Riggs Park (12 page)

“Had one myself,” Essie said. “The disease is overrated, if you ask me.”

I didn’t go into detail. I didn’t mention the face-lift. “And Steve is fine. You probably read about him in the papers.”

“I do.” Essie’s smile threw her face into a spider’s web of wrinkles. “Steve. Mr. Bigshot.”

I leaned closer. “Actually, I’m here because of something Steve told Marilyn. Something she wants to find out about.”

“Oh?”

“You told him Penny had a baby?”

Essie’s smile vanished. “On the condition he leave it be.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said.

Essie turned to the window, studied the rain. Long seconds ticked by. I’d forgotten Essie’s habit of never responding until she was good and ready, and how infuriating that could be. “What would be the harm?” I pressed.

Essie snorted. She’d always played this game with me. When I was young, she’d let me hang around her house, but made me wait endlessly if I asked a question, sometimes pretending not to hear. She was far more responsive to Steve and Penny—finding them more needy, I supposed—but if her offhand manner meant she found me more self-sufficient than they were, still it annoyed me no end.

Essie didn’t offer any more help. She looked toward the doorway, where Taneka was shouldering her way back in through the bedroom that had once been the dining area. She carried a tray of coffee and cookies.

“Good. Caffeine,” Essie said. “These days, believe me, I need it.”

“At your age you shouldn’t drink coffee at all,” Taneka admonished. The affection in Taneka’s voice reassured me. I began to like her better.

Taneka handed us steaming, clunky mugs. “If you’re going to be here a while, how about I just run down to the store? It won’t take long.”

“Please. Of course.”

With the haste of the young released into welcome freedom, Taneka grabbed her purse and let herself out. Essie took a big, unladylike swig of coffee, bit into a cookie. “You’re wondering who’s taking care of who, that’s what you’re wondering.”

“What?”

“Whether I’m supporting Taneka or she’s supporting me.”

“No, Essie, I—”

Essie waved her cookie in my direction to stop me. “She goes to school part-time. She needed a place to live. Her mother ran off years ago, and it doesn’t hurt her to have an older woman to live with. Marcellus pays her tuition. You think I’d let him off without paying her tuition? His own child?” She gave a shiver of disgust. “I give her room and board. She helps me out. A smart girl. It’s a good arrangement.”

“She said she thought I was the police.”

“Drugs,” Essie said. “Not her, but plenty of others. The neighborhood isn’t what it used to be.” She put down her mug. Although fragile, Essie’s hands didn’t shake. “She takes care of me,” she said. “White people never did.”

Deliberately ignoring that, I rushed to change the subject. “What about her little boy?”

“What?” Essie’s eyes narrowed, and I realized too late I couldn’t pursue the subject of Taneka’s child without admitting I’d been there on Sunday.

“Nothing. I was—”

Essie had taken me to mean something else. As glazed and yellowed as her eyes were, the glance she leveled at me was piercing. “So. You thought it was a boy.”

“What?” I was lost.

“It wasn’t a boy,” Essie said. “It was a girl.”

“Who was?”

“Penny’s baby. That’s what Marilyn wanted to know, isn’t it? If it was a boy or a girl. The whole story. Right?”

“Right.” I felt as if someone had cut off my air.

“Penny stayed with me while she was pregnant. From the time she started showing.” Essie’s voice was sharp.

“Here?”

“Where else?” Essie lifted the mug again, slurped some coffee, wiped her lips with a hand. Her manners hadn’t become more delicate with age. “The neighborhood was completely colored except for me and one or two others. Who was going to see her? I arranged the adoption, too.”

“With an agency?”

“A private adoption. Penny wanted to know who the baby would go to. Also, there was money in it. She wanted money for afterward.”

“Then—once it was done. Was Penny all right?”

Essie waved a hand as if to shoo away her disgust. “Was she all right? Of course not. Penny was never all right.”

“That’s not what I meant. I—”

“The adoptive parents were fine. Nice people. The baby grew up and turned out fine, too.”

“So you kept in touch with her?”

She reached for another cookie, bit into it, spoke with her mouth full. “What does Marilyn want to know this for?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe because she never had a daughter and would like a niece. Maybe because she’s sick and wants to tie up loose ends.”

“So you got railroaded, huh?” She stared at me while she finished off the cookie. “You don’t even know what you got dragged into, do you? If Marilyn wanted to find out so bad, why isn’t she the one asking?”

“She had some surgery yesterday. I told you, she has cancer.”

“She had cancer surgery?”

“No. Just some minor—” I couldn’t say it. Helpless, I went on to something else. “So it was a little girl.”

“A girl. Yes. Penny named her Vera. You know what that means? It means
truth.
” Essie slid yet another cookie off the tray, demolished it in a single bite. There was certainly nothing wrong with her teeth.

