How to Breathe Underwater (12 page)

“So what?” my cousin says. “And if you tell anybody about it, you’re dead.”

“You can’t do anything to me.”

“Yes I can,” she says. “I can tell my mother this was
your
book, that you brought it from New York and have been trying to get us to read it.”

“But she’ll know you’re lying,” I say. “Dovid will tell her it’s a lie.”

“No he won’t.”

I know she’s right. Dovid would never own up to the book. In the end he would think about how much he has to lose, compared to me. And so I stand there on the road, my throat tightening, feeling again how young I am and how foolish. Esty smooths the letter between her palms and takes a deep breath. “Now turn around,” she says, “and go back into that house and pretend I’m in bed. And when I come back, I don’t want to see you reading my book.”

“Your book?” I say.

“Mine for now.”

I turn around and stomp back toward the house, but when I get to the screen door I creep in silently. The little cousins are sleeping, after all. There is a line of light beneath my aunt and uncle’s door, and I hear my uncle reading in Hebrew to Aunt Malka. I go to our bedroom and change into my nightgown and sit on the bed in the dark, trying to pray. The eyes of the Lubavitcher Rebbe stare down at me from the wall, old and fierce, and all I can think about is my cousin saying
You
would, wouldn’t you,
her eyes slit with spite. I brush my teeth and get into bed, and then I say the Shema. Saying it alone for the first time, I imagine myself back home in my own bed, whispering to God in the silence of my room, and the thought makes me feel so desolate I roll over and cry. But it isn’t long before I hear Esty climbing through the window and then getting ready for bed, and even though I still feel the sting of her threat, even though I know she’s ready to betray me, her presence is a comfort in the dark.

I struggle awake the next morning to find that Esty is already out of bed. From the kitchen I can hear the clink of spoons against cereal bowls and the high plaintive voices of the step-cousins. Aunt Malka’s voice rises over theirs, announcing that today we will all go blueberry picking. I sigh in relief. Blueberry picking is what I need. I say the Shema and wash my hands in the basin beside the bed.

My cousin is in a fine mood today, her short bangs pulled back in two blue barrettes, a red bandanna at her throat. She sings in the van on the way to the blueberry farm, and all the little cousins sing with her. My aunt looks on with pleasure. At first I’m only pretending to have a good time, but then I find I no longer have to pretend. It feels good to swing a plastic bucket and make my slow way down a row of blueberry shrubs, feeling between the leaves for the sun-hot berries. My cousin acts as if nothing happened between us last night, as if we had never fought, as if she never went down the road to Dovid Frankel’s house in the dark. When her pail is full she helps me fill my pail, and we both eat handfuls of blueberries, staining our shirts and skirts and skin.

Back at home the cousins study Torah with Uncle Shimon, and Aunt Malka and Esty and I bake blueberry cake. Esty keeps glancing at the clock, as if she might have to run out any minute to meet Dovid. When the telephone rings she gives a jolt, then lunges to pick it up.

“Oh, Uncle Alan,” she says. “Hi.”

Uncle Alan is my father. I stop stirring the cake batter and try to get the phone from my cousin, but she’s already handing it to Aunt Malka.

“Hello, Alan,” Aunt Malka says. I watch her face for bad news, but none seems to be forthcoming. “Yes,” she says. “Yes. . . . Yes, we certainly are.” Holding the phone between her cheek and shoulder, she walks out of the kitchen and into the little girls’ bedroom and closes the door behind her.

“What’s going on?” Esty says.

“I don’t know.” I pour the cake batter into the floured pan Esty has prepared, and we slide it into the oven. Through the wall I can hear Aunt Malka’s voice rising and falling. “I think it has to do with the mikveh,” I say. “I told my dad yesterday that my mom should go, and he had a strange reaction.”

“She does have to go,” my cousin says. “You’re supposed to go to the mikveh after you’ve given birth or had your period. Your husband can’t touch you until you do.”

“Your mom already told me about that.”

“There are hundreds of rules,” she says, sighing. “Things we’re supposed to do and not supposed to do. Maybe you’ll learn about them when you’re older.”

