Elegance and Innocence (7 page)

Lisa couldn’t explain her world to me any better than I could understand it. And she had never had to before. Finally, like a child reciting a catechism, she said, ‘Some things are to look at, not to touch.’

‘Oh.’ I didn’t get it at all.

She smiled at me. So I smiled back. We sat there smiling at each other, both thinking the other insane.

‘I know,’ she said at last. ‘Let’s go up to the attic and dress the dog in baby clothes.’

Luckily, there are some human experiences that transcend cultural divides.

Then one day, the Finegolds invited me out to dinner. In honour of the occasion, I wore my best dress, which was made to my exact specifications by Grandma Irene. We chose the pattern and the material together, a crisp white cotton covered in bright blue and red flowers, and she made little cap sleeves trimmed with lace and smocked the front of it by hand.

I brought the dress to school with me on a hanger and hung it in my locker. Occasionally, I’d show it to one of the other girls but I wanted it to be a surprise for Lisa, certain that once she saw me in it, she’d come up with the idea of us being sisters all on her own.

After school we went to her house and played, which, that day, consisted of taking all the miniature figures out of the glass cabinet, looking at them and then putting them back in exactly the same way. After a while, we heard someone come in and Lisa said, ‘It’s time to get ready.’ We put on our dresses, brushed each other’s hair and went downstairs. Lisa didn’t say anything about my dress and I didn’t say anything about hers, which was in black velvet with a creamy satin sash. It was understood that we both looked fabulous.

In the kitchen we found Dr Finegold eating tapioca pudding from a serving bowl in the refrigerator. Tall and slim, with black, wavy hair, a romantic moustache and soft, dark eyes, he was easily the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. He owned an enormous collection of tortoises that
he kept in various tanks and plastic pools in the basement, which I thought were cool but Lisa thought were gross. And best of all, he loved to play the piano.

‘Daddy, don’t do that,’ Lisa admonished half-heartedly. (Even her parents were just minor irritations.)

‘Our little secret,’ he said, tossing the spoon into the sink. ‘I know; why don’t I play you girls a little tune?’

We went into the living room and he began to play. I danced around the piano and we laughed, egging each other on. I’d turn a pirouette and he’d shout, ‘Go on, do another one!’ He’d do a massive run and I’d clap and make him do it again. Lisa wasn’t very good at dancing; it was part of her whole horror of physical activity, so she stood by the side of the piano, sulking and being bored. Dr Finegold sang ‘Mona Lisa’, which I thought was hysterical and Lisa ignored him. All in all, we had a great time.

We didn’t even hear Nancy come in but suddenly she was there and Dr Finegold stopped playing. I stood beaming and panting to catch my breath. This was it, I’d just turned four pirouettes and was wearing the most beautiful dress in the world. If ever they were going to want to adopt me, it was now.

Nancy Finegold stood in silence in the doorway. ‘I think you girls ought to get ready,’ she said at last.

‘We are ready, Mama.’ Lisa’s voice was unusually quiet.

She turned to me. ‘Is that what you’re wearing?’

I nodded. Was this a trick question?

She turned her back to me and spoke to Lisa. ‘Don’t you have something she could borrow?’

I felt myself go cold; the way you do when someone talks about you as if you were a chair.

‘Nan!’ Dr Finegold interrupted.

She registered him with distaste. ‘Don’t be so dramatic, Mel.’ Bending down to examine my dress more closely, she smiled sweetly. ‘That dress is fine, Louise, but Lisa has one that will be better.’

‘Mom!’ The horror on Lisa’s face was unmistakable; she’d obviously never been asked to share anything before.

Nancy Finegold was a genius trapped in a world of idiots. She sighed in exasperation, rolling her eyes in the grown-up version of Lisa’s favourite expression. ‘All right, fine! What about a cardigan then?’

Dr Finegold walked away and Lisa stared dejectedly at the floor.

