Chains Around the Grass (3 page)

“You know what, when business is going good and I pay off some of the loans on the taxi and the medallion, I’m gonna take you all to the country, to Ellenville, to one of those farm hotels…”

“Oh, Dave, they went out of business years ago!” Ruth protested, shaking her head. “In the Thirties.”

“What are you talkin’ about?!”

“Sure they did! But I remember them. My father, God bless him, took me there one summer. They weighed you before you checked in and before you checked out, and if you didn’t gain ten pounds, you got your money back.”

“I was there once, too. I remember those breakfasts, Gotteinu!—herring, whitefish, eggs, pancakes, heaps of sour cream on blintzes, and latkes, pot cheese, and sweet rolls! There was this little skinny kid, Hymie. He would sit and look at it and roll his eyes and take a few bites and then want to go out and play. But his mother would always grab him. ‘Eat, you rotten kid! Eat or die already! Your father works so hard all week in the city you should be here and enjoy yourself !’ And every morning, he would, poor kid, eat and eat and then go outside and throw up. Every morning!

“Then there was this guy who’d order two raw eggs for breakfast. Yeah! Raw! Every single morning for two weeks. He’d stick a pin in one and suck it out, and secretly pocket the other when he thought no one was looking. When it came time to leave—he was already on the buggy going to the train station—his kid came running after him with a suitcase and he—nebbech—tripped. They looked like somebody died, I swear.”

“No—not in the suitcase!” Ruth gasped.

“The yolks started drippin’ out from all sides. Must’ve had five dozen!” Dave’s shoulders shook in laughter, then Ruth started in with her crazy laugh that was almost like a sob. And every time one of them said: “Stop! You’ll make yourself sick!” the other took a peek and said something like “Sunnyside up!” and they’d start all over again, holding their hands over their shaking stomachs.

“You can tell a story, Dave,” Ruth sighed, wiping her eyes. “You’re better than Sid Caesar or Uncle Miltie. You could make a lot of money.”

“Naw,” he shrugged, very pleased. “Comedians don’t make money. Brains make money. What’s that new show? The Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question?”

“And what if you give the wrong answer?”

Leave it to Ruth to worry about the failure just around the corner, he thought, irritated, wondering why she always had to be so negative. But he didn’t want to fight. He was too happy. So he smiled and answered: “So then you’re a Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Schlemiel.”

The road began to narrow, the scenery changing from gray city streets to neighborhoods of cheap, attached houses with patches of unkempt lawns pinched painfully between. Then the houses gave way to low-lying marshes full of pussy willows and the strong smell of fish and finally there was the bay itself. Old men in straw hats cast fishing lines into the muddy waters from peeling rowboats. It looked like an old picture, everything so faded and still.

“How’d you like me to take you fishin’ one day Jess, huh!?” “We don’t have any rods,” the boy answered sullenly.

“So we’ll buy. What, there’s something you can’t buy?” Dave said with forced cheer and a desire to please that seemed downright pathetic to Ruth, who squeezed his shoulder with understanding and pity. The boy had been torturing him for days.

“Just the two of us?” Jesse murmured with faint, conditional interest.

“Sure!” Dave nodded, delighted.

“Can I come too, Daddy?” Sara suddenly interjected joyfully. Dave squirmed. “Well, fishing’s really a boy’s game more,” he hedged, without much hope of success, not surprised by Sara’s immediate howl of protest. With kids, you can never win, he was thinking, when he suddenly realized he’d been saved. “Now would you kids just look at that!”

“A Ferris wheel!” Jesse shouted, rolling down the window, “Playland!”

“And there’s a Merry-Go-Round and boat rides. When I was a kid I used to take the train here from Brooklyn. Took me two hours. But you kids, you’re gonna go all the time. There, and to the beach!

It’s just a few blocks from our new place. What did I tell you? What did I say!?”

But even as he spoke, the gay, colored wheel was already behind them. On either side of the road old shanties with iron fire escapes leaned desperately against boarded-up storefronts. Bars and junk stores flew past, leaving gaps like rotting teeth. Through narrow side streets, they glimpsed Black children chasing each other in torn sneakers. Even the fresh sea breezes smelled rancid, as if filtered through rotting wood and junkyards.

