Hilda and Pearl (9 page)

That night Pearl had a blister and her feet ached. She soaked them in Epsom salts, which she found in the bathroom she shared with the manager and his wife and the chambermaids. She sat on her bed with her feet in an enamel basin, looking out the window and watching the light sift away from the trees and from the lake, which she could just glimpse from her room. She took down her hair, putting her hairpins one by one into an ashtray on her dresser—still careful, though now she had plenty, as though the hairpins were small souvenirs of the day.

Mike liked to take walks, and he began to show up when Pearl was just ready to leave the desk at night. They'd walk partway to town, slapping at mosquitoes. As the summer progressed it began to be dark by the time they'd gone a little way, but they walked a bit anyway, facing traffic, turning their faces away from the headlights when, every once in a while, a car came along. Or they went down to the lake. He stood with his arm around her, not saying much. Then he walked her to the main building of the hotel, where she lived. The band lived in a cottage on the grounds. He walked her home three times before he ever kissed her, but once he began, he kissed her every night.

On weekends she'd sit alone at a table in the lounge, listening to the band. She'd never paid attention to jazz before and at first she didn't like it. It seemed disreputable: it made her sad in a way that scared her. Mike said he didn't know what she meant, jazz was beautiful, and after a while she began to pick out songs she liked, at first those that seemed most like what she called “just plain songs.” Gradually she began to like others, the songs with low, wailing notes. It surprised her when Mike played these songs. It was like hearing him speak in a foreign language, and sometimes she imagined that if she could read his shorthand notes, they would also sound like great cries and strange muted calls.

At the end of the summer Mike said they should get married. “What else will you do?” he asked bluntly, when she claimed to be astonished, although she'd had the same idea herself.

“I could go home and look for a job,” she said. “We can't afford to get married.”

“You don't want to go home.”

“No.” Her father would make her work in the candy store, and make her brother, who belonged there, look for a job. Pearl thrust her feet out in front of her and noticed how the sun made patterns on her open-toed shoes. She and Mike were sitting on the wooden steps of the cottage where he'd been living all summer with the other musicians. They'd been talking in low voices because the other two men were asleep.

“
You'll
be fine in September, whatever we do,” said Pearl. The owner of the music store had said he might give Mike a full-time job in September. And maybe he'd get the stenography job. As she spoke she heard one of the other musicians walking around, and then the pianist came out, carrying a towel. He was on his way to the showers, which were in a small wooden building closer to the main house.

“Somebody else is going to grab you,” Mike said gruffly. It was the nearest he'd come to a declaration of love. “Some guy will come along.” As she watched the pianist, whose name was Moe, walk up the hill to the showers, Pearl wondered if Mike had expected her to have other admirers, and she wondered whether Moe, who was stiffly polite with her, liked her at all. Once she'd been identified as Mike's girl, other people at the hotel had pulled back even more noticeably. The chambermaids were a tiny bit friendlier, and Pearl thought maybe they were afraid of Mike and admired her for being comfortable with him.

“Where would we live?” she said.

“We'd live with my brother and his wife until we found an apartment. You could look for a job, but meanwhile we'd have what I make.”

“Your brother wouldn't mind?”

“He won't mind. We'll give him some money. You'll like his wife. You'll get along with her.”

Pearl thought of the candy store. It had just one light bulb. The windows were crowded with signs sent by companies that sold syrup and malted mix. When Pearl stood at the marble counter of the soda fountain, near the cash register, she couldn't see out into the street; a large cutout blocked her way. From behind, it was just gray cardboard; in front it was the fading picture of a smiling girl and boy drinking with two straws out of the same soda. She remembered how much it irritated her that she couldn't see out the window.

“All right,” she said.

On the Thursday before Labor Day, they borrowed a car and drove to New York for a marriage license. They drove all day, and then, going back, all night, because Mike had to play on Friday. The car broke down. Mike played without sleep Friday night. Labor Day weekend was the busiest time at the hotel all summer, and Pearl took it in confusedly, through tiredness and excitement. They told no one but the band members that they were going to be married. The day after Labor Day, they took the bus to New York, and then Pearl told her family. She'd mentioned Mike in her letters, but she hadn't said much. Her mother cried and tried to talk her out of it.

