Chains Around the Grass (2 page)

He tried not to think about that. He wanted today to be a happy one, the day in which he began to carve out for himself and his loved ones that big solid chunk of the American dream. His piece of the pie. He had to restrain himself from jumping up and looking at it yet again. If a car could smile, that yellow taxi was smiling. At him. He could almost hear the silent meter click up from nickels to dimes, from dimes to quarters, almost smell the new leather seats and the friendly scent of endless strangers climbing into the back. He opened his eyes and they rested on the cardboard boxes into which their settled lives had once again been poured at his urging. And then with guilt and hope and simple fear, he thought of the future.

Ruth rolled over and he caught her around the waist, snuggling deep into her softness and warmth. Her hand caressed the back of his head, smoothing down the hair that touched his neck. He took it and kissed the palm. After fifteen years of marriage, it still surprised him how small, even childish, her fingers were. He wanted so much to protect her and the children, to keep them far from all harm. To make life good for them.

“You still love me, right?” he whispered.

She opened one sleepy eye, startled by the question, the tone.

“What…?”

“Oysh, I didn’t mean to wake you. You’re so tired, Ruthie honey.

Get a little more sleep.”

She sat up now, completely awake, looking at him with alarm. “Something wrong, Dave?”

“No, no, no.” I’ve done it now. “I’m just so happy, that’s all.” He saw a sleepy smile spread across her small, vulnerable lips and watched her lie down again. He lingered hopefully, looking at her sweet pretty face for a while, wanting her to be less easily satisfied, to open her eyes again and really look at him.

“Ruthie,” he whispered. “Umh.”

“You don’t (hate me, do you honey? It’ll only be for a little while, the new place. Until we get the business going, pay off some of the debts on the cab, put down a mortgage on a home of our own. Then we’ll stop moving. You’ll see. Trust me.).”

“Don’t what?” she murmured.

“Don’t have to get up just yet. Rest a while.” He felt her reach out for him and he kissed the tips of her little fingers, one by one.

Outside, iron-colored clouds parted and the sun streamed through the bright autumn trees, touching the windows of the little clapboard houses. There was nothing special about this place. The houses, like the people who lived in them, were a little foolish in their pride, in their carefully painted fences, their neat plastic statuary of birds and holy men placed on lawns the size of beach blankets. There were reminders of the booming twenties in larger homes faced with brick and generous embracing porches. But even those showed traces of the Depression that had forced them into shameful compromises: tin sheds and outcroppings of cheap screened-in add-ons. But mostly, the town was made up of new houses built to welcome home the veterans, to encourage them to put death and corruption behind them, to shed the glory of their uniforms and to forget the great debt owed them. They were houses that whispered in a cynical and mean-spirited way: Get used to it. This is the best you can do. This is all that is owed you and be thankful for that. At least we are not all the same. At least there is some grass, the shade of trees. There are worse houses, they whispered. Worse fates.

Yet, though the houses were mostly small, conveying a clear sense of “make-do,” there was also the feeling of stability: bikes left overnight on dark green lawns, unlocked front doors, clean curtains blowing out of open windows, laundry left billowing on common lines. It was, it proclaimed itself, for all its small attainments, a wonderfully safe place that enveloped housewives and small children in its plain, serviceable arms. It was a place to gossip over coffee, to climb up jungle gyms and zoom down slides, to dig flowerbeds in the dark, rich earth.

Jesse, aged eleven, felt some of this as he sat on the dewy, cold lawn waiting for the moving truck. He felt too, with a child’s keen if inarticulate perception, the small, dark undercurrents that belied the bright surface of things. The women who avoided his mother after learning she lit candles Friday night; who wouldn’t afterwards let their five year-olds come over to play with Sara. It had confused and angered him the first time someone had asked him if he was

“Joo-wish”—making it sound like something you could catch. Still, while he couldn’t begin to fathom the sinister complexities of these dull, plain women in their button-down housedresses, their sons were his friends. They traded baseball cards, sweated through gym, and rode miles and miles on their bikes through thick, fragrant woodlands. It saddened him to think of leaving them; the injustice made him furious.