Dave shifted uncomfortably. “This is the old section. Wait ’til you see our place! Brand new! Everything! Beautiful! When the City builds, it really knows how to build, I’m tellin’ you. Just you wait.

You’ll wonder, watching them get out of the car and step onto the pavement, following their eyes as they gaze up at the uniform brick buildings, how it is they didn’t know, couldn’t see. And your wonder might turn to pity and then perhaps, contempt. They should have known, you might say in your heart of hearts, as much as you feel sympathy. It was, after all, a low-income housing project. And having thought this, you’ll begin to feel sure that your own knowledge would have kept you safe, away from the edge and the abyss. You wouldn’t have let it happen to you, you’ll feel confident. You would have climbed back into the car and rode of, saving yourself, your family.

Of course, you’d be fooling yourself. It is a false security, that feeling of superiority we have listening to someone else recount the steps to personal disaster because all of us are so very similar—we humans. We feel safe only because the teller is untalented, the truth unconveyed. And so, you must consider the soft building dust underfoot, the newness of the place. There was a glitter in the brand new windows, and a pleasant soft morning light that bathed the place in a sort of innocence. You might even realize that it was not, physically, the place itself which presented the problem. Weren’t there untouched playgrounds with a kiddie pool? Basketball and squash courts? And what of the brand new community center with its inviting red doors? And the new saplings planted all over, just beginning to bud? And the large, neatly roped-off stretches of newly planted grass?

True, it was very different from the place they’d left: the small homes, the rivers of beautiful fall leaves drifting down from towering, old trees. And so they, too, were a bit apprehensive, Ruth and Dave and the children. Only Dave took confident, long strides, displaying a certainty he didn’t feel, until, without realizing it, he wasn’t so much leading them, as wandering off by himself. Ruth and Jesse lagged behind, like people let off at the wrong subway station, forced to wind their way through interesting, but unfamiliar and potentially dangerous streets. They searched for familiar signposts, their footsteps reluctant: I don’t have to buy this, their feet said. I can walk out of the store.

But eventually they, too, were charmed by the newness. And why not? It had that rational symmetry of a wholly man-made environment, the realization of someone’s idea of functional beauty. It’s a beauty that seldom lasts. Like the clean lines of modern furniture, of Bauhaus architecture, its stark loveliness begins, too soon, to bore. And it is so very easily corrupted. Fingerprints on a beautifully carved wooden door are hardly noticeable, but consider the same on a severely modern table, in a white on white room. That’s why so many modern neighborhoods are so ugly. They need to be cared for, cherished. And so often the people forced to live in them hate the place, the plainness. And thus the graffiti, the garbage thrown down out of windows… Perhaps we can just say, it wasn’t a place anyone would choose to be in if they had another choice.

If the modest garden apartments in Jersey had said: “This is the best you can do,” then the city’s low-income housing projects in Waveside said, complacently and with utter confidence, “This is the best we can do for you. It is better than rat-infested firetraps in the South Bronx. Better than crumbling, unheated tenements in Harlem. Believe us.”

They did not lie.

But neither did they tell the whole truth. If they had, then a rat or two or a little cold might have seemed more attractive to some of the people who would soon move into these new buildings to take up their lives. And Ruth and David Markowitz, after all, were not coming from a rat-infested tenement in the Bronx.

Seeing all they saw, they nevertheless reserved final judgment, the way an astronaut might, on first landing on a grim new planet. It was Sara who, after skipping the whole way, suddenly balked.

“Saraleh. Come. You’ll play later…” Ruth cajoled, trying to pull her along. But she twisted away, her entire small body clenched against the idea.

“What’s going on? What’s the hold up?” Dave said, doubling back. “What the heck…?”

Ruth pointed to Sara, shrugging. He nodded with sudden insight. Crouching low, he brought his eyes level with the child’s, sharing her sight. The problem was immediately clear: there were ropes around the grass. For Sara, they are chest high, an impenetrable barrier. He reached out to touch them, surprised by their weight and coarse authority.

She will remember what he tells her then: “It’s young grass, baby grass, soon as it gets thicker, stronger, they’ll take away the ropes so you can play in it.” And she’ll always wonder if he knew the truth. And if so, whether he’d felt ashamed? Responsible? Let down? Had he been lying to her on purpose? Or, had Dave Markowitz, her father, been quite simply, quite honestly, deceived?

