Riggs Park (8 page)

“What?” Helen put her hands to her hips.

“Now, Penny—” Sid began, but no one paid any attention. Sid was a pale and ineffectual presence in his daughters’ lives. Playing trumpet in the navy band meant he was gone nearly half the year.

The Weinbergs joined us at the activities demonstration. We went to arts and crafts, and then down to the beach. The only people who actually swam that day were the boys on the swim team, headed by Wish and Seth, who demonstrated each of the skills the campers had learned.

“I guess we’ll take off,” Penny’s mother said as we climbed the stairs from the beach to the top of the bluff.

“What about seeing drama club? What about the basketball game?” Penny asked.

“I think we have the general idea,” Helen said. “We want to stop for crabs on the way back.”

“I’m coming with you,” Penny announced.

“You’ll be home in two weeks.” Helen laughed and turned to her husband.

Sid offered a lame smile. Penny crossed her arms over her chest. “Excuse us,” Helen said, planting both hands on Penny’s shoulders and guiding her away. My family and Marilyn’s proceeded to drama club. We didn’t see Penny again until visiting hours were over.

Penny was sitting on her cot. Her face was swollen from crying, but she was not crying now. “They couldn’t even be bothered to stay for the whole show,” she said bitterly. “They had to
get crabs.
”

“Think of it this way: camp’s half over,” Marilyn told her.

“Think of it this way. Don’t have kids if you don’t have time for them. Don’t have kids if you’ve got better things to do.” An imperturbable calm descended over her face such as I had seen only after she had thrown a hand of jacks and was studying how they had landed. “I’m never going to have children,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that to anyone.”

“It’s not like you have to make that decision
this minute,
” I told her, hoping to lighten the mood.

“I’ll never have children,” she repeated somberly. She fixed her gaze first on me and then on Marilyn, as if to reinforce her point. This was not the helpless, falling-apart Penny we knew. It was a determined, confident one we hadn’t heard before, full of steely resolve. In her tone was something absolute and scary. Something unstoppable. And that was why, more than forty years later, I still did not believe that Penny had had either an “accident” or a baby.

Locust Point was actually only a post office and a gas station next to the bay—no houses. Our cabin had hiked forty minutes up the beach from camp after dinner, singing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer.” The stretch of sand along the bay was wide, with stands of trees almost down to the water. Our sleeping bags arrived in Eli’s pickup truck, driven by one of the boys’ counselors. There was also a picnic basket full of marshmallows, graham crackers, and Hershey’s bars for s’mores. In the morning, the truck would come for the sleeping bags, while the girls hiked back to camp for breakfast.

Except for Penny, all of us spread into the trees to gather firewood. Penny hung back and rubbed her right leg, which was more red and swollen than usual from jellyfish stings. The walk up the beach had aggravated it.

“Come on, the stings’ll clear up soon, they always do,” Darlene said, motioning for her to gather kindling. Darlene brushed sand from her bright red shorts. She had painted her nails to match and curled her hair. We figured Danny would show up sooner or later.

We lit the fire, which made the beach seem darker than before, the wind louder in the trees, the lapping of the bay more ominous. “Let’s tell ghost stories,” one of the girls said when the s’mores were gone. “Darlene first.”

Darlene positioned herself so her hair wouldn’t blow. “Did you ever hear the one about the ghost with the bloody finger?” We shook our heads. She had just opened her mouth to speak when a moaning came from the trees. An eerie light appeared in the upper branches.

Everyone screamed.

“It’s nothing,” Marilyn said. “It’s a flashlight shining through the leaves.”

We hugged ourselves, hugged each other, pulled our sleeping bags close.

“I bet it’s boys!” someone said.

More moans from the trees. Boys! Giggles.

A dark wind blew across the beach, making the fire flutter. Then the camp was silent.

Minutes passed. We held our breath. Nothing happened.

“I think the boys just wanted to scare us, and now they’re on their way back to camp,” Darlene said.

