Banana Rose (36 page)

Sometime in the middle of the night I dozed and dreamed that I was completely white, even my eyes and hair. I was at the edge of a wood and the place was full of moonlight. Dead people walked past me. There was my grandfather. He hardly noticed me. There was an old janitor that used to work for my father, and a seventeen-year-old boy I’d met two years ago in Hopkins, Minnesota, who had just joined the carnival. All their faces were black. They had come out of their graves.

I burst out of sleep, my fists clenched and my heart squeezed tight. I let out a soundless scream, then Anna woke up and grabbed me. “What’s wrong?” she yelled, frightened.

“I don’t know. My heart hurts.”

“Nell, are you having a heart attack?”

“I don’t know.” I paused. “No, I don’t think so, Anna.” I reached out for her. “I’m scared. I’m doing the best I can. I miss Gauguin.” With those last three words, I tumbled over a waterfall and went under. I was swept out to where there was no one, where there never would be anyone, to the place I had always been afraid of. As my body went, my mind traveled through rock and desert. My mouth became dry. My hands were a thousand years old. My face was in Anna’s shoulder. She was a skeleton.

“Nell?” she called me back. “Where are you?”

“Nowhere.” I lay in that place, clutching Anna until, sometime before dawn, we both fell asleep.

Late the next day, we left each other. The sun tried to come out as I drove back to Minneapolis. It didn’t make it.

I
T WAS THE SECOND
Sunday in February. I’d just come from working out at the Jewish Community Center and was pushing my shopping cart down the aisles of Lund’s Market. I stopped in front of the Minnesota wild rice. As I reached for a bag, I remembered leaning over them once as they boiled in a pot and the smell of northern lakes filled my nose. That triggered the memory of our last vacation together up at Gull Lake. Tomorrow Gauguin was moving to California.

I put the rice back on the shelf and pushed myself over to an empty corner of the store where they sold birdseed. I stood there gripping the metal bar of my silver shopping cart, crying and facing the Dew-Hum bird feeders. To my left were the colored columns of eight brands of kitty litter.

I pulled in my last sniffle and walked over to the fluorescent-lit fresh vegetable section. I reached for a cabbage. I put it back. I looked at the brown misshapen bodies of the potatoes. They’d suffered enough, I thought, and pushed my cart past them. In pink and silver cellophane stood fresh gladioli, mums, and African violets. They reminded me of graves. I abandoned my cart in the middle of the store and walked out.

The day was cold. I was as crazy as I’d ever been, and instead of getting in my car I walked down Lake Street and turned right on Hennepin. I could go to the Croissant House, to the Rainbow Café, to Orr Books. No. I walked along Hennepin until it ended eight blocks down at the Lakeside Cemetery. I entered beneath the high iron gates.

The wind split my face apart. I trudged up one of the hills, past the graves of Philip Bates, Mary Bates, and the whole Bates clan. Past a sepulchre for Hudson Crews and a cement sanctuary for the Robinson family. I was headed toward Alice’s grave. Suddenly, I broke down crying again, a dry hard cry like cornflakes without milk. I squatted near the gravestone of Elmer Johnson and leaned my back against his death marker. The ground was too icy for me to sit on it. In the distance, through the bare maple branches, out past the cemetery, I saw the Lyndale Butcher. Every once in a while, a car moved slowly down the street.

I got up, realizing I couldn’t bear to find Alice’s grave. There would just be a marker on the ground. I was consumed by an aching I had never known before. There was nothing to do for it, no place to go to relieve it. I headed for the exit. I’d go home and take a hot bath. Maybe that would help. Maybe it was the cold that was affecting me, I told myself, but I knew that wasn’t true. I walked all the way back to my car, feeling that even the air pulled into my lungs was something strange and foreign.

As soon as I got home and took off my down jacket, I wanted to get out of the house. I felt like a desperate wild animal. Gauguin was moving away, and I couldn’t stop him. I was frightened. I sat down on the couch. Then I jumped up, went to the refrigerator, grabbed the handle, and yanked open the door. There was nothing in there I wanted to eat. I slammed it shut. I went into the bathroom and turned on the tub water.

