We were swimming laps in the camp pool during free play when Vivian told me she was a change-of-life-baby. “What’s change-of-life?” I asked. “It’s when a woman gets cranky and sweats all the time. Drives everyone around her crazy,” she said in between breaths. “It has to do with getting old,” Vivian added the next time she came up for air. “I was a mistake. I wasn’t supposed to be born.” I swam alongside her and wondered whether I was supposed to be born. “How do you know all this stuff?” “Lenore told me.” Lenore was our counselor. Also, Vivian’s older sister. It seemed like an unfair advantage to have your own sister as a counselor, but I liked both of them a lot. More than most people. More than almost anyone I’d ever met. They were funny. Together, they would keep all twelve girls in the bunk in stitches after lights-out while they put on skits and made fun of the camp staff. "How old’s Lenore, anyway?” I asked, struggling to keep up my head above water. “Twenty-one.” “Wow,” I said. Vivian and I were eleven. “She doesn’t live at home anymore. She’s got boyfriends and a job in a design studio. Lenore wants to be an actress. She’s got boobs and hips and everything. You’ve seen them, I know you have. I’ve watched you watching her get undressed.” “So, what?” “So, nothing. I just notice things, that’s all.” We stopped swimming and climbed up on the side of the pool. Between the two of us, there wasn’t a boob or a hip in sight, although Vivian was chubby with a little pot belly she sucked in whenever she remembered. We toweled ourselves dry. Vivian always brought an extra towel for her hair which was dark, straight and silky and hung halfway down her back like a cape. I loved that hair. It always smelled like apple-scented shampoo and matched her eyes, and her eyes made me think of the shape and taste of roasted almonds. “I wish I had long hair,” I said. “Who says you can’t?” “My mother.” “Oh, yeah, well,” she said and grinned at me showing her dimples. “Mothers are weird sometimes.” Vivian knew things. And she understood what I meant. I didn’t always have to say every little word out loud because she could guess what I was thinking. Vivian crossed her legs, one towel wrapped around her head like a turban, the other around her shoulders. She studied me. “I like your hands,” she said, “they’re pretty. And you have nice feet, too. Yeah, I really like your feet.” “Why?” “They’re like Jesus Christ’s feet in those paintings at the museum - except they’re not nailed together with blood pouring out.” “What are you talking about?” “When we’re back in the City after camp, we’ll go the Met together. I’ll show you what I mean.” “Your parents let you go there? Alone?” “Yeah. One cross-town bus, that’s all. Sure, they let me go. They let me do whatever I want as long as I practice the piano and keep my scholarship at Julliard.” I could hear myself trying to persuade my parents. “Vivian Lubeck goes to the Met alone on the bus. Why can’t I go with her?” But the breeze blew my argument away. The cooling sun felt soft on my skin. The water in the swimming pool shimmered with silver sparkles of afternoon light. Vivian sat across from me and continued her inspection. “Actually, you’re very pretty,” she said. “But, you already know that.” “That’s not what my mother thinks. She says my eyes are a little crossed, and that my legs aren’t straight. And she won’t let me grow my hair because it’s so thin.” Vivian giggled. She shined an imaginary light into my face and pretended to examine my eyes like a doctor. “Look right, look left, look up, now down. Nope, eyes are fine. Not a bit crossed. Your hair’s a little skimpy, but so what. Who cares? Stand up. Show me your legs.” Dutifully, I stood. “Legs are fine, too. What’s your mother’s problem, anyway?” I said I didn’t know, and I wasn’t lying. My mother just wanted me to look a certain way, I told Vivian, but I wasn’t exactly sure what way that was, or if there was anything I could do about it. “Well,” she said, “I hate both my parents. The only one in the world I love is Lenore.” “You hate your parents?” I wondered what was wrong with them. What did they do to her? No kid I knew had ever said anything thing like this. Parents were in charge. I didn’t think it was allowed to hate them. “They’re old,” Vivian answered. “They never laugh or clown around. I don’t think they like each other much. Anyway, they just tell me what to do, and I do it. All they care about is that I practice and practice and practice the piano and keep my scholarship at Julliard. My mother wants me to be famous.” “How can you tell they