“What rules?” I say. “I’m old enough.”

“I can’t just say them here in the kitchen.”

“Yes, you can. What are the rules? What are you supposed to do?”

My cousin bends close to my ear. “You can’t do it sitting or standing,” she says. “You can’t do it outside. You can’t do it drunk. You can’t do it during the day or with the lights on. You’re supposed to think about subjects of Torah while you do it. Things like that.”

“You’re supposed to think about subjects of Torah?”

Esty shrugs. “That’s what they say.”

Through the wall we hear Aunt Malka’s voice approaching, and my cousin moves away from me and begins wiping flour and sugar from the countertop. Aunt Malka comes out of the bedroom, her face flushed, her brows drawn together. She’s already hung up the phone.

“How’s my mother?” I ask her.

“Recovering,” she says, gathering the cup measures and mixing bowls.

“Am I in trouble?”

“No.” She sends hot water rolling into the sink and rubs soap into the dish sponge, then begins scrubbing a bowl. She looks as if she’s the one who’s been punished, her mouth drawn into a grim line. “You have to do what you think is right, Rebecca,” she says, “even when the people around you are doing otherwise.”

“Okay,” I say.

“It’s not a problem right now,” she says, “but when you go home it may be.”

I glance at Esty. She’s looking at her mother intently. “Do you really believe that?” she says. “About doing what you think is right?”

“Absolutely,” her mother says. “I’ve always told you that.”

Esty nods, and Aunt Malka continues washing dishes, unaware of what she’s just condoned.

At twelve-thirty that night my cousin dresses in a black skirt and shirt and covers her hair with a black scarf. She wraps
Essence of Persimmon
in its brown paper bag and tucks it under her arm. The house is dark and quiet, everyone asleep.

“Don’t do this, Esty,” I whisper from my bed. “Stay home.”

“If you tell anyone I’m gone, you’re dead,” she says.

“At least take me along,” I say.

“You can’t come along.”

“Try and stop me.”

“You know how I can stop you.”

The dread eyes of the Lubavitcher Rebbe stare down at me from the wall.
Protect your cousin,
he seems to say, and though I don’t know what I am supposed to protect her from, I climb out of bed and begin dressing.

“What are you doing?” Esty says.

“I’m coming along.”

“This has nothing to do with you, Rebecca.”

“I was with you when you found the book,” I say.

Esty looks down at the brown paper bag in her hands. Her face, framed by the black scarf, is dark and serious. Finally she speaks. “You can come,” she says. “But there’s one condition.”

“What condition?”

“If we get caught, you have to take the blame. You have to take the blame for everything.”

“But that’s not fair.”

“That’s the way it is,” she says. “You decide.”

We sit for a moment in the silence of our room. The curtains rise and fall at the window, beckoning us both into the night. “All right,” I say.

“Get dressed, then,” my cousin says. “We’re already late.”

I finish dressing. My cousin slides the bedroom window as far open as it will go, and we crawl out silently into the side yard. We creep through the grass and out to the road, where no cars pass at this time of night. When I look back, the house is pale and small. I imagine Bluma Sarah hovering somewhere above the roof, keeping watch, marking our progress toward the lake.

We walk in the long grass at the side of the road, keeping out of the yellow pools of light that spill from the streetlamps. In the grass there are rustlings, chatterings, sounds that make me pull my skirt around my legs and keep close to my cousin. We do not talk. The moon is bright overhead. The few houses we pass yield no sign of life. Tree frogs call in the dark, the rubber-band twang of their throats sounding to me like
God, God, God.
The road we walk is the same road we traversed on Friday afternoon, our bicycles heavy with Shabbos groceries. I can almost see the ghosts of us passing in the other direction, our faces luminous with the secret of the book, our clothes heavy and damp with lake water. Now we are different girls, it seems to me, carrying a different kind of weight.

By the time we emerge into the Perelmans’ backyard, our skirts are wet with dew. Our sneakers squelch as we tiptoe toward the screen porch. We pause in a stand of bushes, listening for Dovid Frankel, hearing nothing.

