My Last Innocent Year(20)
I took Connelly’s picture out of my pocket and held it next to Roxanne’s. Kelsey always said couples were “attractive in the same way,” and Connelly and Roxanne certainly were not. I didn’t yet understand what drew men to women besides beauty, and I could see that Roxanne wasn’t beautiful and Connelly was—beautiful, yes, something I’d never known a man to be. I tried to picture the two of them together, Roxanne’s hair against his face, his hands spreading her legs open like a book. The light above me shut off and I rose, leaving the books in a pile on the floor.
7
I stepped over the coats and backpacks strewn across the floor of Room 203 and slid into my spot across from the windows. Professor Connelly was in his seat already, writing something on a yellow legal pad. He had a black fleece vest over his button-down shirt, and it looked like he’d gotten a haircut. I liked these in-between times, when I could sit back and study him, soak in every detail as if I might be quizzed later. I watched him stroke the space above his upper lip and wondered if it was bigger or smaller than the tip of my index finger.
“Okay, everyone,” he said as Ginny ran in. “Welcome, Ginny. First up is Isabel’s story. Remember, we start with what we like about a piece before letting the writer know what could be improved. And please, folks, starting your comments with ‘no offense’ does not give you license to say whatever you want.” He looked right at Alec, who shrugged as if to say, “Who me?”
We all laughed, including Connelly. We had an easy rapport now, three weeks into the semester. I liked the way he talked to us, as if we were peers. When he laughed at something one of us said—once, something I had said—it felt sincere.
There was a shuffling of paper around the table as people took out copies of my story. Some were crumpled and scribbled on, others completely blank; Ginny’s copy was so crisp and clean, I could tell she hadn’t read it. I wiped my hands on my skirt and tried to breathe. I was eager to hear what people thought. I’d tried to write the way Connelly told us to, uninhibited, without editing or filtering. To write like no one was looking over my shoulder. The only person I’d imagined looking over my shoulder was him, smiling at something I had written, maybe even moved. I imagined his face, serious and thoughtful, his hands brushing the pages, licking a finger as he turned them.
My story took place in the 1950s in a bungalow community in the Catskills. The main character was Miriam, a twelve-year-old girl from Brooklyn. Her parents were Jews who’d escaped Poland during the war. Despite these historical particulars, the story was really about me and a trip I’d taken with my parents when I was twelve to visit Abe’s brother Leon and his family at their lake house. We never traveled as a family—Abe’s work made it impossible—and I don’t know how he managed to get away that week or why my mother agreed to go. She couldn’t stand Leon’s wife, my Aunt Fanny, and Fanny didn’t like my mother either. Also, both of my parents hated the Catskills. My mother found it shabby and depressing. “Too many Jews,” said Abe. What I remembered most about the trip was the very fact of it, seven days when we’d behaved like a normal family, doing the sorts of things I imagined normal families did.
I learned to swim that week in the lake that abutted the property. All day long, I raced my cousins Celia and Benji to the dock that marked the end of the swimming area. When we got there, we’d climb up and wave at our mothers back on shore. From a distance, my mother looked almost like she belonged with the other mothers on the beach, wiping noses, passing out sandwiches, pouring lemonade into Dixie cups. Like the Polish refugee I’d turned her into, my mother had always been a kind of outsider, but that week, she looked happy, and I saw what she might have been had her life taken a different direction.
The reason my mother was so happy that week, the reason she’d agreed to go to Leon and Fanny’s in the first place, I found out later, was because she was planning on leaving my father when we got home. But right after we returned, she learned she had cancer and “What was the point?” She told me this later, much later, in her hospital room, while Abe was downstairs feeding the meter, when she was dying and telling me things, things I didn’t want to know. I think that was why I gave the story the historical context that I did, not only because I feared it wouldn’t hold up on its own but because I wanted my characters to be haunted by something. For Miriam and her parents, the haunting was the war; for my family, it was cancer. Even though we didn’t know about it yet, whenever I thought about that week, I thought about my mother’s illness. So many of my happy memories were like this, it seemed, blotted out by the shadow of disease and decay.
In the final scene, Miriam spends the last night at the lake sleeping on the screened-in porch with her cousins. Her aunt tucks her in and brings out a plate of cookies, then strokes Miriam’s hair while she reads them all a story. When Miriam looks up and sees her mother standing in the doorway, she feels guilty for liking it all so much—the cousins and the cookies and the lake and the feel of her aunt’s hand, for wanting to give in to it, to love a place that is nothing like home. That’s what I’d wanted to convey, at least; whether or not I’d succeeded, I was about to find out.
“I like the description of the mother on the beach,” said Kara from beneath her bangs. “In her hat and caftan, she reminds me of a flower.”