|
- ing Jemima sat too-big in a minute plastic chair before an array of wide-eyed five-year-olds, a thumbnail wedged between her teeth and her left foot jackhammering against the metal leg too loudly. She rubbed her hand against the underside of the greasy seat bottom and stared at the kids cross-legged on the ground before her, wide-eyed and top-heavy like mushrooms. Jemima was an ostrich at a hummingbird feeder. Zookie sat picket-straight in the front row, beaming and gawk-eyed as she watched her sister squirm around the class's inquisitions. The night before, Zookie had trotted down to Jemima's room in secret to beg her to be her show-and-tell presentation the next day: It was her turn, she'd said, and last week Andy had brought a real live chinchilla, so— Jemima acquiesced, flattered, on the condition that Mom and Dude not know. It became one of many pinkie-sworn secrets held between her and Zookie. Scrunched into the chair, Jemima's knees came to her chin. One butt cheek hung off the tiny seat, despondent. Mrs. Gopnik, bunned and fat, sat in the back and crocheted a pillow that read “I like it when you talk nerdy.” At the periods of Jemima's sentences Mrs. Gopnik glanced up from the pillow to shoot Jemima a censorious stare. Jemima wondered what kind of private lives kindergarten teachers led. Did Mrs. Gopnik here like cop shows? When Mrs. Gopnik was in high school, did she have glow-in-the-dark braces? Did glow-in-the-dark braces even exist when Mrs. Gopnik was in high school? Did Mrs. Gopnik have a mother in Boca who needed hip surgery and pined in Yiddish for the old country and disapproved of Mrs. Gopnik's move to San Francisco, and told her every day, on the phone, more than once? Basically, was Mrs. Gopnik's mother a pain in the ass? Did Mrs. Gopnik like it from behind? To the wide eyes sitting rapt below her, Jemima's life bordered the miraculous. She was sixteen ? She was in high school ? One of the kids' friend's cousins was in high school! Did she know how to climb up the slide without using her arms? Was she allowed to use the microwave all by herself? Had she ever put a fork in the microwave and then the whole microwave exploded boom and then she got her dessert taken away for a month, and also no allowance? Nope. Had she ever been to Disneyland? Uh-uh. Why not? Because I've just never gone. But why not? Because my parents have never taken us. Why not? I guess they don't love us. Zookie opened her eyes wide. Jemima retracted. Juuust kidding. I mean they have no interest in leading us to a life of empty materialistic aspiration. Why? Because they have souls. What's a soul? Jemima tapped her foot and looked to Mrs. Gopnik for help. None came. What's a soul? Jemima flushed. She had no desire to engage in theological discussions with individuals who couldn't yet read street signs by themselves. It's, like, something in you. Something that makes you who you are. Why do we have that? What? A soul? Yeah. I don't know. Mrs. Gopnik fixed a steady gaze on Jemima. Jemima could not tell whether Mrs. Gopnik was interested in why we have souls or in throwing her crochet needle right into Jemima's eye. Did Mrs. Gopnik like it from behind? Is a soul like DNA? Yes! Really? I don't know. I thought you were in high school. I am. Don't you know about DNA? Yes, I do. Well, is it like a soul?
* * *
In the corner of Jemima's bedroom hung a hammock that Dude had successfully haggled from a Slovakian weaver on a strictly-business jaunt through eastern Europe. He had been invited to lecture at the University of Bratislava on his brief but best-selling new volume, Four Types of Cancer You Don't Know Can Kill You: Anal Canal, Ureter, Nasopharynx, and Intrahepatic Bile Duct. (Jemima wondered which type of ignorance the book aimed to address. She doubted the subtle ambiguity was intentional. What is it, exactly, that You Don't Know?— that the cancers exist or that they Can Kill You?) Dude's lecture— or its translation, at least, to a roomful of Slovakian hypochondriacs and bookish oncologists— was a rousing success. He was soon invited back to speak on colorectal growths. Jemima was repulsed by the notion of her father earning his salary on what the New York Times had dubbed the “paranoid success of a manipulative and grotesque literature.” Grampa Ahvram, before he died too young in the old country, Gramma Shosha always said, was a consummate optometrist. “Good glasses for good Jews,” she reminded the family at consistently inappropriate moments. “Never whined, my Ahvram. Slaved away his whole life in that farkookt factory so all the Jews could see .” Some people's parents were pediatricians. They treated ear infections and tummyaches. The pictures on their walls were of puppies and bunny rabbits and smiling children of diverse ethnic backgrounds. Jemima conveyed her discomfort over dinner one evening when Dude announced that for his forthcoming contribution to the For Dummies series— bluntly titled Cancer for Dummies— he had received an advance “so, well— huge, that your mother and I might just get to take that second honeymoon to Thingeyri.” Mom raised her eyebrows. “It's in Iceland,” Dude said, winking. “ Northern Iceland.” “It doesn't seem wrong to you?” Jemima asked. “That you're getting hundreds of thousands of dollars for marketing deadly diseases in a hip new way?” Dude took off his glasses slowly and swiveled in his chair to glare at her. “Gastrointestinal carcinoma,” he said solemnly, “will put you kids through college.” Asher glanced at her quickly. She hoped he would raise some voice of brotherly concurrence. She was ashamed that she lacked the deep affection for Asher that she felt for her two sisters. Asher epitomized normality and was good at sports. He cruelly touted his social ease like a hard-won prize. At certain fleeting moments, though, she felt she underestimated him. “Yeah,” he said loudly. “So shove it.”