We wait. The hands on my cousin’s watch read twelve fiftyfive. The lake lies quiet against the shore like a sleeping animal, and the shadows of bats move across the white arc of the moon. At one o’clock we hear someone coming. We both suck in our breath, grab each other’s arms. We see the shadow of Dovid Frankel moving across the dew-silvered lawn. We wait until he comes up, breathing hard, and sits down on the porch steps. Then we come out of the bushes.

Dovid jumps to his feet when he sees us. “Who’s that?” he says.

“It’s okay,” my cousin whispers. “It’s just us. Esty and Rebecca.”

“Quiet,” Dovid says. “Follow me.”

We follow him up the steps and enter the moonlit darkness of the screen porch. For a long moment, no one says anything. It is utterly silent. All three of us seem to be holding our breath. Dovid looks at my cousin, then at me. “Where’s my book?” he says.

Esty takes the brown paper bag from under her arm. She slides out
Essence of Persimmon.

Dovid lets out a long sigh. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

“Are you kidding?” Esty says.

Dovid reaches for the book, but Esty holds it away from him.

“It’s a sin,” she says. “Looking at pictures like these. You know you’re not supposed to do anything that would make you . . . that would give you . . .”

“That would make you what?” Dovid says.

“I mean, look at these people,” she says, stepping into a shaft of moonlight and opening the book. She takes Dovid’s flashlight and shines it on a drawing of two lovers intertwined on an open verandah, watching tigers wrestle in the tiled courtyard. She stares at the drawing as if she could will herself into the scene, touch the lovers’ garments, their skin, the tiles of the courtyard, the tigers’ pelts.

“There are laws,” my cousin says. “You can’t just do it on a porch, with tigers there. You can’t do it in a garden.”

“I know,” Dovid says.

“I’m serious,” Esty says. She moves closer to Dovid. “There are rules for us. We have to be holy. We can’t act like animals.” She looks up at him, so close their foreheads are almost touching. “We can’t have books like this.”

“What do you want me to do?” he says. “What am I supposed to do?”

My cousin rises onto her toes, and then she’s kissing Dovid Frankel, and he looks startled but he doesn’t pull away. The book falls from her hand. Quietly I pick it up, and I open the screen door and step out into the Perelmans’ backyard. I walk through the long grass to the edge of the water and take off my shoes and socks. The water is warmer than the air, its surface still. I take one step into the lake, then another. I am all alone. I pull off my long-sleeved shirt and feel the night air on my bare skin. Then I step out of my skirt. I throw my clothes onto the shore, onto the grass. Still holding the book, I walk into the water and feel it on all parts of my body, warm, like a mouth, taking me gently in. When the sandy bottom drops away I float on my back, looking up at the spray of stars, at the dense gauze of the Milky Way. The moon spreads its thin white sheet across my limbs. In my hand the book is heavy with water, and I let it fall away toward the bottom.

Care

Tessa knows how to cross the street with a six-year-old: You take her hand, look both ways, and wait until it’s safe. Then you stay within the crosswalk as you cross. She does all these things as she guides Olivia, her niece, across the street toward the cable-car stop. There’s a right way to take care of a child, she knows, and a wrong way. Many wrong ways. What you do
not
do: Take the drugs that are in your pocket, the Devvies and Sallies in their silver pillbox. She can make it through the day without them. Even bringing them was wrong—another wrong thing. But it makes her feel better to have them close by.

The heel of Tessa’s left shoe is coming loose, so she’s been walking on the ball of her foot ever since she left her apartment. She has a blister already. At the stop she sits on a bench and examines the broken shoe. The tips of tiny nails glint in the space between heel and sole. Olivia sits next to her, zipping and unzipping her lavender jacket.

“What’s wrong with your shoe?” Olivia asks.

“Nothing,” Tessa says, straightening the heel. She stuffs her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket—Kenji’s jacket, actually, heavy and worn and smelling of his cigarettes—and feels for the pillbox. There it is in the right-hand pocket, round and familiar, a relief.

