Valentine's Day

  Alicia comes into my first period Learning Center with an assignment she needs help on.   The Learning Center is there to support special education students who are mainstreamed.  It is a deeply flawed model in that at this very minute, Alicia is missing whatever is going on in her class, causing her to fall further behind.   The assignment is to read the first act of Macbeth straight up - no modern translation, no comic book, no text messaged Macbeth.  No doubt some English teacher’s fervent desire to impart flowery imagery.  We sit at the round table (formica, hard as nails to resist graffiti and gouging), shit-brown, pleated plastic curtain behind us and she opens to the first page of the play.

“Shakespeare,” I say.  “Bueno.  Where’s the comic book?”

I think of the eons that have passed since the play was written; the many technological innovations, language evolutions, language impairments later.  Is it really such a good idea to mainstream all these special education students?

“Let’s see,”  I scan the first page and read out loud.  “‘When the hurley burley’s done, when the battle’s lost and won’....those are the three witches.  And it is a dark and stormy night.”

“‘Fair is foul and foul is fair.’  You really can’t understand those witches, that’s spooky too”

  I skip a few pages.  And now someone is talking about Macbeth.....‘For brave Macbeth - well he deserves that name - disdaining fortune - with is brandish’d steel, which smoked bloody execution’.....etc. etc. etc., so he got his sword out........’till he unseam’d him from nave to chaps’.....so he cut his enemy from here to here.”  I show her and her eyes widen.

  “And fix’d his head upon battlements’......yeah, and then he cuts the head off his enemy and puts it on....” I search for a good word for “battlements”....”on the fence to scare everyone else off.”

“Wow,” she says.  This story is better than she thought.

“He was a bad dude, you’d want to stay away from him.”

Alicia nods solemnly.  She knows all about bad dudes.  

I look up at the clock, determined to get her back to class in five minutes.

“Let’s see, now Macbeth meets the three witches who are sitting around in that spooky forest by their witches’ pot.  They tell him he is going to be king but he doesn’t believe them.  And then he goes home and, oh wow, here comes Lady Macbeth.  Now, she is a piece of work, a really awful woman.  You’d want to stay away from her.”

Alicia nods solemnly.  She knows all about bad chicks.

I read, “‘Glamis thou art, Cawdor; shalt be.  What thou art promised, yet I do fear thy nature; it is too full of the milk of human kindess.’  She is telling him that he is too nice and won’t be able to kill the king.”  

I skip to the end and read the last line of Act I.  “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.’  Okay, that’s it.  She has convinced him to kill the king.  Here’s a pass back to class.”

      Danielle bumps into Alicia at the doorway.  Danielle is a mountain of a girl with a ready smile, always carrying a pile of books and notebooks that precede her into a room.  And just when I think I’ll have to call her grandmother again about the combined smoke and sweat smell that makes me gag, she comes in wearing a new cranberry skirt, a nice pressed shirt and clean hair tied back with a red ribbon.

“Valentine’s Day,” I say, “All dressed up for someone?”

She blushes and sits at the round desk, taking out the novel she has to read.  She perches it on her stomach and I watch from the sidelines, her sloping double chin, glasses pushed down her nose, ankes crossed.  She is wearing shiny Mary Jane shoes with little bows.  I wait for awhile but don’t hear any pages turning.  

“How’s it going?”  I ask.

Her voice is a little leaden.  “It’s going all right.”

“What book?”  I ask.

“Catcher in the Rye.”

“Where’s the comic book?”  

I have to keep myself amused here or I will go nuts. 

“There’s a comic book?”  she asks.

“Just joking,” I say.

Danielle stares at the book some more.

After a few minutes, I ask, “How’s it going now?”

“Have you read this?”  she asks timidly.

“Old JD?  Yeah,” I say.  

How big are the academic leaps I have to take here?  The Learning Center presents the challenge that the teacher in charge has to explain every subject area at every grade level in a way that every learning disabled student can comprehend.  From Shakespeare, the raffish wordsmith, writing for an unruly mob at the Globe Theatre to JD Salinger, morosely staring out the window of his Upper West Side pied-a-terre onto Central Park, all before nine in the morning.  I take another swig of my coffee and sit at the round table next to Danielle.

