Riggs Park Part 2

The boys considered this. They were intrigued by the idea of hair as money. They abandoned the names Davey and Red and adopted the moniker they thought would provide a more original, even clever, form of torture: Penny.

Essie invited a furious Davidina over to make chocolate-chip cookies. "The boys call me Penny now," Davidina confessed in a shower of tears.

"So? You don't like it?"

"Of course not!"

"Well, I do," Essie said. "Penny sounds coppery and bold. Think of a new-minted penny standing out in a heap of dull old coins. What's wrong with that?"

Essie handed Davidina a Kleenex.

"It's a bright, snappy name if you ask me. Cheerier than Davidina and more accurate than Red. Imagine the color of a penny. Imagine how it shines. That's how your hair looks. It's beautiful." This was an exaggeration. But Essie's powers of persuasion were legendary. From that day, Davidina answered only to Penny.

Maybe it was the boys' teasing that left her hypersensitive, or maybe she had always been that way. Marilyn and I were never sure. When my father took us to the monthly Sunday night concerts at the National Gallery of Art, where my mother played second clarinet in the gallery orchestra, Penny often burst into tears, suddenly but briefly, and sobbed as if her heart would break. Even at seven, I thought I knew all about the emotional power of music, but I never fully understood what to make of Penny's outbursts. Maybe she was upset because she rarely got to hear her own father's concerts. Sid was often on the road. Or maybe it was something else entirely. Dutifully, Marilyn and I put our arms around Penny and led her out of the chilly marble atrium, down the hall toward the Impressionist room, where we looked at the colorful paintings until her strange mood pa.s.sed. We didn't mind, not really. When a child is not cherished early on, you can't expect her to be predictable. I think we knew that even then.

Houses in Washington weren't air-conditioned in those days, and the gluey swamp-heat that descended on the city sometimes lasted for months, so thick and humid that even our parents grew testy. To take the pressure off them for a few hours, Essie Berman sometimes piled three or four children into her rusty old Plymouth and drove us to Rock Creek Park to watch the fireflies at nightfall. There were fireflies everywhere in the city, of course, but nowhere so many as in one particular location off Military Road. A gra.s.sy bank dropped down to a wide mowed field, and in the distance a tree line served as a backdrop to the drama.

As dusk turned to dark and the trees blackened, flickering spots of light began to float on the air, dozens at first, then hundreds, thousands, until we felt surrounded by a dance of stars. We scattered among them, carrying jelly jars with air-holes punched in the lids, less to capture than to marvel. How, after all, could any creature be its own source of light? We could be observers, Essie instructed, but not murderers. We should look, then set them free.

But one night-we must have been eight or nine and had been catching fireflies for years-Penny balked.

"I'm not going to do this anymore," she said. "You shouldn't, either. It's mean. It's like putting them in jail."

"Only for a few minutes," said Marilyn. "We always let them go."

"It doesn't matter. How long do fireflies live? Only a day or two, I bet. A few minutes to them is like years for us. Like being in jail for years. It's wrong."

"They're so slow they probably don't even know they're captured," said Rosalie Shiffman, another girl who had come along.

"Of course they do! You always know when you're trapped!"

"You're making it sound like they're people, not bugs!"

"Just because they're bugs, that doesn't mean they don't have feelings," Penny a.s.serted.

"Feelings. Sure. Lightning bugs?"

"You don't know." In the darkness, Marilyn and I couldn't see the red anger rushing to Penny's face, but we could feel it as if it were churning under our own skin. It never took much to make Penny blush.

"Leave her be, Rosalie," Marilyn ordered. We didn't like Rosalie, anyway. In the distance behind us, sitting on the bank, Essie smoked a cigarette and watched the glittering night. Even if she were aware of our bickering, she wasn't likely to interfere.

"Well, I'm catching them," Rosalie said. "You can do what you want." In defiance, she caught a firefly not in her jar but in her hand and let its light flicker there for the longest time.

"Let it go," Penny ordered.

Rosalie walked away, her fingers turning alternately dark and golden. Penny followed. "Let it go, I said!"

Instead of obeying, Rosalie clenched her hand into a fist.

Penny screamed as if she were mortally wounded. "What are you doing? You killed it! Are you crazy?"

"You're the crazy one!" Rosalie shouted.

"Murderer!" Penny yelled.

"You think so? Look." Rosalie opened her hand to reveal that there was nothing inside. No squashed bug, no streaks of blood or guts. "I let it go. One firefly, big deal."

But it was too late. Penny had dissolved into hysterical tears. She shook her fist at Rosalie, then let me and Marilyn circle her, hold her close.

