• July 1969 •
My mother met Eddie Lipper in the Catskills on July 4, 1969, and married him in Las Vegas sixteen days later. She claimed they were pronounced man and wife at the exact moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. I didn’t believe her, but I was twelve years old that summer and would have welcomed just about any man into our lives. My mother was thirty-five, and I know the same was true for her.
We were a family of four: me; my mother, Ruth; my twin sister, Sarah; and our younger brother, Seamus—a name recommended to my mother by our neighbor Mary Murphy from County Cork. My name is Seth. Seth Shapiro. Ruth said she selected all of our names because she wanted our initials to represent how strongly we were connected: SSSSSS. She called us her chain of love. She was right, of course—the four of us were deeply and painfully bound together—but over time I have come to see these letters as an ideogram for silence.
• • •
MY PARENTS MET AT NYU. My mother was an undergraduate there, and my father was in the medical school. Throughout her teenaged years Ruth had been overweight and mentally unstable. At sixteen she was hospitalized after an especially bad psychotic episode. She regressed into an infantile state, blathering in baby babble and covering herself in her own feces. Four years later, she had lost fifty pounds and learned to keep herself calm with cigarettes and tranquilizers. For her second date with my father, she brought him home to Long Island for a Sabbath dinner. He proposed one month later. By the ffth year of their marriage, my mother had given birth to three children. In the seventh year of their marriage, my father made an important medical discovery that gilded his career. His photograph appeared in a Life magazine story about one hundred outstanding young Americans. He was an overnight star and left my mother for a young woman from France who had come to Boston to spend a year as a postdoc in his lab. My mother was twenty-nine.
At that time we were living in a small house in a Boston suburb. After the divorce, my mother moved us to a four-room apartment in New Jersey in order to be closer to her family. She began dating not long after we moved. I’m sure she was in no condition to look for another husband, but her sister and father viewed my mother’s divorce as a shame, an embarrassment. I felt exactly the same. Not having a father around, I was as self-conscious as someone with two noses. My mother was usually fixed up with men by her older sister, Rhoda—a depressing assortment of widowers or odd, bland, thoroughly second-rate men. Still, I viewed every man she went out with as a potential father, and I watched her get ready for her dates with hope and amazement. She always enlisted my help in fastening her girdle-and-brassiere contraption. I didn’t like this job, but I was the only one with the strength to do it. I didn’t like how the thing felt so stiff and heavy with metal components. I didn’t like the columns of flesh that formed down the length of my mother’s back as I placed each clasp in its eyelet. I needed all my strength for the last couple of clasps, by which point her back would look like a Torah scroll. Sometimes when she called for my help I would catch my mother admiring her breasts in the mirror. They were pendant shaped and enormous, mapped with bluish veins beneath skin so pink and shiny that it appeared translucent. She would cup them, lift them, lower them, then say with a sigh, “Jesus, I have great breasts.”
The next morning I would pump her for news about her date, but she was always indifferent. One man might have been too old, another not well educated enough for her. She would give me these reports as she studied a crossword puzzle through a haze of cigarette smoke. The real problem, we both knew, was that any man was too far a step down from my father—a handsome, vital, successful doctor.
One weekend, Rhoda and her husband went to a Catskills resort. Eddie was the recreation director, and Rhoda handed him Ruth’s phone number. Two weeks later, my mother drove up to the Catskills on a Friday night to meet him. My brother, sister, and I stayed with Rhoda and her family. I loved Rhoda’s ranch house. When I opened her refrigerator, I was dazzled by the bounty of bright fruit—cherries, grapes, peaches, oranges, and bowls of melon balls. The pantry was neatly lined with enough food to last for five years. They had owned a color television since 1965, built right into the brick wall of their family room. Their finished basement was furnished with ping-pong and billiard tables, and the closets were brimming with toys. Someday, I vowed, I would live this way.
When my mother returned on Sunday night, she was in an exuberant mood. She and Rhoda were sitting at the kitchen table; I was two steps below them, in the family room, sitting on the shag carpet with my siblings and cousins, watching The Wonderful World of Disney, but I tuned in to what my mother was saying. “Oh, Rhoda, let me tell you, he’s the right man. I know it! He told me he’s always wanted boys to raise.” I knew how much my mother wanted her older sister’s approval, and I felt a little bad for her when Rhoda said in a cautious-sounding voice, “Well, that’s nice for you, Ruth. That’s nice.” But I understood Rhoda’s wariness—my mother’s enthusiasm was completely unmodulated, like the voice of a person who’s hard of hearing. Barry, Rhoda’s husband, studied my mother over the top of his Ben Franklin glasses.
“Just be careful, young lady,” Barry said.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” my mother said. “I can handle myself just fine.”
“We know,” Barry said. “You’re a good girl, Ruth.”
My mother downed her iced tea in one long gulp, like a shot of some bracing moral tonic. “Of course I am,” she declared. “I’ve always been a good girl.”
On the way home my mother told us that Eddie had asked her to marry him.
“After one weekend?” Sarah exclaimed.
“I think he’d be a good father.”
“How do you know?” she said.
“Because he told me he always wanted boys to raise.”
“You’re both out of your minds,” Sarah declared.
My mother and I exchanged looks in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were apprehensive; we both understood that there was very little connection between our words and our true feelings. In two days my brother, sister, and I were going to spend two weeks with my father and his family at a summerhouse he had recently bought on Cape Cod. My mother had been deeply unsettled by my father’s invitation, and I sensed her high excitement about Eddie was a reaction to our upcoming visit with my father. He had shown only minimal interest in my siblings and me since the divorce, but I still loved him beyond reason and fairness, which drove my mother mad. On the three weekends a year I visited him, my mother would call at six o’clock on Sunday mornings, telling my father that it was urgent that she speak to me. My father would call out to me in an angry voice that my mother was on the phone. I knew she was doing this to create tension between my father and me, and I would berate her for calling so early. She would respond by reminding me what a bastard my father was. She still loved him too, of course, loved him as unreasonably as I did, and all we could do about it was pummel each other for our illusions.
“How come you didn’t tell Aunt Rhoda he wants to marry you?” Sarah asked.
“Because I wanted my children to be the first to know.”
“No, you didn’t,” I countered. “You were afraid Aunt Rhoda and Uncle Barry would tell you to wait.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ruth exclaimed, “stop raining on my parade.”
Then she tried to get me more enthused about Eddie by saying that he was friends with all the famous ballplayers.
“Which ones?” I quizzed her. I looked at her face again in the rearview mirror as she tried to puzzle out an answer to my question.
“Sandy Koufax.”
“Sandy Koufax?” I said. “Yeah, sure.”