Her assignment is to write a summary of what amounts to the first half of the book.  I grab a piece of paper and begin to write the translation which she will then copy and turn in.  It is a shortcut, but the novel is so dense that I can’t think of any other way to get the assignment completed.  In theory, special education teachers are supposed to “differentiate” instruction, a phrase that one theorist called “an elegant intervention”.  I look around the classroom at the shit-brown curtains, the beat up desks, the boarded up window, the heater that is barely cranking out enough heat and think about the elegant office at the elegant ivy league school where this theory originated.   In a class of thirty unruly students, a mainstream teacher is supposed to mount as many differentiated lessons as suits the learning needs of as many special education students that are mainstreamed into the room five times a day, five days a week.  Where are the comic books?

“Let’s see,” I say, “it starts off with this kid talking.  Holden (not a name anyone here would have) is jealous of his brother in Hollywood and then he tells us he hates school (who doesn’t?) and then he tells us he hates football (not like here) and that he is the captain of the fencing team.”  

I look at Danielle.  “Do you know what fencing is?”

She hesitates.  “Like swords?”

“Very good!”  I say, turning the page quickly to get it done with.        A lot of swords in high school curriculum.  “Oh no!  Then it says that he actually gets kicked out of school because he failed all his classes (although his rich parents will just find another fancy boarding school so it is really no big deal).   Then he goes to say goodbye to his history teacher.  The teacher is really old and has a cold and gives Holden a hard time about failing all his classes. Holden tells us he hates the teacher even though he knows the teacher really cares about him.  There.  All done.”

I finish writing the summary on a piece of paper and Danielle starts to copy it.  I am not going to let JD Salinger, screwing barely legal age ingenues, ruin Danielle’s chance of graduation.  Not let him spoil the walking down the aisle to get her diploma, the turning of the tassel on the cap, the throwing it in the air.  Not let master class bastard JD, ruin her graduation party with her grandma, aunties, kissing cousins taking her graduation picture with their cell phones, hanging the diploma in a frame from CVS.  Danielle spends the rest of the period dutifully copying.

Sandra is weeping at her desk when I walk into another Special Ed classroom for my second period.  Voluptuous, moist, heartrending sobs, the rose bouquet flung down beside her.  I imagine a broken heart, unrequited love.  

Instead, the teacher who is leaving says, “I’m keeping her in for break, she threw a piece of candy and it hit me in the eye.”  

He’s a new teacher, old but new, a talker, a gesturer, who encourages a lot of discussion.  “Luckily, I was wearing my glasses.”  

Sandra weeps - head downon her desk, long, dark hair covering her face.  Her faithful friend, K.K., by her side.

Ronnie comes in and refuses to sit in his assigned seat, preferring one seat over today.  I tell him where to sit.  He refuses.  It is all very scientific, my seating arrangement, designed to discourage the chattering, isolate the lewd, the smelly, the jokers, the players, the masturbators.  Ronnie is one who occupies a corner seat in my mind.  He looks like the missing link.  Creationists need only look to see the falsity of their claims.  He has Neanderthal arms, two chipmunk front teeth, beady eyes and a slanting forehead.  He is wearing a black ski cap, the one favored by all thieves and thugs.  I weigh the battle with Ronnie.  I envision him in the seat he has chosen.  I let go of my seating chart but not the cap.  It’s one thing to have those beady eyes looking at me, another to have them framed in that cap.

“Take it off,” I say.

He won’t.

“Take it off.”

He won’t.

I go to my desk to get the referral.  He takes it off and throws it on his desk.

“But I’m not working today,” he threatens.

As if I care.  He pulls out black gloves and puts them on.

I look over to Sandra.  All tears dried up, she is happily chatting with K.K.  Then David stumbles in, shoes laces untied, he lurches towards me, holding an apple covered in goo.

“I bought you an apple!”  he exclaims.

“Oh how nice, for Valentine’s Day?”

David is the one that Mexican mammas pray for in church.  Their eyes full of tears, in their solemn rebozos, gazing up at Jesus on the cross.  David, a Latin American birth, no oxygen, a poor lamb transported through a veil of tears, a living reminder of our Lord’s suffering.

