Authors: Mira Bartók
I whisper yes in her ear, and ask her to lower her voice.
“Don’t shush me, honey. I’m not speaking too loud. So do you want a milkshake or a pop? Aren’t you thirsty? I sure am.”
“Maybe later,” I say.
On-screen, the story flips back to the dark tribe dining on warthog. The father steals his son’s hunk of meat. A fight ensues and the son falls off a cliff. The son is alone, standing in a vast, barren desert. Giant tarantulas appear, a brontosaurus, and smaller, but deadly, dinosaurs. The young hairy man escapes from death and stumbles beneath the terrible sun. He finally collapses. Nearby, at the shore of the sea, barely clad blond women giggle and spear fish for their dinner. The young women see the fallen man and run over to help. Lurking nearby is a mega-turtle. Luckily, Raquel is at the ready. I picture myself in her place, spear in hand. She tries single-handedly to battle the beast, even though it is a hundred times her size. Someone from her tribe blows on a conch shell and other smooth-skinned blondes arrive.
My mother says, “I’m going out to smoke.”
After she leaves, the man behind me leans forward and whispers into my hair, “Hey, where’d your mom go? Want some popcorn, honey? Have a piece.”
I pretend not to hear him and sink lower into my seat. The blond people look like they could be related to Debbie and Linda Kamps’s, the nice German-American family in our neighborhood who belong to various athletic and social clubs. My mother says their family breeds Hitler Youth because
their daughters are in Girl Scouts and another club called the Rainbow Girls.
Those people are Nazis, just look at their hair and their little brown shirts!
The blond tribe on-screen could be from the tribe of the Brunners, the Bentes, the Budds, or the other families that are blond and whose last names begin with B on our grandparents’ street.
Why do all their names begin with
B? My mother wants to know. B, B, B,
always B’s! What does it mean?
“Hey sweetheart. Your hair smells real nice.”
Raquel and the hairy guy have fallen in love. I hope nobody kisses, especially with tongues. I sink down farther into my seat. Everything looks phony, and yet, even though I can see they’re really lizards and turtles enlarged with cameras to look big and scary, they
are
scary in a way, the way the creatures come out of nowhere and stampede the tribe, just when everyone is having such a nice swim in the river. It’s the way they devour a man, like he’s just a little bug, that sends a shiver down my spine. I can feel the man’s hot breath on the back of my neck again. Something about him reminds me of my grandfather but I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s the acrid scent of beer and cigarettes, maybe something else.
“Where’s your mom? She leave?”
I consider leaving. But what if my mother came back and I wasn’t there because I was outside looking for her? Then she’d be alone with the man. He might do something to her, like touch her, or say dirty words. Or she’d think I disappeared and she’d call the police. What if she called the police and they thought she was crazy for taking me out of school for the day? Maybe they’d put her in jail.
“Hey, doll, come an’ sit back here with me. I’ll buy you a Coke.”
I close my eyes and make myself so small I could be a tiny creature inside a shoe box filled with moss and lumps of clay. Better yet, I am hiding behind a rock on-screen while a massive horned beast rips off the head of a hissing raptor.
My mother returns; the man relaxes into his chair. She’s distracted, rummages for something in her purse. Items fall to the floor: a lipstick, a hairbrush, a pack of Doublemint gum. The man picks up the lipstick that has rolled beneath his seat. When he passes it to her, he leans, half out of his chair, and hovers over her a bit too long. It reminds me of how the hairy dark
men in the movie size a woman up with just one glance, then grab her by her hair and drag her to a corner of their cave. It reminds me of the way they eat the warthog.
My mother twists and turns in her seat. She can’t get comfortable. The scene we’re watching looks like it could turn romantic and I can’t get comfortable either. I have to pee but I’m worried that if I leave, she’ll leave again too. I whisper to her that I have to go to the bathroom.
“Do you want to come with me?” I ask.
“I just went. You go. I’ll watch our coats.”
“Don’t leave,” I say. “I’ll be right back. Stay right here.”
In the lobby, I can hear thunder and lightning from outside. We forgot to bring umbrellas. It’s February and there should be snow. Will things always be like this—strange unpredictable weather, creepy men lurking about; our father, lost in a jungle; my mother, one foot in this world, the other in a dream?
