholic scholars? How did they explain us to each other? We speculated about their speculations.
“Because of our delicate health we are tutored at home,” Willy suggested.
“By our aged relative,” I added.
Aunt Kate grinned.
The Busy Bee was owned and manned by the Halasz family. The Halasz rice pudding was made with ricotta; the Halasz chocolate pie contained nuggets of chocolate cake. When my father was out of stir, as Kate called it, we would bring home one of these desserts, and also a carton of barley beef stew. Though the food was very good, he didn’t finish it.
We longed to practice short-order cooking behind the counter with Anton Halasz, and to try waitressing with Kate. But laws against child labor were more severe than laws against truancy. Mr. Franz Halasz, Anton’s father, allowed us to work only in the kitchen, a high square room that the public couldn’t see. Mr. Halasz, who wore a beret as a chef ’s hat, taught us to scrub up like surgeons. He taught us to pound herbs and then powder them between our palms, and to roll leaves of cabbage around chopped meat sweetened with rosemary, and to beat egg whites until they were as stiff as bandage gauze.
Some mornings Kate visited my father while my mother stayed home with us and the eunuch. We didn’t resent not being left on our own. We knew that our competence was not in question, just as we knew that it was not hatred of men that caused Aunt Kate to snub the blameless advances made by some of the Busy Bee’s patrons, and to keep Anton at arm’s length, too. We knew it was not Willy’s skinniness that prompted Mom to lay her cheek against my sister’s some wintry mornings in the living room, and that it was not my tendency to vertigo that made her embrace me suddenly in the kitchen. And although Willy and I liked to check on what the neighbors were up to, it was not to watch Amaryllis brushing her hair that we perfected our spying techniques. It was to watch our two demimondaines. We saw the glances they exchanged in the beginning of that year; and then we sensed glances without seeing them; and eventually we sensed glances they didn’t even need to exchange.
Often I got up at night — to use the bathroom, if anybody asked — but really to draw closer to the dark heat in the living room. Sometimes Aunt Kate played Chopin or Schubert on the upright. Usually she lay on the couch, her knees bent, reading. Mom sat at the desk, coding. Music came from the hi-fi: Rosamunde, Egmont, Siegfried. The two women talked a little. One time, without preamble, my mother got up from the desk and crossed the room and dropped to the floor and laid her head on Aunt Kate’s stomach. She began soundlessly to cry. Aunt Kate placed the book she’d been reading, still open, across her own forehead, like a sombrero. She held it there with her left hand as if against a gale. With her right hand she fondled my mother’s foolish hair.