“I bought you an apple,” he repeats and holds it out to me and I see it is not goo but frosting as he is trying to walk, hold the apple and eat a bun all at the same time.  He walks on a forward slant, his torso simultaneously moving side to side like a windmill.  I am backing away as he is crazily advancing.  I feel slightly nauseous, remembering the time he vomited projectiles of sour spit in my path.

“Slow down.  Slow down,” I say and he comes to a stop like a jalopy, all the parts quivering.

“How about putting the apple on my desk?”  I suggest.

He tries to set it down and it jerks around on the desk a few times.

“Here comes Sargent Shaky,”  says Ronnie.

“Shut up, Stupid Face,” says David in his garbled voice.

I watch until he makes it to his desk in the back of the room.  He occupies another corner in my mind.  I hold my breath as he turns and somehow flings himself into his seat.  David likes me even though I basically ignore him.  He can’t hold a pencil, he can’t read, I can’t understand him most of the time and when I can, he annoys me.

We begin Silent Reading, a time when most of them have a little siesta behind their propped up books and I take a break.  Ronnie starts off with the comic book opened, forgetting his claim that he won’t do any work, but soon, with slightly agape mouth, his head lolls back, exposing ugly acne welts boiling under his chin, then his head falls to the side, he readjusts with a start and finally, his head goes down on the comic book.  Soon, he is snoring.  Usually, I let sleeping dogs lie, but not when they snore.  I go to his desk, with the whole class watching, and do what just a few years ago I wouldn’t imagine doing.  I lift up the front of the desk, just a bit and drop it back down.  I note how my moral fiber is fraying after the accretion over the years of special ed vomit, farts, belches, coughs, curses.  I lift the desk a bit higher, pause for effect, a warning to all, and drop it.  Ronnie bolts up.

“We’re reading,”  I say, an activity he has probably never awoken to before. 

Sandra giggles.  K.K. chortles.

“Stupid Face,”  David intones from the back.  

"There I Go"

                Irving Weinblatt could have gone to Hollywood.

“Now look at him,” my mother pointed to the chaise as Goldie, Mrs. Irving Weinblatt, went into the house to refill her drink.  Irving lay snoring with mouth open, molars showing.

He could have, should have, would have gone to Hollywood.  That’s the story I heard.  But he didn’t.  Now he was only our next door neighbor on Walter Drive.  I took accordian lessons from him on Wednesdays after school.  Heave, ho, went the bellows of the accordian, sucking air as Irving tapped his foot to the notes on the page in hopes that his rhythmic sense was contagious.  At the half hour mark, he’d check his wristwatch with his sad, pouched, basset hound eyes.  It was almost hopeless, this attempt to make me into an accordian player, and we both knew it.

On hot weekends like this one, he’d nap.  His snores found the rhythm that my music lacked.  He was lost in the dream of life in Hollywood.  His toes wiggled to Busby Berkeley’s big productions,  his ears twitched Jimmy Dorsey,  his eye lids rapidly blinked Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy and his mouth puckered Dean Martin.   I sat on a lawn chair next to my mother, waiting for my food to digest before I would be allowed to go swimming.  Who really knew what food was doing, where it went and how long it took to go down all those inside tubes.  I swallowed hard to make it go faster.  My mother’s warning was clear - I would get cramps that would drag me under in the pool if the food wasn’t digested properly.

“You have to strike when the iron is hot,” my mother waved vaguely towards Irving, “or look at what you will become.”  

Irving was wearing a pair of plaid swimming trunks and nothing else.  His stomach heaved with every snore.  I couldn’t see how I could become like him.  He was a man for one thing.

“Let that be a lesson,” my mother said.  “You can be anything you want to be.”  

When girls were pining over Frank Sinatra, when boys were coming home from World War II, Irving wrote a song.  That was the hot iron.  The song was upbeat and caught the mood.  It became a hit.  But not Irving.  Someone stole the lyrics and the music and went to Hollywood before him.

“Don’t let anyone beat you to it,” my mother said.

