Chains Around the Grass (23 page)

“I can’t stand it,” Ruth thought. This wasn’t like the other times. She felt closer to the brink now, nearer than ever to some act of desperation. It was that kid, that Jesse! He was going to kill her! Kill her! The badgering, the threats, the tantrums. There was nothing in the house that was not scarred, or chipped, or broken from him. How much more could a human being take?

She had waited patiently, with hope, these past three years. You’d think by now…a sixteen-year-old. That he’d be a little help. Not only was he no help, he was…impossible! He made her life a misery. But she was uncomfortable with that, with a full and easy condemnation. He meant well. He might even be a genius for all she knew. But how, in the name of heaven, could a sixteen-year-old have his own company?

“You’re crazy,” she told him a million times. But he had talked to her so long and so earnestly, and he knew so much… Deep down, she was so proud of this tall, intelligent young man who was her eldest son. The things he knew about! Letters of credit, how to set everything up! Maybe it could work out, she sometimes thought against her will, his arguments creating a bridge between her mature grasp of reality and his high-flying hopes that she sometimes, with great joy, allowed herself to secretly cross. (For what, after all, was so great about reality, about the clearly defined terms of her present existence and foreseeable future?)

He seemed so confident and had so many good ideas. Selling refrigerator cases to Argentina, for example. The market was wide open, he said. They were just beginning to have supermarkets over there. He’d read about that in Newsweek. And he now had found a supplier and all they needed were some good contacts…

It was so much fun to dream that she sometimes actually forgot that it was her role to hold him back, to be hard and practical and adult so that he could continue to be a child. A dreaming child. The minute she allowed herself to be seduced, she was in effect agreeing to his vision of himself as the head of the family, handing him the keys to the whole burdensome mess. And so, she fought him, fought herself, calling Morris often for an injection of anti-vision medicine, a dose of lead to keep her feet on the ground. Immunized, she would fight her son, ridiculing him, begging him, screaming back at him. But nothing stopped him. Day and night. Day and night. He pleaded, he cursed her, he threatened, and the school kept calling, kept demanding to know where he was, threatening to call a truant officer. But Jesse wouldn’t go back and she had no power to make him. What he needed, she thought, as a spasm of grief and desolation passed through her, was his father. Morris was a last resort.

The Loony Tunes Cartoon Special had just begun, but the set was all fuzzy again. Louis began to fiddle with the antenna, but as soon as the picture got better the voice would get worse. Then the picture suddenly improved. He loved cartoons so much that he hardly noticed his Uncle Morris come in. That old bulldog was running after Heykll and Jeykll. Those two old crows. They were mean to the old dog. Dumb dog! He set down a can of dynamite under their tails, then turned around and put his fingers in his ears. So of course the birds dragged it over and put it under his tail and flew away saying “My word! What a racket!” when it exploded. But there was so much noise in the kitchen, it was hard to hear the cartoon…Jesse, Ma, Uncle… Then suddenly, there was a smash, like something really exploding.

Inside the kitchen, the table was on its side. Ruth stood against the wall, covering her mouth with a fist.

“GET OUT! YOU STINKING PUTZ! YOU SHMUCK! DON’T EVER COME HERE AGAIN! WHO NEEDS YOU AND YOUR STINKING ADVICE! SHOVE IT UP YOUR…”

“Jesse, stop!” Ruth pleaded like a frightened child, stunned. “WHAT DID YOU EVER DO FOR ANYBODY? YOU’RE

A NOBODY AND YOU’LL DIE A NOBODY. MY FATHER KNEW THAT!”

“Your father knew everything. Left your mother in a palace with servants…”

Jesse rushed at him, butting him full in the stomach like a goat. Morris’ tired eyes bulged. He began to gasp.

“Are you crazy!” Ruth grabbed Jesse’s shoulders, but he pushed her away, a little more harshly than he meant to.

“Then you tell him to go away! Never to come here anymore. We don’t need him. Go back to your rat-hole in Brooklyn! I’m the man in this house now!”

“Some man!” Morris spoke in a strangled voice. “You need a good whipping!” He backed away as he saw Jesse move toward him again.

“Morris, go! He’s beside himself. He doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore. Stop, you meshuganah kid. Stop already! Morris, please go! I’ll call you. I’m sorry!”

