The Life Room, page 3
He slouched to the ground. He looked sad. Stephen gazed around the four walls of the playhouse. In one corner was a spiderweb with a dead fly trapped inside. He perked up and looked at her. “I like being in here with you. Would you let me kiss you, Eleanor?”
His nose was dripping, and he was shivering. His hands were curled up in the sleeves of his sweater. He had run out of the house without his ski jacket. She watched him wipe his nose with his sleeve. “We’re friends,” she said, not quite sure what to say.
“What if I don’t want to be your friend?”
“I won’t let us not be friends.” She reached over and kissed his cheek. His face brightened into a smile.
“Do you think you could really like me?”
“Maybe.”
He looked at her intensely, and as she watched him she felt new feelings inside. He continued to look at her, fixated on her eyes until an icicle fell against the glass.
Then he turned on the record player and put on “Eleanor Rigby.” The turntable was plugged into an extension cord that traveled to the playhouse through the Masons’ garage. The record skipped, warped by the dampness. He picked up the needle and sang the refrain. “Lives in a dream . . . Who is it for? It’s for me, isn’t it, Eleanor?” he said, pinching the skin on her ribs. Candles dripped pools of wax on the old wooden crate they used for a table. He dipped his fingers into the burning wax. “Ouch,” he said, smiling, as though he liked the feel of the burn.
“You want to see something?” He dug into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a Swiss pocketknife. “My father gave it to me. He said I’m supposed to protect her.”
“Protect who?”
“My mom.”
“That means he still loves her.”
“It means he’s leaving.” He looked at her again. “I like your eyes.”
“They don’t creep you out? Janis Talbot said I look like a cat.”
“You’re the cutest girl in the school. Can I tell you something? Sometimes I get this funny feeling. Like I’m going to jump out of my skin. I want to destroy things. Kick in a door. Or burn up something. Do you ever feel that way?” He opened the blade of the pocketknife and began to saw it into the wooden crate they were using for a table.
“Kind of.” She wasn’t sure but didn’t want to make him feel bad.
“You’re it.” He ran to hide as if in love with the idea of fleeing, being sought after, and being found.
She went back out to the yard to try to find him. She went to her house. He was nowhere. She decided to wait for him inside. She looked out the back window from the kitchen. The playhouse was on fire. Within minutes, fire engines encircled the block. When she went back outside Stephen was standing by the playhouse, watching it burn. His parents were consulting with the fire chief. The smell was like burning leaves, grainy and pungent. Smoke floated over the snow-crested hedges like neglect. Mrs. Mason pulled Stephen away from the fire and pressed him against her side. She wasn’t a demonstrative person, and seeing her awkwardly holding Stephen brought tears to Eleanor’s eyes.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Stephen said, pulling out of her grasp.
Eleanor tapped him on the shoulder. Her look said, What happened? He turned away. She tried to catch his eye again but the fire put him in a hypnotic trance. He ignored her. She thought about the cigar box where they kept their secret stash of cigarettes. Their pile of records. The privacy of their talks. How just minutes before they had seemed so close. She wished she had let him kiss her. She pulled on Stephen’s shirtsleeve.
“Cut it out, Eleanor.” He stared ahead, transfixed at the fire devouring the wood.
“But how did it happen?”
“Be quiet, Eleanor.”
She felt like he had jabbed her in the stomach.
Beneath the snow, the fire chief found the chewed-away extension cord with exposed wires that Stephen had run from the garage into the playhouse. He said it was an accident waiting to happen. That night she was unable to sleep, thinking about Stephen, how she was drawn to him and frightened of him at the same time. She thought about the fire, his parents arguing, and the words she’d overheard, wondering if the reason her father had left was because he wasn’t in love with her mother, and she felt strangely linked to Stephen and his own pain.
