If You Come Softly (3 page)

“Well, they’re different now.”

She chewed for a moment and swallowed. When she spoke again, her voice was low and even. “Elisha Eisen—you’re in the tenth grade. Math, science, English, and a few girlfriends to have some tea or a slice of pizza with once in a while. That’s tenth grade. Ask anyone.”

“You’re living in the fifties, Marion.”

“You’ve got years and years for boys.” Her eyes were sad when she said this.

“You don’t know that,” I said, getting angry. “You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day. You don’t know if I have years and years.”

“Trust me ... Ellie ...”

I shook my head. “Trust me ... Mom ... you don’t know.”

My mother was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was shaky, unsure. “I know I don’t know, Elisha. But I do know if you rush into your life, you miss things sometimes.”

I shrugged, looking away from her, embarrassed suddenly. She had married young, and some mornings I came down to the kitchen to find her staring out of the window, a dazed look in her eyes.

“You felt like we just kept coming, didn’t you?” I said. “And you just kept getting further and further away from your life.”

She put her fork down. “You kids are my life,” she said.

“But we weren’t always.”

“I didn’t know I’d wake up one day and not be able to go run a quarter mile in under a minute.” She sighed, pushing a few stray hairs back behind her ears. “That my legs would hurt from just the mere act of throwing them over the side of the bed.”

“You left us,” I said.

I had not known I was going to say this. I hadn’t wanted to. I had wanted to ask what it felt like to be old, to be wishing for things you couldn’t ever have again.

Outside, the rain was falling steadily, drumming against the windowpane. I turned to watch it for a moment. It was almost night, and the sky was caught in the silvery in-between place that made a person’s throat hollow out.

“I left you,” Marion said softly, her voice catching. “I left my family. And you—my baby girl. Isn’t that a terrible thing?” After a moment, she added, “Yes. Yes, it is. A terrible thing.”

I turned away from the window. I wasn’t hungry anymore. Everything felt hot and tight. I wanted to be upstairs alone in my room, with the door closed. I didn’t want this-to talk about this-this thing nobody ever said a word about. But now that we were talking, I couldn’t stop.

“You left us broken all open,” I said. “All reeling, Marion. I didn’t know it back then ...” I felt a lump forming in the back of my throat. It could have been yesterday that we discovered her gone. It could have been an hour ago. “I was only a little kid. I didn’t know I was reeling. Anne stood at the refrigerator for an hour wondering what you would cook if you were here. You didn’t know that, did you?”

Marion shook her head. She looked small and beaten suddenly. No one ever talked about what it was like. And she never asked. Just walked back in one afternoon and held her arms out, ready for us to jump into them.

And I did the first time. But Anne and Ruben hung back, leaning back against the counter with their hands in their pockets, watching her.

“An
hour,
Marion—while me and Ruben sat at the table, hungry. Hungry and struck dumb. And Daddy upstairs calling all the places he thought you might be ...” I swallowed. “Nobody knew where to begin.”

I folded my hands on the table. When Marion reached out with her own to touch them, I snatched them back. I didn’t want her to touch me. Not now.

“We were like, I don’t know—like
holes
or something—just all ... all empty and lost. And that first night, we were so ... so hungry.”

Marion sighed and looked away from me. “You’re fifteen, Elisha,” she said slowly. “You have no idea what it’s like. No idea.”

“We thought you were dead.”

“I
was
dead. In here.” She pointed to her chest. “I woke up that morning knowing I wouldn’t be able to stand another day of making breakfast and lunch and dinner, of fixing arguments between you all, of listening to Edward fret over medical school-of all the noise and mess and ...” Her voice drifted off. When she started speaking again, she was whispering. “I had to go.”

I stared down at my hands. “Then why’d you come back?”

“Because I couldn’t live without those same things I couldn’t live
with.”

I swallowed. I would never trust her. Not one hundred percent. Not the way some people can trust their mothers.

“You know what it made me realize, Marion? That you wouldn’t always be here. That I can’t take anything or anyone for granted ‘cause there’s no guarantee.”