don’t like each other?” My parents weren’t young either, but they looked good together and had a lot of friends. “Mother’s always in the kitchen. Always. I don’t know what she does in there. She’s not a very good cook, but that’s where she stays wearing that stupid red apron with the orange apricots on it. And my father spends all his free time in his den off the hallway. He polishes his diamonds.” “Come on, Vivvie, diamonds?” “Yep. God, he’s always fussing with them, staring at them through his jewelers’ loop, arranging them in these big black cases, you know, lined in velvet, touching them and counting them and mumbling things to himself in Dutch. It’s really gross. I especially hate it when he yammers in Dutch and makes those ugly sounds from the back of his throat. Gives me the creeps.” “Diamonds?” I repeated. “He’s a diamond dealer.” “He keeps diamonds at home?” I asked. “Lots of diamonds?” “Don’t worry,” said Vivian. “He’s insured.” “Oh,” I said, as if I understood. My mother had two diamonds, one on a ring that my father gave her, the other on a broach she got from her mother. She kept them in a sand-colored, satin pouch in her stocking drawer. When she was in the mood, she let me touch them. The stones were sharp and hard and bright and beautiful. I didn’t understand Vivian’s talk about jewelers’ loops and velvet-lined cases, but I didn’t want to look stupid in front of my friend. People at camp said that Vivian was a child prodigy. She could sight-read any sheet of music put in front of her, she could play any song by ear, and she had a beautiful singing voice. The voice part annoyed me a little because I sang, too, and it got me a fair amount of attention. But Vivian’s voice was trained, and she had perfect pitch. I did know what perfect pitch was because Vivian had already told me. I listened to her practice for two hours every afternoon during rest period and marveled at her ability to play pieces as difficult as the music my parents listened to on their LPs at home. “Want to sing something?” she asked. “Sure. What?” “Sing ‘Twinkle,Twinkle Little Star’ and I’ll harmonize.” “That’s a stupid song, Vivian.” “No, wait. Give me a chance. You’ll see. It’s fun. First we’ll do it like Bach.” “What do you mean?” “Just sing. I’ll show you.” So I sang, and Vivian wove her voice up and down and around mine. Her notes chased my notes, caught up, ran on ahead, then slowed down again. She sang a different melody than I did, but the sounds she made fell against mine and landed in harmony. This was something new, exciting, magical. Like a waterfall. Like running downhill. Like dancing with voices instead of feet. “That was great!” I said. “What now?” “Now you sing the song again, but this time I’ll make it Mozart.” I knew Mozart from my red Schirmer’s Piano for Beginners book. “Mozart wrote all sorts of variations on the Twinkle, Twinkle song. You know that, don’t you?” Vivian asked. “Based on an old French melody called...” “Let’s just sing,” I interrupted. Sometimes Vivian made my head ache. She always gave me more information than I could handle. Summer ended, fall began. Vivian and I went to different schools, but we both lived in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive, four city blocks apart. The marble Soldiers’ and Sailors’ monument in the park along the Hudson River was the exact half-way point between her apartment building and mine. It became our meeting place on weekends, the after-school hide-out where we swapped secrets and urgent information. From the moment they laid eyes on her, my parents took to Vivian. She had a knack for making grown-ups like her, trust her and listen to everything she said. Those dimples, or maybe her silky hair or even her little chubby body, charmed them, which was more than fine with me. By my twelfth birthday, without any resistance at all, I got permission to take the 86th Street cross-town bus and spend a Sunday afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum with Vivian. “What a cultured child she is,” my father said looking up from his New York Times crossword puzzle. “And so well brought-up,” my mother added from behind her novel. The first time we went to the Met, Vivian pushed me past the Egyptian art, the swords, knives and knights in armor, past the ancient goblets and urns and the scary African masks. She walked so fast I could hardly keep up with her. She stopped at last in front of a sculpture of a beautiful naked man cast in bronze. She studied it from various angles. “Ever see a live penis?” she asked. “Sort of, ” I answered. “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Well, I’ve