2

The next day I held Brenda’s glasses for her once again, this time not as momentary servant but as afternoon guest; or perhaps as both, which still was an improvement. She wore a black tank suit and went barefooted, and among the other women, with their Cuban heels and boned-up breasts, their knuckle-sized rings, their straw hats, which resembled immense wicker pizza plates and had been purchased, as I heard one deeply tanned woman rasp, “from the cutest little shvartze when we docked at Barbados,” Brenda among them was elegantly simple, like a sailor’s dream of a Polynesian maiden, albeit one with prescription sun glasses and the last name of Patimkin. She brought a little slurp of water with her when she crawled back towards the pool’s edge, and at the edge she grabbed up with her hands and held my ankles, tightly and wet.

“Come in,” she said up to me, squinting. “We’ll play.”

“Your glasses,” I said.

“Oh break the goddam things. I hate them.”

“Why don’t you have your eyes fixed?”

“There you go again.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll give them to Doris.”

Doris, in the surprise of the summer, had gotten past Prince Andrey’s departure from his wife, and now sat brooding, not, it turned out, over the lonely fate of poor Princess Liza, but at the skin which she had lately discovered to be peeling off her shoulders.

“Would you watch Brenda’s glasses?” I said.

“Yes.” She fluffed little scales of translucent flesh into the air. “Damn it.”

I handed her the glasses.

“Well, for God’s sake,” she said, “I’m not going to hold them. Put them down. I’m not her slave.”

“You’re a pain in the ass, you know that, Doris?” Sitting there, she looked a little like Laura Simpson Stolowitch, who was, in fact, walking somewhere off at the far end of the pool, avoiding Brenda and me because (I liked to think) of the defeat Brenda had handed her the night before; or maybe (I didn’t like to think) because of the strangeness of my presence. Regardless, Doris had to bear the weight of my indictment of both Simp and herself.

“Thank you,” she said. “After I invite you up for the day.”

“That was yesterday.”

“What about last year?”

“That’s right, your mother told you last year too—invite Esther’s boy so when he writes his parents they won’t complain we don’t look after him. Every summer I get my day.”

“You should have gone with them. That’s not our fault. You’re not our charge,” and when she said it, I could just tell it was something she’d heard at home, or received in a letter one Monday mail, after she’d returned to Northampton from Stowe, or Dartmouth, or perhaps from that weekend when she’d taken a shower with her boyfriend in Lowell House.

“Tell your father not to worry. Uncle Aaron, the sport. I’ll take care of myself,” and I ran on back to the pool, ran into a dive, in fact, and came up like a dolphin beside Brenda, whose legs I slid upon with my own.

“How’s Doris?” she said.

“Peeling,” I said. “She’s going to have her skin fixed.”

“Stop it,” she said, and dove down beneath us till I felt her clamping her hands on the soles of my feet. I pulled back and then down too, and then, at the bottom, no more than six inches above the wiggling black lines that divided the pool into lanes for races, we bubbled a kiss into each other’s lips. She was smiling there, at me, down at the bottom of the swimming pool of the Green Lane Country Club. Way above us, legs shimmied in the water and a pair of fins skimmed greenly by: my cousin Doris could peel away to nothing for all I cared, my Aunt Gladys have twenty feedings every night, my father and mother could roast away their asthma down in the furnace of Arizona, those penniless deserters—I didn’t care for anything but Brenda. I went to pull her towards me just as she started fluttering up; my hand hooked on to the front of her suit and the cloth pulled away from her. Her breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them. Then, in a moment, it was the sun who kissed us both, and we were out of the water, too pleased with each other to smile. Brenda shook the wetness of her hair onto my face and with the drops that touched me I felt she had made a promise to me about the summer, and, I hoped, beyond.

“Do you want your sun glasses?”

“You’re close enough to see,” she said. We were under a big blue umbrella, side-by-side on two chaise longues, whose plastic covers sizzled against our suits and flesh; I turned my head to look at Brenda and smelled that pleasant little burning odor in the skin of my shoulders. I turned back up to the sun, as did she, and as we talked, and it grew hotter and brighter, the colors splintered under my closed eyelids.

