My parents were already middle-aged people when I came along. My father worked as a welder in the Brooklyn shipyards during the war; but shortly after, he started suffering from a bad back which kept him off the payroll more often than on. So the post-war boom meant little to our family's fortune. I grew up not realizing that relatively speaking we were poor. I was born in 1942, an only child.
We lived in an old tenement section not far from the shipyard; and here I spent the first twelve years of my life. Down in the basement of our building, opposite the coal bins, each family had a storage room made of chicken wire and two-by-fours. They were like cages; and inside them, our mothers kept their treasures, buried in wooden crates or locked up inside old fashioned trunks, some that were dome shaped and so ancient they must have belonged originally to their mothers or even their grandmothers brought over from the old country years before.
In the middle of the basement stood a huge furnace. When it roared away on winter days, it put a dry, brittle heat in that dim space that drove off the musty air lurking in and around those old fashioned trunks. I and my friends sometimes played down there when we were very small. Later, I kept my bicycle there, locked with a chain to a sewer pipe.
After school, I used to run down the basement steps, struggle back up with my bike and do my newspaper route: two blocks to the avenue, two blocks over, then back. It was a sizable route and it usually took me all of the afternoon to make my deliveries. And in winter, sometimes longer. I'd usually wind up returning home after twilight along with the men coming back from their work. Tired and hungry, the back wheel of my bike bouncing down the dark steps where the light bulb was always missing, I felt grown up. In another two years, I would be in high school.
One night, the first snowfall had started just as I finished my
route. I rode home, zipping along the slick pavement, the white, powdery flakes dashing against my cheeks. It seemed to me the perfect way to end the day; and when I hit the basement door with the palm of my hand and made its thin metal sheeting faintly sound like a gong, I couldn't resist shouting, "Open sesame!"
My cold hand smarted from the slap I had given it; and when I stepped inside, my face tingled all over from the sudden warmth that had accumulated in that underground storage room. My eyes felt the heat of the naked flames springing out of the furnace. Someone had forgotten to close the iron door through which the coal was shoveled. Strange shadows leapt everywhere. Octagonal patterns of chicken wire wavered up the concrete wall and then fanned out onto the ceiling above. I felt slightly dizzy for a moment, like a trapeze artist hanging over his distorted safety net.
Only then did I notice a door to one of the storage bins ajar, and inside, a shadowy figure, its frizzy head looming above me on the ceiling, as if a tree had suddenly sprouted.
Startled, I jumped back a step, dropping my bicycle. It clanged to the floor. And the figure inside the cage slowly turned. Stiff as a Popsicle, she stared at me through bulbous eyes.
It was Nadine, the super's granddaughter, whom we weren't supposed to talk to. Her skin was dark, like the olive-brown uniforms we were beginning to see in the neighborhood. The Korean War had come; and my father was constantly complaining about the overtime, while my mother, soothing his back with linemen" oils and what not, painted rosy pictures of the better climate we could soon move away to. Every payday, she'd take out the bank savings book and show my father and me the rapid change in our circumstances. It was a ritual they both took great pleasure in, the atmosphere at the kitchen table charged with what I suppose one could only describe as hope: a word, I just recently discovered, that means the same as Nadine. Her name means hope.
Nadine's large, brown eyes and her thick, protruding lips gave
to her face the look of a frightened fish. She was half Negro and half Russian, lived with her Russian grandparents, abandoned by her mother soon after she was born. That was all any of us kids knew about Nadine, except of course, that there was something "wrong" about her, although what, none of us knew. We had been told only that we should stay away from her, a relatively easy thing to do since she didn't go to school and she never attempted to play with us; and so there were long stretches of time when her existence went entirely unnoticed.
Nadine began to tremble as I stepped closer and called out, "It's only me, Nadine. What are you doing in there?"
And the moment she saw me approaching her cage, she jumped to the door and swung it shut, trying to hide something. Or at least I thought so. Obviously, she didn't want me to get near her. But I was slightly taller than her and could easily see over her shoulder.
One of the big trunks lay opened. I saw the underside of its domed lid, the paper lining of purple flowers on a yellow, creamy background lit up from the flames of the furnace like a garden against the black shadows and the black floor strewn with fine coal dust. There were old clothes inside, piles of dime-store jewelry and forgotten knick-knacks mixed among them. And there was something on the floor behind her feet.
