If You Come Softly (2 page)

And now, on top of everything, he had met a girl.

IT RAINED THE AFTERNOON I MET JEREMIAH. A HARD, heavy rain that would last for four days. I walked home slowly in it, an umbrella I had bought on the street for three dollars barely keeping the rain off my back.

Our doorman, Henry, waved when he saw me then rushed forward, holding an oversized umbrella over mine. We had lived on Eighty-Eighth and Central Park West since I was a baby. And since I was a baby, Henry had been running out from his post by the door with an oversized umbrella to greet us when it rained. It didn’t matter if we were carrying our own umbrellas.

I smiled at Henry. He was tall and quiet, with gray brown curly hair and skin so pale, you could see the veins running along his temples.

“First day in a new school, Ellie.” Henry said.

I nodded. He never asked questions—just sort of stated things. “How can you tell?”

“The uniform. You’re looking like me in it.”

I glanced down at my Percy uniform, wondering if the administration knew the burgundy jackets and gray skirts we had to wear were the same colors that many doormen in the city had. “I guess I’ll get used to it, huh?”

Henry winked at me. “You’ll be surprised how quickly you do. Percy, right.”

“I feel like I’m a walking billboard for that school,” I said.

Henry laughed and returned to his post by the door. “I’ll see you later, Ellie.”

The elevator door slid open quietly. I stepped inside and waited for it to close, counting slowly under my breath. When it started moving again, I closed my eyes and thought about Jeremiah.

I had been staring at my program card, trying to figure out where room 301 or something was— looking from the program card to the numbers on the doors and I had run right into him, my math and science textbooks crashing to the floor. Then he was apologizing and I was apologizing and we were both bending at the same time to retrieve them. And then—we just stopped and burst out laughing.

That’s when he said his name—Jeremiah—and that stupid song about the bullfrog popped into my head so fast I just said it—“Like the bullfrog?”

“Yeah,” he smiled. “Like the bullfrog.”

I couldn’t stop looking at him, at his smile and his hair. I had never seen locks up close. His were thick and black and spiraling down over his shoulders. I wanted to touch them, to touch his face. I wanted to hear him say his name again. For a moment we stared at each other, neither of us saying anything. There was something familiar about him, something I had seen before. I blinked, embarrassed suddenly, and turned away from him.

Then Jeremiah rose and I rose.

“Well ... good-bye. I guess ... I guess I’ll see you around,” he said softly, looking at me a moment longer before turning away and heading down the hall, his locks bouncing gently against his shoulders.

“Jeremiah,” I whispered to myself as I walked away from him. I could feel his name, settling around me, as though I was walking in a mist of it, of him, of Jeremiah.

I stopped then and looked back over my shoulder. He was looking at me, a kind of puzzled look.
Jeremiah,
I thought, smiling. Jeremiah smiled back, then sort of waved, and turned into the classroom at the end of the hall.

 

 

Our apartment takes up the top two floors. Inside, it’s more like a house than an apartment, with high windows, a fireplace in the living room, and stairs leading up to the bedrooms. I let myself in quietly then tiptoed up to my room. Outside, thunder clapped hard. The rain sounded soothing though, consistent. Like it would always come down. Like it would always be here.

I stepped out of my shoes by the closet then sat on the bed to peel off my wet socks. From my room, I could lie across my bed and watch the cars rush along Central Park West. In a hurry to get someplace. Everyone in New York is in a hurry. You see businessmen walking fast, their heads bowed, the cuffs of their pants flapping hard against their ankles. They don’t look at anyone. Once I followed this man, walking so close beside him I could have been his daughter-but he never even looked over and noticed me. For two blocks I walked like that beside him. It made me sad for him—that he could walk through this world without looking left or right.

Lonely.