It was not an unselfish gesture, not really. Taking care of Penny was second nature by then. Everybody needs someone with more troubles than they have. Protecting Penny made us feel normal, sane. But from that night on-Marilyn felt it, too-Penny also scared us.

Because that night it had become clear, somehow, that Penny had viewed the liquid flow of lives through the sieve of time as most people did not; that to Penny fireflies and people were equal: fragile lives pulsing, flickering, vulnerable as candle flame and no more powerful. From that time on, Marilyn and I saw our own impermanence, like the impermanence of fireflies, reflected in Penny's eyes. It frightened us, right from the beginning.

Nearly fifty years later, trying to close an overflowing suitcase for my trip to Washington, I actually shuddered at the memory.

CHAPTER 3.

On the Road I didn't regain my composure until I was more than halfway to Washington. The struggle to zip most of my wardrobe into a single piece of luggage had very nearly gotten the best of me before Jon tiptoed in, silently pressed down on the bulge of clothes and closed the zipper. Then he kissed my neck so softly, in such sweet prelude to what would be a touching night of goodbyes, that I slept better than I had in weeks. So when I left the next morning, I was surprised at the raw fury twisting up again in my gut-until I realized it was directed not at Jon, not at Penny, but at Marilyn. How could she possibly be sick again? She was supposed to recover! She was almost there. Half in jest, we'd always rea.s.sured ourselves that our Coolidge High School cla.s.s of 1959 had endured enough youthful trauma to earn the survivors immortality, or at least good health until eighty-five. We pretended it was a joke, but secretly we believed it.

Truly terrible things had happened to some of us. One of our cla.s.s officers was felled by the chop of propellers while he flagged in planes at National Airport. A disease called scleroderma claimed a shy, lovely girl named Linda, freezing her porcelain skin into a rigid and unbreathing ma.s.s. A handsome, witty cla.s.smate died in a bizarre auto accident. And all this was in addition to the dark, incomprehensible events that touched some of our Riggs Park friends and altered forever our memories of our childhood home. At the time, we felt vulnerable, and maybe jinxed.

Then one day when we were about thirty, Marilyn said to me with a kind of dumb astonishment, "Do you realize that not a single one of us died in Vietnam? Not a single one."

It was true. Instead of going to Southeast Asia, the boys had either married or gone to graduate school, pushed by parents who'd survived the Depression and wanted, above all, a good education for their children. We girls had also finished college, married well, borne healthy children. Except for Marilyn's older brother, Steve, whose songs had climbed the charts and made him a household name, none of us became famous. But most of us were so comfortable-doctors, lawyers, scientists-that the specter of our haunted youth faded like the memory of bad dreams.

Maybe because of that-and in spite of the rash of early deaths-I'd never considered that our whole generation would one day die off. Until now, I'd believed the world held me in the cup of its hand and would shelter me there-a dangerous notion, I realized, that invited the fates to show me just how indifferent they could be. But to begin with Marilyn? No! I wasn't ready to be traveling north to a death-watch for my best friend-not now, not ever.

I clutched the steering wheel so hard my knuckles hurt-until, after an interlude of near-panic, I saw that morbidity would be a difficult emotion to sustain for the full seven-hour drive. By the time I turned north onto I-95 and opened the window, I saw I'd climbed out of the pocket of damp coastal air into a dry, pleasant day. Switching on the cruise control, I coasted toward Richmond, crossed the James River under a sky pewter with clouds, and eased into a rest stop to eat the sandwich I'd packed. Somehow my black mood had vanished along with the humidity.

Nibbling a pear, letting my eyes rest on the peaceful green of rolling hills, I suddenly felt completely normal, which was probably unbalanced in its own right, but comforting. Even my sense of humor began to return. Recalling my packing frenzy last night, during which I'd piled wools on top of cottons (wools in D.C. in October?), I'd prayed for cool as fervently as I had in high school, when Marilyn and Penny and I had spent Rosh Hashanah afternoons lolling on the steps of B'nai Israel Synagogue on Sixteenth Street, sweltering in new woolen shul outfits that we wore whether the temperature was sixty degrees outside or ninety. Adolescent lunacy. Almost n.o.body from Riggs Park belonged to B'nai Israel or went there except to dances in the social hall, but somehow great numbers of us gravitated there on the high holidays. After a few minutes indoors worshipping G.o.d, we came outside to worship each other, praying not for forgiveness, but that our deodorants would hold and not leave us exposed to the world with circles of perspiration under our arms. Sitting at the rest stop, I was suddenly-finally-amused by the realization that my recent yearning for crisp autumn sunshine had the same childish intensity it had had during that annual high-school mating ritual.