The phone rang. I hauled myself into the living room and lifted the receiver. It was Gauguin. “I’m heading out tomorrow early. I thought I’d pack up a few more things and come and say good-bye in about an hour,” he said.

“Okay.” I hung up.

In an hour I’d see Gauguin for the last time. I dropped my clothes on the bathroom floor and lowered myself into the white porcelain tub. Though the bath was hot, my teeth were chattering and I was trembling.

“Please don’t go,” I sobbed. I reached for a towel and buried my face in it.

My eyes were swollen by the time I was dressed again, sitting on the maroon couch, waiting for Gauguin to arrive.

The doorbell finally rang and I got up to answer it. Gauguin stepped in from the cold and stood by the couch. This was my last chance. I’d beg him to stay or take me with him—anything. Instead I was frozen. We stood opposite each other, maybe half a living room apart. He wore his old green army jacket, and his face, that face I loved, those thick lips, hazel eyes, freckled cheekbones—I wanted to reach out and touch them. I would be alone in Minneapolis, a city where I would never have lived except for him.

“Nell—” He started to cry. I glanced at his hand. That hand had touched my face, my breast, my ear. I would never find anything like his tenderness again. I began to sob.

“Please.” I threw my arm across my face. “Please, please, don’t say anything.”

He kept crying. “Nell...” Neither of us made a step closer to the other.

“...I’m so sorry we hurt each other.” He finally got it out. A wide quiet space opened between us.

Then I couldn’t bear it. Speechless, I motioned for him to leave. He opened the front door, stepped out, and closed it behind him.

“N
ELL, WE’RE WORRIED
about you. Please come down. We’ll pay for the ticket,” my mother offered on the phone. “We’re here for another month. It will be good for you. Uncle Harold is here, right nearby, and Cousin Sarah. It will cheer you up. Just because you’re the only one in our family ever to be divorced, you shouldn’t be ashamed. We all love you.”

“Okay, I’ll think about it. Easter vacation is coming up, so maybe I could make it.” We hung up.

Three days later I made reservations to fly to Miami. I was lonesome and maybe my family could help.

After I bought the ticket I panicked. An entire week with my parents? I must really be crazy!

My father lunged at me as soon as I reached gate eight. “Nell, Nell, Nell,” he moaned, and gave me a big bear hug.

My mother was there, too, along with two of their friends from the next condo who had come along for the ride.

“This is Shirley, and this is Max.”

We greeted each other. “They live in New Jersey,” my mother said. “Nell, wait until you see the place we rented. You’ll just love it. Very Floridian.”

“Look at those palm trees. And you know Grandma is coming down the day after you leave. What a shame we couldn’t all be here together,” my father told me as we walked through the parking lot. “I love this semi-retirement, I was exhausted. Cousin Saul’s learned the business so well that I can leave for two months.”

We piled into the car, men in front, women in back. I was scrunched between Shirley and my mother. She held my hand and rubbed it, giving me sympathetic glances while she and Shirley kept up a constant banter, comparing notes on the price of bagels, the new Marshall’s that opened nearby, and how much weight Selma in the next block had lost.

They drove me through the entire condo complex. It was forty miles from the ocean but had a clubhouse with an outdoor pool, tennis courts, and a Jacuzzi.

“Don’t you just love it?” Shirley asked.

“My,” I said.

It was late afternoon and a breeze cooled things off a bit. Almost on cue, people came out of their houses to walk or ride jumbo-size tricycles around the paved streets. It was good for the circulation, my mother told me.

As soon as we got to their place, my father settled into a big lounge chair.

“I don’t do those things, Nell. Why walk all around the block to come back to your own house?” He grinned. “I’d rather go watch horses go round and round at the racetrack.” He shifted his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other and pressed the remote control button to switch the television on. “Come, sit with me. Your mother has to call everyone to let them know you arrived safely.”

I settled down on the couch and together we watched Howard Cosell. The blinds were drawn against the sun. We sat in the light of the television screen. The New York Knicks were slaughtering the Boston Celtics.

Everything in the living room was white—the couch, the chairs, the rugs, the walls. A fat green schefflera plant occupied one corner and a ceiling fan whirled above our heads.

