Broadway Baby (12 page)

She wanted Curly
to touch her only when they were in public, and not because she wanted everyone to think they were a happily married couple but simply because she couldn’t stand the thought of being talked about. She wanted him to hold her hand when they were out with friends, or put his arm around her or even kiss her on the cheek in front of others, so they would think her marriage was the same as theirs.
Th
at way, other people, what they said or how they saw her, wouldn’t matter. She was tired of other people mattering. Creating the impression that there was nothing wrong was how she kept the world from entering her mind.

Home, however, meant being left alone, home was where she had no reason to be touched, because she didn’t have to care about what anybody thought.

Th
e night before, after everyone had gone to sleep, he slipped into her bed. Oh, she did feel sorry for him. She knew how unhappy he was, how much he craved the physical attention she was incapable of giving, especially now. He deserved a wife for whom intimacy wasn’t such a fearful chaos, a wife who was able to love him in all the ways he needed, who didn’t lie there like a mannequin in bed. She wasn’t the “cold bitch” she imagined he imagined her to be. She understood his need for consolation if not relief.
Th
e falling-out with his brother over money, and his new job at Lord & Taylor which paid even less than she was making, temping as a secretary at a nearby college—all of this drew him to her bed more frequently these days, for all the things she couldn’t find it in herself to give. Whatever he might have thought, she got no pleasure from his disappointment.

He said, “Sweetheart, it’s been so long, couldn’t we, tonight?”

“I can’t, Curly,” she said. “Please, forgive me, but I just can’t.”

“Why not? What did I do? We’re married, aren’t we?” His hand rested on her shoulder, heavy as a mallet. She slid out from under it.

“It’s just too late for that,” she said.

“Too late, as in tonight,” he asked, “or too late, as in for good?”

“Tonight,” she said, “but . . .”

“But what?”

“I don’t know, maybe; I just feel it’s just all such a mess. I don’t know what to do. I’m sorry.”

“So what are you saying?” he asked. “You want a divorce?”

“No, not that.
Th
e kids, my mother.
Th
e family. We are a family. No, I don’t want that.”

“
Th
en what?” Now he was leaning over her. “What about me? What am I supposed to do?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know.”

She wanted to tell him that she loved him, and that—that what?
Th
at he deserved to be happy, that she’d always tried to make him happy?
Th
at she had never thought, never dreamed that marriage—not just theirs but any marriage—could be like this, like being trapped inside a scene that just won’t end the way she wanted it to although, just then, if he asked her what it was she really wanted she could not have said?

“I just thought with Stuart out of the picture . . .”

“Stuart has nothing to do with this.” She turned away and pulled the covers up over her shoulder.

He threw the sheet off roughly and left the room, slamming the door behind him.

She lay awake for hours trying to make sense of what had happened—but she couldn’t make sense of it. She couldn’t make sense of herself, of anything. All night she lay there thinking, nonsensically, that Stuart was out of the picture because he wasn’t; that he wasn’t out of the picture because he was.

Scene XIV

From the end of the hall, Sam could hear the whir of shuffled cards, and then the slap, slap, slap on the Formica table. As he came down the dark hall, he could see through the kitchen doorway, in the lamplight, her hands turning over card after card. He had wet the bed again and come downstairs to find her. Everyone else in the house was sleeping. His grandmother snored and murmured from what used to be the upstairs playroom, the room next to the bedroom that he and his brother shared. To get downstairs, he had had to leap over the nightly puddle of pee she left outside his room, the little accidents she had because she couldn’t move fast enough to make it to the toilet. Between his grandmother and him, his mother often said, the house smelled like a flophouse, like a sewer. His mother wouldn’t be happy to see him. She would say, what am I gonna do with you? When are you gonna grow up? Don’t I have enough to do already?

