I was getting used to Benjie being naked. I didn’t even care when he left the bathroom door open while he brushed his teeth and peed.
I pulled the covers over him.
“Sit with me,” he said. “I’m scared of the dark.”
“Come on,” I said. I wanted to watch TV.
“I am. You have to sit with me. Max does when she’s not here.”
“Usually it’s your father?” I liked the idea of Mr. Stone’s being a great father.
“No. Her. Because she’s here. You know, she sleeps in here.” He pointed to the twin bed on the other side of the room.
“Your mother sleeps in here?”
“Yeah. Is that weird?”
“No. Maybe she sleeps in here because you’re scared of the dark. To keep you company.”
“Maybe,” he said, and he yawned.
“You can fall asleep now, you’re all right. Good night, Benjie.”
“Dobrounots, milacku.”
“Dobrounots, you doughnut.”
Scandalize My Name
“Let’s have a look-see at that right hand,” Mrs. Hill said, eyes on the ceiling.
“Vivian said absolutely no more pork rinds.”
I was fifteen, and in our two years we had one ambulance ride, two angina attacks, and more than a few sponge baths between us. After Pride and Prejudice, we alternated between the tabloids and the poetry of Mr. Paul Dunbar.
“Do you see Vivian on the premises?”
“Come on, Mrs. Hill, it’s not good for you.” There was no other adult I could talk to like that. My mother never did anything that wasn’t good for her, my father’s arteries were of no interest to me, and Mr. Stone, who knew something about everything, made it clear that we could talk about me but not about him.
“Who dropped you off? I heard a car door.” Mrs. Hill liked to think that her hearing was extra sharp to make up for her eyesight.
“Mr. Stone.” Very proud.
“Who’s that?”
“He’s my English teacher this year.”
“Why’s he dropping you off here?”
Mrs. Hill was always faintly accusatory. I shrugged, which I knew she couldn’t see but would feel, and started peeling carrots.
“Elizabeth, am I talking to myself? Are you in some kind of trouble at school?”
“No, I’m not. I imagine he dropped me off here because I was going here.” I spoke very slowly and clearly, to show her how stupid she was being.
“How old a man is this Mr. Who?”
“Mr. Stone. How should I know? Old. Do you want these carrots pureed or in circles, to go with peas or something?”
“He drives you home a lot?”
I sliced the carrots into inedible oversized chunks and went into her bedroom to gather up the laundry. She would sit and wait for me to come back. Her legs hurt too much for her to follow me around pestering me.
“Has your mother met him?”
Not on a bet.
“Your legs are getting long.”
I shrugged again.
“You stopped wearing your glasses. How come?”
“Contacts.” I loved my contacts. I loved the sharp world and I loved my eyes, edged in black eyeliner. I had scratched my corneas twice because I couldn’t bear to take the lenses out, except to sleep.
Mr. Stone dropped me off on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and after that, I tried to shut the car door softly, grabbing it with both hands to keep it from slamming, and as soon as I walked through the door Mrs. Hill would say, “Fool,” as though she were speaking to someone else.
Charlotte Macklin was the school social worker, and if she had heard Mrs. Hill, she would have felt better about me, She thought no one gave a damn that I spent all my study halls in Mr. Stone’s office and was frequently seen getting into his car after school. Mrs. Macklin knew, even if no one else did, that although it did not violate any school rule, it undermined morale for students and teachers to see a ninth-grade girl sitting behind the desk of the English department chairman, sipping coffee out of his thermos, showing her boot bottoms to the passing world. Mr. Stone had already heard from her, but I didn’t know that then. Mrs. Macklin looked at me knowingly as I skated past, her pale blue eyes narrow with concern, her handkerchief twisting into damp white loops. She sent me three notes, inviting me to a self-esteem group, to a girls-with-divorcing-parents group, and finally to a one-on-one interview to discuss my goals and expectations for high school. I declined, and she called me out of algebra, showing that she had not read my school records all that carefully. She asked how I was feeling about my parents’ divorce and I said fine. She said she’d noticed that I preferred to have my lunch in Mr. Stone’s office rather than in the cafeteria and I said that was true. We eyed each other for five minutes, and she sent me back to class. I told Mr. Stone about it, and his face got really red, which meant trouble for Mrs. Macklin. Mr. Stone and the principal were old friends and Mrs. Macklin was nobody.
By the end of May my parents were legally divorced. My mother took on a secretary, a yoga teacher, and a bottle-green MG. She was already talking about where I would go to college. She’d had enough.
My father moved further out on the Island, to a cottage in Sag Harbor, and came by for oddly formal, oddly pleasant visits. We gave up on eating out together after trolling up and down Northern Boulevard in his Oldsmobile, looking for a place to get to know each other, silently fishing broccoli out of broccoli and beef, anchovies out of Caesar salad, and raisins out of rice pudding, and discovering that this was what we had in common. He’d knock on the door and come in with bags of Chinese food or gargantuan deli sandwiches, so fat the white paper unwrapped by itself as he laid them down, crumbling slices of pastrami and corned beef falling out the sides, shining heaps of pink meat, enough for another meal. My mother had never liked cooking, but the kitchen was her domain, and it didn’t occur to us to eat in there or to put our big Polish paws all over the glass dining room table. The living room was out; I didn’t mind smears of Ba Tampte Kosher Mustard on the four-hundred-year-old Turkish prayer rugs, but even estranged, my father wouldn’t have it. We: ate in the TV room, surrounded by enough food for six people, and when my mother walked past she shook her head, smiling politely, as if my father were an extravagant, ultimately unacceptable suitor, as I guess he was.
He stopped wearing the navy blazers and light grey pants he’d always worn to make himself look like a German-barely-Jewish-almost-a-Warburg financial adviser instead of an accountant from Pustelnik by way of Brooklyn. He stopped wearing the ties my mother bought him every year, red silk prints of stirrups and foxes and unicorns. Now he wore denim shirts and cotton pants that weren’t jeans but were nothing my mother would have approved, and soft, goosey brown loafers, and he began every conversation telling me how great the air was in the Hamptons. He didn’t touch me much, but when he did, I didn’t flinch. When I was eight, we’d bumped into each other naked outside my parents’ bathroom, and as he gently pulled me off him I cried out at his trembling, helpless sac; I felt so sorry for him, appalled that that dangling, chickenish mess was the true future of boys. He was friendlier, away from my mother. She was the same. No warmer (I saw mothers put their hands to their children’s cheeks for no reason and wondered how you got a mother who did that), no cuddlier (not that I wanted cuddling now), no more interested in my life as her daughter than she’d ever been. My poor father belonged somewhere else, not the somewhere else that was right for me, certainly not the somewhere else of the narrow, balconied brownstones and stark glass apartment buildings that seemed right for my mother.