Morris looked from one to the other and the indignation drained from him. “You tell me to go?! You let him treat me like that? Me?” He was flabbergasted.

“Morris just go! I’ll call you. I…I’m sorry.”

“DON’T EVER WANT TO SEE YOUR HORSE FACE HERE AGAIN!” Jesse screamed, but Morris was already sealed in the elevator on his way down to the street.

“Let’s all go down to the beach,” Jesse suggested the following Sunday. It was his first act of contrition. All week things had been abnormally tense. But finally, his mother had seen the light, he thought, pleased. Signed his dropout consent forms. Even ordered stationery for the company. All week long, he’d been drawing the logo, trying to get it right. He was pleased with the results: a ship on a dark sea sailing toward the glowing horizon. They’d call it: the Horizon Star Company.

So now he was feeling magnanimous, and guilty. He felt that this time, with Morris, he had pushed his mother a little too far. The other times, she’d scream her head off at him, but a half-hour later, she’d come around, asking him what he wanted to eat and all. But after he’d booted Morris out on his rear end (he’d gone over the scene in his mind again and again, each time with fresh relish), she’d just sat there by the window, not saying a word. Her eyes were rimmed with black and red, as if she needed sleep or had been what…cryin’? Naw. For what? She even said later that she understood about Morris, how he was so different from Daddy, but that he was an older man, her brother, the only one she had to lean on…

He’d stopped her right there. He didn’t want to hear all that crap. Ma, he had told her, you don’t need Morris anymore. I’m a man. I’m taking over, he had told her, and she’d looked at him. Kind of proud, he thought. Yeah, it must have been pride, but she hadn’t looked any happier.

“Come on, Ma, let’s go to the beach. Like we used to.”

She looked at him, her face devoid of expression. “It’s so cold there,” she finally whispered.

“Let’s go, Ma,” Sara suddenly backed him up.

“Hey, I’ll even take you for a ride on my bike, Sar? How would you like that?” he said with uncharacteristic friendliness toward his sister, feeling grateful, indulgent and so much older than she; older than he had ever felt before.

Ruth looked at the two of them, her lips breaking into a reluctant smile. “Outnumbered,” she said, shrugging.

Jesse balanced his sister carefully on the handlebars. He felt her long, dark hair whip across his face and enjoyed her squeals of delight at his wide, reckless turns and how she nuzzled back at him for protection. He saw his mother behind them, holding Louis’ hand. The kid was skipping, laughing his head off. Jesse smiled to himself, pleased it was all going so well.

As soon as they hit the boardwalk, the cold salt air whipped up through the damp planks, tossing around their heavy winter clothes. They shivered, but no one complained. Ruth walked up to the metal railing and looked out to sea, feeling, rather than seeing, the empty expanse of grayish sky that curved toward the dull, flat horizon like a tipped cup. She looked toward the right at the stilled Ferris wheel of the boarded-up Playland, then left toward the lifeless moss-covered jetty that fell into the sea like a paralyzed arm. For as far as she could see and further imagine, there was not a single, living soul except for themselves.

She hugged herself. “Ach, such a lonely place.”

“I think it’s great!” Jesse shot back, an offended host.

“In Brooklyn, when I was a girl,” she continued, her tone overly calm, trying not to betray her anxiety at setting her son off again, “wherever you went on a Sunday, it was so lively, so full of people walking along the streets. So many stores were open. Restaurants. Young couples with baby carriages. You could buy hot chestnuts for

a penny. Imagine, a penny!”

“Yeah, I remember wonderful Brooklyn with the fire escapes and a million screaming jerks beating you up in the alleyways. Wonderful Amboy Street!”

Sara ran down the stairs to the sand, feeling the familiar peace and trance of having the enormous place to herself. Here no doors, no stingy clouded windows measured out the light and air.

Jesse took Louis down and they sat digging a sandcastle.

“You have to pack it in good,” he was saying to him, impressed and touched by the child’s attention.

Ruth sat at the bottom of the stairs, hugging her knees against the cold as she watched her children. A man with children never really dies, she thought. Dave’s eyes, his nose, part of his wide brow—they were distributed among the children—living beings who would pass them down to other living beings, along with his capacity for hope, for living richly and carelessly, for squeezing whatever there was to squeeze out of this dry, hard planet.

