Enchanted Islands Page 2

  Then I tell Ainslie that Rosalie is being honored for her war work. I tell him how unfair it is that our story goes untold while hers gets inflated. Ainslie tells me in my head (not really, I’m not that divorced from reality) that the negativity I feel is jealousy, and that I need to get over it. It was part of the deal, this secrecy. Still, I wish he were here to commiserate. He was always so good at validating whatever emotion I needed corroborated. And then there is nothing more to tell him unless I start to relate the gossip from the Chelonia, which bores even me. I tell him I love him and I’ll be with him eventually, though I don’t really believe there is any kind of afterlife. I wave at Dan, and he comes over.

  “All set?”

  I nod. He bends down, not without difficulty, picks up a rock, and puts it on Ainslie’s tombstone. In contrast to the Jewish section, it is the only rock sitting atop all the marble, though there are plenty of wilted flowers. The rock looks a little like a tortoise, swaybacked.

  “Want a rock?” he asks.

  “I’ll share yours,” I say.

  He stands up and turns to me. “Ainslie would have loved this spot.”

  I nod, though I think that Ainslie would rather be alive than buried anywhere. Wouldn’t we all?

  *

  I used to be so busy, not a moment to stop and rest. And now it is moments of activity that punctuate my sedentariness. I have swimming for physical therapy two times a week. It is odd to think that I have a sensual life again after so many years of emptiness. It may seem strange, too, for a woman my age to experience physical pleasure, but I am not dead, yet. Patricia comes to my room and lays me out on my bed. I’m embarrassed when she removes my clothes, and think it’s ridiculous when she puts me in a black swimsuit. My breasts have never been much to look at, but between my crooked back and gravity, they seem to be heading to the grave faster than the rest of me.

  Then Patricia wheels me to the pool. I love the heat and the smell of chlorine. It’s usually quiet in there; only the sound of therapists whispering instruction and limbs moving through water. She straps me into the harness and then winches me down. I feel the water rise to meet me. It’s cool and silky. She unstraps me and holds me under my arms like I’m a child, but even with that point of contact I can feel the water loosen my limbs. My legs begin to kick with muscle memory. They’re free in the water. For a minute, I can pretend that I’m back in the islands, that it’s ocean tide lapping at me, not the splashes created by other residents.

  Sometimes Rosalie and I attend the morning lecture in the atrium. Today there is a woman from the San Francisco Opera, talking to us about Don Giovanni. I enjoy these lectures, most of the time. I like to see the slide shows of African safaris, take a virtual tour of the Hermitage, watch a second-rate magic show. It passes the time. Rosalie and I sit together, giggling and making trouble like schoolgirls. Once, the attendant shushed us, which set me into a laughing fit so strong they had to wheel me back to my room to calm me down.

  This woman is a singer, part of the opera’s Merola program. She is young and thin. How can anyone sing opera so young, so thin? How does she know about real love? How can that small rib cage fill an auditorium?

  She speaks about breath control. I remember seeing this opera, with Ainslie, in Golden Gate Park one summer night. He took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders, and though he finished the entire flask of gin he’d brought to the picnic, eating little as usual, he seemed sober, listening to the music attentively and humming it on the way home.

  I listen now not to the music but to the silence before the young woman presses the button on the record player. The quiet, when the music ends, is dirty with the rustling of old people’s wheezing, the clicking of the phonograph needle bobbing against the label, the distant kitchen clanging. It sounds like the islands then, so silent, more silent than you can even imagine, and yet so noisy.

  *

  They don’t send a limo; they send a young person to pick us up in her enormous car, which is covered in bits of food and children’s books.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I drive the carpool and the kids are slobs. I’m Susie.” I shake her hand; my bones rub together painfully. “Are you Rosalie Fischer?”

  “No, I’m the friend,” I say. Susie’s hair is tremendously long, down past her waist, where it grows straggly like a passionflower vine. She is dressed in a wood sprite’s flouncy skirt and a ruffled blouse with no sleeves.

