Lily White (16 page)

“I don’t need anyone else,” Lee growled, making a tight fist and holding it up in front of Jasper’s face. “I can punch in your nose all by myself.”

To which Jasper gave a raucous, derisive laugh. It made Robin wail with terror, a squeal so maddening that it mobilized both the armies that camped on opposite sides of the corner of North Road and Taylor Farm Lane. As Lee glared into Jasper’s eyes—an uninteresting hazel, but quite thickly lashed—fist aloft, and Jasper glared back, two fellow fifth graders from the Shorehaven elementary school grabbed Lee and yanked her away. At the same time, three strapping boys, the entire midfield of the Wheatley Country Day lacrosse team, hauled Jasper back to their bus stop across the street—not without much ostentatious grunting as he fought being brought under control.

Normally, there were no hostilities. The two armies, the private
day school students and the public school kids, pretty much ignored each other. Oh, except for periodic spit fights. The origin of this particular form of belligerence is lost in time, but each new generation of schoolchildren on that particular street corner in America came to that place with seemingly innate knowledge of the rules of engagement of class warfare: The spitter has to cross the street and run the gauntlet among the spittee’s schoolmates, who are free to try to trip or shove the spitter out of the way, although they may not grab onto the spitter’s limbs or clothing and attempt to drag the spitter away. However, once the aggressor gets to his or her quarry, he or she is free to deliver the best shot as soon as the spittee’s face is no more than a foot away.

Not that Jasper Taylor had targeted little Robin White for a gob of saliva. Far from it. His intended prey was Todd Lomax, a Shorehaven fourth grader, who had the gaunt, haunted look of a future poet. (In truth, Todd was coarse to the core and looked wretched simply because he had discovered the properties of airplane glue years before his contemporaries.) However, in Jasper’s rush to expectorate, he forgot to lay down his lacrosse stick before charging; it accidentally banged Robin’s lunch box—
clunk!
—putting a slight dent in the picture of the Fairy Godmother, beaming as Cinderella stares down at herself, amazed to see the ball gown just transmogrified from her rags by a touch of a wand. That was when Lee jumped forward in defense.

“Up your nose with a rubber hose,” Lee yelled to him.

“Shut the fuck up,” Jasper called back. He sounded bored.

Lee didn’t follow him with her eyes. She didn’t feel her heart beating faster. In fact, Jasper was out of her thoughts moments after he was back across the street. Unlike her father, she had almost no interest in the Taylors. True, she admired their puppies immensely, but Fos and Ginger’s children left her cold. Any curiosity she had was aroused solely by her father’s inexplicable response to anything Taylor.

Like last summer. When the sounds of “Sail Along, Silv’ry Moon” poured across the patio at Hart’s Hill and down over the Whites’ lawn, indicating that the Taylors were throwing still another party, Leonard did not react visibly. He did not stiffen in anger in his lounge chair or cover his face with his hands and weep in grief at once again going unnoticed and uninvited. No, he lay motionless so as not to display to his wife his most sensitive area. Still, Sylvia had picked something up.

“Leonard? Want some lemonade, Leonard?”

“No.”

“It’s not too sweet.”

“No.”

“Greta made it.”

“No.”

“Anything wrong, Leonard?”

“
No.
”

Lee had sensed her father’s turmoil as well. How? A slight movement, perhaps, a hollowing of his chest as if he had just received a knife in his heart as the music wafted over him. Or a change in his aura—if successful furriers reading the business section of the Sunday
Times
do indeed have auras—from a self-satisfied peachy beige to a thunderous gray. That the Taylors had the power, simply by playing a Billy Vaughn record, to drive her father to near insanity, even for an instant, made them an object of concern for his eldest child. But not dread. She had seen the Taylors: They were simply not scary.

Lee had seen Mr. Taylor only a couple of times. A creep, in her estimation. His chin was attachéd to his neck by a large, flappy patch of flesh, like a pelican’s. His eyes were bulgy. He looked like a slow reader. Mrs. Taylor was blonde and pretty, except if you saw her walking down Main Street and she passed you up real close: You could see wrinkles crisscrossing every part of her face, hundreds of tiny tick-tack-toe patterns. And the
kids: The two big girls now were away at boarding school. They were okay, except the one whose freckles were so close together it looked as though she had a brown butterfly tattooed on her face. She was always giggling. The other girl never smiled. Jasper, admittedly, may have been a jerk, but no worse than any of the Wheatley jerks in their stupid ties and jackets, like they were on their way to an office instead of fifth grade. There was a little Taylor brother, too young to go to school, who always waved at whoever he saw, flapping his hand back and forth in a floppy-wristed frenzy. “Hiya! Hiya! Hiya!” he’d call.