Stephen’s father moved out the next day, to a home on the other side of town. A few months later Stephen moved in with him. His mother mysteriously left town. There was talk she’d had a breakdown. Once Stephen moved out, the shades were drawn over the window in his room. Empty of his bike, Frisbees, and baseball bats, the Masons’ backyard looked like a graveyard. Eleanor found herself night after night seated by the window. Stephen’s father eventually fell in love with a young French au pair named Sabine, and within a year she was installed in his new house.
When Stephen’s mother returned to her house a year later, Eleanor’s mother called her changed demeanor a nervous condition. Stephen continued to live with his father and Sabine. The idea of the newly in love couple gave the impression that life could be exotic and foreign even if you lived in a suburb of Chicago, but Eleanor overheard Carol Mason bitterly tell her mother that Stephen was treated like a third wheel.
Eleanor rarely saw Stephen since he moved. Once they ran into each other when he came by his mother’s to visit. He acknowledged her with a quick nod of his head, as if he had revealed too much of himself and was embarrassed to be in her company.
Sometimes Eleanor caught a glimpse of him from the window of her house. She ducked in the shadows of her room to make sure he hadn’t seen her. She didn’t know why she did not want to be seen. As she watched him walk up his mother’s porch stairs in his leather bomber jacket, a hot, distracted feeling consumed her. When he turned sixteen and began to drive, she sometimes saw his blue Pontiac parked in his mother’s driveway. They never spoke. And yet, she often found herself looking through her window into his, as she had through all the years of her childhood.
5
She never told Stephen about why her father left, because she did not know herself. He lived in different cities, in hotel rooms and rented flats. Sometimes months would pass without a word from him, until a postcard arrived telling her about a particular piece of music to listen to. Dvorak meant he was nostalgic. Mahler if he were in torment. Schubert for when he was emotional. Mozart when he was happy. He rarely invited her to visit, never seemed to have a permanent home. Airports with their VIP lounges and complimentary tea and coffee, places for arrivals and departures, longings and regrets, were his second home.
“I have to leave,” Eleanor’s father had said to her, stroking her hair. “It’s because I love you.”
He did not talk about his past, but Eleanor had pieced together that he had lost his family during the war. He had been sent to an ammunition factory and then a camp in Munich. Eventually, when he was nineteen, he was sent to Chicago to live with Horowitz, a friend of his father’s from the old country. Horowitz took care of him like a son. All he had left from his family was the mezuzah his mother had ripped off the door and put in his pocket when they were told to leave their homes. His father had wrapped bread in his prayer shawl and given it to him, but eventually even the prayer shawl was lost. I have to go, Joseph Cahn told his daughter. Give me a kiss, Eleanor, Joseph said, as if her kiss could save him.
He was the kind of tortured, handsome man women coveted, with deep-set eyes and a crooked nose and burnt auburn hair, a man who looked like he was going to cry when he laughed. Eleanor loved him more than anyone on earth. Eleanor’s mother spoke of his sad eyes, his broad shoulders, the ridge down the center of his forehead, the way he walked in a room and drew all eyes toward him, and the way he got lost in his music when he played the piano. His mother had played the piano in Budapest and had given him lessons.
Horowitz sent him to music school in Chicago. Everyone thought he’d be famous. But after music school it was decided he needed to have a trade. “The burden is too great,” he once told Eleanor. “To put so much pressure on the thing in the world you love most.” Horowitz set him up in the dry-cleaning business. Joseph eventually owned four dry cleaners throughout the city. For some reason the laundry business failed, Horowitz died, there were other businesses, other schemes. There were so many stories about why he left that even Eleanor did not know which one was the truth. He was one of those men whose suffering could not be contained in one life; that’s how she had chosen to see him.