We were disappointed. Each of us was poised for something more. But weary from exercise and sugar-dazed from s’mores, instead of keeping a breathless watch we all soon fell asleep. I opened my eyes maybe an hour later, maybe more. The fire on the beach was almost out. Above me the Big Dipper hung in a bowl of black sky. A warm wind made the water lap at the sand. When my eyes adjusted, I spotted Darlene and Danny half-hidden at the edge of the trees. They were lying on a blanket, stretched out against each other, moving in a kind of rhythm that had echoed not the rhythm of the bay but some other cadence I did not yet understand or want to.

In the morning Penny’s leg was purple. The rest of us rolled up our sleeping bags, but Penny said she couldn’t move.

Marilyn and I touched Penny’s calf, which felt hard and slightly hot. Penny sat on the sand, about to cry. Then Eli’s pickup truck pulled up to get the sleeping bags. Danny was at the wheel.

“They let
you
drive?” Darlene teased.

“Of course. Their primo counselor. Who else?”

“Maybe someone who wasn’t getting fired,” Darlene giggled. “Okay, girls, load your gear into the truck.”

“I can’t,” Penny whined.

Marilyn and I rolled Penny’s sleeping bag and handed it to Danny. “You’re going to have to take Penny back to camp in the truck,” Marilyn instructed. “She’s not going to be able to hike all the way up that beach.”

Darlene pondered this, a cheerful flush creeping across her face. “I better ride back to camp with her,” she said. “Becky can be in charge.” Becky, the inept counselor-in-training, had come along to help supervise the hike.

“If you really want to do me a favor,” Penny told Danny and Darlene after the rest of us marched off down the beach, “don’t take me back to camp, take me home.”

“Let’s take her home,” Darlene said. Penny thought she sounded a little giddy.

“Yeah, sure,” Danny said.

“Let’s. Otherwise they’ll put her in the infirmary. She might as well be home.”

“If they think she’s really sick they’ll call her parents.”

“They won’t. The swelling will go down. It always does. Her parents won’t come.”

“If we take her home, they’ll have to let her stay there.” Darlene’s eyes were bright and her voice a little crazy. Penny felt hopeful.

“You want them to arrest us for stealing the truck?” Danny asked.

“They won’t. We’ll call. We’ll say she was inconsolable.”

“We’ll get fired.”

“We’re
already
fired,” Darlene laughed. Penny saw how she was daring him. It was something she would remember. They ended up going down the highway at sixty-five, sleeping bags flopping around in the back, hot wind coming in the windows, rock music blasting from the radio. When Marilyn and I returned from camp two weeks later, Penny came to my house. We’d eaten Popsicles and giggled over her story, and I’d believed all of us were finished with Camp Chesapeake forever, and Penny would never have a baby no matter what.

B
ack at Marilyn’s house, I didn’t go to the cemetery, didn’t call Steve, didn’t even indulge in the guilty pleasure of poring over the Style section of the
Washington Post.
The minute Marilyn excused herself for a nap, I collapsed onto my own inviting, rumpled covers and fell into one of those deep, dreamless, black holes of sleep that for me had always been the only cure for tension.

Dragged back into consciousness hours later by Bernie’s persistent knocking, I had no idea where I was. Patches of gloomy, twilit sky filled the spaces between the open wooden blinds. Clouds? Dusk? I remembered I was in Maryland. I’d gone to Riggs Park. My head was filled with fog.

“Phone for you,” Bernie called from outside the door. I hadn’t heard it ring.

“I know it’s only been a day, but I already miss you,” Jon murmured when I picked up. The hum of background noise almost drowned him out.

“Where are you?”

“The Indianapolis airport. On my way to West Lafayette, a couple of hours drive. Tomorrow I interview that ex-basketball player who coaches at Purdue. Remember I told you about him? How’s Marilyn?”

“Physically, pretty good. Mentally, I’m not so sure. Tomorrow she’s going to have a face-lift.”

