Amor and Psycho: Stories (11 page)

AMONG HER PAPERS
she found an old train ticket from New York to Los Angeles. When the war was over, Sura’s husband-to-be went ahead to California, where his family lived, to work as a machinist. Sura took the train across the country a month later. She ran away from her mother, from home; that was her biggest adventure, at twenty-two years old. She had a suitcase she’d bought in Times Square and hidden under her desk at her office, a couple of sandwiches and apples she’d taken—her mother would say
stolen
—from home. She had her last paycheck, uncashed, in her purse. She could never go back.

Nat had sent her train ticket together with his extra-large letter. Fortunately, Sura always picked up the mail herself, since her mother worked until six as a seamstress on Fourteenth Street. Sura worked as a secretary for the Christian Record Company—all Christians, but they hired Sura anyway and behaved politely. She felt bad she couldn’t give them notice, but her plan had to be top-top secret. The truth was, the largeness of the letter unnerved her. It reminded her of the enormity of the step she was about to take: running away across the country to elope with a man. Her mother would never speak to her again, Sura knew; for the rest of
their lives, her evacuation would be a rock at the bottom of both their hearts. Who besides her mother, who had nobody else, nobody in the world, loved her that much?

For three nights, Sura sat up in her coach seat and felt the train pulling her away. On the last night, a soldier bought her dinner in the dining car—a misunderstanding. Sura hadn’t mentioned Nat soon enough. The soldier had ordered pork in a cream sauce for both of them, and two bottles of Schlitz beer. Sura had never eaten meat and milk together, and never pork (she’d drunk beer, once). After dinner, he was a little bit forward, and she became sick on the train all the way to Los Angeles, and when she met Nat at Union Station, the city looked pink and yellow under the palm trees, and even Nat looked different and orange. His parents gave her a tiny room of her own overlooking a wall of blue delphiniums, where she lived until she and Nat were safely married.

SURA
’
S DAUGHTER
, Fay, knew a lady who had cured herself. She took a coffee enema every morning and ate nothing but fresh vegetables she ground up in an expensive juicer. She could never eat another dairy product as long as she lived. Fay arranged for Sura to meet this woman on the sidewalk outside Fay’s building.

The sun hung low in a silver, smoky sky. Sura climbed awkwardly down Fay’s steep steps, wearing a sweatshirt
that read
I
PRIMATES
across the front. Fay wore a baby blue peasant blouse that revealed the murky tattoo above her pubic bone. (What would Fay’s future children think of that?) Fay said, “Greta, this is my mother, Sura. Mom, this is my friend Greta.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you,” Greta said.

“Likewise,” said Sura.

Greta had two large dogs on leashes—mastiffs, Fay had warned. She unsnapped the leashes while she talked to Sura and let the dogs run all over the neighbors’ lawn. Blond, blue-eyed Greta, it turned out, came from Germany. Sura herself had never stood so close to a German person before. She stood a little closer now than was necessary, as if the health of a woman who had saved herself were an airborne thing, a good germ, or like a hair Greta might shed from her perfect bob, a sacred hair.

Greta wore a black-and-white-checked blazer, a white blouse with button covers striped black and white, and huge, round, black-framed glasses with rose-tinted lenses. In spite of her playful attire, the impression Greta gave off was serious as death. Sura had flung on a wig for this meeting, thank God—her pixie. She felt the sun shining down on her head, and she felt her own new hair growing in underneath the wig, pushing up against the web of another woman’s hair.

“So Dr. Santino is treating you?” Sura asked, meaning, of course, Jesus Santino, the famous doctor Fay had found out about—from Greta, obviously.

“Dr. Santino is not
treating you
,” Greta said. “You take the regimen and treat yourself. You cure yourself. You totally change your life.”

“Change my life?” Sura said.

“You eliminate poisons—dairy, salt, meat.”

“Eliminate dairy? My doctor says I need calcium.”