She sat upright in her lawn chair.  I never saw her relax.  She was always vigilant, always looking to take her enemies on.  I burped and she glanced at me with disapproval.  Clearly, a burping person was not what she wanted me to be.

Returning with her tall plastic tumbler, Goldie sat next to us in a lawn chair under the mimosa tree.  She lit a filtered Parliament and exhaled the first good puff, making that little “o” shape wiht her mouth like a Hollywood starlet.  She picked up the drink and tinkled the already melting ice, sighing.  She stared up at the tree, the pink, shimmering, flowers were tropical like Hawaii or Hollywood, not Long Island.  She looked at the brick wall of her suburban, split level house wondering how she, a girl from Canarsie, could have ended up here in a place that was supposed to be better but was really so much worse.  Even at twelve, I knew that suburbia had a way of declaring you finished.  You could add on to the house ike the Millman’s down the block.  You could build up like the Kornbluth’s when they had their third red-headed child.  You could make the basement a den, enclose the patio, put up the pool every year. You could do all those things but still you were on Walter Drive, the next street being Jane Drive, the street after that Crescent Lane.  Housewives navigated the even grid of suburban streets in cars as big as boats.  Every meadow and field had been razed for new subdivisions that looked like the older ones.  Every tree that didn’t conform had been cut down and new trees planted that subscribed to their placement on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street.  Only the mimosa was saved, bent at an angle, shaking with the wind and showering us with its pink filaments.

From the lawn chair, I could hear the gang of kids hooting from the big blue plastic pool in the neighbor’s back yard.  My friends were all having fun without me.  Soon the summer would be over and there would be no more swimming.  The circle of dirt that remained after the pool was dismantled would be an ice skating rink in the winter.

“Please, Mom,” I begged, sure that all the food was digested, made into energy.

My mother consulted her wristwatch.

“Ten more minutes,” she pronounced.

“I never bother to do that with Scottie,” Goldie said about her son.

My mother looked at her and at Irving sleeping.  It was clear that she did not consider these people capable of meeting her high standards.  It was a look that suggested that dying of stomach cramps in the pool was the least of Scottie Weinblatt’s problems.

“Pull up your suit,” my mother said.  “You’re showing.”

“You’re a young lady now,” Goldie said without much enthusiasm.

  Goldie’s face was a fortress of blank expressions.  She never seemed to care  about all the imperatives my mother subscribed to and I wondered if I could learn to set my mouth that way. For right now, I crossed my arms and squeezed.  I hated having to wear a girl’s bathing suit.  Boys got to run around with no tops.   Already my mother decided that playing with Scottie was no longer allowed.  It had something to do with how boys and girls at a certain age were supposed to stop playing like kids and start acting like they didn’t like each other even if they did.  Pretty soon,  I wouldn’t be a shortstop at the end of the block where the ball games took place and Scottie wouldn’t be showing me how well he walked in his mother’s high heels.

“Where is your son?”  my mother asked.

Goldie pointed up to the window of his room. A twitch crossed Irving’s face.  Suddenly, the music in his head seemed to hit a bad tune.  His legs jerked and  every loud shriek that came from the kids splashing in the pool seemed to etch its mark across his face.

“All he does is sleep.”  Goldie flicked the long ash of her cigarette in his direction.  “He could get a job on the weekends.  He could play bar mitzvahs.  But does he?”

     Goldie’s long red nails and bright lipstick seemed perfect for Hollywood.  Her blonde hair was faded and washed out now but it clung to the sides of her head like a flapper.  Her terrycloth robe was cinched tightly around her still narrow waist and when she leaned forward, her cleavage in that one piece swim suit made me blush.  Even the bedroom slippers she was still wearing looked glamorous, dangling from her arched foot and swinging madly as her shapely leg waved about. 

“She’s from Carnarsie,”  my mother had explained Goldie’s looks to me.  The borough of Brooklyn could only produce harridans and shrews according to my mother.  Everyone knew that.  Queens, where my mother was from, was the launching pad for better things like Long Island.   When you marry an accountant like my mother had and not a high school music teacher like Irving, you are well on your way to being provided with a comfortable lifestyle.  My mother hoped that I was learning this valuable lesson.  Look at the two houses!  Even though they were the same split level, there was a world of difference there.  My mother already had the inside redone by a decorator while Goldie’s house was threadbare, worn down.  We had aluminum siding and a new patio installed.  We drove a shiny new Chevrolet station wagon.  Even the mimosa was on our property. 

