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Authors: Ellyn Bache

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BOOK: Riggs Park
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Jon rose from his desk, roused as if from a trance. “Of course, you have to go. Why didn’t you tell me before?” He seemed genuinely hurt.

He crossed the room and engulfed me—such a solid man, so broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, that I grew breathless simply being near him. “I have those interviews to do. We should both go at the same time. That way we’ll be apart as little as possible.”

Apart as little as possible.

“This is a nice thing you’re doing,” he muttered.

“Not nice. Just necessary.”

He rubbed my neck, stroked my hair. “Nice, too. Kind.”

I disentangled myself, feeling no easier than before, and fled to the beach. From the window it had seemed a paradise of sand and shells, water that changed color with every play of the light. Outside it was unnaturally still, the sun amber and ancient at the horizon, the kind of weather that always heralded the last, tired gasp of summer, when the wind died and the shoreline turned from heaven into a hell of insects, its pale sands swarming with black flies. They lit on my skin the moment I crossed the dunes, bit and stung and clung, no matter how I batted them away. It was impossible to stay outside if you weren’t going to escape into the water. I turned and ran back to the house, once more wanting Jon’s closeness, the familiar smell of him: Dial soap, Right Guard deodorant. That snowy hair above the ebony brows, the fine olive skin etched with lines. How could I leave? There had been such tenderness in his voice, as if he already missed me.

But I thought there was also, unmistakably, relief.

CHAPTER 2

The Old Neighborhood

 
 

I
threw clothes into my suitcase, more than I needed, not allowing myself to dwell on Marilyn’s cancer or my troubles with Jon. I would pretend, as Marilyn had, that we were mainly concerned about Penny. After all, Marilyn and I had protected her, discussed her, analyzed her, searched for her, from the time we were children. Marilyn and I had spent most of our lives searching for Penny, even before she’d disappeared. It was still a central fact of our lives. This, I kept telling myself, was the reason for my trip.

From the beginning, Penny had wandered. In her head—later on, yes of course—but in a pure, lonely, physical way at first, up and down the streets of the old neighborhood, Riggs Park. Climbing, at four years old, the steep hill of Oneida Street as far as New Hampshire Avenue and the traffic, alarming the neighbors until they realized it was just a neighborhood phenomenon, expected and unremarkable. Mostly she didn’t venture far. All you had to do was remind her to go home for dinner and she would. She had no desire to get lost, and certainly none to run away.

“Oh, well,” neighbors would recall later. “You remember how the boys teased her. You remember how wild she was when she got older.” They’d forget the aimless roaming started before all that, before we went to school and the boys became an issue. In the early days, Penny wandered from simple neglect and despair. She wanted someone to find her.

And my mother, Ida, did.

Returning from a rehearsal at dusk one evening, walking down the hill with her clarinet case under her arm, my mother spotted a small, red-haired girl with skin so white it was almost blue in the fading light, wearing a sleeveless pinafore with no blouse underneath or sweater on top.

My mother knew who Penny was. The Weinbergs had moved in a few months before, and in an odd way, they had a connection. Like my mother, Penny’s father Sid was a musician, not classically trained like she was, but nevertheless a trumpet player in the navy band. He was said to be five years younger than Penny’s mother, who had been a widow with two children when they married. Only Penny and her next-oldest sister, Charlene, were the issue of this second marriage. It was quite a story.

“You must be freezing,” my mother said, looking down at the white-skinned child.

“You like it?” Penny twirled to model her outfit, toothpick arms covered with goose bumps. “This is Mom’s favorite. My shoes, too.” On her feet, she wore black patent leather Mary Janes, not meant for playing outdoors.

There was something diaphanous and otherworldly about Penny even then, something that in her most focused moments, simply wasn’t there. My mother thought Penny didn’t follow what she was saying. “Come on, I bet your family’s worried sick,” she said, and took Penny’s hand to lead her home.

When Helen Weinberg opened the door, she did not wrap her daughter in her arms to warm her. She frowned and said, “Oh, Penny, what have I told you about going out without a sweater?” Fixing my mother with a fierce expression, Helen said, “I’m forty years old, Ida. Too old to be chasing a four-year-old. I have three other children at home. You’d think this one would have some sense.”

After that, my mother and Marilyn’s included Penny in all our activities, instructing that we were always to play at our two houses and not Penny’s, which was far too small.

