Beautiful Kate (8 page)

If she had any weakness, it lay in her love for singalong songs such as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain.” Every afternoon for thirty minutes she would sit down at the corner upright piano and begin to bang out the song for the day, lifting her right hand from the keyboard every now and then to direct us as we sat at our scarred little desks, most of us barely mumbling the words to the song, leaving the real singing to three or four gung-ho girls and Miss Josephson herself. Spitballs and paper clips would begin to fly and the comedians among us would do brief clandestine parodies of Miss Josephson thumping away at the keyboard, bounding up and down on her generous hams.

One exception to this general anarchy was on the day she had us sing “Katy.” Then even the boys joined in, loudly, happily mangling the tune in their eagerness to embarrass my twin.

K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy

You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore
.

Kate meanwhile sat at her desk with her arms folded and her eyes raking the songsters, promising them mayhem on the playground after school. I of course had joined in too, unable to pass up an opportunity to torment a female, even if she was my sister. And even now I can hear the piano and that unharmonious squall of voices. I remember looking over at Kate and trying to smile, but giving it up as she glared back at me.

When the song was finished, some of the boys continued to tease her. “Beautiful K-K-K-Katy,” they giggled. “That’s you, K-K-K-Katy.”

Miss Josephson clapped her hands for silence and asked what the problem was, but all she heard was more giggling and the same gleeful taunt: “Beautiful K-K-K-Katy! Beautiful K-K-K-Katy!”

And it was then that Kate stood up, her pigtails whipping and her eyes flashing.

“I’m beautiful
Kate!
” she yelled. “Not
Katy!
”

The class immediately collapsed in laughter and I even saw a slight smile trace across Miss Josephson’s otherwise great stone face. And for the next week or so, Kate was “
Beautiful
Kate” on the playground, at least to the reckless few. Surprisingly, some of the boys even won a smile calling her that, but most of those who tried—including a couple of foolhardy girls—only got sore arms for their trouble. Mine, I think, was sorest of all.

It has been three days since Sarah left, by bus, in the first real snowstorm of the year. I used Junior’s four-wheeler to get us to the station and stood with her in the squalid little waiting room as if we were sending her off to prison instead of to Miami Beach. When the bus finally came, I carried her bags outside and kissed her goodbye and then I watched as she left in a cloud of diesel exhaust and swirling snow, sitting alone at one of the rear windows with her eyes a glaze of tears and self-pity. And I don’t knock her for that. These days I think we’ve all got a little pity coming, even if only from ourselves. Junior, however, is much amused by the fact and the style of her departure. “Bugout,” he calls her, saying she just couldn’t take the competition.

“Toni was too much for her, that’s all,” he says. “And Sis wanted you all to herself. Ain’t it just too, too sad? Poor little Electra.”

I told him that he had his goddesses mixed up, but he said it was no matter, finishing with his usual panache:

“It’s all Greek to me.”

“I’ll bet it is.”

“But then I’m not a writer. Not even a failed writer.”

“You’re too kind.”

“A family trait.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

Toni wisely told us both to shut up, and we did. But other than such sweet exchanges as that, silence is pretty much the rule here now. We are like four very disparate species immured by chance in the same zoo house, each carefully going out of its way not to cross paths with the others. And when we are forced together, as we were yesterday, to dine on a Thanksgiving dinner of cold and greasy Kentucky Fried Chicken, we seem to outdo each other in unsociability. Wonder of wonders, Toni has even taken to the vice of book-reading, and with such avidity that quite often I don’t see her for hours on end. Admittedly, the books are only Harlequin Romances—from Sarah’s room, a whole shelfful of them—but it is a beginning. And who’s to say? In time the girl might even graduate to reading such splendid stuff as this.

Meanwhile Junior, in a display of hitherto unknown talent, is spending most of his waking hours out in the garage tinkering with his jeep and my TR-6, tuning them for the Indy Five Hundred it would seem. He still visits the barn on occasion, for a little socializing with the Congo Lords, or at least with certain ones of them anyway. And once, through my trusty window, I saw him a few blocks away pull up to the curb in his jeep and throw open the door for a slender black youth, who hesitated for a few seconds before climbing in. None of this new industry keeps him from getting on my case more and more, however. Almost every day he asks me about my plans: How long will I be staying? Do I have any blockbuster movies about to premiere? Do I have any prospects at all?

Naturally I try to paint the picture even gloomier than it is.

“No, nothing. No prospects of any kind.”

“You mean you’re just gonna stay here for good?”

“Could be. But then it’s no skin off your nose, is it? It’s Jason we’re living off, not you.”

I see his enormous itch to tell me the truth—that he’s the one with the money, the one who will be feeding us now that Sarah is gone. But each time he elects for prudence. Better to be thought poor than rich by one’s own poor brother. So much simpler anyway.

And then there is Jason. As before, he stays in bed most of the time, with his door closed, listening by the hour to radio call-in talk shows, whose endless democratic babble stirs him to frequent outbursts of vituperative response, harangues of right-thinking lucidity lost on the four walls of his room. Occasionally he will struggle into his ratty old robe and slippers and trek downstairs to watch television or to eat something, usually just a bowl of cornflakes and a cup of coffee, both inundated with enough sugar for a dozen diabetics. His color is fish-belly gray and after any exertion at all he is so short of breath he can barely speak. I raise the subject with Junior, saying that we should get the old man to a doctor and find out what’s wrong with him, but my little brother only makes a face and dismisses the idea.

“He’s getting old, that’s all. He’s been this way for years.”

And when I try with Jason himself, suggesting that he have a checkup, I get even less.

“What if they said I was dying? What would you do then—run? Take off for Hollywood? Send us postcards?”

“You look terrible, Jason. And you shouldn’t be so short of breath, not even at your age.”

