Enchanted Islands Read online

  “Good, Fanny.” Mrs. Hanson turned to the blackboard and I flushed with pride. She wrote “perspective” on the board. Then she wrote, “History is the oral or written interpretation of the past.” She underlined interpretation. I wrote this down. “Very good. We’ll be studying the Crusades first.” She wrote “Crusades, 1095–1291” on the board. “Now who can tell me,” she perched on the edge of her desk, “why the Crusades happened?”

  I wished that stenography class had actually covered stenography because I wrote furiously to keep up with Mrs. Hanson’s bombardment of facts. When the bell rang I had filled three pages with notes. I followed Jessica out the door and down the hall. She went into a classroom and I sat down next to her. “We have biology together too?” she asked me.

  “I suppose we do!” I said, enthusiastically.

  But my career as a hidden high-school student hit a roadblock. Mr. Spark read the roll, and told everyone who wasn’t on it to go straight to the office to register. I followed the other five students out the door and around the corner to the main office, where, in order to not make waves, I registered as a student.

  Rosalie was delighted when she found out. She told me that I shouldn’t feel guilty about deceiving my parents. I could go to secretarial school just often enough to be counted. I could buy a book and practice on my own. I could use Rosalie’s family’s typewriter to practice. And then I would receive my certificate and my high-school diploma. It would be difficult but she would help me. I threw my arms around her, smelling her hair—wood smoke and fried potatoes.

  *

  My parents didn’t find out about high school until the following year. I had passed my secretarial exam, but told them I had one more year to earn an extra certificate. Then came a letter to the house from Central High containing my report card (all As, I’ll have you know) and I wasn’t home to intercept it. Though my parents were barely literate and spoke little English, they knew enough to figure out my ruse.

  My mother sat at the table crying and sewing. She sewed constantly, while cooking, bathing the younger kids; it would not have surprised me to wake in the middle of the night to find her sewing in her sleep. My father paced the floor. Pretty soon the people below us would hit the ceiling with a broom.

  “How could you do this to us, lie?” my father asked.

  I said nothing.

  “Fifteen years we’ve taken care of you,” he continued. “Now it’s your turn to help.”

  I looked around the small room. From the kitchen I could see into the living room where my parents slept and into the girls’ bedroom. I could smell the ache of cabbage on the stove. The wood floor, swept too many times, strained to hold our furniture. I knew then that I would not be living in this apartment much longer. I thought that I was moving on to bigger and better things. I know now that I was just moving on.

  *

  Rosalie hid me at her house in plain sight for three days before her mother realized it. Rosalie ruled the roost chez Mendler. Her parents deferred to her in almost all cases, catering to her whims. Sometimes she tested how far she could push them, demanding money for sweets or forcing her mother to make an additional dinner when the one she prepared was not to Rosalie’s liking. It was curious, because to everyone else Rosalie was respectful and kind, sycophantic; my parents thought she was snobby. I found this side of her distasteful, but there were things she didn’t always like about me, she said, one night in a bull session, where we critiqued each other’s shortcomings. I was too judgmental, too rigid. I never dreamed, never let myself be a silly young woman. So I let her spoiledness be the thing I didn’t like about her. And the fact that she was always late to whatever we’d planned.

  When I showed up for dinner for the third straight evening, Mrs. Mendler finally caught on. I explained why I couldn’t go home.

  “Dear, you need to respect your parents’ wishes.”

  “I can’t be a secretary,” I said. “I want to go to school.”

  “There are lots of things I want,” Mrs. Mendler said. “But there’s a thing called duty and we need to respect it.”

  She smiled her white wall smile. Her tone was so stern, so matter-of-fact, that I returned home, quit school, got a job, and did what I was supposed to do.

  *

  I went to work for a business at the local port, answering correspondence and fetching coffee. The boss was impressed with my typing skills, I think. In any event he stood over me quite frequently while I typed. It couldn’t have been to look down my blouse, I don’t think. I was always buttoned up, and often wore a cravat, which was the style.