“But it’s bigger than ours!” Marilyn protested, keen on logic even then. In that cookie-cutter subdivision of what today would be called duplexes, Penny’s house was one of only a handful built on such a precipitous slope that the backyard was two stories below the street, allowing not only a regular basement but a subbasement, as well—a horrid, dank, subterranean place—with several extra rooms.

“It’s a little bigger,” Marilyn’s mother agreed, “but in our family and Barbara’s there are only two children, and in Penny’s there are four. It’s too much to ask Mrs. Weinberg to keep up with all those daughters and have friends over, too.”

That was certainly true. From the moment we first knocked on Penny’s door, we sensed that Helen simply had no room in her heart for more little girls—certainly not us, and maybe not even Penny. Nobody else in Riggs Park had four children. Very few had even three.

“And those were the ones who kept trying for a boy,” Marilyn reasoned later on. “Ira Schimmel had two older sisters, but once Ira was born they stopped. Same with Mel Eisenberg. The Gerbers and the Weinbergs weren’t so lucky. They kept getting girls.”

“Marilyn!”

“Well, think about it. Even their names. Stephanie Gerber was supposed to be Stephen. And Penny—”

“It was a different situation. The first two had another father.”

“Even so.”

There was no point arguing. Penny’s two older half sisters were Rochelle and Diane, feminine-sounding girls who were nearly adolescents by the time the family moved to Riggs Park. But Penny’s full sister, Charlene, would have been named Charles if she’d been male, and Penny’s real name was Davidina, which in other circumstances would have been David. Sid made no secret of the fact that he’d wanted sons.

In second grade, the boys at school took notice of Penny’s masculine name and dubbed her Davey, which she hated. Encouraged, they decided an even more effective form of torment would be to call her Red because of her hair. It was wild and carroty then, framing a moon-pale face dotted with freckles. One day, teased beyond endurance, she stormed off the Keene School playground in the middle of recess and disappeared before any of the teachers noticed. A frenzied search soon began—what if she were lost?—but Davidina had not gone far. Trembling with cold, her jacket lying in the dirt beside her, she was huddled against the cream-colored brick wall of the Chillum Manor apartments next door, her face swollen from crying. A gentle nurse wrapped her in blankets and led her back to school, but she remained inconsolable until her mother picked her up. She didn’t return to class the rest of the week.

Finally our neighborhood guru Essie Berman stepped in, because after all, a child could not drop out of school forever. Essie was a six-foot-tall woman with kinky salt-and-pepper hair that snaked out around her face like a Brillo pad and such a fierce countenance that she might have frightened us if she hadn’t been such a normal part of our landscape. She lived alone in a house up the block and had served, as long as we could remember, as an extra parent or aunt to all the kids in the neighborhood, concerned and loving, but rarely gentle.

On Penny’s behalf, Essie invited Wish Wishner and Seth Opak—that year’s leaders of the pack—to her house to lend them a signed baseball she’d acquired. She wanted their fathers to inspect it in case it was valuable. She poured Cokes. She mentioned with her usual brusqueness that she had heard the boys were calling Davidina Red and wondered how they could be so stupid. Davidina’s hair wasn’t red at all, but more the color of a penny (which it very clearly wasn’t, though years later, after the carroty orange deepened and mellowed, it would come closer). “If you’re going to call her something, at least be accurate,” Essie admonished.

The boys considered this. They were intrigued by the idea of hair as money. They abandoned the names Davey and Red and adopted the moniker they thought would provide a more original, even clever, form of torture: Penny.

Essie invited a furious Davidina over to make chocolate-chip cookies. “The boys call me Penny now,” Davidina confessed in a shower of tears.

“So? You don’t like it?”

“Of course not!”

“Well, I do,” Essie said. “Penny sounds coppery and bold. Think of a new-minted penny standing out in a heap of dull old coins. What’s wrong with that?”

Essie handed Davidina a Kleenex.

“It’s a bright, snappy name if you ask me. Cheerier than Davidina and more accurate than Red. Imagine the color of a penny. Imagine how it shines. That’s how your hair looks. It’s beautiful.” This was an exaggeration. But Essie’s powers of persuasion were legendary. From that day, Davidina answered only to Penny.

