Chains Around the Grass (18 page)

if the woman had a chance or not. Now, finally, he got to it. “And what would you like if you were Queen for a Day?”

The woman stopped smiling so much, as she had when the people clapped for her six children. Her face became serious, even mean. Her Jimmy, she explained, was hit by a car two years ago and was now confined to bed. What she wanted was a small TV to put in his room so he could have something to do all day.

Sara considered. Her story was better than the woman’s who wanted a new washing machine because her family played football all the time, or the woman who wanted an airplane ticket to visit her sick father. If he was dying, the father, well then maybe, but like this… You always had a better chance with a crippled kid, she’d learned, or somebody dying. And also if you asked for something small and cheap that most people had.

There were three more candidates. If no one had a sicker kid, she was in. Sara waited impatiently for the laughing and clapping to be over. No, that was no good—tires for the car. Boring. But then the last one: a motorized wheelchair so little Debby could get around after her operation which had left her completely paralyzed and not just sick. Paralyzed, Sara considered, impressed, wiggling her fingers and toes.

Now the time had come. The time to choose. It would be hard. The screen went white and instead of people a small arrow appeared, lying on its side. As each woman stood up, the arrow moved forward, propelled by the clapping of unseen hands. Magically, like a thermometer measuring the fever of enthusiasm for each misery, the needle moved.

The clapping was not sad, but joyful, almost like cheering at a baseball game, and Sara felt that she did love the women with their sad, mean faces and heavy bodies and the magic hands that thundered approval for each. She felt her own hands tingle with pain as she joined in the clapping, which surged wildly for the woman who wanted a small TV and then for the woman who wanted a motorized wheelchair for little Debby. Then the two women stood side by side and the people were asked to choose.

The small-TV-woman looked into the camera with a humble smile. You weren’t supposed to do that, to smile. If you smiled, it really didn’t mean that much to you, what you were asking for. The other woman looked as if she would never smile again; as if her life would be ruined or she would pass out. It was the same kind of power her mother had, Sara thought, when she spoke humbly to people and said: “I am a poor widow with three children and I can’t…afford to buy such a big chicken…pay for a seat in the synagogue on Yom Kippur…pay any higher rent…”

Yes. And as the motorized-wheelchair-woman stared into the camera the needle went as far as it could go. Now she would not only get the wheelchair, but finely styled pumps, exciting jewelry by Sara Coventry, exquisite fashions from Hollywood and a new washer and dryer…at least.

Sara tried to picture her mother up there with the lovely, sparkling crown, the long velvet robe draped around her shoulders, the flowers in her hands and all the people clapping for her. And what could she ask for, Sara often wondered, so that the people would clap for her? Well, a new TV for one thing, for her poor, fatherless daughter. And maybe, a place to live with a backyard…but that was too much. They’d never clap enough to get anyone a new house. And even the TV… Well, being fatherless wasn’t that sad, she thought. But maybe if her brother Jesse was paralyzed, her mother could ask for special medicine for him, to make him move his legs and arms just a little, but not enough to be able to break her toys anymore, or beat her up, or change the TV channel…

When she tired of daydreaming and adjusting the television antenna to make the fuzzy gray images recognizable, Sara looked through magazines the neighbors had given her. She began a scrapbook, cutting out her favorite pictures. She called it a “Family Album.” For her grandmother she chose a picture of a smiling white-haired lady, who sat knitting in a rocking chair, her heavy, motherly arms covered in a shawl. The woman wore gold-framed half-glasses, which she peered over kindly. At her feet, small, happy children played; a cat drank from a saucer of milk. Red and white checked curtains framed a window that looked out onto green trees and grass. In an ad for milk she found a young mother with smooth dark hair who wore a crisp, clean shirtwaist and a white apron with no spots even though she was in the middle of baking. With one hand she offered a plate of chocolate chip cookies while with the other she held a white china pitcher, from which she poured milk into tall, clean glasses for two small, clean, smiling children. Everyone looked so healthy, so rosy and happy. Sara cut it out. This would be the picture of her mother, herself and Louis.

The rest of the magazine’s contents did not really interest her.

