Love Invents Us Read online

  “Lizbet …”

  He looked out the window at the rain and I looked up at him quickly. I had obviously done something wrong, and although my parents’ anger and chagrin didn’t bother me a bit, his unhappiness was pulling me apart. I crushed one of the chocolates with my fingers, and Mr. Klein saw me.

  “Nah, nah,” he said softly, wiping my fingers with his handkerchief. He cleared his throat. “My schedule’s changing. I won’t be able to give you rides after school. I’m going to open the shop on Mondays.”

  “How about in the morning?” I didn’t know I could talk through this kind of pain.

  “I don’t think so. I need to get in a little earlier. It’s not so bad, you should ride with other boys and girls. You’ll see, you’ll have a good time.”

  I sat there sullenly, ostentatiously mashing the chocolates.

  “Too bad, they’re very nice chocolates. Teuscher’s. Remember, sable from Klein’s, chocolate from Teuscher’s. Only the best for you. I’m telling you, only the best.”

  “I’m not going to have a good time on the bus.” I didn’t mash the last chocolate, I just ran a fingertip over the tiny ridges of the rosebud.

  “Maybe not. I shouldn’t have said you’d have a good time. I’m sorry.” He sighed and looked away.

  I bit into the last chocolate. “Here, you have some too.”

  “No, they’re for you. They were all for you.”

  “I’m not that hungry. Here.” I held out the chocolate half, and he lowered his head, startling me. I put my fingers up to his narrow lips, and he took the chocolate neatly between his teeth. I could feel the very edge of his teeth against my fingers.

  We pulled up in front of my house, and he put his hand over mine, for just one moment.

  “I’ll say it again, only the best is good enough for you. So, we’ll say au revoir, Lizbet. Elizabeth. Not good-bye.”

  “Au revoir. Thank you very much for the chocolates.” My mother’s instructions surfaced at odd times.

  I left my dripping sneakers on the brick floor, dropped my wet clothes into my lilac straw hamper, and took my very first voluntary shower. I dried off slowly, watching myself in the steamy mirror. When I didn’t come down for dinner, my mother found me, naked and quiet, deep in my covers.

  “Let’s get the piano,” I said.

  I started lessons with Mr. Canetti the next week. He served me wine-flavored cookies instead of chocolate. One day he bent forward to push my sleeves back over my aching wrists, and I saw my beautiful self take shape in his eyes. I loved him, too.

  Take My Hand

  I found comfort in the red, shy eyes of Mr. Klein and Mr. Canetti, and I found it in Franks Five and Dime. I didn’t think of it as stealing; I didn’t brag about it to other kids, not that I talked to them anyway, and I didn’t pray for forgiveness. It was just Taking. Every school day I took Necco wafers and a Heath bar from Frank’s. It was a long, dim box of a room; the candy racks were in front of the cash register, halfway down the left wall facing a heavy glass case, five shelves filled with Madame Alexander dolls and their hats and shoes and luggage sets. I walked in ten minutes before school started most days and cruised the shop, pausing in front of the doll case, looking for the little knot of businessmen and newspapers to stand behind. I was a terrible thief, slow and sticky and predictable. Without my round, trusting face and geeky glasses, I would never have gotten as far as I did. I put the Neccos, shifting in their glassy opaque tube, into my lunch bag and held the Heath bar in my coat pocket. It was easily unwrapped, one blind finger sliding under the smooth brown back flap. Once, my pocket lining was torn and I had to tuck it in the waistband of my panties and get it out during coatroom time. I smelled of anxious sweat and chocolate all day.

  I got caught. Frank wrapped his huge hand around my wrist and squeezed until I dropped my lunch bag on the counter. He took out the candy, and I said, my mind blank with humiliation, that I had intended to pay for it.

  “Sure you did. Every day you come in here. For this. Get outta here and don’t come back.”

  Ellyn and Cindi Kramer stood in the doorway, listening openmouthed, and looked at me with real pleasure as I walked between them. It could have been worse; he could have telephoned my parents, who surely would have made me go to the psychiatrist I’d been ducking for the last year. I didn’t want to talk about what I did and why; I already knew I was crazy. As it was, I entered hell all by myself, like everyone else.