Maybe it was the boys’ teasing that left her hypersensitive, or maybe she had always been that way. Marilyn and I were never sure. When my father took us to the monthly Sunday night concerts at the National Gallery of Art, where my mother played second clarinet in the gallery orchestra, Penny often burst into tears, suddenly but briefly, and sobbed as if her heart would break. Even at seven, I thought I knew all about the emotional power of music, but I never fully understood what to make of Penny’s outbursts. Maybe she was upset because she rarely got to hear her own father’s concerts. Sid was often on the road. Or maybe it was something else entirely. Dutifully, Marilyn and I put our arms around Penny and led her out of the chilly marble atrium, down the hall toward the Impressionist room, where we looked at the colorful paintings until her strange mood passed. We didn’t mind, not really. When a child is not cherished early on, you can’t expect her to be predictable. I think we knew that even then.

Houses in Washington weren’t air-conditioned in those days, and the gluey swamp-heat that descended on the city sometimes lasted for months, so thick and humid that even our parents grew testy. To take the pressure off them for a few hours, Essie Berman sometimes piled three or four children into her rusty old Plymouth and drove us to Rock Creek Park to watch the fireflies at nightfall. There were fireflies everywhere in the city, of course, but nowhere so many as in one particular location off Military Road. A grassy bank dropped down to a wide mowed field, and in the distance a tree line served as a backdrop to the drama.

As dusk turned to dark and the trees blackened, flickering spots of light began to float on the air, dozens at first, then hundreds, thousands, until we felt surrounded by a dance of stars. We scattered among them, carrying jelly jars with air-holes punched in the lids, less to capture than to marvel. How, after all, could any creature be its own source of light? We could be observers, Essie instructed, but not murderers. We should look, then set them free.

But one night—we must have been eight or nine and had been catching fireflies for years—Penny balked.

“I’m not going to do this anymore,” she said. “You shouldn’t, either. It’s mean. It’s like putting them in jail.”

“Only for a few minutes,” said Marilyn. “We always let them go.”

“It doesn’t matter. How long do fireflies live? Only a day or two, I bet. A few minutes to them is like years for us. Like being in jail for years. It’s wrong.”

“They’re so slow they probably don’t even know they’re captured,” said Rosalie Shiffman, another girl who had come along.

“Of course they do! You always know when you’re trapped!”

“You’re making it sound like they’re people, not bugs!”

“Just because they’re bugs, that doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings,” Penny asserted.

“Feelings. Sure. Lightning bugs?”

“You don’t know.” In the darkness, Marilyn and I couldn’t see the red anger rushing to Penny’s face, but we could feel it as if it were churning under our own skin. It never took much to make Penny blush.

“Leave her be, Rosalie,” Marilyn ordered. We didn’t like Rosalie, anyway. In the distance behind us, sitting on the bank, Essie smoked a cigarette and watched the glittering night. Even if she were aware of our bickering, she wasn’t likely to interfere.

“Well, I’m catching them,” Rosalie said. “You can do what you want.” In defiance, she caught a firefly not in her jar but in her hand and let its light flicker there for the longest time.

“Let it go,” Penny ordered.

Rosalie walked away, her fingers turning alternately dark and golden. Penny followed. “Let it go, I said!”

Instead of obeying, Rosalie clenched her hand into a fist.

Penny screamed as if she were mortally wounded. “What are you doing? You killed it! Are you crazy?”

“You’re the crazy one!” Rosalie shouted.

“Murderer!” Penny yelled.

“You think so? Look.” Rosalie opened her hand to reveal that there was nothing inside. No squashed bug, no streaks of blood or guts. “I let it go. One firefly, big deal.”

But it was too late. Penny had dissolved into hysterical tears. She shook her fist at Rosalie, then let me and Marilyn circle her, hold her close.

It was not an unselfish gesture, not really. Taking care of Penny was second nature by then. Everybody needs someone with more troubles than they have. Protecting Penny made us feel normal, sane. But from that night on—Marilyn felt it, too—Penny also scared us.

Because that night it had become clear, somehow, that Penny had viewed the liquid flow of lives through the sieve of time as most people did not; that to Penny fireflies and people were equal: fragile lives pulsing, flickering, vulnerable as candle flame and no more powerful. From that time on, Marilyn and I saw our own impermanence, like the impermanence of fireflies, reflected in Penny’s eyes. It frightened us, right from the beginning.

Nearly fifty years later, trying to close an overflowing suitcase for my trip to Washington, I actually shuddered at the memory.

BOOK: Riggs Park
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ads

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