Anna in the Afterlife (11 page)

Her high heels were pinching her toes; she told him (she didn't yet know his name) she would come out again as soon as she changed her clothes. Inside the house the party was raucous, a circus of jokers and teasers, a bunch of young men from the neighborhood, fellows without a brain in their heads trying to impress Gert and her girlfriends who were in a club they called “The Sorority.”

Anna went upstairs. She passed Mama's room where Mama sat on the side of her bed, soaking her feet in a pan of hot water. She went into the room she shared with Gert (the big front room was rented out to Mr. Vicci, the boarder, who paid $2 rent each month), and she took off her heels, her stockings, her suit jacket (still pinned to it was the orchid corsage David Bloomenstein had given her). Her skirt, her slip, her underwear, they all came off—she felt she could breathe once the elastic stopped pinching her. Then she put on…(here Anna looked closely, to find out the truth of the matter once and for all)…her peignoir set! So Gert was right! The historical truth was that she had gone back downstairs in her sheer nightgown. But of course with a matching robe over it. There was nothing untoward to be seen, just a shimmer of mauve chiffon robe over a lighter lavender chiffon gown. (Who had given her this honeymoon set, and when? She could not recall.) And—this was also true: she let down her hair. Well, why wouldn't she, with the pins sticking in her scalp, and the hair pulled taut around her forehead? She could feel the relief even now, as she shook it loose and it tumbled over her shoulders.

She passed through the crowd of party-makers without a glance toward them (if Gert saw her, it couldn't be helped, could it?) and went out to the front porch.

Abram's long legs made the porch seem small—she had to step over them to take a seat on the wicker chair. They talked a little: nice night, nice party. They exchanged names. After a while Abram said, “I don't really know your sister, you know, so I wonder if you think it would be alright for me to ask you something. Someone gave me a pair of tickets to the ice rink on Ocean Parkway.” He fished around in his jacket pocket and held them up for her to see. “Are you game to go ice skating with me?”

“I don't skate,” she said.

“Me neither,” he said, and laughed. She realized this was a man she could manage. She knew the tickets had been brought along for Gert. He had moved fast, even though he talked in a slow Jimmy Stewart drawl. She was still arranging her frothy nightgown around her legs and already they had a date. So there it was. The famous thing that happened to other people had happened to Anna: love at first sight.

Gert liked to say after the wedding that Anna never wanted to be married. Otherwise, why had she burst into tears after the ceremony in the living room and run upstairs, her lace handkerchief to her mouth? Why did she go to pieces while all the guests were still there? (Years later, Gert told Anna's daughters she thought she knew why. She told them their mother was afraid of what Abram would say when he discovered she wasn't a virgin!) Gert and her salacious mind! Prurient Gert! Anna could never get over the vulgarity of her sister. To whom could she possibly have “given” her virginity? And why would she have? Sex was the furthest thing from her mind, then, now, and all the years in between. She was crying on her wedding night, all right, but crying for a different reason entirely. In “The Desert Song” the lovers flee into the night on their camel; they don't have to live crowded into the same house with the bride's old mother and her old maid sister. That's why she was crying! Heartsick in the realization that she wasn't going into the desert of the mysteries with her handsome lover, but back into the bedroom next to her mother's now that Mr. Vicci, the boarder, had been evicted.

Anna and Abram were forced to run away to Cleveland to get some privacy. Where was Cleveland? Anna, who disdained geography, had no idea, except that it was far away from Gert and Mama in Brooklyn. Abram's job, selling pajamas in the men's department of Abraham and Straus, did not hold much promise for the future. She had resisted Abram's proposition that they go and find their fortunes further west until the morning Mama opened their bedroom door (“Don't pay attention to me, I'm just here to get your laundry”) just as Abram was lifting Anna to get her poised on top of him because he told her she'd have more feeling that way.

Her anger, not her shame, was the thing that convinced her she wanted to leave—anger at her mother and Gert for having to live with them, anger at her father for dying young, anger at Abram for not being satisfied to do it in the dark, in the night, under the blanket, the usual way, and anger at herself for letting him get her into such a compromising position in a room that had no lock on the door.