“This is all very fast,” she said.

“Nothing’s happened,” I said softly.

“No. I guess not. I sort of feel something has.”

“In eighteen hours?”

“Yes. I feel … pursued,” she said after a moment.

“You invited me, Brenda.”

“Why do you always sound a little nasty to me?”

“Did I sound nasty? I don’t mean to. Truly.”

“You do! You invited me, Brenda. So what?” she said. “That isn’t what I mean anyway.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing. You’re so automatic about it, you don’t even mean it.”

“Now you’re being nasty to me,” I said.

“No. Just stating the facts. Let’s not argue. I like you.” She turned her head and looked as though she too paused a second to smell the summer on her own flesh. “I like the way you look.” She saved it from embarrassing me with that factual tone of hers.

“Why?” I said.

“Where did you get those fine shoulders? Do you play something?”

“No,” I said. “I just grew up and they came with me.”

“I like your body. It’s fine.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

“You like mine, don’t you?”

“No,” I said.

“Then it’s denied you,” she said.

I brushed her hair flat against her ear with the back of my hand and then we were silent a while.

“Brenda,” I said, “you haven’t asked me anything about me.”

“How you feel? Do you want me to ask you how you feel?”

“Yes,” I said, accepting the back door she gave me, though probably not for the same reasons she had offered it.

“How do you feel?”

“I want to swim.”

“Okay,” she said.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in the water. There were eight of those long lines painted down the length of the pool and by the end of the day I think we had parked for a while in every lane, close enough to the dark stripes to reach out and touch them. We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them—at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away. So we moved back and forth from chairs to water, from talk to silence, and considering my unshakable edginess with Brenda, and the high walls of ego that rose buttresses and all between her and her knowledge of herself, we managed pretty well.

At about four o’clock, at the bottom of the pool, Brenda suddenly wrenched away from me and shot up to the surface. I shot up after her.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

First she whipped the hair off her forehead. Then she pointed a hand down towards the base of the pool. “My brother,” she said, coughing some water free inside her.

And suddenly, like a crew-cut Proteus rising from the sea, Ron Patimkin emerged from the lower depths we’d just inhabited and his immensity was before us.

“Hey, Bren,” he said, and pushed a palm flat into the water so that a small hurricane beat up against Brenda and me.

“What are you so happy about?” she said.

“The Yankees took two.”

“Are we going to have Mickey Mantle for dinner?” she said. “When the Yankees win,” she said to me, treading so easily she seemed to have turned the chlorine to marble beneath her, “we set an extra place for Mickey Mantle.”

“You want to race?” Ron asked.

“No, Ronald. Go race alone.”

Nobody had as yet said a word about me. I treaded unobtrusively as I could, as a third party, unintroduced, will step back and say nothing, awaiting the amenities. I was tired, however, from the afternoon’s sport, and wished to hell brother and sister would not tease and chat much longer. Fortunately Brenda introduced me. “Ronald, this is Neil Klugman. This is my brother, Ronald Patimkin.”

Of all things there in the fifteen feet water, Ron reached out his hand to shake. I returned the shake, not quite as monumentally as he apparently expected; my chin slipped an inch into the water and all at once I was exhausted.

“Want to race?” Ron asked me good-naturedly.

“Go ahead, Neil, race with him. I want to call home and tell them you’re coming to dinner.”

“Am I? Ill have to call my aunt. You didn’t say anything. My clothes—”

“We dine au naturel.”

“What?” Ronald said.

“Swim, baby,” Brenda said to him and it ached me some when she kissed him on the face.

I begged out of the race, saying I had to make a phone call myself, and once upon the tiled blue border of the pool, looked back to see Ron taking the length in sleek, immense strokes. He gave one the feeling that after swimming the length of the pool a half dozen times he would have earned the right to drink its contents; I imagined he had, like my Uncle Max, a colossal thirst and a gigantic bladder.

Aunt Gladys did not seem relieved when I told her she’d have only three feedings to prepare that night. “Fancy-shmancy” was all she said to me on the phone.