I sighed and lay back on my bed. Some people had friends surrounding them all the time. Sometimes when groups of girls passed by me, giggling and holding hands, my stomach tightened. I wanted that. But I didn’t want that. Marion says it’s because I was born so long after everybody else. The twins, Anne and Ruben, were already ten by the time I was born-and my older brother, Marc, and my sister, Susan, were in graduate school. She says I got used to being alone early on. And this house—with all its empty rooms and quiet. Some days I walked through it slowly, touching the walls of my sisters’ and brothers’ old rooms, wondering what it would feel like to grow up in a house full of people. And some afternoons, sitting at the coffee shop on the corner, eating fries and reading, I wanted to hug myself. Those days, being alone felt whole and right and good.

Jeremiah. Who did he go home to? Would he remember me? Had he seen it too, whatever it was that I saw when we looked at each other? What was it?

Once I had kissed a boy—a boy named Sam in seventh grade. He wore braces that made him lisp. Around me he was always nervous and fumbling, offering to carry my books and buy me sodas. I liked him, liked how he stuttered and looked away from me. One day I just kissed him, leaned forward while he was sitting beside me stuttering out a tale about his father’s sailboat. I had never kissed anyone on the lips and Sam’s lips felt dry and hard. But at the same time warm and sweet. We sat there, in the park, our lips pressed together until Sam pulled away. After that, he avoided me.

Lying across my bed, I wondered where he was now. Good old Sam, who grew scared of me suddenly, scared of kissing. I wondered when I’d kiss someone again. Wondered if it would be Jeremiah.

“Elisha!” my mother called from the bottom of the stairs. “Are you planning on spending the whole afternoon in that room?”

“Maybe,” I yelled back.

I sat up and pressed my hand across the pleats of my gray Percy skirt before pulling it off. I had never worn a uniform. It had hung in my closet beneath thin dry-cleaning plastic all summer. Once I had tried it on for Marion and my father and they had smiled, made me turn this way and that. Still, it felt strange to walk into a school full of people dressed exactly like me.

“Elisha,” Marion called again. “Come down and tell me about your first day.”

I met a boy,
I wanted to scream.
His name is Jeremiah.

“I’m changing clothes, Marion. I’ll be down for dinner.”

“Well, it’s almost dinnertime now.”

 

 

In the dining room, Marion had set the table for two. A thin white candle melted slowly inside a silver holder. I stared at the flame a long time. Jeremiah’s face flickered once inside of it, then disappeared.

There were rolls and a bowl of steaming green beans on the table. When I was small, I had gone for weeks eating only green beans. My parents laughed about it now, about how they had worried I’d wake up completely green one day.

“Daddy working?” I asked, coming up behind Marion in the kitchen.

In the past year, I had grown as tall as my mother. It was strange that in such a short time, she had gone from being someone I had to look up at to someone I met at eye level.

“Of course he’s working,” she said. “First I was married to a nice young medical student and I saw him all the time. Then I was married to a resident and I saw him once in a while. Now I’m married to a doctor who I never see. He called right before you got home from school-said he hoped your first day went well.”

“It was fine. It’s just like Jefferson only the kids can afford dermatologists.” Thomas Jefferson was the public school I had transferred from.

Marion laughed. She pulled a chicken covered with rosemary and lemon slices from the oven.

“Smells good, Marion.”

“Stop calling me Marion.”

“Stop calling me Elisha.”

“That’s your name.”

“And Marion’s yours.” I smiled, pulling a sprig of rosemary from the chicken. It had been going on like this for years. She refused to call me Ellie, so I refused to call her Mom.

“Goodness, I’m glad you’re the last teenager I’ll ever have to raise ...
Elisha.
Even when you’re fifty, you’ll still be Elisha.” She shook her head and looked at me. “What if we
had
named you Ellie. Kids would have called you ‘Smelly’ Ellie or ’Tattle-Telly’ Ellie. You would have come home crying every afternoon.”

I rolled my eyes. “You should have been a poet.”

My mother smiled. “Go put the chicken on the table, silly.”

I started pulling the sleeves of my sweatshirt down over my hands.

“Use pot holders, Elisha!”

“Yes, Marion. We don’t want another little accident.”

