Riggs Park Part 5

"The offspring, then. And you could help. You're the one who does research for a living." She fixed me with a mournful, lambent gaze.

"Oh, no. You're not guilt-tripping me into this. I do term papers. The influence of Sir Thomas Mallory on the modern novel. Nothing real. If Steve wanted to, he could hire a hundred researchers more qualified than I am. The fact that he hasn't ought to tell you something."

Dramatically, Marilyn said nothing.

"Besides," I said. "If Penny really had a baby, why didn't she come out of hiding after it was born and she made her arrangements for it? Why wait another six months to surface again? What was she doing, trying to regain her girlish figure?" Penny had always been slim.

"That's really lame," Marilyn said.

It was, and the fact of that made me angry. I pushed my tray away from me so hard it clunked into hers. "I hate Mexican food," I yelled. "I don't know why I let you bring me here."

A woman dressed like a desert nomad shot us a withering glance from the next booth. Marilyn raised her eyebrows at me as if to say, "Oh, you've really done it now, Barbara," and stood up. "You could have had fried chicken," she told me. She gathered the remains of our uneaten lunch and carried them to the trash.

I slid out of the booth, followed her, handed her her purse. In our rush toward the gla.s.s door to the parking lot, we nearly collided with two huge teenagers, each looking like a linebacker for his football team. Marilyn gave them a brilliant smile. One of them held the door for us. Outside, Marilyn dropped the smile. "I bet she's still alive," she said.

"Who?"

"Essie Berman."

"Essie! That's crazy. She was old even when we were kids. She's probably been dead for years."

"Not necessarily. Kids think everyone is old. She came to my mother's funeral."

"That was ten years ago!" Marilyn's mother had died unexpectedly, and I had missed the funeral because I was on vacation and Marilyn hadn't wanted to interrupt my trip to tell me. I s.n.a.t.c.hed my keys from my purse and unlocked the car.

"At the funeral Essie looked like she'd still be around in another ten years," Marilyn said. "Maybe another twenty."

"She'd be at least in her nineties. Probably senile."

"She never struck me as the type who'd get senile. Even in her nineties." We'd always thought Essie older than our parents because of her salt-and-pepper hair-but as Marilyn said, maybe not. It doesn't occur to a six-year-old that some people simply gray early.

"I don't care," I said. "I'm not interested."

Unfazed, Marilyn got into the car. "I even tried finding her in the phone book," she persisted.

An unbidden bubble of laughter gurgled up through my irritation. "Had a slow week, did you? Didn't have enough to do between selecting medical treatments and scheduling cosmetic surgery? How many Esther Bermans are there in the phone book, anyway?"

"There was no listing," Marilyn huffed. "I tried the retirement places and the nursing homes, too. But I think she's still around."

"Don't be delusional. Did you try Maryland or just D.C.?"

"I only look dumb."

During our years in Riggs Park, Essie's single status had been an oddity, and her family, if she had any, wasn't in Washington. If Essie were still alive, no telling where she might be, or with whom. It was true Penny might have confided to her even a dark secret like a pregnancy-though it was hard for me to believe in a pregnancy even if Steve had said so. Despite all the confusion in Penny's life, on this one issue she'd been firm, even before she was old enough to worry about it. She had not been wanted. She would not inflict that pain on anyone else. End of story. Steve's account was odd enough, but Marilyn setting out on a wild-goose chase for Essie was odder. As children, Penny and I had looked to Marilyn as the gold standard of sanity. It hadn't occurred to me, until I'd heard the story of how the body could heal itself at the expense of the mind, that that could ever change.

"I know what you're thinking, Marilyn," I bellowed as I pulled out of the parking lot, counting on volume to shake her back to her senses. "You think you'll be in there having your surgery tomorrow and out of guilt and sympathy good old Barbara will be out chasing down Steve's nonexistent long-lost child. Let me tell you right now, that's not going to happen. Bernie and I will both be sitting in the waiting room with our blood pressure off the charts while we twiddle our thumbs. If you want to spare us that, learn to live with your wrinkles."