“So sue me. And you don’t look so hot yourself, you know. You look soft. You, with the physique you had.”

“We’re talking about you.”

“And I say no doctors. I’ve been getting along fine without them all these years, and I can do it for a few more.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Sure you do,” he says. “A loving son like you.”

Thus I am able to sit here at my desk more freely now, knowing that no one wants me elsewhere. I work for a while, writing and rewriting such lines as these, and then I light up a cigarette or pace the room or look out the window at the snow and the cold, sometimes staring so raptly that the stumps in the yard magically begin to climb upward as though in time-lapse photography, becoming again the giants of old. And as clearly as I see the blacks walking to and from the barn, I watch her playing with Cliff and me in the snow, making angels or building a snowman or having a running snowball fight with us, her laughter ringing like cymbals in the brittle air. Like some old actor, some inveterate lachrymist, I feel my eyes growing moist and I sink helplessly into great warm pools of nostalgia and amniotic sentimentality. The self-mockery stops the tears, you see. But it also stops the truth. For if I know anything about myself and about this life I’ve lived, it is that the love I had for Kate and Cliff was real, even before that last summer, a love so natural and constant that I never even knew of it until they were gone, just as I now prize the California sun.

So I sit here and I remember. I remember a Sadie Hawkins Day dance when Kate and I were high school freshmen and Cliff a sophomore. For some reason this turnabout—girls asking boys—drove Kate high up the wall, especially when she learned that Cliff and I had been invited by the Mandelbaum sisters, Judy and Joan, a pair of very dark, very well-developed Jewish mercantile princesses. Since I was just then beginning to push into puberty, with a cracking voice and a furze of hair sprouting above my perpetually tumid little dick, I was overjoyed at such good fortune, having a date with a girl like Joan, whose “jugs” dated back to the fifth grade at least, making her not just a woman of the world in my eyes but virtually a woman of the streets as well. I looked forward to a truly crushing “stone-ache,” our word for the testicle pain resulting from unrelieved evening-long erections, and about all I could realistically hope for. Cliff as usual played it cool, not admitting to any of the lascivious dreams of glory that were already seriously cutting into my study time. Whenever I saw Joan at school, and especially during the one class we shared, I seemed incapable of a sustained thought that did not relate in some way to her wondrous breasts, which were huge and conical, and about as firm as kneecaps, I imagined. Occasionally my gaze would stray to her thick black hair and her pert smile and nice dark eyes, but never for very long. And I ignored entirely the fact that she was somewhat short in the leg. At fourteen, I was definitely not a leg man.

Sometimes we spoke, not unlike boys who would be playing against each other soon in football. How could I admit to my lust? I would have been straitjacketed and put away somewhere, force-fed on vast quantities of saltpeter. At home, I spent most of my time pumping Cliff about The Great Night: What did he think would happen? Would the voluptuous pair put out? Would I get bare jug? Would the two of us finally lose our accursed virginity? Not unexpectedly, Cliff had no answers for me. Mostly he just shook his head, as though in sad recognition of the fact that his little brother finally had gone over the edge. And since I was never one to press, I simply carted all my queries over to Kate, who after all was as much my buddy as Cliff ever was, and in addition had a far dirtier mind, in fact almost as dirty as my own. So I was blithely unprepared for the storm my little litany of questions stirred in her. Her eyes blazed and her mouth curled in revulsion as she shoved me back against the wall.

“
Bare jug
?” she yelled. “
Bare jug
! What are you talking about? You twerp! You snotnose! You haven’t even kissed a girl! You—”

But suddenly she was crying, tears of rage, I realize now. Then, however, I was totally baffled, and somewhat thunderstruck too, as she tore up the stairs and slammed the door so hard even Jason came out of his study to ask what the trouble was. I did not tell him, nor did Kate. But from that moment on, until weeks after the dance, she was not herself. Suddenly she would have almost nothing to do with either Cliff or me, unless Mother or Jason was within earshot, and then she would begin on us.
Hymie
and
Abe
, we were, the newest Hebes in Woodglen High. Had we been circumcised yet? Was she invited to our bar mitzvah? Had our noses always been so long?

Jason, who was never bashful about expressing his own anti-Semitism, took all that in stride. But when she began to refer to us as the tape-measure twins and to our dates as the Jewish squaws, Big Big Tit and Little Big Tit, Jason finally put his foot down, going so far as to send her up to her room.

For weeks he and Mother had been after her to ask some boy to the dance herself, but without success. Kate simply would not hear of it.

“I may have to go to school with the pimply freaks,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to dance with them.”

By then, Kate was already known as a “character” around town and especially at school. Students both male and female had learned early on that it was best not to mess with the pretty Kendall girl because she was as quick now with her tongue as she once had been with her fists. But where, in grade school, she had been content to bloody noses, now she went straight for the jugular, often marking her antagonists with a sobriquet so apt and cutting it would stick with the victim like a wound all through school, and maybe all through life, for all I know. Boys knew better than to ask her for dates and girls knew better than to laugh at her except behind her back. And laugh they did, because she wore no makeup and let her hair hang loose, a decade before it became the fashion.

Nevertheless, one day out of the blue Kate announced that she too had a date for the dance, a senior named Waldo Fixx, whom Cliff and I would have figured just about the last person on earth Kate would invite even to a dog fight. He was stupid and greasy and had a vague reputation for minor criminality, things like stealing hubcaps and selling condoms on the school grounds. And worst of all, as far as Cliff and I were concerned, he drove a low-slung black hotrod that he himself had labeled—on the door, in gilt script—
The Baby Factory
. Angry and puzzled, the two of us tried to talk her into disinviting the creep, but all she did was smile sweetly and ask us if we didn’t want to triple-date.