My Last Innocent Year(6)
Zev’s eyes were wild and shining. He looked hurt and confused, but also scared. “Isabel, you know that isn’t what happened. Tell her that. Tell her.”
“You don’t get to decide what happened,” Debra said. “It’s her body. She knows exactly what you did.”
“What is this, another one of your stupid stunts?” He turned to me. “I can’t believe you’d let her use you like this, Isabel. I thought you were smarter than that.” And with that, whatever goodwill Zev had ever felt toward me was gone. Something passed between us, a look that encapsulated all the years of our friendship—because I guess that’s what it was—all of it, evaporated in a moment. I felt like I’d let him down.
“Debra, come on!” I pulled her so hard she lost her balance. I could hear Zev shouting something, but I was gone, running down the stairs so fast I tumbled on the last few steps, twisting my ankle. I could hear Debra behind me, her tennis shoes slapping the ground, her voice echoing in the stairwell: “You haven’t heard the last of us, motherfucker!”
When we got back to our room, I collapsed onto the sofa. My ankle was throbbing. Blood pounded in my ears. Debra sat next to me and lifted my head into her lap. She stroked my forehead, massaged my earlobes, kneaded the muscles on the sides of my neck. It felt so good, I wanted to cry.
“Oh, honey,” she said in a voice so sweet I almost didn’t recognize it. “Didn’t your mother ever warn you about Israeli guys?”
The tears were coming now, fast and hot, soaking the fine hairs at my hairline, collecting in the hollow of my throat. “No,” I managed. My mother hadn’t warned me about any of this.
2
THE next day, I went home for winter break.
Back to Rosen’s Appetizing and the Lower East Side. Back to my father, Abraham Rosen, whom everybody called Abe, even me. Back to Orchard Street, Essex Street, Rivington, Delancey, streets where Jewish immigrants had settled at the turn of the century, dragging their history and sadness behind them. Zev was right: most of them were gone. We had stayed.
Kelsey was from New York too, and people sometimes assumed we knew each other from the city. During the early days of our friendship, she used to ask if I knew this place or that place, this person or that person. I never did. I could see her struggling to understand how there could be a New York she didn’t know, but even from her lofty perch on Park Avenue, she couldn’t see down into the dark and twisted streets where I’d grown up. We’d never met before coming to Wilder—of course we hadn’t. We might as well have been from different countries.
I spent most of break working at Rosen’s. The holidays were always busy. Never mind that Jews didn’t celebrate Christmas, they still came in to stock up on herring and smoked fish, buying food, Abe always said, as though they’d never eat again. This year seemed busier than usual, which was good. The neighborhood was changing, trading junkies for artists. There was a high-rise going up on the corner, pushing out the homeless who’d called the empty lot home for as long as I could remember. So in addition to our usual customers, there were downtown hipsters stopping by for a schmear, along with tourists who didn’t know a bagel from a bialy.
When I wasn’t busy running the cash register or sweeping the floors or stocking the shelves, I worried about what might be waiting for me when I got back to campus. I wanted to talk to Debra, but she was in Boca with her grandparents and too busy to come to the phone. The one time I did speak to her, she assured me everything would be okay. “Please. Isabel, he thinks he got away with raping you. You think he’s going to make a big deal about a little paint?” I could hear her crunching ice cubes between her teeth. “Believe me, he’s freaking out a lot more than you are.” Her words consoled me, but only temporarily. I started knitting, something I did when I was anxious; in the two weeks I was home I made a scarf for Kelsey and a pair of mittens for Debra.
Whatever high school friends I still had were spending the holidays with their families, so on Christmas Eve, I made Abe close the store early and dragged him to see Titanic, which I loved, he less so: “I knew how it ended.” He spent most of Christmas Day hunched over a stack of bills at the kitchen table until I made him go out for Chinese food. On New Year’s Eve, we marched arm in arm to the mailbox on the corner and mailed off my final tuition payment. In less than six months, I would be a college graduate. Abe had done it, somehow. Wilder hadn’t offered me as much financial aid as other schools, but Abe had insisted he could manage. “This is what we planned for, your mother and me, so you could go anywhere,” he said when he mailed off the first deposit, and I decided to believe him. Then later, as the bills started coming in, not just tuition but room and board and computers and books: “I’ll figure out a way to pay for it.” And finally, when things were even less certain and he was robbing Peter to pay Paul—and Martin and Joe and whoever else came along: “They can’t take the education away from you, can they?”
On the calendar, 1997 turned into 1998, but everything felt the same to me. Princess Diana was still dead, Mother Teresa too. Bill Clinton was in the White House doing whatever it was presidents did on New Year’s Eve. Monica Lewinsky was enjoying her last few moments of obscurity: in less than three weeks, the Drudge Report would publish a story accusing the president of having an affair with the intern. That night, after Dick Clark, I watched Abe wrap his tea bag around a spoon, then set it aside so he could use it again, and listened to him enumerate the many opportunities I would have once I graduated. Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. I sipped my champagne and wondered what he would think if he knew what I was actually doing at Wilder, messing around with boys and vandalizing school property and worrying that no one would ever love me.