walked in on my brother a few times. He likes to stand in front of the mirror in his underpants and look at himself. I’ve seen this, well, this sort of lump in front,” I said. “That doesn’t count.” “And then once, I accidentally came into the bathroom when my Dad was peeing, but I got scared and ran away. I didn’t see much really. Just a flash of a wiggly pink and gray thing with some hair around it like a beard.” Vivian threw me the kind of look that made me think she’d seen more than a penis or two in her life. She took my hand and steered me through the galleries until we got to an enormous room full of Jesus paintings. Jesus on the cross, Jesus on the ground bleeding onto a white sheet with pale, worried-looking people wringing their hands all around him or close-up paintings of Jesus’ face with his eyes rolled way back in his head staring up at the sky. “Look here. See his feet?” Vivian asked. “See how narrow and fine they are? Look at the way the veins stick out. They’re beautiful.” I thought about my own feet that my friend had admired so much at camp and wondered how that figured with the bunions my mother said I was starting, bunions that would grow and hurt and make my feet ugly like hers. Just that spring, in spite of tears and pleading, my mother had put an end the ballet classes I’d adored since I’d begun at age five because, she said categorically, I would never be a good enough dancer to make ballerina, so why spoil my feet for nothing. “God, I wish I could draw feet like those,” Vivian went on, still starting at the painting. “Feet are so hard to draw. Hands, too.” “You draw?” I asked. This girl was full of surprises. Was there anything she couldn’t do? “I love to draw. More than anything. When Lenore lived at home, she used to teach me stuff she learned in art school, but now she doesn’t have time any more. I hardly ever see her. I keep begging my mother to let me take art classes, but she says no. Says the piano is more important. Goes on and on about how I could lose my scholarship if I got distracted by other things. Says I have to be EX-CELL-ENT. That’s how she says it. ‘Viffian, you must become ex-cell-ent to succeed.’ She doesn’t want me to be a dilettante.” “A what?” “You know, Jack of all trades and master of none.” I still didn’t understand, and the flat line of her mouth told me that Vivian was losing patience. That, or something else was bothering her. “What’s a dilettante?” I asked again. I couldn’t help it. Vivian sighed. “It’s a person who does a lot of things, but does nothing really well.” “Oh,” I said, satisfied with my new word. Vivian stood in front of the largest Jesus painting. She looked at it for a long time. I was getting bored. My legs hurt from standing so long, and my neck was sore from looking up at the huge canvases. I was just about to say that I wanted to go home, when I saw that her cheeks were wet and her lashes coated with tears. She made no sound, but her shoulders quivered. “Vivvie, what’s wrong? Don’t cry, Vivian, please. Tell me what’s wrong.” “I hate them. I hate them for not letting me learn to draw. I hate Lenore for leaving home. I hate that I was born so late, ten whole years after my sister. I hate....I hate....I hate...I hate...... ” I took her hand and led her, sobbing and sputtering, out of the museum. All week long, I chewed over our visit to the Met, trying to puzzle it out. When I went to her house the next weekend to spend the afternoon, I felt an uncomfortable pressure close in on me the moment Vivian opened the door. Mr. and Mrs. Lubeck were nice enough, but I began to understand what Vivian meant about their not liking each other. They hardly spoke. Mr. Lubeck played with his diamonds in his dark little den, Mrs. Lubeck puttered in her kitchen, her eternal red apron with the orange apricot design wrapped around her waist, although instead of food, the apartment smelled of furniture polish. Vivian either practiced at the walnut baby grand that stood in the center of the living room, or closed herself in her bedroom at the end of a long corridor where she spent hours making charcoal sketches of nude models from photographs she stored in Lenore’s old, black, zippered portfolio. When she didn’t sketch, she studied the anatomical drawings in Lenore’s discarded textbooks. “I have an idea,” I announced the next time I met Vivian behind the monument in the park. “I want to make a deal with you.” “Deal? What deal?” Vivian snapped. She eyed me with suspicion. At camp, she’d never been cranky, but here in New York, well, she just wasn’t the