EDDIE WAS COMING THE NEXT evening to meet us. My mother had told us that Eddie had spent the day in the city looking for a job, using his father’s contacts in the garment industry. At the end of the day, the four of us—me, my mother, Sarah, and Seamus—sat on the steps of our apartment building waiting for him.
The commuter bus from New York stopped at the far end of the street. At six thirty we saw a fotilla of exhausted-looking men coming our way. “Oh, there he is!” my mother cried out, dramatically waving her arms. Eddie waved back. I thought he looked like a bowling ball—corpulent, low to the ground, his face darkened by a heavy five o’clock shadow. He was bald, but his liquid black eyes gave him a youthful appearance. As he approached, my mother brought a hand to her brow as if to shield her eyes from the light, but the sun was setting behind us.
Eddie’s mouth formed itself into the shape of a sickle, his teeth showing only on the side of his mouth that scythed upward—a smile that immediately reminded me of Jackie Gleason’s. Eddie placed a hand against my mother’s cheek and said, “Nice to see you, baby.” In the months to come, I became more certain that Eddie had styled himself after Jackie Gleason: the exaggerated “Nooo”; the eyes bugged out in a fit of apoplexy; the way he called my mother “baby”; his light, almost dance-like steps and the cha-cha-cha hand motions.
Eddie knelt down, drawing level with Seamus’s face. “I’m very happy to meet you, little man.”
Seamus turned his face into Ruth’s arm.
“How are you, beautiful?” he said to my sister.
“My name is Sarah,” she replied, and kicked our mother in the back.
Then Eddie rose and shook my hand. We were the same height, but he probably outweighed me by one hundred pounds. “I’ve heard a lot about you, kid,” he said, adding a wink, as if we were already on familiar terms.
Upstairs in our second-floor apartment, my mother settled Eddie onto the couch. She was affected and off-key, like a bad actress auditioning for a role as a 1950s housewife.
“Are you comfortable, Eddie darling?” my mother asked as she positioned a fan right in front of him and helped him off with his shoes. Eddie unbuttoned his shirt and handed it to her. When he stretched his arms behind his head, I could see oval stains the color of pee on his white undershirt. “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked. “Water? Pepsi?” Then, in a fit of improvisation, she added, “A martini? Is that something you’d like?” My mother wouldn’t have known a martini if she’d fallen into one.
“Pepsi is fine, baby,” Eddie replied, as he stretched out on the couch and opened a copy of the Daily News. Sarah, Seamus, and I all huddled together in the kitchen.
“Why is he calling you ‘baby’?” Seamus asked.
“Because he’s bogus,” Sarah answered.
My mother ignored her and turned to me. “Seth darling, would you bring this Pepsi out to Eddie?”
“Do I have to?”
“Don’t you want to spend some time with Eddie?”
“No.”
“Seamus, honey, would you bring this out to Eddie?”
He fastened himself to her leg and shook his head.
“Sarah?” she asked.
“No chance.”
Our mother looked at us in exasperation, as if we were a failed experiment.
“Jesuschristalmighty! I’ll do it myself.”
Eddie came to the table in his undershirt. He swigged his Pepsi straight from the bottle. When he caught me staring at him, he gave me another huge wink. “So, kid, I hear you’re a star athlete.”
I immediately stared at my mother, but she sent back an innocent look, as if she couldn’t imagine where he might have heard such a thing.
“I’m just OK,” I replied.
“He hits a home run nearly every time up,” my mother said.
“No, I don’t. I’ve never hit a home run. I didn’t even start for my Little League team.”
“Don’t worry, champ,” Eddie said. “We’ll make a ballplayer out of you.”
My mother smiled at me as if she had proven some contested point. Then I asked her if I could have a Pepsi too. She told me no, reminding me that we weren’t permitted to have soda at meals.
“Why can Eddie have one and not me?”
Eddie squeezed my arm. “Didn’t you hear what your mother said, goddamnit!”
I was stunned; tears sprang to my eyes. Sarah’s eyes widened with shock. My mother put her hand on my arm and said to Eddie, “He’s not used to having a man around. He doesn’t have a father.”
“I do too have a father.”
My mother cast me a reproving look, as if I had revealed some well-kept family secret. Then she asked Eddie how his job interviews had gone.
“Fine. Ted Heller at Safir Swimwear said I had a job for the asking.” Eddie didn’t sound very enthusiastic.
“Well, that’s wonderful,” my mother exclaimed. “So we have two things to celebrate.”
Eddie said he had even better news. “Just before I came down to the city, I asked Mr. Cousins, the owner of the hotel, for a substantial raise. I explained to him that I had a family to support now, and he said he would seriously consider my request.”
My mother’s face seemed to have lengthened by about six inches.
“You don’t support us,” I said. “My mother does. My mother and my father.”
My mother pinched my leg under the table.
“Eddie,” my mother said, “we agreed that you’d look for a job in the city. We can’t move to the Catskills.”
“Ruthie,” Eddie replied, with that sickle smile, “when Mr. Cousins offers me a raise, I’ll use it for leverage with Ted Heller.”
“Oh, Eddie darling, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”
Sarah said, “Why would someone who sells bathing suits care how much you earn for leading calisthenics in the Catskills?”
Eddie ignored her and said to my mother, “Let’s just see what Mr. Cousins offers. Mr. Cousins said to me, ‘Eddie, if I give you a raise, I know you’ll spend it on your family. That Bernstein still has the first dime I paid him.’”
“Does Bernstein make more money than you?” I asked.
“Mr. Bernstein has been at the hotel a lot longer than I have,” Eddie said.
“So he’s more important than you,” I said.
My mother pinched me again.
Then Eddie announced that he had some great news for me. “I spoke with Mr. Cousins about having your bar mitzvah at the hotel, and he said he would rent me the nightclub at a nominal charge.”
“What about Sarah?” I said.
“What about her?” Eddie said.
“My bat mitzvah, that’s what,” Sarah said. “Seth and I are sharing the haftarah, and I’m not doing it at some hotel.”
“Me neither,” I chimed in.
Eddie gave us an incredulous look.
“Our cantor and rabbi have been preparing Seth and Sarah since last spring,” our mother explained. “They can’t go up to the Catskills to officiate a bar mitzvah.”
“That’s no problem,” Eddie said. “We can hire the rabbi in town. He does all the bar mitzvahs at the hotel.” Then Eddie continued to lay out his grand vision for the event. We would hold the ceremony in the ballroom, where the hotel held High Holiday services. Then after the service we would go to a private room in the dining hall for lunch, and in the evening we would have the nightclub set up for a sit-down dinner. Eddie said that through his connections he could hire some top-of-the-line entertainment—a small band and a comedian.
“A comedian?” I repeated.
“I think we could get a Corbett Monica, or maybe even a Dick Shawn.”
