Lily White (15 page)

“Tell me what you do!” Leonard yelled at the top of his lungs. “You don’t clean! You don’t—”

“How can I? You’re always giving me lists. Get new garbage cans. Get a pegboard for the garage for your tools.
Why?
You never use tools. You bought that power drill set for fifty-four dollars and never once—”

“Shut the hell up!”

“Did someone tell you Foster Taylor has a pegboard and a power drill in
his
garage—”

“I’m warning you.” Anger grabbed Leonard by the throat, squeezing his voice higher and higher until it was such a terrible, shrill cry that Robin had to cover her ears. “No more, Sylvia!”

“Leonard, just listen—”

“Shut up, or I’m leaving and not coming back!”

Lee’s gut went into a sudden, agonizing spasm. She would always endure this pain in times of severe stress. However, unlike her more high-strung sister (hands over ears, chin aquiver, eyes swimming in unshed tears), Lee could take it on the chin—or in the gut—without falling apart. It was not that her suffering was any less intense than Robin’s. The awful contraction just above and to the right of her navel hurt so that she could not catch her breath. However—except for once in her life—Lee had the strength to endure pain. While this may not have been the style of heroines in books—victimized beauties, or stouthearts who are allowed only moral courage, not physical valor or derring-do—this was Lee White. A hearty girl. A stand-up dame.

“They’ll get over it, Robin,” she said. Robin’s hands, clapped over her ears, shook so badly her head bobbed up and down. Lee then tried a diversion. “Hey, Rob, you know next-door’s new puppies?” Lee was referring, of course, to Ginger Taylor’s latest brood of basenjis, but everyone in the house, even Woofer, the new weimaraner they had gotten after Duchess died, seemed to pick up on the waspishness that the name Taylor roused in Leonard, so they avoided mentioning it.

“So listen,” Lee went on “Guess who got one of the puppies?”

“Who?” Robin hiccuped.

“Cathy Foti, in sixth grade. Her parents bought one from
Mrs. Whatsis!” Robin blinked, and tears began to spill. Lee tried harder. “Those puppies!
So
adorable—okay, not when they’re pooping. They got into Mommy’s herb garden yesterday. Mommy had to pull out all her parsley. Anyway, Cathy’s mother picked her up at school, and the puppy was in the car. You should have seen it!” Lee massaged Woofer’s belly with the toe of her saddle shoe to soften the pain of her betrayal. “Teeny-weeny wrinkles in its little doggy forehead. Oh, and the itty-bitty curly tail.”

The experts, having embraced the concept of sibling rivalry, are too quick to dismiss the force of sibling love. Lee, nuzzler of puppies, cuddler of kittens, could not fail to be moved by the fragility of seven-year-old Robin’s frame, by the almost cartoonishly-big gray-green eyes that dominated the younger girl’s dainty face, by the angelic softness of her pale hair. When not exasperated by Robin’s excessive response to people and noises and smells, Lee wanted to protect her from reality.

“You made me take back Grape-Nuts Flakes,” Sylvia was squawking.

“Don’t make it sound like I held a gun to your head. I asked for Grape-
Nuts
and you bought
Flakes.
You know I hate them. Jesus H. Christ, is it such a big deal to return something to the A & P? What the hell else do you have to do all day?”

“
What else?
Pick up the black wing tips that were getting new heels. Take your gray tweed sports jacket to the cleaners for one-day service.” She was probably enumerating, Lee thought, holding down each graceful, tapering finger, its nail perfectly polished—Cherries Jubilee this week—with the index finger of the other hand. “Pick up a baby gift for your accountant’s sister—”

“How could you neglect your own child?” Leonard boomed. “How could you leave her in the nurse’s office, in pain?”

Lee thought that if she were her mother, she would demand:
How come
you
left her in the nurse’s office in pain? You didn’t exactly run to grab the next train back to Shorehaven. Her mother, Lee noted—with a clarity of thought that coexisted with the ripping pain in her gut—was a lousy arguer, never coming up with a good enough answer. And after these fights, her mother, shaken, ashamed, would take to bed for days, shutting the louvers of the blinds, refusing to come down for meals, not combing her hair or brushing her teeth. Her father, on the other hand, having blown off steam, invariably seemed lighter-hearted than usual, although that may have been because Sylvia was so despondent as to be mute and, thus, incapable of making any emotional demands of him.