Marion reached out for my hand again. This time I let her take it.

“I wish you were thirty and realizing that. Or forty. Or even twenty-five. I wish you didn’t have to realize it at fifteen. As for me, I haven’t left in seven years and don’t think I will again.”

We didn’t say anything for a long time. I turned back toward the rain. One day someone
would
be here for me—and I wouldn’t take that person for granted.

“Tell me about him,” Marion said, a small smile at the corners of her lips. “Tell me about this boy.”

I shook my head, feeling relieved, glad the conversation about leaving was over for now. “No.”

“Does he go to temple?”

I laughed. I knew she was teasing. We rarely went to temple. “If there was a boy—which there isn‘t—I don’t think he’d go to temple.” I tried to imagine Jeremiah with a yarmulke, his locks springing out around it.

Marion smiled. “I guess that’s what happens when we send you to a gentile school. How do you like it?”

I shrugged. “It’s okay. It’s not Spence or Dalton or Nightingale-Bamford. It’s Percy. The kids look like their daddies are rich and their mothers are good-looking.”

“Is this boy’s daddy rich?”

I pressed my fork into the mashed potatoes. They were lumpy and thin, the way they always were. It was the one thing my mother couldn’t do well. “There ... is ... no ... boy ... Marion.”

“Well, you’ll meet some nice friends there. And maybe in your junior year, there’ll be a boy.”

I had chosen Percy myself-from a dozen schools-because I liked the name. It made me think of that song “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge. I knew it was a stupid reason to choose a school, but they all seemed exactly alike.

“I had nice friends at Jefferson.”

Marion and my father had decided to send me to private school in May, when the
New York Times
reported that Thomas Jefferson had the lowest reading levels and college acceptance rate in all of New York City.

“But none of those friends will get into college,” Marion said.

“The only reason Percy has a ninety-eight percent college acceptance rate is because the kids are rich. Their parents
buy
them good grades.”

Marion frowned. “That doesn’t happen.”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“No one can
buy
you a high SAT score, Elisha. No one can
buy
you a high reading level.”

I raised an eyebrow at her and smiled. “Things have changed, Marion.”

All of my brothers and sisters had gone to Jefferson High. And from there, they had all gotten into decent universities. When I argued this, my mother said,
That was a long time ago, before we had money to send you to private school. Things have changed.

“Not that much,” she said now, rising to clear the table. “I made some apple tarts for dessert. Your favorite. Maybe in your junior year you can have the boy over for tarts and tea.”

I handed her my plate. “Marion,” I said. “If—”

“I know, I know, Elisha. If there was a boy, which there isn‘t, he wouldn’t be apple tart and tea kind.”

HE LOVED THE LIGHT IN HIS MAMA’S KITCHEN. THE yellow stained-glass panes across the top of the windows buttered the room a soft gold-even now, in the early evening with the rain coming down hard outside.

“Your daddy left a message,” his mama said. “Said he had to go out to L.A. Be back Sunday night. Left a number.”

“Guess I’m spending the week here then.” Jeremiah glanced out the kitchen window. There was no light on in his father’s apartment. He was glad he didn’t have to make a decision. Every night it was the same thing.
You gonna stay here? You gonna stay here?
His mama and daddy’s voices beating against the side of his head, begging him as if they were really saying,
Choose me. No, choose me.
For the hundredth time, no, maybe the thousandth time, he wished he had a brother or sister—somebody to go up against them with. Someone to help relieve some of the stuff they put him through. How long would it have to be like this anyway? Two addresses. Two phone numbers. Two
bedrooms.

Jeremiah sighed and sat down at the kitchen table and watched his mama fuss with pots and pans. She was making spaghetti sauce-the way they liked it with lots of peppers and onions and no meat. A long time ago, she’d given up red meat. Little by little Jeremiah gave it up too. Every once in a while, he found himself craving a burger with ketchup and mayo the way he used to like it. But it had been a long time since he’d eaten one. It would probably make him sick to his stomach now. He let his basketball roll back and forth between his feet for a few minutes then kicked it gently into the corner.