  I saw Rosalie mostly on weekends, but once, on a day with no school, Rosalie came to meet me for lunch, and we ate on a bench by the port, sticky buns that she had purchased on the way over, still warm from the oven.

  I stayed at her house most Saturday nights. My parents were relieved—one less mouth to feed one night a week. Rosalie was in love with a boy from school, Melvin Shumwitz, a basketball star and one of the only Jewish boys in her class, who did not notice the adoration of the brainy girl in braids whose chest was still flat. On Saturday evenings, Rosalie and I would read the women’s magazines, especially the advice columns. “My wife don’t cook good, what should I do?” “How do I get a man to notice me?” “Would you marry a girl with one leg shorter than the other?”

  Rosalie always answered the questions by supposing that she and Melvin were an old married couple. “Well, when Melvin proposed to me, he was on one knee at the top of the Empire State Building.”

  “In New York?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Yes, in New York, where we both live. I am a famous Broadway actress and Melvin is…a banker.”

  “Oh a banker. With his marks.” I scoffed.

  “Yes, a banker.” Rosalie was adamant.

  After she drifted off to sleep, I pored over her schoolbooks, reading the notes she took in class with her meticulous handwriting and copying down the assignments. I read the books she read, Herodotus and Dreiser, Defoe and Eliot, staying up late into the night, tilting the lamp away from her side of the bed so she wouldn’t notice. But one night, after a couple of months, I saw that there were two copies of each of her schoolbooks, the second with the dog-eared corners of secondhand use, and I understood that one set was mine, to read alongside her.

  *

  Sometimes, on Sundays, a storm gathered around Rosalie. She would wake up with her usual good humor, but directly after breakfast, often with crumbs still hovering around her mouth, she would begin to slink away emotionally, until noon brought with it a blank stare. On these days, her parents and I left at lunchtime, Rosalie’s melancholy unspoken of. Rosalie’s only chore in her house, apparently, was to deliver the rent to the landlord every week. I never saw her do a dish, or sweep, or hang laundry. When her parents left, she’d tell me I had to go, shooing me out the door. Occasionally they took me with them for tea or a walk. More frequently, I went home to help my mother.

  One Sunday morning, Rosalie shook me awake and asked me to pretend to go home when her parents left. “But come back right away, all right?”

  “All right,” I said, too drowsy to question her.

  We ate breakfast as usual. Rosalie picked at her toast and barely sipped her tea, fidgeting around in her seat like she had to use the toilet. Her parents took no notice, reading the Sunday paper, wordlessly exchanging sections. Her little brother scanned the funny pages, laughing at the stupid jokes.

  “Well,” her father said finally. “It’s a nice day. Let’s go look at the ships. Fanny? You up for it? Rosalie, you’ll wait for the landlord.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s a busy week and my mother could use some help with the ironing.” It occurred to me how odd their family was, the parents and brother going out, never asking Rosalie if she wanted to come, almost like Rosalie had to stay home as punishment for some transgression. I tried to meet her father’s eyes, but he turned back to the paper.

  “Ev
erybody up and ready,” her mother said brightly. Had I never noticed the false levity in her voice, a stage actress playing the role of mother? “Getting late.”

  Rosalie closed the door behind us and I accompanied her family to the end of Lake Street. I said goodbye and turned my customary right up the hill. But once they were out of sight, I doubled back, running to Rosalie’s house.

  She was pacing the first floor, wringing her hands like Lady Macbeth. She was so agitated that I didn’t want to upset her by asking what was wrong. When there was a knock on the door, she jumped.

  “Here,” she handed me an envelope, whispering. “Open the door just wide enough to give it to him. Pretend you don’t speak English.”

  Even back then I was motivated by the excitement of espionage, and I should have learned that it is inevitably disappointing. I opened the door a bit. Their landlord was an Irishman with thick hands. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. Had he ever washed his hair? At his side rested a large well-worn leather case.