“They’re doing face-lifts for breast cancer now?”

“It’s a long story.” Realizing how urgently I wanted to tell it, in full detail and at leisure, in the style of our old, comfortable companionship, I resented the airport commotion that made it impossible.

“If you need me, say the word,” Jon told me. “I can get out of here late tomorrow. I was going to Kansas City, but I don’t have to. If you want some company, I’m always a good shoulder to cry on.”

“Thanks, but I think I’m way beyond crying. You know me, Jon. Tough.” I didn’t want to have to ask. I wanted him just to show up.

A loudspeaker blared information about a gate change. “When will you be home?” he shouted. I could picture him holding a hand over his free ear, blocking out the noise.

“Probably Wednesday or Thursday. A few days after Marilyn’s surgery. You?”

“About the same.” He dropped his voice. “Don’t stay away too long. I love you, Barbara.”

“I love you, too.” It was always so easy to say the words.

Outside, the sky had drained of light, a time of day I’d come to know all too well, when loss and longing seemed to live in the mournful air itself, in the aching, endless length of the hour before dark.

I didn’t know why I was so upset.

From downstairs, Marilyn’s voice drifted up. Then Bernie’s voice. Alto. Tenor. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Quickly, surreptitiously, I dialed Steve’s number in California. By the time the answering machine picked up, I had framed a quick, cheery, nonthreatening message to leave, then decided
any
message would alarm him and hung up. I washed my face and went down to the kitchen.

Marilyn stood at the counter chopping vegetables for a stir-fry, cheeks flushed with exertion, looking rested and healthy. She pointed me toward the makings of a salad laid out on the counter.

“I told Bernie about Penny. He thinks you’re right. We ought to leave it alone.”

“Absolutely,” came Bernie’s voice from the den.

“So you’re going to drop it?”

“Not a chance.”

Masking my disappointment, I peeled a clove of garlic and rubbed it around the inside of a wooden salad bowl, not looking at her.

“I know you don’t quite believe there was a baby, and I forgive you for thinking I’m so pathetic that Steve would lie to me,” she said. “And don’t think I didn’t take into account your worries about this Pandora’s box.”

“Well, it’s nice to hear you sounding like your annoying logical self.”

“You’re worried that a baby would have turned out to be someone Steve wouldn’t want to know. Some insecure dyslexic who might want to rob him of his fortune.” She raised her eyebrows at me.

“Yes.” I discarded the garlic and picked up a head of lettuce. I wasn’t going to laugh.

“But I still think Steve must be curious. And I think you need to get over thinking everything you did for Steve you really did for yourself, so now you have to protect him.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, though it was perfectly true. For the first years of my friendship with Marilyn, I had hardly noticed Steve except as Marilyn’s generic, pesky older brother. Then one June day he announced he’d failed third grade, and he suddenly materialized for me like some fascinating alien who’d dropped into the Ginsburg living room from the sky—a goofy boy in plaid shorts, scratching flakes that looked like dandruff off a sunburned, peeling nose—and above all, a boy who could play the guitar almost as well as my mother played clarinet. A boy who, despite his
great musical gift
(the one thing my mother most desired for me) would have to repeat the year.

“If you can’t pass school by yourself, then we’ll help you,” Marilyn told him, gleefully taking charge of her year-older brother. “From now on you’ll be in the same class with me and Barbara. Don’t worry, we’ll get you through.”

But although we attacked the task with gusto as soon as school started the next fall, in the first months we seemed doomed to fail.

Then one day Penny said mildly, in a tone that showed she was trying not to offend, “He’s never going to learn if you keep writing things down for him. You have to tell him out loud. He’s not stupid. He just can’t read.”

“He can’t read?” We were stunned. “How did you know this?”

Penny shrugged. She was always the first to glean our darkest secrets, a kind of perverse and unwanted talent. Having diagnosed Steve’s problem, she lost interest and left me and Marilyn to solve it. It was one of the few things the two of us did without her in those years.