I threw my trash away and braced for the rest of the trip. After so many years living out of town, I was never prepared for Washington's traffic, neither the inevitable tie-ups north of Quantico nor the gridlock I was sure would one day grip the beltway traffic entirely.

Although I always told people I was "going to Washington," as if that meant the city itself, the only person I knew who still lived there was Seth Opak, who'd grown up with us in Riggs Park and liked to boast he was the sole holdout who'd never abandoned the city even during the white flight of the sixties and the growing crime rate in the years after that.

Everyone else had long ago moved to the Maryland suburbs or northern Virginia. In their final years, my parents had lived in Silver Spring. My sister, Trudi, had owned a condo in Alexandria before relocating to Florida, and Marilyn and Bernie were still in White Oak, in the same big house where they'd reared their two sons and at least a dozen dogs. The house was now much too big for them, they declared, but far too precious to sell.

Engrossed in driving, I didn't notice until I got off the beltway that the trees were changing color. And it wasn't until I got out of the car at Marilyn's that I realized the late-after-noon air was not just cool but almost cold. Delicious!

Marilyn flung open the door just as I started to ring the bell. After a long trip, it would usually take hours to shake the feeling I was still moving, but even in my fuzzy state of mind I registered Marilyn's manic energy. "You're here!" she shouted. Perfect spots of color circled her cheekbones. Excitement? Fever? Makeup?

How could she be dying?

I moved forward for a hug, and astonished myself by bursting into tears.

"Sentimental fool," Marilyn whispered, gathering me close, and I knew from her shaky voice that she was crying, too. We clung to each other and wept, coc.o.o.ned inside such a close, damp embrace that I sensed the truth of everything I had only feared on the phone: that Marilyn had come through a forest of pain and did not want to go back again. That Marilyn saw herself drifting toward shadows and darkness, and could not help it any more than she could help breathing. Knowing what we knew, the two of us held tight, wept for our current solidity and the vapor we would become, the loss of ourselves and the sheer horror of it; our belief and disbelief. We wept until we had purged ourselves of feeling and heard the startling excessive noise of our own snorts and sobs. Then we began to laugh, to giggle like children even as we hiccuped and sniffed, making the sound even worse. At long last we pulled apart, slightly mortified, and pointed to each other's reddened, mascara-streaked, swollen faces.

"Ten minutes," Marilyn rasped, wiping a tear from my cheek. "Ten minutes to freshen up so we can stand to look at each other."

Marilyn showed me to the guest room (as if after all this time I couldn't find it myself) and told me I had just long enough to wash my face. Then-dry-eyed, smiling, fully in command of herself-she dragged me downstairs to the kitchen. "Wine or tea?" she asked.

"Better make it tea. Wine'll put me out in a minute."

"Wine for both of us," Marilyn said, as I knew she would, and retrieved a bottle of Chardonnay from the refrigerator. "Bernie'll be here any minute." Moving at approximately the speed of sound, she plucked a corkscrew from a drawer, opened the wine, poured it, shoved a gla.s.s in my direction. Marilyn's frantic activity always frightened me. It could be a sign of fear as easily as of high spirits.

"Okay. I've decided what to do," she said at last. "At least for the immediate future."

"What?"

"Did I tell you this is a new cancer? Not the old one spreading? I found out after I talked to you. That means there's less urgency to do something about it in the next five minutes."

"So-?"

Marilyn sipped her wine, caught her breath. "I'm looking into two new treatments. They're not mutually exclusive. I'll probably do them both. One's a vaccine. One's experimental. It doesn't make you bald." She touched her hair, which was as long as I'd ever seen it, curling halfway down her neck. When the cancer had struck, when she'd had to have chemo, the hardest part, Marilyn claimed, had been losing her hair.

"I've never loved the way I looked," she'd said. "But if there's one thing I was always satisfied with, it was my hair." Until then, I hadn't thought Marilyn's hair was anything special. She'd always worn it short, even in the sixties when everyone else was growing it down past their shoulders. But the point was, it was always all right: its rich, gingery color, the wave that was never too little or too much. There had never been anything wrong with Marilyn's hair until she hadn't had any.

I felt guilty about my own thick locks the whole time Marilyn was sick. My hair had always been bushy and wiry, not straight and shiny as I would have liked, but so pale it was almost white. In a neighborhood where darkness was the norm, my sister Trudi and I had been called "the blondes," and it had been a term of respect. But to be bald? Unthinkable. So I understood why, in late middle age, Marilyn was enchanted with length.

"Spare the Hair, that's my new motto," Marilyn said.

"What about Slay the Beast?"

"That goes without saying."