Pearl stayed with her family that night and the next, and they were married on Thursday, in a rabbi's study, with her parents and brother and Mike's brother and sister-in-law in attendance. Mike said it would be better to tell his mother about it after it was a done thing. Pearl's mother, though she had cried, bought food from a delicatessen and invited everyone to their apartment over the candy store after the wedding. Mike's brother, Nathan, and his wife came along, and Pearl kept her eyes on Hilda, who seemed to be looking everything over, gazing with composure at Pearl's mother and father, her brother, and the small living room with its heavy mahogany furniture.

Pearl thought it would be a privilege to live with Hilda, even for just a few weeks. Hilda was wearing a gray dress and hat, quite plain. Her hair was short, and it was arranged in dark curls around her face. She moved her head slowly, calmly, when she talked to one member of the family or another. She and Nathan were still there when Pearl and Mike left—in the rain—on their honeymoon.

They took the subway to New York and spent two nights in a hotel. Pearl was a virgin, and she was surprised by sex. She'd imagined something more headlong: a moist, yielding sort of dissolution. This ritual felt a little violent and a little silly, both drier and, somehow, wetter than she had expected. But she liked sleeping in bed with her new husband. She woke in the night and kissed his shoulder and arm gently, careful not to waken him. She kissed him over and over again. Asleep, curled away from her, he looked like a boy.

The next day Mike took Pearl to the Central Park Zoo, even though it was still raining. There was a hurricane in Florida, and everyone was talking about how much it had rained. Later they went to the movies, to see
Anna Karenina
with Greta Garbo, and to a jazz club.

“Did you change your name?” Pearl asked Mike, on the way to Hilda and Nathan's Saturday morning. It fascinated her that her last name was now Lewis, but she'd noticed that Hilda and Nathan's name was Levenson.

“I'm not hiding the fact that I'm Jewish,” Mike said. “I'll tell anybody I'm Jewish. But I don't see why I have to advertise it.” So her name might have been Levenson. She wasn't sure which she liked better.

Hilda and Nathan lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Bedford Avenue in Flatbush. They had a couch in the living room that was really a single bed, and Hilda had said that if Mike and Pearl could get hold of another single bed, they could push the two together and have a double bed to sleep on. Pearl's parents said they could take the bed from Pearl's room.

As soon as Pearl and Mike arrived at the Levensons' after their two-night honeymoon, Mike and Nathan took the trolley to the Sutters' apartment and got the bed, which they brought back on the roof of a taxi. Meanwhile Hilda made Pearl a cup of coffee and Pearl sat in the kitchen drinking it, while Hilda cleared away the breakfast things. Pearl offered to help, but Hilda shook her head. Still wearing her jacket and hat, Pearl watched her new sister-in-law. Her suitcase was in the hall, and there was a box of clothes at her parents' apartment that she had to bring sooner or later. Hilda and Nathan's apartment was small.

“You must be sorry you said we could do this,” she said.

“Why should I be sorry?” said Hilda firmly.

“You're crowded already.”

“I like having people around,” said Hilda. “Sometimes Nathan's quiet.”

“I'm not quiet,” said Pearl. “I'm warning you.”

“Well, neither am I,” Hilda said. “I'll say when I'm sick of you.”

“That's fine.” Pearl even tossed her chin, as if she were bouncing a ball off it toward Hilda at the sink, as if she was sure Hilda was joking. “I'm helpful,” she said. “I'll clean the bathroom. I'm not a good cook, but I'll try.”

“We can clean the bathroom together,” said Hilda. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down opposite Pearl to drink it.

“You don't take milk?” said Pearl.

“No, I like it black.”

“No sugar either?”

“No.”

