My Last Innocent Year(23)

On the second to last page, Connelly had written something else, at the part of the story where Miriam sees her mother standing in the doorway. I had to turn the page sideways to read it: I feel like something is stalking this woman. A part of me wonders if she will die.

I held the pages close to my chest, forgetting about Debra and the fact that she was sleeping in the middle of the day. The room was warm, but I was shivering, a tremor that started somewhere deep inside of me. I thought about the way Connelly had looked at me, like he could see something I didn’t know was there, the way he said my name, curling it around his tongue. I took the handkerchief out of my pocket and held it to my face, remembering the way his hand looked when he gave it to me: rough and wind-chapped, his wedding band digging into his flesh like a vise.





8





MY parents met at Rosen’s. “Where else would I have found him?” my mother, Vivian, said whenever I asked her to tell me the story. She’d wandered in one winter day with a friend, looking for a place to get a cup of coffee, and Abe was smitten. Tall and slim with long brown hair ironed straight like Ali MacGraw’s in Love Story, my mother didn’t look like most of the women who shopped there. “Movie-star pretty” my grandmother Yetta, Abe’s mother, called her, but it wasn’t clear she meant it as a compliment.

Abe was already forty, a bachelor who ate dinner with his mother almost every night. On the day she walked into Rosen’s Appetizing, Vivian was twenty-five and new to the city. She’d spent her childhood in and around Rockland County, moving from house to house and town to town, each smaller and more run-down than the one before; she liked to say the most elegant thing about her was her name. She’d gone to work straight out of high school, eventually saved enough money to move to New York with the hope of going to art school. The details of my parents’ courtship were hazy, but a year after they met, they were married. Soon after that, I was born.

Abe wasn’t supposed to marry Vivian. He was supposed to marry Barbara Horowitz, whose family owned the upholstery store down the street. It wasn’t an arranged marriage, more of an understanding that they would marry when the time came, but when the time came, they didn’t. Barbara married Stanley Fishman instead and moved to Great Neck. Her parents eventually sold the store, which was a shame, Abe said: “Pillows is a good business.”

One day when I was eight, Barbara Fishman née Horowitz came into the store with her family. I don’t know if Abe knew she was coming. All I remember is standing behind the counter with him when the door opened and a woman walked in. Barbara was not beautiful like my mother, but pretty, with a bobbed nose, French manicure, and long fur coat. When she leaned in and clasped my hand, she smelled like tea rose.

Barbara had a daughter my age named Lauren, and my father told me to let her pick out something from the candy counter. As Barbara and Abe talked, I showed Lauren how I liked to eat the chocolate jelly rings off my fingers.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Lauren asked. She had two brothers, twins. They were sitting together in a large stroller Stanley was pushing back and forth with one hand.

“No.”

“Lucky,” Lauren said, but I didn’t feel lucky. I’d just started asking my mother why I didn’t have a brother or sister. “Isabel, please,” she said. “One child is plenty.”

“Where do you play?” Lauren asked, glancing around the cramped, dusty store. From outside, you could hear the sound of honking horns and music blasting from a parked car on the corner.

“There’s a playground at school,” I said, but it wasn’t really a playground, just a courtyard where we played Chinese jump rope and bounced balls against a graffiti-covered wall. I hoped we’d change the subject before Lauren asked if I knew how to ride a bike, which I didn’t.

Abe walked outside with Stanley to admire his Mercedes. Barbara kneeled down to wipe something off one of the twins’ faces. Lauren kept asking questions about my house and school, what I liked to do, where I played. It made me uncomfortable, like she was trying to poke holes in the facade of normalcy I had started to construct for myself. Even then, I had the feeling that the way we lived wasn’t normal. I had friends who went to summer camp and church, who had brothers and sisters and grandparents who gave them five-dollar bills and kissed their cheeks. My own family, in comparison, was small and strange—Abe in his apron, my mother and her paints, Yetta with her glowering stares. Even the way we ate, at a small table pushed up against the wall in our kitchen, surrounded by ashtrays and paint cans and greasy packages of smoked fish.

“We have a swing set in our backyard,” Lauren said, nibbling the ring around her pointer finger. Her teeth were small, like a squirrel’s. “It has monkey bars and a tire swing.”

“You have a tire swing?” I loved the tire swing at the playground where my mother sometimes took me, but I always had to wait my turn, and if the teenagers were on it, they never got off.

“Ask your dad if you can come visit,” Lauren said.

“Really?”

“Yes. But he can’t smoke in our house. My mother hates it.” I looked outside where Abe was leaning against Stanley’s car, a cigarette dangling from his hand. “Where’s your mother?” Lauren asked but before I had a chance to answer, Barbara called her name and they were gone.