“Can I get a souvenir?” Olivia says, eyeing a shop across the street.

“Maybe later. We have to wait for the cable car.”

“Can we just look for a second?”

Tessa glances down the street in the direction of the car turnaround. A cable car is just beginning to make the climb up the hill. “We have to stay here.”

“I want a T-shirt and a light-up snow dome,” Olivia says.

“You’ll get what I give you,” Tessa says, and Olivia goes silent. She slides down the bench, as far away from Tessa as possible.

Tessa tries to concentrate on the distant clang of the bell. She wills the cable car to hurry up. All her joints feel dry and sore, her mind whitely empty. She bites the inside of her cheek just for the distraction.

The cable car glides uphill through the intersection of Post and Powell and comes to rest at their stop. It’s packed with tall boys in green-and-white sweatshirts that read BONN JUNGENCHOR. The boys are belting out a peasant tune in three-part harmony. Tessa and Olivia squeeze onto the side rail and grab the brass pole as the cable car begins to move. All around them the boys sing the lilting chorus with its repeating nonsense line: O-di-lon tee-lee, o-di-lon tee-lee. Tessa’s head begins to pound. She wonders if Olivia is too young to be standing on the side rail of a cable car, hanging on to a pole as they ascend Nob Hill. Maybe they should be inside the car, not standing here, where Olivia could fall onto the tracks or be jostled to the pavement. The bell of the cable car is like a pickax inside Tessa’s head. “Clay Street, Clay,” the driver calls, yanking the wooden brake. For a long moment, a metallic screech drowns out the German boys’ song.

They roll through Chinatown, with its dead-eyed fish on ice and its mysterious herb stores, its smells of frying meat and fruity garbage and wet boxes. Farther along, the German boys stop singing. Olivia knocks and knocks her toe against the brass pole. Tessa wants to make her stop, but she can’t move. There’s a hot fast clawing inside her chest. She takes one hand off the pole and feels for the silver pillbox. With her thumb she flicks the lid open. She can feel the difference between a Devvie and a Sallie, the Devvie like a chalky little submarine, the Sallie hexagonal and coated. She works a Devvie out with her index finger. It calms her just to hold it. Clenching it in her hand, she wraps her arm around the pole and braces herself for the next hill.

Her shoes keep slipping on the smooth side rail, and the narrow skirt she’s wearing makes it hard to get her balance. God, if only her mind had been working that morning, she would have worn something different, more casual. Her plan had been to dress as if she’d otherwise be spending the day at a job. When she got to the hotel, though, her sister Gayle was busy zipping Olivia into her jacket and folding her socks down and putting her hair up into a ponytail. She’d hardly glanced at Tessa’s clothes. It was a good thing, too, because Tessa hadn’t gotten it right. She couldn’t find any stockings or a convincing jacket. And if she
had
a job, and this were really her day off, wouldn’t she just be wearing jeans and a T-shirt? But Gayle had her mind on the lecture she was going to deliver that afternoon, something about
Mrs. Dalloway,
and Tessa left before she could notice much of anything.

The German youths move on to another song, this one in English. Tessa doesn’t recognize it, but it has the predictable swelling cadences of a show tune. One of the teenagers beside her belts out the baritone. Olivia stares at the rows of pink and yellow houses, at the blue expanse of bay opening before them. They can see an antique sailing vessel docked near Ghirardelli Square, and the white masts of fishing boats bobbing alongside a pier. The cable car is going downhill now, mashing Olivia against the brass pole and Tessa against Olivia.

“You’re hurting me,” Olivia says.

Tessa pushes herself away, feeling the Devvie like a smooth pebble in her fist. “We’re almost there,” she says. “We can get some ice cream, okay?”

Olivia rubs a hand under her nose. “I’m not allowed,” she says. “It’ll spoil my appetite.”

“Not today it won’t. Not while you’re with me.”

Olivia gives her a skeptical look.

“I’m your adult today,” Tessa says. “I make the rules.”

