Frog (53 page)

“‘When I was a little girl,' his mother said, ‘till I got to around ten, we slept two to three to a bed. Girls with girls, of course, boys altogether. Under lots of thick quilts when it was cold, one pillow per bed, and four of the girls in two beds in one tiny room and three boys and my two older sisters in two beds in another small room. My mother or one of the Polish girls would have to wake us up because we slept so heavily. She'd bang two pots together most times to do it or tinkle a spoon against a glass if we were already stirring. Strange we all slept the same, for in the next room the others had to be gotten up that way too. And also that we were all sent to bed the same time, even though there was twelve years between the oldest and youngest. I suppose my mother wanted to make sure she got an hour to herself. Or if there was any hanky-panky between her and Uncle Leibush, who lived with us, that would be a good time, with my Dad still at work.' For years after she got married she woke up around eleven or even noon. The children would be in school or in the nursery or bedroom with the live-in maid. His father would have left for work at seven. ‘Some people like to have their teeth fixed before they go to work,' he said, ‘because it's their only free time to or they think if they're still half asleep they won't feel as much pain. And lots of my patients I don't give novocaine to when they need it because they want to keep the bill down.' Then she'd come into the kitchen in her bathrobe, make fresh coffee (his father had his breakfast made by the maid), read the paper, smoke some cigarettes, have a second or third coffee, then bathe and dress. ‘It was a little bit too hedonistic,' she said, ‘but I loved it while it lasted. It made me feel like a real lady and late at night I got lots of good reading done.' She changed this routine when his father went to prison and she had to get a full-time job. Then she'd be up before seven, shower and dress, get the children up and ready for school, let the nanny in for the youngest child, make herself a quick breakfast, leave the house with her two youngest sons but in front of the building go left to the subway station while they went the other way to school. ‘A kiss, a kiss, a kiss,' he remembers her saying on the sidewalk, after his brother and he started off, and she'd get down almost on one knee so they could one at a time or together come into her arms easier and kiss her. A few months after his father got out of prison she started getting up around nine, after the children had left for school. They had a housekeeper who'd make breakfast for his father, wake the children up and help then off to school, take the youngest to kindergarten and pick her up and take care of her the rest of the day. His father had a number of jobs for about ten years before he got his dental license back. Factory worker, shoe-store salesman, department store floorwalker, then for eight years selling materials in the Garment Center. He always left early to get to work before anyone else. ‘No matter how menial a job it is, the boss appreciates it,' he said, ‘and the extra hour gives you a jump on everyone else. So you do it for show and possible advancement and the little time alone everybody needs and to make more money.' She was an interior decorator by then—she'd taken an interior design program at night while he was in prison—and once her business got going she'd usually begin seeing clients around 11 a.m. His parents came home around the same time at night and there was lots of take-out Chinese-American food and dishes like lasagna and roast turkey and flanken soup she'd cook to last three to four days. She started sleeping poorly twenty-five years ago, she said, when his sister's disease got much worse and the first symptoms of his father's showed. ‘I got up five to six times a night, just as I do now, but then to help them, running from one room to the other sometimes.' He said a few times it could be the black coffee now she drinks late at night and, after his sister died, the hard liquor she seems to start drinking around noon. ‘I don't drink coffee after dinner and I only nurse a drink or two a day, and when you're here for dinner or a chat and the way you pour, maybe a bit more.' He once checked her bourbon bottle and in three days it was two-thirds gone. ‘You have anyone over for drinks since I was here last?' and she said ‘No, why?' ‘This bottle. You couldn't have consumed that much since then. The woman who cleans up for you, maybe?' ‘You mean to sneak? No, and what about how much is gone? I bought that bottle almost two weeks ago. They say twenty-two shots to a bottle, so it's right on time.' ‘I think I opened it for you when I was here last,' and she said ‘Couldn't be, since you were here about six days ago and I never could have drank so much in that time.' ‘That's not the way I remember it, but I could be wrong.' ‘You're wrong, believe me, dead wrong. I'd be puking every night instead of just tired if I put so much away. As I've told you, I nurse my drinks, put lots of water in them, and ice, which becomes