“I’m not having a comedian at my bar mitzvah, and I don’t want a band either.”
My mother tried to explain to him that we were just interested in a simple religious ceremony.
“I’ve never heard of a kid who didn’t want a band at his bar mitzvah,” Eddie said, with a snort of disbelief.
AFTER DINNER WAS OVER, Eddie went back into the living room to watch baseball. Seamus and I helped our mother and Sarah clear the table, though the two of us had never lifted a finger to help before.
“Go and sit with him,” my mother whispered to me.
“I don’t want to.”
“Do it for me then. Just do it for me, all right?”
I went into the living room and sat next to Eddie on the couch.
He was leaning forward, one hand on the channel dial. He kept changing back and forth between the Yankee game on channel eleven and the Mets game on channel nine.
“Stay with me, kid, and you’ll never miss a pitch,” he told me. I had already missed dozens of them, but I didn’t say anything.
After Ruth finished cleaning up in the kitchen, she and Seamus joined us on the couch. Sarah went into the bedroom she shared with our mother to read her book, Planet of the Apes. Eddie supplied a running commentary about the games. Tom Seaver was about to pitch low and away. Cleon Jones was going to tag up. When the players didn’t do as he had predicted, he called them bums and sons of bitches. My mother feigned interest for a while, then excused herself to put Seamus to bed. When she returned, she sat next to us on the couch and opened an Agatha Christie mystery. The year before, my mother had taken us to see a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium and had spent the afternoon sitting in the bleachers reading Pride and Prejudice from cover to cover.
At ten thirty, my mother told me it was time for bed, but Eddie told her I ought to stay up because Tom Seaver was pitching a perfect game and we were witnessing history. Then one of the Cubs finally got a hit in the ninth inning. “Son of a bitch!” Eddie exclaimed.
“Does this mean it’s not historic anymore?” my mother asked.
“That’s right, baby,” Eddie said, and sent me another wink, as if only he and I understood how hopeless women were when it came to sports.
“All right, sweetie, bedtime,” my mother said to me.
“Good night, son,” Eddie said, and tousled my hair.
A couple of minutes after I had changed into my pajamas, my mother came into the room and sat on the side of my bed. Seamus was asleep on the other side of the room.
“That was nice,” she said, “all of us watching the game together. Just like a family.”
“I guess so,” I replied.
She told me she was glad I approved of Eddie.
“Are you really going to marry him?”
“Yes. I think he’ll be a good father.”
I knew Eddie was all wrong, but I didn’t see a way out. More than my sister and brother, I was the one who truly missed having a father. I was the most difficult of my mother’s three children—the most unhappy, the most surly, the most headstrong, the poorest student. My mother and I both believed that all my faults could be fixed by having a man in my life. My deepest longings had set these events in motion, had brought Eddie into our lives, and I felt powerless to do anything about it.
I asked my mother if she and Eddie were going to have more children.
“No, darling. No more children.”
“Does that mean you’re still going to have sex with him?”
“Yes,” she said. “Men and women still have sex when they’re not trying to have children.”
“I know,” I replied defensively.
“Seth, honey. I just want you to know one thing. I still consider you the man of the house.”
My mother had conferred this title on me when I was six, right after my father had left. The words hadn’t meant anything to me then, and they didn’t mean anything to me at that moment. I doubt they meant much to my mother either. But she probably thought it was something she ought to say, like a prayer you recite but don’t believe in.
THE NEXT MORNING MY MOTHER drove us to the airport for our fight to Boston. Seamus was crying because he didn’t want to leave our mother for two weeks. I tried to cheer him up by telling him about all the wonderful things we would be doing on Cape Cod. We’d go sailing and swimming and waterskiing. Of course I was also saying this to agitate my mother.
“Tell me something,” she said to me. “Why doesn’t your father buy a house for you and your brother and sister to live in before he buys a second house for himself?”
She was right. My father lived in a ten-room house in Cambridge with his wife, Hortense; their child, Francois; and a nanny. We lived in a four-room apartment.
“But this house is for us,” I answered. “That’s why he invited us for two weeks.”
“That’s right,” she retorted. “I’m sure he was thinking of you and your brother and sister when he bought this house. That’s why he never calls you or writes. Because he’s always thinking about you so much.”
Sarah was glum about the trip because she would have preferred to go to sleepaway camp with her friends. She was also much more realistic than I was when it came to our father. Like me, she was hurt by the fact that he paid so little attention to us, but she didn’t harbor any illusions that he secretly loved us, that, if not for Hortense and my mother, he would love us openly, unconditionally. When Sarah and I were very young, we had communicated in our private twins’ language; after our father left and I retreated into myself, missing him with a searing sadness, we gradually lost our private language until, at age twelve, with our hormones humming like an electrified steel fence, we barely communicated at all.
As we approached the airport, Sarah said, “Mom, I don’t want you to marry Eddie. I don’t want him for a stepfather.”
“Fine. Then you can go live with your father. All of you. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to have you.”
Seamus began crying, saying that he didn’t want to go live with our father.
THE HOUSE IN WELLFEET HAD three small bedrooms. My father and Hortense shared one; Francois shared another with his nanny, Mathilde, an old woman from France; Sarah, Seamus, and I were assigned to the third. “Jesus Christ!” Sarah said to me. “We’re twelve years old. Doesn’t he understand that we need our privacy at this age?” Sarah was zealous about maintaining her privacy, and not just because she was twelve and her body was changing. Her vigilance was a reaction against our mother, who left her bloodstained panties hanging from the shower rod, who changed her clothes in front of all of us, who, three months before, had come into the bathroom when I was showering, pulled back the curtain, and exclaimed, “Oh, look, you have pubic hair too! So does your sister.”
We settled into a routine at the house in Wellfeet right away. Seamus and I woke up every morning at around seven. We’d go into the living room and play board games and read for about an hour. Now and then Seamus would cry out, “Seth, I’m bored here. I want to go home!” I was just as bored and lonely as my brother, but I’d tell him to keep quiet, afraid that our father would send us home if he heard our discontent.
At eight o’clock Mathilde and Francois would come down and have breakfast with us. Mathilde kept her iron gray hair wound in a tight bun. She always wore nylons, heavy black shoes, and a sweater, no matter how hot the weather. Mathilde spoke to me in high-speed French and treated me like a six- or seven-year-old, as if my age were lost in translation too.
“No, no,” Mathilde exclaimed the first morning, as I poured milk over my cereal. She seized the bottle and tipped a tiny amount over Francois’s cereal. “Comme ça,” she said to me.
“I’m sorry,” I replied, reclaiming the bottle of milk. “Je ne parle pas français.” Then I emptied half the bottle into my bowl. The Cheerios foated up to the top and over the rim like tiny corpses.