At last the cable car reaches its turnaround. Tessa and Olivia get off and walk toward Ghirardelli Square, leaving the German choirboys behind. Each step sends a burning jolt through Tessa’s foot. She’ll never make it through the day in these shoes. There’s a line at the ice-cream shop entrance, of course, and they have to wait outside in the wind and the blinding sun. The other people in line are parents and children, shivering in their bright T-shirts and shorts. They’re all strangely quiet. They edge against the brick wall of the ice-cream shop, away from a man with dun-colored dreadlocks and milky eyes. Around his neck is a sign that reads, simply, AIDS. He moves in Tessa’s direction, shaking a coffee can. Tessa takes a crumpled dollar from her pocket. When the man reaches her, she drops it in his can. He grins and says, “Thank you, beautiful.” Though she’s never seen him before, something seems to pass between them, a kind of uneasy recognition. Tessa pulls Kenji’s jacket tighter around herself as the man moves off down the line.

“He smelled like pee,” Olivia says.

“You would too, if you were him,” Tessa says. It gives her a strange satisfaction to see how much this disturbs her niece. Olivia takes another look at the man and then moves behind Tessa, out of sight.

It’s another fifteen minutes before the host shows them to a booth. As soon as he leaves, Tessa slides her shoes off and tucks her throbbing feet under her thighs. Olivia seems nervous, glancing at the families in other booths, humming a tight little song to herself. Will no one quit singing? Tessa lowers her forehead onto her fist.

When the waiter comes and asks what they’ll have, Olivia shakes her head and looks down at the table. Tessa orders a hot-fudge-and-Oreo sundae for Olivia and coffee for herself. As they wait, Tessa takes sugar packets from the little ceramic sugar holder and rips them open one by one, lining them up on her napkin. She’s not thinking about it, just getting into the rhythm of it, the feeling of paper in her hands, the sound of tearing. Olivia stares at her. Tessa looks down at the row of sugars, the little nest of torn-off strips of paper. This is not normal behavior. She puts a hand in her pocket and rolls the Devvie between her fingers, thinking how easy it would be to take this one white pill. Olivia would never even notice. It couldn’t hurt anyone. In fact, she’d be worse off without it. And Olivia would be worse off. Olivia needs her to take this Devvie. Who knows what will happen otherwise?

The waitress brings the ice cream and the coffee, and Olivia seems relieved. She picks up the long spoon and lifts a delicate peak of whipped cream from the sundae. When she tastes it, she smiles and then scoops up a bite of ice cream and hot fudge. Quickly, with a feeling of inevitability, Tessa puts the Devvie on her tongue and washes it down with coffee. She takes a long breath and leans back in her chair. In a few minutes she’ll begin to feel it. She glances at her wrist where she once wore a watch. She remembers the watch, an oversized Swiss Army chronometer, and wonders how it got away from her.

Across the table, Olivia eats her ice cream with deliberation, spooning hot fudge and whipped cream with each bite. Tessa watches her, waiting for the first quickening of the drug, that flutter at the center of her chest. Soon she will be able to handle anything, including taking care of her niece, her sister’s child. She squints at Olivia, trying to imagine her as a six-year-old Gayle. But Gayle was a thin sly-eyed girl, her mouth full and pink, her hands agile. This girl is sturdy and round-faced. Pure Henry.

Oh, her brother-in-law is valiantly good, doesn’t smoke or drink; he is devoted to the study of imaginary numbers and to the building of handy gadgets. In his house, each family member’s preferred bathwater temperature is programmed into a special faucet, and the toaster oven responds to voice commands. “Black,” Tessa said, last time she visited, and the toaster complied. Henry is responsible and compassionate, a good father. Right now he’s back home taking care of Ethan, the younger child, who has the chicken pox. He’s the kind of husband who can be trusted to take care of a sick child. Tessa can almost stand him, though for a long time she wanted to kill him. Gayle had met him in college. For years Tessa felt like he was the one who’d taken Gayle away, made Gayle forget that she and Tessa were supposed to go to Barcelona when they finished school, get a tiny apartment there, teach English, go out with dark-eyed men, give the world of careers and babies and husbands a grand and permanent
adiós.