Jesse Marks (name legally changed to “make him more comfortable in Jersey schools”) believed in justice, the way only a well-loved child who has never experienced anything else can. He believed that things should work out; that there was no excuse for them not to. Parents should be omniscient. They should never lie, never be fooled. And thus, he had been up and out at dawn, freezing his butt off on the damp grass, waiting, because his father had casually remarked that the mover was a good friend who’d give them the royal treatment and would move them in by noon.

And now, well after nine am as (finally!) a battered old truck clanked and scraped its way down the street, waking up the whole damned neighborhood, he felt himself fill with fresh fury and nameless betrayal. His feelings came less from childish disappointment than from a budding sense of adult injustice: it should’ve been there at dawn. It should’ve been purring like a big powerful cat. It should’ve been gleaming like the noon sun on the Hudson. For what else did it mean to be treated royally? His handsome, dark face pinched, his young knuckles stretched white with fury, he tore out savage handfuls of grass and flung them at his parents’ bedroom window, at the truck, at heaven.

Dave came out, tucking his wrinkled shirt into his pants, lifting up and snapping his suspenders as he walked. He looked at his son with surprise as a clump of grass caught him on the knee.

“Some friend. Some big deal of a favor,” the boy accused. “Looks like it’s falling apart. A piece of junk!”

Dave laughed, bending down and wiping off his pants where the grass had stuck in muddy green clumps. “Meshuganah kid!” As he spoke, he unconsciously lifted himself up a little, rocking forward on his toes. “What are you worried about? I never saw a kid like you!

Why it’s a great truck! They don’t make them like this anymore. Look at what this can hold! As much as two trucks. I’m telling you. It’s like getting two for the price of one. Trust me.” He’s grown even taller over the summer, Dave thought with a pang of secret joy.

Dave Markowitz hated few things more than being a short man. He nurtured the secret vision of his son towering over him, reaching a height he himself had never dreamed of.

“But Dad, did you hear that noise? It can hardly move. What kinda motor is that anyway? Sounds like it’s croaking…” he said doubtfully, looking at his father with reluctant hope.

Dave just smiled and grabbed him, trying to knead the final resistance out of his delicate young shoulders. But the boy’s body didn’t relax completely, hanging on to its distrust. Dave looked up at the movers (whom he had arranged for through a friend of a friend who had promised to move him as a favor, practically for nothing, with the best service).

“How ya doin, guys?” he said, slapping the rusting metal without rancor. “Think this jalopy can make it all the way from Jersey to Queens?”

Ruth struggled down the steps, propelled forward by Sara’s frantic tug and the baby’s incessant struggle to push of from her shoulder and squirm loose. The effort loosened the bobby pins in her curly, reddish-brown hair, which fell to her shoulders and flew into her eyes. She was always, it seemed to her, trying desperately to keep up—with her husband, her kids. Always pushing herself, making that draining, extra effort, an effort that never seemed to pay of anyway in terms of measurable success.

Dave was always a little ahead of her. He overwhelmed her with his confidence in life, in the future in which she had been brought up not to believe. Life, her own family had warned her, was a dangerous road to be traveled one foot in front of the other, head bowed, eyes on the pavement. To look up, to dream, was to let down one’s guard, to fall into the pit reserved for fools who believed that there was nectar to be wrung from this flinty planet. Dave was just the opposite, rushing headlong, his eyes always on the distance, his feet hardly touching the ground, flying, and she willy-nilly, connected to him, flying with him, her eyes always a little terrified.

She wasn’t like her family. But she could never quite be like Dave either. For her, life meant (she hadn’t thought of this on her own, but had read it somewhere) a constant shoring up. And it felt to her as if the things around her were always about to collapse simultaneously—faucets and toilets breaking down and leaking just as storms loosed electrical wiring and sent cables writhing like snakes just above their heads. She never really knew how to stop up the holes in the dikes. Or, more accurately, she never felt she had enough fingers.

“Dave!” she cried out as the baby struggled free and squirmed to the ground, crawling toward the overflowing boxes—picture albums, books, extension wires, stockings, and linens—the flotsam of their lives.