Once, longing for his attention, she paraded into her father’s study wearing a blue princess dress with a lace skirt and satin bodice, a crown of flowers on her head. Her mother had made the costume for her, hand sewing the sequins and ribbons. He was absorbed in a phone call. She sat quietly on the leather chair in the room and waited for him to finish the call. She imagined he would lift her in the air and kiss her, as all girls want their fathers to do, and anoint her Princess of Her Father’s Heart. In her anticipation she felt warm and good and beautiful and it made the waiting easy (she would have waited all day). His voice grew more urgent and tense on the phone. “God damn it, Moshe, you’re killing me,” her father said. “You’re burying me alive.” She heard her father eventually place the receiver into the phone’s cradle. He made little notes on a yellow legal pad on his desk. He rose from his swivel chair and placed his forehead against the glass of the window. She crept off the chair and put her hand in his. He didn’t look at her. He continued looking out the window, his forehead kissing the glass. “Your father is in trouble, Eleanor. Go find your mother.”
When he played the piano at night, he made the keys cry. His music transformed him into a person she didn’t quite know. He demanded that the menorah go in front of the picture window in the living room on Hanukah. “I want those motherfuckers to know we’re still alive. That we won.” He bowed his head, lit the candles, and said the prayer. She looked at the menorah dripping wax, listening to the sound of her father’s voice and feeling he was a part of her and she was a part of him, and they were not separate, as she feared. She sensed his pent-up fears, his desire to escape. She believed protecting him was one of her reasons to live. When the light went out of the menorah all at once, it was as if God’s eyes had blinked.
“Let me tell you something, Eleanor. There’s good and bad inside all of us. The bad part of me is fighting against the good. It’s taking me away from you and your mother. I have no strength over it.”
After her father left, her mother opened a tailor shop in town; she had been Joseph’s seamstress at the dry cleaner. She developed migraine headaches. They were severe enough that she spent days and nights in bed, until the cycle worked its way out of her system. But the migraines always returned. She spent her evenings, when she wasn’t plagued by the headaches, with a pincushion bracelet attached to her wrist and straight pins slipped into her blouse, dipping her needle into a curtain or the hem of a woman’s coat. She still looked shapely, possessing the kind of beauty that deepens over time. Eleanor thought it was a shame that her father could no longer see her mother in the way she intuited a woman needed to be seen by a man.
Eleanor walked quietly around the house. Sometimes she wanted to swipe her hands along the keyboard of her father’s piano but she kept the top down, the keys locked inside their cage of wood. She kept the lights turned off because they intensified her mother’s headaches. She read until her eyes stung. Her mother stayed in her bedroom with the shades drawn, curled into her pillow. When Eleanor heard her moaning in bed, she went in her mother’s bedroom to bring her a drink of water and another one of her tablets. I had a dream, Eleanor. Your father was eating my kugel. By New Year’s he’ll be home. Don’t worry. It’ll pass.
Eleanor said her prayers before she went to sleep. She asked God to get rid of her mother’s headaches. She asked him to watch over her father. She thought if she prayed hard enough her father might come home. She began to think that the mezuzah nailed into the side of the front entranceway of her house was a sign. She kissed her fingers and touched it every time she went in and out of the front door. If she forgot her homework and had to go back inside again, it was particularly annoying because that meant she kissed the mezuzah at least three times going back and forth, but she felt the compulsion to do so nevertheless. The mezuzah was the last thing her father had from his mother in Budapest. Eleanor thought that because he didn’t take it with him, it meant he was coming back. She washed her hair every morning. She pressed her own skirts and blouses. She polished her father’s piano. She was a straight-A student.
Once, when her mother was working, Eleanor went looking for some scotch tape in the French desk in her bedroom and came upon her mother’s diary. What daughter doesn’t want a glimpse of her mother’s interior life? In the diary, with matchbooks taped to the bottom of pages, or a dried rose pressed between wax paper, Elizabeth recorded the restaurant where she and Eleanor’s father had gone for dinner, what she ordered (Sole Bernadine), the color of her sweater suit with matching colored shoes (coral) that she wore to Joseph’s recital. In one entry she had written,
Joseph scares me. He can go all evening without saying a word. When he plays the piano it is as though he’s in a trance. His eyes close, he smiles. I’m afraid of his hands. He wants us to get married at City Hall. When I told him I wanted to be married in front of God, he said, “There is no God.”