Of course, if it hadn’t been Henry, it would have been someone else. Or something else. Tessa understands that now. Gayle started talking about graduate school when Tessa was still a freshman. She applied and got in right out of college. Stupidly, Tessa kept talking about Barcelona as if they might still go, as if Gayle might ditch her boyfriend and her Ph.D. in favor of a wild life in Catalonia. When Tessa was a senior herself, she asked Gayle what she was supposed to do next. She’d majored in computer programming, but she couldn’t imagine getting a normal job, working in an office. Gayle suggested that Tessa go to Barcelona and teach English, just like they’d talked about. But that wasn’t what they’d talked about, and Gayle knew it. Instead, Tessa dropped out of school and moved to San Francisco. And just look at her now.

Tessa can feel the Devvie coming on, the flush in her face that means her veins are dilating, the flutter in her diaphragm as the drug gets down to business. She can’t avert her eyes from Olivia, sated and pale, the empty ice-cream bowl in front of her. They’ll go look at the sea lions, they’ll shop for souvenirs. She can do these things.

She pays the bill and wipes Olivia’s face with a napkin, and then they’re back out into the wind and sun. The light has become brighter and hotter and she’s drinking it in like milk. Now she’s the one who’s singing, a hand-clapping song from when she and Gayle were little girls,
Miss Lucy had
a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell.
It’s a song where you say all the bad words but not really,
Miss Lucy went to heaven,
the steamboat went to hell-o operator, please give me number
nine. . . .
She and Gayle used to sing it at the top of their lungs when their father wasn’t home. She should teach it to Olivia.
Behind the ’frigerator there lay a piece of glass; Miss Lucy sat
upon it and broke her little ass me no more questions, tell me
no more lies . . .
but she can’t remember what comes after that. And these shoes are killing her. Why is she still wearing them? She pauses to take them off, and the sidewalk is mercifully cold against her burning feet.

“You’re barefoot,” Olivia says. “You can’t go barefoot.”

“Why not?”

“You might step on glass. Or a bee. Or doody.”

“I’m not going to step on doody,” Tessa says. “Believe me.”

“You could get an infection,” Olivia says, pausing at the door of a crowded T-shirt shop. On a tall rotating stand beside the door, pink and turquoise and yellow novelty flip-flops hang on individual hooks. Tessa turns the stand, looking. Maybe Olivia is right. Maybe what she needs is a new pair of shoes.

“What do you think of these?” Tessa pulls off a pair of pink flip-flops with palm trees stenciled in black on the footbed.
California Dreamin’,
they say in looping script.

“You should get them,” Olivia says. “And I could get a souvenir.”

“I just got you ice cream,” Tessa says.

“I’m going to look in here,” Olivia says vaguely, and wanders inside toward a shelf of plush toys. Tessa glances at the price tag on the flip-flops: twelve dollars, but maybe they’re worth it. She goes to the register and waits in line, shifting from foot to foot, biting her nails. When she gets to the front of the line, she pays for the shoes with the twenty Kenji gave her that morning. There are still a couple of crumpled bills in her pocket. How much does she have left? Ten bucks? Fifteen? She doesn’t even want to check. She still has to buy a present for Olivia and lunch for both of them and the cable-car ride back, and her bank account is history, and her credit card won’t accept new charges ever again. The rush in her chest becomes a pounding, the beginning of panic.

Tessa takes her flip-flops and goes to get Olivia, who’s struggling with another child at the rack of plush toys. The child is a blond boy, perhaps three inches taller. He pulls a toy otter away from Olivia and holds it against his chest.

“I want that bear,” Olivia says.

“That’s not a bear,” Tessa says.

“I want him,” Olivia says, her voice low and dangerous. The boy takes a step back, holding the otter. His hair is cut like a hockey player’s, short and scruffy on top, long in back. A thin blond woman rushes toward him and grabs him by the wrist.