  What I did at Mrs. Hill’s wasn’t stealing, either. Stealing was sneaking lipstick from Woolworth’s or blue silk panties from Bee’s Lingerie Shop. After Frank’s, after months of being called a thief by the whole bus, every single day, of being followed down the street by Ellyn and Cindi, catcalling until I reached the hedges that marked our property, I stayed out of candy stores, but I still stole. By the middle of seventh grade, I was casually lining up pens, fluorescent markers, and leather barrettes on one long table in study hall like it was the local flea market. But everything I took from Mrs. Hill I hid in my closet. Every time the doorbell rang I could see two big cops, hands on their guns, standing in my mother’s foyer and calling out my name.

  Mrs. Hill was almost blind, she had something-retinitis; there was a hole in the center of her vision, as if someone had ripped the middle out of every page. If she turned her head way to the right or left, she could just about see my face. When I walked toward her as she sat in the big red vinyl recliner, she would turn her face far to the right; the closer I got, the more she would seem to yearn toward the kitchen. When I was almost upon her, she would smile away from me.

  Every Saturday I tidied up Mrs. Hill’s house and made her lunch and dinner. She was my good deed, courtesy of Samuel C. Shales, minister at the Beech Street A.M.E. Zion Church, Where Everybody Is Somebody and Jesus Is Lord Over All. At eleven o’clock on September 16, through the window of my algebra class, I heard gospel music for the first time. Those sweet, meaty sounds led me to a white wood church on a corner my school bus never passed. Each time I had to walk by Reverend Shales’ office, and each time he looked up and kept talking on the phone. I stayed near the church bulletin board, my eyes down, my heart singing like Mahalia Jackson.

  Reverend Shales was shorter than I’d thought, and his glasses shimmered in the dusty light.

  “Miss? You’re visiting our church again?”

  I said yes. He asked my name, my parents’ names, my address, and my school, and however embarrassed I was to be caught lurking in his church hall, he was not sorry to have me there. His eyes shone like black pearls. I seemed like a girl who could offer a little companionship, he said. I could run to the corner store and bring back the right change, couldn’t I? I wasn’t above a little light cleaning, was I? He invited me to come and listen to the choir whenever I liked, and at the same time take the opportunity, the special opportunity to serve, to offer Christian charity to a very sweet, very lovely elderly lady a few doors down. He led me out the church door and pointed down the street to the small white house with the patchy lawn and the listing porch.

  “I’ll phone Miz Hill to say you’re on your way. You are on your way now, young lady.” And he put his big hand on the small of my back and pushed. He said Go, and I went.

  Crinkly, lifeless grey curls floated up and across Mrs. Hill’s grey-brown scalp, winging out over her ears. What must have been round, brown eyes had become opaque beige slits, like two additional spots of smooth skin in her dark puckered face. She had seven housedresses, and her doctor daughter came home twice a year from the great, safe distance of California and replaced them all. Mrs. Hill did not rotate them as Dr. Hill intended; she wore the pink one all week, and when it was stiff with sweat and moisturizer and medicated cream for her eczema, she threw it in the hamper for me to wash. On Saturdays she wore the purple housedress, and I didn’t blame her a bit. It was the least practical of them; instead of a cotton-poly mix, it was soft velour, and the pull on the end of the zipper was a purple and yellow sunflower, a
s though van Gogh had gotten loose in the Sears catalog. In her purple sunflower robe, Mrs. Hill told my fortune.

  “Long life here,” she said, one thick, twisted finger digging into the middle of my palm. “Love affairs here. Did you bring Mrs. Hill some pork rinds?”

  Dr. Hill had sent a note that Mrs. Hill had all sorts of things wrong with her heart and that salt and fat were out of the question. Mrs. Hill and I had a deal: one palm reading for a bag of Salty Jims Pork Rinds. Mrs. Hill told me that Salty Jim was really Jim Buckton, who played trumpet with Duke Ellington in the fifties and had gone to high school with Mrs. Hill. Out of respect and school loyalty, we usually ate Salty Jim’s, but when the Red Owl Supermarket carried Li’l Pig Bar-B-Que Pork Rinds, we had to give old Jim the heave-ho and stock up on orange-speckled, amber clouds of pork fat.

  “Open up that bag and set it right here. Let’s have that hand.” I popped open two cans of grape soda.

