The First Two

By Marta Szabo

The First Two tells the intimate story of a child becoming lost in her love for her father, and years later lost in her love-or what she thinks of as love-for the first boy who pays her serious attention.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tinker Street Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780996412223

Book preview

PART ONE

THERE WAS A TIME

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN THE BEST THING was to sit on my father’s lap in the morning and stir his coffee. We sat at the table in the room that didn’t have a window, my mother on the other side of a counter where the refrigerator was, in the background, in the shadow.

From my father’s lap I could see into the next room – big windows there and long filmy curtains billowing with brightness.

I don’t know what’s on the other side of those windows. But it’s where my father goes after the coffee. Somehow, he gets out there, beyond the bright windows. I know that, once outside, he has to go downward, as if down a steep slope. These rooms we live in are perched above the place where he goes, and where he goes has to do with a train. He takes a thin hard brown suitcase that opens with bright hard clicks. Inside are only papers.

On the days when he does not go away, he puts me on his shoulders and we walk outside. He holds my ankles. Don’t pull my hair! he laughs in protest. I hear the words, but they rush past me as if meant for someone else. Because I am not pulling his hair. I am holding on.

FATHER SWIMS

WHEN I WAS LITTLE and we went to the beach my father always left us. He set aside the Sunday New York Times to walk through the crowd down to the water, hitching up the navy blue knitted swimming trunks my mother had made him before I was born. Slowly he waded through the shallows, through the people jumping and doing normal things, until he was swimming past every single person, out to the horizon in a straight line further and further and further, his head never below water, just a black dot, until he was gone. And then later, he comes back out of nowhere, reaching for a towel, water streaming down his body, a laugh of pleasure on his face. And I wonder where he has been.

FATHER AND MOTHER

MY FATHER, THE HANDSOME HUNGARIAN. My mother, the subdued Canadian.

The living room is full of my father’s friends. Both of my parents call them friends, but the guests are Hungarians. They are here because of my father. The men wear suits, white shirts and ties. The women wear skirts and jewelry. Everyone is old and they say the war a lot. Before the war. After the war. That was during the war.

My father is at the center. The women look at him with glasses in their hands. Everyone has a glass in their hands. He makes them laugh.

Mostly though the Hungarians are sad. You can tell.

My mother sits on the arm of the couch, not quite part of it, even when they speak in accented English to include her. If she speaks, she sounds like an outsider, her words like wooden blocks instead of the smooth pebbles of party talk.

I sit on a chair and look at how my legs stick straight out. They do not bend over the edge of the chair the way grown-up legs do. I like especially the way ladies cross their legs. I wish mine were long enough to go over the edge of the chair and then cross. I cross them anyway.

My father doesn’t like my mother. He likes the other women who can laugh and talk at the same time. Like the lady he waltzed down to the bottom of the driveway. I didn’t see it, but he told me about it in the morning so that I knew it was special and something no one else would do.

Everyone watches as my mother walks up the stairs. We can see her go up through the railings. The top of her body disappears first and then all we can see are her bare legs.

Joan’s legs are so scratched! say the people.

It’s because she likes to be outside. She grows strawberries and shows them to me, saying the word strawberries with excitement, as if we have stumbled upon buried treasure. She sells clumps of myrtle held in her hand, wrapped in newspaper, to people who drive up. She points out the kitchen window in the morning and says, Look! A cardinal!

I don’t think anyone else here does the things my mother does. They are indoor people. Even when she puts on stockings and heels and a necklace and earrings, she is not like the other women who wear these things naturally.

I wish my mother would change. Can’t she see that she needs to be different, that my father would like her better if she were different? Doesn’t she know? If she knew she would change.

I want a different mother, one my father likes. In the meantime, he has me.

BUBBLEGUM PEOPLE

MY FATHER CLAIMED ME right away. I was his.

My little sister was my mother’s.

She looks just like you, said the grown-ups to my father. And the baby looks like your wife. I did not know what they meant. I did not look like my father. My sister did not look like my mother. How could they say we looked like grown-ups? But it was unanimous, repeated over and over. I was my father’s. She was my mother’s.