  She looks disappointed. “You look so much like my aunt,” she says. “You are Mrs….?”

  “Just call me Frances, please.”

  “Okay, how are we going to do this?” She opens the front passenger door, at which I am surprised. I assumed I’d be riding in the back of the beast, which is elongated like a hearse. I decide to get in quickly before Rosalie arrives. Rosalie can take her turn on the way home. I want to see the world for once, instead of the back of Rosalie’s head.

  I heave myself onto my feet, but I’ve done it too quickly and my legs wobble. Susie grabs me at my armpits. She is surprisingly strong for a wood sprite, and she lowers me into the seat carefully.

  My fancy dress has ridden up, exposing the tops of my knee stockings and my old-lady thighs. Impossible to smooth it down. I place my jacket on top.

  I would like to see the look on Rosalie’s face when she realizes she’s sitting in the back with the compost. But I can’t turn around. After Susie greets her and gets her situated, I say, “You can have the front on the way home.”

  “Thank you, Frances,” she says, using my full name so I know she’s mad at me.

  The ceremony is to be held in the synagogue’s ballroom. When Rosalie and I enter, all the women stand to clap. I am handed a glass of wine, which I drink, and then another, which I also drink, not wanting to be rude, and then the afternoon becomes like a blanket of fog settling in a valley. I’m vaguely aware of Rosalie receiving a medal, of her posing for pictures.

  Susie sits down next to me and offers me a piece of cake. Why not? I take a huge forkful, much larger than my mouth, and laugh when it doesn’t fit.

  “What did you do during the war, Frances?” Susie asks. I want to tell her what I did, what Ainslie and I did, how I played my own small but significant role, but I have been sworn to secrecy. Still, I wonder, what would be the harm now, when so many are gone? How long until a secret is no longer a secret?

  “Oh, I was a secretary,” I say.

  “It must have been a fascinating time.” Susie helps herself to a piece of my cake, and instead of thinking she has bad manners, I enjoy the intimacy. Is this what having a daughter would have been like?

  “That’s one word for it.”

  Susie laughs. “You and Rosalie have obviously been friends for a long time. You share the same emanations.”

  I have no idea what this is. “Since we were eight years old.”

  Susie shakes her head in mock disbelief. “You must have some stories to tell.”

  “You have no idea,” I say.

  *

  Later, in bed, a slight headache from the wine, I think about Rosalie. How many nights have I done so, my own version of counting sheep? So we share the same emanations. How could we not, after all these years together? It’s always ever been me and Rosalie, so it should not surprise me that here at the end we are the two left standing, fighting our own biology. Spouse, sibling, these connections seem more tenuous than whatever emanation holds Rosalie and me together.

  Friendship between women is complicated. We can be kind to the world, but where other women are concerned, we often show our basest selves. We who have grown up in an age such as mine—where women start to wear trousers and leave off girdles, where we can have careers and be perfectly productive members of society without marrying or bearing children—have no excuse for our lack of sorority.

  As I lie here—I sleep very little—my thoughts turn to my stories. Rosalie’s have been told and live on through her children, her awards and deeds (because I will admit, now t
hat I am being honest, now that I am being charitable, she has done some good with the enormous amount of money Clarence made). But I have no children, no visible contributions. I will tell my story, then, official secrecy act be damned, and then something I’ve done will live on, and I can move on from this world.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, the second in a family of four girls and three boys. Non-farming families did not generally have so many children, but my parents were fertile. I suspect my mother got pregnant as a way of keeping my father at bay for eleven months out of the year. They hated each other. The marriage was semi-arranged in Poland; they had only met twice before their wedding. A hasty weekend and then Papa left for America. He was there a year before he saved enough to send for her and the baby, my brother Joe, the only one of us born in the old country.

  Mama took in sewing and washing. Papa stocked the shelves in a grocery store. I never heard a kind word between them. But they did encourage me to read, and made my brother take me often to the newly built public library, which is where I met Rosalie Mendler. She had beautiful tight curly hair, light brown with golden highlights. She was a small girl, and she had a funny sort of cross-eyed look that glasses later straightened out.

