June 9, 2007--Saturday Story: "Crazy Rona"--Part Three

In Part Two we found Lloyd Zazlo and his assistant Rona on the r6ad heading north on I-95. She was telling him about her childhood. A very unusual one at that, which included parents who sought peace at all cost largely by isolating themselves from the perturbations of normal life, especially any problems that manifested themselves in the lives of their children. A son dropping out of high school, for example, or a daughter, Zazlo’s companion, moving into the garment bag in her closet to get away from them and her troubles. This was all too strange for him and he was glad when he was able to switch the subject since he had other things on his mind. As, apparently, did that surgeon Dr. Weinstein. Had he really said,“Take him out and shoot him”?

Thus, in Part Three we discover that . . .

“Into that clothing bag I took with me everything I needed, as if I were running away from home. Which I suppose I was.” While I was squinting into the light at the road signs, feeling my way for the turnoff that would take us north toward Amherst, Rona, in spite of my hopes, returned to the subject, speaking now pointedly not to me but into the space that surrounded her as she curled herself against the car door, as far away from me or anyone as that tight space would allow. “My portable radio, my books, a flashlight, apples, my pajamas, my shredded baby blanket. It was, it still is the happiest time of my life.”

I knew enough not to interrupt much less try again to touch her. How much further, I thought, until we get there?

“You probably wouldn’t understand this,” apparently, in spite of seeming to be ignoring me, in her monologue, she was still aware of my presence. “You who told me what a happy family you came from. How did you put it? You were called by your father his what, his ‘number-one son.’ I can only imagine how that made your brother feel.” I pretended to ignore this. If she was going to insist on continuing in this vein I was not going to get drawn in. In fact, if I were to have responded I would have said that I always suspected my brother was motivated by being relegated to second-tier status in the family hierarchy. After all, look at us now. Who’s doing better? My brother the doctor, the pediatrician or me the struggling academic who’s been bounced around from job to job?

“How would he have felt if in the cabinet in the living room, the one where my mother displayed her wedding pictures, spare me about that, and the pictures of her parents, another couple of bargains, where she later on stuffed three pictures of my brother’s bar mitzvah, more ridiculousness—they never even had matzos in the house during Passover—and of course since my sister was the first born my mother had a whole shelf of pictures of her, all of them with her in crinolines, how would your brother, the doctor, have felt if there was not one, not a single picture of him? Get the picture? Sorry about that.” I was glad to see that her sense of humor had not entirely disappeared.

“Well, that was my life. That was me, ‘Crazy Rona,’ as my father anointed me after I told him that if he insists on paying his credit cards bills $20 dollars a month, the minimum, and thinks by doing that he’s getting away with something, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is since they charge him a million percent a year not only for what he owes but for all his new purchases. I was only eight when I figured that out. And I was the crazy one, right?” She was so incensed by this memory that from her still fresh-sounding anger it sounded as if this had all happened last month rather than fifteen years ago.

“So is it any wonder . . . ?” She cut herself off and dismissed me with a mocking wave of her hand. She contorted herself into an even tighter ball and I was relieved to notice that we were about to reach the Amherst exit.

I was a member of a Middle States accreditation team that was to spend three days visiting the University of Massachusetts campus there. My assignment was to look at their continuing education programs and add my assessment of them to the overall report. It was all to be largely pro forma. It was a foregone conclusion that they were going to be reaccredited so I invited Rona to come along with me to keep me company, which would allow her to get away from the office for a few days, and since I wouldn’t really have that much to do, we could perhaps have drinks, dinner, and who knows what else. I certainly wasn’t just going to drop her off at the motel where I had reserved a room for her—the team would be staying at the more charming Amherst Inn—and abandon her to her own devices. Her place would be nearby, there was a lot for her to do in the area while I was working, and it would be easy for us to get together whenever that might be possible.