"What have you there?" I asked and tried to peek around her waist.
But the silly girl moved to block my vision, wildly shaking her head. I wondered if she thought I would laugh at her; for it occurred to me that perhaps I had caught her just as she was about to play "dress up," a game more suitable for a four year old than for a--my thoughts stopped there. I realized I had no idea how old Nadine was.
And remembering my mother's weird expression when I had asked her once about Nadine, getting in reply the mystifying statement, "She is not an ordinary child," I stepped back, fearful of disturbing her, yet at the same time, overwhelmingly curious to see what she was hiding, as if, discovering that, I could know the mystery surrounding her. Then I remembered the snow and felt moved to tell her about it.
"It's snowing tonight," I said softly. "Come see. It's beautiful. The first snow."
She studied my face for a long while as if she hadn't understood my words. Then finally, without uttering a sound, she stirred herself and came to the door with me. Together, we watched the white flakes drop out of the sky like a shower of tiny stars. I ran up the stairs to the alley and turned around. Below in the doorway, she stood motionless, a silhouette in the glowing light of the furnace, her face tilted upwards, catching the falling snow flakes. I shivered in the cold as I watched the white dots disappear on her darkened cheeks. Then we went back in and warmed ourselves by the fire.
"Will you show me what it is?" I pointed to the opened storage bin, more curious than ever.
She hesitated, then lowered her delicate face that had those huge brown eyes and silently moved past me, leading the way; and as she passed, I caught a whiff of her brown straw hair.
We huddled over the bundle, sitting on our haunches. It was wrapped in an old newspaper printed in a strange language. I remember the discolored photograph of horses and soldiers wearing pointed helmets. The browned paper crackled as she unfolded it. I could tell she had hastily crumpled it together when she had heard my banging. And now her trembling hands tore one of the soldiers in two.
I bent closer to see what was inside. The spidery edge of her hair brushed my forehead. Behind me came the roar of the furnace.
They were seashells. A couple of dozen sea shells, not much larger than my thumb, all about the same size. What a duck, I thought to myself. All this mystery over some sea shells. I picked one up, felt the smooth, mother-of-pearl interior with the surface of my finger, then turned it over and looked at the milk-white crust of the outside. What a strange girl, I thought, feeling as though I had wasted a lot of time, seeing my parents at the dinner table wondering where I was. But when I glanced up and saw her knees jutting toward me, the olive skin stretched tight, and her wet eyes, almost amber from the fire at my back, I felt weird as an owl.
She was crying.
"They're yours?" I asked.
She nodded and leaned forward, pressing the one I held in my palm with the tip of her slender finger. Her dark curly hair hovered over me; and behind her, a huge mushroom danced on the wall.
"My grandmother's," her voice whispered, as if it came from a great distance. "She brought them with her. . .from over there. . ." Her head slowly turned as if to show where she meant. "A long time ago," she said solemnly.
"They're beautiful," I whispered.
After that, every night when I came home from my paper route, I would open the basement door quiet as a breath expecting to find Nadine. But I never saw her down there again; and whenever I did run into her on the street or in the hallway of our building, she would pass by, side-stepping my glance the way she always did with everyone. And if I spoke to her, she would act frightened and scurry away as if I were someone she didn't know. Until finally I realized that she really didn't recognize me, had failed to associate me with that same person who had inadvertently entered her private world that snowy night in the basement.
Now I think I understand what then I only very vaguely sensed, that somehow something had happened to Nadine when I made the metal door sound like a gong, something which had allowed her to open herself so to speak and take me into her mind; and in her later failure to recognize me, I felt as if a part of me had gotten locked up in her head, gathered up with her grandmother's sea shells, sort of like a genie in a bottle.
But I didn't understand this, I only sensed it; and so, although I felt weird about Nadine, I still didn't believe all that nonsense the other kids said about her; so I told no one about our encounter, not even my best friend. Perhaps I was afraid to say anything because I didn't really know what I could say. Perhaps I was afraid the kids would laugh at me or that my parents would punish me. So I told no one.
