Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions Read online

  He’s not buying this, not after last night.

  “You can lie to me, but you can’t lie to yourself,” he says. “We made love last night.”

  That tear-stained face under his. Her stillness.

  “I felt guilty for leading you on,” she says in the boyfriend dead of cancer voice. “And afterwards I felt crummy. You weren’t worth the risk.”

  You knew I was fragile, he wants to say, but words stick in his throat. There are no safe houses left in this hard new city; no earth angels. The fundamentals no longer apply.

  “I want you out of here,” she says, a simple order.

  Blues for Advanced Beginners

  “Woke up this morning

  and went back to sleep…”

  Epstein-Barre Blues byMemphis Earlene Gray

  .

  You have an inalienable right to sing the blues if you were born under a bad sign. Capricorn is a bad sign to be born under. Jesus was one. So was Nixon.

  The right to sing the blues may be earned if you:

  a. suffer

  b. lose

  c. pay some dues

  It’s not the blues when your loss is tax deductible.

  Some examples of dues:

  a. working for the man

  b. hating your day job

  c. losing your man.

  Some forms of suffering that will never be blues worthy:

  a. anorexia nervosa

  b. low LSATs

  It’s the blues if you:

  a. wish you never been born

  b. feel like a motherless child

  If your mother is dead and you miss her it’s Country.

  .

  Good times to have the blues are:

  a. Christmas

  b. Mother’s Day

  c. every night when the sun goes down

  You can’t sing the blues in Chinese.

  .

  Mouth full of toothache

  Head full of network news

  Gonna go downtown

  Buy some alligator shoes

  Silverpoint Blues,

  Attributed to Blind Drunk Johnson

  .

  Blues women never sing Send in the Clowns.

  Blues women pack heat and eat meat.

  Just because you shot that two timing man doesn’t automatically make you a blues woman, but it’s a good start.

  So is buying him an Armani suit, or paying his child- support.

  .

  Blues sports are:

  a. drinking

  b. gambling

  c. running around

  Blues men are not team players.

  You can’t sing the blues in Gore-Tex

  The following drugs don’t belong in the blues:

  a. Ecstasy

  b. Speed

  c. Multi-vitamins

  Blues women don’t wear Chanel. Other fashion no-nos:

  a. running shoes

  b. lace

  c. botox

  .

  Blues men don’t get born again.

  There is no word in French for hellhound.

  You can’t sing the blues in French, not even if you’re blind.

  The Sphinx of Margate

  “A virtuous woman; her price is beyond rubies,” says the Rabbi, but I can’t get my mind off that pale yellow stain on her living room rug, which is a lousy way to remember Aunt Shirley, who raised three sons and kept a kosher household full of polished mahogany furniture. A bright woman married to a dull man. Priced beyond rubies. Uncle Joe was lucky to marry Shirl, my mother always said, which meant too bad she couldn’t have married someone bright and tall, like she was, instead of just tall.

  Uncle Joe was not much of a catch, but Aunt Shirley turned him into a good provider. She wore mink in the winter and none of her jewelry was fake. Maybe she shouldn’t have corrected his grammar in public, but without her nudging, he would have been somebody’s loyal employee and a buyer of second hand Buicks, not a prosperous businessman with a new Cadillac every other year.

  She was my mother’s big sister; the one who came first and set standards none of us could live up to. Everyone in Aunt Shirley’s family could read Hebrew. Passover Seders at Aunt Shirley’s, you read the entire Haggadah, from beginning to end, first the Hebrew and then the English translation, so it took all night. She was strict with her boys, her three dark-eyed, musical sons, but you could sense sweetness in her; the heavy sweetness of fruit stewed in Sabbath wine. She wore steel blue sheath dresses with matching jackets that looked like armour to Synagogue and the Symphony, but she had a weakness for small, silly velvet hats trimmed in feathers or rhinestones like the headpieces of circus elephants and chorus girls. She was a large woman with a broad forehead and a commanding nose. In her presence, my mother became baby sister, the little sparrow, not quite up to the mark but always forgiven.

