2001-02 Charles River Review: The House in the Middle

I grew up in a green house that stood between two brown houses, but the brown houses were very different from one another and so were the families who lived in them. The house to the left of our house was the Flaherty's and the house to the right was the Birnbaum's. The Flaherty's house was a grimy stucco Victorian with a sagging roof and peeling mud brown trim. The Birnbaum's house was composed of golden and chestnut-colored bricks adorned at even intervals by jewel-shaped stained-glass windows. In the Flaherty's yard grew stubbly grass and high weeds, which partly hid rusted bicycles and dilapidated baby buggies and cracked cap pistols. In the Birnbaum's yard grew prize roses in shades of coral and vermilion and bushes heavy with peonies the size of cabbage heads, and a single stray trowel left on the patio was sure to have been put away neatly in the tool shed by the next time I looked over the fence.

The Flahertys were Catholic and had 12 children; we were Jewish, and there were three of us with my two brothers and me; and the Birnbaums had four children with a Jewish father and a Methodist mother--the former Miss Ella Grayson of Omaha. I never wondered how Miss Grayson happened to come all the way from Omaha to marry Mr. Birnbaum and live in Brooklyn because that had happened long before I was born.

More than 30 years after I last laid eyes on any of them I can still name all the Flaherty children in order from oldest to youngest: Peter, Christopher, Mary, Margaret, Edwin, Stephen, Michael, Neal, Maureen, Thomas, Bridget, and Kathleen. There were so many of them that they had at least one of everything. Peter was smart enough to get into Harvard and Edwin was mentally retarded, Michael was an obese asthmatic and Neal was a champion wrestler. Bridget and Kathleen were twins. There were so many of them that I have changed their names because now, so many years later, one of them might be you, for all I know.

Mary was a year older than I and the friendliest of the lot. On warm afternoons she sometimes joined me on our front steps where, side by side, we would do our homework. Mary leaned on knees covered with the blue and green plaid of Holy Trinity, the school all the Flaherty children attended. I wore the Levi's and Keds I had changed into after public school. Mary meticulously inscribed a cross onto the heading of every page, even math homework. I dotted my i's with puffy circles and hearts, as was the fashion then.

The friendship between Mary and me was based as much on mutual curiosity as on anything else, and one day it came to an abrupt and inevitable end. We were playing jump rope in the driveway that separated our houses when Mary, who was a much more skilled jump roper than I and a master of Double Dutch, demanded an extra turn after she stumbled, she said, because of my clumsy rope turning. The quarrel escalated until we had each retreated into our own backyards and were shouting at one another across the driveway. After a few volleys back and forth, Mary paused briefly, dug the rounded tip of one saddle shoe in the dirt and then launched her fiercest blow, the one she had clearly been saving for this exact moment. "Well!" she said, savagely throwing her blonde ponytail back off her shoulder where it lay draped, "Jesus loves ME!" I slunk toward our house, defeated. "Well!" I lobbed back feebly from the top of our back steps, "Moses loves ME!" knowing full well that nothing I had learned in Hebrew school supported the claim that Moses, while a figure central to our faith, had any particular interest in me at all.

Even before the end of my tenuous friendship with Mary I had never actually been inside the Flaherty's house. In the Birnbaum's house, though, I spent many hours. Unlike the Flaherty's, who seemed to inhabit an entirely different planet than we did, the Birnbaum's differed from us in small and comprehensible ways. Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum drank Maxwell House coffee and our parents drank Chock Full o' Nuts; they made chocolate milk with Bosco syrup and we made it with Cocoa Marsh; when we were directed to the downstairs bathroom in the Birnbaum's house to wash our hands before a snack we did so with Camay, while at our house it was always Dial. Since the only important distinction between our families that I could identify was that Mrs. Birnbaum was a Methodist, I reasoned that the brands the Birnbaums favored were Methodist brands while our brands were Jewish brands. This explanation satisfied me so that I enjoyed at the Birnbaum's house the delicious sensation of being someplace foreign and yet not so foreign as to be dangerous.

Usually when I knocked on the Birnbaum's door it was to play with their youngest child, Susan, who was six months younger than I and in my grade at school. They also had three older boys, the two oldest of whom were nearly the same age as my own brothers. Those four boys were crazy for sports and spent hours in the street together playing stickball and touch football with manhole covers serving as bases and goals. In a diagonal arrangement which pleased me, my oldest brother always teamed up with the younger of the two Birnbaum boys and their oldest boy was always with the younger of my brothers. This alignment held when, after hours in the street, the four boys finally stormed into our house or theirs to watch games on TV and one elder and one younger from each family rooted for the Yankees or the Jets while the other pair cheered for the Mets or the Giants.

The third Birnbaum boy, Billy, did not play in the street or watch games on TV with the other boys. Two years younger than the youngest of the four older boys in our families and two years older than Susan and I, he was a misfit and a recluse. Billy had had rheumatic fever when he was very young, and his "weak heart" excused his poor athletic ability and his bookishness, both of which he might well have had even if he had never been sick. Billy interested me. Sometimes I drifted away from a pretend tea party or round of Chinese checkers in Susan's room and knocked on Billy's door. He was always happy to have me visit, as long as I didn't sit on his perfectly smooth bedspread or talk to him while he worked on one of his projects. At age 12 he had begun writing a biography of his great-great grandfather, William Grayson, an abolitionist after whom he had been named and about whom he corresponded with his mother's extended family and with the Omaha Historical Society. Another of Billy's projects was his collection of books and memorabilia about Abraham Lincoln. While Billy hovered at his desk over old sepia photographs and yellowed letters, I sat on his floor flipping through one of his Lincoln books, looking for the especially gory Matthew Brady picture of dead Union soldiers in a ditch. Another attraction of Billy's room was that it looked directly out toward the side of my own house. To crouch unseen next to Billy's window and watch my mother in our kitchen a few yards away putting milk bottles into the refrigerator or rinsing a plate in the steel sink was a thrill that had no name.

Most of my time at the Birnbaum's house, however, was spent with Susan. Though she was the closest in age to me of the Birnbaum children and, like me, the youngest and the only girl, she was my opposite in many ways. I was a wiry and articulate child. Susan was lumpy and lisped. I wore crisp jumpers with an ironed handkerchief pinned to my chest while Susan's allergic nose was forever red and drippy, and her knee socks were always bunched around her ankles. I was superior to her in every way, including being six months older than she, the fact of which I frequently reminded her. Even her name seemed a dull, amputated, inferior version of my own.

Susan and I were in the same grade at school but rarely in the same class. In those days the New York City public school system ruthlessly sorted children--in a way that would never stand today--into the bright, the not-so-bright and the nearly hopeless. I was always with the brights, as were most of the other Jewish kids, and Susan was usually with the not-so-brights, as were the few Irish and Italian kids who did not go to parochial school. Again, I invoked Susan's Methodist mother (though a very bright woman herself who had actually been to medical school at the University of Nebraska before she married and became a housewife) as the reason for Susan's difference from me and the other Jewish kids. In the third class of each grade sat the black and Puerto Rican children who had been bussed in to integrate our school but with whom we never played or associated in any way and about whom we'd heard--I do not know where--that they were slow, rude and not, as teachers invariably wrote on our report cards "a pleasure to teach."

In fourth grade, perhaps because there were more not-so-brights than brights that year, Susan was put in class with me. As I dreaded, Susan clung to me and asked that we be assigned desks next to one another and, maddeningly, saw the fact that we were next door neighbors and often played together on the weekends as giving her a special claim on me. I attempted to distance myself from Susan that year by teasing her about her lisp and her droopy socks and the leaky jelly sandwiches she brought for lunch and anything else I could find to fend her off and save face with the other brights, but she was loyal and took no offense at my teasing, often joining in on the joke herself.

So I looked forward, that year, to any opportunity to get away from my desk and my permanent desk mate, the ubiquitous Susan. For that reason, I especially enjoyed our weekly class trip to the school library. We lined up in size order--I was right in the middle of the girls, ungainly Susan was at the rear--and trooped down to the library, where we were given exactly 15 minutes to browse along the shelves that lined the four walls. There was, in addition to the shelves along the walls, a small mahogany bookcase with a glass door that stood by the entrance to the library under a poster urging us to practice good dental hygiene. On this bookcase was a bronze plaque engraved with the name of its donor, a long-dead alumnus of the school who unrealistically thought future generations of elementary students would enjoy his musty copies of Ivanhoe and other nineteenth-century childhood favorites. The bookcase sat untouched, of course.

After 15 minutes, the librarian, Mrs. Gottleib, flicked the lights on and off, our signal to line up again in size order and present our selection to be checked out. Mrs. Gottleib, who was both tiny and plump, like a small, well-fed bird, stood behind her desk and nodded approvingly as she opened each copy of The Phantom Tollbooth or a Hardy Boys mystery and imprinted the due date (always one week later) with a spring-loaded metal stamper that made a "cha-chunk" sound as it discharged its bright purple ink.

One day in October of that year, just as Susan was about to turn the age that I already had been for six months, we were in line with our books in front of Mrs. Gottleib's desk. Susan, who stood in her place at the back of the line, gripping a copy of Danny Dunn's Homework Machine, suddenly broke away and strode toward the little mahogany case. Without hesitation, as if carrying out a long-made plan, she set Danny Dunn on the top of the case (we had been sternly advised by Mrs. Gottleib that reshelving our own books was against library rules), opened the glass door, withdrew a slim, leatherbound copy of A Tale of Two Cities and resumed her place at the back of the line. Eyes rolled and snickers were stifled, but no one said a word because silence was the other of Mrs. Gottleib's unbreakable rules. We had all reformed a line outside the library when Susan's turn to check out finally came. All thirty-two of us strained to hear what Mrs. Gottleib would say when she saw Susan's unorthodox choice, and were surprised to hear only "A wonderful book, Susan. I'm sure you'll enjoy it," followed by the appearance of Susan, flushed and triumphant, ready to take up her place among us again.

All that week Susan read A Tale of Two Cities; during lunch, at recess, on the school bus. She read it patiently, intently, not--she insisted in response to our frequent inquiries--skipping a single word. When I rang the Birnbaum's bell to see if she wanted to play after school, Susan's mother said she was busy and would not come out. By the end of the week, when it was time to go to the library again, she told us unashamedly that she had only reached page six.

Again we waited in line in front of Mrs. Gottleib, certain that she would put an end to Susan's disturbing behavior, news of which had now spilled out to the not-so-brights and even to the fifth grade, where she was the topic of some not entirely unadmiring talk. Mrs. Gottleib never allowed anyone to renew a book--you had to return it and then check it out again the following week if it was available--and so Susan's possession of the little leather Dickens was sure to be terminated that day. But again, when we lined up outside the library with our books and strained to hear what Mrs. Gottleib would say when Susan arrived at her desk, we were surprised. She said, simply, "I'm so glad you like it, Susan" and stamped in the next week's date with an extra-emphatic cha-chunk.

So it went, week in and week out, past Halloween and Thanksgiving and through Christmas vacation--when Susan sat contentedly under her Methodist mother's Christmas tree reading her book instead of coming out with me to go sledding--until finally, one day in February, Susan arrived at Mrs. Gottleib's desk, set down A Tale of Two Cities and declared "I'm done." Then she marched out of the library and walked past our class with her head high but her hands empty. She'd been so excited by her accomplishment that she had forgotten to check out a new book.

The next year Susan and I were in different classes again, and then we went to different junior high schools, and then my brothers went off to college, and we moved out of the green house and into an apartment building with lots of neighbors on all sides of us, some of whom we never met. Once in my 20s I went back to the old street and rang the Birnbaum's bell and Mrs. Birnbaum told me that her husband had died and all the children except Billy were on their own now, and she was thinking about selling the house and finding a little place just big enough for Billy and her. About Susan she only told me that she had slimmed down and bought her own car, a used Alfa Romeo, as if that told me everything I needed to know about her, which, at that moment, it did.

I'm sure that Susan would remember me even now. But I'm not sure if, 30 years later, she would remember how she tortured me by reading A Tale of Two Cities, how she defeated me by reading that book more soundly than Mary Flaherty had defeated me after the jump rope dispute. How she ruined my life. If you saw her today in any of the thousands of places she might be--in her suburban new Jersey kitchen or her dentist's office at the American army base in Germany or on a quilt on the floor of the farmhouse in Maine she shares with her lover and their adopted Chinese daughter--and asked her if she ever read A Tale of Two Cities she would probably say, in an offhand way, "Oh I suppose I had to read that in school at some point."

But if I saw her today in any of those thousands of places she might be, I would press my cheek close to hers, her cheek which must be starting to spot and slacken like my own, and say "Oh Susan, I'm so sorry! Please forgive me!"