Only the ads seemed to define that ineffable state of happiness she longed for. Her feelings, vague and unfocused, came to the shiny color pictures like a shy seeker of truth. From them she learned what she hoped to know about life. Real lives—her own, her mother and brothers’—gave her no clues. She was convinced that her own family was fundamentally, hopelessly, shamefully mistaken, their error as obvious as it was simple: They simply didn’t know how to buy the right things.

For it was only through merchandise that one could reach salvation, that state of happiness she knew was promised to each living being—even the sad, fat women on Queen for a Day. Her own unhappiness, therefore, was temporary and correctable. The moment she acquired those things necessary to make her look like the children in her first grade reader, and in the advertisements, she too might smile beatifically. Oh, to be Dick and Jane!! To live in a small house on a green, safe, quiet street and wear clean shorts! To have curly, short blonde hair and a mother standing by the door in a clean white apron and a father in a white shirt and tie, his suit jacket flung over his shoulder as he returned by railroad from his well-paying city job!

At night, dreaming, scenes would flash back to Sara in the darkness: Daddy pacing up and back in the living room, his voice unfamiliar in its bitterness: “That mamzer…let him die, let him rot in hell…that Hesse”; her mother standing by with a pinched face, wringing her hands, saying over and over: “So what can we do, what can we do?” not expecting an answer. Her father sitting on the couch in the living room, his face hidden by outstretched hands, and then the heartbreaking lift of his head, his lips drawn back over his teeth—so far back you could see his gold tooth, so far back it could almost have been a wide and joyous grin if not for that shocking and impossible sound from deep inside, a sound that cut through her like a hot knife. Her laughing father. And then the remembered clang of bedpans, her mother rushing in and out of the bedroom where her father lay, sick.

Soon, she developed a certain terror of sleep, of the blank space that loomed behind her eyes, waiting to be filled. She was afraid to close them. “Mommy!” she would call out, “I have nothing to think about!”

“Think about the country,” Ruth would call back, distractedly. “About the cows and the chickens and green grass.”

She tried, closing her eyes again, concentrating. But the cows and chickens would flash by fleetingly, swallowed by the ominously empty darkness. “I can’t sleep,” she’d call out again until her mother grudgingly appeared, her arms akimbo, exasperated. But always as she drew close to the bed, her arms would drop, soft and helpless, her eyes filling with sad concern.

“What can Mommy do for you, sweetie?” she’d murmur.

“I miss Daddy,” she’d say pitifully, always very sure it was a half-lie. She did miss him. But this whimpering admission wasn’t real, she thought. How she really missed him was different; colder, harder, more difficult to form the right face for. But her goal was to get her mother to sit down at the edge of the bed and give her all her attention for once, and being pitiful often worked. Sometimes, however, it backfired, her mother’s eyes becoming blank, dark discs that stared off into space, her lips trembling.
That always infuriated Sara. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t part of the game!

Then one night, she developed a plan. “Read to me,” she begged. “A story.”

Ruth, who wanted to be left alone already, couldn’t think of a reason to say no.

I was a posthumous child. My father’s eyes had closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it. There is something strange to me even in the reflection that he never saw me; and something stranger yet in the shadowy remembrance that I have of my first childish associations with his white grave-stone in the churchyard, and of the indefinable compassion I used to feel for it lying out alone there in the dark night, when our little parlor was warm and bright with fire and candles, and the doors of our house were—almost cruelly, it seemed to me sometimes—bolted and locked against it.

Sara lay back, listening. Not all the words made sense to her, yet something in her mother’s soft, even tone made her eyes feel drowsy and comfortable, infusing the words with meaning. I am not alone, she thought. There were other lives outside the schoolbook readers and magazine advertisements. Children without fathers, without little houses and mothers in white aprons… Little David Copperfield, orphaned and cruelly treated by the world. Fatherless, yet blameless. Like David, she too had not done anything wrong. And as she digested this incredible revelation, sleep came as harmlessly as a pause between words, no more frightening or significant than turning the page.

Chapter seventeen

There was nothing left to do but wait. Ruth wondered again if the directions had been clear enough. Dave had always been the one to give the directions. What if they got lost? Or if they changed their minds? It would be unbearable after all this. After telling the children. She peered out the window anxiously, once again searching the streets below.

“What’s the time? What time did they say they’d come?” Jesse paced nervously.