Mathilde raised her arms and admonished me in furious French. “Cochon! Vous causez seulement des problèmes! Je dis votre père à ce sujet.”
“I’m frightfully sorry,” I said in an affected British accent, “but you may not see my penis.” Hearing the word “penis,” Seamus laughed convulsively, spraying milk and cereal across the table— an action three-year-old Francois immediately imitated.
Mathilde became apoplectic. “Vous petit juif sale! Avez-vous été élevé dans une gouttière?”
“No, no, no,” I said. “I’m dreadfully sorry if you’ve never seen a penis. But it’s impossible. Quite impossible.”
At about ten o’clock I would hear water coursing through the pipes. This was my signal to go upstairs and jump in the shower with my father. Hortense was maniacally frugal and couldn’t bear to think of what their water bill would be if all seven people in the house showered individually. I was glad for this arrangement, because it was a chance to spend time alone with my father for ten minutes. He would be almost done with his shower when I stepped into the back of the tub; after a minute we’d trade places. I would shower rapidly, then wrap a towel around my waist, and sit on the rim of the tub, watching my father shave. Our conversation was always the same: He always asked me if I had played nicely with my brothers that morning, and I always told him yes, and he always said, “That’s nice.” Then I would wait expectantly for him to ask me more questions, to inquire about my life, hoping that the close, steamy, shaving-cream-and-toothpaste-scented air of the bathroom would provide a medium for greater intimacy between us. But he would just regard his face in the mirror, looking to see if he had done a satisfactory job of shaving himself.
One morning I told him that I thought my mother was going to remarry.
“I know,” he replied, sighing heavily, as if the mention of my mother placed a burden on him.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I just do,” he said.
I wasn’t surprised that he knew about Eddie, especially if my mother planned to marry him. It gave her an excuse to get my father’s attention, to remind him that she still existed, to impose a little chaos on his nice, orderly life.
“I met him the day before we came here,” I said. “I didn’t like him.”
My father was still regarding his face in the mirror.
“He yelled at me and twisted my arm.”
My father finally turned around and looked at me.
“Did he hurt you?”
“Not really.”
“I see,” he said. “I see.”
WE ALL SPENT THE AFTERNOONS at the pond behind our cottage. My father and Hortense would read The New York Times and the Boston Globe from cover to cover, then they would open their books and medical journals. Sarah would isolate herself on a blanket about twenty yards from us, reading, writing letters, or swimming far out into the pond. Occasionally my father would look up and gaze out at her, as if trying to decide whether or not he should be concerned. Seamus and I had our books to read, and sometimes we played cards or Monopoly. An old canoe was beached near the house. One day I asked my father if Seamus and I could paddle around the pond in it. He said no, explaining that it wasn’t safe without life jackets. Then I asked him if we could buy life jackets in town.
Hortense looked up from her book. “No, no,” she said. “You are here for only ten more days. We are not going to spend money on life jackets.”
“This is the most boring place in the world!” Seamus complained.
“Good. Then next summer you can stay home,” Hortense said.
My father asked Seamus what he would like to do.
“Seth said we were going to go sailing and waterskiing. All we do is sit here and read.”
“We are here to relax,” Hortense told him. “Your father and I work very hard and we need to relax.”
“Why don’t we go to the ocean?” I suggested, thinking waves might be more interesting than a placid pond.
My father gave me a pained expression. “We have this nice pond all to ourselves. Why do we need to drive to the beach and get sand in everything?”
“How about miniature golf?” I suggested, recalling a number of courses I had seen on Route Six.
“Yeah!” Seamus exclaimed. “Let’s do that!”
My father turned to Hortense. “Horty, my love, would you like to go miniature golfing?”
“No,” she said very decidedly, without looking up from her book.
“Hortense doesn’t want to go,” my father translated. “Can you think of something we’d all enjoy?”
“I just did,” I replied.
He pressed his lips tightly together. “Look how nicely Francois is playing. Can’t you two go play with him?”
Francois was playing in the nude along the shoreline among a bright scatter of beach toys, singing children’s songs in French. Mathilde watched over him, barefoot but still clad in her heavy sweater.
“He’s only three years old,” I pointed out.
“Besides,” Seamus added, “they don’t even speak English.”
Hortense glared at us over the top of her book. “Thank God!” she declared.
My father laughed uproariously.
Over the next week I grew more and more sullen. Hortense was becoming livid at all the food I left on my plate. At dinner one night she handed me the same plate I had used at breakfast that morning. The plate was gravelly with filaments of old toast; a mound of leftover jam solidly adhered to the rim. I asked for a clean plate. Hortense told me I could have a clean plate when I finished my jam. I replied that I didn’t like jam for dinner. “Too bad,” she said. I helped myself to one of the hamburgers my father had cooked on the grill. At dinner the next night Hortense banged down the same plate in front of me. Next to the two-day-old jam was a congealed disk of ketchup and my leftover burger, glazed with a white, waxy membrane of fat. Again I requested a clean plate. Hortense ordered me to finish my hamburger. I refused, declaring it no longer edible.
“It’s fine,” she insisted. “I’m sick and tired of you wasting good food. We don’t have money to throw away.”
“What’s the big deal?” I said. “You’re both doctors.”
“We are researchers. We have very little money.”
“Then how come you bought this house?” Sarah asked.
“What’s the difference whether I eat the hamburger or not?” I added. “You’ve already paid for it.”
“Elliot!” Hortense exclaimed. Usually Sarah and I exchanged smiles when Hortense said our father’s name; her pronunciation of it rhymed with idiot. But at that moment my sister and I just looked down at our plates. My father was concentrating on his food. He wanted no part of this. “Seth, just eat what’s on your plate,” he said.
A platter of plump, bursting hot dogs was next to Hortense, out of my reach.
“I’d like a hot dog, please,” I said, my hands folded primly in my lap.
“No,” Hortense responded. “You finish what you have.”
“I’d like a hot dog, please,” I repeated.
I was ready to forgive my father everything—his indifference, his abandonment of me—if he told Hortense to give me a clean plate with a hot dog on it.
“Look, Seth,” he said, “just eat what’s on your plate. Then you can have all the hot dogs you want.”
Sarah, sitting next to Hortense, plucked a hot dog off the platter and put it on my plate. She pushed her chair away from the table and went out the door. I cut one piece of the hot dog and chewed it very slowly, looking directly at Hortense. Then I declared myself full and left the table.