When I return, my mother is gone again and so is the man.
My red dinosaur book tells me that the Eryops was the lord and tyrant of his day. His mouth was so wide and deep that he could have swallowed a man whole. My book about the North Pole tells me that if you are trapped in the sea ice and starving, you can always boil your boots in a pinch. But nothing, not one single book, can tell me how to find my mother in the rain.
The movie ends. Should I leave? I have money hidden in the bottom of my shoe; I know which bus to take back home. The way back is much shorter than taking the subway alone in the dark after a day at the museum. It’s not too bad if you look at it that way. Then, outside, beneath the marquee, I see a woman with dark curly hair, pacing, smoking in the thrumming rain. She is alone and muttering to herself. Something about her reminds me of the old lady downtown who wears three coats and asks people on the street for a dime. I run to my mother, even though she could be that lady with the coats, the lady who has no teeth and who talks to her hands. When my mother sees me, she hugs me close.
“I was worried sick about you,” she says. “Where the hell did you go?”
The walk to our apartment is just over a mile, but it seems far in the damp cold. I’m tired and want to take the bus, but my mother says that someone could commandeer the vehicle and take us out of the city to a place where they hook up the hearts of Jews to machines. Even if they didn’t kidnap us on the bus, a man sitting across the aisle could take our picture with an X-ray-vision camera hidden in his shoe, just like on the TV show
Get Smart
, and that would just help the enemy along with their plan. At least when you’re walking, you can run if you’re being followed. If you have a knife in your pocket, like my mother does some days, even better.
By the time we get home, my feet are soaked; my hairdo has fallen flipless and limp. The nest on the back of my head is a damp tangled blob. I study my fingernails under the light to see if they got damaged from the storm. They are still pearly pink.
Later that evening, my sister and I are playing Sorry in our room. You don’t have to think that much to play. Sorry is a game of chance, the only game Rachel doesn’t always win. We scurry our blue and red pieces around the board, knocking each other’s men out of their little colored squares. Our mother calls me to her room. “I’ll be right back,” I say to Rachel. “Don’t cheat!” even though I know she never does.
In her bedroom, my mother lounges in a short beige slip among the disheveled sheets. The song “Lemon Tree” plays softly on the radio. She has the heat turned up high; the radiator by the window hisses and spits out steam. Was this what it was like in a primeval jungle, this clammy prison of a room? My mother’s eyes are part wolf, part human: the suspicious eyes that dart from here to there, the red eyes of all-night rants, the prelude to another round of shock treatment.
“Do you like this song?” she asks.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not Beethoven,” she says, “but I like it. So what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“You know. An artist.”
The rain outside that turned to sleet has turned to snow. I can hear wind rattling the loose glass in the window frames. Everything needs fixing in our place—the windows, the stove, the toilet that clogs up.
“You’ll always be my little Picasso. But don’t you want to get married and have babies too?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
My mother is staring at a stack of magazines at the foot of her bed. She points to them and says, “Pick that up—the one on top. I want to show you something.”
She lights a cigarette and motions me to climb up beside her.
“I’m in the middle of a game.”
My mother pats the bed. “Come on. I’m not going to bite you.”
I clamber up over her legs gingerly, a vigilant cat, placing myself as far as I can from her sticky flesh.
“Come closer.”
She reaches for the magazine I’m holding from the top of the pile.
“Look,” she says.
My mother taps her finger hard on a picture that, at first glance, looks like a bunch of people playing Twister. Then I realize it’s a large group of naked white people doing something else. Men and women are licking and thrusting and kissing every possible body part; it’s hard to tell where one person begins and another ends.
“Do you know what they’re doing?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “Can I go back now?”
“Has a man ever done that to you?”
She points to a bearded blond guy entering a young Barbie-like model from behind. The woman looks a lot like Raquel Welch. Could it be the cave girl I just saw?
“You don’t know this yet,” she says, “but there are men who want to do that to you. They did it to me. I know they want to do it to your sister. She’s asking for trouble.”
It’s the same thing my grandfather says only not in so many words. He always warns me, “Boys are rough-and-tumble. They take you down to the river and won’t give you even a glass of water!” When he says that I wonder,
Why would I want to drink from a dirty river that caught on fire? What does he mean?