We did not eat in the kitchen; rather, the six of us—Brenda, myself, Ron, Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin, and Brenda’s little sister, Julie—sat around the dining room table, while the maid, Carlota, a Navaho-faced Negro who had little holes in her ears but no earrings, served us the meal. I was seated next to Brenda, who was dressed in what was au naturel for her: Bermudas, the close ones, white polo shirt, tennis sneakers and white socks. Across from me was Julie, ten, round-faced, bright, who before dinner, while the other little girls on the street had been playing with jacks and boys and each other, had been on the back lawn putting golf balls with her father. Mr. Patimkin reminded me of my father, except that when he spoke he did not surround each syllable with a wheeze. He was tall, strong, ungrammatical, and a ferocious eater. When he attacked his salad—after drenching it in bottled French dressing—the veins swelled under the heavy skin of his forearm. He ate three helpings of salad, Ron had four, Brenda and Julie had two, and only Mrs. Patimkin and I had one each. I did not like Mrs. Patimkin, though she was certainly the handsomest of all of us at the table. She was disastrously polite to me, and with her purple eyes, her dark hair, and large, persuasive frame, she gave me the feeling of some captive beauty, some wild princess, who has been tamed and made the servant to the king’s daughter—who was Brenda.

Outside, through the wide picture window, I could see the back lawn with its twin oak trees. I say oaks, though fancifully, one might call them sporting-goods trees. Beneath their branches, like fruit dropped from their limbs, were two irons, a golf ball, a tennis can, a baseball bat, basketball, a first-baseman’s glove, and what was apparently a riding crop. Further back, near the shrubs that bounded the Patimkin property and in front of the small basketball court, a square red blanket, with a white O stitched in the center, looked to be on fire against the green grass. A breeze must have blown outside, for the net on the basket moved; inside we ate in the steady coolness of air by Westinghouse. It was a pleasure, except that eating among those Brobdingnags, I felt for quite a while as though four inches had been clipped from my shoulders, three inches from my height, and for good measure, someone had removed my ribs and my chest had settled meekly in towards my back.

There was not much dinner conversation; eating was heavy and methodical and serious, and it would be just as well to record all that was said in one swoop, rather than indicate the sentences lost in the passing of food, the words gurgled into mouthfuls, the syntax chopped and forgotten in heapings, spillings, and gorgings.

TO RON: When’s Harriet calling?

RON: Five o’clock.

JULIE: It was five o’clock.

RON: Their time.

JULIE: Why is it that it’s earlier in Milwaukee? Suppose you took a plane back and forth all day. You’d never get older.

BRENDA: That’s right, sweetheart.

MRS. P.: What do you give the child misinformation for? Is that why she goes to school?

BRENDA: I don’t know why she goes to school.

MR. P. (lovingly): College girl.

RON: Where’s Carlota? Carlota!

MRS. P.: Carlota, give Ronald more.

CARLOTA (calling): More what?

RON: Everything.

MR. P.: Me too.

MRS. P.: They’ll have to roll you on the links.

MR. P. (putting his shirt up and slapping his black, curved belly): What are you talking about? Look at that?

RON (yanking his T-shirt up): Look at this.

BRENDA: (to me) Would you care to bare your middle?

ME (the choir boy again): No.

MRS. P.: That’s right, Neil.

ME: Yes. Thank you.

CARLOTA (over my shoulder, like an unsummoned spirit): Would you like more?

ME: No.

MR. P.: He eats like a bird.

JULIE: Certain birds eat a lot.

BRENDA: Which ones?

MRS. P.: Let’s not talk about animals at the dinner table. Brenda, why do you encourage her?

RON: Where’s Carlota, I gotta play tonight.

MR. P.: Tape your wrist, don’t forget.

MRS. P.: Where do you live, Bill?

BRENDA: Neil.

MRS. P.: Didn’t I say Neil?

JULIE: You said “Where do you live, Bill?”

MRS. P.: I must have been thinking of something else.

RON: I hate tape. How the hell can I play in tape?

JULIE: Don’t curse.

