Other People's Lives (19 page)

“Your mother tells you too much,” said her aunt, but in what way this was true she had no idea. “Stalin” was what Miriam's mother called her uncle, and what she said about him was that he simply had nothing in his head and had no way of telling what was true from what wasn't. For this reason, all of his talk about Socialism was just noise-making, and all he was, she said, was a big talker who would believe anyone who was a bigger faker.

The other thing Miriam's mother most often told about was her own life when she was a child, but when she got to that, she talked only half to Miriam and half to someone who wasn't there at all.

“Who could have believed that any place could be as big as Warsaw?” is what she would say. “Streets and more streets, I couldn't understand it. I was the first girl from my town ever to be sent there to school, and I was so smart that when I got there I was the youngest in my class. But all my smartness did me no good—I looked at all the stores and the people, the streetcars and the houses, and all I did was cry constantly.” This, Miriam never had any trouble believing; it was a habit her mother never got out of. Whenever the boiler broke down for a day, her mother cried all the time that she washed in cold water, and if the butcher ever sent the wrong kind of chicken, or one with too many pin-feathers on it, she cried for hours after and then started all over again when they were ready to sit down and eat it.

Still, with all the things that she did tell, when it came to camp Miriam's mother said very little.

“You'll meet children from all over. When Dina went, there was a girl from Winnipeg, Canada.”

“Was her father a Mountie?”

“How could he be a Mountie?” her mother said. “Ask Dina, I think he was a dentist.”

“Then I don't see the point.”

“It isn't a question of point, Miriam. In camp you'll have grass and trees and get away. Here all you'd have is the hot city.”

But it was the hot, empty city that Miriam loved. The flat, gritty sidewalks, freed of people, widened in the glassy, brilliant glare and in the distance fell away like jungle snow. Hard, strange bits of stone came bubbling up through the pavements: glazed, heated traces of another city that once drummed and droned beneath. In front of all the buildings, just where landlords had planted them, low, wiry shrubs pushed themselves out like rubber plants, and the buildings, rougher and rocklike in the ocher heat, seemed turned into brick that was brick before houses, brick that cooked up from the earth itself. From the sky, the city's summer smell sank into Miriam's skin, and walking along with the slow air, she felt her thin, naggy body skim away to the bricks and the pavement that streamed, in belonging, to the sun. What she would do with a bunch of trees, Miriam did not know.

Only dodge ball, it turned out, could have been invented by human beings: if somebody kept throwing balls at you, it was only natural to try to get away from them, and if you would just be allowed to go far enough, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place. This was what Miriam decided on for all games, so in basketball and volleyball she let other people push and scream for the ball as if there were a sale, and in badminton she watched them jump and yell, “Look at the birdie,” like photographers with black cloths in an old-time movie.

Folk dancing was no improvement. “Right over left, left, step, right behind, left, step,” Naamah the Yemenite folk dancer sang out instead of words in her dark Yemenite voice, while all her heavy silver jewelry sounded behind her, a rhythm as clear and alone as somebody cracking gum in an empty subway. In a way, Naamah was the most Israeli-looking person Miriam had ever seen; with her tiny, tight, dark features and black, curly hair, she flew around the room like a strange but very beautiful insect, the kind of insect a crazy scientist would let loose in a room and sit up watching till he no longer knew whether it was beautiful or ugly, human or a bug. Sometimes Naamah would pull Miriam out of the circle and sing the special right-over-left song straight into her ear as if
Miriam
were the one who couldn't speak English.

“The grapevine step,” she screamed over the music. “It's necessary for all Oriental dance. Not just Israeli. Also the Greeks have it, and it's found modified with the Druse.” But it seemed to Miriam like doing arithmetic with your feet, and finally Naamah let her go back into the circle, saying, “Westerners cannot do our dances. They do not have the body.”

“I don't know what
she
acts so fancy about,” Miriam said in a half-whisper to no one. “Everybody knows that when the Yemenites first came to Israel, they never even saw a toilet before, and when the Israelis gave them brand-new bathrooms, what they did was go all over the floor.”