"Bernie won't be sitting in the waiting room," Marilyn said. "He never sits in the waiting room. I don't want you to, either."

"That's ridiculous." We thudded over a huge pothole that jolted the whole car. "What does Bernie think of this whole 'baby' thing?" I demanded.

"I haven't told him."

"Because you know he'd think it's as crazy as I do."

"Steve wouldn't lie to me, Barbara." A mask of exhaustion dropped over her face, and we drove past the District Line in silence.

When her voice came again, it was just a thread. "You remember my baby that died?"

"Of course. Did you think I'd forget?" Marilyn's second child, a girl, arrived two years after Mike. She was so blue that she never left the delivery room before doctors diagnosed the hole in her heart, something that even today might not have been a routine repair. In the confused moments before they rushed her to Children's Hospital for surgery, Marilyn chose not to see the baby. "If she's all right, then I'll have plenty of time to get to know her," she'd said, struggling to keep her voice from cracking. "Better to not get attached yet-just in case." She'd named the baby Carolyn.

The infant lived forty-eight hours after surgery. Steve flew in for the burial, but Marilyn couldn't bring herself to go. The two of us sat together in her living room, entertaining the toddler Mike, while Bernie and Steve accompanied the tiny coffin to the cemetery.

Now Marilyn reached over and touched my wrist with cold, trembling fingers. "If I had it to do over again," she whispered, "I wouldn't have sent the baby off to Children's Hospital without taking a look at her."

She leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes. Two perfectly shaped tears squeezed out from beneath her lashes. "If I had it to do over again," she said, "I would have held her."

CHAPTER 6.

Southern Maryland, 1953 The summer Marilyn and Penny and I were eleven and a half and Penny was about to turn twelve, our parents had decided to send us for the month of July to Camp Chesapeake, a Jewish overnight camp in southern Maryland on the sh.o.r.es of the Chesapeake Bay. Some of our Riggs Park friends had been going for years-notably Wish Wishner, whose charms had not yet captured me, and Seth Opak and his sister. Although we were old to be first time campers, we were lured by the promise that Marilyn and Penny and I would be in the same cabin. Marilyn's brother Steve was going, too. It would be fine.

Penny didn't think so. She said wild horses couldn't drag her there, or to any other summer camp. "Wild horses!" her mother laughed. "Let's hope that won't be necessary." Waiting in front of the Jewish Community Center for the bus to camp, Penny sat on the steps and picked at a scab on her knee, sulking.

"You're not the only one being abandoned," I pointed out. "My mother's on tour with the National Symphony. She doesn't want me around the house making trouble." She had been offered the job, a plum, because the orchestra's second clarinetist was unable to travel. My sister, Trudi, had been shipped off to cousins in New York.

"Our parents are going on vacation," Marilyn and Steve a.s.sured her.

"Leave me alone," Penny said.

The eleven-year-old girls were a.s.signed to Darlene, a counselor with Asian-looking hair and nails the color of cinnamon, who herded us into the bus. The windows were open, but it was stifling. When we finally started to move, a hot wind blew in and ratted Penny's hair into a wild red tangle. Penny didn't seem to notice.

Steve brought out his guitar and began strumming "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall." The campers sang along. By sixty bottles of beer we were traveling through wooded countryside and the singing was so loud that Steve's playing was inaudible. He put the guitar away.

Walking down the aisle to check her charges, Darlene noted Penny's dour expression and smiled at her as if she were some unusual pet. "Are you okay?"

"I have a headache." Penny closed her eyes.

"The singing keeps them under control," a nice-looking male counselor yelled to Darlene when we got to fifty bottles.

"So I see," Darlene said.

"I'm Danny," the other counselor told her. He had high cheekbones, an aristocratic nose, a dark tan.