We had no idea we could be so righteously devious. We tutored Steve, lied for him, taught him to write gibberish essays in an indecipherable script. “His writing’s bad because his hands shake,” we informed our teachers. “Didn’t you know? There’s probably a note of it in his records.” We knew because we’d put the letter there ourselves, signed Shirley H. Ginsburg in perfect imitation of his mother’s handwriting. Helping Steve was better than psychotherapy. It allowed me to deal with a mother who wanted above all to foster musical skills in a daughter who didn’t have a shred of talent. Steve had starred in my childhood as living proof that it was possible to have musical talent and still, in critical ways, not be able to function as well as a neighbor girl with a tin ear.

“The important thing was, you helped him,” Marilyn said now, as I clunked the lettuce on the counter and removed the loosened core. “It doesn’t matter what you believe might have been your
motives.
”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe I want to protect him from your misguided intentions just because he’s my friend.”

Marilyn attacked a cabbage with her chopping knife. A slow smile crept across her face. “We had fun, didn’t we?”

“We did.” We’d worked out a system for Steve to copy multiple-choice tests without getting caught. We encouraged him to endear himself to the teachers. If the class read a poem, he would recite it back from memory. If actors were needed for a play, he would be the only boy to volunteer, and all Marilyn and I had to do was read the script aloud to him, and he’d memorize it overnight. Steve was bright. Steve had potential. Teachers knew his shaky hands were an unlikely explanation, given how well he played the guitar. But they’d loved him too much to care.

“Basically, we taught him to be a con artist,” Marilyn said now, chopping with a kind of cheerful rhythm.

“Not a con artist!” I tore mounds of lettuce into the wooden bowl. “We just taught him to use his charm.”

In junior high he’d begun calling all the females in his life
sweetie,
which might have seemed affected except that he made everyone feel she really
was
his sweetie. Steve had grown into an adolescent with so little sense of style that even when his friends got crew cuts, his hair flopped greasily onto his forehead. He was no threat to either gender. Calling the girls
sweetie
was safe. Every year from eighth grade on he convinced a whole bevy of them to tape textbooks for him, saying to each one, “Oh, sweetie, I like your voice so much,” and smiling so coyly they didn’t know whether he was serious or joking. He committed each taped book to memory—he could always remember everything he heard—and not one of his helpers ever found out about the others.

By high school Steve was offering to bring his guitar to anyone’s party and sing for free if in return they would write him a term paper. On the day of the SATs, he finagled a seat next to Bernie, knowing Bernie was in love with Marilyn and would let him copy. He was determined not just to avoid humiliation, but to shield his parents, who, like many in Riggs Park, had little formal education and valued it above all for their children. He wasn’t planning to go to college (although later, briefly, he did), but even then he wanted everyone to think he could get in if he wanted.

In a way, Steve’s enforced charm prepared him well for the irony of becoming our best-known classmate, the one non-reader in a class that worshipped scholarship. Marilyn and I were glad that, in the early years, when beneath his charm and comedy, Steve’s affliction gave him pain, we lied to his teachers, stayed up all night before exams, dug earthworms out of the garden to teach him biology. We never minded, not really. And certainly had never minded basking in the twinned glow of his talent and gratitude, which he had beamed on us like a benediction ever since.

I’d shredded my entire lettuce by the time Marilyn suddenly stopped chopping and put down her knife. “You know the only one Steve never called
sweetie
was Penny. And you know why? Because even then she wasn’t his
sweetie.
She was his love.”

The welcome, light mood vanished. Dejected, Marilyn dumped her pile of chopped veggies into a bowl. “You know, sometimes I wish we could go back to being in love with Eddie Fisher. Before everything fell apart.” A determined don’t-dare-make-fun-of-me expression settled on her face. “While we all still thought Eddie Fisher was great.”

“Eddie Fisher! I haven’t thought about him for forty years.”

“See? Our first true love, and you repressed it.”

