Benny runs his hand down the bottom half of the cereal box as if stroking his beard. “You make an interesting point.”

I turn around to my mother. “Benny agrees I deserve a second chance.”

She doesn’t answer. She’s holding a strip of photos I’d left on the counter last night. My friend Hannah and I had taken them the other day at the fair (it had been a holy war getting Ma to let me go). An uncomfortable silence settles over the kitchen as we all watch her examining the photos with unusual concentration.

When she finally looks up, her cheeks are even more flushed than usual. She stalks out of the kitchen quickly; the sound of the door to her bedroom closing hard rings through the house a moment later.

I pick up the discarded photos. They are simple black-and-white prints, a couple goofy faces, one serious shot.

“What did you do now, Beth? Why’s Ma upset?” Debbie walks into the kitchen, glaring at me. She’s 17 and thinks she rules the universe.

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Did you sleep outside again?” Debbie asks, eyebrows pinched with accusation.

“Well, yes. But that’s not—”

She grabs the photos from my hand, looks at them for a long moment.

“You look just like her.” She tosses the strip onto the counter.

“Who?”

Debbie rolls her eyes. “Vi, of course.”

Da comes into the kitchen, Benny spills his cereal, Norman sticks two metal spoons behind his ears and announces he’s a moon Martian, and suddenly everyone’s around the breakfast table. Even Ma, who looks like she’s been crying.

When we’re all together like this, the kitchen seems to shrink. Everyone’s so tightly squeezed together, the air polluted with noise and gripes, protests over the empty Apple O’s box, remonstrations and negotiations and everyone’s breath and bodies trapping me while I move back, grow smaller and smaller, wedging myself into the corner.

I would leave if I could, sit outside until everyone’s dispersed, if only the street didn’t smell like rotten potatoes.

I reach for the milk, set it back down immediately when I realize it’s warm, just as someone’s arm comes flying out, knocking the contents of the carton everywhere. There’s a chorus of shrieks.

“Beth put the milk there!” yells Norman.

In an instant everyone’s glaring at me.

“Look at my skirt, Beth!” Debbie pushes back her chair and stomps out of the kitchen.

“Oh, okay. Let’s all scream at Beth!” I yell back. “It’s always my fault anyway.”

Da turns to me, lets out a sigh. “Your mother tells me you slept on the fire escape again.” He adjusts his glasses.

“It’s three million degrees. I can’t breathe.”

“Well, the weather doesn’t change the nature of this neighborhood, Missy! Vagabonds! Drifters!” Ma interjects. “Heaven knows what I’d do if something happened to you, the sort of people on the streets at night… doesn’t take a genius to get up the fire escape—”

“She’s saying she can’t breathe, Idy.” My father turns at my mother. “I’d say breathing is important. We can send her to my sister Esther.”

My mother stiffens. “What? To Levittown?” She blinks a few times. “But… well, it’s just her and Morris. Beth’ll be bored as a rock. What’ll she do all day?”

Da shrugs. “Inhale. Exhale.”

I think Da knows it’s not about the heat, or the cramped sweaty apartment, or the buildings hugging each other so tightly they obstruct the whole entire world. It’s about getting away. Ma has it out for me. Where were you? With who? Why? Hands tied, legs in shackles.

He know this, knows I will literally go anywhere to get away, even to my most sour aunt, and considering how many aunts I have, that’s saying something.

It doesn’t help that I’ve naturally got ants in my pants. Bubby always called me her little boordak. But this summer it’s gotten worse, I’ve got a constant feeling I’m meant to be doing something more. I asked Debbie about it one night after the moon landing a few weeks ago.

“Do you ever get the feeling that you’re bigger than your spot in the universe?”

Debbie rolled her eyes at the question. She liked to think of herself as practical, like Zeidy. (“What is all this hullabaloo infecting and inflating you young people?” he’d groaned after the landing. “Why do we need to reach the moon, when we have the earth right here?”)

“You know, that was Vi’s problem,” Debbie said to me in that uppity voice she likes to put on. “She thought she was too good for us all, and look where that got her. She’s 23 years old now, without a soul in the world.”

“Without a soul? You mean… soulless—”

“Alone, dummy. She’s all alone.”

Her words come ringing back now. Alone. All alone. As much as I crave space, the thought of being all alone in mind-numbing Levittown has me biting my nails down to the nubs the whole evening.

“Debbie.” I lean over the top bunk of our bed, my hair hanging down in a mass of unruly blonde curls. “Come with me to Aunt Esther.”

Her reply is swift and typical. “You couldn’t pay me.”

Rosie, my oldest, most boring sibling — scratch that, most boring person on the planet — is in the bed next to me, flipping pages in her book. I bet she isn’t even reading the thing, it’s not humanly possible to read that fast.

She is my ultimate last resort.

“Rosie, come with me,” I plead.

Silence. I wait, nearly give up before she finally answers.

“You want space, right? So go get yourself some space, Beth.”

I flinch in the face of my own transparency.