“On such a nice day,  Scottie should be out,” my mother pronounced and nodded emphatically, her laquered hair not moving because of all the hairspray.

Goldie shrugged.  She had given up the stewardship of her family.  What Scottie did locked up in his room, venetian blinds drawn, on a sunny day was beyond her.  What Irving did on rainy days was not something she cared to think about.

On those days when thunder rumbled and lightning lit up the darkening sky, Irving came out of the house and stood in his driveway, face upwards.  When the sprinkling began falling, he would start off down Walter Drive in the same plaid swimming trunks he wore to sleep on the chaise.  When the clouds rubbed together and threatened to pour their excess to the ground, he had already turned the corner onto Crescent Street, whistling his tune. He was alone out there.  Everyone else  was protecting themselves from a case of summer pneumonia by going indoors.  

One day, I decided to follow Irving on my bike.  I sneaked out of the house before my mother could find me and scream that I was going to die from the rain.   I rode slowly behind him watching the water fall off his bare shoulders and slide down his back.  It wasn’t as bad out here as I had been told, it was humid and the rain was warm.  It seemed a nice break from the sun and the glaring heat.  From Crescent, Irving turned onto John Drive and towards the last remaining piece of land that hadn’t been developed yet.  It was called the old farm and maybe some years ago it was but now it just lay rutted and vacant, a place where we played hide and seek and rode our bikes over hills and into ditches.  Irving was going there, his flip flops making a slapping sound as he went along.  

When he got to the entrance which was really just a path where weeds had parted, Irving stopped and turned around.  I was only a few feet behind him.  He looked at me like he had never seen me before.  Rain poured from his hair and tangled onto his arms like snakes.  He looked like no one else in suburbia.  He looked like a madman.   My  soaking tee shirt was sticking to my body and I suddenly became self conscious of my chest.  But Irving wasn’t looking that way.   

“I love the rain,” he said.  His voice was deeper than I remembered.  I shivered.  

“I love the rain,” he echoed himself, seeming now far away.  

“Hollywood,”  I thought.  In your mind you could go anywhere.  It was like when Scottie and I pretended that the aluminum picnic table in the closet was the sides of our spaceship to Mars.  You could go anywhere and be anyone if you pushed.

“The rain is...musical,”  Irving said.  He seemed surprised to have put it in words.  “Maybe if you listen to the rain more, your accordian playing will get better, ” he added.

“Is it like your song?”  

“What song?”

“The one you almost took to Hollywood,” I said and then felt bad about reminding him, as if he could forget.  I was at the age where I felt that my words could destroy someone, that they would take it as hard as I took my mother’s criticisms.  I half expected Irving to fall down dead with a heart attack.

“Who told you I had a song?”  he asked.

“Well, Goldie said....”

“Bubsey told you I had a song?”

“Well, yes she did.”

“And did she sing this song?”

“Well, part of it.”

“And it goes like?”

My mind was a blank.

“Ah ha! A song with no words.  What does the melody sound like?”

Again, my mind was blank.  I was still waiting for Irving to fall to his knees screaming at me or at the world.

“Bubsey lives in a fantasy world is all I can tell you.  A song. Sure. Hollywood.  Right.”  He turned his face up to the sky and the rain became like tears rolling down his cheeks.

I wondered if having a song and losing it was better or worse than never having one to start with.  The possiblity of failure being a chronic condition presented itself to me for the first time.  Irving was always just a high school music teacher with a bare house, an unhappy wife and a son who liked to play dress up.  

“You’re shivering,” he said.  “You better ride that bike home before you get pneumonia.”

I turned the bike around.  Thunder rolled and lightning jagged through the sky.  The rushing cascade of the first line of Irving’s song came back to me.   

“There I go...” I said over my shoulder as I started to ride away, “leading with my heart again...”