“Oh—” said Pearl, and she laid her hands flat on the table, palms up, open. “You know what?” she said, before she knew what she was going to say, but wanting it to be pretty spectacular. “I
always wanted
a friend who drank black coffee. I never knew people like that. In high school, I wanted to know the girls like that.”

Hilda looked annoyed, as if she didn't know what Pearl meant and didn't want to know, but Pearl said, “Don't worry, I'm nice, even if I talk funny.” She was scared, despite this brave speech, because Hilda looked irritated. But Hilda didn't say anything and now Pearl thought that maybe she wasn't angry. Hilda was looking at her with her eyes wide and interested, very black. She was shorter than Pearl but several years older, and Pearl felt childish near her, maybe because Hilda's clothes and gestures were so simple.

“It's a nice apartment,” said Pearl.

“Thank you.” They stood up and toured it, and figured out where there was room for a new chest of drawers. Pearl and Mike could afford one piece of furniture. If they bought it now, they'd have something when they found their new place. It could go in an alcove in the living room—a room Pearl liked, with a dark maroon rug and checked drapes in maroon and tan. There were two easy chairs and between them was a radio. Pearl looked out the window, but the view was just the courtyard in the center of the building.

“The quiet side of the building,” she said, though she was disappointed. She'd have preferred to look out at the street.

When Nathan and Mike arrived, carrying the mattress and then the box spring, Hilda and Pearl made the two beds in the living room with one sheet over them, but that night Pearl's bed moved whenever Mike turned over. Mike wanted to make love, but she was afraid Hilda and Nathan could hear them from their bedroom.

“We're
married
,” Mike whispered.

She was sore after the two nights in the hotel. “Tomorrow,” she whispered back. Mike tried to take her in his arms, just to hold her, but his bed shifted and the crack between the beds opened into an abyss with the sheet stretched over it. He got out and pushed the beds back together, but then he came around to her side. She giggled and claimed she was going to fall into the space, but he just said, “Well, hold on tighter, then.” It was a long time before she fell asleep.

The next afternoon Nathan asked her if she liked to listen to music. He had a record collection and a good record player, and he played Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for her. Pearl was surprised when a voice began to sing, and then a whole chorus, after Nathan had stood up many times to change the record.

“What does it mean?” she said, and thought of Mike's shorthand.

Nathan shrugged, turning the record over carefully, holding it by its edges. “This is the real Germany,” he said. “Better to listen to Beethoven than the bandits in charge now.” He had told her he was preparing to become a teacher and he talked like one already. He seemed much older than Mike. He was comfortable with his arms and legs. Like his wife, he could sit still. Mike never could, and was always moving his hands: fiddling with something, ripping something up, lighting a cigarette. Hilda scolded him now for tearing an envelope, ripping it studiously back and forth so it turned into one long crooked strip. “Stop it, Michael,” she said. “You're like a little kid.” Pearl was fascinated.

Mike laughed at Hilda. “I thought you socialists were liberated from bourgeois notions about neatness. I thought you had higher things to think about.”

“Not me,” said Hilda. “Maybe your brother. I'm just a housewife.”

Nathan frowned at them for talking during the music—now it was a different symphony—and quietly swept Mike's trash into his hands and carried it off. “There,” he said, when the music paused. “Plenty of room for socialism, a clean carpet, and Beethoven too.”

Pearl liked the way he talked and she liked the music and the living room. It was starting to get dark outside, but the lamps had been on all afternoon. She felt safe in her big chair. Nathan had brought in a wooden kitchen chair for himself, and Hilda was sitting on the bed, which now took up most of the room. The warm lamplight was on Pearl's arm. She and Hilda had conferred about dinner, and Hilda had started a pot roast. Soon they'd peel the potatoes. Pearl wished she could stay home and keep house for the four of them, but she knew she had to look for a job, and then that they'd have to find an apartment. Her brother-in-law leaned over the stack of records, putting the ones he'd played back into their brown sleeves. They came in a big album that was dark red like so much else in this room.