I got up during a commercial, took a chicken leg from the refrigerator, and ate it, standing by the kitchen sink. “Don’t spoil your appetite, Nell. We’ll have dinner after our walk. You’ll come with me?” my mother asked, stepping out of the bedroom.

“Of course.” I nodded.

She ducked back into the bedroom to put on her special brown walking shoes. When she reemerged, we went out. As she walked, she swung her arms. The walking instructor had said it was good for the heart. She liked going on her walk later than everyone else.

As we passed each house, she told me who lived there. “Oh, that’s the Katzes’. The husband was a physician before he retired. They have three daughters. All married very well. One is married to an Israeli, and they live in Scarsdale.

“This is the Durantes’ house. They’re Italian, but very nice. They have two granddaughters who visited last week. The older one’s a little chubby, but she has nice skin.

“Would you prefer brisket tonight? Or we could go out for dinner. Tomorrow your father and I start our diet. We read about it in the
Miami Herald.
We’re only allowed lean meat twice a day. In the morning when we wake up and for dinner. In between we can eat carrot sticks. That’s all.”

“Mom, I don’t really care what we eat.”

We walked past small condo units, each with a green lawn, a hibiscus bush, a willow tree, and a forsythia. Wandering Jew plants were draped around the front entrances.

“Nell, isn’t this paradise? Aren’t these places cute? Look at that adorable flamingo statue on the front lawn.” She stopped swinging and held my arm.

“My,” I said.

We walked on in silence, my mother awed by the beauty.

At the corner she suddenly halted and turned to me. “So what happened? He didn’t have a nice family?”

“No, it wasn’t that. We were no longer compatible. I couldn’t stand him playing music all the time and not being home,” I said, hoping to satisfy her with an easy explanation.

“Nell, I don’t understand. You knew he was a musician before you married him. That’s the way they live.” She was very logical. I was impressed.

“I guess I changed. And my painting—”

She interrupted. “He was a sweet boy. He just didn’t look like you. That’s all.”

I knew she meant he wasn’t Jewish. Could it be that simple?

When we came in the house, my father jumped up from his chair. “What took you so long? I’m starving. Let’s eat a lot tonight since we have to start dieting tomorrow. Nell, I never get to see you. You arrive, and your mother takes you off gallivanting.”

“I didn’t take her gallivanting. We exercised. Something you should do.” She tapped him on the stomach to remind him of his weight. He beamed with delight. He liked any kind of attention from her.

After dinner, my father and I settled into watching a late movie. My mother decided to go to bed early. She padded into the living room to say good night wearing a white cotton nightgown that ended above her knees. Her knees were brown and very round, like a young girl’s. She kissed me, kissed my father, then padded back to their bedroom where she fell asleep to the crackling of the radio.

The movie was about a man in England who fell in love with a Russian spy. In the middle of the film, when the Englishman turned the corner on Trafalgar Square and barely missed a bullet aimed at his head, my father turned to me. “This movie is good, isn’t it?” he said.

I nodded.

After the spy and the man ran off together, “The End” flashed across the television screen.

I got up to turn off the set. He raised his hand. “Don’t do that. I like the sound.” He shifted in his chair and fell asleep.

I crossed the living room to the guest bedroom. I stood in the bedroom for a moment, then turned and walked out the front door. I continued past the tennis courts and the artificial lake used for paddle boats. A thin moon rippled in the water and hung steady in the Florida sky.

I imagined that Gauguin and I were visiting here together. Gauguin would have sat for an hour in the hot tub and my father would have nagged me to tell him to get out. Lying on a chaise lounge, I would have said, “Leave him alone. His parents just died.” In the morning, my father would have squeezed us fresh orange juice and my mother would have cut up bagels to go with the lox and cream cheese. Then both my parents would have sat and watched us eat. Gauguin would have made them happy by eating two bagels.

I headed toward the back of the condo village. I remembered something Gauguin had said about my parents when they visited Minneapolis. “They make you feel weird if you want to be alone, like it’s an abnormal state.”

I reached the high-wire fence that surrounded the condos. On the other side was forest. Shirley had said in the car that soon bulldozers would be knocking down the Australian pines to make way for the construction of Seagull Motor Park. I climbed the fence. No one was around to stop me. Everyone was asleep.