The Wonder Spot (2 page)

The bandleader called Rebecca's grandparents up to the stage to say the blessing over the candles; he said, “Put your hands together for Grandpa Nathan,” while the band played “Light My Fire.”

I felt free to eat my roll.

Then a girl wearing a gold necklace that spelled
Alyssa
in script said, “Where are you from?”

“Surrey, Pennsylvania,” I said. “It's outside of Philadelphia.”

“I've been to the Pennsylvania Dutch country,” she said. “You know, the Amish?”

I'd been there, too, and was about to say so, but she turned away from me, as though living in Pennsylvania instead of New York made me less like her than the somber people whose beliefs forbade the driving of cars and the wearing of zippers.

To the table at large, Alyssa said, “Who's going to Lori's bat mitzvah?”

I felt a pang that I hadn't been invited to the bat mitzvah of a girl I didn't even know.

I was wishing I could get up and leave, but a second later there was no need; the band went from “Hava Nagila” to “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog,” and everybody at my table got up to dance. I saw that all the girls were wearing tights; they probably had slips on, too.

I ate my chicken and watched the dance floor.

You could tell Rebecca saw herself as the belle of the bat mitzvah, but the grace that served her so well in ballet deserted her at rock 'n' roll. Maybe she wasn't used to dancing with her heels on the ground; she marched like a majorette in a parade or, it occurred to me, like the nutcracker in
The Nutcracker
.

The boy who looked like Eric Green danced like him, too; he barely did anything except jerk his overgrown bangs out of his eyes and mouth the occasional phrase, such as, “Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea.”

He stayed in one spot while Alyssa go-go danced around him. I studied her, trying to memorize the way she shimmied and swiveled; then I remembered that I'd tried moves like these in front of the mirror in my parents' bedroom and discovered the huge gap between how I wanted to look when I danced and how I actually did look.

I got up to visit my brothers. But Robert was performing his disappearing-nickel trick for the children's table, and Jack was sitting between two girls. One with wavy hair and glasses was making him laugh, and the other, very pretty, was jiggling one high heel to the music. I wished that for once he would like the funny one, but as I stood there I saw him ask the other girl to dance.

I almost bumped into Aunt Nora greeting guests at the eighty-plus table. She wore a pale blue sleeveless dress and her hair up in a bun plus
bangs. It seemed possible that she was trying to look like Audrey Hepburn, and she did a little; both gave the impression of fragility, though Aunt Nora's seemed to come from tension and Audrey's from innocence.

Aunt Nora made a kissing sound and squeezed my shoulder, which felt less like affection than a fact—not,
I like you,
but,
You are the daughter of an old friend.

I knew there was some appropriate thing my mother wanted me to say, but I couldn't remember what and just offered the standard, “Thank you for having me.”

She said, “Thank you for coming,” which came out
cubbing;
Aunt Nora suffered from allergies.

I said, “You're welcome,” and asked where my parents were sitting; she pointed.

As a judge, my father was an expert at making his face blank, but I could tell he didn't like the man who was talking to him. I cruised right over.

I heard the man say, “Am I right, or am I right?” and then my father noticed me and excused himself from their conversation.

In a low voice, he said, “How's it going?”

“Bad,” I told him. “Very bad.”

He stood up and put his arm around my shoulders; he walked me away from the table and said, “Want to dance?”

The band was playing “The Impossible Dream”; I said, “This one's kind of schmaltzy.”

He said, “Do you know what schmaltz is?”

“I thought I did.”

“Chicken fat,” he said. He told me that people spread it on bread, and we needed to go to a Jewish restaurant so I could try some.

I said, “Could we go right now?”

He took my hand, and I let him move me around to the chicken-fatty music.

Back at the table, he told me to take his chair and went off to find another, leaving me between Mr. Am-I-Right? and the actress my mother had become.

“Hel-lo,” she said, with the two-beat singsong of a doorbell. To the table, she said, “This is my daughter, Sophie.”

“Hi,” I said.

My mother said, “Are you having a good time?”

I said, “I am having a great time,” and then just loud enough for her: “Everyone is more dressed up than I am.”

Her smile disappeared, my goal.

She didn't realize that I was kidding until I suggested we drive around and look for tights.

My dad pulled up a chair, and he and I sat very close.

I asked if he was finished with his lunch.

He said, “Go ahead, sweetheart.”

I snuck what was left of my father's chicken into a napkin when Aunt Nora came to the table and got everyone's attention: Did anyone want to dance “The Hokey Pokey”? My mother did. She and Aunt Nora walked off with their arms linked.

I spotted them with Rebecca on the dance floor as I made my getaway. The bandleader was singing, “Put your right foot in, and shake it all about,” and the three of them did it along with everyone else, without thinking, as I did,
Why? Why would you put your right foot in and shake it all about?

In the parking lot, I let Albert out of the station wagon and poured water into his bowl. “You're feeling sorry for yourself,” I said, feeding him the leftover chicken, “but you don't know how lucky you are.”

I was fastening his leash when I heard a voice say, “Hey.”

It was the boy who looked like Eric Green.

I said, “Hi.”

“I'm Danny,” he said. “You don't have a cigarette, do you?”

“Oh,” I said. A bunch of girls in my grade had tried smoking at a Girl Scout overnight, but I never had. I looked around the parking lot; we were alone. I said, “There might be a pack in the glove compartment.” There was. “I don't see any matches, though.”