same. I laid out my plan. When we got together on the weekends, we’d trade off houses. One week she’d come to my house with sketch pads, pens and charcoal. I would let her draw whatever part of me she wanted for exactly one hour. The following week, I’d go to her house and she’d play the piano for me. We’d also sing, I said, and she would teach me to harmonize. “An hour? A whole hour? Do you have any idea how hard it will be for you to sit absolutely still for a whole hour?” Vivian asked. “I can do it. I know I can. I will if you will, Vivvie. Please. Let’s try it.” She looked doubtful, but she agreed. We shook on it. I never knew how much five fingers and a palm could weigh, even resting on some surface, until I had to hold my right hand in a fixed position on the arm of my bedroom chair for exactly sixty minutes. “Damn, you moved!” Vivian hissed. “I couldn’t help it, I had an itch.” “Itching’s not allowed. Got it? ” “Sorry. Next time, I won’t scratch. Promise. Keep going.” “Now I’ve got to fix the thumb.” Vivian sighed. She came over to me and rearranged my fingers on the chair. “There,” she said. “Keep that thumb facing up.” “What time is it?” I asked. While I labored at our piano at home practicing easy classics from my Music for the Millions book, Vivian was hard at work preparing works by Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc for an upcoming recital at Julliard. And yet, a full year later, she still kept her part of the bargain. Sacred Sunday came. My turn at her house. Vivian at the piano. Me curled up near her feet, the better to watch her pedal. “It’s Impressionism in music,” she explained. “Like Monet, Manet, Renoir at the Met?” I asked. “Exactly,” Vivian said. “You get smarter all the time. Why is that, I wonder?” “Because of you,” I sang, one hand on my heart. “Bull-shit,” she sang back, hitting high C on each syllable. “Play the Debussy preludes for me please, your Highness.” Vivian’s hands and mine were the same size. We’d measured more than once. But while my fingers could barely span the eight notes of an octave, Vivian’s were like rubber. She could reach an octave plus two. To watch Vivian play was to understand absolute concentration. She never moved her torso. She didn’t rock or sway. Her plump fingers flew over the keys, small birds skimming a black and white sea. The melodies traveled from her head to her hands to the keyboard, then soared through the air to fall like a shower of silver arrows aimed straight at my heart. I would have given up everything to make music like hers. Meanwhile, she taught me the rudiments of harmony. She was an exacting teacher. “You’re learning by rote again. You’ve gone and memorized instead of inventing.” “Vivvie, I’m not you. I can’t. I can only learn by rote.” “Bullshit!” she said, but this time she didn’t sing. “Just try again! And remember your intervals.” “Okay, okay,” I said, and I did, noting that “bullshit” had become an integral part of Vivian’s vocabulary. When we turned thirteen, and after years of badgering, my parents finally allowed me to spend the night at Vivian’s house. Why I would want to stay at a friend’s house when I had a perfectly lovely room of my own was something my mother didn’t want to understand. Dinner at the Lubecks was a quiet affair. We ate in the kitchen, instead of the dining room the way we did at my house. I thought this would be cozy, but quickly realized that there was nothing cozy about the terse questions and grunted replies between the parents. Mostly I remember that we had a soup with gummy dumplings, and that the food was as colorless as it was bland. Vivian and I ate quickly and withdrew to her room at the end of the corridor. “We’ll go back later for snacks,” she whispered, “but we’ll have to wait til they’re asleep. I’m off my diet tonight.” “What diet?” “Come to the bathroom. Let’s weigh ourselves.” I thought weighing was something only doctors did. We had no scale at home. The bedroom that Vivian had shared for years with Lenore was very large; it held two beds arranged in an L with bookshelves and writing surfaces all around the periphery and a large empty space in the middle. Vivian led me to the adjoining bathroom with a black and white tiled floor and a claw-footed tub and told me to take my clothes off. At the doorway, I hesitated. Vivian looked at me and grinned. She threw me a robe, disappeared behind the bathroom door for a second, then re-emerged with a giant bath towel wrapped around her torso. “So, okay. Here I go,” she said and stepped gingerly onto the scale. “Oh shit! I gained a pound. No wait, Lenore