I was glad to be on the winning team. I looked up into the bright sun of my father’s attention and smiled back, flung my arms open and knew he knew everything. Do not be a bubblegum person, he warned me with a serious face and raised index finger. Do not ever become a bubblegum person, and I knew what he meant.

Not all Americans were bubblegum people but all bubblegum people were American. They chewed gum. They watched TV during the daytime. The men wore tee shirts or plaid sport jackets. Their kids had runny noses and ate cereal. Their wives had dyed hair in rollers, long painted nails and drove station wagons.

My father laid out the correct choices clearly: classical music, literature, good theater, good opera, Europe, Hungary, villas, people with titles, good table manners, restaurants where they treat you with deference. I knew that some things were right and some things were not to even be tried because they were for bubblegum people only.

NO ONE ELSE

HIS SQUARE GOLD CUFFLINKS. His custom suits. Not many, but custom, made by the same tailor used by Katherine Hepburn, he said. He’d seen her there once. During some rich years.

The way he laced his leather shoes, not criss-crossing like everyone else, but lacing them so that they marched up the tongue in horizontal bars. The thick gold wedding band and thin gold lozenge of a Swiss watch on a leather strap.

Perhaps most of all the three black Mont Blanc pens, his as if no one else in the world had one, each identified by a fat white star at the tip. The ballpoint that opened with a lever. The pencil that swiveled open. But most especially, the thick fountain pen filled from a bottle of dark blue Quink ink sitting on his desk. His handwriting never casual, always a considered movement as if he were leaving a trace of himself for others to admire, the handwriting mysterious to me as a child, wavy lines, illegible and nothing at all like what they taught us in school. Who could read those wavy lines, and especially his signature, which I knew was supposed to be his name?

What was the point, I asked him, if no one can read your signature? He just smiled, implying that if you had the secret code you could read that signature. But I didn’t have it and he wasn’t going to give it to me.

He was proud not only of that signature but of his name itself, which he said meant Victory of the People, a name that many Hungarian boys of his generation were given, but to my father it was only his name, its meaning profound, proof that he was a leader of greatness.

I must make sure I have special features to set me apart. Without them who will pay attention?

They used to say I looked like Beethoven! he said, combing his black hair straight back from his high forehead – a high forehead that was a sign of intelligence, he said, saying my bangs made me look like a monkey and paying me at the age of 12 to grow them out.

Beige, he said, was the best color. And anyone who thought otherwise was missing something.

The way he underlined and marked everything he read. He did not read even the newspaper without a Mont Blanc in hand. As a teenager I looked at the fragments and phrases my father had underlined and questioned him as I had when younger about the signature. Dad, why did you underline these three words? His response was again the small smile revealing only that I did not have the secret code.

His instructions: do not bite into your whole piece of bread. Separate and eat it piece by piece. Drink the soup by tilting the spoon sideways. Fold your coat with the lining on the outside when you hang it over a chair at the theater.

When I was ten years old he took me to his office for the day. My mother sent me off dressed in my best party dress, smocking across the chest, a sash that tied behind my waist, puffed sleeves.

On the way, my father stopped at a department store where he asked the sales lady on the quiet carpeted floor to find me a new dress for the occasion. They chose a blue velvet straight shift with a double row of pearl buttons. I’d never worn a straight dress before.

He stopped again to pick up a book for me and left me in the empty conference room – tall leather chairs, long heavy wooden table – with David Copperfield, unabridged, a block of paperback with small print and no pictures. I scraped my way through the pages because there was absolutely nothing else to do except stop every now and then to be introduced to a man in a suit, or a secretary. Then we went home. It took a few years before my mother brought the velvet dress out again. I had needed that much time to grow into it.

TO ENGLAND

SHALL WE MOVE TO ENGLAND to be with Dad? my mother asked. It was third grade and my father had gone to England with a new job. I was used to him