I went outside to look for Sarah but didn’t see her anywhere. It was after seven thirty, and I could already see a star in the twilight. I dragged the canoe down to the water, stepped in it, shoved away from the shore, and paddled until I reached the middle of the pond. Then I let the canoe drift and fell into one of my most consoling reveries—that Hortense would leave my father. She always railed about living in the United States, and she was so devoid of love or humor or happiness—certainly it seemed possible that she might leave him and return to France with Francois and Mathilde. My father would be shattered. I would go live with him, nurture him with love and solace, and he would finally recognize me as his true family, the one person in the world who would love him unconditionally and never leave him. I fantasized in this fashion until the sky was almost black. The stars were massing, the trees turning into a dark ring around the water. I was waiting for my father to come look for me, to shout out my name. This was my chance to hear concern in his voice, hear him express grief and panic over me. But all the lights in the house gradually went off, and I knew I could stay out on the pond all night and my father would sleep undisturbed for his usual ten hours. Then I tried to imagine his reaction if he came down to the beach in the morning and found my drowned corpse on the shore. Would he collapse to the ground in sorrow and regret? Or would he turn my body over with his toe, studying it disapprovingly?
Finally, I did hear a voice calling me, but it was Sarah’s, not my father’s. As I paddled into shore, I saw Sarah sitting on the ground, her knees pulled up to her chin. She put her head down and began crying.
I stepped out of the canoe and pulled it up onto the land. I wanted to put my arms around Sarah, to comfort and console her, but I was too self-conscious. Physical affection was a foreign language to us. I sat down next to her and asked her why she was so upset.
“I just had my period. My blood is all over the sheets. I don’t want Hortense to know.”
“She’s a woman. She’ll understand.”
Sarah, still agitated, began rocking back and forth. She could see that I didn’t get it. I had recently read Anne Frank’s diary and remembered how Anne rejoiced in getting her period, calling it her “sweet secret.” I couldn’t reconcile Sarah’s reaction with what I had read about Anne Frank.
“This is my first time. It’s supposed to be a big deal between mothers and daughters,” Sarah told me. “Mom is going to have a fit if she knows that Hortense had to help me.”
“Do you want to hide the sheets?” I asked.
“Yes, but where? You know Hortense is going to find them.”
“Not if we paddle out to the middle of the pond and drop them overboard.”
“All right,” Sarah said, laughing with relief. “Let’s do that.”
She went back in the house and returned with the sheets in a pillowcase. As she sat facing me in the front of the canoe, I gave it a shove, jumped in, and paddled back out to the center of the pond. Sarah dropped the pillowcase over the side. For a moment it billowed out under the surface of the water, looking like a drowned ghost. “Oh, shit!” Sarah exclaimed. “Maybe I should have put some rocks in it.” But then it gradually became heavy with water and we watched the sack containing my sister’s bloody sheets disappear down into the blackness.
Paddling back in to shore, I asked Sarah what she was going to do about Mom.
“What about her?” Sarah replied.
“Isn’t she going to know that you’ve already had your period?”
“Not if I don’t tell her. Next month I’ll just pretend it’s my first time.”
“Do you think Mom is really going to marry Eddie?” I asked.
“Jesus, I hope not,” Sarah said. We had not received a letter from her in the nearly two weeks we had been on Cape Cod, and we knew this was a bad sign, as if she was hiding something. We looked at each other, then away, realizing that our mother was probably doing something mad. We could help each other in small ways—she could pluck a hot dog off a platter for me, I could help her dispose of her bloody sheets—but we both felt helpless and alone floating in the middle of that vast black pond.
Back in the house, Sarah went into the bathroom and took some of Hortense’s sanitary pads. But in our room we were faced with the problem of a bed without sheets—something we hadn’t thought about in our excitement. Still feeling heroic, proud that my idea of drowning the sheets had relieved Sarah of her sadness, I offered to put my sheets on Sarah’s bed and deal with the flak from Hortense.
“What are you going to tell her?” Sarah asked, as I removed the sheets from my bed.
“I’ll tell her I had a wet dream.”
Sarah laughed as she helped me fit the sheets onto her bed.
“A really massive one,” I added. “I’ll tell her that I was dreaming about Mathilde and just couldn’t control myself.”
“Seth, stop it,” Sarah protested, laughing even louder. “You’ll wake Seamus.”
“Oh, Mathilde, you don’t know how those heavy black sweaters turn me on!” I said, pulling the sheet tight on my end. Sarah fell onto the bed and put both hands over her mouth to stifle her laughter. I lay down next to her and said in a faux French accent, “Oh, chéri, you get me so hot when I watch you roll down your pantyhose at the beach.”
Seamus woke up looking stunned and puzzled, then joined us in our laughter.
The next morning I looked in the refrigerator and didn’t see my old plate. Hortense didn’t call for me to shower with my father. After he and Hortense ate breakfast, he summoned Sarah and me into the living room. We sat on the couch; he sat facing us in a hard-backed chair from the kitchen. I was certain he had already discovered that the sheets were missing, but apparently that wasn’t the case.
“Hortense and I have been very disappointed in your behavior,” he said to us.
Tears immediately welled up in my eyes. Sarah looked away; perhaps she couldn’t bear to be reminded of how much I loved our father, a love, we both knew, that would never be returned.
“Haven’t you been enjoying yourselves here?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Can you tell me why?”
“You don’t pay any attention to us.”
He stared at me for several seconds, his expression teetering between exasperation and concern, as if weighing what it would cost him to acknowledge my pain.
“What about you, Sarah? Do you feel the same?”
“Yes. You’re cold and distant. I don’t know why you wanted us to come on this vacation.”
“I see,” he said. “‘Cold and distant.’ I see.”
Sarah and I just stared at him. “All right then,” he said, placing his palms on his thighs, as if something had been settled. “We can all try to do a little better.”
Later that morning, when we went down to the pond, my father called me over to look at the newspaper with him. That night, men were going to set foot on the moon, and my father showed me illustrations in the paper to explain the science of the moon walk. He told me about how the lunar module would detach itself from the spaceship and then orbit the moon thirty times before it landed in the Sea of Tranquility. He explained that the moon had no atmosphere and very little gravity. “A boy like you would weigh only about twenty pounds on the moon.” I knew this was his way of responding to my complaint that he didn’t pay attention to me, but I wanted love, not scientific explanations. I kept looking away.
“Aren’t you interested in this?” he asked.
“No.”
“No?” he repeated, incredulous.
“I’m not interested in science.”
“Fine,” he said, lacing the word with anger. He snapped the paper open to another page.
For a couple of moments I gazed out across the pond. On the far side was a small white sandbar. At that moment the sandbar looked like an oasis, a strip of white beach, unexplored terrain where I could be completely alone, away from everything. I went over to the canoe and began dragging it down to the shoreline.
My father asked me what I was doing.
“Going to the moon.”
He told me to stop, that I wasn’t allowed to use the canoe.