At any rate, we soon moved away. We went to California, to a small city called Vallejo where there was a shipyard. My father's back trouble, instead of improving, got worse. And after a few years we moved again further south, only this time without any savings. I worked after school to help with the family expenses. Nadine got lost in my memory. I forgot about the seashells, the drops of snow, her dark watery eyes. I grew older. The next war came and this one took me, took a piece of me and when it sent me back, I found myself living in San Francisco, married and with a small son.
At first, I couldn't settle on anything. I went from one job to another. Nothing seemed to fit; or perhaps, I couldn't fit myself into anything. Finally, I stayed put and pulled down a living driving a cab. A simple task. I could sit in my cab and wait for passengers. They'd give me an address and I'd swing into traffic, flipping the little flag, shifting the gears, listening to the meter tick away.
I brooded too much, my wife told me. But I couldn't say what bothered me. And she, after a few pitiful attempts at sounding me out, decided to ignore my moodiness and turn her attentions elsewhere.
She was a sun-worshiper with a green thumb and she spent her days in silence, digging and planting; while Jamie, our son, played by himself in the yard or in the house. We had a small house with a smaller yard, on a street about as close to the freeway as you could get without actually being on it.
What we couldn't do with words, we tried to hold together with our bodies; but there was really nothing there; and more than once I found myself wondering how we had managed to come together in the first place, because after Helen had gotten pregnant, it seemed as if we had no important need for each other.
I drove my cab at night and came home in the early mornings when I would eat, sitting alone in the kitchen, a supper she had prepared the night before. And while I slept, she would work in her garden, cultivating the soil. Once in a while, on a nice afternoon, I'd take Jamie to the park. But generally he preferred to play by himself; so I left him alone. And this was how we lived.
Until one morning when I came home from work and Helen met me at the door and with a worried voice told me that Jamie was ill. It turned out he was very ill. But our doctor could not diagnose the trouble.
We went from doctor to doctor and finally to the university hospital where specialist fees weren't out of our reach. Still, medicine was expensive; and the drain on our finances soon put a lot of pressure on our situation.
Jamie's case baffled the doctors. They tried this approach and that; and for a time he would respond to the treatments; but soon improvement would give way to a period when he would grow weak again; and no one seemed to know what was wrong, although they always pretended they were on top of it; and there was never enough money. Because I had a job, we didn't qualify for financial assistance; so I started working double shifts whenever I could. We started selling things that we had accumulated, furniture we didn't actually need. Helen started making clothes and tried to sell them through boutiques on consignment.
She went around the neighborhood like an old rag buyer, cleaning out the neighbors' attics. The times hadn't gotten quite so hard yet for most people; so our neighbors, more often than not, willingly gave her the old garments in their attics, which Helen had offered to buy. They knew our situation and were happy to help us out in a way that didn't cost them anything.
While I drove the cab, Helen made strange looking clothes, taking pieces from this old dress and that old scarf and fashioning them into an object a person could wear, shirts, dresses, capes, jackets and trousers, if they had the nerve; I couldn't imagine who would buy such things. Helen described these clothes with a word I hadn't heard before. She called them funky, telling me that all the young people were going in for funk in a big way. I couldn't understand that. I was only twenty-six myself; and, although admittedly I hadn't been paying much attention to all the fads that were going on around me, I still couldn't believe people would wear such things. When I persisted, Helen snapped at me, saying I was a straight, completely out of it - by which she meant, I gathered, that I didn't know anything or want to know anything, in other words, that I was moody and only lived inside my head. So I left her alone.
While I took care of Jamie during the afternoons, Helen went around to all the boutiques in the city and over in Berkeley where many of those so-called hippies hung out--attempting to place her creations, as she called them, in their stores. She'd deliver the clothes and wait a month to see if any sold, then she'd move them from one shop to another, meanwhile making more of these things, and then go through the whole process of delivering, moving them around, always calculating the amount of money that would eventually be coming in; but actually we saw very little cash. One or two sales a month at the most. And for all the energy she spent, it seemed to me a waste of time.
She was so caught up in this activity, her gardening stopped completely. The house was becoming a pigpen. And Jamie would lie in bed, his weakened, coughing frame buried in a heap of stinking bedclothes.