“Dairy is poison,” Greta told her. “And your doctor says you’ll be a skeleton in three months. You want to listen to him?”

“I never had to worry about salt. I have the arteries of a thirteen-year-old.”

(Here I am, thought Sura, bargaining with a German woman! A book Fay had given her said bargaining was the first stage of death.)

“This, too, is what your doctor says?”

“Sure,” said Sura.

Greta looked up at the sky through her big black rose-tinted glasses and made a screaming sound: “AAAAGH!” Then she said, “Listen, you don’t want to cure yourself, don’t do it. The regimen isn’t for everybody, but I wanted to see my grandchildren grow up, you know? So I go to Dr. Santino. My doctor has killed me off already with his chemotherapy. I’ve lost fifty pounds and I’m supposed to die in two weeks. So I buy myself a juicer. I eat nothing but vegetable juice I make myself. This is five years ago. I go in once in a while and get my platelets counted, I get a marker. And no cancer! I’m not talking you into anything. I’m just telling my experience. You spend four hours a day in the kitchen,
juicing it all up. Every morning, you wake up and you take a coffee enema to purge. This is every morning for the rest of your life.”

Sura watched the German woman’s enormous dogs dig their claws into the neighbors’ turf lawn, which covered the front yard like a green rug.

“Oh my God,” she said.

SURA WAS
her mother’s only child. The way they ate in those days, when food was love! Her mother made latkes and borscht with sour cream, and stewed fruit with more sour cream, not much meat because of the expense, but lots of dairy. Her mother bought cream cheese on a stick (she pulled the money out of her knee-high stockings) and they ate it walking home, just like Popsicles. Her mother poured creamy milk from the bottle into a glass. The milkman came every day to the door. Sura’s mother would walk in from work, tie an apron around her waist and start cooking. Two hours she cooked, just for supper. She set one place at the wobble-legged table and watched Sura eat. She never talked, not really, just stray phrases in Yiddish about food and sleep and fabric and fit, because in addition to working in the dress factory and keeping a kosher kitchen, Sura’s mother made all their clothes, and took in extra sewing. But there was no single conversation Sura could remember in which they exchanged thoughts or impressions. What her children wanted from her, she couldn’t tell them. Sura didn’t
even know what shtetl her mother had come from in Poland, just that it was in the Bialystok region, taken by the Russians in 1939 and invaded by the Nazis in 1942, when her mother was already on a boat to America.

Then Sura ran away to Nat—he arranged everything—and she never saw or spoke to her mother again, though she wrote to her, of course. When Fay and Daniel asked about her life, about their history, she reached into her mind for happy things to tell them. “We ate cream cheese in the street, just like a Popsicle on a stick,” she told them. But they, especially Fay, were never satisfied—they wanted other, more terrible stories.

SURA WENT INSIDE
and sat down on the couch, which puffed up cold air. She opened up her book on surviving. Fay moved around the kitchen, making smoothies in the blender. Sura appreciated this gesture for her health, only she wished Fay wouldn’t use bananas; they had one hundred calories. When the noise of the blender stopped, Sura read out loud to Fay about a toll-free number in Washington, D.C. “I can send my medical record number to the office of the armed forces. They have state-of-the-art cancer equipment. There is no cost,” she called into the kitchen.

Fay came out with a juice glass Sura remembered getting free years ago with a five-dollar purchase at Lucky’s. She reached for the glass carefully. All these articles were family history.

“Is that all you got from that book?” Fay asked. “You’ve been reading the same paragraph for three days.”

“It haunts me,” Sura said.

“What haunts you?” Fay asked.

Sura’s voice rose. “Let me do it my way, that’s all!”

