Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (34 page)

“Oy!” she slapped her forehead. “You're hopeless.”

“He's all I've got,” I laughed.

“I know some guys,” she offered.

Sammy and Josh were Israeli premed students. Shoshana had dated Josh a couple of times, and he had asked her to introduce his best friend to a girl. That's how, on a damp Sunday morning in June, I sat stiff and fearful atop a horse in Van Cortland Park.

“You have to show the horse who is boss,” Sammy asserted, his speech garbled by the cigarette in his mouth.

“He's the boss,” I said.

“No, no, no, no.” Sammy shook his head, and ashes flew in every direction. “You are the boss. You!”

It was hard for me to believe I could dominate the quivering creature between my legs. His malevolent eyes rolled back wetly to focus on me, petrified on his sagging back. He stomped his hooves into the gravel the way Trigger did when Roy Rogers asked him to count, only this horse wasn't counting. He was, I was certain, anticipating the moment Sammy handed me the reins to take off, with me helplessly bouncing atop him, or dragged alongside, still attached to the stirrups. I suggested to Sammy, Shoshana, and Josh that I'd be happy to sit on a bench and wait for them to come back from their ride. But Shoshana insisted that this was a fun date. The horses in Van Cortland Park, Josh claimed, were old, docile, one false step from the glue factory. Sammy swore he was an expert horseman and would ride alongside, in case I needed him.

The horse knew where he was going. No matter what I did with the reins, he trudged forward, followed Josh and Shoshana's horses as if he were attached to them. I loosened my grip and looked around. Beside me, Sammy chatted in a low murmur about his experiences on kibbutz, where he worked as an electrician. He was very thin, with abundant black hair and eyes that probed from beneath luxurious eyebrows. He sucked unfiltered cigarettes one after the other. His fingertips and teeth were stained an opaque mustard color, and from time to time he doubled over with rumbling coughs that turned his face red.

The path was wooded near the stables, but as we came around a curve, it opened into a long stretch alongside a busy avenue. Cars and trucks rumbled past, but the horses were used to the congestion and paid no attention to it. They ambled along placidly, the clop of their hooves an incongruous contrast to the whir and horns of traffic. Josh and Sammy spoke to each other in Hebrew, and Shoshana and Sammy changed places, so that she rode next to me.

“The guys want to canter,” she explained.

“What's that?”

“When the horses go fast.”

I gripped the reins again. I expected a “Hi-yo, Silver,” or some other exclamation to make the horses go, but Josh and Sammy simply dug their heels into the animals' sides, and they took off. Shoshana's horse and mine pursued them, even though I, at least, did nothing to encourage mine. I pulled the reins with all the power in my arms, but the horse ignored me. Shoshana's horse was even faster and soon whizzed past me. Then, way ahead, I saw Shoshana fly through the air and land on her side, inches from the avenue. In a move to make Annie Oakley proud, I slid off my horse while he was still moving and rushed to her side. She was unconscious. Within seconds, traffic stopped on the avenue, Josh and Sammy appeared, and the horses could be seen cantering (if that's what they did when they ran fast) toward the stables, their reins flapping uselessly along the ground.

“I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor,” Sammy and Josh yelled, to keep people away from Shoshana.

“You're not supposed to move someone . . .” I started when Sammy turned her over, but he gave me a look to wither poison ivy, and I backed away.

She moaned, opened her eyes, and it was a relief to see she was alive. Josh and Sammy hovered over her until an ambulance wailed its way to us, then I rode with her while the guys followed in Sammy's car. She was pale but conscious. I held her hand all the way to the hospital, and when they took her away to be examined, I called Mami.

“Has someone told her mother?” Mami asked. I hadn't, and probably Sammy and Josh hadn't either. Mami said it was Shoshana's mother I should be calling and not mine.

Josh and Sammy ran in, and while Josh went into the room where they'd taken Shoshana (“I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor!”), Sammy called her mother. Josh was escorted to the waiting room, and we sat in silence until a doctor came out and led us back to
Shoshana. She lay on a high bed, her golden curls framing her face like a halo. The white sheets added to the angelic effect. She looked both vulnerable and sexy, and the three men were jelly. The guys spoke to her in Hebrew, and then she asked if she could be alone with me. Once they left, she smiled mischievously.

“He's cute, isn't he?”

“Which one?”

“The doctor.”

“Which one?”

“The real one, silly. We're going out next week.”

Shoshana was in the hospital a few days. She was released in time for her date with Dr. Diamond, who testified when she sued the people who rented the horses. They settled for enough money to allow Shoshana to spend the rest of the summer in Israel. “But you should go out with Sammy while I'm gone,” she suggested.

Dashing as Sammy was, I preferred my quiet afternoons with Andy. Shoshana rolled her eyes. “You'll die an old maid!” We laughed. We were both nineteen, and although we were desperate for love, we knew there was still time. After all, this was America, not the old country.

I hadn't seen Neftalí since the day he had tried to propose on the street. His mother, Doña Lila, still came up to visit, but I rarely saw her. Then, shortly after Cibi was born, Mami decided the apartment above Doña Lila's was too small. We moved to a single-family house with a huge yard and large, bright rooms with high ceilings. At the rear of the house was a small room off the kitchen, which I claimed. It was big enough for a single bed, a desk, my mirrored vanity table and matching chair. I spent the “summer of love” in that room, loveless, writing term papers about the history of public relations and the use of humor in outdoor advertising.