She laughed again and swatted me with the dish towel. It was a family joke. When the twins were still living at home, they would refer to me as our parents’ little accident. Even though my mother and father swore they had planned to have another child, none of us believed them.

“It was the dancing,” Marion said, following behind me with a bowl of mashed potatoes. She set them carefully on the table. “If your father hadn’t taken me out dancing that night—we went to Rose-land—maybe, then maybe, you wouldn’t be here. But it was the dancing and, possibly, the wine.” She winked at me and sat down.

I sat across from her. “I’m sure it had a lot to do with the wine.”

“And a lot to do with why I haven’t touched a drop since!”

We laughed and the laughter seemed to echo through the empty house and wind its way back to us. We were almost friends now.

A long time ago, Marion left us. Just packed up and was gone. I was little and the twins were still living at home then. The three of us cried every night for a week while my father took time off from medical school to try to find her. Then we stopped crying, and three weeks later she returned.

When she left the next time, I was eight and the twins had left for college. I was old enough to understand what it meant that she wasn’t coming home for a while, that she might never come home. When she did, I couldn’t speak to her for a long time. Scared to say the wrong thing. Scared she’d leave again.

When you’re young and your mother leaves, something inside of you fills up with the absence of her. I don’t know how to explain. For a long time, there was this place inside of me where love for Marion should have been but wasn’t.

“Marc called,” Marion said, tearing a chicken leg away with her hands. I watched her, saying nothing. There were parts of her that were still, even after all these years, unfamiliar to me. The way her hands moved when she ate. The way she brushed her hair down over her eyes before sweeping it back behind her ears. “He said the girls are safely tucked away at boarding school.”

My oldest brother’s daughters were twelve. All summer, he and his wife had been calling. His wife wanted the girls to go to boarding school and Marc didn’t. The twins didn’t know what they wanted.

“Good riddance.” I didn’t like my nieces. They were spoiled and prim. Even at twelve, they insisted on dressing identically. There was something weird about that to me. It’s one thing to have someone in the world who looks
exactly
like you—I mean, that part you can’t help. But to want to
dress
exactly like that person was a different story.

Marion shook her head. “It’s not like you’ll see them any less, Elisha.”

“I know. One can only hope.”

Marion laughed.

Although they lived in Seattle, they came east once a year at Hanukkah. Unfortunately, that would probably still be the case whether they were at boarding school or not.

“One day I’ll join Marc and Susan and Anne and Ruben on the great parental divide.” I smiled, picked up a green bean with my fingers and chewed it slowly.

My sisters and brothers had all moved on a long time ago. I missed my sister Anne the most. Sometimes we spent hours on the phone talking about nothing really. She would probably have all kinds of things to say about Jeremiah. Anne was like that. She had an opinion about everything and everyone whether she’d met them or not. She had opinions about the idea of things.

“So do you love it or hate it?”

I blinked. I didn’t love him, I didn’t even know him.

“Excuse me?”

My mother raised her eyebrows. “Well
someone
was far away.”

“I was thinking.”

“About what?”

I looked down at my plate. “Nothing.”

My mother sighed. “Don’t say ‘nothing,’ Elisha. You don’t have to tell me. Just don’t lie about it. Say ‘none of your business.’ ”

“None of your business.” I put another green bean in my mouth.

“Does it involve a boy?”

“None of your business.”

“You’re too young for boys, Elisha. Do you want a glass of water?”

“Water instead of a boyfriend?” I smiled. “No thank you.”

Marion got up and went to the kitchen. A few minutes later, she came back with two glasses brim ming with water and ice and set one beside my plate.

“There. Cool your thirst.”

I pulled a piece of chicken from its bone with my fingers, ignoring the glass of water. “If I were interested in boys,” I said slowly. “Which I am not. What would be the
appropriate
age?”

Marion was thoughtful for a moment. “I guess seventeen or eighteen.”

“You were
married
at eighteen, Marion. And pregnant. And I’m not even going to venture a guess as to which one happened first.”

“Things were different then,” she said slowly, concentrating on cutting a piece of chicken and putting it in her mouth.