Mrs. Nozawa proved to be quite a talker. Mr. Tamazaki learned that she was twenty when released from Moab, that she was forty-four now and, with her husband, had become a successful entrepreneur. They owned a car wash, two dry-cleaning shops, and an apartment building. Their younger daughter was a sophomore at Northwestern University in Evanston. Their older daughter was a senior at Yale. And their son had begun work on his MBA at UCLA. She loved to play bridge, taught origami to interested friends, was learning French cooking from the book by Julia Child, found the Beatles unlistenable, but was fond of the music of the Osmonds even if Utah didn’t have good associations for her.
When Mr. Tamazaki finally managed to explain his situation and described the information he hoped that she would attempt to collect for him, she at once agreed. She was currently at the front desk of one of the dry-cleaning shops, but could get someone to cover for her within the hour.
54
After Miss Pearl left, I went inside to lie down on the sofa, and I fell asleep at once. For half an hour I remained oblivious, until the doorbell woke me, ringing incessantly. Of course the insistent visitor proved to be the twelve-year-old geek saxophonist.
At the open door, squinting and blinking blearily against a day fiercely bright by comparison to my dreamless sleep, I was reminded that the sun is a continuing nuclear holocaust, ninety-three million miles from our doorstep.
Assessing my appearance, Malcolm said, “Drinking this early in the day, you’ll be dead of liver failure before you’re famous.”
Without being quite so mean as to indicate that his belt line was just inches below his nipples, I said, “At least when I’m found dead, I’ll be dressed with style.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. I was asleep on the sofa. I don’t know what I’m saying. Come in.”
He shuffled across the threshold, tripped on the throw rug in the foyer, and stumbled into the living room. Already, I found his lack of coordination endearing, as if it were his cross to bear just like Quasimodo’s deformity in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, only not so tragic and grotesque. Because he never excused himself or showed the least embarrassment when he careened through a room, you had to admire his determined pretense of grace; and considering how well he blew that sax, he would win the heart of the pretty Gypsy girl that Quasimodo had lost, assuming a pretty Gypsy found him one day.
“I hope I didn’t bring my axe for nothing.”
“That’s like fingernails on a blackboard to me. Please don’t call it an axe.”
“What do you want me to call it?”
“Sax, saxophone, brass-wind instrument, reed instrument, I don’t care.”
“So if you don’t care, I’ll call it my axe. You’ve got to loosen up a little, man. So why were you taking a nap at ten-thirty in the morning?”
“Because I didn’t sleep well,” I lied, but it was a little white lie to avoid being taken for a nut if I told him about the woman who was the city and what she had in her handbag.
“Hey, you know what’ll always put you sound asleep?”
“Listening to you?”
“A glass of milk before bed. Use it to chase a Benadryl.”
“I don’t do drugs, and I never will.”
“Benadryl isn’t a drug. It’s an allergy medication.”
“I don’t have any allergies.”
“Take a walk on the wild side, Jonah.”
“You want to play?”
“Did I bring my axe?”
So we played. Here it was 1967, when rock ’n’ roll already had a storied history, and we liked a lot of that music, we really did, and we played some. But in truth, we were throwbacks, born too late, and our hearts were in the swing era. Since we’d learned the previous day that we both knew the songwriter and arranger Sy Oliver, we took the sax and piano parts the way we heard them on vinyl, and tried to be faithful to them, first on his arrangement of “On the Beach at Bali Bali,” which he’d done for Jimmie Lunceford’s band, a great band back in the day, and then we swung into “Yes, Indeed!,” which Oliver worked up for Tommy Dorsey.
We had played fifteen minutes when the doorbell rang. Standing up at the piano, I could see a girl on the porch. She looked about seventeen, her blond hair in a ponytail.
Malcolm could see her, too. He said, “She’s my sister, Amalia,” and he went to open the door for her.
If you’re ten, you can recognize pretty women when you see them, but you appreciate them only when they’re at least a decade older than you—preferably more—so that you live in separate worlds. Girls any closer to your age are interlopers at best, annoyances at worst, and alien in any case, just getting in the way of what boys might want to do.