She closed her eyes. She remembered certain stories she’d saved and never told her children. One time, her mother took her on a bus trip to the factory where her father worked. It was in another state—Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, somewhere like that. They stayed overnight in a boardinghouse. In the morning, they walked to the factory where Sura’s father worked and her mother asked for him. After a long time, he came out front, smoking, and right away she started yelling at him in Yiddish for him to come back, to send money. He said in English, “You can’t come around here,” and sent them away. Sura, pulling on her mother’s arm, felt glad. He came home sometimes, though, for a week or a month. When he went away again, the women from the neighborhood would take her mother to have a “hot bath”—that was how you got rid of babies. Her mother grew sick and weak from her “hot baths,” yet Sura remembered her working all the time, taking in extra sewing she did at night, cooking with two sets of dishes, everything kosher. She was strong as an ox, and before Sura ran away, she depended on her mother completely.

Why hadn’t her mother taken a hot bath to get rid of her? Because she, Sura, was her mother’s Love, her Hope.

(Years after her mother died, Sura’s father turned up in
California and took two rooms in a not-bad hotel downtown. He brought with him a few old sewing machines, which Sura saw in his room when she and Nat drove downtown to pick him up. They drove him out to the valley for a family supper so the children could meet their grandfather, but she could hardly bear to look at him or speak to him. “How could you be so rude to your own father?” Fay asked her later. “You embarrassed all of us.”)

FAY DROVE
Sura to Dr. Frank’s office in her funny old car.

“Why don’t you get an automatic? It’s easier,” Sura told her. Then she said, “How many earrings have you got in your ears?”

“Nine earrings,” Fay said. “Ten holes.”

Dr. Frank made them wait. Fay had brought along pictures of the trip she and her boyfriend, Ted, had taken to Mexico with another couple. The other woman had long red hair, beautiful hair, almost too much of it, like a wig. Someone—Fay, Sura guessed—had pasted bubbles over the heads in the photographs, which were supposed to show what everybody was thinking. In one picture, the four of them sat at a table around enormous plates of food and bottles of beer. A bubble over Ted’s head read “Are we eating again?” In another photograph, Fay stood in front of a pink shack. A bubble over her head read “You see old-world charm—I see a bathroom down the hall.”

Fay rattled on about Mexico. Sura waited, listening for
her name. As Fay showed her pictures of hotels, restaurants and pastries, Sura said, “That looks expensive. That looks fattening.” Of the countryside, she said, “That looks dirty.”

While Fay talked, Sura watched the scrawny woman with baby hair jump up out of her seat and walk to the front desk. She lifted the glass knob of a jar of lollipops, pulled one out, unwrapped it and stuck it into her mouth. Walking past Sura, she winked and, removing the lollipop, held it like a cigarette between two fingers. “What the hell, right?” she said.

Sura shrank back, horrified by this series of gestures, by the way the woman picked her out, winked at her. After Sura’s first round of chemo, Fay had told her how beautiful she looked without her wig, how her face looked wise and sculpted. But Fay had also said Sura looked great the year she separated from Nat, those years before he died, when Sura was so independent and went back to school for her A.A. degree.

“You’re crazy!” she told Fay. “I didn’t sleep for a year! I got those shadows under my eyes that never went away!” She hated it when Fay or Daniel brought up that rough patch. Every marriage had one.

“Why do you bring that up?” Sura had demanded. “Now he’s gone, who cares?”

Looking back, it was the years of marriage that counted. Then, ten years ago, Nat had died. He never got to the stage of bargaining. He stayed angry. Fay brought him CDs of the operas he used to like, but he couldn’t stand them anymore.

The woman with the lollipop struck up a conversation with the people waiting near her. They all leaned forward, talking at once. Sura felt proud to have her daughter with her in this place; it reflected well to have your adult children care what happened to you. But she found herself tuning out Fay’s talk about Chiclets and Incas, actually leaning across Fay’s lap a little bit, her ear drawn to these others, even though they weren’t talking about selenium and Taxol.

“In kindergarten, I felt I was a special soul,” said a man who was very bad off, missing one leg. “My father dragged me in a sled to school. My brother and I shared a pair of mittens to keep our hands warm. I remember warm tears on my cheeks on a snowy day, I loved that girl so much, what was her name, five years old.”