One day I came home and Mami and Tata were at the dining room table, their faces so somber I knew someone had died.

“Who?” I asked.

“Neftalí.” Mami said.

I dropped onto a chair, overwhelmed with images of Neftalí riddled with bullets in a foxhole in faraway Vietnam. But that's not how it happened. Neftalí, Mami informed me, had been rejected by the army because he was a heroin addict.

“He was arrested,” she said, “and he jumped out the window of the police station.”

“There were spikes on the fence . . .” Tata added.

I raised my hands and motioned for them to stop. It was too much, too fast. My brain was still working on Neftalí being rejected by the service. Mami and Tata waited for me to signal I was ready for more, and then they repeated the information, as if it hadn't been clear enough, and filled in the details.

Doña Lila had such an attack of
los nervios
when she was called by the police that she was hospitalized. Neftalí hadn't told anyone the army didn't want him. When he was arrested, he jumped, according to Doña Lila, because he was ashamed everyone would find out he was on heroin.

“That's why he always wore long-sleeved shirts,” Tata mused, and I stared at her.

“I never noticed that,” I cried, and went into my room, followed by Mami and Tata's concerned gaze.

I threw myself on the bed and closed my eyes. Images of Neftalí popped into my head in confused sequences. Neftalí hoisting my brothers on his arms to show off his muscles. Did he wince because it hurt the needle tracks? Neftalí's flat nails against Tata's Spanish playing cards. Did he always lose because he couldn't concentrate? Neftalí's green eyes that made me shudder. Was the look I interpreted as mysterious actually blank? It was hard to reconcile the romantic hero I had wanted him to be with who he had been: an addict who'd rather jump out a window than confront his problem.

One Sunday afternoon, my half sister, Margie, came to visit. In the two years since she had first come to our apartment on Pitkin Avenue accompanied by her mother, we had moved four times, and Margie at least once. She had recently married Nestor, a warm, sociable man several years older. He stood behind her, his left hand lightly touching her waist, as Margie introduced him and tried to remember our names. When we had last seen her, there were only eight of us, and she was surprised that the family had grown so fast in two years.

Mami and Tata immediately began preparing
arroz con pollo
and stewed pinto beans. Nestor and Margie sat at the kitchen table talking about their new apartment in Yonkers.

“Why so far?” Mami asked.

“It's just over the border with the Bronx,” Nestor said. But anything outside the confines of Brooklyn or north of the garment district in Manhattan was foreign territory to Mami. To her they might as well be living in another country.

Margie and Nestor were interested in every bit of news we could give them. They asked what schools we attended, what jobs we held, how tall we were. She apologized several times. “I don't mean to be nosy,” she said. “But it's been so long since we were together.” I was touched by her need to connect with us, to feel a part of our family. Nestor played with the boys as if he'd known them forever, and Margie talked to the sisters, helped Mami and Tata in the kitchen, jiggled Charlie and Cibi on her knees. She was comfortable, as if this were her house, her mother and grandmother, her siblings. I was enchanted by how open she was, how sweet and unpretentious. Before they left, Margie asked Mami if we could visit her now that she had her own place.

“Of course!” Mami said, and hugged her.

A few weeks later, Margie met me at the Yonkers train station. We walked the few blocks to the yellow brick building on a hill where she and Nestor lived in a sunny, cheerful apartment decorated with the optimism of newlyweds.

“This is where you'll sleep.” She opened a door to a small
room near the kitchen. A single bed was covered by a fluffy comforter and matching pillows. A lamp topped a wicker side table with drawers. At the foot of the bed lay a set of towels, a basket with tiny soaps, a shower cap. She reached under the bed and pulled out a small basket. “If you get your period, here are the tampons.” A box of Tampax was propped into a well of pink tissue paper like an offering to the goddess of menstruation.

I'd never touched a tampon, since Mami warned I could lose my virginity if I used them. Just having Margie think that I wore them made me feel grown-up, privy to the secrets of a married woman. She no longer needed to worry about her virginity, and I wondered if offering me the tampon was a test to see if I worried about mine.

Nestor was due from work, so Margie asked me to set the table. At home, setting the table meant putting platters of food in the center so that everyone could come and get their share. Margie used place mats, knives, forks, a dinner plate, a salad plate, a water glass, a coffee cup and saucer. She had to remind me to put each on the table. A pitcher had to be filled with ice water. Paper napkins had to be folded into a triangle, placed to the left of the plate. Matching salt and pepper shakers had to be retrieved from the cabinet and lined up with the bottle of ketchup, the sugar bowl. It took me as long to set the table for three people as it took her to cook the entire meal, because I kept getting things wrong. I closed my eyes and tried to remember restaurant settings, but that was no help. Most of my dining-out experience was in coffee shops and the Automat, where one was lucky to get utensils.

“No, the water glass goes to the right of the plate,” Margie corrected me. “The salad plate on the left, like this.” She was kind, but I took her criticism personally, which made me sullen and uncomfortable during the meal. I offered to clean up, to make up for my ineptitude in other areas. She stayed in the kitchen with me, which under other circumstances I would have welcomed. But I was so self-conscious that I was bound to break something. She cleaned up the glass from the floor and sent me to watch Red
Skelton with Nestor. I was glad they went to bed early and curled up under the plush bedcovers, neither comforted nor consoled.