June 1934
Gussie
Gussie Feldman didn’t enjoy swimming but she did like to lie on the wet sand, in the shadow of Atlantic City’s Steel Pier, and wait for the tiniest ripple of a wave to wash over her. If she positioned herself just so, her body rose with the incoming tide, and for a brief moment, she felt weightless.
She was lying in just such a manner, staring up at the bright blue sky, when her aunt Florence’s face came into her field of vision. “I discovered a lovely note when I arrived home,” Florence said. “I want to give my compliments to the artist.”
Gussie grinned. She had devoted more than a quarter of an hour to writing the note, which she’d carefully positioned on the Oriental rug in the entryway of her grandparents’ apartment, where Florence would be sure to see it. With her colored pencils, she had written in big, purple letters, Dear Florence! And Anna. We are at the beach. Come have fun! Love, Gussie. At the last minute, she decided she had not used enough exclamation marks, so she added three more after Florence’s name but stopped short of allocating any to Anna. Maybe, if her grandparents’ houseguest noticed she hadn’t been awarded any, she’d decide to stay at the apartment.
“Do you want to be a mermaid?” Gussie asked Florence now, hoping to capitalize on her aunt’s good mood. Sometimes, if Gussie asked sweetly, Florence would cross her legs at the ankles and pretend the two of them were merpeople, out for a swim around the Tongan Islands, which Gussie had read about in her picture book Fairy Tales of the South Seas.
“For a few minutes. Then I’m going to go out for a swim.”
Florence lay down beside Gussie in the surf, and the two of them bumped against each other as the waves lapped at their ankles and hips and shoulders. When their skin touched, Gussie felt shy. It was always like this when her aunt returned home from college. It took time for Gussie to relearn Florence’s face and the amount of space she took up in a room and the funny way she talked to Gussie like she was both a beloved child and a trusted grown-up.
“What do you think of Anna?” Florence asked as she propped herself up on her elbows and gave Anna a wave. It was a hot day and the beach was crowded with people, but Gussie spotted her right away.
“I think it’s her fault I have to sleep on the sun porch.”
Florence let out a loud cackle. “Nonsense. I spent my entire childhood begging your Nana and Papa to clear out that sun porch. Mainly so I could get away from your mother.” She reached out and pinched Gussie in the ribs. “You’re a lucky girl.”
Gussie didn’t know about any of that. The sun porch was fine—no tinier, in actual fact, than her bedroom in her parents’ apartment. The room had a bank of windows that faced the ocean, and if she stood on her tiptoes, she could see beyond the pitched roofs of the homes that lined Virginia Avenue, all the way to the beach, where the blue-and-white umbrellas looked like tiny pinwheels. The view was nice but, on summer mornings, when the sun rose over the Atlantic Ocean and its long rays bored through the glass, the room became unbearably hot. In those moments, Gussie wished her grandparents had remained in their house on Atlantic Avenue for the summer.
“I wish we weren’t in the apartment,” she allowed herself to say out loud, since her grandparents were yards away in their beach chairs. In the summer months, Esther and Joseph rented out their house—just one block from the beach—to tourists and moved back into the apartment above the bakery, where, Esther reminded anyone who complained, the family had lived quite happily when Florence and her older sister, Fannie, were small.
“Do you know how many summers I spent wishing I weren’t in that apartment?” Florence asked.
“How many?”
“God, I have no idea,” she said, sending a small splash of water in Gussie’s general direction. “It was a rhetorical question.”
“What’s rhetorical mean?”
Florence looked up at the sky and thought for a moment. “Something you say because it sounds good but not because you actually expect an answer from anyone.”
“Then why say it?”
“Because it’s better than saying nothing at all?” She squeezed a handful of wet sand through her fingers. “But when you put it like that, it makes me wonder if we shouldn’t all just tell each other what we mean.”
Gussie scrunched up her nose and grabbed at her own fistful of sand. What Florence seemed to forget was that, since Gussie was only seven, no one ever told her anything—one way or the other. Everything she’d ever learned about anything she had learned by keeping quiet and paying attention.
Take her mother’s confinement, for instance. She first learned her mother, Fannie, was expecting another baby because she’d overheard her say something to Mrs. Kingman when they had stopped by her shop for a pair of stockings. She guessed the pregnancy was risky because she’d heard her grandfather warn her mother to be careful on several different occasions in recent months. And she knew Dr. Rosenthal had recommended strict bed rest at Atlantic City Hospital because her mother had repeated his prescription to Esther when she’d returned from a recent doctor’s appointment.
There had been a good bit of debate between Gussie’s mother and grandmother over what to do with Gussie while her mother was on bed rest. Remaining with her father, Isaac, had turned out to be out of the question. Gussie knew this because she had overheard Esther tell Fannie so in precisely those words. “Gussie remaining at your apartment is out of the question.”
Gussie was sure her father would balk when he learned that her mother intended to send her to live with her grandparents for the summer but, as her mother’s confinement neared, not a word was said about the plan, one way or the other. The day before Fannie was to be admitted to Atlantic City Hospital, she packed Gussie’s summer clothes and bathing suit, some of her books, her jacks, and coloring pencils away in an old suitcase. The bag sat in the apartment’s narrow hallway, a boulder that Isaac had to step over to get to the kitchen. When Gussie could no longer stand his silence on the subject, she begged, “Father, can’t I stay with you? Here?”
“Gus-Gus,” Isaac said, as if he were going to give her a straightforward response, “what in the world would we get into, knocking around by ourselves?”
Gussie had begun to wonder if her entire life might be rhetorical—no answers for any of it—when Florence pulled her back to the present, “Remember, knees and heels together. If you’re a mermaid you can only move your feet. I mean, fins.”
Gussie pushed off the sandy bottom and scooted through the waves, using her arms to steer and kicking her tail fiercely. Always, she was careful to keep her chin above water. “How do I look?” she called over her shoulder, but Florence wasn’t watching her, wasn’t even looking in her direction. Instead, she sat in the breaking waves, studying the shore.
Gussie circled back, waved a hand in front of Florence’s face. “Let’s pretend you’re the mermaid in the glass tank at Steel Pier, and I’ll swim from Australia to save you.”
“Why do I need to be saved?” said Florence, who still looked very far away. “Don’t I like my life at the Pier?”