5

“Ron’s getting married!” Julie screamed at me when I came through the door. “Ron’s getting married!”

“Now?” I said.

“Labor Day! He’s marrying Harriet, he’s marrying Harriet.” She began to sing it like a jump-rope song, nasal and rhythmic. “I’m going to be a sister-in-law!”

“Hi,” Brenda said, “I’m going to be a sister-in-law.”

“So I hear. When did it happen?”

“This afternoon he told us. They spoke long distance for forty minutes last night. She’s flying here next week, and there’s going to be a huge wedding. My parents are flittering all over the place. They’ve got to arrange everything in about a day or two. And my father’s taking Ron in the business—but he’s going to have to start at two hundred a week and then work himself up. That’ll take till October.”

“I thought he was going to be a gym teacher.”

“He was. But now he has responsibilities …”

And at dinner Ron expanded on the subject of responsibilities and the future.

“We’re going to have a boy,” he said, to his mother’s delight, “and when he’s about six months old I’m going to sit him down with a basketball in front of him, and a football, and a baseball, and then whichever one he reaches for, that’s the one we’re going to concentrate on.”

“Suppose he doesn’t reach for any of them,” Brenda said.

“Don’t be funny, young lady,” Mrs. Patimkin said.

“I’m going to be an aunt,” Julie sang, and she stuck her tongue out at Brenda.

“When is Harriet coming?” Mr. Patimkin breathed through a mouthful of potatoes.

“A week from yesterday.”

“Can she sleep in my room?” Julie cried. “Can she?”

“No, the guest room—” Mrs. Patimkin began, but then she remembered me—with a crashing side glance from those purple eyes, and said, “Of course.”

Well, I did eat like a bird. After dinner my bag was carried—by me—up to the guest room which was across from Ron’s room and right down the hall from Brenda. Brenda came along to show me the way.

“Let me see your bed, Bren.”

“Later,” she said.

“Can we? Up here?”

“I think so,” she said. “Ron sleeps like a log.”

“Can I stay the night?”

“I don’t know.”

“I could get up early and come back in here. We’ll set the alarm.”

“It’ll wake everybody up.”

“I’ll remember to get up. I can do it.”

“I better not stay up here with you too long,” she said. “My mother’ll have a fit. I think she’s nervous about your being here.”

“So am I. I hardly know them. Do you think I should really stay a whole week?”

“A whole week? Once Harriet gets here it’ll be so chaotic you can probably stay two months.”

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes,” she said, and went down the stairs so as to ease her mother’s conscience.

I unpacked my bag and dropped my clothes into a drawer that was empty except for a packet of dress shields and a high school yearbook. In the middle of my unpacking, Ron came clunking up the stairs.

“Hi,” he called into my room.

“Congratulations,” I called back. I should have realized that any word of ceremony would provoke a handshake from Ron; he interrupted whatever it was he was about to do in his room, and came into mine.

“Thanks.” He pumped me. “Thanks.”

Then he sat down on my bed and watched me as I finished unpacking. I have one shirt with a Brooks Brothers label and I let it linger on the bed a while; the Arrows I heaped in the drawer. Ron sat there rubbing his forearm and grinning. After a while I was thoroughly unsettled by the silence.

“Well,” I said, “that’s something.”

He agreed, to what I don’t know.

“How does it feel?” I asked, after another longer silence.

“Better. Ferrari smacked it under the boards.”

“Oh. Good,” I said. “How does getting married feel?”

“Ah, okay, I guess.”

I leaned against the bureau and counted stitches in the carpet.

Ron finally risked a journey into language. “Do you know anything about music?” he asked.

“Something, yes.”

“You can listen to my phonograph if you want.”

“Thanks, Ron. I didn’t know you were interested in music.

“Sure. I got all the Andre Kostelanetz records ever made. You like Mantovani? I got all of him too. I like semi-classical a lot. You can hear my Columbus record if you want …” he dwindled off. Finally he shook my hand and left.