The hammock had been a gift of apology, a sort of consolation prize. Jemima knew that Dude had not known what to get her, that he had felt at that bizarrely-sited crafts fair only an odd compulsion to demonstrate to his daughter that though he knew impressively little of her nature or her needs, he did know that she liked a good hammock and, well, he supported that wholeheartedly. She hung it from her ceiling and sat in it at night. Hours after her parents had zoned out to late night television and the windows of her bedroom had transformed into mirrors, Jemima would take a little white sleeping pill and wait to be permitted to sleep. As Casper's snores meandered through the wall, Jemima would dozily do problems five nine and eleven from chapter four point eight: trinomials or outline five paragraphs on the world-changing accomplishments of that week's historical Important Man. Then she would sit in the mesh of multi-colored rope until, dizzy and nauseated, she'd find her way to her pillow and curl up and close her eyes and fall asleep with little to no effort at all. It was in this hour of wobbly chemical daze that Jemima could not distinguish the life she lived from the life her mind created and explored. Knocked out on her brand of insomniac's cocktail, her brain loosed and floating somewhere in the next room, she'd read a poem ten times and think of all the words she knew that concluded with a given set of letters. Stoic, say. Heroic. Mesozoic. Methanoic. Methylpropanoic. Seventeen years ago that night Mom was at San Francisco Children's Hospital yelling bloody murder for an epidural. Dude was sweet-talking his colleagues into switching his blimp-sized wife to a nicer delivery room. More comfortable. You know, private. With a view. Maybe some flowers. She had taken the sleeping pill too early. She shouldn't be awake. When she turned her head the axis of the earth shifted. She was dizzy. She should lie down. What is the past tense of to lie? Lay? Layed? Not like to lie, like to tell an untruth. That was lied. That she knew. Laid? Why is that? Why is sex something you get? You get laid. You get lie. No one says that. It should have its own conjugatable verb. I want to sex you. Weep not, fair Helena, for tomorrow we sex. She liked that. And if she were a screenwriter she'd want to make the movies herself. A straight page-to-the-camera type of woman and direct her own work. Part of the new breed. She wanted to be a philosopher. A poet-philosopher. A sexually liberated poet-philosopher. Kingdom. Martyrdom. Wisdom. She wanted some seaweed soup. Or seaweed salad. Seaweed salad would suffice. With some fried vegetables and that Japanese soda with the marble in it. She wanted to drive somewhere. Sodom. Boredom. Random. She wanted to go somewhere exciting. Christendom. Freedom. Santa Cruz. She would go. Tomorrow she would go to Santa Cruz. Coast. Abreast. Feast. Fast. Alone. She would go to sleep. She would go to sleep and get up early and go.
Wast. Acediast. Aminoplast.
Early and go.
Barbeque.
Go to sleep.
Bisque. Boutique.
Mosque. Picturesque. Technique.
To sleep.
Albuquerque.
Macaque.