“He has demons in his closet,” her mother said to Eleanor the first night the two of them had sat alone at the table for dinner. Joseph’s chair at the head of the table still reigned over their conversation despite the fact that it was empty. “He thinks that if he leaves us he’ll escape them. Maybe it’s better this way. I told him to go.”
“You should be mad.”
“You know what he’s like. Is he a man you can be mad at? With those eyes.”
“You shouldn’t have let him.”
“And let him destroy us?”
Elizabeth was strong and determined. Her terrible forgiveness had filled the rooms of Eleanor’s childhood.
6
Eleanor did not have a boyfriend until she was sixteen.
For weeks they had watched each other circling around the ice-skating rink on the outskirts of town. She loved the cold air on her skin, the sense of openness as she skated, the way pockets of wind pushed her forward, the tall evergreens and pines surrounding the open ice, and the sounds of winter birds in the distance swooping through the trees. His dog was tied up on a long leash outside the gates. The dog barked with excitement each time his master, William Woods, skated by.
William scraped his blades into an abrupt hockey stop and a spray of crushed ice sprinkled Eleanor’s face. He took her scarf and unraveled it as if it were a piece of ribbon, and then wrapped it around her neck again. “Your name is Eleanor, isn’t it?” She nodded. His eye was black and blue. “I’ve been watching you. Here, take my hand. Let’s skate faster. Hold my hand tighter. Come on. Faster.”
They stopped at the edge. She was panting. The wind was cold against their faces. She looked at him more closely. He was so unusual.
“Did you get in a fight?”
“Something like that.”
His eyes, including the bruised one, were surrounded by long, black, curled-up eyelashes. His hair was thin and reached past his neck, where it was tied in a ponytail. A look of suffering weighed down his face when he wasn’t aware she was looking, or was it just the black eye that made her feel that way? He was soft like a piece of fruit, with an edge of hard skin around him. His black-and-blue eye inspired in her an overpowering rush of compassion that would define their relationship.
“What happened?” Eleanor took off her gloves and gently touched the skin underneath his eye. The touch seemed to soften him.
“Nothing you need to worry about.” His cheeks were red and chapped from the frozen wind. “Are you cold, Eleanor?” He put his arm around her. “Do you know what I was thinking when we were skating? You see this ice we’re skating on? See how thick it is. Fish are swimming under us. Underneath a whole other world is going on. Let’s keep skating.”
William came from a family of six kids. He was the last son at home. His house was filled with the sound of his father watching television, the dishwasher running in the kitchen, two dogs and three cats circling the angles and curves of the overly decorated rooms. Behind the house was a barn where they kept horses.
“Don’t worry,” William said, the first time he brought her home. “Even when my parents are around, it’ll just be the two of us. When I watch football he thinks I’m watching the game.” He was referring to his father. “He thinks we’re rooting for the same team. He thinks he can control me, but he can’t. I can disappear into myself whenever I want.”
Mr. Woods came into the den, and William introduced him to Eleanor. “Did your red hair come from a bottle or a can?” he said.
After he left, William turned to Eleanor. “We don’t get along. He thinks I should care what kind of car a person drives and what college they’re going to. He thinks things like that matter.” Eleanor at first thought it commendable that Mr. Woods had chosen to marry someone less attractive than he was. His wife’s face was plain. She wore A-line skirts, sweaters, and heels, even when she was preparing dinner. But he did not treat his wife with consideration. He sat by himself in the den while she served him lunch.
“Let me tell you what I know, Eleanor,” William said. “You can be inside yourself when people are filling up the air. Close your eyes. Picture it. Imagine we’re still skating. Imagine we’re holding hands.”