Downstairs I could hear Julie singing. “I’m going to be an a-a-aunt,” and Mrs. Patimkin saying to her, “No, honey, you’re going to be a sister-in-law. Sing that, sweetheart,” but Julie continued to sing, “I’m going to be an a-a-aunt,” and then I heard Brenda’s voice joining hers, singing, “We’re going to be an a-a-aunt,” and then Julie joined that, and finally Mrs. Patimkin called to Mr. Patimkin, “Will you make her stop encouraging her …” and soon the duet ended.

And then I heard Mrs. Patimkin again. I couldn’t make out the words but Brenda answered her. Their voices grew louder; finally I could hear perfectly. “I need a houseful of company at a time like this?” It was Mrs. Patimkin. “I asked you, Mother.” “You asked your father. I’m the one you should have asked first. He doesn’t know how much extra work this is for me…” “My God, Mother, you’d think we didn’t have Carlota and Jenny.” “Carlota and Jenny can’t do everything. This is not the Salvation Army!” “What the hell does that mean?” “Watch your tongue, young lady. That may be very well for your college friends” “Oh, stop it, Mother!” “Don’t raise your voice to me. When’s the last time you lifted a finger to help around here?” “I’m not a slave … I’m a daughter” “You ought to learn what a day’s work means” “Why?” Brenda said. “Why?” “Because you’re lazy,” Mrs. Patimkin answered, “and you think the world owes you a living.” “Whoever said that?” “You ought to earn some money and buy your own clothes.” “Why? Good God, Mother, Daddy could live off the stocks alone, for God’s sake. What are you complaining about?” “When’s the last time you washed the dishes!” “Jesus Christ!” Brenda flared, “Carlota washes the dishes!” “Don’t Jesus Christ me!” “Oh, Mother!” and Brenda was crying. “Why the hell are you like this'” “That’s it” Mrs Patimkin said “cry in front of your company ‘” “My company… ” Brenda wept “why don’t you go yell at him too … why is everyone so nasty to me…”

From across the hall I heard Andre Kostelanetz let several thousand singing violins loose on “Night and Day.” Ron’s door was open and I saw he was stretched out, colossal, on his bed; he was singing along with the record. The words belonged to “Night and Day,” but I didn’t recognize Ron’s tune. In a minute he picked up the phone and asked the operator for a Milwaukee number. While she connected him, he rolled over and turned up the volume on the record player, so that it would carry the nine hundred miles west.

I heard Julie downstairs. “Ha ha, Brenda’s crying, ha ha, Brenda’s crying.”

And then Brenda was running up the stairs. “Your day’ll come, you little bastard!” she called.

“Brenda!” Mrs. Patimkin called.

“Mommy!” Julie cried. “Brenda cursed at me!”

“What’s going on here!” Mr. Patimkin shouted.

“You call me, Mrs. P?” Carlota shouted.

And Ron, in the other room, said, “Hello, Har, I told them…”

I sat down on my Brooks Brothers shirt and pronounced my own name out loud.

*  *  *  *  *

“Goddam her!” Brenda said to me as she paced up and down my room.

“Bren, do you think I should go—”

“Shhh …” She went to the door of my room and listened. “They’re going visiting, thank God.”

“Brenda—”

“Shhh … They’ve gone.”

“Julie too?”

“Yes,” she said. “Is Ron in his room? His door is closed.”

“He went out.”

“You can’t hear anybody move around here. They all creep around in sneakers. Oh Neil.”

“Bren, I asked you, maybe I should just stay through tomorrow and then go.”

“Oh, it isn’t you she’s angry about.”

“I’m not helping any.”

“It’s Ron, really. That he’s getting married just has her flipped. And me. Now with that goody-good Harriet around she’ll just forget I ever exist.”

“Isn’t that okay with you?”