* * * Knocking on Casper's door the next morning, Jemima reflected that the processes her sister had always enjoyed were characterized by being wet. At six Casper had joined the swim team and grown progressively adept at butterfly; in high school, this marine athleticism had led to a brief alliance with varsity diving, which, in turn, led one fateful afternoon to an expedition to the emergency room following an abrupt encounter with the concrete bottom of a hostilely shallow pool. That accidental overture into the sphere of medicine precipitated a foray into the world of microbiology, which in turn led the transitory Casper to the myriad high school science fairs of northern California. With a stunning state-wide win her junior year she was catapulted into the pre-med track at Princeton . There she met one Jarvis Meister, a gorgeous, waspy, New England-descended two-years-her-senior student of break dancing and oceanic biology who promptly introduced a formerly unsullied Casper into the exceptionally wet worlds of frat parties, The Cape, and, Jemima suspected, sex. Bearing all of this in mind as she moved to open the door on her sleeping sister, Jemima could foresee the rationales of both outcomes. On one hand, Casper likely had better things to do with a winter break Saturday than accompany the elder of her younger sisters to an eccentric beach town. On the other hand, it was a beach town. And Jemima's birthday. Her hope rose. She knocked softly. A muffled little noise came out. “Nuh-uh. I'm sleeping.” It paused. “But happy birthday.” Jemima opened the door. Her sister was lying still and prostrate on her mattress, the sheets and blankets rumpled to the floor. She was wearing intensely orange pajamas and her eyes were closed. Jemima addressed the mass of day-glo. “Come to Santa Cruz with me!” “I'm sleeping.” Jemima walked to the bed and surveyed the still form of her sister. Wasn't it cold? She kneeled down to whisper in its ear. “ Please.” The form was silent. She poked it. “Shhh.” She seated herself on the mattress's edge. “ Please come with me. I want to go. It's my birthday.” Casper opened her eyes. “What time is it?” “Ten.” She closed her eyes again. “Sorry, Jem.” “I want you to come. I hardly ever see you.” “Isn't Grandma making a special meal tonight?” “We'd be home for that.” “Sure don't wanna miss the borscht.” “Please, Cas. I don't want to go alone.” Casper blinked her eyes open and fussily negotiated herself half-upright on her elbows. Her face was splotchy with sleep. The orange was unbecoming. “Ask someone else to go.” Jemima wanted to leave. “No.” “Why?” She stood up. “Fine. Go back to sleep.”
* * *
She didn't take a map. She never did. She found her way by getting lost until she knew the way by heart. She got to Santa Cruz by sense and numbers-of-miles street signs. She took a wrong turn to the Bay Bridge and turned around at arrows pointing south. She spent a frightened ten minutes in a derelict fringe of San Jose. She stopped at two Safeways and a gas station and pulled over once to consult with a maternal-faced woman who directed her two sharp lefts and a right onto the highway. She got to know the way from place to place, eventually; but she knew too the shortcuts of the route, and the steep roads to the river and the cul-de-sacs and the Puerto Rican and the brightly colored and the bullet-ridden neighborhoods. Jemima mistrusted precision. She drove easily, one hand on the stretch of steering wheel closest to her lap, the other on the sill above the door handle. She poked at the stereo buttons, listening passively as it sang of Lady Madonna and Judy Blue Eyes and winter specials at Lucky's, your favorite neighborhood grocery store. The landscape flowed from gray to green to brown and back to green. Chameleon. Surgeon. Luncheon. Nickelodeon. Neon. Pigeon. Thereon. She would have liked to go to Santa Cruz and leave her body behind. Climbing a tree. Sleeping. Reaching orgasm. Riding on a roller coaster. Doing what they are good for. She was captive of her physicality. Everybody is. Some people liked it. Baseball players. Nascar drivers. Opera singers. She didn't. Simeon. Eon. She was driving and driving to get herself to a location. She wanted to explore it, explore the thoughts in it, the people in it. She wanted a soul. She wanted no body. No one dies who has no physical self. When cancer goes undetected for too long, it comes to light in ruptures and spasms on the floor. Your doctor tells you an alien gray mass has overtaken your cerebellum. You'll wail and they'll prolong it for a few months, maybe a year, maybe a few. They'll stick you with needles and you'll watch your heartbeat on a screen. You'll retch, you'll lie awake for days, you'll crave food that you can't have. You'll hold the hands of the people you love. You'll bequeath them your possessions. You'll make arrangements to be burnt and scattered. You'll disappear. The radio was talking about a two-for-one discount at 7-11. Five. Fixative. Adjective. Laxative. Executive. Myeloproliferative. Now the radio was playing one of her favorite songs. She loved the Beatles. She sang along.