“Too bad,” I said. “I already have.”
He banged his newspaper down and came over to me, yanking me away from the canoe by my ear. “I’ve had it with you,” he yelled. “I’ve had it with this thoroughly dreadful behavior.” I headed straight for the pond, dove in, and began swimming away. Except for the ringing in my ear, I felt strong, easily capable of reaching the sandbar. Usually, I had very little awareness of my body, but as I continued to swim I enjoyed the sensation of feeling muscular and light. At some point I heard Seamus crying for me. The dread and panic in his voice echoed across the water. I wanted to turn around to see how far I had come, but I knew that if I saw my little brother, I would feel too guilty to continue. I didn’t look back until I reached the sandbar. They were all so small and far away. My father was standing on the shoreline, his hand to his brow, monitoring my swim. When he saw that I had reached the opposite shore he went back to his chair. I sat down on the sandbar for a couple of minutes, thinking about the one detail of the space mission that had morbidly interested me: When Apollo 11 was returning home, the spaceship had to reenter the earth’s atmosphere at a very exact angle, with no margin for error; if the spaceship missed, it would either be vaporized or boomerang back into space, with no hope of reentry. I couldn’t stop myself from dwelling on the second scenario, imagining the astronauts entombed in their spaceship, knowing they could never go home, just waiting to die.
On the other side of the sandbar was a smaller pond. I decided to explore and began tracking the bend of the shoreline. Up ahead, about twenty yards away, I saw a girl in a bikini lying on a blanket and reading a book. She waved me over. As I approached her, I noticed a NO TRESPASSING sign. I asked the girl if it was all right for me to be there.
“No problem,” she said. “That’s my stepfather’s sign. I’m not into private property. I don’t believe in being territorial.”
She was certainly older than me. Her hip arced gracefully up from her rib cage and gradually tapered down to her shapely legs. She asked me if I had a cigarette. I patted my pockets as if this might be a possibility.
“Sorry. I left them at home. I just swam across the pond.”
I asked her what she was reading. She held up her copy of On the Road.
“I’ve read that,” I said. I hadn’t liked it very much, but when she told me she was reading it for the third time, I said that it was my favorite book too. She asked me what other books I liked. I told her that in the past year I had read Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, David Copperfield, The Metamorphosis, The Catcher in the Rye, and Look Homeward, Angel. My reading habits were the one vanity I allowed myself. I was a poor student but prided myself on being able to read anything that was fiction.
She asked me what grade I was in.
“Ninth,” I said. I had just completed sixth grade. I didn’t like to lie and exaggerate—those were my mother’s traits. I wanted to model myself after my father. I believed his life was happier than my mother’s because he was more realistic and circumspect, because he didn’t hope for things he couldn’t have. But I was afraid she would send me back where I had come from if she knew I was only twelve.
She told me her name was Zelda, that she was going into the eleventh grade, and that she lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“My father lives in Cambridge too.”
“Are your parents divorced?”
“How did you know?”
“Because you told me that your father lives in Cambridge. That means you live somewhere else.”
“Oh, right,” I replied.
She laughed affectionately. “Do your parents get along?” she asked.
“Not at all.”
“Neither do mine. My mother still has credit cards in my dad’s name, and she runs up thousands of dollars in bills. Then she and my dad get into huge fights over it. My psychiatrist said that my mother’s spending habits are her way of acting out her sexual claims over my father.”
“Yeah, I think my mother has the same problem.”
Zelda asked me if I wanted to come in and get high.
“Sure . . . but what about your parents?”
“Oh, my mother and stepfather are at some moon-walk party in Provincetown. They probably won’t even come home tonight because they’ll get falling-down drunk.”
“How come they didn’t bring you with them?”
“I didn’t want to go,” she declared. “I’m against spending all that money on sending men to the moon when so many people right here on earth don’t have enough to eat.”
I told her I completely agreed with her.
Then Zelda stood up, whisking the sand off her beautiful limbs—nut brown and matted with a fine golden down. A sexual shiver went from my gut to my groin. I said that sending men to the moon was the most immoral thing our country had ever done.
Zelda’s room was on the second floor of a breezy old ship-captain’s house, low ceilinged with wide pine floorboards. She handed me one of her stepfather’s bathrobes, then pulled out a white halter top and a Band-Aid box from her bureau. She pulled on the top and I put on the bathrobe. Then I watched her reach behind and undo her bikini top. It fell to her feet, enchaining her ankles. When she bent over for it, I caught a glimpse of her breasts, white as lightbulbs against her tanned body.
“Don’t you want to get out of that wet bathing suit?” she asked me.
“Oh, sure,” I said, and shimmied out of the suit underneath the robe.
She went over to her turntable and put on a Jefferson Airplane record. Then she sat next to me on the bed as she opened the Band-Aid box and extracted a skinny cigarette pinched at the ends. She lit it and inhaled a deep mouthful of smoke, looking as if she was trying to set a record for holding her breath. Then she held the joint out to me. I imitated exactly what she had done, but the smoke scalded my lungs and I coughed it all out. We passed the joint back and forth. It only made me a little dizzy and dreamy; I was far more powerfully affected by staring at her legs, by the sexy blend of scents in the room: lotion, talcum powder, and the marijuana, sweet and pungent. I had never kissed a girl before—I expected a silvery movie screen-kiss—but when my mouth met Zelda’s, I was shocked at how wet and groping a real kiss was. She moved her tongue around inside my mouth. I slipped my hand underneath her halter top and slowly inched it upward, as if the goal was to reach her breasts without her knowing what I had in mind. When my hand finally cupped one, I squeezed and fondled it as if I were testing the ripeness of a cantaloupe. Zelda sat up and removed her top. We embraced each other, her breasts pressing against my partly exposed chest. “Oh, this feels nice,” Zelda murmured.
“Yes,” I agreed. My mouth moved to her breasts, kissing and suckling until my lips were numb. Then I remembered that I had another hand, a free hand, and I began to move it down Zelda’s belly. She caught it just as I reached the elastic of her bikini bottom.
“Bummer,” she said. “I’m having my period.”
For a moment I was perplexed as to why she was telling me this; then I caught on: Her bottom wasn’t coming off.
I wasn’t sure what came next, so I said, “My sister is having her period too.”
Zelda looked at me strangely, wondering why I would share that information with her.
“It’s probably the moon,” she said.
Then she pointed at my erection tenting the bathrobe.
“Oh, I don’t think this is because of the moon.” She smiled coyly, opened up the robe, and studied me approvingly. “Far out,” she declared.
“Thank you,” I said.
Zelda bent down and kissed the tip of my penis.
Stunned and slightly scandalized, I said, “Oh, that’s all right.
You don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.” I immediately regretted my words, wondering why I always became polite at all the wrong moments.