“Shush, Miriam,” said Phyllis Axelrod, a tanned, chunky girl in Miriam's bunk. “Don't answer back. If you feel bad, just cry into your pillow. I do it every night and it works.”

“What does your pillow have to do with it? That sounds like putting teeth under your pillow so that fairies will give you money.”

“You get dimes that way, Miriam. Don't you even want the dimes?”

“If I want a dime, I ask my mother for it. I don't hide teeth and expect fairies, that's not something I believe in.”

“My mother wouldn't just hand out dimes like that,” Phyllis said, and Miriam immediately felt sorry. She liked Phyllis, though she often seemed not too brilliant; sometimes they were buddies in swimming, and once they snuck out of the water together because Phyllis heard a radio playing inside the little cabaña that was only for counselors. It was the reason that Phyllis cried into her pillow at night: she missed listening to the radio and knowing what was on the Hit Parade, and this gave Miriam the idea that when Phyllis got to be a teenager she might spend all her time hanging around cars in the street, holding up a radio and looking for boys. Sometimes Phyllis also cried because she missed her oldest brother, Ronny, who had just come back from Korea and immediately got married.

“You're not glad about being a sister-in-law?” Miriam asked her.

“It's not that great,” Phyllis said. “I just wish I had my regular brother back again, no Army and no wedding.” Still, she had a beautiful red-and-gold silk scarf that Ronny had brought back for her from Asia; once she wore it as a shawl when everyone, already in white tops and shorts, had gone out on the road to pick wild flowers for the Friday-evening table. On that road, outside camp but just behind the bunks, most of the flowers were tiger lilies, and when Phyllis bent over to pick one, she looked, with her straight black hair and broad brown face, like an Asian girl herself.

It was the closest Miriam got to “children from all over”: except for a girl from Teaneck, New Jersey, everyone in her bunk was from New York, mostly from Brooklyn or Queens, both places Miriam had not been to. Still, from what they said, the only difference she could see was that they called Manhattan “going into the city,” while people from the Bronx called it “going downtown.” Besides Miriam, that meant only Bryna Sue Seligman, who, because she came from Riverdale, would not admit it. Everything that belonged to Bryna, her recorder included, had specially printed stickers, made up by her father who was in the printing business, that said in giant yellow letters
BRYNA SUE SELIGMAN,
and her favorite book in the world was the Classic Comic of
Green Mansions.
On the very first day they were in camp she asked Miriam, “Don't you wish you were Rima? Isn't
Green Mansions
the most beautiful thing you ever heard of?”

“It's OK,” Miriam said; she could not see constantly going barefoot in a hot jungle and having to depend on birds when you had any trouble. But Bryna liked the whole idea so much that just in order to be like Rima, she kept her long red hair loose and hanging down her back, walked around without shoes when she wasn't supposed to, and blew into her recorder, which she couldn't really play, when she lay in bed after Lights Out. Whenever there was any free time, Bryna the bird-girl spent almost all of it either brushing her hair or dusting herself with bath powder, all in her private mirror with the yellow label, moving it constantly from side to side so that there was no part of her she would miss.

“I don't know what I'm doing here,” she would say as she stared at herself and brushed all her red hair. “I'm going to be a bareback rider and my mother promised me a camp with horses.”

“Jewish camps don't come with horses,” Miriam said. “You should have figured that out for yourself. Besides, I thought you said you were going to be a poetess.”

“Oh, I am one already,” Bryna said. “Any time I feel like it, my father prints up all my poems.”

“In yellow?” said Miriam.

“In any color I want. Once I wrote a poem about a rainbow and my father made every line in a different color.”

This sounded like a bubble-gum wrapper and no poem, but watching Bryna trace around her suntan marks in the mirror, Miriam decided not to say it.

“I could be going horseback riding in Riverdale right now. Where I live, it's practically the country.”

“Where you live is the Bronx,” Miriam said. “On your letters you put Bronx, New York, and you even write in a zone number.”

“It just so happens that lots of people put Riverdale-on-Hudson, and any time I wanted to, I could.”