  “Where is she, then?” he asked.

  I answered in my best thick Polish accent. “Out,” I said. “Family is out. Rent here. Here, rent.”

  He looked disappointed, took the envelope, and went on his way. “Stupid Polack,” I heard him say. “Dumb Mick,” I thought back.

  I closed the door and watched as Rosalie’s face transformed into a smile. “Thanks, Fan. You’re a real pal.”

  “Always,” I said, not sure what I’d done.

  I find it hard to believe now that I didn’t understand what was happening. But I was so sheltered and so young. Most of my waking thoughts were about myself. Would I grow curvy? Would I have the courage to quit my job and run away from home? What should I do with my limp, drab hair?

  When I thought about Rosalie—which I did, in my defense, often—I decided she was simply irrational and showed signs of nervous behavior that she would most likely outgrow.

  *

  Though we all anxiously awaited signs of maturity, Rosalie had a desire to start menstruation that bordered on the obsessive. I was scared as well as excited—from what I’d heard at school, the monthly was unpleasant at best, messy and uncomfortable. I worried it would hurt, that it would start while I was at work and I couldn’t do anything about it. But Rosalie scanned her underwear each day for signs, took every upset stomach as a precursor to cramps. When the pain would go away, she’d burst into tears, so forlorn that nothing I could say would calm her.

  Right after my fifteenth birthday, it finally happened to me, a bright spot of blood when I got home from work. When I whispered to my mother what had happened (I didn’t know the Yiddish or the Polish; I told her I was passing blood), she knocked on my forehead three times. Then she wordlessly showed me how to fasten the bulky pads to the belt around my waist, and I felt like a child with a diaper, the sensation of having liquid seep out of me strange.

  When I told her that weekend, Rosalie began to cry. I was angry that she was so selfish. Couldn’t she celebrate my womanhood with me? But she refused to speak, indeed refused to come out of her room, so I ate dinner with her parents without her, and then went home to spend the night without my books.

  I considered not going to see her the following weekend. I was angry with her and wanted her to know it. But the lure of the books was strong—I wanted to hear what her teacher said in the lecture about the Industrial Revolution, and I wanted to finish Pride and Prejudice.

  So I arrived at her house at our typical time, and Rosalie received me like nothing had changed. We ate, then listened to a radio program, though Rosalie was silent. Then she went to bed while I stayed up reading her notebooks.

  I thought she’d gone to sleep but her voice emerged, reed-thin, from between the covers. “Fanny? What’s it like?”

  I closed the notebook. I knew exactly what she was talking about. I tried to explain to her how it drips out over several days, describing the diaper padding to her.

  She nodded at me, sitting up. “But is it different?”

  “Different than what?”

  “I mean…” I heard the sharp intake of her breath. “Are you different?”

  “Is that what you’re worried about?” I asked. “I’m the same me. I’m your friend, always, Rosie.” She hated when I called her that.

  She waved her hand at me like I was a silly fly. “It’s not that. I want to be different. I want to be…” She let the thought trail off.

  “We will be,” I said. “We’ll grow bosoms and get boys and get married and everything.”

  Rosalie smiled sadly, as though she meant the opposite.

  *

  Rosalie was not far behind me in becoming a woman. It may have been the only thing I ever beat her to, and I can’t say that this didn’t give me a small satisfaction, which I took pains to conceal but probably didn’t do a very good job of. When she was finally “visited,” as we used to say, she met me at the door bright-eyed with happiness, and we sang until her mother banged on the door and told us to keep it down. I didn’t understand her elation—so far it had been the curse its name promised to be—but her excitement was infectious.

  The next morning, Rosalie woke early, and I heard voices from downstairs. She, her mother, and her father were having a heated discussion. Occasionally her father’s voice would emerge from the floorboards, loud and angry, but I could not make out the words, and Rosalie’s mother hushed him.

  When I came downstairs, Rosalie was in her Sunday funk, and I understood that I was to leave directly after breakfast.

