| Unpainted Indians “I think there’s something wrong with me.” Esther is standing in front of her side of the closet in ‘our’ room. She is standing in that little space between the end of the pine chest of drawers on ‘my’ side of the room and the secret and untouchable place that is her private treasury, ‘her’ side of the closet. Within is a seemingly endless line of carefully hung, doll-perfect, In-Crowd clothes, pretty little skirts, cashmere turtlenecks, clothes my mother took her to Plain & Fancy in the Village to buy last week, so that she would fit in with the Gelbands and the Harders and the Barrys, with whom she competes for the highest marks in her class, though her father is nothing but a whoremaster, a greenskeeper at the Golf Course who has ruined all of our lives by having an affair with Mom’s best friend. I have two repulsive pink polyester dresses and a few corduroy peddle-pushers hanging behind the flimsy, hollow core doors that she has pushed to ‘my’ side of the closet, clothes Mom sewed me, in her completely accurate but utterly unfashionable way to cover my repulsively Italian looking eleven-year-old ass. I look like my father. Exactly. My mother has always concurred with my Italian relatives that this is so. Mom has also told us endless times that Dad was the handsomest man she had ever seen. He is still handsome enough to have women chase him. But apparently, my likeness to him does not exempt me from being a dusky skinned, repulsive Italian. I also, supposedly, own half of the flimsy pine wrap-around-the-room bedroom set Mom and Dad drove out to the East End to buy at an unpainted furniture store, the one with the big, hook-nosed Indian statue guarding the door. But somehow it doesn’t seem like it. Esther does not allow me to be in the room when she is studying. She is almost always studying. A long time ago, in a time I can barely remember, when we were each other’s best friend although I am four years her junior, Mom and Dad took us all to the unpainted furniture store out east. We live on Long Island and "out east" is the expanse of pine woods and cottages somewhere beyond Shirley. I sat in the middle of the back seat of Mom’s white Pontiac Bonneville and Esther sat to my left. Esther always sat to my left, probably because it was the seat behind Mom, who tended to drive on these outings. David, wise enough even at the age of six to understand that a family like our own needed a comedian, sat on my right. The reason I got the hard bump that was the middle seat, the one with no window to look out of, was not because it was the worst seat in the car, hard and uncomfortable and windowless, but because I was the youngest and therefore prone to fall out a door. Not that I ever fell out of a moving car door. It seemed reasonable to me, even at four, that once the Bonneville was moving I should remain seated, tucked in behind the safety of the enormous, wing-like door, with the door locked and the window shut. But that was the excuse I got. Despite our age difference Esther and I looked similar to the untrained eye back in 1960. For one thing, I caught up to her in size quickly, as if I understood that it was not in my best interest to be a child for long in this household. In addition to that, people were watching a lot of westerns on their Sylvanias and Zeniths and the Indians in these bits of racist advertising were invariably played by Italians. Esther and I both had long, near-black hair, in fact I could sit on mine, and though we both had olive skin, somehow my mother’s Swedish genes, diluted by my father’s Italian ones, had managed to mock up a kind of Polynesian look in Esther’s face, whereas they flat out gave up the fight by the time I came along. But the long brown-black hair did it. People took one look at us, especially from behind, and proclaimed us twins. Indian twins. So when we got out of the Pontiac at the unpainted furniture store with the big wooden Indian statue out front, you can imagine that, while no one had the pluck to accuse my dark-red-skinned father (put an Italian on a golf course eight hours a day and that’s what you’ll get, I assure you) of being an enemy of the state (that’s what Native Americans were in 1960), Esther and I were invariably approached with, “Are you American Indians? Are you twins?” by all the white folk on their way out to the Hamptons, who had stopped at the unpainted furniture store because the big wooden hook-nosed Indian out front had attracted their eye. They were from the city and on their way out east, for chrissake. There could be Injuns. Inside the store my brother and sister and I wandered through piles of cheap, unpainted pine furniture while Mom and Dad talked over our heads, deciding what was in their