* * *
When Jemima was Zookie's age, she had thought that all mothers were as pompously pragmatic as her own. But in her process of acclimatization to the outside world—after kindergarten, but prior to learning (from someone else's mommy) how Zookie had gotten into Mom's tummy in the first place— Jemima realized that other people's mothers weren't approached by shrieking, overzealous women in supermarkets and implored in desperate tones for personal advice. “Miss Vivian!” they'd squeal, pushing their way frantically through aisles of canned goods and feminine products. “Miss Vivian! Miss Vivian!” These scenes roused in Jemima the knowledge that her mother's name was Vivian. They introduced her to the notion that her parents had lives of which she was not a part. Mom had a syndicated daily column in the newspaper: “Miss Vivian Tells It Like It Is.” Miss Vivian, it seemed, knew all the answers to every question. Middle-aged women named Ignored in Indianapolis and Harried Housewife in Honolulu asked Jemima's mother what to do about their inert husbands, their failing children, their juice stains in their featherbeds. Miss Vivian told them like it is. The fat husband doesn't deserve you, you saintly thing, you. Kids these days are lazy— it's all the MTV. A stain stick and some olive oil should do the trick. And, Boy! It must be hot in Honolulu! I've heard you've got some really big volcanoes! Jemima had once written to Miss Vivian. She'd complained of a bossy mom and a breathing ego for a father, a big-shot older sister and little siblings to whom everyone paid all the attention all the time. She had been plaintive— years later, she felt retrospectively naïve. Her letter had been published the next week; Miss Vivian wittily advised the Seventh-Grader Sidelined in San Francisco to speak up more at the dinner table. Maybe your parents just trust you, sweetheart. Maybe they know you better than you think. Jemima had been referred to a sleep specialist by the school psychologist when she was in seventh grade. Mom thought it unnecessary— it's all the MTV— but Dude had said, memorably, that sleeping isn't just for wusses.
* * *
She arrived at noon in Santa Cruz. She wandered, wonderstruck, along sidewalks shimmering with tiny motes of smashed glass that sparkled in defiance of the portentous gray cloak hovering just above the treetops. She found a bookstore with a little boy in a big chair, running his fingers under the lines as he read a jacketless old book. She found a little shop which sold only clay drums. The man at the counter had skin the color of charcoal; she asked, and he had made the drums himself. The materials were from a village in Kenya, and so was he. She ate a lunch of watery mozzarella and cherry soda on a painted bench outside a record store. People came in and out, holding kids and ice cream and big dusty album covers. They smiled at her. It was her birthday. As she wandered from where she had begun, a deep slow beat rose from the streets, its bass steadying the knockings in her chest. People were shouting, laughing, busying themselves around its rhythm. She followed it. A loose crowd was churning through a street fair, flitting from booth to booth like bees. There was color everywhere— in paint, propped up on easels; in the people, in their hair and in their skin, and on their clothes; on the sides of the buildings, in murals and through windows; in the flowers, in the food people ate and in the bags they carried. The street itself was dizzy, too, with color: bold chalk pictures covered every inch and every corner— portraits of children and crowds, pictures of landscapes and flowers and shapes and suns and stars, color in abstraction. It was in the air, frozen in prisms in tiny wet droplets, falling and swirling, mixing up in everything. There was a band in the center, turning out that low heavy beat. She followed it to its core. There was a man plucking a tall dark bass, standing up and swaying and looking in the sky, his knuckly brown hands steady and settled on the strings like spiders. He was old, she saw— he had steely gray hair and his eyes had milky green rims around black cores. The beat he plucked coursed through Jemima's blood. She watched him play. The notes clung to her like gnats. She stood there, at the center of the world, for seconds, for a minute, hours, listening. The gray cloak had nestled down to earth, and the droplets had morphed into big splotchy raindrops. He spoke, suddenly, startling her. “Look.” She followed his eyes to the ground. The rain had sucked all the color from the air, from the people, from the fair itself, and had fused it with the color on the street. The chalk was running, and there were no more pictures. They were spilling slowly down the street in a river of glowing, soaking color, seizing and stealing the light of the afternoon as it surged past the booths, past the stores, past the old man plucking the strings of the bass, past Jemima. She looked down the street to where she came from. She wanted to catch it, to follow it. She started to run.