His condition had become static. He neither improved, nor became desperately worse. When I fed him, he would hardly touch his food. When I talked to him, he would look away and not hear me. I didn't talk to him much, except to ask him how he felt or if he wanted anything to play with. I didn't think it was too good for him just to lie there day after day watching television; but that was all he wanted to do. All his life, he had been by himself; and now that he was getting old enough to be going to school, I was feeling a desperate need to see him well, so he could go to school and learn to play with other children. I tried to keep him company. I read to him portions of Treasure Island--one of the few books I had read when I was young (I had read Poe and O. Henry and Bret Harte as a kid with considerable enjoyment) and which I thought he could understand; but he didn't want me to read to him. The truth was, he didn't like to have me around him. He had picked up the attitude from his mother that I brooded too much, a word he used once when he told me to leave him alone.
On the days that we took him to the clinic, Helen was finding herself too busy with her clothing business to accompany us. Jamie was now going once a month. The doctor at the clinic had us bring him in once a month for progress check-ups, having decided that iron supplements for his anemia and a proper diet in conjunction with the medication he had been prescribing, plus fresh air, sunshine and a bit of exercise was all Jamie needed to bring him around to full recovery. It was all very well for the doctor to have a positive attitude; but to get Jamie to go outside, to get him to eat, and all the other things was another matter.
The day I took him to the clinic, a new doctor was on the staff. I asked him to examine Jamie. He did so, and then asked me a lot of questions about our home life, and then talked to me about psychosomatic diseases (most of which I didn't see any sense in, or perhaps, I just couldn't follow him) and then he asked me to consider psychotherapy treatments. I told him I didn't think Jamie needed a psychiatrist. The doctor explained he considered it important that all three of us should be involved, that we could all benefit from some counseling. Of course, we'd all have to decide, he said, and would I come next time with my wife. I asked him about the expense; and he assured me the cost would be nominal. I told him I would think about it. I took Jamie home and waited for Helen to get back from Berkeley. She came home just in time for me to go to work, full of her own affairs and not even interested enough to ask what the new doctor had said about Jamie. I only had time to tell her Jamie had seen a new doctor and that he had suggested a new approach. Did she sense the faint hope in my voice? I doubted that she had and I felt bitter about her lack of attention and the way she prattled on about the sale of one of her capes that had been bought the week before but had been returned and so instead of collecting the money she had been expecting she had gone all the way over to Berkeley for nothing; and only as an afterthought did she bother to ask me if I had given Jamie his medicine, this just as I was leaving the house.
I drove the cab that night thinking about what the doctor had said, and fuming about Helen's damn clothing business.
The next morning, when I got home from work, I forced her to listen to me. She sneered at the idea of psychotherapy, said it would be throwing good money after bad and where would the money come from in any case, already we were broke this month and we needed to buy a refill of Jamie's prescription, plus her six months' supply of birth control pills, altogether thirty dollars we didn't have and how could 1 think of spending another--how much was it?--a month on family counseling or whatever the hell it was, and I didn't even know how much it would cost. I had five dollars in my pocket from tips made the night before and how much did she have, I asked. She said nothing. A couple of dollars, all my paycheck for that week spent. I couldn't believe it. Did I realize how much groceries were costing, gas and electricity, etc., etc.? She carried on like this while I went through the house looking for something we could sell in order to buy the medicine. I could find nothing. I found myself contemplating her sewing machine.
"I'm going to pawn the machine," I said, interrupting her.
What followed was a terrible battle. We had never really argued before, having taken the other approach to our domestic disharmony'simply ignoring each other.
She refused to sell the machine. I explained to her we wouldn't be selling it. Simply pawning it. She would just have to go without it for a short while until we could reclaim it. After all, I pointed out, she had plenty of merchandise out in the stores. She could let production ride for a while. She wouldn't have it, she said, she didn't believe we would ever have enough money to get it back, once it was gone it would be gone forever and she wasn't about to give up her one possible means of support. I started shouting at her that so far her so-called business had netted us practically nothing after all the time and expense she had used traveling here and there, buying thread and replacing broken needles--even if she didn't have to lay out cash for the rags she scrounged--and so on and so forth, like a litany of venal infractions, I recounted the details of her financial disaster, letting go with all the bitterness I had accumulated the night before, winding up my tirade with the fact that it was I and I alone who supported this house and who had paid for that damn machine in the first place.