"Isn't that cute," Marilyn giggled. "Darlene and Danny."

Penny opened her eyes and studied the counselors. "I envy Danny his tan," she said. She'd told her mother redheads didn't belong at a camp where they were in the sun all day. "Twenty years from now I'll have skin cancer just like Aunt Selma." Skin cancer and sun hadn't been linked yet in the official medical literature, but Penny's family offered several redheaded case histories.

"Use lotion," Helen had said. "Wear a T-shirt." While Penny was away, Helen would be painting their house. Penny had spent two weeks destroying diaries, letters, anything her mother might find in her room and construe as evidence of a private existence.

Camp Chesapeake sat on a bluff overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. Two hours after we'd arrived, we were shoving footlockers under our cots and getting ready for the first swim of the day. Eli, the camp's manager, believed frequent swims would keep us from heatstroke, given that all the other activities took place in relentless sun. Even our cabins offered little respite-hot wooden boxes with no insulation or air-conditioning. The windows were small, the walls unfinished. Wires snaked up bare plywood to unshaded ceiling bulbs; daddy longlegs lived in the wooden toilet stalls.

In the cabin, our cots were lined up beneath two rows of windows. Darlene the counselor got to sleep behind a wooden barrier at the front. We campers eyed each other as we changed into bathing suits, lingering on the chest of a girl named Abigail, who wore a C-cup bra while most of us were still in undershirts. Abigail undressed facing the wall. Penny, whose chest was still utterly flat, retreated to the toilet to change.

The beach was a narrow strip at the bottom of the bluff, looking out to the brown, slow-moving bay. The net designed to keep jellyfish out of the swimming area was torn. Most of us waded in tentatively. One girl bravely walked out on the dock and jumped into the water. Seconds later she came up festooned with jellyfish-draped across her shoulders, her bathing suit, her arms.

"Aaaiieee!" the girl screamed.

Bruno, the swim director, blew his whistle. "Everyone out of the water!"

We watched in horror as the girl pulled jellyfish from her body, flung them into the water, retreated to the beach. Bruno scooped more jellyfish from the swimming area with a net on a long pole. He deposited them on the sand, where veteran campers found sticks to poke into their melting, gelatinous tentacles.

"Okay, everyone back in," Bruno yelled. No one moved.

"All right, girls," Darlene said. The polished, well-groomed fingers with which she gestured toward the water were long, delicate, without authority. We stood our ground.

"Rebellion on your hands?" asked Danny, who'd come down with his group of boys.

"Mutiny on the first day," Darlene said. Wish and Seth, two of Danny's charges, sprinted into the water and raced in a strong freestyle out to the net. The jellyfish seemed not to bother them.

"Swim team," Danny told Darlene.

She'd fluffed her hair and smiled.

Four days later, Penny's skin had been burned raw. "On visiting day you'll recognize me as the bright scarlet one," she wrote her mother. "I'm the only one who wears a man's undershirt over her bathing suit." Penny had brought along a whole stack of her father's undershirts for protection. She shed the current one reluctantly-a hundred percent cotton, kind to the skin-and dressed in scratchy shorts and T-shirt for Friday supper. As was required on Friday evenings, all of us were outfitted entirely in white. Darlene zipped herself into a tight white jumpsuit and ducked behind her wooden barrier to curl her hair.

Penny combed her carrot bangs over a magenta forehead. She'd been slightly feverish from sunburn all day, taking aspirin and rubbing moisturizer on her skin. Several times each day, she tiptoed away from the scheduled outdoor activity and retreated to the bunk, where she practiced playing jacks. Invariably, Darlene found her and made her go back outside.

In the dining hall, the smell of greasy chicken mingled with the odor of pine from the unfinished walls. "Oh, G.o.d, I don't think I can eat," Penny wailed. Nausea, she had informed us, was a primary symptom of sun-poisoning.