But for the moment, Sylvia had not yet given up trying to win over the unwinnable. “Leonard, hon, Robin wasn’t dying, for God’s sake. It was just a sore throat. She gets sore throats all the time.” She added vaguely: “I really should talk to Dr. Gould about her tonsils.”

At last, Robin’s tears fell. Lee was full of the envy and admiration she always felt. What dazzling crying! First, Robin’s huge eyes would glisten. Then perfect, fat teardrops would meander down each cheek. No sobbing, though, although her reed of a body would jerk as if someone were screaming “Boo!” at her again and again. Miraculously, Robin’s silent suffering brought her double—no, triple—the attention the average caterwauling child could get.

It wasn’t only their parents’ fighting that brought tears to Robin’s eyes, however. Lee watched the little girl blanch as she took another peek at the liver. Any external event could cause an inner storm. Right that second, it had switched from her parents’ fight to dinner. Robin was probably thinking: Doomed. There they were, sitting in the breakfast nook, with Greta just yards away alternately clanging pots and picking over the apples she was going to turn into applesauce. No way could Robin escape
the dread liver. True, Greta’s powerful back was turned toward them, but that meant nothing. A scrape of the chair leg at a decibel level so low that not even Woofer could hear it would make Greta spin around and blare: Ha! In any other house in Shore-haven Estates, children could flip food to the family dog, but Woofer was as awed by Greta’s authority as Leonard and Sylvia were, so even though he lay right there under the table, he could not be relied upon to be the consummate disposal unit dogs by nature are.

Another thing about Robin’s genius for crying, Lee mused. You’d think a kid who was such a bundle of nerves would always be grabbing wads of tissues, or wiping off her cheeks with her fingers, or blotting her nose with the back of her hand. But no, Robin never wiped away her tears; they accumulated around her nose or left shining trails until they dripped off her chin. They were mesmerizing, beautiful.

Robin’s crying made Lee want to weep with jealousy. At the same time, it also forced Lee to come to her sister’s aid—instantly. “Give me your plate,” Lee commanded, but softly.

“What?”

“Pick it up quietly and hand it to me. Don’t slide it. She’ll hear. You take my plate. Don’t be
too
quiet or she’ll turn around.”

“Why should I give you my plate?” asked Robin.

“You’re too upset to eat your dinner. I’ll eat it for you.”

“You’re kidding!” Robin’s face reflected incredulity, then wonder.

“I’m serious.”

“Oh, Lee-lee,” Robin cried in her tiny high voice. Although not too loud. (Even as an adult, she would tend to sound like Tweety Bird.) “Thank you!”

“Welcome.” Lee, naturally, played the liver for all it was worth, cringing at the taste, shuddering with revulsion at the texture. However, the truth was, she was crazy about liver and
onions. In fact, after years of Sylvia’s medium-rare meatballs and Chinese Jell-O—an ill-starred combination of lemon-flavored gelatin and julienned water chestnuts with a dash of soy sauce—there was nothing Greta cooked that Lee did not love. Although in later years Lee would refine her palate, her lifetime food preferences remained those of a Hessian day laborer.

“I’m done, Greta,” Robin sang out.

At the exact same moment Leonard roared: “You went to Garden City, to a shoe sale at Saks, when your child was sick as a dog in the nurse’s office!”

“I said I was sorry.” Sylvia was screaming now. “What more do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say: ‘I have no other responsibilities except to be a mother to my goddamn kids!’”

Greta set aside her apples and wheeled around for inspection of Robin’s plate. “See?” Robin said. Her eyes were still wet. “All finished!” Her heart of a face was suffused with the light of grace under pressure: I have done my best under terribly trying circumstances.

Shrewd Greta turned her pale eyes to Lee’s slick lips and shiny chin. “You think I was born yesterday, Miss Lee White? You think I don’t know?”

Even way back then, in 1960, Lee would never cop a plea. “Know what?” she inquired, projecting genuine curiosity, even though she was beginning to feel a little nauseous from eating nearly a pound of liver—although not so distressed as to make her willing to forgo dessert.

“Know that you ate your sister’s supper. Shame on you!”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“No dessert tonight.”

“Come on, Greta!” Lee protested. “That’s not fair!”

“
I
decide what is fair!” Greta banged her fist down on the dish drainer; a colander rattled, and Robin shook.

