Chains Around the Grass (4 page)

“So what’s the story with the movers, Dave?” Ruth interrupted.

“Ruth, you see I’m trying to talk to the kid…can’t it just wait?”

Jesse shook his head, wandered off. The door slammed.

“They should have been here already,” Ruth persisted, already regretting having asked. She lowered her voice, touching her husband’s shoulder. “He’s just a kid. He’ll get over it. It’s hard for kids to move. Don’t eat your heart out, Dave.”

He didn’t answer her because it was none of her business and she was right, and he’d failed again. They should have been here already. He walked to the window and peered out into the distance. Imperceptibly, the light began to fade, casting long, dark shadows. A breeze, salty and cold from the unseen ocean, blew through the empty house.

“Dave, it’s dark already…”

“What…?” Her voice brought him back from some far place. “Let there be light! What’s the big problem? Where are the light bulbs?”

“Gee, I don’t remember. Did we bring them? I’m such a dummy. You’d think a person would remember that,” she shook her head. “Light bulbs.”

“I could’ve picked some up when I did the shopping if you would’ve mentioned it earlier…” he complained mildly, but seeing her face go all humble like a scolded child’s, stopped. “So don’t worry about it. I’ll go next door and borrow. I’ll call the movers too.

He soon returned, waving a bulb victoriously. “Great neighbors. Promise me you’ll go in and say hello, Ruth. I’m telling you. Good people. Now, where do you want this?” His eyes met hers as they looked toward the socket high in the ceiling, both painfully aware of being short people.

“So I’ll borrow a chair,” he shrugged good-naturedly. Nothing was wrong. Everything was going to be just fine. Keep it up. Just keep it up.

She caught his arm. “It’s not right to ask so many favors, to get so close with people right away.”

He bowed his head, gathering patience. When he looked up, his eyes were wide with exasperation. “The big expert on how to get along with people… When are you going to learn? To have a few friends? To trust…”

“Pick me up, Dad,” Jesse cut him off. “I’ll screw it in.”

Tall, but he weighs nothing, Dave thought, hoisting the boy up to his shoulders easily, his own short arms muscled by years of manual labor. “Now you see what a good head he’s got? We should send him to The Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question!”

The bare bulb glowed with a dirty, yellow light. The baby cried. “Truck broke down. They’ll be here tomorrow,” Dave whispered, embarrassed.

“You see? You see what you get when you start with friends! Aach! I had a bad feeling from the start… Why didn’t you listen to me?”

“Ruth!” his arm shot up in warning.

On those rare occasions when David Markowitz got really angry, he could be frightening. Never remotely dangerous, or even really hurtful, he had nevertheless once and only once slapped her lightly across the face when she had kept him waiting out in the rain for her for over two hours. But it had scared her just the same. She looked at him, guilty and cautious, biting her tongue, and he seemed to calm down. “It could’ve happened with any company,” he groused.

He had long ago accepted her indecisiveness, her dependence on him for everything. At one time, he’d even found in it something distinctly feminine, even charming. He’d never known much about women and had just assumed they were all like that. But the way he figured it, that gave him the right to make the decisions; if they were good, so they were good. And if they weren’t, well, that was no one’s business but his own. If you weren’t willing to take responsibility, you had no right to second guess or criticize.

His own father had kissed his mother, his older brother Reuben, his sister Sylvia and himself goodbye in a little town in the Ukraine, then climbed into a rotting, horse-drawn carriage, which had taken him to the ship that sailed for America.

And then the family had waited.

He remembered his mother’s face, the soft curly hair, the large, wondering eyes, the childish mouth which had stretched with time and disappointment into a thin, bitter line. He remembered her in the lamplight, the laborious scratch of her pen on paper, page after page, week after week, sending out letters. After two years, she’d paid a photographer to have their faces reproduced on a strong metal oval, which she’d sent to America with a good friend of the family.

Nothing happened.

And then there was the laundry—tons and tons filling the house, the yard, in big sacks; the steaming kettles, the harsh detergent fumes. There were his mother’s white hands reddening, becoming harsh to his young skin. And then they, too, were on a boat.