This brought her to a frenzy and she made scorching references to my mental capacity and its inability to make us a proper living. Which, of course, enraged me.
I accused her of not wanting to give up her hippy friends, that she had made her clothing business an excuse for spending all her time with these good-for-nothings instead of staying home and taking care of her sick child.
Then out it came, like a volcano erupting, all her stored up hate for me: my unrelieved moodiness, my unwillingness to fight for a better place in the world--in short, the meanness of my spirit--and finally the assertion that her so-called hippy friends had more life under the edge of one of their little fingernails than I could ever hope to have in my whole lifetime of boring nothingness, even if I lived to a hundred and fifty.
To which I screamed above her voice that she had gotten pretty thick with those dope fiends and that I wouldn't have been at all surprised to find out she was taking dope herself--and that that was where all our money was going.
I didn't really know. I merely suspected. But what I didn't know, what I never could have imagined, which, when she told me, left me at first completely stunned and then gradually relieved, was the fact that this woman had taken a lover from among that crowd of addicts in Berkeley.
Yes, from her own lips--this news mixed in with the vile accusations she flung at me like a house painter gone mad, wildly splashing about with all the colors of her tongue, so delighted she was to ridicule and at the same time inform me how she, the woman I had married, the woman I supported, the mother of Jamie, had turned her back, had pleased herself with all kinds of goings on--so beside herself with joy to be finally throwing it all up in my face.
And each revelation, instead of causing me consternation, on the contrary, made me feel more and more light-hearted. For I suddenly understood, as she raged--suddenly realized with a joy of my own, a joy bordering on insanity, that these very same short-comings brought home to me by her violent and lively mouth were in truth the result of my having been shackled to her In the first place in what was an unholy, tortuous marriage. And now I saw that I would be free of it. And so I laughed. And the more I laughed, the wilder she became, enraged by my exquisite lack of despair. She told me things about her friends, she told me things about her lover, about the things she and her lover did with each other, intimate, unorthodox sexual acts--and in such a detailed way calculated to crush me once and for all. But instead, I laughed even more, if that was possible. And I danced around the kitchen and sang all the dirty songs I could remember. Free of her at last! And finally, suddenly becoming quite sober, I told her in no uncertain terms, my intention of taking the sewing machine to the pawnshop.
To my surprise, she agreed without a murmur. She even helped me load it into the car; and, as I drove off, she waved to me and I waved back watching her through the rear-view mirror as she went back into the house to give Jamie his mid-morning snack which generally he refused to eat. And then I thought of the doctor at the clinic and wondered how in the hell he could imagine psychotherapy would restore Jamie's appetite. The kid just doesn't like to eat, I shouted to the windshield, anger and frustration and the heat of the day swelling the pressure behind my eyes. I drove with tears blurring my vision.
By the time I lugged the sewing machine into the pawn shop and up to the counter, grimy and sweaty, I didn't have the energy to complain when the pawn broker offered me fifteen dollars for a piece of equipment that had cost a hundred.
Without a word, I took the money and the receipt, shoved them in my pocket and stumbled out the door. The harsh midday sun, its rays magnified and bouncing off a car window parked at the curb, stabbed me in my eyes.
Flinching, I squinted and turned my back to the burning glare. I had forgotten how bright the days could be, working at night all the time and staying indoors most of the day. I stood with my eyes shut and waited for the flame dancing under my eyelids to subside.
And when I could see again, I found myself looking into the pawnshop's front window.
Something there fastened my attention. It was a box, an old fashioned round box, the kind cheese used to come in; and inside the box, filled to the brim, were hundreds of seashells, dull in the hot window, covered with dust.
I stared at the seashells wondering why they had attracted me. And then suddenly, like a piece of shrapnel tearing through my skin, I remembered Nadine.
A flood of memory rushed into my head, images swept past, vividly tossing and turning, churned up out of a dim, obscure place. I saw the handle bars of my bike, the flakes of snow dashing against the pavement, falling and disappearing into her dark face. I saw the glow of an orange flame reflected in her amber eyes. Yes, I had forgotten so much. That strange night, that strange creature, Nadine. And yes, everything before.