He shook his head. She was the most disorganized, helpless… But then he looked at her and her presence lit into him, physically, with that familiar buzz of recognition. His wife. He scooped up his tiny son, washing his beaming face with kisses, then freed one arm to pat the head of his little girl as she pressed softly into the warmth of his thigh, her arms clinging around him as if he was a breakwater in the middle of a raging sea.

Slowly, the family gathered. They looked at the new taxi, watching the strong morning light bounce of the shining yellow paint, turning it to pure gold. They stared at its flashing promise, breathed in its new leather seats, their eyes lingering on the silent meter.

“Musta costa pretty penny,” one of the fat movers grunted mockingly, breaking the long silence. The sight of him—so stupid, envious, and mean-spirited—depressed everyone but Dave and the baby, who simply didn’t notice.

“Bet your sweet life,” Dave answered, as if an innocent question had been asked, his hands all the while caressing the flashing chrome handles. Then, as if ashamed of being serious, he flicked an imaginary cigar, crouching like Groucho.

“But what you gotta understand here, Ladies and Gents, is that this ain’t just a be-you-ti-ful classy conveyance. This is the first member of that taxi fleet that took New York by storm! Markowitz and Sons, Incorporated,” he practically shouted, putting one arm around his reluctant son and the other around his harried wife and pulling them toward him with the implacable force of his love and conviction. A hug.

The engine seemed to clear its throat then burst into a powerful hum, a song of youthful power and effortless movement. Dave draped his arm around his wife’s shoulder then turned to look at his children in the back seat. “I’ll make it up to you kids, I swear.” Then he gripped the steering wheel, pressed firmly on the gas, and moved his family down the familiar driveway onto the open road.

Chapter two

Through a darkness punctuated by the wheezing rhythm of the life support machine that will keep her heart going for a few more days at age eighty-five, Ruth will see this moment again. So many things will be lost to her, chips frying away under time’s relentless chisel, but this she will recall with almost perfect clarity: sitting, apprehensive yet hopeful—next to her smiling husband on their way to their new home. She will see again the strong, satisfied corners of his mouth, turned upward in happiness, the dreamy languor in his smiling eyes. She will think of him as more relaxed than he had actually been, his hands looser and more confident around the wheel…. But it will comfort her in her strange, drug-induced sleep, discrediting the notion that they’d been nothing but dust mites in a limitless universe, suspended for a second in space until blown away by the random, exhaled breath of time. In that rich, shining moment when her husband’s struggle, his choice, and his own good had come together in brief triumph, she will find proof of real joy and meaning in life. And that it existed simply in the ability to choose your own path freely, whether it end in failure or in triumph.

We are never fully awake while we live; never conscious at the time of what are destined to be our lives’ pivotal moments. Ruth didn’t know, didn’t realize as she sat there, worrying whether the milk in Louis’s bottle would go sour, whether she’d remembered to put iodine on Sara’s scraped knee, or if they’d locked the front door and turned off the gas, that this would be one of them.

“GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROADWAY! ” Dave sang.

Ruth looked up, startled, shielding her eyes from the dazzling light of New York City skyscrapers reflecting the afternoon sun across the Hudson River. But Dave looked straight ahead, smiling, absorbing the bright vision of silver ladders climbing into the sky, Manhattan’s gleaming pile of promises.

They harmonized, only slightly out of key: “AND SAY THAT I WILL SOON BE THERE!!!”

“Jeez!” Jesse shook his head, stretching his adolescent legs out in the back seat, cramped with bags and boxes. But he, too, couldn’t help tapping his fingers in time on the glass, while Sara and the baby giggled and bounced, making the car shake.

Then, just as abruptly, the vision vanished as they burrowed through the dark underside of the river, leaving the sun behind in a burning hole that shrank until it was finally extinguished. They emerged into treeless streets and the shadows of old gray buildings. Ruth clasped her hands together tensely. Jesse leaned back, defeated, his face darkening. Brooklyn. Again.

“New York, New York, whatever you wanna say, there’s no place like it,” Dave exulted. He pressed joyfully into the traffic, ignoring a chorus of condemning honks, giving them all the feeling of getting someplace, fast.