says I can subtract a pound for the towel, so I guess I’m fine. We’ll have cream cheese sandwiches later and oreos with milk, or something else reeeally sinful.” “I don’t get it Vivvie. You’ve got breasts now and your period and stuff. That’s got to put weight on you. Our doctor said I was “prepubescent.” I had to look the word up. She was probably trying to make me feel better about being so flat-chested. And I don’t think I’ll ever get a period. “Never mind your chest. As for periods, trust me, you can wait. I’d switch bodies with you any day.” In high school, Vivian and I saw each other less and less. We had different friends from our different schools and boys began to occupy much of my spare time. I still showed up regularly at her Julliard recitals, but it seemed to me that I enjoyed her successes more than she did. Vivian had become a serious girl, her once-chubby body transformed into a mass of edges and angles. Her almond eyes had turned opaque, no flicker of mischief to be found. Only her long, silky, cape-like hair remained the same. After graduation, I went away to college, while Vivian stayed on in New York to divide her studies between Barnard and The Julliard School. The last time we saw each other at the end of our freshman year, she was feverishly planning her debut at Carnegie Hall and obsessed with a reed-thin cellist from her chamber music group. She told me she was preparing Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms for the program: What other music could express as well the exquisite torments and complexities of love? I continued to write from college in Massachusetts, but received no reply. I was six months pregnant with my first child when I flew to New York to show off my belly to anyone who might be interested. At a neighborhood market where I stopped to buy a snack, I saw Mrs. Lubeck’s familiar pudgy frame hovering near the produce section. I elbowed my way down the narrow aisles and tapped her on the shoulder. “Mrs. Lubeck, oh, Mrs. Lubeck, it’s been so long! How are you?” She looked at me across a bin of lemons. Her eyes drooped, her once-round face was heavily lined. She glanced down at my belly, then quickly looked away. “How’s Vivian? Still in New York? I never heard from her.” Mrs. Lubeck didn’t answer. She just looked at me vacantly. Her silence made me nervous. I put my hand on her arm. “Please, Mrs. Lubeck. Tell me. How can I get in touch with her?” “You can’t,” she said. “Viffian is dead. We found her on the floor of her apartment on 112th street. Last spring. She took pills. All that promise, all that future, and she takes pills.” Mrs. Lubeck’s head dropped to her chest. My mind went blank, but for the lemons. It suddenly seemed imperative to count them, to verify, to ascertain, to understand, but all I could see was a vision of Vivian stretched out on the hardwood floor of a place I didn’t know, her hair flung out in all directions. My stomach soured bringing up an aftertaste of breakfast. In protest, the baby shifted inside me. Memories raced across my mind: Two girls listening to talk radio late at night, licking cream cheese off the tips of their fingers; Vivian and me, singing two-part inventions as we walked through the rooms full of medieval tapestries at the Cloisters Museum in Ft. Tryon Park; Vivian with her charcoals, drawing my hand. It occurred to me then, that for all the years of sketches, successful or failed, I didn’t own a single drawing Vivian had done, nothing at all to put my hands on. I needed to steady myself, so I put my arms around Mrs. Lubeck. She stiffened, at first, but I held fast, in spite of the mass of baby pressed between us. Her head barely reached my shoulder, and her body felt insubstantial against mine. Finally, I felt her go limp as she released her grief into my arms and began to weep against my shoulder. We stood in the embrace for a long time, rocking each other by the lemon bin, while busy shoppers steered their carts around us, up and down the narrow aisles. Dratt's personal essays and short fiction have been widely published. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes on numerous occasions, and in 1999, won an honorable mention for her memoir "After the War." She is currently working on a book-length memoir by the same name. Mother of a grown son and daughter, and married to the same man for thirty-eight years, Dratt is a distance walker, a Yogi-in-training, and a teacher of English as a foreign language. She writes from Chicago, although she magically believes she still lives in some fashion on the West Side of Manhattan. HOME