My whole childhood, in fact, as if it had been bottled up and hidden somewhere in my head. Suddenly it seized my emotions and screamed at me like an abandoned, raging child: Remember? Remember? And I looked up and saw my silhouette in the window, cast there by the glaring light--a shadow, like a chunk of black coal, framed in the sheet of reflecting, searing glass. And my nerves turned into colors. Yes! I shouted. I remember!
I spun around and slammed through the door into the pawnshop with such a force, shouting, "Hey!" that the man behind the counter, startled, dropped the magnifying glass he had been using, examining an object. His head shot up, a wave of crimson flowed down to his Adam's apple.
"That box in the window. Let me see it!"
He looked me up and down, gathering his composure.
"What box are you talking about?" he asked uncertainly, as if he thought I had come to rob him.
"The box of seashells. I want to buy it."
"Are you a collector?"
"What difference does that make? Does it matter to you who buys your goods?" I was becoming irritated.
"Shells are getting scarce, you know. They're becoming a thing of the past."
"Look," 1 interrupted, "forget the pitch. I want to buy them. How much are they?"
"I only tell you this so you will not be surprised at the price."
The man smiled blandly.
"Take them out of the window, please," I said firmly.
I was surprised at his resistance and by my own insistence. I couldn't remember wanting anything so much as I wanted those seashells. And when finally, almost with reluctance, he went to the window and removed the box, blowing away some of the accumulated dust, his pale, unshaven cheeks like two white balloons, my hands actually trembled with anticipation.
I ran my fingers through them.
"How much do you want?" I asked.
"They're easily worth twelve," he said, eyeing me with faint amusement. "But I'll let you have them for ten."
I paused, outraged.
Never mind, I said to myself. I slapped the ten-dollar bill he had just given me into his palm, grabbed the box and rushed for the door. There must have been at least a thousand shells in that box. A penny each, I calculated as I drove home, comparing them to a bottle of pills, the medicine I was supposed to be bringing back with me.
I had no doubts what Helen's reaction would be when she'd seen how I had spent the money. The hell with her, I thought. I wasn't going to explain my action. How could 1, when I didn't even know myself why I had spent good money on a bunch of sea shells, whether they were a collector's item or not. It was a crazy thing to do. An impulse. A gesture perhaps. Like a celebration for getting back something I had lost. If I tried to tell her the story of Nadine, it would be a waste of time. It would take too long, I said to myself. And in any case, she wouldn't be interested. Why should she care? She only cared about her clothing business and her boyfriend. And then it struck me that I had turned her sewing machine into a thousand seashells and the thought made me giddy. I laughed the rest of the way home.
I was laughing when I walked into the house and showed her what I had done.
Helen stared at me, a dumb look of horror on her face. Then she broke into a torrent of abuse, flung herself at me; I had to dance out of her way in order to prevent the shells from spilling out onto the floor.
"You were supposed to buy medicine!" she screamed.
"That's right!" I laughed.
"My sewing machine! My beautiful sewing machine. . .for this? You're mad! Mad!" She fell into bitter weeping.
"Stop your crying," I said. "I bought them for Jamie."
"For Jamie? Seashells? Ten dollars' worth?" She was incredulous.
"When have we bought anything for Jamie lately? Except medicine?"
I shouted. "Now quit your crying. Show the kid you're happy about it. Let him see you happy for a change."
"Happy?" she screamed. "You're crazy!"
Our commotion awakened Jamie out of one of his fitful slumbers. We heard him sobbing in his bed.
I went to his room, one of the shells stuck in my eye socket like a monocle. Helen followed behind me, shouting, "Crazy! Crazy! Crazy!"
"Look, Jamie!" I called out. "I got something for you."
"What is it?" he whimpered.
He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes.
I let the shell fall from my eye into my opened palm. Then I tossed it into the valley of blankets between his little knees. And, before he could pick it up, I tossed another. And still another. He began to giggle. And finally, I stepped up to his bed and turned the entire box upside down. A shower of seashells, like chimes, flowed into his lap.
He laughed and plunged his arms into the pile, stirring
the shells in swirls, as though he were swimming.
"Look, Helen," I said, laughing, "Jamie's swimming!"
For some reason, this made Jamie laugh for all he was worth.
And then I heard her, in the doorway behind me, laughing.
We were all laughing.
"Let's go to the beach! " She said.

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