“How’s your father, the goy?” her grandmother Bella inquired. The question could have been asked the following weekend, since it was one Bella invariably posed, but it was now two years later.

Lee was not perched on the brink of adolescence, as are many twelve-year-olds; she had gone over the edge. Her breasts were now larger than her biceps, and she had forsaken her tree climbing, her racing, and her roughhousing with the neighborhood boys for the lesser pleasures of the junior high school girls’ tennis team. Coming of age as she had in 1962, at the height of the Jacqueline Kennedy mystique, and being Sylvia’s daughter, Lee bore herself rather elegantly. She sat with her legs crossed only at the ankle, no matter how her body yearned to slump and tie itself into its comfy prepubescent knot. Lee’s figure was fine, even noble, with the lovely shoulders and strong thighs of Winged Victory—although in a family of the small-boned and wasp-waisted, she felt too large, which she interpreted as being fat. She was beginning a lifetime crusade against an ever evolving list of wicked carbohydrates and satanic fats. Her face had lost its round girlish good looks and had yet to come into its bright-eyed, clear-skinned adult prettiness; every day at least one pimple popped up on one feature; her nose had bloomed faster than her cheekbones, forehead, or chin and would have
totally dominated her face if not for the competition from her stick-out ears. Her hair had become her crowning glory, turning from plain brown into a thick chestnut mix—the warm gold of the nut mingled with the intense red-brown of the shell.

“Daddy? He’s fine, Grandma,” Lee replied absently, all her energies focused on a single loop of pink wool.

“Who’s he fooling—
White
—with a schnozz like a knockwurst?”

Lee was tempted to ask what “schnozz” meant but, fearing it was yet another Yiddish word for “penis,” kept silent. She was spending the weekend at her grandparents’ apartment in Brooklyn and, as she always did, had taken over Bella’s crocheting. This current project was an afghan comprising of squares with a tricky rose design in the middle that required all her concentration.

“They fight?” Bella inquired, with a casualness that immediately caught Lee’s attention. Bella always described herself as having retired from acting, but truth is, even in the Yiddish theater, where extravagant gestures were anticipated and overacting was applauded, Bella had been deemed lacking in subtlety. The truth was she had not jumped off the stage; she had been pushed. But as Bella did not find the truth appealing, she ignored it and created her own Biography of a Star (she had been too great to be a mere ingenue) who had left audiences weeping and critics gnashing their teeth in despair at her departure. And she did it all for the love of—as Bella always told it when relating the details—“a regular Joe named Nat.”

“Fight? Who? My parents?”

“No, not your parents. Debbie and Eddie.” Bella patted her hair, pleased with her show business allusion. She had a new hairdo, Lee noted, a bun of dyed red hair, a swollen thing, that looked like a bite from a huge and vicious insect, but her grandmother seemed quite pleased with her appearance. Then again,
Bella believed herself to be a ringer for Rita Hayworth, demonstrating an exuberant ego not often found in three-hundred-pound, fifty-six-year-old working-class women in the outer boroughs of New York City. Satisfied with her hair, Bella let her left hand drift over to the coffee table, where it discovered a bowl of M&M’s, and scooped up just three fewer than the critical mass of sugar-coated chocolate that would induce diabetic shock. “Of course I mean your parents. Hey, you’re stretching the wool too tight, Miss Lily Weissberg.”

“That’s not my name.”

“It’s what your name oughta be. Now it’s too slack; tighten up the littlest bit. Good. And you know it and I know it and your father, Mr. White, knows it. White! Like he’s from Ohio, with a cow. ‘Howdy, Farmer White. How’s your alfalfa this year?’ ‘Not bad, if I say so myself.’”