She had seemed content, even nonplussed and had casually accepted my offer as if it was everyday that a much-older supervisor invited her to go away for a few days in the country. Rona, for certain, was from a different world than the one in which I had grown up—back then the only thing girls and young women were nonplussed about was whether or not to let you put your arm around them in the movie theater. But since things had been stressful for Rona at the office, to me her disappointing matter-of-factness made it appear that tagging along with me, and that must have been how she thought about this, tagging, was an opportunity for her to get away for a day or two. Nothing much more than that. Though earlier she had told me how much she loved the mountains.

But even though the foothills of the Berkshires had come into view, Rona still had other things on her mind, “If that wasn’t bad enough,” we still had about ten minutes to go before getting to the Best Western, “for an eight year-old whose parents thought more about what was for dessert than their own daughter, you might have thought I would have gotten lucky and been rescued by my grandparents. At least one of them. I still had four. My mother’s father, who with her mother lived downstairs from us, was the only one who showed any interest in me. My father’s mother didn’t even know my name.” She paused as if to elicit a reaction to that suspect charge; and said, when I didn’t react, “I can see that look on you face. You don’t believe me.” I did have that thought but couldn’t imagine she could see my face, much less any looks on it, curled up as she was. “It’s true. When she bought all her grandchildren necklaces with our names on them she spelled mine R-H-O-N-A. She didn’t know there’s no H in it. Shit.”

This in truth didn’t seem to be such a transgression to me, not enough at least to cause one to move into a garment bag. I can’t tell you how many times people misspelled Zazlo. With S’s instead of Z’s. You can only imagine.

Rona, though, was still thinking about her grandparents, “My mother’s father would take me down to the basement and show me where he kept his tools and where he stored all the things he bought for the house—if they were having a sale on jam or soup he would buy a supply big enough to last a year. He had been a grocer and was used to buying things in bulk. I loved that. Not all the things he kept hidden down there from my grandmother but the fact that he paid attention to me. Pathetic isn’t it that my fondest memories are going to the basement with my grandfather to look at cartons of toilet paper?”

Again I didn’t respond since I needed to pay attention to the driving. We were snaking our way through back roads with which I wasn’t familiar and the traffic had picked up as we approached town.

“Then one morning, I was eight as I said, he went out to the store to buy the paper and get cigarettes but he never came home. They found him dead, from a heart attack or stroke; face down on the sidewalk two blocks from our house. I was never again able to walk by there. To get to the store I would walk three blocks out of my way.”

I had my nose in the map and didn’t catch everything she had been saying. I knew someone significant in her life had died so I said, “Sorry about that.” And added, “Now where’s that damn motel?”

Ignoring me again, she continued, “On the day he died my grandmother, who had always kept to herself and was not much of a grandmother to any of us even though we lived right upstairs, I never remember her cooking anything grandmotherly for us, well the same day he died she had what I guess we would now call a nervous breakdown or a version of an instant case of Alzheimer’s. From that day on she wore her underwear on top of her dresses and only spoke Yiddish, which I didn’t understand. She called my mother in the middle of the night, every night, screaming into the phone that she was dying. And every night my mother would go downstairs and stay with her. All through the night. At least,” Rona snickered, “she was capable of paying attention to someone.”

* * *
“Is it OK if I put my hand there?” It was past 10:00 and we had finished dinner at the Asparagus Valley Roadhouse, as it turned out a not-very-charming or good steak house, in spite of the promise of its name or its weathered shingles. But the wine was adequate and by then we both had had quite a lot of it. It helped us forget the long drive and me to get past what Rona had shared and my less than half-sincere interest.

To my question Rona simply nodded and thus I allowed my arm to slide more completely around her back, she had already agreed to remove her sweater, so that the tips of my fingers could just begin to touch the swelling, above her bra, of her right breast. When they stealthily arrived at that delicious spot, I began slowly, and I hoped tenderly, to touch and stroke her.
This went on for some time and I could feel my arm beginning to grow numb because of the pressure of Rona lying against me and on it.

We were back at her motel room; I had failed to check in at the inn.

To be continued . . .