Zelda raised her head, looking at me through her hair, which had partly fallen over her face. Then she moved a mass of it behind her ear, a gesture that filled me with more yearning than I would have thought possible. She moved close to me and kissed my cheek. “You’re sweet,” she said, and placed her hand on me. Until that moment, my experience of sex had come from masturbating to photographs from Playboy or to certain passages in D. H. Lawrence, but that did nothing to prepare me for the wonder of the real thing. It was as if I had been studying a planet through the wrong end of a telescope and someone had simply, kindly turned it around for me. I wanted Zelda to kiss me, or at least look into my eyes, but she just watched herself stroke me. I closed my eyes, felt a tremor in the back of my legs, then heard Zelda whisper in my ear, “Yeah, come, come.” I opened my eyes and saw a pearl white thread glistening across my belly. “That was nice,” she said. I apologized for being so loud. Zelda cupped my penis, but it began to feel like a strange, woolly appendage, a little mouse corpse Zelda was cradling in her palm. As I gradually shrank up, I felt myself becoming shy. I turned over onto my side. Zelda cuddled up next to me.
“Do you feel sad?” she asked.
“No,” I replied a little defensively, but that’s exactly what I was feeling.
“It’s all right if you are,” she said. “Sometimes that happens. Afterward you get sad.”
Zelda and I spent the rest of the afternoon and night together. We played Monopoly and passed another joint back and forth. She told me that she was pretty much a prisoner at the summer-house because her mother had discovered she had been seeing a twenty-two year old Vietnam vet she had met in Harvard Square. The vet’s name was Zack, and her mother had found out about him after Zelda had withdrawn five thousand dollars of her bat mitzvah money from the bank and given it to Zack so he could privately print copies of his novel to sell in the square. She told me his novel was about a group of Vietnam vets who try to stop the capitalist war machine by bombing factories. So Zelda was grounded for the summer, only allowed off the property to see her psychiatrist, Dr. Feingold, who was spending the summer in Well-feet too. I wanted to tell her stories about myself that were just as lurid, so I told her all about my cruel and bizarre stepmother and then moved on to my mother. I was going on and on about my mother’s most lunatic episodes, but I began to sense that telling Zelda stories about my mother wasn’t enhancing my sex appeal.
For dinner we ate some cold roast chicken her parents had left for her. At ten o’clock, despite our moral objections, we turned on the television to watch the moon landing. I reached over to hold Zelda’s hand. She didn’t respond—didn’t squeeze it to signal affection, didn’t look at me meaningfully or lean against my shoulder. I understood that Zelda was only spending time with me because she was bored and lonely, but that didn’t stop me from imagining that I might go live with my father in Cambridge and that Zelda would be my girlfriend. After school, we would go to her house and have sex and on weekends we’d go to movies at the Orson Welles theater. Certainly her parents would prefer me—a nice, polite, well-read boy—to Zack, and I was certain that she would come to appreciate my refined literary sensibility. She would read Catcher in the Rye and Look Homeward, Angel and see me as I saw myself—an exquisitely sensitive and romantic composite of Holden and Eugene. I’d like to say that I was inspired by the historic event I was watching on the television: If men could actually travel to the moon, then how far-fetched could it be to believe that my father would invite me to live with him and that Zelda would be my girlfriend. But I was so involved in imagining my great new life that I was barely aware of Neil Armstrong setting one foot on the moon and declaiming his famous words. I think the moon landing had the opposite effect on Zelda—it gradually brought her back to reality. She removed her hand from mine and told me I better get going.
“Do you think your parents will come home tonight?”
She looked down and shook her head. Then I noticed tears slanting across her face. I leaned over and began kissing her; she returned my kisses, sweetly, softly. This was the type of kissing I had imagined—boyfriend and girlfriend kissing. We made out for about ten minutes. My bathrobe had fallen open, and I pressed my erection against her.
“Look what’s happened to you,” she said.
Feeling bolder, I asked, “Can you do what you did before?”
“You mean this?” she replied, and put her hand on me.
“No, before that.”
“Can you say it?”
I had no idea what the term was, no words for what I wanted her to do. I looked at her helplessly. Then she whispered in my ear, “Blow job.”
“Blow job,” I repeated.
She commanded me to lie down on the couch. Then she knelt down next to me and said, “You’re a very lucky boy. For your information, I happen to give the best blow jobs in the world. Zack told me I was better than the professional girls he had been to in Nam.” Then she put me in her mouth, sucking and yanking heedlessly, zealously, as if trying to vanquish my hard-on. When it was over, she kissed the rim of my ear and whispered that I better get going.
“I love you,” I said.
“You better go now.”
Before leaving, I wrote down my address for Zelda. I couldn’t leave with hers because I had arrived and was departing in my bathing suit. I didn’t really think she would write to me, but three months later, near the end of October, I came home from school one day and found a ten-page letter from Zelda in the mailbox. She apologized for not writing sooner, but so much had happened to her. In August, Zack had ridden down to Well-feet on his motorcycle to help her escape. When her mother and stepfather were out, she’d jumped onto Zack’s motorcycle and they’d split, heading north for the concert at Woodstock. On the New York State Thruway they got caught in a massive traffic jam. Then the rain came. She had never been so miserable in her life. She was cold, wet, hungry, exhausted, and Zack was being a complete asshole. He told her to stop complaining so much, that she sounded like a bourgeois bitch, that this was nothing compared to what he had experienced in Nam. When they finally reached the town in which the concert was being held, she had ditched Zack and just begun walking down a street. Someone was selling water for a dollar a glass, and she bought three glasses because she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for more than twelve hours. Zelda was about to buy her fourth glass when a woman in a house across the street began yelling at her neighbor for exploiting these poor young people. She told Zelda to come into her house and that she could have all the food and water she wanted. Zelda said the family was great to her, except for their twelve-year-old daughter, a girl named Mara, who seemed angry at her parents for bringing Zelda into their house. The girl sat in a chair and read a book about astrophysics as if to show Zelda how superior she was. But after dinner Zelda told the girl all about Zack and she became a little nicer. She said that Mara really tripped out when she realized Zelda was Jewish too. Zelda said it was like Mara wanted to be her but looked down on her at the same time. Mara reminded her of me: super straight, very curious, and judgmental (I was stunned that Zelda had seen right through my poses). Zelda spent the night at the family’s house, and the next day her mother drove up to get her. Her parents decided to send her to an all-girls boarding school in Connecticut, which where she was writing to me from. The school wasn’t so bad, Zelda concluded. Some of the girls were bogus, most were sex maniacs, but a couple of them were a real trip.