Anger shrank the house. You couldn’t turn around without getting yelled at. She and his father fought about her mother. She and her mother fought about hairspray or brands of coffee, or whatever it was his mother was supposed to get for Tula and didn’t or got wrong. She and Ethan fought about his voice, his practicing. Julie was never around anymore to fight with, which was what her parents fought with her about when she was around. Sam tried to stay out of everybody’s way. But the house was shrinking. During the day, the only hiding place that remained was good behavior. He had stopped caring about his shirt and shoelaces. Even though his throat hurt when he cut his food, he cut his food. He was quieter now. He didn’t ask so many questions. He tried to do what he was told and not get in anybody’s way, but every night the wet bed dragged him out of hiding. He said, “Ma, I need you.” She stared down at the cards her hands were flipping over and moving from column to column; it was as if her hands were independent of her body, moving by themselves. Next to the cards, there was a cup of coffee; next to the coffee, an ashtray with a cigarette leaning against the grooved lip. Little curls of smoke were rising from it. “Go back to bed,” she said in a flat voice, not even looking up. It was just a body, not his mother speaking. Where she had gone, he had no idea. “Go back to bed before I scream.”

From that night on, he no longer left his bedroom when he wet the bed. He’d strip the sheets off and slip free of the damp pajamas. He’d find a thin edge of mattress that wasn’t wet and lie along it on his side, trying not to move as he fell asleep with the house shrinking all around him.

U
NABLE TO SLEEP,
she’d sit at the kitchen table playing solitaire for hours, slapping the cards down on the Formica table, sliding the cards from one column to another, watching and not watching as the columns grew and shrank, and shrank and grew, while the cigarette she never lifted burned down to nothing in the ashtray, and the coffee cooled. And as she played game after game long into the night, shifting the cards by suit or sequence, the royal families broken apart and struggling (by her hand alone) to reunite, fragments of memories flashed randomly before her from the near and distant past: there was Stuart at the piano, singing as he played, his face at once exuberant with pleasure and somehow menacing, bright lit and shadowy, giving way to Curly’s face, his handsome, loving face, the face he watched her with the night they met, becoming suddenly his needy face, his disappointed face, one moment sorrowful, the next enraged, changing, in turn, into her mother’s face reflected in the window of a train, young, beautiful, so charming to the world, so harsh to her only daughter. And there was Sam’s face crying, or Ethan’s pitching a fit because he didn’t want to practice, or Julie’s staring at her with that blank, infuriating, you-can’t-do-anything-for-me expression that Miriam couldn’t help but hate, and hate herself for hating. Only God knew how much she loved them. Only God knew how terrible the world could be, how vulnerable the children were, and what it took to get them ready for the trials that surely lay ahead. Only God knew she never meant to hurt them, and when she did hurt them sometimes (she wasn’t perfect, who was?), when she spoke too brusquely, when she shook them harder than she meant to, or ignored them, or responded coldly or impatiently to pleas for help, to pleas (oh God) for love, yes, only God knew how much she suffered when they suffered, how indelibly into her heart their pain was stamped.

Long into the night she watched the broken royal families drift from column onto column, searching for the proper suit and sequence over the kitchen table between the untouched cigarette burning in the ashtray and the coffee cooling in the cup.

A
T ELEVEN YEARS
old, Sam was the only one left to look after his grandmother. Miriam hated to demand this of him, he was too young for this kind of thing. It wasn’t right to ask a child to do this, she knew that, she felt terrible about it, but what choice did she have?
Th
ey couldn’t afford to have Melba come once a week. Even if she, Miriam, wanted to, she couldn’t afford to quit her new job as a secretary at Happy Trails, a local travel agency, not now, not with Curly making peanuts. She just couldn’t continue running her mother’s errands after work each day—medication, mouthwash, dietary candy, cigarettes—and nothing in her mother’s eyes was right or ever enough, she couldn’t do anything right, and lately she hadn’t been getting home till seven. She’d apologize for getting home so late, and her mother would scoff—party girl, you, you’re just a party girl, you never think of anybody but yourself. And tired as she was, there’d be an angry pool of urine waiting for her to wipe up on the kitchen floor or outside the bathroom her mother hadn’t reached in time.

Ethan and Julie were already well launched into their lives.
Th
ere was just no other way around it. Sam would have to run home between elementary school and Hebrew school and check on his grandmother, make sure she was all right, and didn’t need anything.