He smoothed back her light brown hair from her forehead. “Would you like your Daddy to carry you?” Not waiting for an answer, he lifted her. She threw her arms around his neck, grateful he had reduced the problem to something so small.

They entered the long, dim hall filled with the promising and not unpleasant smells of turpentine and newly cut wood. An elevator, shiny with chrome, deposited them efficiently on the top floor.

“I asked ’specially for this floor, because of the sea view,” Dave explained, fumbling for the key, smiling anxiously at his wife.

Ruth hadn’t seen the apartment. Typically, she’d let him rent it without her, really believing what she’d told him, what she was always telling him, “Whatever’s good for you is good for me.” Or perhaps it might have been just her way of avoiding responsibility for any decision, of putting the whole burden on his shoulders. This thought often tiptoed delicately and quickly through his mind, though he tried to stop it. When he couldn’t, he gave himself a good talking to: “This is your responsibility. This is what you wanted and there’s no reason to go on trying to pretend she’d wanted it too. No reason at all.”

He took a deep breath then stepped gingerly over the threshold. “Now look at this living room, what a size!” he began, a salesman’s octave of enthusiasm too high for him to sustain.

Ruth stepped in after him cautiously, tiptoeing almost like an intruder through the empty spaces. It was very clean, very spanking white and new. The windows faced the ocean and by looking carefully though the spaces of the brick towers, over the rooftops of decaying summer houses, she imagined she actually caught a glimpse of the green-gray sea.

The view surprised and worried her. From that height, the neighborhood’s stark contrasts struck her all at once with a force they did not possess at ground level. The dividing line was the road in front of the projects: to the right stood the indistinguishably solid brick buildings, massive and new; to the left, individual two and three-story private homes with carved banisters and Victorian gingerbread moldings, no two in the same stage of anarchic decay. Then, and forever after, Ruth couldn’t help feeling she preferred the decay. There was something recognizably human in their aging, exhausted slouch toward collapse; and in the massive sameness of the projects, something inhuman.

The shops, from what she could see, were rotting too. Many had been boarded up and the rest—the bakery, grocery, pharmacy and candy store—were painted in the gay fading pastels of a seedy and abandoned summer resort. Ruth, brought up on Brooklyn’s Pitkin Avenue, didn’t fault a place for being poor or shoddy. What she couldn’t forgive was that it looked so deserted. Lonely, she thought, hugging herself against the view and turning to explore the rest of the house.

Does it surprise us, then, that she nevertheless felt an unexpected twinge of pleasure as she examined the inside the house? It shouldn’t. After all, it was still early in the day and the light—not yet blocked out by tall shadows of buildings in the sun’s western movement across the sky—generously flooded the clean, new rooms made larger by their emptiness.

“So?” Dave gave her a wide grin, but his eyes, unsmiling, strained.

“Nice,” she smiled.

He reached for her gratefully, pressing his cheek against hers and leading her into a waltz through the empty living room:

“I’ll be loving you always, always,” he sang softly.

Yes, Ruth  thought. I will always love you, and be there to help you, as the
song said, “not for just an hour, or a day.”  Always.

She rested against his shoulder, silently mouthing the words, allowing her doubts to be danced away.

They were all together. They were all well. It was enough for her.

For Dave, as usual, it was never enough. He ran around, telling stories, making jokes. He did the shopping, bringing back fresh, fragrant rye bread with tiny poppy seeds from the bakery and thin slices of sweet Munster cheese and cold bottles of Coke from the grocery. He spread the baby’s red blanket beneath them, giving an air of picnic-like frivolity and summertime grace to the act of eating on the floor without utensils.

“Come ’ere kid,” Dave crooked an arm around Jesse’s neck, wrestling him close. “Listen. When the movers get here, pick out any room you want, fix it up beautiful, just like in Jersey. You’ll bring all your new friends here, make parties…”

Jesse shrugged him off.

“I know, I know. What friends. But what do you think? What do you think? A good-lookin’ kid like you with a head on his shoulders… A great pitcher… You’ll have plenty.”