MRS. P.: THAT’S RIGHT.

MR. P.: What is Mantle batting now?

JULIE: Three twenty-eight.

RON: Three twenty-five.

JULIE: Eight!

RON: Five, jerk! He got three for four in the second game.

JULIE: Four for four.

RON: That was an error, Minoso should have had it.

JULIE: I didn’t think so.

BRENDA (to me): See?

MRS. P.: See what?

BRENDA: I was talking to Bill.

JULIE: Neil.

MR. P.: Shut up and eat.

MRS. P.: A little less talking, young lady.

JULIE: I didn’t say anything.

BRENDA: She was talking to me, sweetie.

MR. P.: What’s this she business. Is that how you call your mother? What’s dessert?

The phone rings, and though we are awaiting dessert, the meal seems at a formal end, for Ron breaks for his room, Julie shouts “Harriet!” and Mr. Patimkin is not wholly successful in stifling a belch, though the failure even more than the effort ingratiates him to me. Mrs. Patimkin is directing Carlota not to mix the milk silverware and the meat silverware again, and Carlota is eating a peach while she listens; under the table I feel Brenda’s fingers tease my calf. I am full.

*  *  *  *  *

We sat under the biggest of the oak trees while out on the basketball court Mr. Patimkin played five and two with Julie. In the driveway Ron was racing the motor of the Volkswagen. “Will somebody please move the Chrysler out from behind me?” he called angrily. “I’m late as it is.”

“Excuse me,” Brenda said, getting up.

“I think I’m behind the Chrysler,” I said.

“Let’s go,” she said.

We backed the cars out so that Ron could hasten on to his game. Then we reparked them and went back to watching Mr. Patimkin and Julie.

“I like your sister,” I said.

“So do I,” she said. “I wonder what she’ll turn out to be.”

“Like you,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Better probably.” And then she added, “or maybe worse. How can you tell? My father’s nice to her, but I’ll give her another three years with my mother … Bill,” she said, musingly.

“I didn’t mind that,” I said. “She’s very beautiful, your mother.”

“I can’t even think of her as my mother. She hates me. Other girls, when they pack in September, at least their mothers help them. Not mine. She’ll be busy sharpening pencils for Julie’s pencil box while I’m carrying my trunk around upstairs. And it’s so obvious why. It’s practically a case study.”

“Why?”

“She’s jealous. It’s so corny I’m ashamed to say it. Do you know my mother had the best back-hand in New Jersey? Really, she was the best tennis player in the state, man or woman. You ought to see the pictures of her when she was a girl. She was so healthy-looking. But not chubby or anything. She was soulful, truly. I love her in those pictures. Sometimes I say to her how beautiful the pictures are. I even asked to have one blown up so I could have it at school. We have other things to do with our money, young lady, than spend it on old photographs.’ Money! My father’s up to here with it, but whenever I buy a coat you should hear her. ‘You don’t have to go to Bonwit’s, young lady, Ohrbach’s has the strongest fabrics of any of them.’ Who wants a strong fabric! Finally I get what I want, but not till she’s had a chance to aggravate me. Money is a waste for her. She doesn’t even know how to enjoy it. She still thinks we live in Newark.”

“But you get what you want,” I said.

“Yes. Him,” and she pointed out to Mr. Patimkin who had just swished his third straight set shot through the basket to the disgruntlement, apparently, of Julie, who stamped so hard at the ground that she raised a little dust storm around her perfect young legs.

“He’s not too smart but he’s sweet at least. He doesn’t treat my brother the way she treats me. Thank God, for that. Oh, I’m tired of talking about them. Since my freshman year I think every conversation I’ve ever had has always wound up about my parents and how awful it is. It’s universal. The only trouble is they don’t know it.”