even more water the way I drink them, and lots of times after that ice melts I put in some more. Sometimes I think it's the taste of the bourbon-tinted water I like rather than the bourbon.' Almost every time he speaks to her on the phone she complains she didn't sleep well the previous night. ‘Last night I was up almost the entire time. I put on the TV at four in the morning and watched it—the cable weather station, as nothing more interesting was on—till six, while I read and did my needlepoint, and then lay in bed for an hour trying to keep my eyes closed till it took away too much energy from me and I got up for the day. I know old people don't need that much sleep, but a few hours wouldn't kill me.' From what he's seen and she's said over the years her day runs something like this: bed by eight or nine, sleep till ten or eleven, read a book or watch TV in the sitting room while she sews or does needlepoint, back in bed listening to radio call-in shows and reading and sometimes sleeping for an hour, in the kitchen around three or four, a drink, some coffee, watch TV or read or both, back in bed, sleep for an hour or so, up, coffee, bathe, fresh coffee, half a toasted bagel or slice of dry toast, read the
Times
delivered to her building's vestibule, maybe make cookies or bread, preparing them now, baking them later, every other day a short walk around the neighborhood or block but sometimes, even when the weather's nice and she's feeling well, not leaving the house for three straight days, shopping for food, about every other week stopping to sit for an hour on a bench on one of the Broadway islands and listening to other elderly people talk, a phone call or two, her sister, her sister-in-law, a real estate agent calling to see if she's interested in selling her building, slice of bread or the other half of that bagel with cottage cheese for lunch, maybe a tomato or green pepper slice and a couple of radishes or celery stalks, drink before, drink after, sip it, forget where the drink is, pour a new one, drink from it, the other, thinking they're both the same glass, bourbon, little water, lemon slice or twist if one's been left over from the last time he was there or if he cut a number of them for her later and put them in wax paper and told her where they were in the refrigerator, since she likes twists better than slices, every five days or so opening her mailbox, every other day for an an hour working on the books for the building which she hates, every Friday telling the cleaning woman what work needs to be done and pitching in with some of the lighter chores, once or twice a week letting a building inspector in or oil burner man downstairs or accepting a package for a tenant or telling the delivery boy to leave her groceries on her doormat and then dragging the box or bags into the foyer and almost item by item carrying the groceries to the kitchen, once or twice a month depositing the rent checks in the bank and getting a few weeks' cash, seeing her doctor and dentist twice a year, week every summer staying with him and Denise in Maine, drink before dinner, dinner around six, slice of Gruyère or Brie or tallegio cheese on bread, maybe a baked potato with a pad of butter or butterless sweet potato or yam and piece of fish or half a can of white tuna or piece of chicken from a breast she baked and which'll last three days and a salad or a carrot and a few of her cookies but never her own bread, those loaves she gives away to neighbors or freezes for her sons or grandchildren who once every week or two stop by or come for dinner which they usually bring cooked and prepared or make there with their own food, about two out of every three Sundays lunch at home with her sister-in-law and then a walk along Columbus or Broadway to look at the shop windows and perhaps have an ice cream or in Central Park if it's not crowded or rowdy or the music too loud and then sitting, before her sister-in-law takes the bus home, along the wall outside the park opposite the bus stop, drink after dinner which she nurses till she puts the glass with whatever's left in it into the refrigerator for the next day or carries it to bed. ‘If you are going to drink,' he's said to her in various ways, ‘and I'm sure a little of it's OK—blood vessels, and to relax or for the lift it gives and just to have something in your hand other than another coffee or cigarette—why not wine or beer? The hard stuff isn't good for your stomach after a certain age, at least not more than a shot a day. Fifty, I'd think, if you've drunk your share for a while, is when one should call it quits with it, and you've gone more than thirty years past that. Fine, means great constitution, ability to withstand liver and kidney corrosion or wherever it is. And your mind's still sharp, which I hope, if I inherited it right, means good news for me. But from my own experiences, it gives you a gnawing often aching feeling in your gut that keeps you up nights or a good slice of them. Or a glass of sherry or port, if you want to drink something late at night to help you sleep, another of its pluses, but not the cheap stuff but