budget. In the end, though, Dad would take the owner of the place aside and screw his head off negotiating the price. Dad, who walked around during my entire childhood in his golf course hat and greens, smelling of fresh mown grass and sea air, carried a wad of bills in his back pocket that could have bought and sold the unpainted furniture store several times. That’s because Dad, whose own father had died when he was eleven, leaving him responsible to feed his mother, himself and five of his seven siblings, was good at making money. He left his golf course job at two thirty in the afternoon, taking Tom, his “colored” friend and helper with him, and spent the hours between two-thirty and five taking rich people’s money. As the Bellport Golf Course greenskeeper he had quite a reputation with grass and they were fighting over him. But the unpainted furniture store owner, the Bonneville dealer, the Sylvania salesman, never knew about that wad until it was too late and a damned handsome American Indian was pulling the cash out of his pocket to pay for an entire car, a new TV, a wrap-around unpainted pine bedroom set. Then Dad would chuckle, that “eh heh, heh, heh” chuckle he had when he’d really stuck it to someone, and smile that smile that made women chase him. And somehow, the salesman would manage to shake his hand and smile back, at least long enough for Dad to tip his greenskeeper’s hat and turn his back. When the furniture arrived on the back of Dad’s old Dodge pickup a few days later Esther and I watched in amazement as it was carried in and set on the varnished pine floor in the big bedroom at the front of the house. We were to share the big bedroom. Mom and Dad would take the one across the hall, a dark twelve by twelve foot cave, and David would have his own bedroom next to Mom and Dad’s, off the hall on the way to the kitchen. The house was nothing more than a three bedroom ranch, but to my mother it was the Taj Mahal. She lived on a single loaf of bread the week she arrived in New York from Sweden in 1927, a seventeen-year-old Swede who knew not a word of English, and she never let us forget it. It was a fairytale come true, to her. We were to be princesses, sharing the biggest bedroom in the house and the sunniest, with our own cheap pine wrap-around bedroom set. Esther would have one of the two double chest-of-drawers, one of the corner desks, a book shelf and a low-boy. I would have an identical, double chest-of-drawers, an identical corner desk, another single chest of drawers (I wanted a bookcase but for some reason the fact that I was four precluded me from having books) and a low-boy. It was too good to be true. And somehow, at the age of four, I knew it. And so I stood there, probably pooping my pants because I still did that now and then, feeling a strange intuition that this was not what it appeared to be, while my sister silently planned her takeover. In the end, after Mom stained the cabinets in her favorite Ipswich Pine Minwax (everything in the house was Ipswich Pine, I supposed because it was the most Swede-friendly color in the Minwax palette at that time) and varnished them, they were set up against the walls in a horseshoe in the big front bedroom, Esther immediately taking the right side of the room, farthest from the door and therefore never to be trod upon except by her, and me being stuck with the runway around the beds that would never really be my own. Across the hall, David had his own inner sanctum. He was a boy, after all, and that gave him privileges. A long built-in desk under the window overlooking the backyard, flanked by built-in highboys, gave his room the kind of masculine solidity that I would continue to long for all of my life and find nowhere. I was invited into the sanctum to play war with plastic soldiers, or Lost in Space with his gyroscope, or even, during the very best of times, with stuffed animals he named after the manufacturers on their tags, and whom David was able to create voices for with a ventriloquist’s comic ease. I was, after all, not supposed to be a girl. Mom had told me whenever she was in a particularly cold mood that I was somehow unexpected despite nine months of advanced warning, and so she didn’t bother to come up with a name for me. She had been in the garden weeding her zinnia bed when I let her know I was coming and she seems to have maintained that grudge, that she never got to finish that row, ever since. She often reminded me that we barely made it to the hospital, she didn’t get her enema and therefore I was born covered in shit. Dr. Hornstein delivered me. He was in love with her and had been chasing her for some time, but Mom didn’t play that way. As she told me this story I always imagined myself