  “Would you like to come with us?” her mother asked. “Rosalie has to wait for the landlord.”

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Mendler.” Rosalie avoided my gaze.

  She walked me to the door. “Want me to stay and do it?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, her tone so icy that I let it drop. I thought she was sore that her family left her, and I could see how dealing with that man would put anyone in a bad mood, but Rosalie was always so dramatic that I assumed she was exaggerating her displeasure for effect.

  The following Saturday, I found that Rosalie’s mood was still sour. She’d stayed in bed most of the week, with a vague complaint of a headache and stomach pains. Her mother called the doctor (a luxury in which no one in my family had ever indulged) but he was unconcerned.

  I sat by her side. Her mother said she’d barely spoken or eaten in the last few days. “Rosie,” I said, “you have to tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I can’t,” she said hoarsely. “There aren’t words for it.” I was hurt that she wouldn’t confide in me.

  I nursed her that night, sitting on the bed and reading to her from The Castle of Otranto. Every so often she sighed, and once she got up to use the toilet and drink some juice.

  When she woke up the next day, Rosalie was close to her normal, if morose, Sunday self. She came downstairs in her dressing gown for breakfast, and I completed her English assignment for her (a paragraph on symbols of nature in Dickens).

  “I’ll go along home then,” I said, after the breakfast chatter had died down.

  “You needn’t go yet,” said Rosalie’s mother, looking up at the wall clock.

  “I have things to do,” I replied, “since Rosalie is feeling better.”

  Rosalie heard the chill in my voice. She walked me to the front door, where a cold wind forced its way between the door and the jamb.

  “You really are my best friend,” she said. “And no one could ever have a better one. Just remember that you’ve always been a perfect friend to me.”

  “You sound like you’re dying,” I said, anxious to lighten her tone. She hugged me. The display of affection made me blush.

  “We’re all dying,” she said. “Every moment.”

  “Thanks for the reminder,” I said. And then I walked down her front steps in ignorance.

  *

  Part of my worry was that I wasn’t good enough for Rosalie’s family. After all, we were Eastern European immigrant
s. The Germans who arrived earlier were our superiors in every way, a sentiment the Germans and we both shared. They were educated, wealthy. They spoke impeccable English, even those who just came over, and often worked the same jobs they had held back in Germany—professor, banker, lawyer, pharmacist. Even the ones who practiced a trade had their own shops and often hired others to work in them.

  We Poles, on the other hand, were peasants. Most of my parents’ generation couldn’t read. Someone had to teach us to sign our own names. And we barely scraped by, taking in washing, like my mother, or serving as maids. The men worked in the factories or on the docks, or, like my father, stacking stock, manual labor. Our English was stilted, clipped, and simplistic. And we were squat, dark people, with curly hair and brown eyes (I was the anomalous straight-haired giant). The Germans were tall, often blond, and held themselves erect, lithe like the Westerners they were. Yes, they deigned to help us, monetarily, in the name of our shared religion, but they were the beneficent ones, we the supplicants.

  Rosalie’s family never treated me that way, kindly looking the other way when my table manners were not up to snuff, or I encountered a new vegetable that I approached in the wrong way (artichokes come to mind—at some point I’ll be able to tell without blushing how I tried to eat the whole leaf, struggling with my knife and fork). But I worried that their goodwill had an end date, when they would no longer tolerate their Tarzan experiment and return me to my natural habitat to be raised by apes.

  Naturally, I placed Rosalie’s family on a pedestal. They were wealthier than we were, better-dressed, better-spoken, much better-fed. They placed a premium on education; they encouraged reading. Around the table, they had active political discussions, opinions on the Zionist movement’s president, David Wolffsohn, and whether or not Germany should intervene in the revolution in Turkey. It was expected that their children attend university, whereas no amount of begging could persuade my parents to let me reenroll in high school. I felt sometimes that I had been switched as a baby at the hospital, that somewhere my real parents were stuck with a short, frizzy-haired child, wondering where on earth she had come from.