When I first laid eyes on Amalia Pomerantz, I was prepared to dislike her, and maybe I did for half an hour. She was pretty enough, but I didn’t think she was beautiful, not like my mom, except I had to admit that her eyes, the exact shade of lime-flavored Life Savers candy, were extraordinary. I didn’t like the way she dressed, which seemed to strain for the style that her brother would never achieve: blue-and-white vertical-stripe knitted-cotton top with short sleeves and a wide slashed neckline; white bell-bottom pants cut low on the hips, wide red-leather belt with a big buckle; white canvas shoes with blue-rubber soles and heels. It was like Gidget had been moved from the beach to a marina and updated to 1967.
I think I winced when I saw that she was carrying a clarinet, because it was my opinion, based on the makeup of all the classic swing bands, that girls had no place in the jazz world, except as singers behind a microphone.
She didn’t even wait to be introduced, but said, “Hey, Jonah, if you’re half as good as I hear, you’re going to be playing to a sold-out house in Carnegie Hall before I find a guy I want to date more than once, if I ever do. Can’t wait to hear you run those keys.” She also carried a small insulated picnic chest. “Brought lunch. I’ll put stuff in the fridge and be right back.” She breezed to the kitchen at the back of the house.
I braced Malcolm. “You didn’t tell me you had a sister.”
“Isn’t she great?”
“Sure, she’s okay.”
“She’s the best. You’ll see.”
“She’s not going to play the clarinet, is she?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Depends on if she wants to join in or not.”
“Why wouldn’t she want to join in?”
“Music isn’t her everything, isn’t her future, the way it is for you and me.”
“An amateur,” I said with a note of disdain.
“She’s good, though. She’s been playing since she was nine.”
“I’ve been playing since I was eight.”
“Yeah, but you’re only ten now.”
I had no rejoinder except, “Jeez.” I made the sign of the cross. Returning from the kitchen with just the clarinet, Amalia said, “I need some lively music, guys. I’ve had a boring morning. Did the laundry, half the ironing, cleaned the kitchen, washed the breakfast dishes.” Directly to me, she said, “My mother has far, far too many obligations to be able to do much housework. She’s committed to smoking two packs of Lucky Strikes a day, and she has to spend a couple of hours with Mrs. Janowski next door analyzing the sad marital relationships of our various neighbors, catch the afternoon soap operas on TV, the game shows later, to all of which, by the way, she has often applied to be a contestant. She’s most frustrated that she can’t get a spot on one of the nighttime game shows. She wanted to be on What’s My Line, but by ‘line’ they mean line of work, which is so unfair, and she wanted to be on I’ve Got a Secret, but the only secrets she has all regard the terribly sad marital relationships of our various neighbors, many of which are too risqué for TV.” She flopped onto the sofa. “Give me some music that makes me forget I’m an indentured servant.”
We went Ellington on her, starting with “Satin Doll” and moving on to “Jump for Joy,” trying as best we could to give the flavor and the essence of what the
full band might have sounded like, though we knew that we were fools for even trying, just two of us and kids to boot. When we started “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” Amalia sprang off the sofa and snatched up her clarinet, and when the reed was wet, she came in not note for note, because maybe she didn’t know it that well, but inventing riffs not of the song but totally in harmony with it, playing them over until she found a place to slip in and repeat a new one.
When we finished, she said, “Fabulous, you’re great, that was fun. Lunchtime. If you don’t want me to eat it all myself, you have to help me put it on the table, and don’t give me any boys-don’t-do-kitchen crap.”
She’d brought three amazing submarine sandwiches, potato salad, macaroni salad with black olives, and rice pudding for dessert, all of which she had made herself, the sandwiches that morning between laundry and dishes, the rest of it the day before. All of it was first-rate food, and I don’t know what impressed me the most—her ability as a cook or the way she could eat. She was about five foot five, slim as any model, but she sure could pack away the food, and she ate with great relish.