His father stood waiting for them in Ellis Island, shockingly beardless and wearing a dapper new hat. He’d taken his wife’s bundles solicitously and hugged her, there in front of everyone; a public act of intimacy that had made his pious mother cringe. He was still a strong, toweringly handsome man, not very different from his photograph in a Russian captain’s uniform as undefeated boxing champion of his army unit. But his mother’s eyes had never shed their disappointment, nor had her mouth relaxed again into the lost lines of their youth.

Dave remembered her, gentle in her dark, lustrous Sabbath clothes, her pious wig, ladling out the rich Sabbath food whose odors filled the small apartment. She had reached her goal, assuming once again the position of the respectable Jewish matron, never understanding that it was too late; that the traditional, averagely pious Russian Jew she had struggled to rejoin no longer existed. That he now preferred Friday night card parties to heavy Sabbath dinners eaten by pious candlelight; bleached blondes to pious, dark wigs. Until he finally walked out and didn’t come back. Dave Markowitz wasn’t like his father. He was responsible, and he would provide.

“Marty came to the phone himself. He’s sorry. He meant well. One of those things. Movers’ll be here in the morning, first thing. I’ll get the blanket from the trunk of the taxi. We’ll sleep on the floor. It’ll be fun! Right, Jesse, Saraleh? Like a sleep-out!”

“And we can tell scary stories,” Jesse considered, forgetting he was never going to speak to his father again.

“And tell jokes, and tickle each other!” Sara shrieked. Dave covered his ears with his hands, grimaced in mock anguish. Then smiled: “What did I tell you, what did I say!?”

The icy living room floor seeped through the thin blanket, chilling Sara’s back. She reached out for her father’s warm hand. But he wasn’t there.

“Daddy?” she whispered, no louder than her mother’s soft breathing, lifting her head to search. But it was too dark to see. She got up carefully, treading carefully past her big brother’s head, avoiding her mother’s toes, padding softly from the living room through the long, dark hall.

Was that him? Her hands reached out but met only shadows dancing eerily on a cold, blank wall.

“Daddy!” her voice rose in panic. She had gone too far into the uncharted darkness, too far to turn back. She peeked through the door to the bedroom. There was the closet door. And behind it? Was it moving, opening? She lunged past it.

“DADDY!”

He’d been standing alone by the window, his hands in his pockets, studying the night. “Daddy,” she whimpered, feeling his strong, solid arms curve around her, saving her.

“Vey… What are you doing up? What’s… You’re crying?” he asked, genuinely surprised as his lips met her salty, wet cheeks. She nodded, ashamed, relieved.

“Afraid,” she admitted. “Of what?”

“Of… of… (How could you name it? That thing. That terrifying thing that had no weight, no shape, no substance? That wasn’t there at all?)”

“Tell your Daddy,” he nuzzled her cheek, his breath warm. “Come on now, sweetie.” His voice was gentle and kind. She leaned into his shoulder with greater urgency.

“Of… of… (What lay hidden in heavy silences and strange whispers, looks exchanged) It’s… (in faces fading, disappearing into the distance. Trees without leaves. Ropes around grass.) It’s what (most of all, the sudden choking sadness that caught you unaware, coiling itself around your heart). It’s… what’s in the closet! Monsters!!” she finally blurted out, surprising herself at having found a way to make something so large fit inside one, small word.

He laughed low, his scratchy stubble grazing her cheek, his large hands warming her small, cold feet, and suddenly she also felt it was funny. There weren’t any monsters. Not here, not now. But as he carried her back out to sleep, she couldn’t help looking over his shoulder at the blackened window and wondering if they weren’t out there, beating dark wings against the fragile glass, like insects, waiting to get in.

Chapter three

Ruth bent over the moving boxes, sending a puff of breath fiercely and deliberately toward her forehead. The tormenting wisps of hair that had been tickling her nose and striping her vision hovered for an instant before landing like some persistent, obnoxious fly, firmly back in place. Setting aside the wadded paper bundle (whose contents she could not begin to fathom since she had neglected to mark any of the moving boxes), she sat back on her heels. Using both hands, she smoothed back the hair from her eyes, sliding in a bobby pin just a fraction of an inch too high. Massaging her aching back, she once again leaned forward into the carton. Immediately, the unmistakable slide of the tickling, silken weight drooped down, blinding her once again.

She almost felt like crying.

A month had gone by and they were still not unpacked. Buttons were coming loose like baby teeth and piling up until she could locate the sewing box; mashed potatoes were off the menu until the masher could be located; and she had no idea where her good scissors had disappeared to. The only real progress she made, she thought with sadness and embarrassment, was on Sundays when Dave lent a hand.