Together they looked at road maps to Cleveland where Abram had heard from his brother Sol there were certain opportunities having to do with gambling machines. Sol was already out there doing business. He was sure Abram and he could make some money together. Abram, who was looking for his life's work, thought this might be it.

“Don't worry about Mama and Gert,” he assured Anna. “We'll send them money for rent and food the whole time we're away, and if—after I learn the ropes—the business works out there, I'll set up the same business back here in Brooklyn.”

This Abram of hers hadn't just married her. He had married the lot of them: Gert and Mama, too. He'd taken on their full support. Was he made out of pure gold, her husband? My God, how Anna resented his goodness. She wanted her own life even if it meant leaving her mother and sister to fend for themselves. But Abram wouldn't think of it. He was a better man than she. He was too good to be true. Even if he had enjoyed a few burlesque shows in his day, even if she knew he had a pack of playing cards of naked women in his handkerchief drawer, even if he thought Anna should have more feeling in bed, how could she hold it against him?

For her, indignation was a natural reaction. She found it a relief to hold everything against everyone—it was almost her religion. For reasons she did not question, her life energy had been powered by fury. She was actually surprised (now that she was dead) that it hadn't kept her living forever. She crackled like a burning bush, throwing flames at the world for not letting her get educated, for not giving her the best piano teacher, for not introducing her to a rich and important husband, for making her take care of these two helpless women. If she'd married a rich lawyer she'd have a house with a decorator by now. She was angry at herself that no lawyer had ever appealed to her as much as Abram. She was seduced and attracted by his gentleness and kindness and therefore angry at him the rest of her life for having so much of those qualities that he never got ahead in the world.

Abram's younger brother, Sol, was a Valentino look-alike, always in black shoes polished to a shine, a rakish thin mustache on his face, a wink in his eye. Women loved him, women—unlike Anna—who couldn't see through to his slyness, his crooked nature. He was dumb and shrewd at the same time, a combination Anna had no use for, a man without a vocabulary, a man who said things like “She don't want to see me,” and never knew the difference. His stupidity gave him courage, he took chances, he got mixed up with every lowlife around and thought anyone in a striped suit was a powerful kingpin.

Sol's business in Cleveland involved installing claw machines in bars, diners, cafés, and dance halls. The machines required customers to put money into a slot, then aim the claw down into a pile of tantalizing gifts: leather wallets, wristwatches, china dolls, pearl earrings, rings, and necklaces. The goal was to capture a prize. When Sol brought a machine to their apartment to demonstrate it to them, Anna tried it and found that the prize fell from the claw's grip every time.

“It's robbery,” she told Sol.

He laughed.

She tried again: the claw hand was imprecise, it was impossible to get it positioned. If she did grasp a prize, the claw went limp, its springs collapsing and allowing the object to drop back into the pile.

“Try it this way,” Sol instructed her, and showed her how to position the claw behind the object so that—as it dropped down—it also moved forward and landed on the prize. “It's not easy but it's possible.”

After he left that night (to go out with one of his bleached-blonde floozies), Anna confronted Abram. “I don't like you mixed up in this business. It's gambling.”

“What's so bad about that? Isn't all of life a gamble?”

Abram, the philosopher, comforted himself every day, convinced that if he wasn't rich, it didn't matter because “the best things in life are free.” If he didn't own a yacht, he could still rent a rowboat in Prospect Park and go fishing. If he didn't own an oceanfront house, he could still go out to Coney Island and sit on a bench on the boardwalk and contemplate the mystery of the sea. The ocean was his, the seagulls were his, the big tankers out on the horizon were his. The pelicans diving for fish were his.

But they weren't Anna's, and she had no interest whatsoever in pelicans.

At least they had privacy in Cleveland. Mama and Gert were not underfoot. Anna could make meals for Abram without garlic and onions, which Mama always used and which Anna hated. She wanted to prove to her husband, who had a streak of impossible Jewish piety, that if she served butter in his mashed potatoes alongside a steak, God would not strike him dead for the sin of putting meat and milk together. How could Abram, or anyone, believe those Old World tales in which God was always about to strike someone dead for some foolish act like eating bacon? What God? Where was God? Had he turned up to save her brother from drowning or her father from dying young of a sore throat? Had he stopped Anna's mother from marrying, for her first husband, a bigamist? Why should Anna worry about what God wanted the Jews to eat?