My own heart swelled with renewed possibility. Irving stared coldly at me.

And then the second line revealed itself with a corresponding ache,  “And there I go acting not so smart again.”

“Maybe once,” he said, “but not mine anymore.”  He turned and walked into the old abandoned lot and the weeds swallowed him up.

Read These Lips 5 is here!

My story, "Coyote" has finally found a home!http://www.readtheselips.com/RTLTake5%20new%20release.html

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Bea

When my family moved into Jane Drive, the housing development wasn’t finished.  All around us were empty lots and model houses that Billy and I would sneak into.  We’d jump up and down on the model beds, flush the toilets, run the water in the sinks and see who could race from the attic to the basement fastest.  Planners were still thinking up bright names like John, Walter and Robert for the streets.  For my parents, owning a home was their American Dream come true.  The house on Jane Drive - its big rooms and four floors - was a way of naming and defining our lives.  With the den, the dining room, the living room, the master bedroom, the kitchen, the basement, the patio, the swimming pool and the backyard, we were fully formed as Americans in a way that my immigrant grandparents never could be.

The Kramers lived two blocks away.  My mother and Bea Kramer loved each other.

            “I love Bea,” my mother said passionately.  “She is my best friend.”

            Bea was married to Harold who sold ice cream to stores.  His truck was always parked in the driveway and the freezer in their garage was always filled with gallons of all flavors.

          “If Bea didn’t eat so much ice cream, she wouldn’t be so fat,” my father said.

           “Bea has a very pretty face,” my mother said. “She is so intelligent, so competent.”

          “Built like a Sherman tank,” my father joked.

          “Al, that is not very nice,” my mother poked his protruding stomach.

          “Mine’s solid,” he said. 

           “Bea is fat because she is so sensitive,” my mother said, “she gets hurt easily and her weight is a protection against the world.”

          “Sensitive like a hand grenade,” my father scoffed but clearly he did not like my mother’s friendship with Bea.  It took attention away from him.

          “And look at her children,” my mother said.

          Four of them, all smart like Bea - my friend Billy who had severe asthma, Joe, Bonnie and baby David.  On nights when Billy had problems breathing, one of the more unconventional treatments involved my mother.  The horn would beep outside our door late at night and my mother, clad in housecoat and slippers, would fly out of the house and into the driver’s seat of Bea’s car.  With all the windows down, she’d take off at breakneck speed, racing through empty suburban streets.  Bea would sit in the back seat with Billy, fanning air into his lungs.  Their eyes met when my mother looked into the rear view mirror.

            “You don’t have to do this,”  Bea said.  “It’s so late.”

            “Don’t be silly, I’d do anything for you and Billy,” my mother replied.

     

My mother always said that she could have gotten any husband she wanted.  Then I’d see her looking at my father wondering if she made the right choice.  My father never looked back.  He was slouched down in the old armchair, smoking Parliament cigarettes and staring at one page in a calculus book for hours at a time.

         “Jewish men work with their heads not their hands,” she said this as a warning fo rme not to disturb my father.  

          She was unhappy with him.  He was an accountant in the garment district in mid-town Manhattan, although he was really better than that because he wanted to be a mathematician.  Every morning he went off ot work and left my mother stranded in the house.  I never saw them touch.  That was the unspoken rule in our family - no touching.  All of us bobbed to the surface only as we spoke.

          To her credit, my mother did have artistic ideas and a flair for the unusual.  Her greatest accomplishment so far was the den.  From a travel agent, she got posters from all around the world.  These were places that she hoped to someday see and which rolled off both our tongues like magic words  - Paris, Budapest, Jakarta, Sinapore.  My mother arranged these posters on the long wall of the den and lacquered them down so they shone forever.  It was a technique called decoupage, a craze which had hit suburbia.  Every housewife was decoupaging every piece of paper she could lay her hands on.  But I though my mother more unique, brilliant and talented than anyone when I played in the den under the glow of those mythical places.