They all want me to leave, anyway. I don’t really blame them. I’m like a rubber ball in a box. Trapped. They can all feel me buzzing away, driving Ma batty, bouncing into the walls.

Sometimes I wonder if Vi had the same itch I do, to run toward something greener. If she felt ready to burst from the lack of air. If our likeness runs deeper than our features. I reach between my mattress and the bed frame and pull out the postcard I’d received a month earlier.

On the front is a drawing of the beach, so true to life it could almost be a photograph. Tall reeds sway in the foreground, white sand and sparkling water in the background. Montauk, Long Island is scrawled in cursive on the bottom right corner. The card had been addressed to me, with no return address. There was nothing written on the back, only the faint outline of a falling leaf, drawn in pencil. I’d told my mother it was from a school friend who’d promised me a postcard over the summer, but that was a lie. It’s from Vi.

I knew it the second I saw it, for two reasons. First: Vi and I both love autumn, It’s the magical time when the heat breaks and the air returns. Second: She told me once, long ago, that Robert owned property all the way down Long Island, and when Vi talked, I listened.

“Rosie.”

“What.”

“Do you think I look like Aunty Vi?”

“I don’t want to talk about Vi,” she says, annoyed.

No one ever wants to talk about Vi.

She rolls over, her bedsprings squealing beneath her, then lets out a humph and mumbles, “You’re a replica, Beth.” She picks up her book, then puts it back down. “And it’s not your fault, you know. Ma on your back. It’s the conflation, see. You look so similar, it’s like she’s got you and Vi all mixed up together.”

I hold my breath, wait for her to say more, but her nose is already back in her book.

I don’t go out to the fire escape the whole night. In fact, I only leave my bed once — to lug down the dictionary and look up the word conflation. Then I try to sleep, sweating through short tumultuous dreams of two separate entities jumbled into one.

Da works in Queens, so I’m leaving from there. The train station is filled with people fleeing the city. If I squint, they look like squirrels, the whole station full of fuzzy woodland creatures running from a forest fire.

“So you’ll be taking the Main Line to Hicksville, then on to Levittown from there,” Da says, squinting up at the map. “In 1948, the Levitt brothers were putting up 30 houses a day.” He turns to me, clearly excited to share. “You know, that sort of streamlined, utilitarian process hadn’t been seen before the war. Interchangeable parts, building on concrete slabs, and boom, you’ve got a whole city. They started selling these houses for $8,000 a piece. Brilliant. Just brilliant. And Levittown was the very first town built in such a way — the mold. Isn’t that something?”

Only Da finds the most boring place on the planet fascinating. The same house a million times over. I have a sudden pit in my stomach, picturing myself drowning in a sea of squat dreary structures.

I glance back at the map, follow the line until the end of the peninsula. If I just stay on the Main Line, past Hicksville, Bridgehampton, Southampton—

“You’ll call Esther from the payphone when you get in and she’ll come pick you up,” Da says.

I trace the line all the way down Long Island, past all the Hamptons, until the end. Montauk! I quickly pull away before my finger burns a hole through the glass. I glance up at Da, who’s thankfully oblivious.

“You have dimes?” he asks, checking his watch.

I nod, my mind working quickly.

“Let’s go buy you a ticket then.”

“That’s all right. I can do it, I’m sure you need to get going to work.”

He frowns. “Your mother. You know how she gets—”

“Drifters and vagrants.” I roll my eyes. “I know how she gets. But you were fighting in France at my age. I think I can handle buying a ticket and boarding a train.”

He frowns. “I was 19, Beth. Not 15.” He looks at his watch again and gives a little sigh. “All right, then. If you’re sure…”

“I’m sure,” I say quickly, barely managing to hide my smile.

I’m going to Montauk.

There’s a massive wad of gum on the seat next to me, which means no one will be sitting there. I take it as a good omen. As the train pulls out of the station, a sense of peace settles over me, like the tingling bits of electricity racing through my veins have finally been quelled. I’m going to find Vi. Not just the memory of her, but the living, breathing Vi. As we fly down the peninsula, traveling farther from the city, the towns get smaller and the sky expands. Vi. My eyelids grow heavy, I press the side of my head into the glass. Living, breathing Vi.

My daughter is dead, my grandfather had proclaimed after Vi married Robert. There had been a wedding announcement the day before in the New York Times, which we girls had read over and over again, under the covers so Ma wouldn’t see and start crying again. My daughter is dead. He gave a bang on the table, his hand rolled into a fist, the veins in his arm popping in exertion. The nearly empty silver cup to his right jumped up in fear, rolled on its side, and let out a little flow of red wine.

Everyone was quiet, all the aunts and uncles and cousins gathered for our weekly Friday night dinner at my grandparents’. Maybe for the first time ever there was only the sound of a baby babbling in the corner. No one spoke, no one moved. I felt a giant ache and then a little bit of relief because it was over now: We had our marching orders. All throughout Vi’s engagement there had been hushed conversations and tears and brooding and handwringing. Now there would be no more tiptoeing. No embracing the situation. She’s gone. It’s over.