Marilyn and I sat on either side of her at the long table. Waiters appeared with platters of chicken and mashed potatoes. Penny looked at the food and turned the color of the camp's infamous lime mousse.

"I've got to go back to the bunk," she whispered urgently.

"Try to eat something first," Darlene said.

"I need to get out of here. Now."

"We'll take her," I offered. "She's too sunburned to eat."

Back at the bunk, we made Penny lie down. She could only lie on her stomach because her back was too sore. The cabin was airless, a purgatory of humid heat that coated us like glue. After what seemed an eternity, Marilyn said, "We ought to go down to the rec hall, it'll be better than lying in bed. All you have to do is sit." Penny looked skeptical, but she came with us.

The rec hall was a huge wooden rectangle with vaulted ceilings and window openings with no gla.s.s or screens, just plywood shutters that could be closed in case of a storm. After supper on Fridays, there was a short service in the rec hall, followed by a movie for the whole camp. The opening credits of National Velvet were already rolling by the time we crept in and took our seats.

In front of us, Danny and Darlene sat side by side, their shoulders touching. They were surrounded by campers. Across the aisle were the older boys. Steve Ginsburg sat on the end, directly across from Penny.

"I've seen this already," he said, leaning in her direction.

"Me, too."

"What a sunburn. Bet it hurts."

"It does." Without further preamble, Penny burst into tears.

We led her outside. Steve followed. "Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't know it was that bad."

Penny pulled up her sleeve to reveal the water blisters on her shoulder.

"After it peels your skin will get some color," Steve a.s.sured her.

"Not me. I never get tan. I just get freckles."

"Freckles are okay. Freckles are angel dust."

Penny smiled. I think Steve was in love with her even then.

A week later, the three of us sat on Darlene's cot, hidden from our bunk mates by her wooden barrier, composing a letter to Penny's mother. It was Darlene's night off and she'd gone out with Danny. Becky, the counselor-in-training who was supposed to fill in for her, had slipped out after curfew, the minute Taps ended and the lights went out. We'd filched a few pages of Darlene's fancy stationery and were working by flashlight.

"Tell your mother you've been running a fever of 102 all week," I suggested.

"Tell her all they give you is aspirin," Marilyn offered. Penny wrote it down.

On the campers' side of the wooden barrier, the girl with the C-cup bra, Abigail, got up and rummaged in her foot-locker, then walked to the bathroom with a heavy step. Abigail had her period. Marilyn and Penny and I hadn't had this experience yet, so we were fascinated-though Penny, with three older sisters, was less so. Abigail changed sanitary pads at least ten times a day. She was terrified that otherwise the blood might leak through her clothes. When Abigail returned to her cot, she started sobbing softly.

"Come on outside," Marilyn whispered, sensitive to Abigail's plight.

We tiptoed out the door. The sky was gray-black, hazed over, no stars. Marilyn sat on the top step of the little porch and Penny and I sat below, our legs sticking out of pale shorty pajamas.

"Abigail's just homesick," Marilyn said.

"Me, too," Penny told her. "I hate it here."

Marilyn scratched a mosquito bite on her arm. "Hate's a strong word."

"I hate swimming. I hate that I'm the only one here so allergic to jellyfish that I get so swollen from them. I hate the sun. I hate everything but playing jacks." Between scheduled activities, all the girls played jacks. Penny's delicate fingers seemed able to pick up any combination of them, no matter how scattered. It was a matter of pride that she was as good as she was. It was the first thing, maybe the only thing, she'd ever really been good at.

With a crunch of dry leaves, someone walked by in the woods adjacent to our cabin.

"We better go in," Marilyn said.

Penny ignored her. "I couldn't sleep the whole time I was sunburned. Now my shoulders itch and I can't sleep because of the itching." Penny's water bubbles were bursting. A bright red wounded skin was emerging underneath, which had to be covered with her father's undershirts. "I feel rotten when it's this hot. Truly, genuinely rotten."

"It's even hotter at home."