           Mostly, however, my mother had difficulty executing her ideas.  She was all smiles and talk which hid the canyons and valleys inside of her, the molten lava of anger at her core.  Her hands were like lobster claws that plunked down heavily on people and objects.  Early in life, I came to fear the proceedings of the material world under her direction.  Nothing was ever wrapped or battened down tightly enouhg.  Hems always fell.  Garbage leaked through paper bottoms, sleeping bags unraveled, sandwiches dripped, cabinet doors hung by one screw while my mother looked on uncomprehendingly.  So when my mother decided to take Bea on as a partner in her new fried marble business, I was relieved.

Fried marbles were the latest thing in suburbia.  My mother used the oven as a kiln, and lately, instead of dinner, I would open the oven door and find trays of cracked marbles, like crazy, broken eyes, staring up at me.  Everyone thought fried marbles beautiful.  They came in all different colors.

       “You’ll come to love them too,” my mother said as she cooled them on the countertop.

       The kitchen table was the work table and my mother tried hard to glue the fried marbles into all kinds of settings.   Rings, bracelets, necklaces, it was a complete line.  When she took Bea on, I began to think that just maybe this business idea would be successful.  Bea had been a physical therapist during WWII.  She was a WAC and under her hands, anything could be fixed.  I didn’t think my mother could do anything that the Army needed.

“Fried marbles are just coming into their own,” my mother said in her winning way, “with Bea, production will increase tenfold.  We’ll expand  - do earrings.”

       My mother was always ambitious, restless for more.  Her housecoat would slip off her brown shoulders.  She didn’t know why she was so restless.  Like many women of her generation, she had traded experience for security, sensation and feeling for fidelity.  With her wide smile and straight teeth, her narrow hips and broad shoulders, my mother was beautiful but unfulfilled.  I held a fried marble up to the light and marveled at its smooth, hard, round surface.  Inside the glass was all broken up along many faceted lines.  Light was reflected in skewed ways.  It reminded me of my motehr, all tough, hard and smooth talking on the surface, all fractured inside.

My mother and Bea worked late into the summer nights filling their growing orders for fried marble jewelry.  They sat at the kitchen table under the white florescent light.  The hum of the house, with my father and me asleep upstairs, satisfied my mother for a minute.  She looked at Bea and relaxed.  The heat and humidity of the day subsided and there was the pleasure of breezes traveling up bare legs.  My mother wiggled her toes luxuriously in her thongs.  Bea’s fingers moved deftly, gluing and setting marbles, twisting and braiding chains, putting the final touches on packing boxes.  Outside fireflies rhythmically it up the dark night.  The sound of crickets filled the air.  Suburbia, with its cookie cutter houses and tidy lawns faded away and the feelings of the lowlands, of the ocean’s salty presence asserted itself.  Indian spirits who once lived on Long Island drifted back.  It was hard to lie to yourself on summer nights like that.

My mother and Bea talked in their easy way.  They talked about the children, about camping trips the families could take together, about Harold’s ice cream route.  They talked about the Weight Watcher’s group my mother was starting for Bea.  Bea shared her favorite meat loaf recipe which my mother promised to try.  They talked about an article they had both read in the latest Ladies Home Journal.  My father snored from the upstairs bedroom.  My mother imagined him on his back like a beached whale, the white sheet tangled between his sweaty legs.  In her mind, my mother scanned her house - the rooms the decorator had gotten to, the rooms that still had furniture from teh old days.  She made a note to herself to get rid of that old armchair my father sat in so often.

           My mother sighed in contentment at how she was transforming herself - no more was she just the poor daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants who once owned a candy store in Brooklyn.  She patted down the hair tha the beauty salon had straightened and set.  No more did she have kinky Jewish hair.  With every new piece of furniture - with the slate shelves, the mustard colored ottoman, the Chinese vases, the Castro convertible - she was different.   With every appliance and fixture, the RCA tv, the GE refrigerator, the Ford station wagon - she was an American.

Bea rested a skilled hand on my mother’s shoulder.

“I want to tell you about something that happened to me a long time ago,” she said.

            My mother’s eyes gleamed and she shifted away from Bea.

          “During the war, when I was a WAC,” Bea continued, “I met a woman - another WAC - and we cared about each other in the same way I care about you now.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” my mother said.