What surprised her was how he took the news. Okay, Ma, he said, okay, but not like he was trying to be helpful, or not only that; but like he knew his not whining or complaining would disturb her more than if he pitched a fit.

Without a fuss, he ran home after school. He cleaned up after his grandmother. He’d go to stores and get her whatever she needed or wanted.

Th
en one night, a school night, and after his bedtime, she caught him leaving the house.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Grandma needs cigarettes, and saccharin, and she said, while I’m at it, I should get us a couple of sundaes at Brigham’s.”

“On a school night, after bedtime? I don’t think so.”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking down at his feet. “She’ll be real disappointed, Ma.”

“I don’t care what she is,” she said. “It’s too late for you to be running all over town for her.”

Her mother called down from upstairs, “Let the boy go, goddamn it; I need cigarettes and you’re too busy, miss party girl, to get them.”

“Mother,” Miriam called back, “it’s too late, he has school tomorrow, and he’s just a boy!”

“And you’re just a party girl!” Now her mother was crying. “Oy Gott, I should just be dead already. What did I do to deserve such a daughter?”

Th
ey could hear her huffing and puffing as she shuffled back into her room.

“Jesus, okay,” Miriam said, “go get her whatever the hell she wants. But only tonight. Never again.”

But from then on her mother sent him out most every night. And not only that, when he’d return they would stay up late watching TV and talking, with the door shut. Sometimes, Miriam would creep up the stairs and put her ear to the door, though she couldn’t make out what it was they said. Sometimes she thought he was performing for her, telling her jokes, doing impressions, maybe imitating the comics they’d seen on the Johnny Carson show. She could hear her mother laughing. It was the only time she ever heard her mother laugh. What did they talk about? Sam would never say, and her mother would only smile, as if to say, such a good boy, and so talented.

Sam wasn’t getting the sleep he needed; what with the late-night television and the bedwetting, he’d be especially cranky in the mornings. And the Hebrew school had called to say that he was failing and in danger of being kept back. But what could she do? She and Curly were just too tired at night to police them.
Th
ey demanded that the late nights stop and then pretended that they had. He
was
a good boy, Miriam told herself.
Th
ere was no denying that. She should feel grateful. But there was something in the way he was being good that she didn’t like; something about it, she couldn’t say what, didn’t feel good at all.

T
HEN
S
AM STARTED
telling jokes, one-liners—Henny Youngman, Rodney Dangerfield, Myron Cohen, Milton Berle. He must have been getting the jokes from all the late-night television in her mother’s room. Lately, at dinner, particularly when nothing was being said, or when the bickering started, he would say them one after another in rapid fire:

“Went to a child psychiatrist the other day; the kid didn’t do a thing for me.

“Went to a psychiatrist, he said what do you do? I said I’m a mechanic, he said good you get under the couch.

“I was so ugly when I was born my mother had to breast-feed me through a straw.

“My mother refused to breast-feed me. She said she just wanted to be friends.

“She told the lifeguard at the pool to keep an eye off me.

“My proctologist stuck his finger in my mouth.

“My wife and I bumped into her old boyfriend, Bob. ‘Bob,’ she said, ‘this is Sam. Sam this is good-bye.’

“When I got home from work, my wife met me at the door dressed in nothing but Saran Wrap. What, I said, leftovers again?

“She says to me what would it take to get you to go on a second honeymoon? And I say, A second wife.

“She says, why don’t you take me somewhere I’ve never been before? I say, how ’bout the kitchen?”

Th
ere was something manic in the joke-telling, as if he thought that if he didn’t tell them all as fast as possible something horrible would happen. She wondered if his quirkiness was finally turning into real insanity. For a moment she pictured him in the nuthouse, doing stand-up in a padded cell.

Only her mother would laugh at the jokes.
Th
e two of them—it was like they were in league together, up to no good somehow at her expense, but she couldn’t say exactly how or why.

“If it weren’t for pickpockets, I’d have no sex at all.

“At my age eating’s more fun than sex; I’ve put a mirror over the dinner table.”

After a while Miriam would say, “Enough already. Let us eat in peace.”

Her mother would still be laughing. Her mother would say, “Take my daughter!” And Sam would reply on cue, “Please.”