Malcolm’s appetite didn’t match his sister’s, but his approach to food was more colorful than hers. She and I made do with a single plate each, but he would employ his plate for only his submarine sandwich. He used two small dishes for his portions of potato salad and macaroni salad, and if his primary plate had been the face of a clock, the macaroni was placed beside it precisely at ten o’clock, the potato salad exactly at two o’clock. He ate the former with a fork but preferred a tablespoon for the latter. He sliced the ends off his sandwich and set them aside, never to be eaten, then cut the submarine in three equal pieces with such calculation that I expected him to pull out a tape measure.
Because Amalia didn’t remark on her brother’s table habits, neither did I. As the years have gone by, however, and as he has gradually become more obsessive-compulsive, I take some comfort in knowing that I couldn’t be the entire cause of his condition, that he had embarked on these rituals long before he ever knew me.
I don’t mean to imply that Amalia Pomerantz dominated the table conversation, which she did but in another way didn’t. She tried to draw me out, and by then she’d won me over, so I chattered a lot when I wasn’t stuffing my face. I didn’t want to dislike her anymore, couldn’t dislike her. Malcolm put in his two cents from time to time, as well, but I’m not going to tell you much of what he or I said, because for one thing, none of it was interesting, and for another thing, I’ve forgotten nearly everything except what Amalia said. She was the first seventeen-year-old, either male or female, I’d met who cared to talk for more than a minute to a ten-year-old boy. To some degree she probably pretended to be interested in what I had to say, but she convinced me that she really, totally cared.
I wanted to know why she took up the clarinet, and she said, “To annoy my parents, to annoy them so much that they’d make me practice in the garage, where I could breathe air that smelled of automotive grease and tires and mildew instead of cigarette smoke. They’re in a contest, Mom and Dad, to see who can get terminal lung cancer first. And in the garage, I didn’t have to listen to their endless awkward silence.”
“They say more to Tweetie,” Malcolm revealed, “than they say to each other.”
“Tweetie being the parakeet who lives in a cage in our living room and watches us with bitter resentment,” Amalia explained, “most likely because the poor perpetually molting thing just can’t stand cigarette smoke or can’t tolerate my parents talking baby talk to him until he wants to scream. If you ask me, something happened between Mom and Dad long ago, and they’ve said all they have to say about it, but they haven’t forgiven each other or themselves, so they don’t want to talk to each other about anything. Dad’s a lathe operator. In fact, he’s also a foreman overseeing a shop floor of other lathe operators, and he makes good money, I guess. But judging by other lathe operators I’ve met, people he works with, maybe it’s a trait of lathe operators that they’re the strong silent type. Because he doesn’t talk to me or Malcolm much, either.”
“Except,” Malcolm said, “to say, ‘Take it to the garage.’ Or, ‘I’m just tryin’ to watch a little TV here and forget what a shitty day I had at work, okay?’ ”
“But at least Dad’s not a mean man,” Amalia said. “He wouldn’t hurt my mother or us, and that’s something. He isn’t mean and he isn’t cold.”
“He’s cold,” Malcolm disagreed.
“Well,” Amalia said, “yes, he’s cold, but maybe that’s not his nature. Maybe he wasn’t born that way. Maybe life has made him cold. Maybe disappointment and regret and who-knows-what has made him the way he is. Maybe he wishes he weren’t that way, but he’s just stuck in that mode, kind of frozen and doesn’t know how to thaw.”
“He was born that way,” Malcolm declared, “and the last thing he wants to do is thaw.” To me, he said, “Amalia’s getting out. She’s got a full scholarship, food and board and everything, to the state university. Leaves in September. She’s going to be a writer. She’s brilliant.”
Her blush was lovely. “I’m not brilliant, Malcolm. I just love the language, I’m full of words, and I’ve got kind of a knack for putting them together. But I’m not sure I should go. Maybe I should get a job, wait a few years. The scholarship doesn’t come with any spending money.”