“Her name was Rose and she wasn’t really like you at all,” Bea laughed, “she was tall and skinny and had red hair and freckles.  Yellow Rose of Texas I’d call her - she was from there.  I’d always kid her about that amazing drawl.”

“That’s nice,” my mother said.

“But the point I was making was that we felt the same way about each other that you and I feel now.”

My mother looked at Bea.  Bea took a deep breath.  “We loved each other.”

“Oh!  Of course!  I love you, Bea,” my mother said blithely like a reflex, “you’re my best friend.”

Bea was red in the face with the shame of explaining the kind of love she had with Rose fighting with the desire she felt for my mother.

“My friendship with Rose grew to be physical,” she said simply.

My mother felt a chill go up and down her spine.  She felt suddenly nauseous.  Her head began to pound.  Bea couldn’t mean what she was saying.  For some strange reason, my mother thought of her property line, how it ran close to the side of the house and expanded out to corral in the big backyard.  The white picket fence she imagined putting up now had spikes.  She drew her arms around her chest.

“And we loved each other that way until the war ended,” Bea was saying.

Loved each other like that?  For a second, my mother imagined stroking Bea’s beloved face, imagined the deepness of their kisses, their laughter and secrets.  For a second, she imagined riding the soft ocean swell of their bodies moving together.  For a second, my mother felt happy.  Then the property line ran through her.  This was her house, her furniture, her trees, her pool, her clean, spotless American dream.  Sex with a woman?  What was she thinking?  That was disgusting.  These things only existed in lurid paperbacks with mannish women on the cover or in Greenwich Villages in dark, smoky coffeehouses between peope who wore berets and dressed in all black.  In drug dens with prostitutes, in mental hospitals with women who wanted to be men and shaved their head and wore army pants and padded crotches.  That was something sick that only ugly or fat women did to each other because they couldn’t find a man or because they were men themselves.  My mother thought she was going to retch.  She looked angrily at Bea who was wearing a floral tent dress.  How did Bea fool her?  They went to the same beauty salon.  They both got their nails done by the same manicurist.

“So why did you go back somewhere with that person after the war?” my mother asked coldly.

Bea struggled helplessly.  “Texas is far away.  I didn’t want to live in a strange place.....and I wanted a family and children and a home.”

“You have those things.”

“Yes........and I’ve tried hard to make t work and it has but then I met you.  At first I just loved you like my best friend bu tit grew into something more in my mind.......I didn’t want it to, it just happened.”

“You made your bed, now lay in it,” my mother said.

“I am sorry.........I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You can have all kinds of feelings  - that doesn’t mean you act on them.  If I acted on every feeling I had........”

“You’re right, of course.  I didn’t mean we should act on it.”

“How dare you think I would do something like that?”

“I am sorry.........I really have upset you.

“Upset me?  Upset me?  I’ve loved you Bea and yet you bring such a disgusting thing into my house?  I loved you........for god’s sake, I never said I was IN love with you!  With a woman?  How sick could you be to confuse that ?  How dare you think I’m that kind of person?  How could you twist my words into something so peverted?”

Bea stood up, tears streaming down her face.  Her hands clumsy for once trying to find the car keys in her pocketbook.

“Please, let’s just forget the whole thing.”

“Forget it?  How is that going to be possible?  Knowing that you twist everything I say or do for you?  I can’t trust you.  I can’t be friends with you anymore.  I’ve been so stupid to think you were my friend when all along you’ve been harboring this terrible thing.  Go.  Get out of my house!”

She slammed the door as Bea ran out.

True to her word, my mother never saw Bea again.

“Bea is not my friend anymore,” she told me, “she did something very bad.

The fried marbles never got off the ground.  “People just aren’t into them anymore,” my mother said.

Years later, after my mother had gone back to school to study psychology but before I came out to her as a lesbian, she said, “Bea was a person who had a lot of problems with boundaries.”

“She loved you, Ma,”  I said.

“Bea was co-dependent.  I don’t know where I was at to have enabled her like that.”

“You loved her, Ma,” I said.

My mother looked at me quickly, a tiny tear forming, then her jaw tightened and she resolutely looked away.