  My brother Joe was eager to get back—he had arranged to play a game of stickball. “Let’s go, Fanny,” he said. “Don’t dance around looking for the perfect book. Just pick one you like the cover of.”

  I ignored him, smiling shyly at the little girl, whose mother was sitting primly at a table nearby, a stack of books in front of her like a club sandwich she was going to eat. Rosalie pretended not to notice me, but I saw she picked the same book out twice.

  “I read that last year,” I said. “It’s for second graders.”

  “I’m in third,” she said, putting it back on the shelf.

  “Me too,” I said. That exhausted the conversation. I browsed the shelves some more. “Here,” I handed her Robinson Crusoe. “This is a good one for third grade.”

  “I read it,” she said. “Have you read Gulliver’s Travels?”

  “Uh-huh,” I lied. I had checked it out of the library but found it impenetrable.

  “I couldn’t get through it,” Rosalie told me. “It was soooo boring.”

  I wanted to admit my lie, but now I couldn’t see a way to do so. I had wanted to befriend this bookish girl, but I had gone about it the wrong way. I searched for something to say.

  “I liked Little Women,” I said. “I like books about girls.”

  “It was so sad, in the end,” Rosalie said. “I just about bawled my eyes out.”

  “My little sister told me I was being a baby,” I said. It felt so good to meet a kindred soul.

  “One should never apologize for sentiment,” Rosalie said, obviously quoting her mother, who looked up from her book and put her finger to her mouth to shush us. We giggled.

  Joe said, “Fanny, we’re leaving. Now.”

  I took the first book that was in reach as Joe pulled me toward the checkout desk. I turned to wave, but Rosalie already had her head in a book. When I got home, I realized I’d selected a mystery book for boys.

  I made sure to run into her again, and soon Rosalie became my constant companion. I was over at her house every day after school. We’d play pretend, or read, or sit with her mother while she brushed our hair. Rosalie’s family was from Germany, and her house was filled with books. I often stayed to supper and her mother served meat, real meat, not just chicken. Rosalie and her little brother and I got to eat all we wanted, but Mr. and Mrs. Mendler didn’t put any on their plates. When cleaning up, though, I noticed Rosalie’s mother ate any leftovers while she stood in front of the sink.

  Rosalie’s house was a sharp contrast to mine. At the Mendlers’ the radio could be heard, while at my house someone was always yelling or crying. Rosalie got her own room, with a sign saying KEEP OUT OR ELSE, whereas all the children were piled into the one bedroom in our apartment, my parents on the sofa in the living room with the newest baby. Our house was always damp with hanging laundry, though it was nice and warm in the winter—Mama had to keep the iron going.

  Rosalie’s and my parents met just once, a disaster. My parents spoke only the most rudimentary English. Plus they were dowdy and round like dumplings, and I was embarrassed of them. My father walked with a limp whose origins he refused to relate. Rosalie’s family was thin and tall, and it was only later that I understood the irony that my family’s discontent hid an undercurrent of, if not happiness, then satisfaction. Rosalie’s, meanwhile, was comprised of a thin veneer of contentment covering up a lake of disappointment and deception. Her mother’s face was lined, as if she had permanently just received bad news. When she smiled, her teeth showed, top and bottom touching each other, as if creating a white wall against intruders.

  *

  When I turned fourteen, my parents informed me that I’d had enough school, and that I would go to work. I was devastated. I loved school. Rosalie helped convince my parents that I should at least attend secretarial school, and it was there I went for the first day of what should have been my high-school career, toting paper for the typewriter and a steno pad.

  Secretarial school had me yawning by lunchtime of the first day. We sat in rows in front of typewriters and practiced putting our hands on the right keys. Then we pressed a succession of vowels, AAAA, EEEE, IIII, etc. Consonants would have to wait for tomorrow. Steno class was equally as uninspiring. First we were to practice handwriting. Mine had always been abominable, no matter how steady I held my hand. The teacher, an overweight man whose pants were held up by suspenders, strode up and down the rows, clucking or cooing at our lines of letters.