Malcolm looked pained. “You’ll have spending money. Even if the old man doesn’t want you going to college, he’ll probably cough up a little pocket change. And I know you—you’ll get a part-time job, and you’ll still get top grades.”
He had picked all the slices of black olives out of his macaroni salad, but it wasn’t that he didn’t like them. When he finished his serving of macaroni, he then ate the olives.
I asked Amalia, “Your dad doesn’t want you to go to college?”
“It’s not that he doesn’t want me to go to college or to become a writer, it’s just maybe that he’s dreading the day when Malcolm leaves, too, because then it’s only the two of them and the parakeet, which would be a kind of hell.”
“He resents you getting more education,” Malcolm said, “because already you have more than he does. Quote, ‘Pomerantzes don’t need college, they never did, we don’t mix with the hoity-toity.’ ” Malcolm turned to me, and his magnified, sad eyes were haunted by the fear that she might not take the scholarship. “She’s afraid to go to the university and leave me home with them, because I’m already a social misfit.”
She said, “You’re not a social misfit, Malcolm. You’re just awkward, and that will pass.”
“I’m an awkward social misfit, and proud of it. If you don’t go to college in September, it’ll be my fault, all mine, and I can’t live with that, so I’ll blow my brains out.”
“You won’t blow your brains out, little brother. You faint at the sight of blood, and you don’t have a gun.”
“I’ll get a gun, and I’ll be dead before I have a chance to see the blood. You better go to college.”
I tried to help out. “He won’t be a social misfit when I’m done with him, Amalia. And there’s Grandpa Teddy and my mom, and with them he’s welcome here anytime.”
After we finished the rice pudding—which Malcolm ate with a clean fork—we never did get back to making music. We talked while we cleaned up the kitchen, and then we sat at the table again and talked some more—mostly she did—and the time flew.
One thing she said about Malcolm that I’ll never forget. “He thinks he’s got music in him because he got it growing up with me, from me always with the clarinet as far back as he can remember, but that’s not right. What music I have, I got it with iron-headed determination and grueling practice, and it’s a thimble of spit compared to the ocean of natural talent in Malcolm. You heard me play, Jonah. I’d be fine for some dance band at the VFW and the Moose hall, but Malcolm’s like you, he’s got the real thing, and he’s got it all. Mom and Dad, they’re as interested in
music as they are in chess tournaments, so Malcolm can’t believe somehow his music came through them, but it did, just like my way with words.” She turned those lime-green eyes on her brother and said, “Without me here to buck you up and keep you focused on how wonderful you are … what if I come home for Christmas my freshman year and you’ve already given up the saxophone and bought your own parakeet?”
“If you don’t go to college in September,” Malcolm said again, “I’ll blow my brains out.”
“And even if you could do that, little brother, where is a twelve-year-old going to buy a gun?”
“There’s a lot of bad people in a city like this, a lot of completely wicked degenerates who’d sell a kid anything.”
“And you know a great many of these wicked degenerates, do you?”
“I’m working on it,” Malcolm said.
When they picked up their instruments to leave, it was nearly four o’clock, but I didn’t want them to go home. Well, I didn’t want Amalia to go home. I was equivocal about Malcolm going home.
I stood on the porch, watching them cross the street. When I’d first seen Amalia, I’d thought she was pretty but not beautiful. Now I had no doubt that she was major beautiful. I felt bad for having compared the way she dressed to Gidget, even though I hadn’t said as much aloud, because I now saw that she had real style. In that blue-striped slashed-neck top and white slacks with a big red belt, she was cute. Sometimes a girl can be not classically beautiful but so cute that you wouldn’t even notice a dozen classic beauties if they walked past naked. Amalia was really cute. And smart. And funny. And caring.
I was in love. Understand, at ten years of age, I didn’t mean romantic love. I had not begun to save for a wedding ring and brood about ideal honeymoon locations. This felt like the same kind of love I had for my mother and for Grandpa Teddy, that I had begun to feel for Mr. Yoshioka, a noble and platonic love but so intense that I wished I owned the world so that I could give it to her.