Enchanted Islands Read Online Free PDF Page B

found that Rosalie’s mood was still sour. She’d stayed in bed most of the week, with a vague complaint of a headache and stomach pains. Her mother called the doctor (a luxury in which no one in my family had ever indulged) but he was unconcerned.
    I sat by her side. Her mother said she’d barely spoken or eaten in the last few days. “Rosie,” I said, “you have to tell me what’s wrong.”
    “I can’t,” she said hoarsely. “There aren’t words for it.” I was hurt that she wouldn’t confide in me.
    I nursed her that night, sitting on the bed and reading to her from
The Castle of Otranto
. Every so often she sighed, and once she got up to use the toilet and drink some juice.
    When she woke up the next day, Rosalie was close to her normal, if morose, Sunday self. She came downstairs in her dressing gown for breakfast, and I completed her English assignment for her (a paragraph on symbols of nature in Dickens).
    “I’ll go along home then,” I said, after the breakfast chatter had died down.
    “You needn’t go yet,” said Rosalie’s mother, looking up at the wall clock.
    “I have things to do,” I replied, “since Rosalie is feeling better.”
    Rosalie heard the chill in my voice. She walked me to the front door, where a cold wind forced its way between the door and the jamb.
    “You really are my best friend,” she said. “And no one could ever have a better one. Just remember that you’ve always been a perfect friend to me.”
    “You sound like you’re dying,” I said, anxious to lighten her tone. She hugged me. The display of affection made me blush.
    “We’re all dying,” she said. “Every moment.”
    “Thanks for the reminder,” I said. And then I walked down her front steps in ignorance.
    *
    Part of my worry was that I wasn’t good enough for Rosalie’s family. After all, we were Eastern European immigrants. The Germans who arrived earlier were our superiors in every way, a sentiment the Germans and we both shared. They were educated, wealthy. They spoke impeccable English, even those who just came over, and often worked the same jobs they had held back in Germany—professor, banker, lawyer, pharmacist. Even the ones who practiced a trade had their own shops and often hired others to work in them.
    We Poles, on the other hand, were peasants. Most of my parents’ generation couldn’t read. Someone had to teach us to sign our own names. And we barely scraped by, taking in washing, like my mother, or serving as maids. The men worked in the factories or on the docks, or, like my father, stacking stock, manual labor. Our English was stilted, clipped, and simplistic. And we were squat, dark people, with curly hair and brown eyes (I was the anomalous straight-haired giant). The Germans were tall, often blond, and held themselves erect, lithe like the Westerners they were. Yes, they deigned to help us, monetarily, in the name of our shared religion, but they were the beneficent ones, we the supplicants.
    Rosalie’s family never treated me that way, kindly looking the other way when my table manners were not up to snuff, or I encountered a new vegetable that I approached in the wrong way (artichokes come to mind—at some point I’ll be able to tell without blushing how I tried to eat the whole leaf, struggling with my knife and fork). But I worried that their goodwill had an end date, when they would no longer tolerate their Tarzan experiment and return me to my natural habitat to be raised by apes.
    Naturally, I placed Rosalie’s family on a pedestal. They were wealthier than we were, better-dressed, better-spoken, much better-fed. They placed a premium on education; they encouraged reading. Around the table, they had active political discussions, opinions on the Zionist movement’s president, David Wolffsohn, and whether or not Germany should intervene in the revolution in Turkey. It was expected that their children attend university, whereas no amount of begging could persuade