“If Steve knew he had a daughter, he could have helped. He could have—”

“Who said she was Steve’s?”

“Well, was she?”

Essie shrugged.

“The man in the bus station,” I said. “She could have been his.” The man in the bus station reportedly looked like Steve. I didn’t know what, if anything, they did to prove paternity in the days before DNA testing. Essie said nothing.

“So it was a private adoption.” Slowly, I tried to feel my way through the thoughts racing through my head. In those days, adoption papers were sealed. Could a potential father, or a potential aunt, get hold of them? “Who drew up the agreement?” I asked. “Did you have a lawyer?”

“Bring Marilyn with you and we’ll talk about it,” Essie said.

“But she can’t—”

“Never mind, she can’t. You waited all these years, you can wait until she’s up and around.” Essie gulped the last of her coffee and put down her cup, as if to close the subject. “So. Besides Marilyn and Bernie, tell me who else you keep up with. Linda Schecter?”

“I haven’t seen her in years. Seriously, Essie, about the baby—”

“Not a baby anymore. Not for a long time.” She crossed her arms in front of her, a shield. “What about Wish?” she demanded. “You always liked Wish.”

I crossed my own arms, locking her out. How like Essie to veer the conversation exactly where she wanted it to go. “He doesn’t call himself Wish anymore,” I said. “He hasn’t been called Wish for years.”

“No? Why not?”

“I guess he outgrew it.”

“So what does he call himself now?
Mister
Wishner?”

“Just Jon, Essie.”

“And where is he? I used to read his columns. A writer…I guess he could live anywhere.”

“He’s with me, Essie,” I whispered. “In North Carolina. We’ve been together the last couple of years.”

I
held my breath as I waited for Essie to respond. The fact of my live-in relationship with Jon seemed a momentous revelation, but for all the reaction I got, I might have confessed to the air. Essie’s hands lay limp in her lap. She seemed blanketed by a great stillness. “So. You got together after all.”

“Yes.”

She turned toward the window, features masked by the unyielding fatigue of old age, eyes almost closed. “That big snow,” she said. “Sweet sixteen and never been kissed.”

“Kissed once or twice, maybe.” I smiled, remembering.

“You gained a boyfriend and Penny lost a tooth.”

It seemed an odd thing to say, though true enough. “Penny got a bridge,” I reminded her. “Her teeth looked okay. You couldn’t tell.”

Essie’s head bobbed, nodded onto her chest. Her white scalp glowed dully beneath the wispy hair. I leaned over and touched her wrist. “Essie?”

She was sound asleep. She was still snoring when Taneka returned ten minutes later, her halo of braided hair frosted with tiny drops of rain.

“She ate a cookie, didn’t she?” She put down a small grocery bag and studied Essie.

“More like three or four.”

Taneka glared as if it were all my fault. “She’s a little bit diabetic. Anything with sugar, it puts her right out.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“She’ll sleep it off. It happens any time I don’t watch her.”

“You should have told me.”

“She would have been embarrassed. Would have made my life miserable for weeks.” Leaning over, Taneka eased Essie up from her chair and half walked, half carried her into the dining-room-turned-bedroom. Through the open door, I watched as she tenderly helped Essie onto the bed, slipped off her shoes, pulled up the cover. But when she returned to the living room, all traces of the tenderness she had lavished on the old woman were gone.

“You better go now,” she told me sharply. “She’ll still be fuzzy when she wakes up. That’s from the sugar, too. You can come another time.”

“We were in the middle of a conversation when she fell asleep,” I said. “She was just telling me—”

“Another time.” Taneka motioned me to get up.

What the hell, I thought. As long as she was throwing good manners out the door with me, I might as well say what was on my mind. “What about the little boy?” I demanded. “The little boy who was with you on Sunday. Is he yours?”

Taneka tilted her head back and gave a mirthful bark. “Yeah, he’s mine. Mine to babysit,” she said. “How do you think I pay to go to school?”

Back in the car, I was thoroughly shaken, and not just by Taneka’s tone. There was no question of asking Marilyn to come here with me. She was perfectly capable of getting out of a sickbed to do it, even if it meant a relapse, and I had no intention of being responsible for
that.
And since Essie was stubborn as concrete, I had no idea how I was going to get her to talk to me without Marilyn coming along.

Nor could I shake the sting of Essie saying I had gained a boyfriend and Penny had lost a tooth, as if the two were of equal significance. It was bad enough that I’d always felt a little guilty about the foolish, selfish Sweet Sixteen Marilyn and I had shared. But for Essie to be rubbing it in after all these years? What could be the point?