“You
could,
” Miriam said, “but it would probably end up in a museum in Albany.”

Because their beds were next to each other, Miriam and Bryna shared a cubby; with all Bryna's yellow labels shining through the shelves like flashbulb suns and the smell of her bath powder always hanging in the air, there was no place that Miriam felt was really hers. Her bathrobe and bathing suits hung like blind midgets in the way; they even got the Bryna bath-powder smell. It made them seem as if they were someone else's clothes and, like everything else in camp, had nothing to do with Miriam and her life.

“I could be in a special dramatics camp on a fat scholarship,” Bryna said. “The only reason I told them no was that they didn't have any horseback riding, but at least
there
they would have had me starring in a million plays.”

“I'm in a play here,” said Miriam. It was turning out to be what she had instead of a cubby, and completely faking calmness, she waited for Bryna to faint.

Who could have believed that anyplace could be as big as Warsaw? Probably not anyone in the play: who they were, all of them, were Jews, Nazis, and Polish partisans in the Warsaw ghetto—but where all the streets, more streets, and streetcars could be, the stage gave no idea and Amnon didn't ever say. On the stage was a tiny, crowded Warsaw filled with people who had phlegmy, sad Polish names—Dudek and Vladek, Dunya and Renya—just like in Miriam's mother's stories, and though they were always fighting and singing, there was no way for them to turn out not to be dead. Even the Yiddish song that Miriam had to sing at the end was about a girl who gets taught by her boyfriend how to shoot a gun, and who, one night in the freezing cold, goes out in her beret and shoots up a truckload of Nazis. When the girl is finished, she falls asleep, and the snow coming down makes a garland in her hair. Probably it also freezes her to death, though all it said at the end of the song was: “Exhausted from this small victory, For our new, free generation.”

How could a girl who ran out all alone shooting soldiers let herself end up snowed under? And what was the point of people's running through sewers with guns if all they turned into was corpses? It was very hard to explain to Bryna, whose big question was, “Are you starring?”

“Nobody is,” Miriam said. “It's not that kind of a play. Half of the time I fake being dead so that nobody finds out and they leave me.”

“You mean you don't even
say
anything?”

“I do,” Miriam said, “but what I say doesn't do any good. I'm a little girl in braids and I sneak out of the ghetto with my big brother.”

Bryna said, “That's your big part? What do you tell him?”

“Nothing. While he's out getting guns, I hide and I hear some Nazi soldiers being so drunk that they start screaming out their plans. And that's when I immediately run back to the ghetto and warn everyone.”

“Oh,” Bryna said. “So the whole thing is that you copy Paul Revere.”

“The only kind of Paul Revere it could be is a Jewish kind. Everyone dies and there are no horses.”

Bryna said, “Some play! When we did
The Princess and the Pea,
I was the star, and then when we did
Pocahontas, Red-Skin Lady of Jamestown,
I was the heroine. In
this
moron play, I bet that there isn't even one person with a halfway decent part.”

“My part's good,” Miriam said. “I'm practically the only one who doesn't turn out to be killed.”

“That's because you're a girl.”

“No, it's not,” Miriam said. “I don't even
know
why, that's just the way the play is.”

“Listen, Miriam, I've been in a million plays. Little girls never get killed in any of them.”

“Well, in this one they do. In this one the only people who don't wind up dead are me and Gil Burstein.”

“You're
in a play with Gil Burstein? You? Just let me come to rehearsals with you and I'll let you use my expensive bath powder any time you want.”

“You can't get out of playing badminton just like that,” Miriam told her. “That's only for people in the play.”

But play or not, camp was still camp. At night, cold air flew in through the dark from Canada and mixed on the screens with mosquitoes; 6–12 and whispers filled up the air in the bunk and stayed there like ugly wallpaper. How could anyone sleep? Miriam played with the dark like a blind person in a foreign country: in the chilly, quiet strangeness, her bed was as black as a packed-up trunk, and her body, separate in all its sunburned parts, was suddenly as unfamiliar as someone else's toothpaste.