"So this experimental treatment-"

"It doesn't start for another month. All I know is, the doctors are excited about it." Marilyn flashed a smile that didn't extend to her eyes, and occupied herself swirling the wine around in her gla.s.s. "Or-h.e.l.l, it might not work at all. I don't even want to think about that." She lifted her gla.s.s, took a long sip. "Which is why I'm also doing the vaccine thing. And why I've decided on plan B."

"Plan B?"

"The reason I lured you up here."

"You mean the real reason instead of the 'secret about Penny' reason?"

"Penny later. This first. Promise you won't laugh."

"Tell me," I said.

"I'm going to have a face-lift."

"A face-lift!"

A tremor of alarm shot through me. What did this mean? Marilyn was not the same person she'd been before, not that ordinary, vain woman who thought the most important thing was to have a normal shape, to have matching nipples. After two failed grafts, Marilyn claimed she didn't care if she ever had nipples again; and the tummy tuck to provide her with reconstructed b.r.e.a.s.t.s had been a mistake, so painful; people had no idea. And now a face-lift? I didn't believe it.

But Marilyn was suddenly radiant. "You remember what I always said. When my face got to looking like my mother's, I'd do it."

"Marilyn!"

"Anyway, I needed you here for moral support. Bernie's opposed. And he's no good at being a nurse."

Which was completely untrue, because after Marilyn's surgeries he had changed her dressings, chauffeured her to doctors, been a saint. When they'd first removed the bandages from her chest, Marilyn had confided, Bernie had never flinched or looked away.

"I go in on Monday. Lifts have become so routine they do it as outpatient surgery. I come home the same day."

"Monday! But today's already Sat.u.r.day."

"Correct. Sometimes even the busy surgeons recognize that time is of the essence." She put down her gla.s.s. "Look." With thumb and index finger, Marilyn grasped an inch of flesh where her jaw met her ears, and pulled up: lifted her jowls, tightened the crepey skin on her neck. "What do you think? I'm going to be gorgeous."

"You're already gorgeous! A face-lift is crazy. You look fine." A chilling memory a.s.sailed me of a comment my mother had made when a great-aunt, recovering from a broken hip, had slipped into senility. "At a certain point you have only so many resources," she'd said. "The body heals, but the mind doesn't." And I wondered now if Marilyn, in her effort to heal her cancer-battered body, was also losing her mind.

But she smiled, pulled the skin on her neck tighter, waited. And looking at her taut face, momentarily youthful, I began to understand. Of course she was afraid of the surgery; of course a face-lift was impractical. At the same time, it was the ultimate expression of hope.

I stood up, walked around the table, folded Marilyn into another hug. "Ever the optimist," I whispered.

She shrugged me off, trying not to show emotion. "It's the season for optimism, don't you remember? We were always upbeat in the fall."

I recalled then what the two of us had believed the whole time we were growing up: that in Washington in autumn, when the great humid weight of summer finally lifted, when the skies cleared and the mid-Atlantic haze blew off, leaving Riggs Park and the whole of the city fresh and clean and sparkling, we were privileged to witness, instead of death and wilt, the astonishing beginning of the world.

In retrospect, it seemed pretty childish.

When Bernie arrived, he had the grace to kiss me on the cheek, ask a few polite questions, and then profess a hankering for pizza, which he promptly went out to buy before disappearing to the bedroom to watch a rerun of The G.o.dfather on TV. Left to ourselves, Marilyn and I stayed up past midnight, honoring an old tradition of sipping wine and catching up.

Marilyn filled me in about her sons; I spoke about Jon briefly and cheerily and deceptively, wanting to spare her my recent tale of woe.

"So tell me," Marilyn sighed. "After all this time, is he the true love of your life, after all?"

"I think he is," I whispered.

Marilyn c.o.c.ked her head and waited for more, but I talked instead about Robin's frenzy of work and how it had restored her spirits.

"There's a difference between happy and hyper," Marilyn noted-and might have been speaking about herself.

"Yes, but I think Robin was better when she left. Truly. Or at least getting there."

Marilyn's sharp gaze blurred. She was on her fourth gla.s.s of wine, maybe her fifth. "Bob was a schmuck anyway."

I raised my gla.s.s in a toast. "To being rid of schmucks."

We clinked gla.s.ses so energetically that mine sloshed over.

"I'll tell you," Marilyn confided as she refilled it to the brim. "You're lucky you can work at home. Don't have to face the compet.i.tion. Otherwise they come after you." Always quick to claim she wanted only a job, not a career, Marilyn had nevertheless worked part-time on Capitol Hill for years, and loved being a political insider more than she admitted.