She walked off to the window and looked outside. It was dark and cool; the trees rustled and flapped as though they were sheets that had been hung out to dry. Everything outside hinted at September, and for the first time I realized how close we were to Brenda’s departure for school.

“Is it, Bren?” but she was not listening to me.

She walked across the room to a door at the far end of the room. She opened it.

“I thought that was a closet,” I said.

“Come here.”

She held the door back and we leaned into the darkness and could hear the strange wind hissing in the eaves of the house.

“What’s in here?” I said.

“Money.”

Brenda went into the room. When the puny sixty-watt bulb was twisted on, I saw that the place was full of old furniture—two wing chairs with hair-oil lines at the back, a sofa with a paunch in its middle, a bridge table, two bridge chairs with their stuffing showing, a mirror whose backing had peeled off, shadeless lamps, lampless shades, a coffee table with a cracked glass top, and a pile of rolled up shades.

“What is this?” I said.

“A storeroom. Our old furniture.”

“How old?”

“From Newark,” she said. “Come here.” She was on her hands and knees in front of the sofa and was holding up its paunch to peek beneath.

“Brenda, what the hell are we doing here? You’re getting filthy.”

“It’s not here.”

“What?”

“The money. I told you.”

I sat down on a wing chair, raising some dust. It had begun to rain outside, and we could smell the fall dampness coming through the vent that was outlined at the far end of the storeroom. Brenda got up from the floor and sat down on the sofa. Her knees and Bermudas were dirty and when she pushed her hair back she dirtied her forehead. There among the disarrangement and dirt I had the strange experience of seeing us, both of us, placed among disarrangement and dirt: we looked like a young couple who had just moved into a new apartment; we had suddenly taken stock of our furniture, finances, and future, and all we could feel any pleasure about was the clean smell of outside, which reminded us we were alive, but which, in a pinch, would not feed us.

“What money?” I said again.

“The hundred-dollar bills. From when I was a little girl …” and she breathed deeply. “When I was little and we’d just moved from Newark, my father took me up here one day. He took me into this room and told me that if anything should ever happen to him, he wanted me to know where there was some money that I should have. He said it wasn’t for anybody else but me, and that I should never tell anyone about it, not even Ron. Or my mother.”

“How much was it?”

“Three hundred-dollar bills. I’d never seen them before. I was nine, around Julie’s age. I don’t think we’d been living here a month. I remember I used to come up here about once a week, when no one was home but Carlota, and crawl under the sofa and make sure it was still here. And it always was. He never mentioned it once again. Never.”

“Where is it? Maybe someone stole it.”

“I don’t know, Neil. I suppose he took it back.”

“When it was gone,” I said, “my God, didn’t you tell him? Maybe Carlota—”

“I never knew it was gone, until just now. I guess I stopped looking at one time or another … And then I forgot about it. Or just didn’t think about it. I mean I always had enough, I didn’t need this. I guess one day he figured I wouldn’t need it.”

Brenda paced up to the narrow, dust-covered window and drew her initials on it.

“Why did you want it now?” I said.

“I don’t know …” she said and went over and twisted the bulb off.

I didn’t move from the chair and Brenda, in her tight shorts and shirt, seemed naked standing there a few feet away. Then I saw her shoulders shaking. “I wanted to find it and tear it up in little pieces and put the goddam pieces in her purse! If it was there, I swear it, I would have done it.”

“I wouldn’t have let you, Bren.”

“Wouldn’t you have?”

“No.”

“Make love to me, Neil. Right now.”

“Where?”

“Do it! Here. On this cruddy cruddy cruddy sofa.”

And I obeyed her.

*  *  *  *  *

The next morning Brenda made breakfast for the two of us. Ron had gone off to his first day of work—I’d heard him singing in the shower only an hour after I’d returned to my own room; in fact, I had still been awake when the Chrysler had pulled out of the garage, carrying boss and son down to the Patimkin works in Newark. Mrs. Patimkin wasn’t home either; she had taken her car and had gone off to the Temple to talk to Rabbi Kranitz about the wedding. Julie was on the back lawn playing at helping Carlota hang the clothes.