He let us squirm then, my grandfather, warning eyes scanning his offspring slowly so that we should never forget the moment when he buried his youngest daughter alive. We sat uncomfortably under his glare, suffering collective atonement for what had happened in our midst. At last, long after the silence became too much to bear, my grandfather turned to my grandmother and said, “Golda, we’re ready for dessert.”

Half of us jumped up to help, desperate for a reprieve. We piled into the kitchen and tried not to stare at my grandmother’s shaking hands as she spooned out compote, bits of mashed fruit dripping all over the counter. My mother rushed to take the ladle.

“No,” Bubby said, in a voice that belied her diminutive figure. “Go sit, Idy.” Then she turned her head and addressed us girls. “You can serve these, go on.”

As if that was all there was to it. Just go on. Let Vi turn to dust, as if she’d never been.

I served my grandfather his bowl of soggy peaches, placed it directly on top of the wine stain, covering it completely. Then I reached to straighten the Kiddush cup, but his hand came over mine and his eyes met my own, all metal and pain. Leave it. Let it weep.

“Last stop, Montauk!”

I’m jostled awake by the woman to my left. Her smile reveals disintegrating teeth. I wonder sleepily what she’s done with the gum.

“Wake up, little girl.”

I nod, disoriented. Grab my bag.

It occurs to me, as I make my way off the train, that no one knows where I am right now. No one. The thought leaves me giddy and I stifle a smile, lest I look like a crazy person.

Outside the window of the tiny station there are huge storm clouds rolling in from the east — dark, ominous formations of breathtaking magnitude. I watch them for a moment in awe. The payphone in the corner of the room brings me back to earth. Business first. I take a deep breath and brace myself. My Aunt Esther picks up right away.

“Hi. It’s Beth.”

“We expected you ages ago, Beth! Are you all right?”

“I’m sorry. I fell asleep on the train. I’m in Montauk.” Not a lie. Not a lie at all.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Beth,” she grumbles. “You’ll be the death of your mother, you know that?”

“Well, maybe we can keep this between the two of us?” I ask hopefully, my voice as sweet and childlike as I can manage. “I’ll call home and explain everything the moment I get to where I’m staying.”

“No, no—”

“My aunt lives here. Vi. I can spend the night.”

She is quiet for a moment. “Vivian? Your mother’s sister? The one who married a shegetz?”

“He’s not alive,” I say quickly. “He’s dead,” I repeat, just to be clear.

Aunt Esther is silent. I wonder if the line’s gone out.

“Hello?”

I suppress a sigh. Esther is hopelessly religious. “I’ll stay away from meat and chicken, like I always do outside the house.”

Esther gives a little harrumph. “Well, I suppose. Are you quite sure she’ll have you?”

“Yes. Quite.” I spew a rapid goodbye and hang up quickly before she has time to change her mind.

She’ll call Ma. Probably. Or she’ll give me a bit of time. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because I’m here and they’re there, and I’m going to find Vi.

Once outside, I’m taken aback by the smell of pungent earth and air — the total absence of humanity. Trees and rotting fish and wet soil and incoming rain. The familiar crush of humans is missing. In fact, once the small bulge of passengers scatter, there is no one around at all.

With the threat of rain hanging over my head, it dawns on me quite suddenly that I’ve no plan at all. I turn in circles, scouting the area. There is nothing around but the tiny train station — white clapboard, gray gabled roof, green shutters.

I walk in a wide circle, studying the emptiness. In the distance there’s what looks to be a diner, but nothing else. The wind blows and some dandelion seeds go somersaulting through the air and the rails begin to tremble. I can feel the vibrations of a train in my feet, a rumbling laughter that erupts from the belly of the earth. I wonder if the universe is chuckling at my distress, as if I’m the butt of some gigantic joke. The laughter grows louder; it’s ever so humanlike.

I spin around and look up. There are four or five kids my age perched like crows on the roof of the station. They erupt into raucous laughter as my cheeks grow red. I begin to walk away quickly.

“Hey!” one of the girls calls out, sliding down the roof. “We didn’t mean it. We’re sorry.”

I keep walking but steal a quick backward glance. The girl has nearly caught up to me. Her hair is a fiery red pulled tight into a ponytail at the top of her head, and she is dressed head-to-toe in white.

“You lost?” she calls out. “This is the last stop. Europe’s that way.” She jabs her finger toward the ocean. “We’ve got bets on where you come from.”

“That so?” I say, speeding up my pace so that I’m nearly jogging.

“Not Long Island.”

“You seem sure of yourself,” I call back.

“Mary thinks you’re from someplace obscure and farm-y. Like Minnesota, or Monta—”

“She’s looking for Vi,” someone says loudly behind us. I stop so suddenly Red nearly crashes into me. Turning around, I spot a boy a few paces back.

“Well, aren’t you?” Folding his arms across his chest, the boy leans against a tree, a mocking little smile on his face.

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 628)