  Class was dismissed at noon, so I walked across town to Rosalie’s high school to wait for her. The unimaginatively named Central High School was an enormous building that looked more like a bank or a government office. I opened one of the big doors and went inside in search of a bubbler, and just then a bell rang. Students streamed out of classrooms, a storm moving in from Lake Superior, fast and windy. I got swept up in the crowd and found myself in a classroom. Before I could leave, the teacher closed the door and began to take roll.

  The perspiration under my arms began to spread as the teacher moved down the list. The names were a mix of ethnicities, German and Hungarian and Finnish and Irish and Polish, and she got to the end of the list and asked, “Is there anyone whose name I haven’t called?”

  Five or six students raised their hands.

  “Please come up and add your name to the roster,” the teacher said. So I stood up with the rest of them and added “Frances Frankowski” in my spindly handwriting. Then I sat back down and took out my steno pad. Everyone else had a composition notebook.

  The teacher wrote her name on the board: Mrs. Hanson. I copied it down in the book. Then she added “History.” I copied that down too.

  “What is history?” she wrote under her name. Then she turned around. “Well, class?” she asked. “What is history?”

  A boy in front raised his hand. Mrs. Hanson nodded at him. “Say your name first,” she said.

  His voice broke as he spoke, but Mrs. Hanson suppressed the giggles with a look. “Johnson, Peter. History is what happened in the past.”

  Mrs. Hanson nodded, considering the answer. “Good. What’s the oldest history book you can think of?”

  A small blond girl raised her hand, sitting on the edge of her chair. “Joanne Macintosh,” she said. “I mean, Macintosh, Joanne. The Bible.” I happened to know that there were books written by Greeks and Romans much older than the Bible, but I didn’t correct her.

  “Okay,” said Mrs. Hanson. “How do you know it’s so old?”

  “Because God wrote it,” she said proudly.

  “I see,” said Mrs. Hanson. The words hung in the air for a minute. Then a girl I recognized from the neighborhood raised her hand.

  “Actually, wasn’t it written by Moses? And then the other books
in it were written by the people who have their names on them?”

  “Very good. What was your name?”

  “Sohnen, Jessica.”

  “Miss?” A boy who was too tall for his desk raised his hand and spoke at the same time. “I don’t want to be impudent, but isn’t there separation of church and state?”

  There was a murmur of agreement from the class.

  “Your name,” Mrs. Hanson demanded.

  “Järvi? Lars?” He spoke tentatively.

  Mrs. Hanson considered. I tried to decide how old she was. Young, maybe in her twenties. Did she have children, I wondered. She wore a simple gold band around her ring finger, but no other jewelry.

  “You’re right to bring it up,” she said, and I could see Lars sag with relief. “But we’re talking about the Bible as a popular book, not as a religious treatise. Let’s go back to Jessica. Where does the Bible start?”

  “Sohnen, Jessica,” she said again. The class laughed and Jessica’s face grew red. “Genesis,” she added in a small voice. “In the beginning.”

  “Ah,” Mrs. Hanson said, as though this were news to her. “What day, according to the Bible as a text, was man created?”

  Two dozen hands went up. Mrs. Hanson called on someone in the back row. “The sixth,” he said, not providing his name.

  Mrs. Hanson said nothing. “I’m waiting for you to draw a conclusion,” she said, after a while. “That’s what this class will be about, your conclusions rather than mine.”

  The class was silent. I understood what she wanted to say. I had already come across this paradox in synagogue, and I began to think maybe I could express it. Before I could convince myself not to do it, my hand shot up.

  “Frankowski, Frances, but everyone calls me Fanny,” I said. “Since the Bible is writing about a time before there was man, man obviously was not present to see creation. So how does man know about it?” Now that I was on a roll, I doubt much but an earthquake would have stopped me. “And there are books that are older than the Bible.”