hanging by my ankles from his fist, being examined in shameful nudity. Dr. Hornstein gives me a good whack on the butt to get me breathing and asks her what my name is to be. Mom says she hasn’t thought of a name for a girl, as she had been expecting a playmate for David named Steven. According to Mom, Dr. Hornstein suggested my name. “They can call her Suzy when she’s little, Susan when she’s a young woman and Sue when she’s an old lady,” he said. As if that was a selling point. Mom thought it over a minute and agreed. She didn't have time to waste, there were beds to weed, two other children to return to, and now, after all this trouble, David still didn’t have a little brother to play with. So the name stuck. "Suzy means a woman's privates in Swedish you know," she'd chuckle after finishing the story. I think it pissed her off that my father liked it, though, and called me Suzy for the rest of his life. As it turned out, he’d had a hot girlfriend by that name while he was in the Army. Need I say that she was one of two sisters, twins actually, that Mom had made friends with after she followed him to boot camp in Louisiana. My parents married down there, with only a chaplain and two witnesses (Probably Suzy and Sally). In the photo, they make a handsome couple, he in his dress uniform and hat, she in a tonal wool suit and a pair of sharp looking toeless heels. As far as my not making a damned good little brother for David, I didn’t see it that way, though. I made a fine little brother for David, whom I adored. His favorite subject was war, even as a five-year-old, and he taught me everything I know about it. We played endlessly with little green soldiers and tanks, and one of my fondest memories is of Mom throwing a paper bag from the 5 & 10 Cent Store on the picnic table one summer day, which I subsequently discovered was my third-birthday present, and within which was my very own plastic army. But my brother sucked it up when Mom brought home not his brother, Steven, but a baby girl who looked suspiciously like his father. He’s like that. An eternal optimist. Work with what you got. I was in training for battle by the time I was on my feet. I had no interest in dolls, except to pull their heads off and dress them like men if possible. One needed to recruit, after all. It was not until I saw my first horse that my attention wavered from the frontlines beside my brother’s twin bed. After that, it was pretty much over. It was all horses, real or imagined, big or small, until the day a paratrooper from the Westhampton Air Base called me Susan and kissed me. But right now Esther is standing in front of her side of the double closet in our room while I sit at the end of my twin bed, the bed nearest the door and furthest from privacy. My normally slightly terrifying sister is vulnerable, she is humbled and her voice is soft. This is the Esther I see very little of, the Esther I love the best. This is the big sister who is my best friend, who confides in me more than she does Alice Quatrocchi or June Loman or even Joann Rideout. You can help me, says the contrite bend of her head. You can be of service to the half-Italian greenskeeper’s daughter who will one day screw the heads off the In-Crowd brats in my class, whose fathers and mothers are all scientists at the Brookhaven Lab. You can lend some support to the walking skeleton who will one day wear the tassel of the 1974 Valedictorian of Bellport High School. “Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” she asks again. “I don’t know, Esther. Why do you think there’s something wrong with you?” I offer her my softest, most concerned voice in return. Ignoring me, as usual, she puts her fingers to her chin in that thoughtful way she has. Seven years from now, hours after I am told she is dead, my fingers will make the same gesture, driving me into a weird hole of self-doubt (which twin died?) for the next decade of my life. “I have to balance things,” she is explaining, but not to me. “I have to touch every corner. If I pick up something on my desk, I have to pick up something on the opposite side. Everything has to be balanced.” “OK,” I respond, frowning and blinking. Because I don’t have a clue what she means. Nor do I know that I am naively missing a golden opportunity, perhaps the only opportunity that anyone will ever have to discuss the emergence of her madness with her in a rational conversation. After today that door will be locked. After today, any logical attempt to approach or discuss her anorexia, and the host of other crazy obsessions that will accompany it, will be considered reason enough for an absolute and indisputable verdict of treason. Continues... |
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