“Your grandmother was Russian. You wanted to learn Russian, you could have learned Russian from her.” That wasn't the same thing. Besides, she spoke Yiddish all the time …” His voice had trailed off. He hated arguing with them. His mother loved to argue about everything. It was the mainstay of her life, her greatest joy, her favorite sport. She argued with everyone, and especially with him.
“Don't speak with disrespect about the dead!”
“I wasn't speaking with disrespect. I said that Grandma spoke Yiddish all the time …”
“She spoke beautiful Russian too. And what good is that going to do you now? You should be taking science classes, that's what men need in this country today …economics …” She wanted him to be a doctor like his father, or a lawyer at the very least. His father was a throat surgeon and considered one of the most important men in his field. But it had never appealed to Bernie to follow in his father's footsteps, even as a child. He admired him a great deal. But he would have hated being a doctor. He wanted to do other things, in spite of his mother's dreams.
“Russian? Who talks Russian except Communists?” Sheila Borden …that was who…. Bernie looked at his mother in despair. She was attractive, she always had been. He had never been embarrassed about the way his mother looked, or his father for that matter. His father was a tall, spare man with dark eyes and gray hair, and a frequently distracted look. He loved what he did, and he was always thinking of his patients. But Bernie always knew he was there, if he needed him. And his mother had been dying her hair blond for years, “Autumn Sun” the color was called, and it looked well on her. She had green eyes, which Bernie had inherited from her, and she had kept her figure well. She wore expensive clothes that one never really noticed. They were navy suits and black dresses and had cost an arm and a leg at Lord and Taylor or Saks. Somehow she just looked like a mother to him. “Why does that girl study Russian anyway? Where are her parents from?”
“Connecticut.”
“Where in Connecticut?” He wanted to ask her if she was planning to visit them.
“Hartford. What difference does it make?” “Don't be rude, Bernard.” She looked prim and he folded his napkin and pushed back his chair. Eating dinner with her always gave him stomach pains. “Where are you going? You haven't been excused.” As though he were still five years old. He hated coming home sometimes. And then he felt guilty for hating it. And then he got mad at her for making him feel guilty for hating it….
“I have some studying to do before I go back.” “Thank God you're not playing football anymore.” She always said things like that that made him want to rebel. It made him want to turn around and tell her he'd gone back on the team … or that he was studying the ballet with Sheila now just to shake her up a little bit….
“The decision isn't necessarily permanent, Mom.” Ruth Fine glared at him. “Talk to your father about it.” Lou knew what he had to do. She had already talked to him at length. If Bernie ever wanted to play football again, you offer him a new car…. If Bernie had known, he would have gone through the roof, and not only refused the car, but gone back to playing football immediately. He hated being bribed. Hated the way she thought sometimes, and the over-protective way she treated him, in spite of his father's more sensible attitudes. It was difficult being an only child, and when he got back to Ann Arbor and saw Sheila she agreed with him. The holidays hadn't been easy for her either. And they hadn't been able to get together at all, even though Hartford was certainly not the end of the world, but it might as well have been. Her parents had had her late in life, and now they treated her like a piece of glass, terrified each time she left the house, frightened that she would get hurt or mugged or raped, or fall on the ice, or meet the wrong men, or go to the wrong school. They hadn't been thrilled at the prospect of the University of Michigan either, but she had insisted on it. She knew just how to get what she wanted from them. But it was exhausting having them hang all over her. She knew just what Bernie meant, and after their Easter holidays they devised a plan. They were going to meet in Europe the following summer, and travel for at least a month, without telling anyone. And they had.
It had been blissful seeing Venice and Paris and Rome for the first time together. Sheila had been madly in love, and as they lay naked on a deserted beach in Ischia, with her raven black hair falling over her shoulders, he had known that he had never seen anyone as beautiful. So much so that he was secretly thinking of asking her to marry him. But he kept it to himself. He dreamt of getting engaged to her over the Christmas holidays, and married after they graduated the following June…. They went to England and Ireland too, and flew home from London on the same plane.
As usual, his father was in surgery. His mother picked him up, despite his cable not to. Eagerly waving to him, she looked younger than her years in her new beige Ben Zuckerman suit with her hair done just for him. But whatever good feelings he had for her disappeared as she spotted his traveling companion immediately. “Who is that?”
“This is Sheila Borden, Mom.” Mrs. Fine looked as though she might faint.
“You've been traveling together all this time?” They had given him enough money for six weeks. It had been his twenty-first birthday present from them. “You've been traveling together so …so …shamelessly …?” He wanted to die as he listened to her, and Sheila was smiling at him as though she didn't give a damn.
“It's okay …don't worry, Bernie … I have to get the shuttle bus to Hartford anyway …” She gave him a private smile, grabbed her duffel bag, and literally disappeared without saying goodbye, as his mother began to dab at her eyes.
“Mom …please …”
“How could you lie to us like that?”
“I didn't lie to you. I told you I was meeting friends.” His face was red and he wanted the floor to open up and swallow him. He wanted never to see his mother again.
“You call that a friend?”
He thought instantly of all the times they had made love … on beaches, in parks, next to rivers, in tiny hotels…. Nothing she ever said could take away that memory and he stared at his mother belligerently.
“She's the best friend I have!” He grabbed his bag and started out of the airport alone, leaving her standing there, but he had made the mistake of turning back to look at her once, and she had been standing there crying openly. He couldn't do it to her. He went back and apologized and hated himself for it afterwards.
Back at school in the fall, the romance had flourished anyway, and this time when they came back for Thanksgiving, he drove up to Hartford to meet her family. They had been cool but polite, obviously surprised by something Sheila hadn't said, and when they flew back to school, Bernie questioned her.
“Were they upset that I'm Jewish?” He was curious. He wondered if her parents were as intense as his own, although that hardly seemed possible. Nobody could be as intense as Ruth Fine, not in his eyes anyway.
“No.” Sheila smiled absentmindedly, lighting a joint in the back row of the plane on the way back to Michigan. “Just surprised, I guess. I never thought it was such a big deal I had to mention it.” He liked that about her. She took everything in stride. Nothing was ever a big deal, and he took a quick hit with her before they carefully put out the joint and she put the roach in an envelope in her purse. “They thought you were nice.”