But I remembered now. Penny and Marilyn and I had fallen in love with him right after we’d returned from Camp Chesapeake, a curly-haired teen idol we’d thought was the handsomest man alive. A man who sang with the tongue of an angel! And
Jewish!
We could marry him and our mothers would have to approve! We arranged our schedules so we could watch his fifteen-minute TV show,
Coke Time,
in the privacy of Marilyn’s basement. We sighed collectively as he crooned the words to “Oh, My Papa.” Unless Marilyn’s mother was close by, we screamed as Eddie held out his beckoning arms. We took turns kissing his face on the little black-and-white screen. Each of us hung autographed photos of him on our bedroom walls.

One day, Marilyn read aloud from an article about Eddie Fisher in a movie magazine. “Although it isn’t generally known, Eddie Fisher shares a problem well-known to many of his fans.” Her voice grew low and dramatic. “Eddie Fisher suffers from acne. The scars and eruptions are invisible on TV only because he wears heavy makeup.”

“Eruptions!” Penny was horrified. “Makeup!”

From that moment, the romance was ruined. Penny was too appalled to let it continue. Pimples! How disgusting! We’d been duped! Penny wept bitter, genuine tears.

So for Penny’s sake, we ended the relationship with Eddie, with
Coke Time,
with the kissable face of Marilyn’s TV. Anxious to placate, Marilyn and I vowed the three of us would fall in love only with
real
boys from then on. It turned out to be a difficult promise. We weren’t ready for real boys yet. We were happy loving Eddie. I wondered now—and was sure Marilyn was wondering, too—if that hadn’t been the first moment, just for a second, we’d resented giving in to Penny’s needs.

But by then we had started seventh grade, our first year at Paul Junior High, and we felt so sorry for Penny that it would have been wrong to resent her, wrong not to try to help. She became a worse student than Steve, getting Fs on three English tests in a row before she discovered she was failing because she couldn’t see the board. Her mother took her to an eye doctor who prescribed glasses. They were thick, with tortoiseshell frames that were supposed to complement her red hair. Penny hated them. She had worn them only because she’d hated her nearsightedness more.

We were still lost in memory when Bernie came into the kitchen and plucked a handful of vegetables from Marilyn’s bowl. “All talked out already?” He looked quizzically from one of us to the other. “You two are mighty quiet.”

“Thinking about Penny,” Marilyn said.

“Ah.” Bernie popped a slice of celery into his mouth. “Don’t get too morose. You had some good years with her when you were younger.”

“Younger!” Marilyn savaged an onion with her knife. “She wasn’t even fourteen when her childhood was wiped out. Fourteen! All the good stuff gone in the course of a single afternoon!”

“You don’t know—” Bernie started to say something and then stopped. “Didn’t they say she was only—Only—”

“
Only
molested. Not raped?” Marilyn slapped away the hand Bernie dipped back into the vegetables. “Don’t you think molested would have been bad enough?”

“I didn’t mean—” Bernie was clearly at a loss. Looking at first surprised, then admonished, he wandered out of the room.

Penny had had a dentist appointment the day it had happened. Afterward she’d walked over to Wishner’s Upholstery Shop, where her sister Diane worked summers as a receptionist. Diane was to drive her home.

When Penny arrived at the shop, it was deserted. Diane had been sent to run an errand. Wish was at Camp Chesapeake where he still went in the summer, although now as a counselor-in-training. Wish’s father, Murray, was out giving an estimate. The others were delivering a living-room couch. No one was around except a laborer who worked on the furniture. The man came into the receptionist’s area and asked Penny if she needed help. She said she was waiting for Diane. He closed the door behind them. He did things Penny never confided. Later, we were told that Murray arrived just in time to stop whatever was happening, but he could not stop Penny’s screaming. Nor did Penny calm down when her sister Diane returned and tried to soothe her. Murray and Diane loaded a hysterical Penny into Murray’s car and drove her home.