“You know what I want to do this morning?” Brenda said. We were eating a grapefruit, sharing it rather sloppily, for Brenda couldn’t find a paring knife, and so we’d decided to peel it down like an orange and eat the segments separately.

“What?” I said.

“Run,” she said. “Do you ever run?”

“You mean on a track? God, yes. In high school we had to run a mile every month. So we wouldn’t be Momma’s boys. I think the bigger your lungs get the more you’re supposed to hate your mother.”

“I want to run,” she said, “and I want you to run. Okay?”

“Oh, Brenda …”

But an hour later, after a breakfast that consisted of another grapefruit, which apparently is all a runner is supposed to eat in the morning, we had driven the Volkswagen over to the high school, behind which was a quarter-mile track. Some kids were playing with a dog out in the grassy center of the track, and at the far end, near the woods, a figure in white shorts with slits in the side, and no shirt, was twirling, twirling, and then flinging a shot put as far as he could. After it left his hand he did a little eagle-eyed tap dance while he watched it arch and bend and land in the distance.

“You know,” Brenda said, “you look like me. Except bigger.”

We were dressed similarly, sneakers, sweat socks, khaki Bermudas, and sweat shirts, but I had the feeling that Brenda was not talking about the accidents of our dress—if they were accidents. She meant, I was sure, that I was somehow beginning to look the way she wanted me to. Like herself.

“Let’s see who’s faster,” she said, and then we started along the track. Within the first eighth of a mile the three little boys and their dog were following us. As we passed the corner where the shot putter was, he waved at us; Brenda called “Hi!” and I smiled, which, as you may or may not know, makes one engaged in serious running feel inordinately silly. At the quarter mile the kids dropped off and retired to the grass the dog turned and started the other way, and I had a tiny knife in my side. Still I was abreast of Brenda, who as we started on the second lap called “Hi!” once again to the lucky shot putter who was reclining on the grass now watching us and rubbing his shot like a crystal ball Ah, I thought, there’s the sport.

“How about us throwing the shot put?” I panted.

“After,” she said, and I saw beads of sweat clinging to the last strands of hair that shagged off her ear. When we approached the half mile Brenda suddenly swerved off the track onto the grass and tumbled down; her departure surprised me and I was still running.

“Hey, Bob Mathias,” she called, “let’s lie in the sun…”

But I acted as though I didn’t hear her and though my heart pounded in my throat and my mouth was dry as a drought, I made my legs move, and swore I would not stop until I’d finished one more lap. As I passed the shot putter for the third time, I called “Hi!”

She was excited when I finally pulled up alongside of her. “You’re good,” she said. My hands were on my hips and I was looking at the ground and sucking air—rather, air was sucking me, I didn’t have much to say about it.

“Uh-huh,” I breathed.

“Let’s do this every morning,” she said. “We’ll get up and have two grapefruit, and then you’ll come out here and run. I’ll time you. In two weeks you’ll break four minutes, won’t you, sweetie? I’ll get Ron’s stop watch.” She was so excited—she’d slid over on the grass and was pushing my socks up against my wet ankles and calves. She bit my kneecap.

“Okay,” I said.

“Then we’ll go back and have a real breakfast.”

“Okay.”

“You drive back,” she said, and suddenly she was up and running ahead of me, and then we were headed back in the car.

And the next morning, my mouth still edgy from the grapefruit segments, we were at the track. We had Ron’s stop watch and a towel for me, for when I was finished.

“My legs are a little sore,” I said.

“Do some exercises,” Brenda said. “I’ll do them with you.” She heaped the towel on the grass and together we did deep knee bends, and sit-ups, and push-ups, and some high-knee raising in place. I felt overwhelmingly happy.