From the way Julie and Mr. Patimkin were laughing now, out on the court, no problem could ever have seemed less universal; but, of course, it was universal for Brenda, more than that, cosmic—it made every cashmere sweater a battle with her mother, and her life, which, I was certain, consisted to a large part of cornering the market on fabrics that felt soft to the skin, took on the quality of a Hundred Years’ War …

I did not intend to allow myself such unfaithful thoughts, to line up with Mrs. Patimkin while I sat beside Brenda, but I could not shake from my elephant’s brain that she-still-thinks-we-live-in-Newark remark. I did not speak, however, fearful that my tone would shatter our post-dinner ease and intimacy. It had been so simple to be intimate with water pounding and securing all our pores, and later, with the sun heating them and drugging our senses, but now, in the shade and the open, cool and clothed on her own grounds, I did not want to voice a word that would lift the cover and reveal that hideous emotion I always felt for her, and is the underside of love. It will not always stay the underside—but I am skipping ahead.

Suddenly, little Julie was upon us. “Want to play?” she said to me. “Daddy’s tired.”

“C’mon,” Mr. Patimkin called. “Finish for me.”

I hesitated—I hadn’t held a basketball since high school—but Julie was dragging at my hand, and Brenda said, “Go ahead.”

Mr. Patimkin tossed the ball towards me while I wasn’t looking and it bounced off my chest, leaving a round dust spot, like the shadow of a moon, on my shirt. I laughed, insanely.

“Can’t you catch?” Julie said.

Like her sister, she seemed to have a knack for asking practical, infuriating questions.

“Yes.”

“Your turn,” she said. “Daddy’s behind forty-seven to thirty-nine. Two hundred wins.”

For an instant, as I placed my toes in the little groove that over the years had been nicked into a foul line, I had one of those instantaneous waking dreams that plague me from time to time, and send, my friends tell me, deadly cataracts over my eyes: the sun had sunk, crickets had come and gone, the leaves had blackened, and still Julie and I stood alone on the lawn, tossing the ball at the basket; “Five hundred wins,” she called, and then when she beat me to five hundred she called, “Now you have to reach it,” and I did, and the night lengthened, and she called, “Eight hundred wins,” and we played on and then it was eleven hundred that won and we played on and it never was morning.

“Shoot,” Mr. Patimkin said. “You’re me.”

That puzzled me, but I took my set shot and, of course, missed. With the Lord’s blessing and a soft breeze, I made the lay-up.

“You have forty-one. I go,” Julie said.

Mr. Patimkin sat on the grass at the far end of the court. He took his shirt off, and in his undershirt, and his whole day’s growth of beard, looked like a trucker. Brenda’s old nose fitted him well. There was a bump in it, all right; up at the bridge it seemed as though a small eight-sided diamond had been squeezed in under the skin. I knew Mr. Patimkin would never bother to have that stone cut from his face, and yet, with joy and pride, no doubt, had paid to have Brenda’s diamond removed and dropped down some toilet in Fifth Avenue Hospital.

Julie missed her set shot, and I admit to a slight, gay, flutter of heart.

“Put a little spin on it,” Mr. Patimkin told her.

“Can I take it again?” Julie asked me.

“Yes.” What with paternal directions from the sidelines and my own grudging graciousness on the court, there did not seem much of a chance for me to catch up. And I wanted to, suddenly, I wanted to win, to run little Julie into the ground. Brenda was back on one elbow, under the tree, chewing on a leaf, watching. And up in the house, at the kitchen window, I could see that the curtain had swished back—the sun too low now to glare off electrical appliances—and Mrs. Patimkin was looking steadily out at the game. And then Carlota appeared on the back steps, eating a peach and holding a pail of garbage in her free hand. She stopped to watch too.

It was my turn again. I missed the set shot and laughingly turned to Julie and said, “Can I take it again?”

“No!”

So I learned how the game was played. Over the years Mr. Patimkin had taught his daughters that free throws were theirs for the asking; he could afford to. However, with the strange eyes of Short Hills upon me, matrons, servants, and providers, I somehow felt I couldn’t. But I had to and I did.

“Thanks a lot, Neil,” Julie said when the game was ended—at 100—and the crickets had come.

“You’re welcome.”

Under the trees, Brenda smiled. “Did you let her win?”

“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

There was something in my voice that prompted Brenda to say, comfortingly, “Even Ron lets her win.”

“It’s all nice for Julie,” I said.