Don’t be too harsh on Greta here. True, she was a dreadful stiff, but her steel-rod spine grounded the White family. Because of her, floors were washed, dinner was served, Woofer got his rabies shot and the girls their polio boosters—all of which left Sylvia free to pursue her God-given talents: eyebrow-plucking, smoking, and creating bad art. And Greta never once complained, although working in other people’s houses was a sad and wearying job.

(Greta had come to the United States in 1937 with her husband, who had determined that being a half-Jewish labor union organizer was perhaps not the ticket to a happy life in Nazi Germany. Although it was still the Depression, he managed to find a job operating a machine that sliced pumpernickel at a wholesale bakery in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. While he did not thrive, he did well, except for his high blood pressure, which he didn’t know about. In any case, he dropped dead of a stroke a few days short of his first anniversary in America. Greta took the bit of money they had managed to save and enrolled in a secretarial course. But during the late thirties and early forties, her heavy German accent was an insurmountable obstacle to office employment. However, the same business big shots who would not let her take their dictation did not mind her scouring their bathtubs. In fact, the upper-middle-class families who employed her in the years before the Whites, as well as Sylvia and Leonard themselves, viewed her Teutonic style with approbation. They saw in her inflexible bearing and clipped consonants a benign personification of the efficient German war machine. Therefore, although she was a thoroughly decent person, her employers treated Greta as if she were more apparatus than human—that is, with all the warmth that would be accorded a well-oiled panzer.)

“The little one is all skin and bones!” Greta chided Lee. “How could you take the food from her mouth?
No fresh answers, Miss Lee Whiter

Just as a big grin began to spread across Lee’s face, her mother screamed at her father: “Drop dead!”

“Ladies first!”

Lee’s grin disappeared, but Robin, no fool, knowing she was off the hook in the dinner department, offered Greta her captivating waif smile. Then she climbed down from her chair and, purposefully, headed to her room. Lee realized: She’s going to do it: Until Greta makes her go to bed, Robin will draw, color, and cut out yet another new wardrobe of paper doll furs, mink coats, Persian lamb ski jackets, and sable boas. And the second Mommy and Daddy’s fight is over, Robin will be squeaking: “Ooh, Daddy, look!” And Leonard would cry “Fabulous, Robbie-my-baby!” Even Sylvia, in bed, would find enough energy to kiss the top of Robin’s head and sigh: “Lovely, sweetheart.”

It was going to be a lousy, lonesome night. For less than a second, Lee weighed the advantages of joining Robin and her paper fashions. But to watch Robin sharpen a crayon so the fur hairs wouldn’t look too thick, then painstakingly cut out those stupid tiny paper coats in teeny-weeny nips with her mother’s old manicure scissors, was too enraging to be borne. Robin’s patience for detail was … shitty. And her love of style … Daddy, I like the way the sleeves go tight on the coat in your window. Is that sheared mink or mouton, Daddy? He lapped it up like a cat with a bowl of milk. He couldn’t get enough. And, Mommy, doesn’t it look prettier if I button the top button? Mommy would be in heaven, and they would talk about the vital importance of top-button shiftiness for a half hour! Shitty! Lee loved that word:
Shitty!

She had learned it two years earlier at the school bus stop and had yet to say it out loud, but in her head she’d said it a thousand times. Shitty, Lee brooded. Lately, all Robin did was go to her mother’s magazines and copy pictures of furs or clothes, and her parents kept having heart attacks of joy. “You have so much
flair!” her father would cry. “If it was real sable, I could sell it to Mrs. Continental Can. Split the profits with you, Robbie-baby.” Sylvia would sound reverent: “It almost looks like a Norell! I’m absolutely serious!” Lee thought: She’s going to spend three damn hours drawing shitty little fur hairs one at a time, and if one doesn’t look right she’ll erase it! Shitty little brownnose.

If Lee had been asked about it, she’d have sworn that word would never ever pass her lips. But the very next day, she actually shouted the word—and in defense of Robin. “Get your shitty lacrosse stick away from my sister’s lunch box or I’ll punch your fat nose in.”

“Yeah?” snickered Jasper Taylor, the boy from the house next door. The really tall boy. Jasper, at age ten, the third of Fos and Ginger Taylor’s four children, was already well over five feet tall and growing fast. Although slender, he had the powerful legs of a natural athlete and the presence of an all-star. Lee’s mass was nowhere near as imposing as his, but at age ten, she had an inch on him. “You and who else?” Jasper demanded.