She could never get used to the sheer wonder of it—their bodies combining to form new human beings, beings that were half her and half him, that united them—two separate people, two strangers—so they could never be parted again even in death. Maybe she was a fool to think about something so basic when the world was thousands of years old—millions if you believed the scientists—and this had been going on for just as long. Why, she wondered, didn’t people ever give God the credit He deserved for the sheer, miraculous beauty of a system in which life was the product of love, and each multiplied the other forever?

Then her eyes met Jesse’s and her heart seemed to stop. There it was, the knowledge she had been fighting against, trying to avoid. Those eyes, looking out into the distance with hope and determination.

Dave’s eyes.

She felt the tidal rush of America, the richest country on earth, in all its power to entice and deny; to raise a man taller than is human and to flatten him so utterly he would never rise again, and she understood she could not compete. All her knowledge, so new and painfully won, all her experience, would not be able to help her son, as it had not been able to help her husband. He would keep on running toward the vision until he found it and saw for himself that its promises were like movie sets, beautiful fronts with nothing behind them. Only then would he turn around and go back, as she had, toward older truths, deeper rhythms. He had to, because if not, there was only the precipice and the long crushing fall. Her husband was already lying at the bottom. Not Jesse too, she prayed in utter helplessness, please God, not him too. She prayed silently, watching the rise of the beautiful sandcastle her sons were building at the edge of the shore, with turrets and towers that kept growing higher and higher even as the tide lapped away at its foundations.

Chapter twenty-two

The typewriter, which Ruth bought with a check from social security, was set up on the kitchen table. The stationery, which had cost two weeks’ food allowance, lay stacked in neat boxes in the bedroom. Ruth layered the sheets carefully: stationery, carbon paper, onionskin, carbon paper, onionskin. She was in a trance, yet not unhappy. Not really. It was even exciting in a way, to have something else to think about except the dishes which needed washing, the cooking that never got done, or got done badly, the furniture and clothing that were falling apart and could not be replaced.

Her mind kept wandering to the past, as if the present were a crowded, unpleasant room she wanted to escape. There she was, nineteen (before Dave, before children, before heartache…had such a time ever really existed?), her face half in shadow, leaning against a white wall, her fair, fine skin glowing, framed by dark hair, her smile gleaming with shy pride. It was the picture taken of her by one of the handsome young doctors with their impressive stethoscopes and cheerful, appreciative eyes.

What would life had been like if she had fallen in love with one of them, married him? And what if he hadn’t been Jewish? She tried to imagine a life without rituals, the Sabbath day, the synagogue… And then she tried to imagine herself as a doctor’s wife, in dry-clean only knits, and beauty parlor hair, who stayed home all day in her finely furnished home… She shook her head, chasing away the visions, unable to decide which one was more ludicrous.

She’d never minded working, as long as the people were nice. She remembered the pious skinflints and shuddered. Actually, as bosses went, Jesse wasn’t bad, she’d think, amused by the irony. But sometimes, she’d look up and the dingy, airless apartment bathed in gray light would slap her in the face, the way you slap a person who becomes hysterical. Then she’d think: What am I doing?! It’s crazy, just crazy! He’s just a kid!

What kept her from turning her back and walking out on him, was that it echoed unbearably of that fatal act which time and circumstance had turned into an unforgivable betrayal that would haunt her all her days. No, she wouldn’t do it twice! And he looked so much like his father…! With this in mind, she’d lower her head, and keep on typing.

She’d forgotten a lot. Her fingers kept slipping, making mistakes that needed to be corrected with stiff rubber erasers that often tore the paper, forcing her to unroll the layers and peel them apart, staining her fingers blue from the carbon. But then, gradually, she began to make fewer mistakes. That in itself felt like an accomplishment.

Sometimes, she’d sit and study her hands, tracing how the rough streams of flowing time had coursed over them, aging the once smooth, pretty skin; how hot dishwater and bleach had chapped and roughened them; how mistakes with scalding pots had left tan burn scars. How could these aging stranger’s hands be hers? She was not old, not yet. Her life was not over, she told herself a little desperately.