I don’t want to look at the picture, or my mother, so I stare at the floor. There are plates of old food and stacks of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
, piles of books and newspapers everywhere, baskets of dirty laundry, my old green Mr. Magoo sippy cup overflowing with cigarette butts. There is a picture of flowers I made for her, crumbled and coffee-stained, sticking out from beneath the bed. I can hear Ginger whining and scratching at the bedroom door.
“Ginger has to go,” I say. “She’s crying.”
My mother sighs; waves me off the bed.
“Oh, all right. Why don’t you be a good girl and go buy your old lady a pack of Benson & Hedges? I’m all out.”
I sneak out of the building, so no one can see I have a dog, and we walk down to the corner store. When a man honks his horn at another driver, I jump and Ginger trembles. I bend over to rub the soft white stripe down the front of her face. “It’s okay, girl,” I say, kissing her nose. “It’s okay.” Ginger is jumpy, like me—sensitive to sound and sudden movements. She wasn’t that way at first but one day after we got her, Grandpa told me to stand still outside and hold her leash tight. Then he shot a gun off by our feet several times. “This is how girls learn to obey,” he said. “How to be seen and not heard.”
I’m nervous at the counter, afraid the clerk will think I’m buying cigarettes for myself. I search my pockets for my mother’s five-dollar bill; there’s money left over, so I get some cherry licorice for Rachel, malted milk balls for me. Ginger and I race home in the dark. It seems I can never finish anything: a game, a drawing, or a song on my violin. By the time I get back, my mother is dozing. The radio is blasting something Cuban, with lots of brass and drums. I put out my mother’s cigarette resting precariously on the edge of an ashtray and shut her door. My sister is already in bed, reading, our board game scattered on the floor. The phone rings in the kitchen. I go to pick it up.
“Hello?” I say.
“Myra?”
The man’s voice sounds uncertain, like he doesn’t quite know who I am, but I know who he is. I know it’s my father, even though I haven’t talked to him since I was four. I barely remember him. He is the man who hid upstairs in his studio for hours and wouldn’t let me up there to play. He is the electrical smell of a train leaving a station, a tall dark-haired man in a suit, photographed laughing at a bar. He is a serious face on the back of a serious-looking book my mother keeps on the nightstand by her bed. My father is a stern figure standing at the edge of a dune, looking out at a cold blue lake.
On the phone, he says he wants my sister and me to come live with him and says I have to decide right away. Where is he calling from? Is he going to save us? Should I tell him about the man at the movies who leaned forward and smelled my hair?
“I’ll go get Mom,” I say.
“No—just tell me yes or no.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Who will take care of her?”
Does my father tell me that he lives in a strange and beautiful jungle where there are peacocks and tigers and all sorts of monkeys and birds, like the worlds I want to explore? And if I move there we can eat snake meat when we’re hungry, grab breadfruit right off the trees? Does he tell me we can ride wild horses? Are there wolves where he lives? Are there bears?
“Decide now. I’m calling long-distance.”
“I can’t... I promised.”
“All right. If that’s what you want.”
“Don’t you want to say hi to Rachel? I’ll go get her. Just a sec.”
“I’m saying goodbye.”
“Hello? Are you there? Hello?”
Always there is that memory of holding on to the heavy black phone, whispering, Hello? into a void. And the nothing at the other end, and the waiting for the nothing to become a voice, but it never does, and the creeping back down the hall to bed, the light still on in my mother’s room, radio still
blaring, my sister asleep in our room, open book upon her chest, the sound of her little-girl breath soft and steady. She is the only one I can count on in this changing world, to play a game, to race with across the street, to help me write a poem.
In 1969 I am filled with so many questions: When did the first birds appear? What exactly is a sauropod? When will my mother stop being crazy? Will our father ever return, now that I made him mad? We are entering a new era. I can feel it—something has shifted, is changing fast. When did she start buying those magazines? Why did all the dinosaurs die? How smooth is the surface of the moon? Will I ever reach the Serengeti or the Pole? When will the soldiers come home, Cousin Philip, who is somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam, all of our neighbors’ sons? Who will come to save us now? Will Jesus? Or our father? Will Neil Armstrong and his crew?