“You hungry?”

Jeremiah nodded. The kitchen smelled like garlic and tomatoes. “I guess so.”

His mother looked at him a moment. She was pretty-his mama was. He’d always thought so. She wore her hair short, tied her head up with pretty scarves. Tonight she was wearing an orange and yellow one, wrapped high like a turban. Her skin was dark like his and smooth. People said they had the same mouth-wide and soft. And the same eyes. His eyes were light brown like hers and people were always asking them if they were wearing contact lenses. Now his mother smiled, shaking her head. She pressed her fingers to her lips.

“What?” Jeremiah said, feeling his own face break into a smile. This evening, his mama was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with Vassar printed across the front. She had gone there, had studied literature and film. The summer after she graduated, she took a film course at NYU that his father was teaching. She had heard of him—had even seen a couple of his movies. They dated a long time before they married.
I wanted to be sure he was the right man,
his mother used to say.

She didn’t have much to say about his daddy anymore.

“You gonna tell me how your first day was or am I going to have to guess.”

“You gonna have to guess,” Jeremiah said.

His mother turned back to the stove and stirred the sauce once more. Jeremiah watched her lift spaghetti from the colander onto the blue plates they always ate off. The plates had been a wedding gift from his grandmother—his father’s mother. Sometimes the memory of her crept up quickly—unexpected—like somebody sneaking up behind you in the dark. He missed his grandmother more than anything. In February it would be five years since she passed. Jeremiah twirled the saltshaker absently, wondering how long it took before you stopped missing someone.

“I was thinking about Grandma just now,” he said.

“Yeah? What were you thinking?”

“Just about her. She came into my mind.” He bit his bottom lip. “Remember that time she was interviewed about Daddy?”

His mama smiled. It was a sad smile, full of good and bad memories. Jeremiah was sorry he had even started talking about his grandma. Sometimes he forgot that Grandma was his father’s mother.

Mama put the plates of spaghetti down on the table. “Which time?” she asked.

“I don’t remember the show. I think it was around the time of the first Oscar nomination. Remember, she wore that bright red dress and that silly necklace I’d made her—the one made out of bottle tops?”

His mama smiled.

“She said that even though he was a big-time moviemaker, she had changed his diapers and she could tell everyone listening that Daddy’s poop smelled just as bad as anybody else’s. Later on, she’d told me she wanted to use the other word, but it would have gotten bleeped out and she wanted to make sure the American audience got the message.”

“I thought Norman was going to lose it for sure.”

“Me and Grandma laughed about that for a long time,” he said softly.

Jeremiah ran his fingers slowly across the table. Outside he could hear little girls singing,
“Miss Lucy had a baby, she named him Tiny Tim...”
He swallowed. When he had looked into that girl’s eyes today, he saw something familiar in them. A little bit of himself there. Where was she now?

“Want some wine, high-school boy?” She poured a glass of red wine for herself and waited.

Jeremiah sighed, knowing his mama was trying to change the subject.
I miss you, Grandma. You would be able to tell me, wouldn’t you? You’d be able to make everything all right.

“Pinot Noir,” she said. “Supposed to be a good vintage-1993 from the Napa Valley.”

Before they separated, his mother and father had gone to the wine country. When they came home, his mama filled him in on everything she’d learned about wine, and together they sat sipping various wines and comparing them. He wasn’t really allowed to drink yet, but his mother still offered and told him everything she knew about certain wines. She said she wanted him to be knowledgeable when the time came to choose one.

“Nah. 1993 wasn’t great for Pinot Noirs. If you had a Cabernet or even a Petite Syrah then maybe.”

His mama smiled.

They were quiet for a moment. Jeremiah watched her dance a hot loaf of bread from the oven to the table and wondered again how his father could have just fallen for someone else. Yeah, over and over, his father had tried to explain it to him, and each time Jeremiah thought he finally understood. But then he’d come home some evening and find his mother sitting in front of the television in the empty living room and his heart would tighten inside his chest. She looked lonely and lost sitting in the half-light.