Even at the time, Marilyn and I had worried that the party would be awkward. Penny had turned sixteen in October and proclaimed Sweet Sixteens silly, but Marilyn and I wanted one. We both had birthdays in December, an impossible month because of Hanukkah and Christmas Night Dance and vacations. Our nose jobs were coming up at Easter. Terrified of that as we were, it seemed important to celebrate ourselves in some small way while we still could. We scheduled our joint party for January. Penny was our best friend, true enough—but if there was never any telling how she’d react when our sorority sisters were around, was that our problem, or hers?

We decided on a Chinese lunch because no one had done that yet. There had been sleepovers, a tea, an excursion to a downtown show, even a cosmetics makeover at Francine Ades’s. But no one had done Chinese. Marilyn’s mother would pick up the food, bring it to my house, and help my mother serve. It turned out to be the kind of gray Saturday afternoon when everyone was glad to have somewhere to go. Marilyn and I kept telling each other that plenty of the guests besides Penny would be from outside the sorority. Penny wouldn’t be ostracized. Penny would be fine.

We hadn’t counted on Rhoda Apple. Chair of the sorority’s Midwinter Carnival, Rhoda saw the party as a chance to have a committee meeting. After the chicken and snow peas and rice had been eaten off paper plates in my living room, after the fortune-cookie fortunes had been read and passed around, while Marilyn and I opened our stack of presents, Rhoda herded her three committee members upstairs to the master bedroom. There, where dozens of coats were stacked on my parents’ bed, they had their meeting and used the phone to consult Bertie Eiger, who’d stayed home with the flu.

Lying under some of the coats, half asleep in a fetal position, they found Penny.

“Penny, you all right?”

“Just cramps,” Penny said. “I’m all right. The aspirin should kick in in a minute.”

“Well, what about lying down somewhere else?” Rhoda asked. “We’re having a committee meeting. About Midwinter Carnival.”

“Well, go ahead.”

“It’s a sorority function,” Rhoda said. “It’s—Well, you’re not a member. Sorority business is confidential. I don’t think you should stay.”

“Oh.” Cowed, shaken, Penny retreated to the bathroom. Fearing her red and splotchy face would give her away, fearing the others would assume her tears were not from anger (“I should have told Rhoda to go to hell instead of just thinking about it”), but from the humiliation of being forced to depledge the year before, Penny stayed in the bathroom for nearly an hour. She ignored the other girls, full of Coke and Seven-Up and Chinese tea, who knocked on the door and begged to get in. Downstairs, the presents had all been opened. Although my mother and Marilyn’s mother tactfully sent the full-bladdered guests to the half-bath in the basement, word of Penny’s standoff spread like wildfire. Marilyn and I feared our curious guests would stay all day.

Then, like a mercy, it snowed.

Most of the girls who’d driven to the party had had their licenses less than a year. None of them knew how to handle a car on slick roads. All were in a sudden panic to get home. Within minutes, the house was cleared, and Marilyn and I were able to coax Penny out of her retreat. The three of us spent the next hour filling trash cans with Chinese take-out cartons, used paper plates, cardboard gift boxes, crumpled wrapping paper and yards of ribbon. By the time we were finished, Penny’s good mood had returned.

It snowed on and off for more than twenty-four hours. Over a foot accumulated before it stopped on Sunday afternoon. The city was paralyzed. The temperature dropped and stayed below freezing the better part of a week. School was canceled. In the bright, bitter weather, the crust of the snow melted repeatedly in the sunshine, only to freeze again into a slick surface, shiny as icing on a cake and hard enough to walk on.

Snowplows rumbled along New Hampshire Avenue and Eastern Avenue. Occasionally they came across Third Street at the top of our hill and Sixth Street at the bottom. The effect was mainly to pack the frozen surface even more.

With the raw, edgy energy of girls trapped in our houses, Marilyn and Penny and I sledded each morning in the bitter cold, then broke for lunch and came out again. There were never enough sleds for everyone, so when the twelve-year-old boys urged Penny to belly flop on top of them, she did, offering the boys one of the great thrills of their sexual awakening, even though every inch of her body was insulated with layers of cotton and wool. Not seeing the harm, Marilyn and I stretched out atop the younger boys, too, racing with them on sleds so fleet that our world blurred into a collage of black tires at the curb, white snowmen in the yards, scarves and jackets in a pastiche of primary colors. At the alley, we began scraping our feet behind us to slow down and avoid crashing into Sixth Street at the bottom. No car had been by for days, but the snowplows had left frozen ruts and mounds in the cross street, dangerous at full speed.

While the boys pulled the sleds back up the hill, we girls walked unencumbered, sun glittering off the snow and into our eyes, ice crusting on our lashes until the street lost its shape entirely, became nothing but shooting prisms of light, transformed.

By the third morning, the holiday had turned wild. Children dug through the ice for handfuls of pebbles to pack into their snowballs. The sledders careened recklessly down the hill, racing each other with gleeful abandon. When the ice melted enough to make slick spots on the walk, no one noticed.