* * *
In the scheme of the universe, Jemima explained to the kindergarteners sitting rapt beneath her, we're all so small and our lives so short that, really, nothing we ever do rises beyond the trivial. Mathematically speaking, we don't really exist. Little voices flung themselves at her. Zookie looked up imploringly at her sister. She sat cross-legged on that gummy juice-stained carpet, high-pitched and happy and blameless for being five. The ultimate paradox, really, is that we're here in the first place. “And the earth spins even faster than a rocketship!” “And the sun is so hot you would burn if you touched it!” “Even for a second!” “Even for one-twelve-billionth of a second!” “My dad went to the sun on a rocket and he didn't even die!” Their voices were coming too fast. Jemima wanted to scream at them. She wanted to rush to the floor and lie down and they would all fall on her, their kindergarten bodies, their minds that were so little, so unaware and so at peace. “My dad went to the sun on a rocket and he didn't even die!” Jacamar, dammar. Mrs. Gopnik sat displeased and stout at the back of the classroom. Jemima supposed that Mrs. Gopnik hadn't much thought about her own insignificance. Dewan, Iowan. But we're making history! And that's something! Taiwan. Zookie slowly climbed up and into Jemima's lap. I wouldn't say it's something to get worked up over. The kids were silent. Jemima's hair shone red in the ceiling's fluorescence. She scurried her fingers along a strand and fixed it behind her ear. She crossed her hands in her lap and looked quickly at Mrs. Gopnik. Mrs. Gopnik pretended she hadn't just been picking her nose.
* * *
Gramma Shosha had, as promised, cooked a lot of borscht. Gramma Shosha had gotten the notion sometime back that Jemima loved borscht. Jemima had never told her otherwise, and wondered why she hadn't. There was a big bowl in the center of the table. The family sat around it, in chairs of differing widths and heights. (Dude didn't believe in furniture sets, but believed strongly in garage sales.) Jemima was assigned the Birthday Kid Seat at the head of the table in the tallest chair. She wore a purple paper crown Zookie had made her: it read HApy biRtday in rainbow glitter with flowers popping out in the spaces of the As and D, with bumpy spikes and construction paper jewels atop them. The crown was too big, and hung down over Jemima's right eye, pirate-like and scratchy. Mom was pacing the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, shutting it, opening drawers, shutting them. The food was on the table. All the silverware was out. All waited for Miss Vivian to sit. Zookie was hungry, and said so. Mom cast a royal glance over the table. “Eat,” she commanded. Jemima had in front of her a plate of pasta-mushroom fricassee and a bowl of purple soup and a glass of milk. If she were underwater, she thought, no one would sound different. Apagoge. Gamboge. Dude began to speak of an imminent conference in Slovakia. “It's for specialists,” he said. “My Ahvram went to Belarus,” Gramma Shosha said. “Bullshit.” Mom spoke from the kitchen. “When Ahvram was alive it wasn't a country.” Gramma Shosha glowered. “I meant Czechoslovakia.” Asher asked Zookie to pass the corn; Zookie couldn't reach. “Sit, Vivian.” Gramma Shosha stood suddenly. So funny how their voices sounded! “ I went to Santa Cruz today.” Dude spoke between chews. “Well that's great, Jem.” “I know. It was. It was fun.” Bush, flush, agush. Qurush, Kiddush. Additur, sequitur, exequatur. Jemima? Do you think Gramma Shosha had glow-in-the-dark braces when she was in high school? Probably. But do you think they even existed? Pass the pasta-and-mushroom fricassee? Where did you go in Santa Cruz? Like DNA, except smaller. Where did you go in Santa Cruz, Jemima? A fair. A fair? Affair, lair, debonair. If I could be anywhere in the world right now, I'd probably be younger. Mohair. I don't think Belarus is a country. Venushair. Gripe, wincopipe. Recipe. It could be. Mom came out, suddenly, holding a tray out in front her. There was a birthday cake on the tray. The cake was made of ice cream. The ice cream was melting. And people perked up! Just like that! All the focus on Jemima! Her family began to sing so loudly. — to you, to you, to yooouuu— Asher's voice cracked. Zookie's was loudest. Gramma Shosha's was raspy. The candles were sticking up and getting smaller. Mom's face hung above them, the flames' reflections bouncing in her pupils. —dear Jemiiimmmmaaaaa— And the candles were burning down slowly, like the sun was setting.
|