  Mrs. Hill bent over my palm, and I could smell the greasy fruit smell of her hair pomade and the piercing eucalyptus of Vicks VapoRub, which she used prophylactically.

  “The love affairs startin’ early.” She jabbed my palm and then held my own hand up to me, showing me the point at which the love line joined the life line.

  “Really?” I said. I didn’t think of Mr. Klein or Mr. Canetti as love affairs. I knew that they had loved me and I had loved them back, but there wasn’t any sex, and you couldn’t have an affair without sex. When I was in fifth grade I had had a little sex with Seth Stern, but it wasn’t what I thought a love affair should be. We were playing James Bond, and he pulled down my underpants and stuck his hand between my legs. He was only in sixth grade, but he was shaving already, and I found the red nicks on his throat and chin mysterious, alluring tribal scars. He stuck one long finger inside me and rocked me roughly on his hand until we heard our parents gathering coats in the front hall. He pushed me back onto the bed and yanked up my panties while running his thumb along the inside of my thigh. My parents called for me, and we went downstairs, all my attention on my bruised, wet center and on Seth, who insisted on shaking my fathers hand as we said good-bye. The tension and excitement and shame I felt were terrible and vivid. This was life. Out of remorse, or indifference, he wouldn’t answer my phone calls, and my parents had just about dropped the Sterns anyway, so I kept my virginity quite a while longer. I dreamt of his hands.

  Mrs. Hill leaned back in her recliner and twisted her face away to watch me.

  “In my closet there’s a hatbox, an old red hatbox. Bring it to me, sugar.”

  Mrs. Hill only used endearments when she was asking me a favor or criticizing me.

  The closet would have been my mother’s worst nightmare: blouses lying on the floor in their own wrinkled, dusty puddles, single shoes turned heel up, sticking into piles of sweaters and pants. On the top shelf were three hatboxes, one faded red, one with green and white stripes, and a yellowed one with grimy ivory tassels hanging from the sides. Mrs. Hill was much shorter than I was and could barely hobble from room to room; the hatboxes and the shelf they sat on were covered in dust.

  Mrs. Hill rested the red hatbox in her purple velour lap, her bony knees hunched up to keep it from sliding to the floor. “Some pretty things in here. If I kept them out, a burglar might get them. No burglar’s going hunting through an old lady’s underthings, through a messy old closet.” I was always looking to justify the mess in my room, too.

  Mrs. Hill lifted off the lid and handed it to me, the thick dust rippling slightly.

  “What about these, miss? You don’t see these anymore.”

  They were eight long silver straws with filigreed hearts at their ends. Mrs. Hill handed them to me one by one, and I ran my fingers over the thin silver lacework around the hearts’ edges. She waved one straw in the air.

  “Spoons for iced tea. Plus the stems are hollow, so you can sip too. Wedding present.” She closed her eyes. “Wedding present from Alva and Edna Thomas, he worked with Mr. Hill. Iced tea and strawberry shortcake in the summer. And brandy cup and lemon cake with burnt sugar frosting at Christmas.”

  I had never seen anything so fancy and frivolous in all my life. My parents’ house was all handsome, angular teak and tautly rounded leather, and each decorative piece had the added weight of culture or art or good taste. These were just pretty and gay, and as I held them I could feel that if I pressed down any harder at all, the hollow stems would give way.

  “Are you going to give them to your daughter?” I asked, sure that the Dr. Vivian Hill in the pastel-tinted eight-by-ten on the mantelpiece, with one manicured hand on the hood of a big white Mercedes, black eyes flatly daring us to wonder how she got from here to there, would not want the spoons, or anything else from this small house with the rutted floors and soiled lampshades. Dr. Hill’s old bedroom was now the storage room—wire hangers, dresses from twenty years ago, shoes slit for corns and bunions and still not right, cat food for the cat that died six months before I came, cookie tins filled with rubber bands and green stamps. The only bit of Dr. Hill left was the graduation tassel used to pull down the window shade. Dr. Hill stayed at the Great Neck Inn when she visited.

  Mrs. Hill made a feeble grab for the spoons, snatching at the air to my left. “Give them to Vivian? Why should I give them to anyone? I’m not dead. Gimme those spoons, girl.”