  .

  Marriage had exiled my mother from the familial warmth of Philadelphia to New York, the price of marrying for love, and condemned her to permanent homesickness. In New York, according to my mother, even the nicest people (she meant other Jews in general and her in-laws in particular) were hard and lacked proper family feeling. Her in-laws were too visibly ambitious, too conscious of price tags. They exchanged Christmas gifts as though they were Protestants.

  A“real” Jewish family, by which she meant the one she grew up in and Aunt Shirley preserved, celebrated Hanukah and all major Jewish holidays together. It was a cosy place, a haven. You didn’t need best friends because you had plenty of cousins to play with, and no place was better than home. We always went to Aunt Shirley’s for the holidays.

  .

  The three yellow squares in the southeast corner of the Monopoly Board, Atlantic Avenue, Ventnor Avenue, and Marvin Gardens, are in Margate, New Jersey. Aunt Shirley had a house in Marvin Gardens,

  a real one, a white Dutch colonial with a sun porch. It was bigger than ours back in New York, but the back yard was smaller and it didn’t have a basement. No one had much back yard in Marvin Gardens nor real basements either. Margate was a sedate beach town full of carnival attractions. The Boardwalk began at the Margate/Ventnor border.

  Ten blocks away from Aunt Shirley’s house was the Margate Elephant, four stories tall and hollow inside, made of some substance that looked like industrial strength paper mache. It, or rather she, was almost as famous as Monopoly. The radio comedian Jean Shepherd called her The Sphinx of Margate (“How she got here? Nobody knows. Why she came here? Nobody says. What she does here? Nobody cares.’’) There had once been a sister elephant in Florida, that was levelled by a hurricane and another at Coney Island that was destroyed by fire.

  We never went to Coney Island, even though it was close to home. It was not a suitable place for families, according to my mother, as though the Atlantic Ocean itself became more refined once you reached the Philadelphia part of the Jersey Shore.

  .

  There was always a bowl of fruit on Aunt Shirley’s dining room table. In her kitchen, the women spoke Yiddish, language of secrets and nuanced disparagement. Such heavy brown food, garnished with cooked carrots and schmaltz, which is Yiddish for chicken fat but connotes sentimental excess.

  Didn’t she ever get sick of doing all that cooking?

  Uncle Joe and the three boys listened to the ball game on the sun porch, (Phillies fans, all of them, didn’t they get tired of rooting for a team that always lost?), and played pinochle, a mysterious card game with its own special deck; forty-eight cards and nothing lower than a nine. Cousin Danny said girls weren’t allowed to play pinochle.

  Girl card games were go fish, concentration, and spit, which I played with my sisters. When Danny played cards with me, we played gin rummy or war. Sometimes we played war using the pinochle deck, which made for a faster game, more fights for bigger stakes. More fun but not kosher.

  Keeping kosher meant you weren’t allowed to mix things that God told Jewish people to keep separate, and it got complicated. You needed one
set of china for dairy dishes and another set for meat. A milk plate used for meat had to be buried in the back yard for twenty-four hours before it could be used again. Following all the rules was like saying “step on a crack break your mother’s back”, but crossing your fingers. As if God would get you for eating a cheeseburger. Kosher was a lot of extra work for mother. Back home, in New York, my sisters and I grew up drinking milk with our baloney sandwhiches.

  .

  Aunt Shirley’s studious eldest, Jeffrey, flunked out of Penn State his freshman year, his first time away from home, but later redeemed himself when he started over at Temple. He lived at home until he passed his CPA exam and married a rabbi’s daughter from Pittsburgh. Stewie, the good looking one, got married a Catholic girl. He’d always had lots of girfriends. He flirted with fat great aunts, and little gril cousins and waitresses in family restaurants and flashy Boardwalk babes, but his girlfriends were always artistic. Stewie’s wife Joanne, was a dancer.

  Aunt Shirley took it surprisingly well, which is sad when you think about how everything ended.