the better Californian or Iberian kind. And no coffee after three or four in the afternoon, and if you can keep it down to just one in the morning and then tea after and preferably herbal or vegetable teas or substitute coffees bought in health food stores, even better.' ‘When I was a girl,' she answered him once, ‘I thought I'd never take a drop of alcohol in my life. I was surrounded by it, that's why. My dad owned a saloon downstairs and the fumes from it rose to where it got in our bedroom window three flights up or through the floorboards some way, passing through the ceilings between us. I wasn't crazy. My sisters smelled it too and we always woke up with the stench in our hair and on our freshly laid-out clothes. His clothes also stunk from it and from cigarette and cigar smoke, something I also thought I'd never touch or marry a man who did, because he was in that place fourteen hours a day. I blamed alcohol for my not seeing him except an hour at dinner when he came up and if I bumped into him on the street during one of his brisk walks when he said he had to get out or not breathe, which is another reason I hated alcohol so much, though he never drank anything but a little schnapps every now and then and several glasses of religious wine on the holidays.' She often looks exhausted when he visits her and says she hasn't slept well the previous nights. She quickly uses up bathrobes and he's been buying her one every other Christmas. He once said ‘Maybe it's your mattress that's keeping you from sleep,' and went to her room and felt it and said ‘It's lumpy, slumps sharply to the side, I'm surprised you don't roll off it and end up sleeping on the floor. Let me get you a new one—a whole new bed, even. This year's Christmas gift instead of another plaid robe.' ‘What for? It's still a good bed. Aunt Teddy gave it to me when I had my double one taken out.' ‘That's my point. It was probably her son's first bed. Even if the frame's still OK, the mattress must be sixty years old. Get rid of it. Get a double one so you can turn over in it without falling out, have a place to put your books and newspapers on when you read in bed and then fall asleep while reading without being poked or rattled by them.' ‘Why a double for a single woman? And then I'll have to buy several changes of sheets to replace the ones I gave you when I sold the double bed.' ‘I'll give you them back. Or buy you some all-cotton ones for the ones you gave me. As a birthday gift if you won't take so much for Christmas. But a single bed's for kids just out of the crib and convicts; it's too confining, part of some punishment.' ‘I'll think about it, maybe it's not a bad idea,' but she'll never let him buy it for her nor get one herself. It'd have to collapse first and be declared unrepairable by both his brother and he and the super. Then she'd say she doesn't care what size bed she gets, queen, double or single: she won't sleep well on it anyway. When he moved out of town and came in for a weekend on some business or just to see her and slept in the old boys' room in her apartment, he'd hear her late at night or very early morning flushing the toilet, chopping or slicing vegetables on a cutting board, prowling about the house with her slippers flopping and sometimes past his door with a glass tinkling, could smell cigarette smoke, sometimes hear the TV going, hear her hacking loudly or trying to cough up phlegm or blowing a clot out of her nose, smell bread or cookies baking, coffee brewing, a stew starting which she'd jar and give him to take home because she doesn't eat red meat, twice heard her typing, forgot to ask what but he thinks a letter because after one of those times she asked him to mail one for her when he goes out. Later those mornings he'd say she seemed to have slept badly last night and she'd usually say ‘I slept better than I have since the last time you stayed over. I don't know why, since I'm no longer afraid of a break-in after all those locks and bars and alarms and steel doors I had installed, but my mind feels much easier with you here.' Sometimes he's said ‘I hate to bring this up again but maybe you'd always sleep well if you didn't drink and smoke and have coffee so late at night.' ‘What drinking?' and one time he mentioned the glass tinkling and she said ‘That tinkling was from an inch of drink I put back in the refrigerator yesterday and added some ice to this morning and which will probably be, because you're staying another night, the first of the only two I'll have all day.' One time she said ‘Leave me alone, stop hounding me about it, for what other pleasures do I get? If I lived this long with them in pretty good health, I'm not about to die because of them, and if I suddenly did, what of it? I'm already eight years older than your father was when he died at a respectable age and some twenty years older than my parents ever got and which I never thought I'd be.' ‘When I was a girl,' she said recently, ‘I was spilling over with self-respect. I dressed beautifully, did my nails, we had a girl for this but to get it done the way I liked I ironed my own clothes, bathed