  I put all but one of the spoons back into her hands; they stuck out like silver pins in an old brown cushion. She sorted them and wrapped them in the tissue paper. Before she could count them up and accuse me, I handed her the last one.

  “Don’t forget this, it fell off your lap,” I lied.

  She gestured for the lid. “Next time, we can look at some more treasures,” she said.

  I put the red hatbox back and quickly lifted out the striped one. Inside were twelve silver spoons with short, thickly twisted stems, the ends crowned with tiny enameled portraits of long-haired, biblical-looking men. Each little white face was touched with two pink dots for cheeks and pairs of blue or brown dots for eyes. Their hair was several different shades of brown.

  “Don’t be goin’ in my things, now.”

  “I’m not, I was just trying to get this put back where it belongs. I was tidying up your closet, as a matter of fact.”

  “Uh-huh. Snooping and spying is more like it.”

  I knew she didn’t mind; it wasn’t like there were millions of people interested in Mrs. Hill’s life, never mind the contents of her closet.

  Mrs. Hill had two cookbooks: The Joy of Cooking and The Paschal Lamb, which was put out by the Greater A.M.E. Zion Church of Philadelphia and was almost as long as the gravy-stained Rombauer bible. I read them both, and once Mrs. Hill showed me how to light her chipped gas stove, I was fearless. I didn’t see what harm I could do. No Limoges plates to break, nothing to stain or put back the wrong way, no system to throw out of whack. Mrs. Hill’s spice rack was six tins of Durkee’s in a shoebox on the counter. I put my hair in a ponytail, and Mrs. Hill wrapped a pink gingham towel around my waist. I made chicken-and-dumplings. I used lard and cornflake crumbs, and when Mrs. Hill said she’d loved Brunswick stew as a girl, I turned to this page in the Lamb and said, “All I need is corn. And a squirrel.” I made sweet potato casserole and angels on horseback for Mrs. Hill’s birthday. I made lasagna and divided it into four little loaf pans so Mrs. Hill could just heat them up during the week. I precooked them so if she didn’t have the energy to put them in the oven she could eat them cold without getting some kind of uncooked-meat disease.

  At school on Monday, I asked Mimi Tedeschi, who practically lived in church, who she thought the men on the spoons could be.

  “The apostles. Don’t you know who the apostles are? Peter, Andrew, John, Matthias, James the Greater …” She rattled off all twelve names. “I guess being Jewish you didn’t learn about them. My grandmother has a set like that. Apostle spoons. Hers are all on a little wood stand over the fireplace.”

  After a few Saturdays,
Mrs. Hill and I had gone through all three hatboxes. Besides the apostles and the iced tea stirrers, there were two small bowls of cranberry glass set in baskets of braided gold wire; four monogrammed silver napkin rings; six half-size teacups and matching saucers, each with a different flower garlanding the sides of the cup and the face of the saucer, each with one coy bud resting at the bottom of the cup. I loved them all. Mrs. Hill would hand them to me to admire, and then we’d rewrap them in tissue and I’d put them back in the closet.

  In November, Mrs. Hill was always cold. She was tired of the hatboxes, tired of reading my palm, and tired of lasagna. She would fall asleep around two and wake up as the sky was getting dark.

  “Don’t you leave while I’m sleeping. Elizabeth, you hear me? Don’t you leave if I’m not awake.”

  “Okay. I mean, even if I did, you’d be fine. I mean, nothing would happen.”

  “Don’t tell me what’s gonna happen in my own house. You come and wake me up before you leave.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The next Saturday, she fell asleep in her chair right after lunch. I went into her bedroom and stood in the mouth of the closet, staring up at the row of hatboxes. I took down the apostles and chose one whose eyes seemed to tilt up at me beneath lashes as dark and spiky as Seth Stern’s. I put him into my backpack and changed Mrs. Hill’s bed, trying to hold my breath until I got the clean sheets on and the old ones stuffed into the washer.

  The following Saturday, I took one with blue eyes, and the Saturday after that, another dark-eyed one. I wanted to take the lady’s-slipper teacup next.

  Mrs. Hill said to me, “Could you come this Tuesday? Vivian’s coming by, for just a little while. I think we could do a little cleaning up before.”