  Cousin Stewie with his degree in psychology talking about Empty Nest Syndrome, and the rest of them; were they as stupid and vindictive as my mother thinks, or was it just that they’d stopped listening to her long ago?

  There’s a bad dream I get sometimes, the one that begins with a splitting headache and the sensation of burning urine trickling down the insides of my legs.

  Everyone says I’m the one who looks most like her.

  .

  Last summer Aunt Shirley let her hair down, and confessed that she really liked the Catholic dancer better than the Rabbi’s daughter.

  “She’s got some life in her. The other one is such a stick,” she said to my mother; the daughters-in-law barely out of earshot.

  Aunt Shirley spoke English, which meant I was included, that I’d been promoted from the children’s table, if only for a day. I had just turned 15, and she gave me perfume, My Sin Eau de Toilette, instead of the usual Israel bond. That day on the beach we were three grown women; gossiping, mildly indiscreet, basking in the sun with Noxema on our noses. Aunt Shirley wore her old straw farmer’s hat but she had new sunglasses with rhinestones. Usually she was hard to amuse, but that day she laughed her head off till the tears came.

  .

  “Weren’t we something!” she kept saying to my mother, and they laughed like clowns in back of the midway after the crowd has gone home.

  The first signs of trouble, but who knew then?

  We thought she was finally happy.

  .

  Thanksgiving dinner that year the air was full of Aunt Shirley’s rage. Her dining room furniture looked dusted in a haphazard way, like she’d run out of steam and Lemon Pledge. Thumb prints smudged the wine glasses. She only came out of the kitchen to serve food, which was cold and under cooked. She wouldn’t sit with us. She wouldn’t let the Rabbi’s daughter or Joanne help her, only my mother. Uncle Joe and the boys tried to act like there was nothing wrong, tried to smooth over everything with Scotch, but without Aunt Shirley there was no conversation at the dinner table beyond please pass the salt. No laughter, no jokes.

  The women talked Yiddish in the kitchen.

  The stain on the living room wall to wall carpet reminded me of the ones we had, from when our collie got old.

  “She’s stopped talking to us. I don’t know why,” Uncle Joe said. “You know how stubborn she can be. She won’t even eat.”

  “She’s sick,” my mother said.

  “I know she’s a sick woman, but what am I supposed to do, force feed her? We’re doing everything we can. Stewie got her into a support group for empty nesters, but she won’t go.”

  My mother screamed at him. “What’s the matter with you? She needs to see a real doctor, not group therapy.”

  My mother turned out to be right, but by the time they discovered the tumor, it was too late to operate.

  .

  The human brain is another version of the Monopoly Board. The multiplication tables are filed next to Spanish verbs. The habits of love live next door to the memory of toilet training. A tumor the size of a golf ball was discovered at the location of conscience and emotion in Aunt Shirley’s brain. In effect, she had undergone a pre-frontal lobotomy, an operation that used to be recommended in the Forties for mental patients who worried too much.

  It made them happy, but irresponsible, made them incontinent; turned them into tractable zombies.

  We’d thought she’d finally figured out she could relax a little and all the time it was creeping pathology.

  The second opinion doctor, a relative youngster as neurosurgeons go, told us Aunt Shirley had three to six months left, but that she would feel no pain.

  “It will be harder on you guys, not her. In a way she’s already gone.”

  .

  At the funeral Uncle Joe and the boys sit on one side with the two daughters in law, and Uncle Joe’s sister and brother-in-law. With Aunt Shirley gone they are no longer part of our family. Everyone else sits with us; all the rest of the relatives, as well as the ladies from Hadassah, the music appreciation class Aunt Shirley taught at the Jewish Senior Center, the dentist she used to work for before she got married, and some of her friends from Overbrook High. It seems to be the general consensus that Uncle Joe and the boys let her die, that it was all their fault she didn’t get medical attention until it was too late.

  “They killed my sister,” is what my mother says.