In her full-length mink coat and slender high heels, Nancy seemed too thin to stand upright for long. Her huge brown eyes scanned the room for any sign of affirmation or weakness and, finding nothing, she opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. She closed it again in such a way that she reminded me of a ventriloquist’s dummy and for one terrible moment I thought I would laugh. Her exquisite hands clenched in frustration and then fell limply by her side, the gold bangles rattling against one another, as if someone had suddenly let go of the strings.

I couldn’t bear it. ‘I’ll wear a cardigan,’ I offered.

She stared at me for a moment and then smiled, triumphant. She gave Lisa a shove. ‘Go on. Run upstairs and grab one of your blue cardigans.’

Lisa extracted herself with all the speed of one of my giant slugs.

Now there was just the two of us. I stared at her, but she didn’t look at me. Instead, she knelt down and pulled up my knee socks, folding the tops over in two perfectly even strips. I could smell her perfume, her hairspray and the musky, almost aluminium scent of the fur coat she wore as she smoothed down my hair with her hand. I had wanted to be touched by her for months, to run up and wrap my arms around her, to bury my head against her shoulder and tell her how much I loved her. And now, at last, I was the whole focus of her attention. And I couldn’t move.

Some things are to look at, not to touch. Nancy Finegold was one of them.

We went out to dinner and I wore the cardigan.

My father came to pick me up in the old brown family station wagon and when I jumped in the front seat, I felt free and very, very old.

‘How’d it go, Pea?’ he asked. ‘Did they like your dress?’

‘I don’t think they understood it, Da.’

He laughed. ‘What’s there to understand?’

‘Everything,’ I said.

Absolutely everything.

E
Expecting

The period during which a woman is expecting a baby is not always, it must be admitted, the most propitious one for elegance. A bad complexion, an expanding waistline, a silhouette becoming a bit awkward towards the end, all add up to an image that is not always a joy to contemplate in the mirror. But since almost every woman is obliged to go through it at one time or another, it is better to accept the situation with good humour and to make the most of it
.

A good plan is to buy only a few things for your maternity wardrobe and to wear the same dresses over and over again until you are quite fed up with them. This way you can give them away afterwards without the slightest regret. Above all, don’t try to have them taken in at the seams after you have recovered your normal figure. The clothes you have worn throughout these long months will disgust you for the rest of your days
.

My husband and I are entertaining friends, a couple we haven’t seen in a long time. We haven’t seen them because they have children, twin girls. My husband and I don’t do children very well; no matter how much we try to hide it, we’re clearly horrified. I keep staring at them like I’m going to pass out and he’s permanently on guard, brandishing a washing up cloth like he’s ready to mop up toxic waste. Very quickly the couple feel as if they’ve defiled the sanitized sanctuary of our pristine living room and decide that the twins need to go home for a nap after only forty-five minutes in our company. Everyone’s relieved, even the babies, who are only nine months old. Their faces noticeably relax as they’re loaded into the car.

Our friends are all having children now; we’re the odd ones out. They’ve stopped asking us about it; stopped smiling and saying, ‘But surely
someday
you’ll want a family.’ By now it’s obvious that only an act of God could make us parents. We wave to them as they drive away, and then walk back into our barren household – the one with the dust-free living room and the bed the size of Kansas.

‘Thank God that’s over,’ my husband says, bending down to pick up something from the floor. It’s a single, pale blue baby sock, still warm and smelling of baby. He hands it to me. I don’t know what to do with it or where to put it, so I throw it away.

‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Thank God.’

The first time I was pregnant, I was sixteen and it was
before the creation of home pregnancy tests. I had to see a doctor to tell me what I already knew. You don’t have to have been pregnant before to know that there’s something strange going on. I was throwing up in the mornings and, in fact, all through the day and I started noticing strange discharges I’d never encountered before. Things smelled different, tasted wrong, and I’d gone off pizza. For the first time in my life, I was forced into paying attention to my body. I was possessed, like in
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and it wasn’t going to go away.

I couldn’t go to the family physician – not to the same man who’d vaccinated me against smallpox and measured my growth against a chart on the wall covered with smiling, cartoon animals. I was sick but I had to hide it. But by now I was used to hiding all the most important facts of my day.