Lee smiled and, abandoning what her mother called “proper carriage,” wriggled deep into a corner of the couch: Ah, a perfect meeting of buttocks and cushion. The furniture in her grandparents’ living room had been sold to them at a going-out-of-business sale by a salesman who swore the entire suite—couch, two club chairs, a side table, and a coffee table—would last forever, little knowing that for once he was telling the truth. Besides being rugged it was comfortable. And unusually hideous, a Brooklyn restatement of French Provincial style that might have been better left unsaid: painted white wood with flecks of gold, skinny legs, upholstered in royal blue. An odd choice, perhaps, for a card-carrying Communist and his apolitical (but nominally fellow-traveling) wife, but the Weissbergs were blind to its pretensions and saw only its brightness. “Livens up the whole apartment!” Bella had decreed. Lee, whose aesthetic judgment had been honed by Sylvia, grasped that the suite was in the worst possible taste. Nevertheless, side by side with her certitude of its hideousness lay the contrary
belief that her grandparents’ furniture was the most regal anywhere. Besides, with its fat pillows filled with cheap, chopped-up foam-rubber, it was vastly more comfortable than the icy spareness of the Whites’ Bauhaus furnishings.

“So?” Bella demanded.

“What?”

“Do they fight?”

“Once in a while.”

“What about?”

“I don’t know. They go upstairs and shut the door. I just … Their voices get louder, but I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

“You think I was born yesterday?” Bella demanded. Her voice, easily capable of projecting from the Flatbush section of Brooklyn to an audience on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, resounded in Lee’s ears. A second later, she softened her statement, smiling in kindly fashion, her mouth a tiny upturned crescent in her round moon of a face. “You don’t gotta tell me nothing if you don’t want to, toots.”

“There’s nothing much to tell, Grandma.”

“Fine by me.”

Two silent stitches, then: “There’s nothing Mommy does that makes him happy. Even when she tries.”

“So give me a for instance,” Bella said, sitting back, crossing her arms and resting them on her shelf of a bosom.

“Like dinner parties. You know? Like they had twelve people over, and I helped her set the table. It looked beautiful, with the Georg Jensen silver—”

“Who?”

“Their good flatware.”

“Flatware,” Bella breathed. “God in heaven.”

“Anyway, she made a centerpiece with a bunch of twigs and dead leaves and white roses.” Catching her grandmother’s about-to-curl lip, Lee added: “I know it sounds icky, but it was
really beautiful. Very … What Mommy and Daddy call ‘stark.’ That means plain but in a very good way.” Lee took a deep breath, hesitating to give her grandmother ammunition in her campaign against her son’s life. “He came in, around six-thirty on a Saturday. He’d been at the store all day. Mommy took him into the dining room, you know, to kind of show it off. And he said: ‘Oh.’ just ‘Oh.’ And right away Mommy started acting too happy, the way she always gets when she’s …”

“When she’s what?”

“Afraid of him. No. I don’t know. When she’s … She wants him to love what she does, but the second he saw the centerpiece, he just stared at it. And she started acting even happier—laughing too much—ha-ha-ha!—telling about how she’d walked in the woods in back of the house to find the twigs and stuff and how she copied the idea from the dinner dance at the Museum of Modern Art … just blabbing away a mile a minute.”

“And what did he say?”

“Nothing. No, wait. He said, ‘They did those arrangements
two yean ago!
Then he said he had to go up and shower and change, but she kept hanging on to his arm and asking over and over ‘Is anything wrong, Leonard?’ So finally, he said: ‘No. Everything’s fine and dandy’ And then he just yanked his arm away and went up. Mommy sat down on one of the chairs and started crying, the way she always does.”

“What way?”

“Putting her head all the way back. So her mascara on her bottom eyelashes doesn’t run.”

Bella took the crocheting out of Lee’s hands and put her arm around the girl, pulling Lee into the shelter of her warm, fat body. “Is he like this with you, tootsie?”

“No.”

“Is he okay with you kids?”

“I always kid around with him. He says I’ve got a big mouth,
but he doesn’t mean it in a bad way. He likes when I’m … what’s the word? Spunky. And he likes that I’m good at tennis and get mostly A’s at school. Robin gets A-pluses. She’s a big cry-baby and can’t do any sports. Daddy says learning sportsmanship is key.”

“Key for what?”

“For life. But he doesn’t play any sports.”

“So how does it come to be a key?”

“I don’t know. So I tell him about all our games and what Coach says about my backhand—a killer backhand—and it makes him happy.” Lee put the wool rose on her lap. “Happy in a kind of phony, excited way. He says: ‘Super-duper!’ I think he’s happier when Robin draws designs for him.” Lee’s normally golden skin took on a yellowish hue, as if all the bitterness deep within had risen to the surface. “He’s using one of her designs at his store. He’s actually having it made up. A raccoon coat with a hood that zips on and off.” Lee’s mouth tightened until her lips disappeared. “I can’t draw.”