By the time her letter arrived, my mother’s marriage to Eddie was already bleeding out. She had married him, of course, and of course it was a calamity. Eddie had opened up his own garment factory with money borrowed from my mother, but the business was in trouble from the beginning. After a time he simply stopped going in to the city, staying in the apartment all day, not bothering to shave or change out of his bathrobe. His eyes were chronically bloodshot from his violent bouts of crying. At night, my mother whimpered and moaned on the floor. Eddie stamped around the apartment like a lovesick elephant. “Ruthie, baby,” he would cry, “please come to bed. Oh, baby, please come to bed!” Sarah and I shared a bunk bed, but she spent nearly every night at the house of her best friend, Cheryl Edelstein. I would lie on the top bunk, wanting to escape my body, praying that I would die during the night.
But Zelda’s letter saved me; it provided me with a passport out of myself when I needed it most. Every night, I reread her letter in bed, thrilled that she was safely ensconced at an all-girls boarding school, hoping and praying that days and nights would pass rapidly until I was old enough to come for her.
AFTER KISSING ZELDA GOOD-BYE ONE more time, I walked back to the sandbar. The water felt silken against my body. When I reached the middle of the pond, I turned over onto my back and looked up at the sky. At that moment I was inspired by the moon landing. Floating in the middle of that vast black disc of water, reveling in my own sweet secret, gazing up at the stars and the moon, I felt that I had traveled millions of miles away from my life and had my found my own uncharted spot in the universe, a place where anything was possible, a place where I was free from the gravity of my other life. I imagined that the astronauts felt exactly the same way, bounding weightlessly, joyfully across the surface of the moon.
My euphoria subsided as I swam closer to the house and noticed that all the lights were blazing. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that my father and Hortense might have been concerned when I didn’t return after dark, and, full of dread, I tramped up to the house. When I opened the door, I heard my father call out my name. “Yes,” I answered. My father, Hortense, and Sarah were sitting at the kitchen table. Sarah burst into tears when she saw me. My father stared at me with a mixture of anger and relief. I crossed my arms over my chest to warm myself up. I could have controlled my shivering, but I let myself vibrate violently in an attempt to quell my father’s anger.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I told him I was cold.
“Sarah, go get your brother a towel.” Then he asked me where I had been.
“I met someone. We were watching the moon landing.”
“You were watching the moon landing!” he repeated incredulously. “Do you know we called the police? Do you know there were divers looking for you in the pond?”
Sarah returned and handed me a towel. I draped it around myself but kept shivering in order not to answer.
“I mean, didn’t it occur to you to call us?”
“I don’t know the phone number here.”
“Look, I have to call that police lieutenant and tell him you’re all right.”
My father went over to the phone and dialed a number on a card. I tried to get a sympathetic look out of Sarah, but she refused to return my gaze. I heard my father telling someone that I was back and that I was all right. He said that I had been at someone’s house watching the moon landing. Then I heard him say, “Yes, all right. I understand.” He put the phone down and looked hard at me. “Do you know that I’m going to have to pay for the rescue effort? Do you know how much that’s going to cost?”
I didn’t answer.
“Hundreds. They dragged the pond. They brought in divers. This is going to cost hundreds of dollars.” Then he pointed his finger at me and said, “I’m sending the bill to your mother. She can pay for this.” He kept staring at me, expecting a response. When I remained silent, he said, “All right, Horty, let’s go to bed.”
I went into the bathroom and changed into my pajamas. Sarah was in her bed, turned to the wall, when I returned to the bedroom. No one had replaced the sheets on my bed. I lay down on the bare mattress and told Sarah that I was sorry. She didn’t answer.
“Sarah?”
“I’m never talking to you again,” she said. “For as long as I live.”
SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER, she told me what had happened. The police had found the bloody sheets when they were dragging the pond looking for my body. As a diver brought them up from the bottom of the pond, one of the men on the boat cried out that they had found something. The boat sped back to shore and a policeman laid the bloodstained sheets on the ground. Hortense said that the sheets belonged to her. A policeman asked my father if I might have tried to hurt myself. “I don’t think so,” my father said. Then he added, “I don’t know.” The policeman told my father that he might have to prepare himself for bad news and they would continue to drag the pond. Then Sarah realized she needed to explain.
“Why?” my father asked her.
“I don’t know,” Sarah replied.
“Everyone has accidents,” he said. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”
Sarah told me all this in 1986, a couple of days before her marriage to Aaron Zelman. I was treating her to a celebratory dinner. As adults we had become extremely close; we had recovered our private language, mainly through the medium of our mother. She was the main topic of our lives: her madness, her habits, her demands, her crude, sad, and comic life. As close as we had become, though, we were both discreet and shy with each other about our sex lives. But at dinner that night we got drunk and exchanged sex stories like two old friends. She told me that the best sex she ever had was on July 4, 1976, when she and Aaron had made love on the beach in East Hampton. She said he was a true maestro, so much better than any of the teenaged boys she had fucked, boys who always came too fast and kept their eyes shut. Aaron gazed into her eyes the whole time, she said. Then I boasted that I had received my first blow job the night Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.
It took Sarah a second to do the math. Then she screeched, “You got a blow job when you were twelve years old!” The people at the next table turned and looked at me.
“Sarah! Shhh,” I said.
“Seth, I never would have guessed that about you.”
I felt a little guilty, as if I had revealed to Sarah that I had access to a private bank account during our childhood.
“Well, I did have to wait seven years until my next one.”
I didn’t tell her that it took me nearly that long to get over the blow job Zelda had given me, that throughout my adolescence it cast a spell over me as potent and paralyzing as any kiss from a princess with magical powers. I replayed the act over and over in my imagination, believing that only someone who recognized me as her true soul mate would do such a thing for me. I didn’t understand, of course, that Zelda was just a mixed-up fifteen-year-old who had been left alone for the night by her parents, a girl who was just trying to feel in control of things, and the only way she knew how was through sex. Sarah demanded details. Who? How? When? I told her it happened that day in Wellfeet when I swam across the pond and everyone thought I had drowned. Sarah’s eyes filled with tears, remembering all those hours when she had thought I was dead. Then she told me about the bloody sheets. I was mortified and apologized profusely. I imagined her humiliation, her secret so publicly exposed, everyone staring at the sheets, at her, our father’s thoughtless comments. Sarah made light of it. “Seth, did you really think we could hide those sheets at the bottom of the pond and not have Hortense discover them?” We both laughed, but then she began crying. Tears welled up in my eyes too. Sarah tried to laugh my tears away, saying, “Why are you crying, asshole? Some fifteen-year-old girl was going down on you!” But of course we were crying because we were seeing ourselves as children, remembering how sad and strange our lives were during the summer of the moon landing and Woodstock, remembering how we had haplessly, hopelessly tried to rescue each other.