  Even the Rabbi seems to think so. When he talks about Aunt Shirley’s devotion to her family and how devoted they were to her; he doesn’t mention Uncle Joe or the boys, but makes a big deal about how her nieces came all the way from New York to visit her when she was sick. I look for some way to convey to Danny how embarrassed I am by this undeserved praise. I should stand up for him, my favorite of the cousins, who turned me on to Jean Shepherd and Mad Magazine, and made it fun to sit at the children’s table.

  Danny catches my eye and his face is hard.

  .

  I visited Aunt Shirley two months before she died. By then she required round the clock nursing, but she looked almost like her old self, again, makeup in place and her hair set and colored. In her steel blue silk dress and the pearls Uncle Joe gave her for their thirtieth anniversary she looked like Civic Virtue after a trip to the beauty parlor. Stately and hollow. Most of her mind was gone but the data retrieval systems were still in place. She recognized me and called me by name, but not like it mattered to her.

  .

  A bright woman lives with a dull man by holding herself in check. And then, one day, she can’t. At first it feels like euphoria. Layers of restraint and propriety fall off. You mock the rabbi’s daughter and who cares if she overhears you. You burn the roast on purpose. You tell your husband you don’t love him and never did; say unforgiveable things to each of your sons.

  Everyone says I look like her. .

  Unmentionable Acts with Shoes

  Brian and I were tenants in the same rundown Greenwich Village brownstone. His apartment was on the second floor, down the hall from mine. This was in 1972. Back then it seemed like everyone I knew got paid off the books, lived in an illegal sublet, or was having an affair with a married man. I was 23 and desperate to get into law school, which seemed my only chance to escape a life of moral drift and group therapy.

  .

  Brian often showed up in my dreams disguised as Governor Nelson Rockefeller or Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas, each of whom could have gotten me into law school on a phone call. In real life, Brian was 47, old enough to be my father. He thought The Greening of America was deep stuff. I forgave such a sentimental lapse because he was English, and I was in love with his ravaged face.

  There was twenty years difference between the right side of Brian’s face, where all the stitches were, and the unlined left side. It was beautiful, like driftwood. He’d wrecked a car once, back in England, gone head first through the windsh
ield and had to be put back together again.

  I was in love with his voice, too; his English accent all weathered from years of New York City, and his gruff, matter of fact tenderness. He muttered endearments to his calico cat as he ground up the beans for his morning coffee. Old Bum, he used to call her, and made it sound sweeter than sweetheart.

  .

  Brian used to read fortunes from left over Turkish coffee grounds. The design the grounds made on the inside of your coffee cup was supposed to be you intersecting with the cosmic order. Coffee grounds were good for grand designs but skimpy on details, which is why I don’t remember Brian’s fortunes the way I remember my stranger dreams.

  By now, some of them could have even come true.

  .

  During the day, Brian stayed home, working on his dissertation while his wife supported him. Brian’s wife was a graphic designer who earned $10 an hour off the books doing free lance paste-ups. She wore long skirts and leotards like a modern dancer.

  .

  Group said the wife was Brian’s problem, not mine.

  Group was real encouraging where affairs were concerned, just down on guilt. A major premise of our particular therapy group was that we all suffered from excess guilt and were cut off from our feelings. We were hard on people who didn’t share their feelings with the group. I didn’t share feelings with the group that I knew they’d disapprove of, like guilt. I wondered how much longer they’d let me get away with it.

  .

  Group said the affair was my idea, I just didn’t want to take responsibility. But wasn’t it Brian’s idea to begin with? He was the one who spoke first that spring day when he found me crying by the mailbox.

  “We regret to inform you,” said the law schools of Western New England, Eastern Ohio State, and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.”

  “Come upstairs,” Brian said, “I’ll make you some Turkish coffee.”

  I stared at him in wonder, all the while babbling about not wanting to put him to any bother, how I didn’t even drink coffee.

  “Turkish coffee doesn’t taste like ordinary coffee,” he said. “It’s a whole different experience of coffee.”