“Around ten. Wasn’t for sure, though. So maybe ten-thirty.” “Shit. It’s already ten-thirty.”

“What kind of language is that?! So maybe she meant eleven.

‘Around’ could also mean eleven.”

“And maybe they ain’t comin’ after all, our big, rich relatives! How’d they get so rich anyway? That big house in Woodhurst, and all?”

Ruth chewed on her lower lip. “Not sure. The Gelts had this wine business. Your Aunt Sylvia, she’s a widow. She’s some kind of cousin, distant, to Mrs. Gelt…”

“So you’ll ask her about how you start a wine business?” he pressed impatiently, bored with the crappy details of family history. “If I can. Well, sure. Maybe, that is. OK. Anyway, when Sylvia

lost her husband she went to stay with the Gelts, and she just never left. It’s their house really, their money. She helps them, with the kids—”

“So she doesn’t have any money at all, our rich relative! She’s a babysitter for the Gelts… Son of a bitch!” he shouted.

“What a thing to say! What a thing… It’s not like that at all…

it’s…” she began to lose track of her arguments.

“Tellin’ me stories, gettin’ my hopes up!” he flung the couch pillows across the room, where they thudded against the wall.

“But Jesse, Jesse,” she pleaded helplessly, afraid of him and for him.

Lately, he was like a young animal that does not yet know its limits. His discipline was thin—weak bands that were stretched to the limit everyday by small disappointments. If you didn’t bring him a bottle of Royal Cola, or if the Yankees beat the Dodgers, he went around slapping Sara, slamming doors and cupboards until there wasn’t one damn thing in the house that wasn’t chipped, cracked or dented. Something terrible was building up in him, she knew that. She found herself watching helplessly, waiting with dread for it to explode.

“But Jesse, she’s bringing Mrs. Gelt with her! They’re coming together!” she poured her voice like water on the glowing coals of his simmering rage.

“And maybe nobody’s comin’ at all!”

“You louse!” Sara suddenly yelled. “You creep!”

“So who asked you, bucky beaver?” he shot back, offended. He shoved his straight white teeth at her. “Brusha, brusha, brusha, new Ipana toothpaste, it’s better for your teeeeeeeth!!!”

Tears came to the child’s eyes, which narrowed into hot slits of liquid hate. Her lips quivered as she stretched them with effort over her slightly protruding front teeth. She was terrified her brother would spoil this, like he spoiled everything. She’d been waiting for this visit for days. It wasn’t that she expected a gift, something tangible, like a new doll or a dress. She didn’t think of the rich relative as a person at all, but as a vast transforming presence, like a change of season; a fairy godmother who would drip sparkling silver stars over their lives.

“Oy, stop already! Stop! Jesse, leave her!” Ruth paced to the window once again. “Look!”

At the edge of the project grounds, the small squares of grass chained off with metal links, they could glimpse a long black limousine. A chauffeur in livery opened the doors.

“I’ll go down for them,” Jesse shouted, running toward the door, pausing only for a moment by the mirror to slick down his hair.

Up close, the car was a wonder, gleaming like patent leather, the polished chrome reflecting an inflated, concave world. Looking at it, Jesse’s face stared back at him, a prosperous stranger. “Aunt Sylvia,” he said with sudden dignity. Both women turned to him.

Two old ladies, he saw, disappointed. A small gray one and a fat blonde one. The small one was nothing special, he noted. She wore a plain cloth coat. The blonde was uglier, but at least she had furs.

“This is mine nephew, Jesse,” he heard the small gray one offer him up to the fat blonde. He smiled uncertainly at her stare, painfully aware of each pimple on his face and the awkward stringy length of his body inside the already too-small Bar Mitzvah suit.

“My mother’s expecting you. I came to show you the way.” “She’s gut mazal, Sylvia, your sistar-in-law! Soouch a big boy!”

the blonde in furs said.

Sylvia nodded. “Very lucky, Lydia. You’re so right!”

In the house, Lydia Gelt took out a tissue from her pocketbook, wiped off a chair carefully, then sat down. “Com ’ere, dahling,” she said to Sara, who approached with a shy smile. “You shoed alvays be ah goot gell and do homvoik. Den ven you grow ahp you cooed voik and help your matheir.”