“I’m just going to run a half today, Bren. We’ll see what I do …” and I heard Brenda click the watch, and then when I was on the far side of the track, the clouds trailing above me like my own white, fleecy tail, I saw that Brenda was on the ground, hugging her knees, and alternately checking the watch and looking out at me. We were the only ones there, and it all reminded me of one of those scenes in race-horse movies, where an old trainer like Walter Brennan and a young handsome man clock the beautiful girl’s horse in the early Kentucky morning, to see if it really is the fastest two-year-old alive. There were differences all right—one being simply that at the quarter mile Brenda shouted out to me, “A minute and fourteen seconds,” but it was pleasant and exciting and clean and when I was finished Brenda was standing up and waiting for me. Instead of a tape to break I had Brenda’s sweet flesh to meet, and I did, and it was the first time she said that she loved me.

We ran—I ran—every morning, and by the end of the week I was running a 7:02 mile, and always at the end there was the little click of the watch and Brenda’s arms.

At night, I would read in my pajamas, while Brenda, in her room, read, and we would wait for Ron to go to sleep. Some nights we had to wait longer than others, and I would hear the leaves swishing outside, for it had grown cooler at the end of August, and the air-conditioning was turned off at night and we were all allowed to open our windows. Finally Ron would be ready for bed. He would stomp around his room and then he would come to the door in his shorts and T-shirt and go into the bathroom where he would urinate loudly and brush his teeth. After he brushed his teeth I would go in to brush mine. We would pass in the hall and I would give him a hearty and sincere “Goodnight ” Once in the bathroom I would spend a moment admiring my tan in the mirror; behind me I could see Ron’s jock straps hanging out to dry on the Hot and Cold knobs of the shower. Nobody ever questioned their tastefulness as adornment and after a few nights I didn’t even notice them.

While Ron brushed his teeth and I waited in my bed for my turn, I could hear the record player going in his room. Generally, after coming in from basketball, he would call Harriet—who was now only a few days away from us—and then would lock himself up with Sports Illustrated and Mantovani; however, when he emerged from his room for his evening toilet, it was not a Mantovani record I would hear playing, but something else, apparently what he’d once referred to as his Columbus record. I imagined that was what I heard, for I could not tell much from the last moments of sound. All I heard were bells moaning evenly and soft patriotic music behind them, and riding over it all, a deep kind of Edward R. Murrow gloomy voice: “And so goodbye Columbus” the voice intoned, “…goodbye, Columbus … goodbye…” Then there would be silence and Ron would be back in his room; the light would switch off and in only a few minutes I would hear him rumbling down into that exhilarating, restorative, vitamin-packed sleep that I imagined athletes to enjoy.

One morning near sneaking-away time I had a dream and when I awakened from it, there was just enough dawn coming into the room for me to see the color of Brenda’s hair. I touched her in her sleep, for the dream had unsettled me: it had taken place on a ship, an old sailing ship like those you see in pirate movies. With me on the ship was the little colored kid from the library—I was the captain and he my mate, and we were the only crew members. For a while it was a pleasant dream; we were anchored in the harbor of an island in the Pacific and it was very sunny. Up on the beach there were beautiful bare-skinned Negresses, and none of them moved; but suddenly we were moving our ship out of the harbor and, the Negresses moved slowly down to the shore and began to throw leis at us and say “Goodbye, Columbus … goodbye, Columbus … goodbye…” and though we did not want to go, the little boy and I, the boat was moving and there was nothing we could do about it, and he shouted at me that it was my fault and I shouted it was his for not having a library card, but we were wasting our breath, for we were further and further from the island, and soon the natives were nothing at all. Space was all out of proportion in the dream, and things were sized and squared in no way I’d ever seen before, and I think it was that more than anything else that steered me into consciousness. I did not want to leave Brenda’s side that morning, and for a while I played with the little point at the nape of her neck, where she’d had her hair cut. I stayed longer than I should have, and when finally I returned to my room I almost ran into Ron who was preparing for his day at Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks.