Then one day Penny said mildly, in a tone that showed she was trying not to offend, "He's never going to learn if you keep writing things down for him. You have to tell him out loud. He's not stupid. He just can't read."

"He can't read?" We were stunned. "How did you know this?"

Penny shrugged. She was always the first to glean our darkest secrets, a kind of perverse and unwanted talent. Having diagnosed Steve's problem, she lost interest and left me and Marilyn to solve it. It was one of the few things the two of us did without her in those years.

We had no idea we could be so righteously devious. We tutored Steve, lied for him, taught him to write gibberish essays in an indecipherable script. "His writing's bad because his hands shake," we informed our teachers. "Didn't you know? There's probably a note of it in his records." We knew because we'd put the letter there ourselves, signed Shirley H. Ginsburg in perfect imitation of his mother's handwriting. Helping Steve was better than psychotherapy. It allowed me to deal with a mother who wanted above all to foster musical skills in a daughter who didn't have a shred of talent. Steve had starred in my childhood as living proof that it was possible to have musical talent and still, in critical ways, not be able to function as well as a neighbor girl with a tin ear.

"The important thing was, you helped him," Marilyn said now, as I clunked the lettuce on the counter and removed the loosened core. "It doesn't matter what you believe might have been your motives."

"Maybe not," I said. "Maybe I want to protect him from your misguided intentions just because he's my friend."

Marilyn attacked a cabbage with her chopping knife. A slow smile crept across her face. "We had fun, didn't we?"

"We did." We'd worked out a system for Steve to copy multiple-choice tests without getting caught. We encouraged him to endear himself to the teachers. If the cla.s.s read a poem, he would recite it back from memory. If actors were needed for a play, he would be the only boy to volunteer, and all Marilyn and I had to do was read the script aloud to him, and he'd memorize it overnight. Steve was bright. Steve had potential. Teachers knew his shaky hands were an unlikely explanation, given how well he played the guitar. But they'd loved him too much to care.

"Basically, we taught him to be a con artist," Marilyn said now, chopping with a kind of cheerful rhythm.

"Not a con artist!" I tore mounds of lettuce into the wooden bowl. "We just taught him to use his charm."

In junior high he'd begun calling all the females in his life sweetie, which might have seemed affected except that he made everyone feel she really was his sweetie. Steve had grown into an adolescent with so little sense of style that even when his friends got crew cuts, his hair flopped greasily onto his forehead. He was no threat to either gender. Calling the girls sweetie was safe. Every year from eighth grade on he convinced a whole bevy of them to tape textbooks for him, saying to each one, "Oh, sweetie, I like your voice so much," and smiling so coyly they didn't know whether he was serious or joking. He committed each taped book to memory-he could always remember everything he heard-and not one of his helpers ever found out about the others.

By high school Steve was offering to bring his guitar to anyone's party and sing for free if in return they would write him a term paper. On the day of the SATs, he finagled a seat next to Bernie, knowing Bernie was in love with Marilyn and would let him copy. He was determined not just to avoid humiliation, but to shield his parents, who, like many in Riggs Park, had little formal education and valued it above all for their children. He wasn't planning to go to college (although later, briefly, he did), but even then he wanted everyone to think he could get in if he wanted.

In a way, Steve's enforced charm prepared him well for the irony of becoming our best-known cla.s.smate, the one non-reader in a cla.s.s that worshipped scholarship. Marilyn and I were glad that, in the early years, when beneath his charm and comedy, Steve's affliction gave him pain, we lied to his teachers, stayed up all night before exams, dug earthworms out of the garden to teach him biology. We never minded, not really. And certainly had never minded basking in the twinned glow of his talent and grat.i.tude, which he had beamed on us like a benediction ever since.

I'd shredded my entire lettuce by the time Marilyn suddenly stopped chopping and put down her knife. "You know the only one Steve never called sweetie was Penny. And you know why? Because even then she wasn't his sweetie. She was his love."

The welcome, light mood vanished. Dejected, Marilyn dumped her pile of chopped veggies into a bowl. "You know, sometimes I wish we could go back to being in love with Eddie Fisher. Before everything fell apart." A determined don't-dare-make-fun-of-me expression settled on her face. "While we all still thought Eddie Fisher was great."

"Eddie Fisher! I haven't thought about him for forty years."

"See? Our first true love, and you repressed it."

But I remembered now. Penny and Marilyn and I had fallen in love with him right after we'd returned from Camp Chesapeake, a curly-haired teen idol we'd thought was the handsomest man alive. A man who sang with the tongue of an angel! And Jewish! We could marry him and our mothers would have to approve! We arranged our schedules so we could watch his fifteen-minute TV show, c.o.ke Time, in the privacy of Marilyn's bas.e.m.e.nt. We sighed collectively as he crooned the words to "Oh, My Papa." Unless Marilyn's mother was close by, we screamed as Eddie held out his beckoning arms. We took turns kissing his face on the little black-and-white screen. Each of us hung autographed photos of him on our bedroom walls.

One day, Marilyn read aloud from an article about Eddie Fisher in a movie magazine. "Although it isn't generally known, Eddie Fisher shares a problem well-known to many of his fans." Her voice grew low and dramatic. "Eddie Fisher suffers from acne. The scars and eruptions are invisible on TV only because he wears heavy makeup."

"Eruptions!" Penny was horrified. "Makeup!"

From that moment, the romance was ruined. Penny was too appalled to let it continue. Pimples! How disgusting! We'd been duped! Penny wept bitter, genuine tears.

So for Penny's sake, we ended the relationship with Eddie, with c.o.ke Time, with the kissable face of Marilyn's TV. Anxious to placate, Marilyn and I vowed the three of us would fall in love only with real boys from then on. It turned out to be a difficult promise. We weren't ready for real boys yet. We were happy loving Eddie. I wondered now-and was sure Marilyn was wondering, too-if that hadn't been the first moment, just for a second, we'd resented giving in to Penny's needs.

But by then we had started seventh grade, our first year at Paul Junior High, and we felt so sorry for Penny that it would have been wrong to resent her, wrong not to try to help. She became a worse student than Steve, getting Fs on three English tests in a row before she discovered she was failing because she couldn't see the board. Her mother took her to an eye doctor who prescribed gla.s.ses. They were thick, with tortoisesh.e.l.l frames that were supposed to complement her red hair. Penny hated them. She had worn them only because she'd hated her nearsightedness more.

We were still lost in memory when Bernie came into the kitchen and plucked a handful of vegetables from Marilyn's bowl. "All talked out already?" He looked quizzically from one of us to the other. "You two are mighty quiet."

"Thinking about Penny," Marilyn said.

"Ah." Bernie popped a slice of celery into his mouth. "Don't get too morose. You had some good years with her when you were younger."

"Younger!" Marilyn savaged an onion with her knife. "She wasn't even fourteen when her childhood was wiped out. Fourteen! All the good stuff gone in the course of a single afternoon!"

"You don't know-" Bernie started to say something and then stopped. "Didn't they say she was only-Only-"

"Only molested. Not raped?" Marilyn slapped away the hand Bernie dipped back into the vegetables. "Don't you think molested would have been bad enough?"

"I didn't mean-" Bernie was clearly at a loss. Looking at first surprised, then admonished, he wandered out of the room.

Penny had had a dentist appointment the day it had happened. Afterward she'd walked over to Wishner's Upholstery Shop, where her sister Diane worked summers as a receptionist. Diane was to drive her home.

When Penny arrived at the shop, it was deserted. Diane had been sent to run an errand. Wish was at Camp Chesapeake where he still went in the summer, although now as a counselor-in-training. Wish's father, Murray, was out giving an estimate. The others were delivering a living-room couch. No one was around except a laborer who worked on the furniture. The man came into the receptionist's area and asked Penny if she needed help. She said she was waiting for Diane. He closed the door behind them. He did things Penny never confided. Later, we were told that Murray arrived just in time to stop whatever was happening, but he could not stop Penny's screaming. Nor did Penny calm down when her sister Diane returned and tried to soothe her. Murray and Diane loaded a hysterical Penny into Murray's car and drove her home.

For a week, Penny wouldn't let anyone into her room. Murray fired the offender, but no one pressed charges because Penny would not speak of the event, even to her parents. She wouldn't talk to Marilyn or me at all. She became so withdrawn that finally the family sent her to New York to stay with her grandmother, hoping she would revive.

For nearly a year, Marilyn and I learned nothing more. When Wish returned from camp before school started, we pressed for details his father might have revealed about the incident, but he knew no more than we did. We sent Penny letters, but she didn't answer. Her sister Diane was back at college. Her sister Charlene would say only that Penny was okay. She was going to a school within sight of her grandmother's building. She was fine.

I wasn't rea.s.sured. There was a meanness in brick and concrete, I believed. I had seen it the year before when my family had visited New York: the tall buildings that closed off the sky, the stench and sound of traffic, the dearth of trees. Humans were not meant to be confined within the bounds of masonry. I knew Penny would come back changed.

And she did. When Penny returned to Washington the summer before we started tenth grade at Coolidge High School, she was someone else. She had become beautiful, but it was not only that. Her skinny body had taken on delicate curves; she had developed small, hard b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The fullness had fallen away from her face, leaving her with high cheekbones that set off her aquiline nose and accentuated slanted blue eyes framed by long, long eyelashes. No one had noticed her lashes before because they were such a pale red, but now, coated with mascara, they were elegant, lush. Penny still had freckles, but they didn't matter anymore except to Penny herself. And her hair! No longer carroty, it had grown darker and richer, a perfect Crayola auburn. A stylist had tamed its wildness into a shimmering, shoulder-length corona.

At her grandmother's urging, Penny had even been fitted with a pair of contact lenses. These were the first contacts Marilyn and I had seen, hard pieces of plastic that covered her whole eye. When Penny looked to the side, the outline of the lens was visible, signaling to us that such a large foreign object in the eye must be a torture device. Penny said she didn't care; the lenses didn't hurt and even if they did, she'd wear them anyway. She would do anything to be able to see.

Strange, how easily Marilyn and I were dissuaded from asking what had happened at the upholstery shop. "You can tell us," we whispered when she first returned to town. But after Penny's eyes misted with tears and she shook her head because she couldn't speak, we changed the subject. Maybe we were put off by the changes in her. Maybe we really didn't want know-not yet, not then. And later Penny seemed too vulnerable to ask.

It was clear right away that though Penny knew she was pretty, her transformation gave her no confidence. She longed for my blond hair, for Marilyn's upbeat disposition, for everyone else's strengths. She never saw her own tangle-haired, blue-eyed, narrow-waisted beauty except through other people's eyes. The eyes of boys. When Penny returned home two months before her fifteenth birthday, she'd never had a date. She soon made up for that by going out with more than a dozen boys in the weeks before school started-boys who all told their friends she'd let them feel her up, and some who claimed she'd let them go all the way. Knowing how shy she was, Marilyn and I were as mystified as we were stunned.

But as far as Penny was concerned, chast.i.ty was not an issue-at least not enough for her to keep her escapades secret. When she phoned me for rea.s.surance late at night, long after my parents were in bed, what frightened her was never boys, never her impending disgrace, never even the memory of what had happened. What frightened her was the dark.

"Talk to me," she'd demand from the clammy depths of her bas.e.m.e.nt bedroom. "It's black as death down here."

"Turn on the light, Penny. Do it right now." I'd wait until I heard the click of the switch. "I tried to call you before. Where were you?"

"I was out with Sam (or Mel or Joey). I had to help him pick out a birthday present for his mother (or take his father's car to the car wash or return a baseball bat to a friend)."

"You fooled around with him, didn't you?" We'd known these boys since grade school-old friends and neighbors that made Penny's behavior seem incestuous.

"Well, why not? He wanted to so badly."

"Oh, sure...why not? You could get pregnant or you could get a disease."

"I'm not stupid," Penny insisted. "I made him use rubbers-" the term we used in those days for condoms "-and besides, I have a diaphragm." I was horrified to think Penny had actually gone to a doctor and been fitted for a birth-control device. Did Penny's mother know? Or care?

Even then I believed the boys wanted her not just for her beauty, but because the only way they could have her was physically. Part of her appeal was her vacantness, her inscrutable mystery, always that. Yet she had been focused enough to insist on not one form of birth control, but several.

I finished shredding the lettuce and started slicing a tomato. "Here's why I can't imagine her having a baby," I told Marilyn. "Not just because she made up her mind way back at summer camp. But also because boys never stayed with her. They wanted her for a plaything, not a mate. She knew that. And it made her just mad enough that she was determined not to get caught. Even with Steve." I threw the sliced tomato onto the salad, grabbed a cuc.u.mber, hacked it apart. My salad for three had grown large enough to feed a dozen people. Marilyn's pile of vegetables, too, would make a stir-fry for an army.

We regarded the food with dawning dismay and might have burst into healing laughter if Marilyn's eyes hadn't suddenly grown wide. "Now I remember!" she said, brandishing her knife.

"Remember what?"

"Who would know where to find Essie Berman! Marcellus Johnson!"

"Who?"

"He brought her to my mother's funeral. The hoodlum Essie took up with after we moved. They were still friends."

"Oh, great. Now you're tracking down hoodlums."

"He hasn't been a hoodlum for years."

I put down my knife. "Absolutely not."

"You could work on it tomorrow," she said. "There's no point sitting outside an operating room when someone is under anesthetic. They're not grateful. It's completely unproductive. Even Bernie knows enough to go to work."

"Look at me, Marilyn," I said, and waited until she did. "The answer is no. It was no at lunchtime and it's no now and it will be no tomorrow."

Marilyn squinted a little. Stealthily, but with considerable drama, she picked up an onion. I knew what she was doing: trying to call up tears. And there they were, right on cue, glistening drops in the corners of her eyes. A deliberate parody of the genuine emotions of earlier in the day.

"Marilyn, this is ridiculous." I laughed because she wanted me to, but I felt ineffably sad as she grinned and wiped her eyes. The night before her surgery, she didn't want to fight.

"I know the act doesn't mean you aren't sincere," I said. "But onions? Onions? Who's the con artist now?"

CHAPTER 8.

Surgery During the night, the weather grew dull and chilly, and as the gray dregs of dawn crept into the kitchen, Marilyn looked as if she were having second thoughts about her face-lift.

"Scared?" I asked.

"Always scared, never chicken." Although her surgery wasn't scheduled until after lunch, Marilyn had to be at the clinic early for pre-op tests, and she was dressed in the clothes she'd been advised to wear for the trip home later that evening: sweatpants and a b.u.t.ton-down shirt, since she wouldn't be able to pull anything over what would be her sore, swollen face. Her hair was covered by a turban, a relic of the chemo days. She'd been instructed to shampoo before she left home, and not to rinse out the conditioner.

"The idea is that I won't wash my hair again for a couple of days, and by then it'll be all nice and silky."

Instructed not to eat or drink after midnight, Marilyn watched Bernie chew his toast with such concentration that he finally abandoned it on his plate. She insisted he go to work. "Barbara can drop me off, she doesn't have anything to do," she told him. "Then she can run her errands." As if I had errands. "The surgery isn't till one, so why should either of you lose your morning? Then I'll be under the knife three or four hours, so you can probably work all day. If I'm out early, I'll call you." As if she were having a tooth filled, or a pesky mole removed.

Of course, Bernie wouldn't really stay at his office. He'd come to the clinic the minute he knew Marilyn had been taken to pre-op and spend the day in the waiting room. I'd be there, too. It was crazy, letting her plot our schedules so it wouldn't seem we were concerned about her, but she'd made such a fuss about it that we agreed.

By the time we left the house, the rush hour had ended and a gray drizzle had started. The plastic surgery clinic was in Rockville, a sprawling modern testimony to the buying power of aging women. The airy reception area had vaulted ceilings, expanses of gla.s.s looking out onto dense green foliage, burgundy couches arranged on dove-gray carpets. On the pale walls, a thick, modernistic burgundy stripe had been painted at eye-level, tracing the angle of the ceiling. Several women sat reading magazines, but no one seemed to have touched the pamphlets about laser skin resurfacing.

"Do you have an appointment?" a receptionist asked from behind her gla.s.s cage.

"Marilyn Waxman."

The woman consulted a list on her desk and nodded. "Surgery's upstairs." She buzzed us in, pointed us to an elevator.

"There's still time to change your mind," I said.

Lips tight, she shook her head.

The upper floor was a complete surgical suite: operating rooms A, B and C, and yet another gla.s.sed-in reception area. With a show of bravado, Marilyn checked herself in and was whisked off for tests and prepping while I was shown to the waiting area. I drank a cup of coffee from the urn on a table. I flipped through the selection of magazines without picking one up. The elevator opened and out walked Bernie, clutching his briefcase as if, after all, he really did plan to work all day.

"Did they take her back?"

"A while ago."

"We should probably have lunch," he said.

I wasn't hungry and could tell he wasn't, either, but my watch said noon so we followed the signs to the snack bar and got sandwiches. Back in the waiting area, Bernie set his briefcase on an end table, shrugged off his suit jacket, and pulled at the knot in his tie as if in for a long siege.

"We had a meeting with the doctor the other day," he told me. "Marilyn won't be out of surgery until at least four o'clock. Then she goes to recovery, and then 'post-recovery'-whatever the h.e.l.l that is-where we can see her.

"In the meantime there's nothing for us to do. I know you want to go out to the cemetery. I think you should."

"I'd be too worried," I said.

"I'll call if there's any reason to. Do you have a cell phone?"

I didn't.

"Here, take Marilyn's." He reached into his briefcase and drew it out. "She won't be needing it today."

"I can't just leave."

"You can. You should. You always procrastinate till the last minute about going to see your parents' graves, and you're never happy until after you go." Bernie took my hand, leaned close, kissed me on the cheek. "Go," he said.

So I did.

I reached the cemetery half an hour later, a hilly expanse of lawn and a few shade trees set behind tall fences in the midst of what had once been rural pastureland but was now suburban sprawl. The bit of woods on one side and tall apartment buildings on the other were far enough in the distance to give me a sense of being in a carefully tended park. Hard as it always was to make myself come there, it was a surprisingly peaceful place.

My parents were in the "new" section, thirty or forty years old, where raised headstones were not allowed, just plaques that lay flush with the ground. The identical bronze markers, engraved with tendrils of vines and flowers, were inscribed in graceful block letters: Harold "Harry" Cohen, Devoted Husband and Father, 1912-1985; Ida Marmelstein Cohen, Musician, Devoted Wife and Mother, 1915-1985.

My father, a pharmacist, hadn't thought his profession important enough to be on the plaque (most people didn't), but he'd put my mother's on hers. At age seventy, she had been killed in an auto accident less than an hour after doing what she liked best: playing her clarinet in an orchestra at the National Gallery of Art. A snowstorm had started halfway through the concert, and the violinist who always drove her home skidded on icy Sixteenth Street and rammed into a telephone pole. He was injured only slightly, but my mother was jettisoned onto the street.

Though I was in my midforties then, I felt too young to lose a parent. Wells and I were divorced. Robin was practically grown. I was alone. At the cemetery, Marilyn and Bernie stood on either side of my father and Robin and me, forming a protective shield. Trudi and her husband huddled next to us. We were all very stoic.

Afterward, as we were getting out of the car back at my parents' apartment, Steve emerged from the building and held out his arms. He had canceled a singing engagement and come straight from the airport. "Oh, sweetie, I'm so sorry I couldn't get here sooner. I'm so sorry."

It was then, clinging to him, that I began to weep-uncontrollably, for nearly half an hour, stopping only because Robin seemed so alarmed. I wasn't sure, later, if my outburst was prompted by grief for my mother or grat.i.tude to Steve for allowing me-years before, while there was still plenty of time-to forgive my mother for what I had once considered her terrible crimes. For making me take piano lessons even before I could read, for wanting her daughters to learn music the way other children in Riggs Park learned Hebrew, for watching with horror (after Trudi threw a temper tantrum and quit piano forever) as I, too, turned out to lack that innate sense of rhythm that might have made music come out my fingers instead of the cacophony that emerged even though I could hear the cadence perfectly well in my head.

I couldn't really read music, either, any more than Steve could read words. "I never heard of anyone who could follow the treble clef but not the ba.s.s," my mother said. Her tone was kind-more like "probably we need a therapist for this" than "you stupid fool"-but the words sat against my heart like a red-hot brand. If not for illiterate, talented Steve waiting for my help two doors away, I surely would have been scarred.

Struggling with Steve over his homework day after day, I saw that he had no more power over words than I did over music-and that my mother, like Steve's teachers, was only confused and frustrated and never meant to be cruel. I recalled that even when Trudi and I were tiny, at the hour when other parents were reading bedtime tories, my mother had gone them one better and provided her children with music, too. She'd tucked us in, opened the latest box of reeds that had arrived for her clarinet, and regaled us with the musical themes from all the characters in Peter and the Wolf, while testing each reed for tonal quality and strength. Reed number one: the twittery bird; number two: the silly duck; then the sly cat and cheerful Peter, the booming grandfather (in a real concert, she reminded us, he would be played by the ba.s.soon), the menacing wolf whose music really belonged to three French horns. Other times she found a reed of such good quality that she abandoned Peter altogether and played some favorite tune in its entirety: "Morning Mood" from the Peer Gynt Suite, the theme from Swan Lake, something sweet and haunting, such an ecstasy of sound that our childish crankiness vanished and we were hypnotized, bewitched, asleep. Compared with the uplifting power of music, Trudi and I realized, we were only grubby, earthbound things. How could our mother possibly choose us over that? Yet, those enchanted evenings when she sat at our bedside and not in some theater or concert hall, she did. She did!