She sat down on the floor, her back against the wall, awash in the familiar feeling of incompetence that had weighed down upon her since childhood. She unwrapped the bundle and smiled in surprise. It was an old picture album, the pages already yellowing, the photos gone sepia.

There was her brother Morris on her father’s knee, a grave, unsmiling child looking dutifully into the camera; and there was her sister Saidie’s husband, dead five years now, a serious young man in a dark skullcap and short beard standing before an ironing board in the fur shop, the heavy old-fashioned iron gripped in his hand. This infamous family picture brought a guilty smile to her lips. As the story went, while posing for it, the iron had burnt a hole in the expensive coat and her brother-in-law had been fired and had never held a steady job again.

And there was Saidie in a midi dress, in a picture taken before Ruth’s birth, looking frivolously girlish, so unlike the somber, matronly woman who had taken Ruth in after her young mother’s sudden death. It was a pity. She seemed like someone Ruth could have giggled with, even liked.

Ruth had been five years old when her mother died. She remembered the days of mourning: the delicate, beloved body in a cold, unmoving sleep above the bedcovers; the tiny army of candle flames on the bedroom floor giving off their mysterious, sinister glow; the cawing of old women: “Poor, poor little yosom. Poor kinderlech,” they had clacked, reaching out their wizened hands to caress her. Everyone had fussed over her, plying her with rogelach and little toys until she’d forgotten why they’d come and begun to be shyly pleased at all the attention.

Papa had stroked her head and wept quietly, the tears wetting his graying beard. “My precious jewel. My light,” he had whispered, hugging her to his side, reluctant to have her wander, even for a moment, out of his sight. Sixty years old and grief-stricken, he had looked at his little girl with wonder and shock, as if amazed to still find her there. Morris and Saidie—children of his first wife—were fully grown and married. They hadn’t approved of their father’s rash, (indecent they called it amongst themselves) rush into the arms of a pretty, sickly twenty-year-old straight off the boat from Poland so many years after their own mother’s death. And when their half-sister Ruth was born, they’d looked at each other incredulously.

They weren’t bad people, Morris and Saidie, she supposed. And they had been good to her in their plodding, dutiful way all these years. They had—she had at last been able to accept and almost forgive—meant well. Even when they argued Papa into letting her live with Saidie and her new husband, convincing him how selfishly wrong it would be to try and raise her himself.

And Ruth had hated it; hated the parting from her dear Papa, hated trading his soft indulgence for Saidie’s hard, unbending rules. Instead of a candy or a toy every day, there had been elaborate table legs to dust, the kind that were full of deep, narrow crevices that pinched your fingers when you attempted a thorough onslaught. She never did a good job. A good enough job. She was a dusting failure, a pot-scrubbing incompetent, and a bad face-and-hand washer. A hopeless braider. And Saidie, all of nineteen years-old herself, recipient of the sage advice of a horde of old bubbies who lined the stoops and fire escapes of Pitkin Avenue and had no business more pressing than that of their neighbors, had shown no mercy. With their iron-fisted insistence goading her on, Saidie had taken away the plates with a martyr’s sigh, washing them herself; had gone over all the dusting with vigor; and had stubbornly insisted on plaiting Ruth’s hair well into high school, long after everyone else had cut theirs into sassy flappers’ bobs. It had humiliated Ruth deeply.

She’d longed to have her mother back, her sweet, smiling little momma. And Papa.

Dearest Papa.

Even now his image—merely a soft, indistinct shadow in the corner of her mind—knotted her throat in a grief that, she finally admitted, was never going to go away. Papa, sitting in the parlor during the long, slow Sabbath meals of roast chicken, tzimmes and fresh baked challah bread, his soft black beard rinsed clean of the paint flecks that aged it during the week, his paint-stained work clothes replaced by the dark, festive satin waistcoat of a scholar. Seated on his lap, sharing the precious, golden circle of Sabbath candlelight, touching the large pages of the open Talmud, she had felt enveloped in an impregnable cocoon of contentment, security and joy. Sealed within the Sabbath peace, the world locked out for a few precious hours, she’d been allowed to become her true self, fearless, full of love, curiosity and quiet ambition. It was a feeling that had never quite returned to her.