I was used to hiding the fact that I threw up my food after each meal by going upstairs to the guest bathroom and sticking my fingers down my throat. I was used to hiding the little black speed pills I took every morning, the ones I bought from Sarah Blatz, a fat, red-headed girl who played on the girls’ field-hockey team and who was prescribed them by her doctor to lose weight. And I was used to hiding where I went in the evenings from my parents, what I did and especially who with.

My friend Mary took me to see her doctor, a female physician in another part of town. She had a growth chart
on her wall too, but she’d never measured me before, so that was OK.

Mary was frightened; she wasn’t used to concealing things or maybe she was just used to covering up all the normal things, like that she’d gone all the way with her boyfriend, the one she’d been going steady with for a year and a half, or that she’d got drunk at a friend’s party last Saturday and had to spend the night.

I didn’t have a boyfriend; I got pregnant from a guy who never called again and I was drunk every Saturday night.

After school, Mary drove me to the doctor’s in her mother’s custom built silver Cadillac, the one with the horn that played the theme from
The Godfather
when you pressed it. (Her father was in the meat trade.) Every once in a while she’d press it and we’d laugh; more out of politeness than anything else. She was obviously trying her best to cheer me up and I was grateful for her kindness.

The doctor took a blood test and examined me as I sat in my little paper gown on the crinkly paper strip that covered the examining table. The office was on the 7th floor of a modern block, overlooking the traffic that led into the mall below. I concentrated on the pale blue of the sky as she felt my breasts and shook her head sadly.

‘They’re pregnanty,’ she announced. ‘We’ll get the test back tomorrow, but I can tell you right now, you’re pregnant.’

I know, I thought. I know.

Mary wanted me to tell her mom because that’s what she would do. But I knew I’d have to do the rest on my own. I made an appointment, but had to wait another month before I could have the abortion.

In the meantime, I told my parents I had an ulcer, which they believed without questioning. Every morning at around 4:30 am, I was sick. And every morning, my father woke up at 4:15 and made me a small bowl of porridge to settle my stomach, which he placed by the side of my bed. Then he’d pad off upstairs in his red robe, feeling his way in the darkness to catch another hour and a half’s sleep. He never asked if he should do that; he just did it. Like so many things in our house, even acts of kindness occurred in silence. I wondered if he would do the same thing if he knew the truth. I think he would.

My skin got bad and my mouth tasted metallic. In my locker at school, I kept an enormous box of saltines, which I ate in the hundreds. My diet diminished to saltines, mashed potatoes, and porridge. Anything else was just too exciting. No matter how much I ate, I still got sick. And no matter how often I threw up, I was still hungry. I was more afraid of gaining weight than of being pregnant.

The operation cost two hundred and thirty dollars. My parents gave me two hundred dollars in cash after I managed to convince them that I needed a new winter coat and the rest of it I paid for out of my allowance.

Finally the day came, a Saturday morning in early March. It was raining, softly misting when I left the house.

I told my parents I was going to go shopping with my friend Anne and then I drove myself to the clinic and checked in. It was early, around 9 am. The waiting room was full of flowered cushions, pleasant prints, and bright, soft colours. There were little clusters of people – a young couple holding hands and whispering to each other, a girl with her family. They’d obviously tried to make the waiting room as sympathetic and normal looking as possible, but despite that, no one wanted to look at one another.

You had to meet with a counsellor before you did it. They took us in one at a time, in such a way that you never passed any of the other women in the hall. I was led into a little office where a young woman with short brown hair was waiting for me. I cannot remember her name or how she introduced herself but I can remember her deliberate, almost institutionalized kindness. And I recall her asking if I was alone and saying ‘yes’.

My mouth was dry and sticky. The office was like a closet, with no windows. There was a table and two chairs and a chart on the wall with a diagram of the female anatomy. Even here they’d done their best to make it seem normal and wholesome by painting the walls pink. It was like a beauty parlour for abortions. There were no sounds at all in the room, no traffic noise, no distant conversations. Just the woman and me.

‘I’m here to tell you about the operation and what to expect,’ she began.