When Wish Wishner and Seth Opak and Bernie Waxman appeared at the top of the hill for the first time in three days, they swaggered down a shoveled thread of walk with their usual pack of friends and watched disdainfully as we flew past them atop the twelve-year-olds. As if at a signal, the older boys plunked their own sled onto the street and piled one on the other like tiers of a huge cake. With exaggerated comic gestures, they fell off one by one as far as the alley.

“You’re real champs there,” Marilyn taunted as we trudged back up the hill.

“Champs at comic relief,” I clarified.

“I sense a twinge of doubt at our racing abilities,” Wish said.

“More than a twinge,” I replied.

“Then you’re in for a treat.” Elbowing my twelve-year-old partner out of the way, Wish took my sled in his hands and led me to the top of the hill. Bernie did the same with Marilyn, and Seth was climbing the incline with Penny. The displaced younger boys protested noisily.

It was exciting, being shepherded up the hill like that. Wish was in some of my classes at school, but otherwise I hadn’t seen him much since our one date a year before on Christmas night. He swam on a city-wide team that practiced both morning and afternoon and traveled most weekends. During the summer he was gone, working as one of the junior swim instructors at Camp Chesapeake. It was only now, walking by his side, that I realized how much bigger he’d grown—not taller so much as broader-shouldered and more massive, maybe from all that swimming. Situating myself on my sled on top of him, with all the neighborhood watching, for a moment I felt as naked and as awkward as I ever had in my life.

We pushed off and instantly were two lengths in front of Penny and Seth, Marilyn and Bernie. Oh, we were a team! Unable to stop, at the bottom I rolled off into the crusty snow just before Sixth Street, and Wish dove off a split second later, so smoothly our moves might have been synchronized. Walking back up the hill, Wish bowed to his friends on the sidewalk, who whistled and cheered. The attention made me feel important. On subsequent runs, Penny and Seth lagged so far behind us that they were hardly in the competition, and Wish and I beat Marilyn and Bernie seven times in a row.

Once on the way down, caught in the eye by a drop of water and forced to push my head into the collar of Wish’s coat, I was certain I felt the warmth of his neck underneath. When we reached the bottom and he pulled me up, his hands, too, seemed warm under his gloves. I could not imagine, as we stood there in that snow, what it felt like to be cold.

On our next trip down the hill, I saw the car. Saw it dreamily at first, through a film of snow in my eyes. Creeping into the intersection where no car had been for three days, it labored its way along Sixth Street, directly in our path. I had neither the time nor the presence of mind to think. I catapulted off the sled and hit the street hard. Behind me, Wish landed on his right shoulder, then instinctively jerked the rope toward him so the sled would not go under the car.

The driver saw us and jammed on his brakes.

Marilyn and Bernie were right behind us, and Penny and Seth a few yards back.

“Watch out!” I yelled. “Car!”

The car’s wheels locked, but the ice carried it forward. It skidded in slow-motion over the snowplow ruts.

Marilyn and Bernie lunged off, rolled over and over, a tangle of arms and legs and coats. Seth and Penny did the same.

Shocked and dumb, all six of us sat up where we had landed on the snow. We watched as the skidding car finally came to a halt on the rutted street.

The driver got out, dazed. His eyes slid over me and Wish, Bernie and Marilyn, and settled on Penny. At the sight of her, he muttered, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” We all turned to look. She must have landed with her mouth open, hit her upper teeth on the ground. Her gashed gum was dripping blood onto the sunshine-white street, and her upper left front tooth hung crazily by a thread.

She hadn’t yet been aware of it. Seeing the man’s alarm, she removed one of her gloves and lifted a hand to her face to touch the injury. Even before her fingers found the tooth, she noticed her own blood on the snow and started to scream.

Except for Marilyn, who coddled a bruised knee, the rest of us had no idea if we were hurt. There is a moment when you suffer a traumatic injury, when you are numb and still free of pain, a moment of grace. Bernie and I were fine, but we did not know yet—even Wish did not know—that he had broken his shoulder. We did not know that when it healed it would never again be right enough for swimming, which had been half his life. Or if he knew, he understood only in some visceral, unconscious way. Later that was how it seemed: that Wish knew, and that I knew, that in the instant we had flown together off the sled, he had ceased being Wish the swimmer and become Wish who loved Barbara Cohen. And I had become the girl who loved him back.

Then the street was full of people, all noise and color. Penny’s mother, Helen Weinberg, coatless, came running down the block like the devoted parent she’d never been. Trudi dragged my mother down from our house. Pauline Wishner appeared, a frilly apron tied around her waist and a jacket flung over her shoulders, hands clawing at her face in disbelief.