Sol lived in a room in a hotel in downtown Cleveland; he spent time there only when some lady friend did not have him stay over at her place or when Abram happened to forget to invite him over for dinner. Sol filled up Anna's apartment with cigarette smoke and the scent of his shoe polish. He didn't seem to sense her obvious distaste at everything about him; in fact, he seemed to think she was grateful for his offering Abram this chance to get rich. He'd tilt back in one of the kitchen chairs with the air of entitlement that the rich carry with them—he'd drop his cigarette ash into the dessert dish that had been filled previously with applesauce or canned peaches. He was always plotting: to buy more machines, different machines, to fill them with cheaper items, to invent new kinds of machines. He thought they could sell other things, like dirty postcards, from vending machines. He had a collection of these that he brought over one night, laying them out on the kitchen table in a fan, like a winning poker hand. While he and Abram talked business, Anna, pretending not to look, peered over their shoulders as she cleaned up the dishes. Her eyes were riveted on these women: young women, with delicate faces and tendrils of curly dark hair framing their graceful features—but naked! Posed with a single rose in her hand, or her toe held forward, about to step into a marble tub, or with a feathery shawl resting on her shoulder, each woman looked as if she belonged in a poem or a Shakespeare play, each having a radiance and sweetness about her form.

Anna could not understand how they would pose for a camera this way, to know that their private parts would be slavered over by men like Sol, to know their images would be sold and bartered from pocket to pocket. Why was she here serving lamb chops and string beans and applesauce to a man who was trying to convince her husband to sell pictures of naked women in coin machines? What did Sol think when he looked at Anna in her linen skirt and wool sweater? What did Abram think when he studied these women? Did he wish his wife were one of them?

She knew Abram wanted her to have more feeling, but Anna was convinced she had been born with something missing: she had no animal instincts. She didn't sweat. She didn't like food (meat with its gristle, eggs with their slime, milk that turned sour in the bottle). And she didn't like the mess and grunting of sex, the untidiness of it, the invasiveness of it. She knew she had to put up with it, she knew it came with the wedding ring, but could other women really enjoy it?

Gert, ever the thorn in her side, actually said to Anna's daughters one day, in her old age, “Your mother thinks her shit doesn't stink.” Anna was shocked by this, truly disgusted, horrified, to see so frankly revealed the pit of slime in which her sister's mind swam. The irony was, in fact, that Anna's bowels—all her life—were literally knotted in slime, an “irritable bowel,” the doctors told her (they always asked her if she was especially worried or tense about anything!). What she never told them was that her father had been fanatic about bowels all his life. He asked Anna and Gert daily if they'd had their bowel movements. Anna refused to discuss this with him. Therefore, because she wouldn't answer him, he forced cod liver oil into her mouth—a disgusting, fishy, spoonful of poison! My God, Anna thought, now that life was all over for her, if only she had been able to live it like an angel: unsweaty, unfed, unboweled, unsexed.

Soon after they got back to Brooklyn, soon after Abram installed dozens of claw machines in bars and dance halls and cigar stores in Brooklyn, Governor Dewey declared gambling machines illegal and ordered that they all be thrown in the East River.

Abram's scheme to get rich and buy Anna the privacy she craved never came to pass. At least he did this one thing: when they moved back into the bedroom next to Mama's in the house in Brooklyn, Abram screwed a lock and bolt on their bedroom door. Time and time again he tried to lead her into the desert of the mysteries. He whispered imaginary tales to her, he told her to pretend she was someone else, a fan dancer, a veiled beauty in a harem, he urged her to forget herself. He would be a sultan, she a belly dancer in his harem. He would be King Herod and she would be Salome. She would do the dance of the seven veils to delight him. But the bolt on the door never stopped Mama from knocking and asking for laundry, and though once or twice Anna tried to imagine herself Salome, and once or twice the mistress of Chopin, she never achieved the key to the secrets found in the desert of the mysteries.