with a special rough soap to clean out my pores, washed my hair every night even though I had to boil water to do it, combed and brushed my hair till it shone, held it with tortoiseshell barrettes I saved up months for to get, was always chipper and alert in the morning, sharpest one at home and in class, would often run to school just to get out of breath because it felt so good, could beat up some of the bigger boys when they got too cheeky with me, played ball so well and ran so fast that I was called, in spite of my good looks and feminine clothes, a tomboy, ran errands for money after school till around dusk and between each of them studied my schoolbooks. Later on I found I wasn't a day person anymore though I certainly kept up my appearance and wardrobe. Now with old age everything's gone to pot. I could care less what I look like. I forget to eat and don't bother with makeup or wear nice clothes and do little with my hair, though the beauty parlor I went to for forty years is still right around the corner. I'm a mess and I should do something to correct it. Maybe now that you're here for the weekend I will. You've always let me know when I've let myself go and I'm grateful for it.' ‘You haven't, and when have I let you know that much? You still look good—your skin and the way you carry yourself and the texture and nice gray color of your hair, and unlike most old people your nose hasn't grown too long and in fact has stayed thin. What I wonder about is why you wear torn stained housecoats around the house and slippers and socks that are falling apart when you must have new ones or the money to buy them.' ‘Because I can't sleep and so always wear the easiest clothes to slip off just in case I suddenly feel like getting into bed, and also that I've become a slob. But keep harping on me about this and also what you're not saying about my hair and face and I'll change.' When he lived in the city and she invited him for dinner, he'd sometimes ring her bell, get no answer, let himself in with keys, call out for her, go to her bedroom door to see if she was asleep or sick. Sometimes he'd leave a note that he was here and left and other times he'd sit in the kitchen for an hour or two sipping scotch and listening to a classical music station if it had good music while reading one of her newspapers or the book he always carried with him when he went out, then would leave a note saying he waited for her, she must have slept badly last night so he was glad she was able to nap for so long, hope it isn't that she's coming down with something, he took some salad and cheese and bread so don't worry—he ate plenty and had a drink too and he'll call her tomorrow around noon. A few times he'd hear her clopping in her slippers from her bedroom, then she'd come into the kitchen in her bathrobe, say she was sorry but she'd only put her head down to rest a few minutes, she wasn't hungry but he should go ahead and have something, and she'd turn on the ovens and burners to warm up the food. He'd eat just enough to satisfy her and eventually convince her to have a slice of toast and cheese and glass of milk or some cottage cheese or yogurt before she had a drink. ‘When I was young I talked and talked and talked,' she once said. ‘Some people thought it a problem. When I got older I just talked and talked. By your age I was listening more than talking, and now I have nothing to say.' When he sat with her at one of these dinners or took her out to eat, after they talked about the food or the restaurant table and her health and she asked and he briefly told her how his work and other things were going, they didn't talk much unless he thought up things to ask her, a lot of which he'd asked before and so often knew the answers: what she did the last couple of weeks, whom she's seen and spoken to recently, anything interesting or unusual that might have happened to her lately, what's the book she's reading about? she go to any recent movies or see anything she liked on TV? anything particularly excite or disturb her in the papers? what about that woman with the strange Indian name who eagerly testified against her mother who's a judge? what about that beast who beat his child into a coma and then instead of helping her smoked cocaine after? how'd she get along when Dad was in prison? was it tough going back to full-time work after so long? any friends or relatives cut her off once that mess started? any of the women she danced with on stage or in movies become celebrated actresses or dancers or known in any way? who were some of the more famous headliners in the show? she have anything to do with them offstage? ever see Gershwin? she remember her first impression when she heard Stravinsky or Bartok or even Mahler? she ever try to return to the stage after her father pulled her off? did he actually drag her off during a performance or rehearsal or just told her not to go to the theater again? she have any interest in the election? she ever have any interest in politics? who was the president she admired most? What's she think of this new information that Roosevelt didn't do enough to save the