“I have matches,” he said. I handed him two cigarettes, and he held one and put the other behind his ear like a pencil.

He walked with me and Albert past the cars and along the grassy edge of the parking lot. He ran his hand along the bushes. I thought of the one afternoon Eric Green had walked me home from school, his finger through my back belt loop.

Now, Danny said, “Poodles are really smart, right?”

“I can't speak for the whole breed,” I said, “but Albert is a genius.”

“Can he do tricks?”

“Tricks are beneath him.” I said that he'd been named for both Albert Einstein (Robert's hero) and Albert Camus (Jack's).

The sun was glinting off the cars, and in the bright light I saw that this boy looked less like Eric Green than I'd thought. It occurred to me that Danny was older, and I was right.

He told me that he was in eighth grade and his private school had already started. It always started early, he said bitterly, adding that he'd had to miss the last day of hockey camp.

I almost said,
That's too bad,
but it sounded like gloating.

As we walked, the bushes thinned out, and you could see a field on the other side. At a large gap, there was a path and Danny said, “You want to . . . ?” and I said, “Okay.”

He took Albert's leash and cut through first. Then he reached his hand out for me. I took it, and he steadied me so I wouldn't slide down the hill, which was more mud than grass.

He said, “You okay?”

I nodded.

He seemed reluctant to let go of my hand, and when he looked at me, everything tingled—not the tiny on-and-off sparks of a foot falling asleep but single and continuous like flying in a dream.

The grass had been mashed down into a path. What had looked like a beautiful field turned out to be a vacant lot; a ratty blanket and rusted beer cans surrounded the ashes and burned sticks of an old campfire. Even so, the sun was lighting up the trees and weeds and flowers. There was the buzzing hum of insects in unison, loud and then quiet.

Danny lit his cigarette and said, “I can't believe summer's over,”
and I heard in his voice what I knew I'd feel in another week when my school started; it made summer seem less real now.

Danny blew a smoke ring. “Are you going out with anybody?”

I thought again about Eric Green, who had stopped talking to me. “Not at the moment.”

At my feet, Albert was sniffing at what looked like a big finger of the flesh-colored gloves Jack wore while dissecting sharks in the basement.

I could feel Danny's eyes on me, and though we were in the shade, I thought of Robert saying that my dress was see-through in the sun. I suddenly felt queasy and nervous. “We should get back.”

He didn't move; maybe he was hoping I'd change my mind. He used his first cigarette to light his second.

I got my voice to sound normal, but I felt the quiver underneath when I said, “Come on,” to Albert.

I tried to pretend I wasn't hurrying, but I was, and Danny followed. Then we weren't on the path anymore; there wasn't a path. I was stomping down weeds. Pricker bushes were scratching my legs. Finally, I caught sight of the parking lot through the weeds. We'd wound up behind the synagogue, where only a catering truck and a maintenance van were parked.

I slowed down a little then; we walked side by side. In the distance, I could see guests leaving. A few wild children were running around while their parents talked. Rebecca's father, carrying a tutu centerpiece, was helping her grandmother into a sedan. I saw my father then; he was smoking near the station wagon.

On reflex, I crouched down behind a Cadillac, and Danny crouched with me. “That's my father,” I said.

After a few minutes, Danny said, “You want me to see if he's still there?” He stood up. “What does he look like?”

“Tall,” I said. “He's wearing a dark gray suit.”

“I don't know.”

I stood up. We were safe.

At the station wagon, I noticed that Albert's paws were muddy, and I wiped them with a rag.

Danny took the rag and wiped the mud off my sandals and pulled a blade of grass out from between my toes.

When he opened the door to the synagogue for me, I thought he was going to ask for my address so he could write to me, but all he said was, “Thanks for the cigarettes.”

I was relieved and then disappointed.

In the hall, Alyssa rushed up to him and said, “My dad's here.” She glared at me. I wondered if she was his girlfriend, or wanted to be; it was one or the other.

Danny didn't seem to care that she was angry. He said, “See ya,” to me, and followed her out to the parking lot.

Downstairs, in the pink palace, Robert and Jack were sitting with my father at a table that had been cleared of everything, including the centerpiece.

My father said, “Let your mother know we're going, please,” and I walked over to where she stood with a woman wearing a big-brimmed straw hat with a beige ribbon.

“This is my daughter, Sophie,” my mom said, in her fakest voice of the day.

The woman said, “And how old are you?”

“Twelve,” I said.

She cooed at this impressive accomplishment. “And when is
your
bat mitzvah?”

I was about to say that I wasn't having one when my mother cut in and said, “We're just planning it now.”

I was shocked to hear my mother lie, but I didn't give her away. I remembered a cliché that seemed to fit: “Rebecca will be a hard act to follow.”

The woman tittered, and said, “She's darling.”

. . . . .

At the car, my mother told me to sit up front and didn't speak again until we were on the highway. “Where were you?”

“Walking Albert,” I said.

“She was walking Albert,” Robert repeated, in my defense.

Without turning around, my mother said, “I'm talking to Sophie, Robert.” To me, she said, “You were gone for over an hour.”

I was wondering what she suspected, and then I realized that she didn't suspect anything, she was just angry that I'd disappeared. “It wasn't like anyone missed my company,” I said. “No one at my table would even talk to me.”

She said, “That's not the point.”

We passed three exits before she told me what her point was. I was a guest, she said; I was a member of this family. She kept talking, but whatever she was angry about wasn't making it into her lecture.